From Blogging to a SaaS Exit by Building Audience First

Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan, and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies, and insights to help you build, launch, and grow your SaaS business.
So let's talk about the first episode of 2017.
It's a story about a developer who moved across the country thinking he was starting a new job.
But when he got there, he realized he didn't have a job anymore.
So he started doing freelance work and pretty soon after that discovered Ruby on Rails and immediately fell in love and decided that this was the technology that he wanted to work with.
At the same time, he also started a blog where he would write about Rails and what he was learning.
And he discovered that creating content was actually his true passion.
Eventually, he built a business creating educational content and went on to sell that company five years later for $36 million.
It's a great story.
He's a great guy, and I know you're going to enjoy this interview.
Today's guest is a software developer and serial entrepreneur.
In 2011, he founded Code School, an online learning platform that teaches you programming and web design skills.
And five years later, he sold that business for $36 million.
He's also the founder of NV Labs, a web consultancy which he launched in 2009, and the founder of Starter Studio, a business accelerator that combines mentorship with educational events to help startups in Orlando, Florida.
I first came across him years ago when I watched his Rails for Zombies tutorial to learn Ruby on Rails, and I'm glad to finally be able to have him as a guest on this show.
So today I'd like to welcome Greg Pollock.
Greg, welcome to the show.

Gregg Pollack (02:17.710)
Thank you for having me.
It's great to be here.

Omer (02:19.950)
So we should just warn people that there is some construction going on nearby you.

Gregg Pollack (02:26.500)
It's like, no, they never have construction.
Then I, of course, you know, I go to record a podcast with you and then they start it up and there's nothing I can do about it.
It's on some floor below me.

Omer (02:35.340)
We're just going to kind of, I, I, we'll, we'll do our best and we'll, if, if it gets really bad, we may just have to pause for a little while.
But yeah, let's just roll with it.
So let's start by talking about what drives and motivates you.
This is, you're onto your, what, third or fourth business now with Starter Studio?

Gregg Pollack (02:57.640)
Yeah, I'm ready to move on to the next thing

Omer (03:02.360)
so what drives you?
What gets you out of bed?
Is there a quote that kind of sums up what you do or just in your own words, what gets you out of bed?

Gregg Pollack (03:12.480)
Sure.
Certainly what motivates me the most, I think, is honestly creating content that helps people.
That's what I'm always looking for.
That's what I always love doing.
I mean, I've been getting into personal blogging the last few weeks, and it's been phenomenal to set aside some time for that, just because I love putting a lot of effort into learning and then teaching and getting the positive feedback from people has just been really what drives me the most when it comes to business.

Omer (03:43.340)
So let's start by talking about code school.
I mean, you.
There's a lot of businesses we can talk about.
Obviously, that's the.
The one that you had a very successful exit with, I guess.

Gregg Pollack (03:54.420)
Success.
Yeah.

Omer (03:55.500)
Yeah.
That was what.
After all the failure, that was like, near the end of 2014.
Is that what happened?
Yeah.
So, yeah, let's stop it with the.
Where the idea came from.
Like, how did you.
How did you decide to start building that business in the first place?

Gregg Pollack (04:15.840)
Yeah, no problem.
So really, you know, it all starts when I moved to Orlando about 10 years ago, where I was out of a job.
I thought I could work remote.
I got here to Orlando, I called them up and I said, hey, I'm ready to work.
And they said, we really need somebody in Washington, D.C. i was like, wait, wait, wait.
You told me I could work remote.
I just moved across the country to Orlando from San Diego.
I'm ready to work.
Can I work?
And they said, we really need somebody in Washington, D.C. i was like, oh, you're saying I don't have a job unless I want to move again?
So I found myself without a gig.
And it was around that time that I found Ruby on Rails.
Dave Thomas was going around the country preaching Ruby on Rails at these conferences called no Fluff, just stuff for Java developers.
And I was just amazed at it.
And what was awesome about the technology is that it gave people a recipe for creating web applications and also doing consulting work.
And so I was like, hey, I can do this consulting thing.
And my wife at the time really encouraged me to do that.
So I started Rails Envy, a first patch software, which turned to Rails Envy, which eventually was Envy Labs, doing consulting work.
And I started blogging too, around then.
And that's when I first discovered my passion for creating content.
So I was creating content, which led to more gigs for consulting work.
And then really so that was maybe eight years ago.
Figuring out how to do consulting and then educating people online, educating developers, which brought in more leads, which led to consulting work.
And then code school was me figuring out how to monetize the content that I loved producing.
And that's really how code school came to be.

Omer (06:00.020)
So, so it all started from finding yourself without a job.

Gregg Pollack (06:05.230)
Right.

Omer (06:05.630)
I love that.
I know maybe it's a bit corny when they say like one, when one door closes, another one opens, but there's so many people who can kind of share examples of things like that happening to them.
And, and when you look back at the time, probably you're thinking, oh, what a shitty thing to happen.
But when you look back, you're like, I'm so glad that, that I got in that situation.

Gregg Pollack (06:24.590)
Yeah.
And, you know, looking back, it's so interesting to me how figuring out that I could hire good developers who could do the consulting work, and that left me to create content because I loved creating content, which drove more consulting so I could create more content.
And then code school, like I said, was me figuring out how to take that passion.
What I love the most doing, which was creating educational content and really step it up, create really high quality content and make money doing it.

Omer (06:58.470)
How long did it take you to start making any kind of money with code school?
You often hear, well, these days anyway, you often hear about people saying, you know, content marketing is really a long game.
Right.
And you need to be.
If you're going to blog, you need to be blogging at least a couple of times a week.
And you need to be doing it for at least 18 months or two years before you're going to get to a stage where you're getting enough traffic and enough people to kind of help you build some kind of business.
So.

Gregg Pollack (07:36.360)
Oh, tell me about it.
Yeah.

Omer (07:37.880)
Was that your experience?

Gregg Pollack (07:40.040)
Oh, certainly.
And one thing that I always tell people is, you know, if you look at sort of the code school timeline from when we launched it to sort of the acquisition to the, to today, if you looked at it when we launched it, it would look like an, you know, it would look like an overnight success.
It would look like we.
You were instantly profitable.
We were, we were very instantly profitable.
The reason why was I had spent the prior three or four years building an audience.
So really building an audience for Code school started about three years before I launched it, because I was educating developers and building an audience that respected my content, that liked consuming my content.
I was podcasting in the Ruby on Rails world.
I was Speaking at all the conferences.
I was creating free video, working with sponsors to create free video.
And all of the story leading up to launch of Code School is in my founders talks.
If you just Google Greg Pollock founders Talks, you'll find them where I go over the path of building that audience.
I started building the audience for Code School about three years before I launched it because it was bringing in business for the consultancy.
We launched Code School and just give you an idea.
Code School, in case you're not familiar, is where we have courses for software developers to learn, and we release one course a month.
When we launched Code School, we put it out with just one course for 45 bucks.
The cost for us to produce it was probably about 20 to 30,000.
And then within two months, we would get back 40.
So then we would just rinse and repeat.
We'd do that over and over again.
Very quickly.
We were able to be profitable because I had the audience.

Omer (09:22.610)
You said we.
Was there somebody else working with you in the early days?

Gregg Pollack (09:27.010)
Well, it was just the consultancy.
Yeah.
So all these guys that were in there with the consultancy at the time we launched Code School, we had about.
Envy Labs at that point had grown.
I think we had about maybe 16 people working for the consultancy at that point, doing lots of great consulting work, building web applications for our companies, some of them big companies.
And as we built Code School, we just kind of bootstrapped Code School from the money that we made in the consultancy.

Omer (09:57.880)
I'm curious, how did you go from being a freelance developer to hiring other developers and building out the consultancy?
The reason I ask is it's.
I think a lot of people would maybe want to go down there and maybe even build a services business.
But making that transition from doing everything yourself to hiring people often seems like a really big leap to make.
And then you kind of almost in a place where you're thinking, well, I can only make so much from clients, and then how am I going to hire people who I can pay?
And then it's also worth my time to kind of be accountable for delivering on this project.
So how and why did you make that transition?
Well, I know why you made the transition.
You just told me.
Because you could focus on the content.
But how did you make that transition?

Gregg Pollack (10:59.430)
Well, it's a little more than that, so.
Yeah.
Where does that start?
Well, I think it starts with an email that I sent out to a couple guys when I started Envy Labs.
Sent out an email to them because I was inspired by some of the developer workspaces that I saw coming up around the country.
There was Hash Rocket in Jacksonville, there was Thoughtbot, there was a bunch of these that I really admired.
All these smart guys getting together and creating this optimal work environment for developers where they didn't have set hours, they were very flexible, they had not much of a hierarchy, you know, very self managed, I guess you would say.
And I really admired that.
So I emailed a couple guys that I knew through the Ruby Users Group.
I mean, so many of the most talented people that I ended up hiring through the years came from the local tech community getting involved with them.
I started the Ruby Users Group here in Orlando and a lot of the guys ended up hiring came right out of that group because I knew they were competent and they were craftsmen.
I knew they were craftsmen because they went to the even after hours.
They wanted to keep on learning.
So I emailed a couple of those guys at one point said, hey, I'm thinking, I know you guys do contract work, maybe we should all work in the same office and then eventually maybe all work under the same company.
And what would it be like, do you think?
What's your optimal work environment?
And can we create that?
Do you want to try creating that with me?
And so with them I kind of painted that vision of creating a space where people felt safe and valued and it was very transparent.
So they knew where the company was going and everybody had a voice, very democratic.
And that's how we built up Envy Labs.
And I'm really motivated by that about creating culture.
And I just took it a day at a time.
So it's definitely scary dealing with people's livelihoods and thinking, wow, so if I hire somebody, I'm kind of on the hook to pay them.
So what I ended up doing is twofold.
First I would, when a project would come along and I would get the lead and nurture the lead and have a project that was going to take that guaranteed me at least three months work.
It would be at that point that I reach out to my friend, say Jacob.
And I would say, hey Jacob, I've got this project here that should be at least three months of work.
I'd love to work with you.
I can guarantee you at least three months of work.
Work, hopefully more.
We're a startup so it's a little risky, but I would love to work with you and I know I can pay you a fair hourly rate as a contractor.
Are you interested?
All these guys that were working, most of them were working in.
NET and PHP in these languages.
They weren't interested in they all wanted to work on Rails, so when given the opportunity, they were willing to take the risk on me.
That's how I got started hiring more people.
The second thing that was really important was creating a rainy day list.
So one thing that gave me a lot of confidence is I wrote down like a list of 15 to 20 different things that I knew I could do if I needed to drum up work.
If two clients left at the same time, I've got guys that are waiting for work.
Here's 20 things, 20 steps that I can do to try to drum up work.
Things like going back to old clients and seeing if they need extra work.
Things like going back to cold leads who maybe didn't went with another dev shop, but just checking in with and saying, hey, I know you didn't choose us, but I'm checking in to make sure everything's still going smoothly because we would love to work with you.
Or it could even be going to an existing client and saying, hey, we have an extra developer free.
If you can commit that work you were thinking about doing next year.
If you can commit to doing it now, I can give you 20% off if you commit to it now.
Because we have availability.
There's all these things you can do to drum up work.
And having that list, knowing I could go down the list really gave me the confidence I needed to make those hires and get really valuable people on board.
That allowed me to scale the business.

Omer (15:15.880)
So where were the majority of your clients coming from?
I assume that the content creation or if you were blogging probably took longer and maybe you were finding more people through speaking at events or podcasts.
Really?

Gregg Pollack (15:33.940)
No, it was all.
It was all through pod.
Well, my own podcast that I did for the Rails community and the education for developers got tons of leads through those and they were really warm leads.
When you can kind of establish yourself with other developers, other people in the community.
As a domain expert, yeah, I got tons of leads because also Rails was a hot commodity at the time.
There wasn't that many developer shops who said they did Rails.
And so people would inevitably be googling around and they would find the tutorials, maybe they'd be dabbling with Rails, or they would ask their friend, hey, what technology should I be using?
And they said, oh, Rails.
And okay, where should I go?
Well, I know this guy Greg, knows what he's doing and he's associated with the consultancy, maybe call him.
And so, so many times I would get the warmest of leads that people because their friend, so their developer Friend Tim listens to our podcast and maybe read my blog post this one time.
And Tim turns to say, James, the business guy who's looking for someone to build their web app and says, James goes to Tim and says, hey, Tim, I need to build this web app.
Who should I go to?
Tim says, oh, hey, you should go to Greg at Rails Envy, because he looks like I think he knows what he's talking about.
Then I would get a call from James and so many times James would be like, greg, I hear you're the person to go to for this.
And James came to me thinking, well, if Tim recommended this guy, he must know him pretty well.
So this is the person that I should probably be hiring.
That's such a warm lead that would happen over and over again because I had established myself as a domain expert in the community and I would get all these people recommending me and that meaning something to these leads when in reality I had never worked with them.

Omer (17:28.709)
Yeah, I find that as well, I think whether, you know, I've kind of experienced that with people who listen to this show and then kind of my own experience listening to other people's podcasts is after you spend enough time listening to somebody, it kind of feels like you know them and it kind of makes it a lot easier to kind of have an offline conversation.
So I can.
That totally makes sense.
So let's kind of go on to code school.
And again, I think when we kind of look at this, at the 50,000 Foot View, we see Greg had this idea, he loves to create content, so he started teaching people stuff that he knew or was learning, and five years later he sold it for $36 million.
Woohoo.
Right, so, and I think that on your blog, on your personal blog, you've been putting some content up there recently and there are some great videos which go into a lot of lessons you learned by going through that process.
And I'll include links in the show notes to all of that content for folks to go and check out.
But it would be great to sort of think about a few difficult times, some mistakes, some of the hard times during those five years that you kind of went through, both from just kind of helping people to understand, you know, it wasn't as, as easy as maybe the way I'm kind of portraying it, but also, what were some of the lessons that you learned along the way?
So I know.

Gregg Pollack (19:11.370)
Along the way, yeah, and I know

Omer (19:12.530)
we can't possibly kind of COVID everything you do in your own videos, but what were some of the top things that you think are worth calling out?

Gregg Pollack (19:20.650)
Well, I'm a huge proponent of building culture and transparency into the business.
And it's so important to build that from the start into your business, meaning making sure everybody knows the direction the company's headed, the vision of the company, the core values of the company are so important.
I think that's usually the best place to start when you're building something.
And that's something that we did a little bit, but we could have always done more.
Because when it comes down to it, if you don't have a direction that your ship is sailing and everybody's not in alignment with what you're doing and where you're headed, you can sail off in other directions.
And certainly we did that over the years.
There were some sponsorship deals that were a waste of time.
There were some, even some topics that we taught that in the long run did not drive the traffic that we needed them to drive.
And probably one of the darkest things that one of the darkest days, I would say, happened, really.
I mean, it wasn't even because of Code School.
Code School and Envy Labs were going along, and then two clients left Envy Labs at the same time.
So we were running Code School and Envy Labs, and some people would work on Code School, some people work on Envy Labs, and some people were in the middle, and two clients from Envy Labs left.
And we were left with sort of the hard decision of what to do.
Like, do we have to let some people go?
And we ended up letting some of our team go.
I think it was about five people.
We were about, like.
I think we're up to about 26 at that point.
And we had to let, like, five people go.
And I had no idea how much it would hurt morale and culture.
I had no idea how much it would hurt to let people go and how long it would take to regain people's trust and how difficult it would be in the coming weeks.
Luckily, it was around that time that I found and started working with an organizational psychologist.
And then the company that we worked with is called Key Talent Solutions.
And that was around that time that I started.
I got a leadership coach.
And I think it's so important for somebody who is building a business to have someone like this, like a coach.
Not an advisor, not a mentor, a coach.
The difference is advisors and mentors often give you advice.
You come to them with a problem and they give you advice.
But when it comes down to it, who is the best person to solve your problems?
Who is the most capable?
Is it Somebody else who doesn't live through it.
Right.
It's obviously yourself.
And so by having.
That's what a coach's job for.
A coach's job is not to give you advice.
A coach's job is to help you grow and to help you figure out the answers.
And the things that you don't know you know, or the things that you know you're going to have to do, but they're really difficult and to get you further faster.
And so having a leadership coach through this was phenomenal.
Also having somebody from the outside the company who could come in and do one on ones with people because you know, no matter how much you try to get your team to open up to you as the boss, when you do one on ones and when you ask them what's going on for them, they're just not going to be as perfectly honest with you as they will with somebody who's not you, somebody who's not the boss, or somebody who's not even associated with the company.
So it was around that time that we worked with somebody outside the company to start helping us with culture, helping us build our team.
But your question was sort of the darkest days, I would say probably when we, yeah, at that point also, we always tried to push ourselves to create a lot of content.
Creating more than one course a month.
We kind of set that pace out for us.
One course a month.
We wanted to have at least one course a month.
And we all constantly were trying to get to more than one course a month and we were constantly failing at it.
And I think that's no fault than our own.
But looking back, back at it, it was partially because we were also like spending more and more time with each course.
We realized all these ways we could do an even better job.
And the reality of it is we could have been creating like two courses a month, but we just would have had to dial down the quality.
And that just wasn't acceptable to me.
Like, quality is so important to me.
If I see an opportunity to create more effective content, I'm going to jump at it.
Which is why over the years the content has just gotten more and more polished over there.
And our vision at code school, which eventually we did figure out, was to create the most, you know, we want to be the most effective way to learn a technology.
We want to enliven technology learning so that it can be.
So when people want to learn technology, whether they're a beginner or someone more advanced, they think to themselves, well, I could go and pick up A book or maybe I should check to see if there's a code school course.
So given that, yeah, that's sort of the vision we headed towards.
Is that enough for that question?
I could probably keep on going, but I'll stop there.

Omer (24:51.780)
Totally.
One thing I was curious about was what was your success rate with the courses that you were creating?
And how are you kind of figuring out what content to create were you getting, like, every course you were creating was kind of paying for itself in terms of sales and more.
Or did you have some kind of failures along that journey too?

Gregg Pollack (25:21.310)
Certainly there was some courses that were more popular than others.
When we released one course a month, we threw it out to the mailing list.
We would always get an influx of new subscribers.
So it was very much.
We'd create one course, we'd put it out there, you could play the first level three free.
We would get some subscribers.
And certainly one of the weaknesses of the business was always the customer lifetime value because we're creating courses in so many different topics.
The struggle that we always had to deal with was people coming, taking the course, taking that one course, subscribing monthly, and then unsubscribing after they were done with the content.
And that's kind of one of the reasons why pluralsight made such a good acquisition partner, because pluralsight has this huge library of content and they've got a great customer lifetime value because they have a reference library.
And that's how developers use them.
So that's why it was so powerful to sort of team up with a company that our weakness is their strength.

Omer (26:31.470)
Got it.
Okay.

Gregg Pollack (26:33.710)
But some courses obviously weren't as successful as others.
Like our iOS track, for example, you would think, you know, programming native iOS apps would be popular, but we were never able to get that as popular as, like, JavaScript or even Ruby.
And it was really unfortunate.
That audience is really hard to get in front of.
And, you know, to be fair, there's definitely more that we could have done to get in front of the audience to make those courses more popular, but that's just something we were never able to do.

Omer (27:06.890)
Yeah, I think I went through.
I must have gone through at least some of those courses at some point.
And I think it all started with the Rails for Zombies tutorials.
I don't know, but for me personally, I just never really groked with Rails and I don't know whether it was just not really getting on with Ruby or what.

Gregg Pollack (27:30.740)
But where were you coming from?

Omer (27:33.180)
I was coming from.
Well, I'd been at Microsoft.
So I came from a.
Net kind of C type environment.
And yeah, I just kind of really never really.
And I don't know why.
I think I often sort of wonder, you know, about going back and trying again.
But I eventually, personally, for me, I eventually landed with using Python and Flask, which is kind of a really interesting kind of, you know, nice.
I'll tell you what, it was partly it was that I love the whole scaffolding and the black box kind of the benefits of Rails, but I also didn't like that because there was a lot of stuff that I just didn't understand, like how it was happening or why it was happening.

Gregg Pollack (28:14.010)
Sure.
It's a lot of magic.

Omer (28:15.450)
Yeah, yeah.
And I think that that's one of the things that I liked with Flask was that it's super lightweight, you build everything up and you only use what you need to use.
And so I was kind of able to see how the pieces were coming together.

Gregg Pollack (28:27.849)
So the equivalent to that is Sinatra with Ruby.
Right.
So Flask is to Sinatra, not to Rails.

Omer (28:36.410)
Interesting.
Yeah.
Well, and I think the other thing was the comparison between using Rails and, sorry, you're using Ruby and Python.
And I don't know, maybe it was just a syntax or something, but just Python just seemed a lot easier for me.

Gregg Pollack (28:47.970)
But anyway, they're very similar.

Omer (28:50.850)
Yeah, yeah, I digress.
So also, I want to kind of talk a little bit about, like, kind of growing, acquiring customers and growth marketing for code school.
And again, kind of, from what we've heard so far, you kind of did a lot of the groundwork in terms of creating the blog and a bunch of content marketing for many years before you kind of built that business.
But as you kind of went in and started, started working and growing Code school, where was that growth coming from?
Was it more content and just building on the momentum that you'd been kind of creating over those first few years, or were you trying other, other marketing strategies and what was working and what wasn't working?

Gregg Pollack (29:36.580)
Well, probably the biggest thing that I love, I love creating free content.
I love creating content that gets in front of as many people as possible.
And even, like, you know, that's my first motivator, is to educate people.
So that was probably the biggest thing that led to more customers because every few months at code school, we would produce another free course.
And that was a way to drive more traffic.
And that's just another way of saying, give, give, ask, in my opinion, where you just provide a lot of value, as much value as you can for Free.
So that when it gets to the paid content, people don't mind paying.
They're paying not only because they want that content, but because they feel good supporting you because you've already helped them so much.
We did that over and over again.
We would create free content, very strategic content.
We would identify what is some free content that we can create that'll get us in front of the right people.
Or even eventually it became who can we work with that already has an audience that we can create content for?
So we did this first with GitHub.
We went to the Git guys in the very early days of GitHub and said, hey, can we create a free git course for you guys that's kind of fun and interactive and you guys sponsor it, we'll make it free, and then when we launch it, we'll even kind of co brand it with you guys.
And when we launch it, you can promote it and it just help you and it'll help us.
So we created Try Git and then we worked with the jQuery team in the same way, went to the jQuery chain and said, hey, we want to create a totally free way for people to learn jQuery online.
And they were interested and we did the same thing with them.
And then we thought, who else should we work with?
Well, I know some people over at Google and Google likes to train people to use the web as a platform.
What are some of their projects?
So we started working with the Angular team over there and then we created a free Angular course.
So the one thing that we did over and over again really successfully to drive traffic was to think about who has our audience.
Who has our audience, what can we create for them or with them that can get in front of their audience and drive awareness and drive brand for our customers, maybe even drive people to our mailing list.
Because that's what we did.
We would create these free courses and they were totally open and free.
But if you wanted to save the badges that you earned or save your progress, you had to have a code school account.
So you'd sign up for a code school account and you get on our mailing list and then we can market to you our paid content.
Got it?

Omer (32:12.630)
Okay.
Why did you decide to sell the business?
Apart from getting lots of money?

Gregg Pollack (32:22.230)
That was never the motivation we got about.
It's about four years into it, we reached a point where we were doing about a 5 million run rate.
So that means if you take the monthly revenue and multiply it by times 12, it was at about the $5 million mark that we just crossed, which is a unique time in a business.
We realized that the people that took us from 50amonth in revenue to get to 5 million are different than the people who are going to help you scale from 5 million to 50 million.
So we realized we kind of had a lack of expertise.
We didn't have a sales department.
We never really figured out the sales department.
The sales thing.
We had a marketing department, and they were pretty good, but would have to get better.
And so we realized, okay, we've got this unique recipe of a business and there's not too much competition.
We have three options.
First, we can keep on growing slow and steady.
We never hockey sticked.
We were, you know, we kind of looked like a lifestyle business.
Every year we would get more revenue and more recurring revenue.
And so we could continue writing that out.
And, you know, over the next 10, 20 years, if we didn't, if something horrible didn't happen, the economy didn't tank, or somebody raised money and outspend us and competed with us, we would probably do great, make some people some money.
So we could do that.
We could be a lifestyle business, or we could go and raise some strategic money, raise some strategic investment, maybe take some money off the table de risk a little bit and get some strategic investors that would come in and have the expertise to help us build that sales team, to help us build that marketing team, to help us go from 5 million to 50 million.
But one thing I realized about that, the only disadvantage about that is once you bring in investors and you do that, I kind of feel like you have to resign yourself to doing an IPO eventually someday.
I've read more and more about CEOs who lead things through an IPO and realized how not fun that would be.
I don't think I would enjoy my life by then.
I've seen it.
I know startup tech founders that are in that position, and it's just not fun.
It just drains them for years.
They have to kind of toe the line because now they have a board and eventually they have public owners.
So that's a whole other world.
So that's kind of a disadvantage if you raise money.
And then sort of the third option was to potentially look at an acquisition.
And the best time to look for an acquisition, to entertain it, is usually like right before you raise the next round.
Because when you raise the next round, your valuation is about to jump.
And what your investors are going to accept as a successful exit in an acquisition is also going to jump.
So it's tough.
So I realized if there was any time we needed to entertain it.
So I met with a couple advisors and they helped me kind of put together a deck that was like potential acquisition deck.
And in it it had non negotiables.
So I was going to go to potential acquirers and give them what I want and what's not acceptable things like I'm only looking for an acquirer that will protect the team in Orlando.
We want to keep on producing courses just like we're doing.
We don't want to screw up the brand, we care about our customers, we don't want to screw our customers.
We want to take care of our employees like we always have.
So we had a bunch of things to sort of protect what we loved doing.
And then I just started reaching out to companies that I respected, companies that I wouldn't mind working for, that I had built bridges with over the years.
And we did the whole acquisition dating dance and we were just entertaining it.
And that whole process of kind of founder dating that you're doing when you considering acquisitions was so worth it.
I learned so much getting to see other companies at the executive level.
So even if it didn't work out, it would have totally still been worth it and it didn't have to work out.
We were fine going the other routes, but we were lucky enough kind of at the last minute before we gave up on looking for an acquisition.
We're introduced to pluralsight and we walked into pluralsight and we were just like, oh my God, these guys are just like us.
Their culture is just like ours.
I aligned extremely well with all the founders of that company and their executive team.
I would want to work for these guys.
So that's why that worked out.
That acquisition worked out.
We weren't looking for acquisition.
It was just a great opportunity, a great culture fit.
And also the product was extremely strategic.
They were in the same market that we are and like I said earlier, their strength was our weakness.
It was a perfect fit and it was awesome.
So everything.
I feel really lucky for how it worked out and I can't say I would do much differently.

Omer (37:19.040)
Let's talk about what you're doing with your own.
Your personal blog, GregPollock.com and I'll include a link to that because that's where those videos are that we kind of mentioned earlier.
You've sort of started kind of publishing content fairly frequently and regularly there now is that kind of like what you do to like in your spare time or is there like what's the deal with that?
Where are you going with that?

Gregg Pollack (37:50.690)
Yeah, well, you know, I kind of.
So I left code school about 5 months ago now after giving my 6 months notice and learning all about succession planning so I could leave the place better than I found it and put the right people in the leadership position, which is a whole nother story.
But I left.
I took the summer off and then decided to do something else for a little while.
I kicked off September by going to Content Marketing World because I love creating content, but I know probably one of my weaknesses is marketing.
I figured out something that worked with Code School, but I know there was more I could do.
I learned more about content marketing and then decided to launch my personal blog, my personal brand, and apply some of those principles.
So I started a mailing list.
I went on there and I installed Thrive leads and started to generate leads, put on some free email courses on there just to start building my personal brand.
I think it's really important that everybody, even if they're an employee at a bigger company, without equity, it's important for everyone to invest some time in building their personal brand because you never know when you're going to lose your gig or get laid off.
If you've built a blog or you've built a mailing list or you just built a lot of connections on LinkedIn, you then have the ability to reach out to those people and ask them for help.
I assume someday I'm going to be creating another startup of some sort and putting my efforts towards it.
And if I've spent time, you know, nurturing and giving people value under my personal brand, I will have a network of people I can reach out to to promote my next product to.

Omer (39:46.550)
Yeah, I mean, that's kind of where I was going with this because it seems like it's a personal blog.
There's no kind of business there right now, but it's.
It could potentially evolve into a business or be a launching pad for another business.
And the reason I asked that was because when people are at a very early stage, maybe they have an idea, or maybe they don't even have an idea, but they know that they want to start a business.
There's often a lot of analysis paralysis around how to get started, what to do, what business, who are my customers, what should I sell?
And kind of looking at somebody who's kind of done it several times and built several businesses, it seemed like your approach was just start creating some value and do what you enjoy doing and sort of figure out how to evolve that into a business when the time is right.
Is that a fair?

Gregg Pollack (40:54.300)
Kind of, yeah.
And, you know, I work with a lot of startups at the accelerator that I started downtown called Starter Studio.
It's a nonprofit.
I don't make any money off of it.
We don't even give people investments or take equity.
It's just total nonprofit for the community.
And what I see over and over again is you see tech founders who spend so much time building a product before they think about how they're going to have an audience to sell it to.
And I like to challenge people to think of it the other way around.
Best thing you can do is build an audience.
Start the other way around, see if you can build an audience.
See if you can create value that drives people to consume your content.
Or you don't even have to create content.
You can just go on people's podcasts, for example.
I guess that's creating content.
You can collect other people's content and you can deliver to them.
Try to deliver people value in some way to build your audience.
And then if you can build an audience, at some point, you could probably talk to the audience and figure out what you could sell them, and they'll tell you what their problems are.
Everybody has problems.
And if you can solve your audience's problems, it's probably a product you can create to sell them.
And so many people don't think like that, but that's the best way you can do it.
You know, create an audience first, figure out what they want and sell it to them.

Omer (42:17.340)
Yeah, yeah.
You mentioned Thrive themes earlier.
And Shane, the founder of Thrive, is a guest I had on the show recently.
And, you know, we talked a lot about how he had built Thrive, a product that both you and I use into a successful business.
And, you know, his kind of overnight success came from, like, spending six or seven years blogging and building an audience and building trust and delivering value before he launched that business.
And I think there's definitely something there.
And.
And you're right.
It doesn't have to be a blog or something like that, but just the concept.

Gregg Pollack (43:04.810)
Yeah.
And so many people don't know how to start small.
Like, so say you want to create a tech startup that gives people, you know, restaurant recommendations.
Starting small means starting telling your friends, hey, feel free to call me and ask me for restaurant recommendations, and I'll give you them.
It's like, you start there, you start manually, do that.
Or if somebody wants to create an organization that gives value in some way locally, they can start with small Events.
Create a meetup.
Start with a meetup.
Start with something small where you can start giving people value before you spend two months building a web app and making it perfect.

Omer (43:50.050)
Yeah, And I think that I've seen people do sort of like a concierge type product as well, where maybe the next step is you kind of are asking for recommendations on a website and somebody manually is kind of getting back to you the next day with some recommendations, as opposed to spending 18 months trying to build a perfect algorithm to.

Gregg Pollack (44:10.220)
Yeah.

Omer (44:10.500)
Figure out super, you know, super recommendations or something.

Gregg Pollack (44:13.340)
That's a great example.

Omer (44:15.260)
One thing I read on your blog was a post called Hitting the Reset Button this Summer.
And you talked about just taking some time off after all these years of working hard on the businesses that you have and some of the reflections from there and being able to spend more time with family and your kids.
But the thing that really struck me there was one of the comments that you made was about you saying, I have a tendency to give up on projects when I can't do them perfectly and I've got to kind of be able to settle for good enough.
And another comment about, you know, I've never really spent much time kind of on planning and I need to get better at that.
And I was like, are you kidding me?
Look at what you've done.

Gregg Pollack (45:03.360)
You've got.

Omer (45:03.680)
You've got these businesses.
You, you just sold a business or, you know, a couple of years ago for $36 million, and you're telling me you have these problems?
And I was like, so I just want to talk about that.

Gregg Pollack (45:14.240)
Like, I'm a recovering perfectionist.
I learned that over and over again.
I mean, because, you know, I'm always going to want to create content.
I'm always going to want to give people value.
That's just what, you know, motivates me to be alive.
And it's funny.
So I had a project that I was.
I told myself it was like an art.
It was like an art audio project that I was going to do in August.
And I was like, all excited to do it.
And then when it came down time to it to actually execute on it, I kind of gave up on it because I realized how much work it was going to take to create something that I would probably be happy with because I just was like, it's not going to happen.
And I felt that again with my blog learning again, like going to Content Marketing World at the beginning of September and learning what content marketing directors and VPs of marketing do for a living.
And how they create content, how they market content, how much time they spend marketing content.
And then going to my blog, it's been hard to keep at it because I know I gained the knowledge at that conference on how to do it perfectly, on how these domain experts do it perfectly.
And so I find myself demotivated to do it because I want to do it extremely well.
And so I find, you know, it's hard to strike a balance there and to accept the fact that, like, okay, I'm going to put effort towards here and it's okay if I do an okay job.
Well, what's the quote?
It's okay to do something that was something imperfectly than nothing flawlessly.
It's better to do something imperfectly than nothing flawlessly, which is really the case.
So I got to keep an eye out for that.
It's good to get something.
That's so true with creating content.
So many people especially have content paralysis, especially people creating startups.
They're like, okay, you're telling me I need to build an audience and I need to start building content, but it's just going to take so much time.
And how do I create a mailing list?
And if I create content, I have to put it on the mailing list and I have to then tweet about it.
And if I'm tweeting about it, I should probably create images.
My blog post should have images and I should tweet about images.
But really the most effective way to market content is with video.
So I should probably be creating video.
And then I need to be marketing all my content every week and so on and so forth until it feels so overwhelming that you end up just not doing anything because it feels so overwhelming.

Omer (47:49.720)
So, yeah, you're talking about what I've been.

Gregg Pollack (47:52.440)
Oh, yeah.
Sound familiar?

Omer (47:54.160)
I do that a lot.
And I think part of it is this kind of perfectionism where you kind of have an idea and you want to create something and kind of get excited.
And I love just kind of starting things, but I also have this kind of thing where you start thinking about the big picture or having a vision for where you're going.
And sometimes that vision becomes so big and you start to sort of then think about.
You kind of overthink it, right?
You start thinking about all the, as you were sort of talking about all the thousands of things that you have to do and how are you possibly going to get to.
From a blog that has, you know, two posts on it to a, you know, a content marketing machine that's going to do all of these things and generate, you know, thousands of leads every month and whatever.
And you're like, you know, I. I could just watch football, right?
It's like, I don't have to think about any of that stuff.
It reminded me of a book.
I just kind of.
Kind of mentioned this because it's one of those books that I really like.
It's a really simple book, and I think it's.
It's a pretty short read called the Practicing Mind by a guy called Thomas M. Sterner.
And what I really like about it is that he kind of talks about how we get so caught up in thinking about the outcome of something, whether it's a business or something else that we want to create in our lives, that we kind of start to stumble, or we kind of feel it's too hard, or we just give up completely.
And he kind of gives you some of these simple thoughts on how to focus on the process and enjoying the process.
So if you're writing, for example, instead of thinking about how am I going to get this blog post to reach thousands of people and generate, you know, subscribers and sales for a product and whatever, you kind of just focus on the page and creating something that you're proud of and thinking of it as almost like a kind of an artistic endeavor that you're enjoying the process of writing, as opposed to kind of thinking about what outcome it's going to deliver somewhere down the line.
And I think that that was just a really good distinction to make.
That certainly has helped me a lot.
So, yeah.

Gregg Pollack (50:12.440)
What if it's the outcome that motivates you?

Omer (50:15.000)
The outcome or the.
Well, it depends what it is.
I think for me, the outcome most of the time, what I'm driven by and it's part of to do with this podcast and building products and coding and everything else is creating something that doesn't exist and delivers some value, whether you get paid for it or whether you get remunerated in just other ways, where people are just showing you how their lives got better by using something.
But I think it's just that I've just always loved that idea of being able to create something out of nothing.
It's kind of like this magical process.
Well, it's not really magical, but it kind of feels like that sometimes.

Gregg Pollack (51:03.270)
Yeah, that's a cool way to look at it.
I added that book to my reading list.

Omer (51:07.670)
Cool.
All right.
Now we could kind of go on forever, but I think we should kind of wrap up on this.
And I also realized that we've done really?
Well, we haven't heard much construction while we've been talking.

Gregg Pollack (51:20.950)
Oh, you haven't heard it.
Okay, great.

Omer (51:22.630)
Yeah.
So I know it's been pretty good.

Gregg Pollack (51:24.590)
I've heard it.

Omer (51:26.110)
All right, so let's get on to the lightning round.
I'm going to ask you seven questions.
Just answer them as quickly as you can.
Ready?

Gregg Pollack (51:32.910)
Okay.
Yeah.

Omer (51:33.870)
What's the best piece of business advice that you've ever received?

Gregg Pollack (51:38.270)
Spend half your time on sales and marketing.

Omer (51:41.310)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

Gregg Pollack (51:44.750)
Oh, geez.
I started building my business learning from the E Myth.

Omer (51:50.430)
The Michael Gerber.

Gregg Pollack (51:53.870)
Gerber, the author.

Omer (51:54.750)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember.
Yeah, I like that book.
Yeah, I like that book, too.
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?

Gregg Pollack (52:06.030)
A learner that's always willing to learn what it takes to do whatever task is needed?

Omer (52:11.390)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

Gregg Pollack (52:16.280)
I love Wunderlist to keep track of all the things to get everything out of my head because I don't think of my brain as a storage device.
I like to get it all out so that I can focus on building and connecting things.

Omer (52:26.920)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
It's kind of funny, given the context of what we talked about.

Gregg Pollack (52:35.080)
I could say rentable pets so that you can have a cat for a weekend or a dog for a weekend, and that's it.
I would rent a cat.
When my girlfriend's gone, I'd probably rent a cat.
Although I would need then a cleaning service to come and erase all traces that it ever was.
Here.

Omer (52:53.150)
There you go.
Two business opportunities in one.
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

Gregg Pollack (53:03.790)
Well, I'm a huge theater fan.
I love theater.
Probably my favorite vacations are going to New York City and seeing musicals and shows.
And I like to go see theater here locally as well.
I wouldn't have survived college without the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Omer (53:23.870)
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?

Gregg Pollack (53:29.630)
I think I just answered that question.
I think it's theater.

Omer (53:33.070)
All right, cool.
Great.
I want to thank you for joining me.
This is a conversation I've wanted to have for some time, and I'm glad we finally got a chance to do that.
Congrats again on building and having a successful exit with Code School and continuing to build NV Labs as a consulting business.
And also the work that you're doing with Starter Studio.
To help startups in Orlando.
And I'll include links to all those sites in the show notes if folks want to get in touch with you.
What's the best way to do that?

Gregg Pollack (54:14.200)
Well, just check out my blog, just gregpolik.com and on there you can contact me or just drop me an email@greggpolik.com awesome.

Omer (54:26.360)
Yeah, I'll definitely include a link to that as well.
It looks like you're publishing new content every week, and definitely that's the goal.
Well, I'm reading the stuff, so it's.

Gregg Pollack (54:37.450)
Oh, thanks.

Omer (54:38.330)
It's good stuff.
I appreciate that.
Cool.
So thank you again and I wish you all the best with whatever you do, and maybe we'll have you back when you've sold another company.

Gregg Pollack (54:50.730)
Sure.

Omer (54:51.850)
Cheers.

Gregg Pollack (54:52.210)
Greg.