Omer (00:11.920)
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 strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
This week's episode is a story about two co founders who struggled for three years to get their first paying customer and to make ends meet.
During that time, one of the co founders even had to sell his car to be able to put food on the table.
These guys spent three years building a B2C business to consumer product and they had almost 300,000 users.
The problem was that they had zero revenue, but they kept telling themselves that they just had to keep going.
Then one day they received a call from someone at Lufthansa, the largest airline in Germany.
The company had a number of their employees using this B2C product to track soccer game scores and they wanted to know if the app could also be used to display business data in a dashboard.
And that was the day that the co founders pivoted to a B2B business.
They built what Lufthansa wanted and then went out to find their next corporate customer and then the next one.
It wasn't easy.
It involved a lot of cold calling in the early days which both the co founders hated.
But slowly they started to get traction and it was really slow growth.
After 10 years of being in business, the company had about 14 employees.
But finally their persistence paid off and they started to see the elusive hockey stick growth after year 10.
The company now has over 90 employees and does over $8 million in annual run rate.
It's a great story and I hope you enjoy it.
Today's guest is the co founder and CEO of Clipfolio, a SaaS application for building and sharing real time business dashboards on web browsers, mobile devices and TVs.
It helps you stay in control of your business by giving you visibility into your most important data and metrics wherever you are.
Clipfolio is based in Ottawa, Canada and was founded in 2001.
To date, the company has raised over $16 million and it has over eight and a half thousand customers, including companies such as Jet.com, zendesk and IKEA, to name a few.
So today I'd like to welcome Alan Vilay.
Alan, welcome to the show.
Allan Wille (02:55.610)
So great to be here.
Thanks Omer.
Omer (02:58.170)
Now I always like to start by asking my guests, getting inside your head a little bit and figuring out what makes them tick.
So what is it for you?
What gets you out of bed every day to work on your business.
Allan Wille (03:11.850)
I think there's a lot of things, and probably most importantly, it's the people that I work with fundamentally.
I've always been a huge fan of hiring the right people and really surrounding myself with amazing people.
And that's something that I've really taken to heart.
We've done that actually quite successfully.
So working with a team that is inspiring and is really here to solve problems and solve problems for customers is probably the biggest thing that gets me out of bed in the morning.
I also love and I remember, and a lot of entrepreneurs probably have this experience, but I remember the very, very first time that a customer actually paid us, like, real money, paid us for our software, for our service.
And it was just such an insanely humbling experience.
It was such a high.
It was almost unbelievable that somebody was going to part with their money and.
And buy what we had created.
And I don't think I'm alone in that.
But I think that's another huge thing that drives a lot of entrepreneurs is this idea that they are truly helping and building value, you know, and I think you ask most folks, and that's why they're in it.
That's why they're in it, for sure.
Omer (04:31.970)
Yeah.
It's interesting.
I've heard a number of people say that, and many of those people have got to a point where, you know, like your business, they're running very successful businesses, but they still look back and they remember that first customer or the first time it happened.
And it's almost like that first $10 or $50 or whatever it was seems more valuable than a lot of what's happening after.
Allan Wille (04:58.710)
It really does.
Right.
Because you were intimately involved at that time.
You know, like, you know, the first thousand customers that we brought on.
I think I was intimately involved with almost every single one of those.
And there's huge value in that, of course.
Right.
And I try to stay as close as possible to all customers and especially the early ones.
But you're right, that first customer or the first dozen customers, they're really, really special, and they really shape how an entrepreneur approaches, you know, what they're doing and how they get up in the morning.
Right.
Omer (05:36.740)
Yeah.
Now, I gave the audience an overview of Clipfolio, but in your own words, can you help the audience understand a little bit more about who are your target customers and what's the problem that you're trying to solve?
Allan Wille (05:56.020)
Sure, sure.
And I mean, the business has changed quite dramatically over the past 15 years, and I'm sure we can get into that today.
We're really lucky in that we work with a lot, multiple thousands of small and mid sized businesses.
So I know that you mentioned some of the bigger names, Jet and Ikea and whoever else there was, and we deal with big companies as well.
But the bulk of our customers are small and mid sized companies and the owners or the founders or the managers, they'll come to us and they'll say, I know I need to be monitoring the health of my business.
I know that these things should be things that are on my radar on a daily basis.
But first of all, I don't know what I should be monitoring.
So we can help them and guide them.
A lot of what we do is with our content and with our sales process is coach them into what metrics and what, what dashboards they should be looking at in the first place.
And then secondly, you know, is this a good number or is this a bad number?
So when these customers first come to us and we've talked to them about this, they'll often say, I don't feel that I'm in control of what my business is doing.
Or I have so many data sources or so many apps that are providing data.
Again, I don't feel like I am in control.
And that's an interesting word because I think that's something that every entrepreneur needs to feel like they are in charge and are on top of what the business is telling them.
So I think in that regard there's a real connection between what we're doing and how we can help our customers build better, more successful, stronger, more competitively sustainable businesses.
So I mean, that in a nutshell is what we're doing.
We're helping them bring all the varied metrics on, all the things that matter and put them in a real time dashboard so that they know and can make better decisions throughout the day.
Omer (07:56.320)
The business was founded in 2001 and 16 years is a long time for any SaaS business.
I'm not even sure there are that many out there.
Allan Wille (08:09.520)
No, I know, I know.
Omer (08:11.920)
Can you talk to us a little bit about how your co founder is Peter, right?
Allan Wille (08:17.900)
Yeah, that's right, that's right.
We actually went to school together, so I've known him for a long time.
This is actually my second company.
I started another company in 96 and I mean just a quick sidebar with that company in 96, straight out of university and for those of you old enough, money was being thrown around like crazy and we raised $45 million within a matter of about three years in 96 and I exited that company, the company did an IPO and I mean nobody really got terribly rich.
But when I started this company in 2001, you know, my only real experience was that I was going to go out to market and raise funds, you know, and this is 2001, 2002, you know, and we had a product idea, but there was really no evidence.
And I think that was probably one of the earliest misconceptions or mistakes that I made.
And what's maybe the lesson in this is that I still see that behavior today.
There's definitely a glorification of companies that go out and raise money and raise money often far too soon.
Really it's a case of the cart before the horse syndrome.
And we were doing exactly the same thing.
We went out to market and first of all, in 2002, 2001, there was no BC or angel in their right mind that was going to invest in a pre revenue startup.
And that was probably one of the best things that ever happened to us because it really sort of level set our expectations about what it meant to be starting a business, what it meant to be an entrepreneur.
And I mean, I always caution folks that, you know, being an entrepreneur is both the best thing and the worst thing in the world.
And you had better have an expectation to be self sufficient, cash self sufficient for two years because it's going to be hard.
And I remember the early days, I mean Peter, my co founder, sold his car so that we could put some food on the table, you know, and we weren't married, we didn't have a house, we didn't have kids at the time, none of that kind of stuff.
So you know, those things are, it's easier if you don't have those obligations.
But still, I mean there's a lot of hard perseverance and really painful, difficult uncertainty in the early years.
Now what was interesting, when we first started the company, it actually wasn't a B2B play, it was a B2C play where we had a dashboard.
We've always been a dashboard vendor, real time dashboard, better.
But the premise was we have a dashboard that you download to your desktop.
It was an on prem tool and you monitor your soccer scores, your weather, your sports news, your stock prices, etc.
Etc.
And it was actually wildly popular.
We had thousands of downloads every day and we could not find a business buyer.
And it was really, really difficult to see on the one hand this success, but on the other hand this inability to get money coming in.
So that was Very difficult.
And it wasn't until one of our early customers, Lufthansa, came along and said, well, would you consider pushing business data to the dashboard instead of soccer scores?
And that was really our first customer.
And we listened and we made an overnight decision that we were going to move into the business dashboard space.
And of course, at that time, it's not hard to do because you're starving.
There's really no viable business model that is making sense.
So if a customer comes along and presents an opportunity, I think it's a very clear indication that you jump on it and you listen to that customer and you pivot the business very quickly.
That's a clear indication.
Right?
But I'll tell you the flip side.
As we were then moving into the business space and we sold into customers such as intel and emc, we had this downloadable desktop dashboard that was very expensive and it was being sold into it, and the sales cycle was very long, and we started making revenue, but we never really experienced a tremendous amount of growth.
And here's one of the places where a lot of entrepreneurs get stuck.
As I said, if you're not making any money whatsoever and there's a clear indication that things are not working, it's very easy to say, okay, let's move on.
Let's discard this business model or discard this product and move on.
On the flip side, if things are growing like crazy and you're 2xing or 3x in your revenue, again, it's clear to say that, hey, we've got something that's working.
But a lot of entrepreneurs get stuck in that middle ground where they have fits and spurts of successes, little successes that drive hope and drive these false positives of a business model or a product that actually has fit.
And we were in that same boat for actually a very long time.
And you say things to yourself.
You say things, let's stay the course.
Because look at last month, we sold this big deal, and you say, let's stick to our guns.
But the reality is that the product is not working.
It's not working to the expectations that you should be growing at.
So I think this is definitely one of the lessons that I would put out there.
Be as brutally honest as you can with your success and your growth rate.
If you're stuck in that mediocrity, in that sort of middle ground where it's not a horrible disaster and it's not a wonderful success, you really have to ask yourself, is this as good as it's going to get, or should we try something different.
In our case, we spent too long doing the same thing and we should have said, listen, this is not working, let's retool, let's go back to the drawing board and try something different.
So certainly in the early years we definitely struggled with that.
We struggled with the fact that we were not funded and that was probably a good thing.
And we also of course struggled with the fact that we had this very slow growth that we should have probably killed much, much earlier than we did.
Omer (15:12.460)
So the, the funding is, is a great point.
And so why do you say that?
You see too many startups that sort of are going out and trying to get funding before they really have traction.
What are, what are, from your perspective, what are some of the downsides of raising money too early?
Allan Wille (15:36.630)
The downsides are that you don't have any leverage if you go out and raise money or even if you start working with an incubator.
I think that's often one of the first places that put companies on the wrong path.
Now there's incubators that are really, really tremendous at what they do.
And I always caution people, if you're getting involved with an equity based incubator, I would definitely say think twice about it.
You really have to believe in the value that they're going to give you for that equity.
But there are also tons of non equity based incubators, accelerators, and those are the ones that I'm a big fan of.
So they're more of a, more of a place where you can bounce ideas, you can work with a like minded group of folks and you're not giving up equity in the early days.
I mean, these days there's so much, I mean even your podcast, there's so much information online, there's so many entrepreneurs that are willing to help.
You can get advice.
And it used to be that that was the big thing that an incubator would offer, but I think that that model has changed somewhat.
So I would be cautious about incubators and definitely cautious about bringing equity on too earlier.
I think the very, very first thing that a company should be focused on is product market fit.
You need to get it out and have 12 customers say, this is fantastic, I love this.
And you want to hear words like that, you want to then see if you can replicate that, get another 12 customers.
Can you then push that a little bit further and maybe only then say, okay, do we have something that is scalable like cloud?
Could we put money in the top and either further build out our product roadmap or further build out our sales and marketing organization.
The only time that you really should be looking at a capital infusion is if you can accelerate the business.
And I think a lot of companies look at it the other way around, where they say, let's get some funding in here so that we can build the product so that we can build out the market use case, and then we'll sort of go for another round and then we'll scale it.
I think there's a tremendous amount of respect that you learn or you gain if you bootstrap and really have to fight for that first customer and the first dozen customers and the first two dozen customers.
So I'm a huge fan of bootstrapping it first, proving it out, and then only.
And most companies actually, I would argue, should actually never go for capital.
You know, probably only a few companies really, really should be looking at giving up that valuable equity.
Omer (18:44.020)
Okay, so the other.
The lesson that you kind of shared in, in terms of the mediocrity can be dangerous and kind of not totally being honest with yourself that, you know, is your product actually getting somewhere?
Are you actually onto something, or do you need to make a change?
And I think that maybe in hindsight that's easier to do.
But if somebody's kind of in that stage right now where maybe they have a product in market, they have some customers, maybe they're not getting the rapid growth that they would like to see.
What are some of the signs that you what the advice you could give
Allan Wille (19:36.490)
them exactly what are those telltale signs?
I actually just wrote a blog post about this, so it's top of mind.
And we went through it as well.
And when I talk to other entrepreneurs around here, I often hear one of two stories.
I hear entrepreneurs saying, how do we generate leads?
How do we generate demand?
Do you have a direct sales force?
And should we be investing in the partner channel?
So I hear questions like that, and it feels to me like you're still pushing the string.
Like you don't have product market fit yet.
You don't have the demand yet.
So if you're asking questions about how do we grow marketing, how do we grow leads, how do we grow sales?
Those may be red flags once in a blue moon.
And unfortunately, there's fewer of these companies.
I will meet with a founder who says, how do we sell scale?
How do we build our DevOps?
How do we build our qa?
We don't have enough support people.
Those are very, very different questions.
And in that case, the business is feeling a pull from the string, the product is fitting a use case and it's really valuable and it is moving.
And it's a totally, totally different feeling than a product that doesn't have product market fit.
So if you're in one of those situations, it will feel very, very different.
If you're in the first situation, it's where you're trying to figure out how to market and how to generate more leads and sales.
You may want to ask yourself the question if the product is really something that customers are valuing.
Omer (21:18.690)
Yeah.
And also, how about is the amount of effort you need to put into selling your product?
Allan Wille (21:32.840)
If you're chatting with prospects, is it a long sales cycle?
Is it a difficult sales cycle?
Now, some products are more difficult to sell than others.
They're more of a technical sale.
So that can give you a false positive.
But you're right, those kind of things are often telltale signs as well.
On the flip side, the customers that you have, do you have high churn?
Do you have customers that have low engagement?
So all of those questions as well will point to is your product market fit?
So I really see the growth stages as three things.
First, the company, any company needs to really focus on product.
Do they have value and product market fit?
Only then they should sort of add on the second stage, which, which is all about growth.
What can we do to grow and accelerate this as quickly as possible?
And once they've got that, then they should be thinking about efficiency metrics.
What can we do to not only have product market fit and grow this, but also be efficient with our, with our metrics?
Omer (22:36.940)
So going back to 2001, when you guys launched this business, how long did you run it as a B2C play before you, you sort of pivoted to a B2B business?
Allan Wille (22:50.420)
Well, it was, it was three years.
It was three years before we had Lufthansa as our first paying B2B client.
And, you know, in the early days, we were building websites for people.
We were doing odd jobs to sort of keep the money coming in.
And, you know, I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
I think those are good humbling experiences that, that entrepreneurs need to, and probably should be doing.
Omer (23:17.020)
So three years.
It took you three years to get your first paying customer?
Allan Wille (23:21.260)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
But in the meantime, we had close to 250 or 300,000 users that were using this B2C product.
So again, we were stuck in this sort of false positive market.
We had sort of this side of the market that was working Sideways side of the business that was working, but it wasn't generating any revenue.
So it's, it's hard.
It's really hard.
You get all these different mixed messages.
Omer (23:47.510)
And I guess one of the dangers is that you can start to look at that and say, great, we've got, you know, a few hundred thousand users.
They're not paying us anything.
Let's kind of focus on how we can monetize that.
Maybe we can grow that to, you know, 500,000 users and sort of then we'll figure out how to make money from it.
But there's a danger with that, right, because you can kind of, you can kind of fool yourself into thinking that,
Allan Wille (24:15.780)
you know, and every company will take a lot of different paths to sort of figure things out, you know, and we were, we were, we were still passionate and excited about this, but it wasn't until this customer came to us and, and opened our eyes to a different business model that we really said, hey, this is something that we can still be passionate about and grow the company.
Omer (24:39.350)
So how did you go about getting a company like Lufthansa as a customer?
Allan Wille (24:48.790)
Well, that came with the volume, right?
So we had a lot of customers or users on the consumer product.
You know, fast forward to today.
You know, today I'm a huge fan of content marketing or SEO and it's something that I actually think that we've done very, very well.
You know, we put a lot of energy, the way we structure our marketing department, we put a lot of energy into writing relevant, valuable content.
And again, that kind of content really drives the best type of leads as well.
So I think, yes, you can have this user base that will, through a viral manner, sort of have customers come back to your site.
But in many cases for customers or for businesses that are starting to generate leads and really need to look at demand generation, I would say one of the most efficient, efficient, and probably the highest quality things to do is to really look at what kind of content, what kind of questions are your customers asking, and can you put valuable content around that that will drive leads and awareness back to your website?
So I mean, that's what we do today.
We really spend most of our effort on that.
We spend quite a bit of money on AdWords as well.
Of course, we have also invested in, in Facebook, but we found that Facebook is too high up in the funnel, so there's not enough intent because again, it's not a search driven or intent rich channel.
So I mean, you've got to try all these things.
Some Things will work for some companies and not for others.
One sort of lesson that I have found is that it takes, it takes a lot of effort and testing to get advertising spend.
Right.
You can waste a tremendous amount of dollars if you don't accurately monitor the leads.
And the quality of leads that come in through some of the paid advertising channels like Facebook gave us a tremendous amount of volume, but the quality of the conversions and then the retention of that cohort was very low.
So, you know, it doesn't make sense to continue investing in that, for example.
So test everything.
Test every single cohort.
But consistently we found that content marketing and SEO effort.
Omer (27:18.200)
Was content marketing the way you acquired that first customer, the Lufthansa?
Allan Wille (27:23.960)
No, that first customer was acquired because they had a couple of hundred Lufthansa employees that were using our consumer dashboard to monitor their soccer scores.
Omer (27:36.630)
I love it.
Allan Wille (27:38.430)
You know, and, and they're like, okay, enough is enough, you know, let's see if we can push some business data through this channel as opposed to the soccer scores.
Right.
And you know, the Germans are pretty passionate about their soccer scores.
So.
So there you go.
That's how that happened.
Omer (27:55.470)
And so what were, what were you guys doing in those early days to get customers?
So you get Lufthansa, you know, you got a big, big kind of corporate customer.
It kind of validates the, the shift or the pivot that you decided to make.
And so what did you do next to then say, okay, how do we get the next customer or the one after the that?
Allan Wille (28:23.390)
Right.
So this is still before we launched our cloud based application and we pivoted the business model to more of an SMB model.
So we're selling enterprise grade software.
We're selling into, you know, we sold into intel and American Express and, you know, H and R Block and Staples.
So this was, this was very much direct selling.
Now we, we really still had a lot of large content focus and SEO has always been something that has been very close to everything that we do.
But for the most part, I remember I would prospect and I would cold call and omer.
I can tell you, I hated it.
I mean, it felt so inefficient.
No matter how well I targeted a person, there was just a real difficult struggle to get them to spend any time with me and listen to the story.
So I remember that was very, very difficult.
And throughout that entire period, we continued to spend more time on growing our inbound processes.
So really with content and with demand generation through SEO, that started making that much easier.
So I had to do less outbound cold calling.
And what I was doing is I was then replying to warm leads that were coming through our inbound process.
And it's night and day.
I mean, anybody that's tried that firsthand, it truly is night and day.
And it felt much more efficient because here's somebody who raised their hand and they said, hey, I'm interested in what you're selling and I would like to speak with somebody.
And again, back in those days, this is sort of 2007, 2008, the product wasn't as self serve as the one that is that we have today.
So we had to talk to them, we had to onboard them, we had to have a technical discussion with it.
And it still was a relatively long sales cycle, so that direct approach was necessary.
But moving from, from a cold call to a warm prospect who had raised their hand was a huge shift and a very valuable shift as far as the efficiency of that process went.
And also my mental health, I think it's really hard to sort of pick up the phone every day and reach out to folks that fundamentally probably don't want to talk to you.
Omer (30:59.290)
How long did you have to do that for before you, you were able to rely more on inbound marketing?
Allan Wille (31:06.100)
That happened relatively quickly.
I mean, I was super motivated because this was simply not working.
It was not working from my happiness point of view and it simply wasn't working from a volume point of view.
So we started investing very early on in blog posts and in content.
And the other thing is, these 300,000 consumer users actually helped us quite a bit as far as our presence and our backlinks and our buzz.
So when we started writing content and really employing SEO tactics, it actually happened pretty quickly.
And keep in mind, back then there was not a lot of sophistication in the search engine optimization world and we were actually able to make some huge strides very, very quickly.
So luckily for me, I didn't have to do more than maybe a year or so of cold calling.
And before we had warm prospects coming in.
Omer (32:07.370)
A year of cold calling for you and I, probably a day of cold calling feels like a year.
Allan Wille (32:12.810)
It's horrendous.
It is horrendous.
Omer (32:15.130)
All right.
You also, when we were talking earlier, you, you also mentioned that when it came to your first thousand customers, you had been pretty involved with just about all of them.
Allan Wille (32:29.140)
Yeah, yeah.
Omer (32:30.340)
So how did that happen?
Was that because you were having to onboard these people, what was the level of involvement you had?
Allan Wille (32:39.940)
Yeah.
So let's switch gears for A sec.
Because the first thousand.
When I talk about the first thousand.
So in 2012 we launched the current product which is our cloud based dashboard that is targeting small and mid sized businesses and it wasn't being sold for $50,000, it was being sold for $25 a month per user.
So very, very different business model.
Super risky move on our part.
But the reason, the fundamental reason and we had lots and lots of inbound volume.
The reason I wanted to talk to all of these customers and I was motivated to talk to all of these customers because it was a brand new product, it was immature, we were trying to understand the market and I really wanted to talk to as many customers as I possibly could and, and there's a huge advantage to that.
So a lot of founders will shy away from the idea of talking with customers and either they'll say well we're going to build something that is totally self serve and it's going to be through the website only.
Or they'll say listen, I don't really like sales and I'm going to hand this over to some sales rep that I bring in or that I hire.
There's huge advantage, especially for the founder or the CEO to talk to those early customers.
A, you will find that your customer retention rate is through the roof because the customers have got personal relationship with the CEO or the founder.
And fundamentally I'm asking about the health and the interest and the value of the product.
So it really is like we're involving these early customers in every single decision and there's huge value in that.
So I really tried to talk to onboard, help learn from each one of those first thousand customers and then the volume starts becoming too difficult and I still try to reach out and get involved as much as I can.
And especially if a customer today if a customer says hey, we've got got an issue, I might jump in and see if I can help out or likewise, which is really nice.
If a customer writes in and says hey, we had a great experience working with your support team, I'll reach out to that customer again and I'll say hey, listen, thanks so much for the note.
It really makes a big difference.
Let me know if there's anything I can do to help.
Those touch points I think are so incredibly valuable and especially in the early days when, when you're really trying to figure out the product market fit.
Omer (35:28.140)
Yeah, totally.
So how big is the company now?
How many employees do you have?
Allan Wille (35:32.620)
So we have about 90 employees today, you know, and when we launched the cloud app which was in 2012, I think we probably had about 14 employees.
If you chart that.
It was basically, you know, there was a.
You know, just the founders, and then we sort of had very, very slow growth for a very, very long time, like 10 years.
And then all of a sudden, we've had this hockey stick over the past five years.
Omer (36:03.140)
So in the first 10 years, you were probably hiring about an employee a year on average.
Allan Wille (36:08.420)
Yeah, or maybe not even that.
I mean, you know, there's ups and downs, and sometimes it was even worse than you could possibly imagine.
But, you know, like, it was.
It was slow growth in the first 10 years.
I mean, I have zero regrets.
I don't know what else I'd be doing.
You know, it's always been something that gets me up in the morning, but it's very different than it was then.
Omer (36:32.510)
Today, I don't know if you talk about revenue publicly, but if you don't, can you give us kind of a broad sense of how big the business is?
Allan Wille (36:42.450)
Yeah, for sure.
So, I mean, we've got 8,500 customers, and we're closing in on doing sort of a 8 million ARR.
Kind of number.
Omer (36:51.090)
Wow, that's awesome.
And to think, you know, for a business that took three years to get the first paying customer, it's a truly inspirational story.
Allan Wille (37:03.170)
I mean, I'm a huge optimist.
Right.
And so we were talking about quotes before.
Is there a favorite quote of mine?
And I don't know that there is, but.
And I don't know who told this to me first.
It was either my chief customer success guy or my cfo.
And they said, listen, Alan, nothing is ever as good or as bad as it seems.
And you take that to heart because.
Because I think a lot of entrepreneurs live on the roller coaster every day, and there really are extreme highs and extreme lows.
And I think you really have to say, okay, you know what?
You're right.
The sun will always come up tomorrow.
Nothing is ever as good or as bad as it seems.
And both things are true.
But sort of that even keel is something that.
I think that perspective can help a lot of entrepreneurs.
Omer (37:58.670)
Yeah, that's.
That's great advice.
Okay, let's move on to the lightning round.
I'm going to ask you seven questions, and just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
You ready?
Allan Wille (38:08.450)
Yeah, absolutely.
Let's do it.
Omer (38:10.170)
What's the best piece of business advice that you ever received?
Allan Wille (38:14.570)
Hire the best people.
And we live by that.
And it is, hands down the most important thing that you can do.
Omer (38:21.690)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Allan Wille (38:25.540)
So there's a couple of books I'm going to say Good to Great has been one that I've always found fantastic.
Hard Things is it's a raw, rough read and I'm not sure if I like his tactics, but it's still a really good lesson.
And the one that I just finished reading was an amazing book called Lead by Greatness by David Lapin.
Omer (38:47.380)
Awesome.
I will include all those in the show.
Notes what's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a success entrepreneur?
Allan Wille (38:54.900)
Well, we talked about it a little bit, but I think a combination of this optimism and brutal honesty is super important.
Omer (39:03.780)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Allan Wille (39:09.300)
If it's a productivity tool, I'd probably have to say doing lots of reading or chatting with.
I love chatting with other founders.
I find it so motivational.
So yeah, reading and getting information from other founders.
Omer (39:24.440)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Allan Wille (39:28.920)
You know, I struggled with that one, but it would probably be something energy or eco related.
I think there's just so much opportunity and so much to be done in that space.
Omer (39:41.880)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Allan Wille (39:49.150)
I'm pretty open book.
Most people know me quite well.
Sometimes people are surprised to find out that I'm not a software or a business person.
You know, had gone to school.
I actually did industrial design.
I wanted to be an architect or an industrial designer when I was in school.
So, you know, I think there's all sorts of different, different backgrounds that can serendipitously, you know, lead to lead to different things.
Omer (40:17.420)
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Allan Wille (40:22.060)
I do a lot of cycling.
I cycle every single day to work and back.
And to me it is such a mental health hack.
It's fantastic.
And I've gotten a lot of the office to be into cycling or running as well.
So I'm a huge fan of having that balance.
Omer (40:39.250)
How far do you cycle?
Allan Wille (40:41.810)
I cycle about.
I mean for you guys in the States, I don't know how long this is, but about 16 kilometers one way.
So about 32 kilometers a day.
Omer (40:50.850)
That must be about at least 20 miles.
Allan Wille (40:53.810)
I don't know what that is, but yeah, it's good.
It's perfect.
Omer (40:57.170)
I get tired driving my car that far.
Allan Wille (41:01.170)
Steve, you should be cycling or walking.
Omer (41:04.980)
Alan, thanks.
It's been a pleasure talking to you.
Now if folks want to check out Clipfolio, you can go to Clipfolio.
That's clip with a k folio.com and I'll include a link in the show notes for that as well.
And if, if people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Allan Wille (41:24.740)
You know what?
I'd be happy for them to ping me on LinkedIn.
You can look me up.
I think that's, that's probably one of the best ways you can DM me on Twitter as well.
But LinkedIn is probably the best thing to do.
Omer (41:34.750)
Okay.
Allan Wille (41:35.550)
And in the notes always say, hey, I heard you on the podcast like notes with LinkedIn requests with no notes I tend to ignore.
Omer (41:43.550)
Good tip there.
Yeah, I tend to do the same as all these days.
All right, awesome.
Alan, thank you.
It's been a pleasure.
And I wish you and the team at Clipfolio all the best in the future.
Allan Wille (41:55.470)
Absolutely.
My pleasure, Owen.
Omer (41:57.230)
Cheers.
