Omer (00:09.760)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan, and this is a 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.
In this episode, I talk to Michael Kumleitner, the founder and CEO of Walls IO, a social media content aggregator, and Swat IO, a social media management platform.
In 2008, while working as a software developer, Michael spotted an opportunity to start an agency specializing in Facebook app development.
A few years later, after seeing his clients struggle with managing their Facebook communities, he launched Swat IO to help solve the problem.
But finding his first 10 customers took nearly two years.
Around that time, a friend asked Michael to create a tool for aggregating and showcasing social media posts on TV screens at a co working event.
Now realizing its broader potential, Michael quickly turned the tool into another product called Walls IO soon after the event.
But growth was slow for both products.
It took many years and a lot of hard work and persistence to get traction.
Then the pandemic hit, causing big problems for Walls IO.
As live events suddenly stopped, Michael and his team had to quickly pivot to keep the product alive.
Although he believed he could handle everything, the challenge of running the agency and building two products eventually became too much for Michael.
That's when he decided to focus mainly on Walls IO, realizing he had to use his time and energy better.
And that decision paid off significantly.
Today, his two product companies generate over $10 million in annual revenue.
In this episode, you'll learn how Michael navigated the initial challenges of building SWOTIO and WAHLsIO, including the struggles to find his first customers, what strategies Michael implemented to pivot Walls IO during the pandemic, and how that change significantly impacted the company's growth.
We talk about how Michael balanced running two bootstrap companies and the lessons this taught him about entrepreneurship and growth, how Walls IO leveraged SEO, content marketing and search ads as key growth tactics and a surprising growth channel that failed.
And finally, we talk about some of the unique challenges and lessons Michael's faced as a Bootstrap solo founder, growing his business to over $10 million in annual revenue.
So I hope you enjoy it.
Michael, welcome to the show.
Michael Kamleitner (02:48.980)
Hi Omer.
Thanks for having me.
Omer (02:51.300)
My pleasure.
Do you have a favorite quote?
Something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?
Michael Kamleitner (02:56.980)
Yeah, yeah, I do.
I did think about that a lot.
And since.
Since I've been a founder of two SaaS companies, Bootstrap Both, and both times a solo founder I really love this quote, which is taken from a book from Sarah Lacy and she originally titled her book once you're lucky, twice you're good.
And I adapted that slogan for myself since I am a two times founder.
Once you're lucky, twice you're stupid.
Because sometimes I really felt very stupid doing it twice at the same time alone.
And bootstrapped.
The book is very good though, and definitely also recommendation.
Omer (03:33.660)
Yeah, that's the key there.
It's not that you're a second time founder, it's that you've built two companies in parallel.
And I think that's a really interesting part of your story.
As we were talking earlier, number one, you're bootstrapped.
Number two, you're a solo founder.
Number three, you have built these two companies in parallel.
And number four, you're not in Silicon Valley.
Right.
Like all the things that people say you need to be doing.
So we're going to have some fun with this conversation and figure out what you've done because you've obviously done something right here.
Why don't we start by you telling us about Wals IO, what does the product do, who's it for and what's the main problem you're trying to solve?
And then also tell us about the second company, SWOT IO.
Michael Kamleitner (04:20.980)
Sure, sure.
Happy to do so, Omer.
So Walls IO is of course it's a B2B SaaS product in the social media marketing space.
And our pitch is that Wasio engages your audience with user generated content and by that increases engagement and brand awareness, whether that's at events or on or on your mobile app, anywhere you want to use user generated content to increase engagement.
That's where was IO comes in.
And the second company, SWOT IO is a social media management tool.
So that's a very, very classical software category.
A tool that allows social media marketing professionals to streamline their community management, their content planning, analytics, everything that the social media manager does every day.
Omer (05:05.040)
Give us a sense of the size of the business where you in terms of revenue, size of team, number of customers.
Michael Kamleitner (05:12.410)
All in all we are now more than 65 team members.
That's about 45 coming from Swardeo and about 20 from Warzeo.
We are coming from the same parent company.
We are still sharing an office.
So sometimes it's hard to say who's working for which company.
So it's 65 in total and I don't disclose any revenue numbers per se.
But what I can tell you what I'm very proud of and also thankful for all my team is that we have been able to cross the US$10 million annual revenue both businesses combined.
Omer (05:47.190)
Okay, so let's talk about how you got started.
I think you started SWOTIO first and then about a year later you launched Walls IO.
So why don't we go back to those days?
Like what year was that and what were you doing at the time?
Michael Kamleitner (06:09.860)
Yeah, let's go back down the memory, memory lane.
That's almost 15 years ago.
I think I used to be a software developer myself back then.
And I still remember 2008.
I found it super, super exciting when Facebook first launched their first public API, their platform.
So I was dabbling around in my bedroom building tiny little, and I would say stupid little applications on top of Facebook.
And out of that I've created my first business, which was a tiny boutique software agency focusing on building marketing apps on Facebook and other social media platforms.
So that was the first real business I created or founded myself.
However, pretty quickly I became aware that I don't see myself in running an agency forever.
I wanted to do product.
So I was happy that and blessed, I would say, that from the agency business, I was able to develop the product ideas together with my team for both SWOT IO and Walls IO.
And you're right, SWOT IO was founded or created first as a product that's pretty much 10 years ago in 2013.
It's sometimes hard to pinpoint the exact date because there used to be long periods of prototyping and being unsure whether this is a self sustainable business until we really jumped into the cold water and said, okay, now let's make this a real product.
And then I think two years later or one.
Yeah, one year, one or two years later, we did the same thing again with Valzio.
Omer (07:38.860)
Okay, so let's talk about SWAT first.
So 2013, how did you come up with the idea?
You know, you said you wanted to start building a product business, get out of this agency business.
I remember those days, by the way.
I remember when everyone said Facebook apps were the thing that were going to change the world.
And you know, there was kind of like this gold rush to go and build these, these apps.
Were you just constantly looking for a product idea around that time and trying to figure out how to get out of the agency business or was this something that, you know, opportunistically you came across and decided to pursue?
Michael Kamleitner (08:11.190)
Yeah, so both, both happened at the same time.
I was trying to find ideas myself and we, we did side projects here and there, but nothing really, really stuck.
And Nothing really turned out viable.
But the good news was we only had to look very close at our agency customers to basically find the ideas ready made for us.
So the companies we were working with, like you said, social media apps were the hot.
Sorry, forgive my, pardon my fren.
And suddenly huge or bigger companies and brands started to build Facebook communities.
And they were having trouble because once you have a certain community, size of community, you have to deal with lots of incoming customer requests.
With spam, you have suddenly two or three people posting at the same time, and you need a tool to manage that.
It was not really a big invention on our end, but we just saw what our bigger agency customers were having trouble with and then started to build a solution for that.
Omer (09:07.650)
Okay, and let's talk about what you did in terms of validating the idea.
Was this more about, okay, you just started building the product or did you kind of go through and do the customer validation thing and interview some of your customers?
How did you get to a point where you were like, I'm confident that we're going to invest time and money into building this product.
We're going to bootstrap.
So you don't have the benefit of having raised any money and you've got an agency business to keep running at the time.
Michael Kamleitner (09:48.480)
So that's a lot of questions to unpack.
First, we didn't do what usually what today you would recommend to do, like doing customer research, validating a product idea.
We were way too naive.
I was way too naive to do that also.
For a very, very long time, I really thought like this, yeah, this is a side project, really.
Maybe I can sell it to 10 or 20 agency customers.
That would have been already like paradise for me.
So now nowadays SWOTIO has, I think, more than 700 customers.
Right.
So, but, so the vision wasn't, wasn't fully developed yet in my, in my head, to be honest.
Yeah.
So, but on the, on the.
So that's the, that's a criticism I would see for myself looking back.
What we did, right, is that we were working on the product very closely with our future customers.
We really made sure to build the first prototype not within months, probably even within weeks, and get our customers their hands on it and start using it.
They didn't pay yet, of course, but they gave us a lot of feedback, which mostly helped us in really finding that sweet spot and later reaching what you would call product market fit.
Although I have to say, it's also dangerous if you only have like a handful of existing agency customers who give you feedback that can also very easily drive the product management, the product direction, into a wrong way.
So you get easily distracted by a single customer who has these crazy demands and crazy ideas which might sound right for them but will never be applicable to a broader number of customers.
So that was difficult to navigate.
And if I'm honest, there's still, I think even to this day you will still find the odd feature in our product that clearly can be traced back to one specific customer who had a lot of, who had a big word, who had a big in our minds and therefore influenced product management.
Omer (11:42.510)
How long did it take for you to get your first 10 customers and did they all come from existing agency clients?
Michael Kamleitner (11:52.430)
Yeah, I would say the first 10 customers definitely took more than one year, something between one or two years.
So it was really a kind of slow process.
But that also has to do with some lessons I had to learn during that time.
We can talk about that later.
And those first 10 to 20 customers, they were not exclusively existing agency customers.
Luckily what we achieved was that these early agency customers then started to spread the word and then new customers were joining.
So after this one or two year period, we were pretty sure that we have a viable product on our hands, something that it's worth to really go not all in, but definitely, definitely allocate significant resources to our.
Omer (12:37.660)
Okay, so it took a couple of years to get the first 10 customers for SWOT and presumably it wasn't an easy thing to do because you've still got to run the agency, you've still got to get money coming in, pay the bills, keep the lights on, all that stuff while you're allocating resources for a fair amount of time without generating revenue.
So that sounds like a challenging situation anyway, but in the middle of that you then decide, let's launch another product.
How did that happen?
Michael Kamleitner (13:17.750)
Sort of.
Sort of, yes.
So just to get the timeline straight, the second product, Wasio, was launched one or two years after Swoteo and at this point I was already pretty much committed on Swardio, although you could ask me how committed was I when I came up with the second product idea.
So I was probably not fully committed yet.
Again, this came the idea for Voss IO which at its core is a social media content aggregator.
So it collects user generated content from all sorts of social media platforms.
The idea for that came again from a very specific customer need, or it wasn't actually a customer, it actually was a friend of mine who was throwing a party, an event at the co working space.
We didn't have so many of those in Vienna back then.
And we just wanted to create a fun element for this, for this event, A video screen collecting and encouraging everyone to post on Twitter and on platforms which are now long forgotten, like Foursquare.
If anyone in your audience still remembers that we didn't have Instagram back then.
So the idea came again from close ally, customer, partner.
And once we built that for this event, suddenly other people were asking for it.
So again, I had the feeling maybe this could be more than a side project, a one off project, maybe we could productize this.
So it was very much the same or similar story on how we came up with the idea.
But of course, in hindsight I might have just said no and focused on the first idea, but I just couldn't say no to a great product idea that that was put right in front of me.
Omer (14:57.200)
I'm curious, you know, when we talk about the two products today, they are clearly different, serve a very clear purpose and need, but in the early days you could kind of put them both into a social media app bucket, right?
So it possibly would have been as easy to say, let's just build all of this into one product.
Did you go through that thought process where it's like, why aren't we just building this uber product for social media that does all of these things versus saying no, let's just do this completely different, completely separately, its own brand.
How did you make that decision?
Michael Kamleitner (15:41.230)
That's a great question.
We did consider that for a while.
The issue that I saw and still see if you want to have this 360 social media suite, that beast that can do everything, we would not have been able to pull that off in the way we were bootstrapped.
So there would have been way more like other competitors which we otherwise wouldn't have to face.
Bigger competitors funded with hundreds or at least dozens of millions of capital who were able to offer this suite with way more features.
There was not just SWOTIO and also there was social media, paid advertising, there was monitoring or listening.
So if you really want to have wanted to compete in this suite with this suite approach, we wouldn't have been able to create all those products in our bootstrapped situation.
So that was off the table.
And I think another reason for, for, for deciding to have two independent products which later became also independent legal entities, legal like separate companies.
Another reason for that was to really allow both products and later both companies to grow and develop on their own, on their own individual growth trajectory, weren't like tied to each other so strong they could all both find their way.
Which also, of course, at one point gives you more flexibility when you're looking for partners.
Maybe at one.
If you at one point decide to, to look for M and A scenarios, or if you're looking for investments that at a later stage.
I think that's all easier if you have mostly separated companies, separate entities who can go.
Who can go their own way.
But still, you are absolutely right.
I'm not saying this was the absolute right or best decision.
It turned out well for me and for our companies.
But who knows what would have happened if we went the other way, as you suggested.
So I'm not saying this is like the only, the only solution or the best one.
Neither.
But that was my thinking back then.
Omer (17:47.470)
You know, when we were talking earlier, you said to me, you know, mixing agency and product doesn't work.
At least, you know, for us.
Looking back at it now, you know, things, things worked out, got you to where you are today.
But I'm guessing trying to do both caused more problems than maybe, you know, you wanted to deal with at the time.
Michael Kamleitner (18:12.040)
Yeah, sure.
That, that is true.
The question, of course, is always, do you really have a choice?
Especially do you have a choice when bootstrapping, because you have to pay your bills and your salary somehow, right?
If you, if you're not lucky enough to get that capital from some earlier venture, or, I don't know, from friends, families, fools, you will have to bankroll the development of your SaaS product somehow.
And I think in general, having a working agency, software agency business is a great way to bankroll that first one or two years of product development.
But as you said, rightly, it comes at a cost and it has to be navigated very consciously.
Things I probably only learned along the way and which in hindsight slowed us down unnecessarily.
I guess the biggest, and in hindsight, of course, obvious learning, is trying to have as dedicated as possible personal resources for agency and product as possible.
So in the first year or so, we didn't have that.
We have.
We had a handful of engineers, really, we didn't have much else than engineers, to be honest, and they were available for work both on product and agency.
Now, of course, what happens, and I'm hearing that from similar founder stories, so I don't think we are.
I'm unique in that.
I think a lot of people go through that.
A lot of bootstrappers, by the way, are coming from agency backgrounds.
It's also a very common treat.
So the mistake was not to have like separation in resources.
So of course short term revenue was, was calling like agency customers, asking for that super important project that has to be done by four weeks.
And of course what that meant is for the next four weeks, nobody would work on our product.
Everyone was focusing on the agency project.
Yeah, we would get some cash flow, but we didn't have focus.
And that definitely cost us a lot of time, at least in the first year, maybe even a bit longer, until I understood that there's no way to build for me, at least for us, at least to build, to have enough velocity in building the product.
Then by basically installing like a firewall and making absolutely clear that the first engineer moving them over to the product side and he is not allowed to have to do anything with agency projects.
Then as soon as I saw some traction, move over the second engineer and so on and so on.
You could do the same with marketing and sales.
Although we were very much engineering driven
Omer (20:38.640)
back then, kind of beyond the.
In the first 10 customers, for both Walls and Swat, were you selling basically both products to the same type of customer to agencies?
Michael Kamleitner (20:52.510)
That was a big overlap.
And for a long time we didn't have.
Well, at first we didn't have neither sales nor marketing specialists.
So as so many bootstrappers, I had to not level up but change my roles.
I was first very much focused on engineering, then building the product ideas, then I had to do marketing, then I had to do sales.
So basically it was me for a long time trying to sell and market those products.
Yes, it helped that the target audience has a very big overlap, which of course the Persona is a social media marketing professional.
So that certainly helped, although there were also a lot of differences in terms of the markets we were playing in.
SWATO was very much focused on German speaking markets.
Also it was worldwide from the get go.
But still there was overlap and that certainly helped.
Omer (21:42.250)
So let's talk about growth.
So one of the bigger growth channels for you has been content and SEO.
What was the approach you took?
What was the thinking as you were starting to build out your marketing plan here?
Because I'm guessing at the time you were the marketing team.
Is this just you on your own
Michael Kamleitner (22:07.050)
figuring this out in the beginning?
Yes, although marketing was the first position I could actually, I'm not sure, maybe I'm mixing up marketing and sales.
One of those were really the first positions I could really afford to hire a professional.
I think at Svadio it was sales and that marketing it was at Walzio was marketing, which makes sense because One is more direct sales heavy, the other is more self service product led.
So yes, for Volzio it was definitely marketing.
So for Volzio being like very self service focused and having a worldwide target audience, we felt like we going all in on the marketing side made a lot of sense.
And we were pretty early in that new software category of user generated content tools.
We didn't even have the word UGC back then I think.
So that meant there was still a lot of space in terms of content marketing and therefore effective SEO.
And so that definitely helped.
That wouldn't work today if I would launch a UGC tool or a social media marketing tool today.
It's very, very hard to, to be successful with content.
It will take forever since the spaces are so, so saturated.
Back then it was still possible and of course it's still even today worth it pursuing such a, such a, such an approach.
Because organic SEO is still the only thing that really that has the best scale still.
While other channels might be clocked or saturated sooner or later, owned organic profile on SEO is what always works.
Omer (23:46.330)
So if I kind of recap that it was.
You feel that one of the reasons you were able to get content marketing and SEO working was largely to do with timing.
You were pretty early entering that space around user generated content and the market wasn't as saturated as it is today with so many social media tools.
So that helped you create content and start ranking faster and getting discovered by customers certainly.
Michael Kamleitner (24:19.550)
But of course it was still necessary to provide really great content that was actually valuable for users, existing users, potential leads.
So there's no way around that if you invest in content and make sure it's really high quality.
And we did our share of mistakes here as well, like hiring external agents, agencies who would like churn out piece after piece after piece, but really not ideally aligned with our customers needs.
So in the end we learned hey, we should really do it ourselves or at least learn how to do it ourselves first before we let someone, someone from outside doing it.
So we, we did our share of mistakes.
We did also a few, A few, a few good.
A few, A few intuitively smart things like making sure that, that we gave away a lot.
So very early on we started to give away free licenses to NGOs to non profits and we just asked for links in exchange.
Hey, please mention us as a sponsor link.
Here's our logo.
Please link it on your website.
They usually put it somewhere in the footer so it's linked from every page.
So over time that really helped us build a Good link profile.
Omer (25:40.720)
Yeah, that's a good strategy.
In terms of going after NGOs and those sorts of organizations, I'm assuming they have pretty decent domain ratings, right?
Michael Kamleitner (25:54.799)
Very often, yeah.
It happens a lot.
It could be organizations in the academic space which tend to have very high rated domains, even if the single link is not as valuable.
If you do this constantly and over years, there's a lot of things happening, positive things happening.
Omer (26:12.910)
I want to go back to what you just mentioned about hiring agencies to churn out content and that not really working.
And I've seen that over and over again.
Many startups go through that process.
Some maybe are 6 more successful than others, but it's not the first time.
I'm hearing we eventually had to bring it in house.
I know it's quite some time back, many years ago, but if you had to summarize what was the biggest difference between the type of content these agencies were producing versus the type of content you are able to produce in house, how is it different and why?
What specifically do you think made the difference in terms of resonating with your potential customers and helping to drive leads?
Michael Kamleitner (27:08.190)
Well, I would like to start with saying I'm not even like throwing any agency we have been working with under the bus here.
I really think it was more like our own mistake to outsource work prematurely before we even understood it ourselves.
So we didn't know enough about our customer profile, we didn't know enough how we could provide value.
So.
And if we don't know who are the closest to our customer, how should an agency know?
There's always at least one or two layers between the agency and our end customers.
I think it's almost impossible to breach that gap.
So we first had to start to learn ourselves what kind of content provides value, who we are going to target on which channels and stuff like that.
Once we figured that out, we just were able to create content that was much more aligned with those, with those requirements and with those goals.
So maybe if we would have done it the other way around, invest and build knowledge first on our own and then work with a super professional agency, it might have turned out differently.
I think the big mistake here was, hey, we don't need to hire our own marketing professional.
We can immediately outsource this.
Like from a CEO perspective, I thought, okay, I know, I understand, I need to do, or I believe I need to do content marketing.
I currently can't afford a full time professional.
Let's outsource this without outsource it without having any Personal experience or expertise with content marketing.
And that is a recipe that of course is bound to go wrong.
I should have first invested in my own in house marketing professional who could then guide an agency and really make it work.
I think that's an important advice for if you are a single solo founder and you have like a certain area of your experience.
For me that was engineering product, you gotta understand those other important areas first, sales, marketing, before you hand it over to someone completely outside of your organization.
Omer (29:22.930)
Yeah, I think you're totally right.
And it's not just content, it's everything.
Right.
Michael Kamleitner (29:28.450)
It applies to most or all the things, I guess.
Yeah.
Omer (29:32.150)
I remember somebody saying to me many, many years ago that you outsource stuff that you have got a handle on, you understand, and then you want to get somebody to help run that so you can free up your team potentially to do something else.
And that if you don't really have a handle on it, if you're not really doing that well yourself and you outsource it, chances are the problem is just going to get worse.
Michael Kamleitner (29:57.200)
Yeah, exactly.
And that's the same thing today when you, when you don't think about agencies but think about even lower, how should I say, lower price alternatives like, I don't know, going to upwork or fiverr.com, it will be the same thing.
If you don't understand the task and how it should be done correctly yourself, it will never work.
Similarly, it's probably also similar if you start thinking about outsourcing these tasks to an AI.
Great idea, but you should have understood the task first before you put it into ChatGPT.
Omer (30:31.240)
Right.
The other growth channel that you were able to get working was paid advertising.
And as you and I were talking earlier, the interesting thing here was that you got search ads working but not social media ads.
And I think it's a little ironical that you're selling a social media product and yet social media advertising wasn't effective or helpful and yet search ads were.
So just kind of help us understand what you went through, what you tried.
And then I have a few other questions I'd love to ask you about that.
Michael Kamleitner (31:17.460)
Well, yeah, you could say it's ironic.
You could also say it's almost embarrassing, but it's the truth.
Well, I mean, search ads of course, or yes, luckily worked out pretty soon and without too much hassle.
Of course, search ads work because of the clear, clear buyer intent.
And once our category was starting to be established, there was enough volume, people looking for social media management tools or People searching for even social media walls, which is like lower volume but still there's enough intent there.
So it's, it was easy to work with that and make it also work with enough return on investment because both my companies, both our products were at a comparatively high price point so we never went like a low price strategy.
So it was relatively easy to recoup whatever we paid for clicks or for conversions through our customer lifetime.
So figuring out paid search was relatively easy.
Although it has to be said it's not getting easier over time.
So everyone I think, well maybe it's different in consumer, in consumer land, but in B2B software land I think paid advertising has a clear tendency also to reach a glass ceiling to saturate, also getting more expensive the more competitors you have.
So it's not all fine and easy.
Which brings me back to my first point that organic SEO and reaches basically the holy grail that we are all looking for now to the social media paid advertising.
I mean in hindsight it's clear what we made wrong here.
Advertising on social media doesn't hook into an existing buyer intent but does aim much earlier in the customer journey of your future client.
Your future customer.
And I think while that is pretty much obvious, what we didn't understand is that for catching or touching a customer very early in their journey, like when they even don't know that there is a demand for the problem we are solving, we need to provide much different and much broader for example content to make such a funnel work.
We just didn't do it.
We sort of understood that there is no intent yet, but basically use the same copy, the same landing pages, the same ebooks and addressed with the same material addressed the customer who is much, much earlier and doesn't even know about us yet.
Well, I guess that was bound to be a failure and we wasted quite some money on, on that.
We are still working on it by the way.
It's not, it's not done for us yet.
Of course if you broaden up your funnel in this way, that usually means you need to invest more in creating the appropriate content.
And that's not always easy for a bootstrap company.
But we are getting there and we also learning still a lot of where we ideally can reach our audience.
LinkedIn is a very interesting opportunity that works better than many other platforms.
So yeah, we are learning.
Omer (34:33.200)
Yeah.
So I think now that you describe it that way, it seems pretty obvious but it's a very easy mistake to make until you get clarity on what stage of the customer journey the buyer is at.
And it's very different when somebody is looking for some kind of user generated social media tool on Google and finding you.
And the intent is to find a tool, buy a tool, et cetera, versus somebody discovering the ad on Facebook while they were checking a feed about what their friends were up to.
And they may potentially still be a buyer, but one, there's no intent.
Two, they may be so early in the journey that they don't even realize they need to be creating user generated content.
Right.
So you have a whole different type of education kind of process you need to go through before they'll even be thinking about, about looking for a tool like yours.
Michael Kamleitner (35:38.510)
Absolutely.
And it took us a while to get clear on that or to understand that whole customer journey, like thinking about where is this social media marketing professional, how could we create demand with them, how could we explain our solution, educate them on that?
And also very often that like I mentioned before, that means creating, investing more into content.
I mean a Google search ad is pretty easy to create, even like hundred variations of it.
But for targeting a customer in this early stage, you would probably maybe need something more visual, something more emotional.
You might have to invest into video and stuff like that.
And yeah, that took us a while to figure out and to allocate the right resources to it to get that going.
Omer (36:23.400)
The other channel, which turned out to be crucial for helping drive growth over the last couple of years and possibly helping you cross that 10 million ARR.
Mark has been working with channel partners and doing integrations.
So integrations can mean a whole bunch of things and partnerships.
So just tell me what that meant for you and what was it that you were doing that finally started working?
Michael Kamleitner (36:50.790)
So this is mostly about the second company, about Wars I.O.
because we have a really strong channel partnership program there.
It actually happened in 2020, right in the middle of, of the pandemic.
Back then, wars here was still to a large extent used for, for events, for trade shows, conferences, all of which didn't happen anymore in March 2020.
So as a, as a solo founder, that kept me awake for quite a while until we luckily understood that our product, these social media content hubs were working in a great way also in virtual events which were then of course seeing a lot of traction in the middle of 2020.
So, so our thinking was how can we get the most out of these industry trends?
And for us it was clear we need to bring our social media content hubs into as many virtual event experiences as possible.
Technically that was very easy because our Product is basically a standard widget, an iframe widget which can embed it anywhere.
So that was easy.
We didn't have a lot of technical integration to do.
Now it was all about identifying as many potential platforms, platforms as possible.
Look at the biggest ones, those with the most traction and then setting up a lightweight partnership program integration program that allowed us to integrate our product into theirs.
And what that really means is we want to be part of their app marketplace.
Most of these platforms, all of which are 10, have a tend have a tendency to be larger companies than ours.
All of them have like an app marketplace, a list of integration partners.
We want our logo, we want the walls here logo to be included in these app marketplaces so that their customers can easily find us.
Maybe they also have no idea about using social media walls in the virtual events, but they will find us in the marketplace, can, can start a free trial and hopefully become customers like that.
So that turned out to be a very successful initiative of strategy.
We later first of all, it helped us to survive the pandemic year.
The first saw quite a significant drop in revenue in the, in the first two quarters.
We were actually able to balance that out in Q3 and Q4 largely by our partnership program.
So it was really a good decision to do that.
And we later branched out and extended the partnership program to other categories of software platforms, event platforms first.
And we later added digital signage solutions.
We are now adding HR and employer branding platforms.
So we are continuing and extending that partnership program.
Omer (39:33.110)
Now in terms of day to day operations, I think you've stepped away from SWOT IO and are focused on walls IO Now I want to understand how you think about positioning the two products and differentiating them from competitors.
Now SWOT IO kind of more of a traditional social media management tool in a super crowded, super saturated market.
So one, I want to understand what you do there to position and differentiate yourself.
And then the same question with walls like you know, this idea of social walls is there are more and more products around, around that do that in different ways.
So again, how do you differentiate, how do you make it clearer in terms of your positioning to your ideal customers that you are the best choice for them?
Michael Kamleitner (40:36.610)
Well, this is a real struggle for both companies, ongoing I think for so many SaaS companies out there, let's be honest with ourselves, there's hardly any software category or SaaS category that is not crowded and over saturated.
We all know those SaaS landscape, logo maps, right where you can see hundreds, thousands of logos.
And honestly no customer can Differentiate us, put the pricing pages next to each other.
It's extremely hard for a customer to decide what product is the right match.
So that being said, we did follow different strategies here for Swadeo.
We made two very clear decisions early on which are to most extent still valid and in place.
The first one was a super sharp focus on in markets.
We were clearly saying hey, we want to focus on the German speaking markets, we have a great advantage there, we speak the same language, we're in the same time zone and we understand the legal and later privacy related requirements like GDPR and things like that.
So we were very focused on those markets where our frankly bigger and sometimes maybe better product wise, better positioned us competitors had a very hard time to compete.
If we would have focused on small or medium companies that would have been harder because they don't care so much about GDPR for example.
So at the same time while we were focusing on German speaking markets, we were focusing on mid to larger size companies and also larger acb, larger contract value and that combination allowed us to find our niche, although it's not such a small niche and we are still growing from that market and that turned out to be a successful decision.
However, I have to say especially since as you mentioned I put down my operational duties at Spot IO I'm now in an ownership role which means of course I'm very very tightly working with the management team.
But what we also see now is that for growing further than we are at right now and we have to think ahead, of course we will have to reconsider both of these limiting factors.
Both the market shall we ever play only in the German speaking markets and also shall we only play on the mid to enterprise sized companies?
The latter one we already started to relax by starting to offer a self service model with SWAT two years ago and we will see what my management team comes up with in terms of geographies and markets.
So it was a good decision for a long time but it has to constantly be reconsidered.
Now similar with walls that I would the market by now is also pretty crowded and again I think the answer is positioning and trying to explain to your customer, to your potential customer why you are so much better than that cheap competitor that undercuts your price constantly.
And a lot of that answer is in quality of service.
How fast is your aggregator working?
Is it working with official APIs or are you scraping which is very unstable.
So product quality really is something that you will in my opinion, and I think of myself as a product person always comes first in differentiating, like making clear the product value is better invested and double investing into your product value.
Secondly, as I mentioned, the pricing and the positioning should make that also clear that you are a high quality solution, that you don't want to compare yourself to the $10 per month competitor, that you are a completely different beast.
And that's the challenge of course for marketing and communicating your value.
It's not going to be easy, but it's the only way.
It's the only way you will survive if you are in a market where there is a very low cost competitors or new entries onto the market.
Omer (44:43.340)
I want to talk a little bit about your role as a founder and one being a solo founder and two running two companies at the same time.
When people listening to this interview or listening to you could easily be mistaken for thinking well he had it easy, he got lucky, it worked out for him.
He's got these two businesses that have both survived and thrived.
But there was a time when you realized this was a big struggle, this was affecting your personal health.
It wasn't necessarily helping the growth of the companies.
So give us a picture of that, Give us a picture of the struggle so people can understand both sides of this journey.
Michael Kamleitner (45:43.340)
Here I want to take the opportunity and first state something completely clear.
While I often talk about that I created the product and I came up with this idea and I did that, of course it was very often me but I wouldn't sit here almost 15 years later with two with two profitable SaaS businesses if it wasn't for a very, very strong team that is working behind me.
Not on the co founder level, of course it's different but I have people on both my teams who are working with me for 10 years or more and without them it would not be possible.
So if I can want to be remembered, I want to be proud of something is that at least a few times I read really had a good a good intuition to pick the right person, the right people for my team.
So that being said, you are right.
A lot of that's going back to my to the quote I initially threw into the microphone this once you're once you're lucky, twice you're good or stupid.
There is of course a certain amount of luck involved.
I also won't deny that we had a very great time timing being right in the right moment of in the right moment of time focusing on social media, that was exactly the right time.
That is partly luck, partly intuition.
Honestly, if I would have started 10 years later, I would probably have had maybe a similar intuition about crypto.
I might have failed, most likely with that intuition.
So it's not that easy.
You also have to have luck.
And of course, there was all this organic development of my two companies.
I think, I hope I was able to explain the history of how we came to Swartheo and Bolshev, that a lot of these things happened from a point of nativity and not having, like, super strong vision.
And I'm fine with that.
I'm not embarrassed by that or anything.
It was just the way I evolved personally as an entrepreneur.
But that being said, said that's how I ended up in this double CEO role.
Nobody in their right mind, I guess, would do this in a planned way.
Like you said, two companies, two times bootstrap, two times solo founder.
That's.
That is not healthy, at least for most people.
I mean, maybe if you, if you, if you think you're Elon Musk, you can do that and run 10 companies as a CEO, but I think most, most human beings should focus on one thing, but it is what it is.
I had.
That's what, That's.
That's what I woke up with.
And you're right, it took, it took at all.
It took many years of being focused only on work and having no balance at all with private life.
And that certainly wasn't healthy all the time.
Luckily, it never got to a point where I really had to, I don't know, pull the emergency switch or whatever, but I might have been close to that.
More importantly, I just realized making my own life harder by this constantly switching back and forth.
Like, I mean, there is no multitasking really.
You just switch from one task to the other, and some people do it faster than others, but you always lose time with context switching.
And I had that 10, 10 hours a day at least, switching between Swotio and Bozio.
So at one point, luckily, I realized this is not ideal.
Not for me personally, but more importantly, it is not ideal for the companies, for both companies, because we had two growing products, both had a lot of potential.
And I'm very sure that by remaining in that single or double CEO role, that cost us time or potential, which we would have achieved faster if I would have made the step back from one of the companies earlier.
I'm not complaining.
I think in a way it was necessary, like I said, for my personal trajectory as a founder.
It all has probably some meaning in the end, but it might have been better to make such decisions, to step down from one earlier.
Omer (49:48.750)
All Right, we should wrap up.
Let's get on to the lightning round.
I'm going to ask you seven quick fire questions.
What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?
Michael Kamleitner (50:01.150)
So I think it's about networking and and what I believe networking really should be.
It's not that you're connecting, sending someone a LinkedIn connection request and once they have accepted, start selling to them.
For me, networking really means investing a lot in one to one relationships and that usually means you offer your help, you give a lot of things, you pay forward until you finally maybe ask for a favor in return.
That's so trivial and obvious but yet so many people think networking is sending out as many LinkedIn requests as possible.
I also am a believer in Danvers number which I think says you can only have meaningful relationships with about 150 people and I think even that number might be too high.
So I think having like a small but meaningful network goes a long way.
Omer (50:55.040)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Michael Kamleitner (50:57.360)
It's an older book.
I think the first edition is 10 plus years ago but they had a reprint rewind edition lately.
It's called in search of stupidity.
40 years of high Tech Marketing Failures by Meryl Chapman and it's basically it does what it promises on the COVID It's super fun stories especially for people who have been in the industry for more than five or ten years.
You will revisit a lot of fun marketing failures from the days of IBM to Microsoft up to HubSpot.
It's really a fun read and very much recommended.
Omer (51:30.430)
That's super interesting.
I'm definitely going to read that book.
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
Michael Kamleitner (51:38.750)
I would say it's openness and eagerness to learn and to learn from everyone in your organization, whether that's your co founder or whether it's a customer support agent.
Being on eye level and being open to learn from everyone.
Omer (51:50.430)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Michael Kamleitner (51:53.870)
I would say it's doing a personal time audit and I'm sure for those who are not familiar the concept is that for at least a month you make a very very detailed log of every task, of every of every task you do with the goal of having a really good understanding what am I actually spending time on?
And you can do this with a Google sheet.
I'm doing it with a software tool called Time Euler Time U L A R Whatever you do.
It's very insightful and I'm kind of Addicted to it by now.
And I keep doing these time audits to optimize and to be aware of my time speed spent.
Omer (52:29.910)
I've been thinking about doing that as well.
But I'm afraid what I might learn from that experience.
Michael Kamleitner (52:35.990)
That's a very good point and it is very revealing and it can be scary and it can hurt, but I think that's the point of it.
Omer (52:42.390)
Yeah.
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time and wanted to build a third business in parallel?
Michael Kamleitner (52:50.550)
Okay, first of all, I go on the record here.
I'm not going to found a third SaaS company in parallel.
I'm swear to God, I'm not going to do that.
I can also go on the record, if I ever found another company, it will not be in the social media space, but that's a different story.
So I don't have any crazy business idea per se, but what I really would love to do is to do something in the physical world, like in person events, for example.
I'm super huge on community, on getting together, sharing.
So something like a conference or a meetup, it doesn't have to be a business per se, but that is something I would be very interested in doing.
And who knows, maybe I have some ideas.
Maybe there is something happening in 2024.
Right.
Omer (53:33.680)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Michael Kamleitner (53:37.280)
Okay, those who are working with me, they know it by now, but everyone else, probably not.
I'm a huge fan of the country of Greece.
Actually, I've been in Greece every year for my whole life, starting from age one.
And also ye.
Yeah, so my parents brought me there and I have been there every year, sometimes more than once a year.
So obviously I love the country.
And yeah, that's a fun fact that some people know, but not everyone.
Omer (54:06.540)
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Michael Kamleitner (54:10.220)
Yeah, I would say my friends, my family, my friends.
That's the only thing that is as important as work and where I spend as much time for and with.
Omer (54:20.390)
Yeah, I totally agree.
Okay, great.
Well, Michael, thanks so much for joining me and unpacking the story of the last 10 or 15 years in a relatively short amount of time.
Appreciate that.
If people want to check out the two products, they can go to Walls IO or Swat IO and if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Michael Kamleitner (54:47.450)
Easiest, of course is look my Name up on LinkedIn.
If you prefer email, that's Michaelalls IO.
Please don't hesitate to get in touch.
If you want to share something or maybe even if you need some help somewhere, please let me know.
Omer (55:02.490)
Thank you so much.
It's been a pleasure.
I'm glad we got to do this, and I wish you and the team the best of success and a successful new year as we approach.
Michael Kamleitner (55:14.100)
Thanks a lot, Omer.
It's been a pleasure, it's been fun, and it's been an honor to be on your show.
Omer (55:19.060)
My pleasure too.
Cheers.
