Bootstrapping A Side Project Into a Successful Business
Use clever bootstrapping techniques to transform your side project into a profitable venture.
Uncover the secrets behind transforming an idea into a full-fledged business with our captivating show on bootstrapping a side project to success. Explore proven strategies, learn from the experiences of successful founders, and get inspired to kickstart your entrepreneurial journey. Ready to make your side hustle thrive?
With Special Guest Justin Chen, Joint Founder of Pickfu.
#1 – Justin, can you give the tribe some background information that led you to start Pickfu?
#2—What are some significant problems that Pickful solves for users, and what is its ideal target user group?
#3—What are a couple of significant lessons you have learned building up Pickfu that you can share with the audience?”
#4 – What has been the biggest mistake connected with your journey with Pickfu?
#5—How do you see AI changing online business, including your own, in the next 18 months?
#6—If you had your time machine (H. G. Wells) and could travel back to the beginning of you
This Week’s Show’s Sponsors
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
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Omnisend: Omnisend
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:01.160] -Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the WP-Tonic show this week in WordPress and SaaS. And this week, we got a great special guest. We got Justin Chan from Pitbull with us. It’s a SaaS-based business. It helps you do surveys to your clients or potential users to find out how they think of your copy or design, anything to do with any product or service that you’re trying to pitch to the general public or business to business. It should be a great discussion. We’re going to be talking about all the things that Justin has learned in trying to build this business, some of the things that came on the radar that he wasn’t expecting.
[00:01:37.060] -Jonathan Denwood
We’re going to be talking about AI. It’s going to be a fantastic discussion. I’m going to let Justin do a really quick 10, 15-second intro. Justin, would you like to quickly introduce yourself to the tribe?
[00:02:19.180] -Justin Chen
Sure. My name is Justin Chen. I’m the co-founder of Pickfu. I’ve been an entrepreneur since 2006, so I won’t even try to do the math on that, but it’s been a long time. I’ve been running fully remote companies and building them for the past, whatever it is, 18 years.
[00:02:19.180] -Jonathan Denwood
A bit like me, really, but there we go. I’ve got my great co-host, Kurt. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?
[00:02:28.090] – Kurt von Ahnen
Sure thing, Jonathan. My name is Kurt von I own an agency called Mañana No Mas, a podcast with the same name, and we focus on membership and learning websites.
[00:02:37.490] -Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. Before we go into the meat and potatoes of this great show, I’ve got a couple of messages from our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I want to point out that we got some great special offers from the sponsors, plus a curated list of the best WordPress plugins and services that will save you a ton of time if you’re a WordPress professional. You can get all these goodies by going over to Wp-tonic. Com/deals. Wp wp-tonic. Com/deals. What more could you ask for, beloved tribe? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’re going to get from that bloody page. Sorry to disappoint, I’ve made a career of it. So, let’s go into it. Justin is already looking puzzled. I can guarantee Justin, by the end of this show, you’re going to look a lot more puzzled. Justin, maybe you can give some more detailed information. So how did you get into the world of entrepreneurship and trying to build digital companies? It’s a crazy part of the world. How did you get into it? And also what led to you seeing an opportunity with Pitfoo?
[00:04:03.930] -Justin Chen
Sure. So, going way back, my co-founder and I, met each other in college. We were both in computer science, but we graduated during the dot-com bust of ’01. And so we went the big corporate route. He went to Microsoft, I went to Hill at Packard, and we just did the easier corporate route for a number of years. But we always had this entrepreneurial bug that we wanted to do something. We finally got together in 2006 and just quit our jobs. We tried to run some business. We weren’t sure what it was. It could have been a restaurant, a bar, a website, anything. We literally had a whiteboard of the craziest ideas we could think of. And we just decided to… We decided to build a restaurant review website, and so we quit the next week. And there was no code, nothing was written. It was literally a legal Zoom Zoom Corporation and just went cold turkey. So we did that for a couple of years. And along the way, we were doing a redesign for that website, and we wanted to get feedback on what’s designed to use. And by that point, it had already been a couple of years; we had asked our friends and family a million questions to that point, and they started to get sick of it.
[00:05:26.060] -Justin Chen
They start giving you answers like, Oh, you know best, and whatever you choose will be fine. And so we’ve all heard these kinds of answers from our friends and family. So, we decided to build our digital focus group service as a side project. And that’s where PickFoo was born back in 2008. And it was a side project that we threw up on Hacker News, and you could still find the original post there. We just launched it, put it out there for other entrepreneurs to use, and just watched to see how it would evolve from there.
[00:05:57.930] -Jonathan Denwood
Oh, that’s fantastic. So, How long did it take before you started to get what you consider any traction in the company? How long did it take you to get the will actually moving to any extent?
[00:06:14.260] -Justin Chen
It took a long time because we weren’t treating it like a business, I guess. It was a very low price. We put it out there. The first big user we had was actually Gabriel Weinberg of DuckDuckGo. He wrote a really lovely blog post about how he was using it to do some validation. That was really lovely confirmation that we were on the right track. But the initial target market we thought was just going to be other entrepreneurs like ourselves, very bootstrapped, which is excellent, and we always wanted to support that community, but we’re all cheap, and we all don’t want to spend a ton of money. So not really the best audience for monetization. But what was interesting as we slowly evolved the product based on customer feedback, and we started seeing people outside of entrepreneurship using it. We had a lot of authors using it, self-publishing authors, testing book titles and book covers, and By that point, Tim Farris had popularized using data to choose your book title. That’s how he chose for our work week. And so there was a large community of book marketers talking about it, about using it to test that stuff before you published your book before you launched, especially if you didn’t have an editor or publisher that could guide you along the way.
[00:07:34.640] -Justin Chen
And so it was a very interesting path as we started seeing different customer segments using the platform. Then, we would try marketing to them. We would try to tailor the service a little bit. And then it was a very good learning experience to see which customer segments were not only good customers but attainable, I guess. You need to be able to reach them in a scalable way. So, we also started seeing mobile game companies use us. Some really large ones were using us, but then those were really difficult to find because they were more of a sales process, and we just weren’t ready or equipped to handle that at that time. As we evolved this product over eight years as a side project, it finally took hold in the e-commerce space. Selling online, selling on Amazon, and selling in different marketplaces really started taking off back in 2018 and 2019. And that’s where we found a target customer that had a lot of repeat usage. We were providing value because we were helping them make money. We were helping them de-risk their investments. And so there was a much better alignment with the business. And then also from a marketing standpoint, they were easier to reach than, say, mobile game companies, because there was a tighter community of people learning about e-commerce and talking about selling on Amazon and things like that.
[00:09:00.800] -Justin Chen
And so that’s when we really started to grow. That’s when we decided to pivot all of our attention from our previous business over to Figfu and really start scaling the team and going for it, so to speak.
[00:09:13.450] -Jonathan Denwood
So I think what you’re describing is a lot of people, and I’ve learned myself, this road of market fit, finding the right audience, that is also available in a timeline that the cost of So the acquiring that customer isn’t ridiculous to the price of the product.
[00:09:36.110] -Justin Chen
Yeah, because in the beginning, when we thought authors were going to be a great market for us, they’re still great. It’s a great use case for them. But the acquisition cost and then the amount that they would use it just wasn’t matching up, right? Because maybe you’ll write a book once a year if you’re prolific, probably just once in your life. And so you’re going to use it a few times, and that’s great. But then you’re no longer a repeat user for Whereas if you’re selling products, you might be selling a dozen or more products at a given time. You’re constantly working on new designs or packaging or logos or branding or marketing, imagery, all that stuff. There’s always more things to test that could actually just improve your revenue as a customer in the e-commerce space and gaming as well, which is still a big segment for us. We definitely have honed in on those two markets as the ones where we think there’s the best product market fit.
[00:10:33.160] -Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:10:35.490] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I’m just curious as my brain’s swimming around. I think of it… I’ve worked with a lot of marketing people in the past, and so marketing people typically say, Well, let’s throw it up on an A/B test, and then none of them know how to run an A/B test. It’s like, well, it’s run around the office, or let’s release the page this way and this way and see what gets the most hits or whatever. It seems like you guys have just simplified that process. Throw a mockup of this and a mockup of that, and what do people pick? And then now you can go into production and make something instead of sitting around with your hands folded, waiting to see what marketing says.
[00:11:10.490] -Justin Chen
Yeah, that’s exactly right. So we’re trying to make it easier to test hypothetical situations and allow people who don’t have any experience doing this market research do it. So we try to make it simple. You basically come to the site, you ask a question, which design would you prefer or which product would you like to buy? Like you said, you could put up two different mockups. It could be two different packaging designs, two different logos, or two to eight different logos. It could be your product against your competitor. Maybe it’s in the marketplace. Maybe you’ve got your app icon versus your other solitaire games that you’re trying to compete with. We’re going to go find the audience for you. We’re going to make sure that they’re high quality and they’re incentivized, and then they’re going to vote on which ones they like. But more importantly, they’re going to give you written explanations why, and That’s where the real nuggets of insight are. And also a differentiation from live A/B testing because you may see which one wins quantitatively, but you’re not going to understand why they chose it. You might have assumptions, but when people just tell you, I don’t like that font, change it, or green doesn’t it work for this product?
[00:12:18.650] -Justin Chen
Then you know exactly what to have, what to change on the next iteration. And so what we’ll see, because it’s so fast, it also takes like 15, 30 minutes to get this feedback. We’ll see the designer sit down and just throughout the day making changes based off the feedback. And then within a day, you could come to a more confirmed, better product than what you had at the start of the day.
[00:12:43.720] – Kurt von Ahnen
So to bounce off of what you and Jonathan were talking about, you were talking about product market fit and things like that. Is there an action for you and your team to be like, Oh, real estate is starting to suck right now. We should go help a team of… We should reach out to realtors to try and do A/B testing on curb appeal or- You definitely don’t want to do that, Justin. Or the automotive industry, EVs now seem to be suffering in sales. Maybe car manufacturers would be someone to approach that says, Oh, should these EVs be released in more colors than just white, silver, and black? As I think about industries that come up against their obstacles, when they hit their plateaus, your service could be a really good leapfrog service to reinject that sinking market.
[00:13:39.130] -Justin Chen
I think there’s always ideas of other markets that we could tackle, but I think for now, we feel the opportunity is large enough in the two that we’ve decided to focus on, so e-commerce and specifically mobile gaming. I think until we’ve hit the critical mass that we want to see there, we’re not going to do a strong expansion to other markets. I think even within those, I think there’s differentations in the ideal customer profile that, for example, why we focus on mobile gaming versus, let’s say, like AAA games, like a Call of Duty thing, because the iterations cycle of a mobile game is much faster. Typically, mobile game companies will have larger portfolio of games to work on. For us, as a usage-based company, that’s really the name of the game. The same with someone selling on Amazon versus someone who’s selling a single product on their Shopify store where there’s not as many decisions anymore. I’ve already established a brand. Here’s the product. I don’t have a tons of different variations or lines. But if I’m selling something on a marketplace, I’m probably doing more of a numbers game. I’ve got a lot of different product lines.
[00:14:47.700] -Justin Chen
I’ve got a lot of different variations, a lot of different marketing assets to test. As we consider other market segments, that’s something that we keep in mind now that we better understand what’s going to work well for the business. And then to the point about realtors, they could be an interesting… We do have people testing AirBnB main images, things like that. But then it comes down to how hard is it going to be to acquire those? What’s the repeat usage? And then also how B2C are they as a customer? Because the more consumer-like they are, the harder… If they’re too much like a consumer mindset, they’re a little bit more difficult as a lot of you guys probably know.
[00:15:28.960] – Kurt von Ahnen
We don’t know anything about The more business-minded they can be as a customer, then they’re going to understand value propositions and be willing to spend money versus someone who is an amateur business person, I guess. Nice. Well, that hits on what your ideal target market group is, but my question was supposed to be, what are the major problems that Pickful really helps solve for the client?
[00:15:55.800] -Justin Chen
Yeah, so it’s really derisking risking decisions and having information before you launch. So a lot of times we’ll have customers come to us before they’ve made a huge investment in something. So on the gaming side, as they’re they’re testing a game, they’re testing out game concepts, they’re testing out character designs, even UX. And sometimes it’s a hypothetical gameplay against their competitors, trying to see what’s going to be interesting. On the product side, it might be testing out product designs that they’re trying to see if it’s going to be better than the competition. Maybe they’re trying to test out variations of different products. We’ll get feedback that like, Hey, I thought I was going to order eight different colors of journals, but it really came back that people only wanted purple or whatever it is, so I only bought purple. That’s great. It sold out. Now you’re not stuck with, Oh, I’m trying to get rid of the weird orange color, and I’m marking it half price on Amazon because no one wants to buy it. Just making sure that they’re not losing money. So really de-risking investment is the major problem that we’re solving for people.
[00:17:06.790] -Justin Chen
And things like books, like books and products, once you put it out there, there’s no live testing it. There’s no rapid iteration. It’s not digital. So really making sure you hit it right from the very beginning is important.
[00:17:21.250] – Kurt von Ahnen
Good, good. Thanks. Jonathan, back to you.
[00:17:24.260] -Jonathan Denwood
It’s a quick to follow what you just said. Did it take you a while to work at what what your product really was doing for its target audience?
[00:17:34.870] -Justin Chen
Yeah, it took a lot of customer conversations to understand the fact that we were giving them more confidence, that they were making these decisions because when we see them come through, we don’t really have the context of what is it that they’re testing. As every business owner should be doing, you should be talking to your customers. When we hop on the phone with them and they give us the context, Oh, actually, I was trying to decide before an order, or on the gaming side, what was really interesting is we thought they were just optimizing out of the gate app icons. A lot of times what we hear is that, Oh, we actually soft launched into a different country. It failed horribly. And so we came back and now we were doing testing and iterations to try to improve the odds for the next time we either soft launch or do our main launch into the country that we want to. So really interesting to get the context from talking to customers and just watching how they use it to tailor their products. I think a lot of times as builders, we all have an idea of how we want people to use it, and that’s not always how they want to use it.
[00:18:45.640] -Justin Chen
Having that mental flexibility to talk to them, Okay, well, first of all, I do agree that they are the ideal customer, and I do want to build them in that way and just being open to adapting it. And then even broader, I guess, We didn’t know what we were building in the very beginning. We just knew we had an itch to scratch.
[00:19:06.460] -Jonathan Denwood
You had, I wouldn’t say a vision, but you had a plan. But it can only be… Unless you’re really in that industry, you’re one of those target users. It’s educated guessing to some extent. Would you agree with me?
[00:19:27.010] -Justin Chen
Yeah, it is educated guessing. But I think, again, as you talk to your customers and get confirmation that you’re heading in the right direction, I think what was interesting to us was as we started discovering this broad need for rapid consumer feedback across different customer segments, and then as we started getting larger customers, we have a lot of corporate customers now using it, which we always thought was puzzling because they have consumer insight teams. We have some of the largest companies in the world using us. We always ask them, Why don’t you just tap into the Insight team that you have? They’ll tell us, Well, insight teams won’t give us the time of day for these kinds of tests because they run the big studies. What’s the strategy around this next big product push or something like that. It’s a very long form, takes five figures at least and maybe a couple of months. But if I just want to test out packaging variation, they’re not going to help me out, and we don’t have the tools to do that. Really Really enabling everyone in any enterprise to gather feedback. So basically getting into the hands of the people doing the work.
[00:20:38.210] -Justin Chen
So the marketers, the designers, the product managers has really empowered a lot of people. And so we saw this untapped area of democratized market research. And that’s what our goal is. Our broader goal is just to make it so that anyone can do this research, whether you’re a small publisher, author that will still handle, or a product manager at a Fortune 500 company.
[00:21:05.390] -Jonathan Denwood
If you don’t mind me, are you totally bootstrap, or are you angel VC?
[00:21:13.480] -Justin Chen
Fully bootstrap, yeah. We were able to build it with the revenue from our previous business. Then as we started seeing the growth, then we just started reinvesting profits into hiring.
[00:21:24.990] -Jonathan Denwood
That was fantastic. What are a couple of the major things you’ve learned the hard way through this, was it eight to almost 10-year journey we put through? What are a couple of the most surprising things you’ve learned on this journey that you didn’t anticipate?
[00:21:46.700] -Justin Chen
Well, we definitely didn’t anticipate all the different industries and customer segments we were going to get into. So I think that’s been interesting. Definitely, authors caught us for a loop in the very beginning. Seeing game companies test out Super Bowl commercials was amazing. And then helping really large CPG companies test the actual products that see the retail shelves is really awesome. So I think that’s been really amazing. I think for us also, the global nature of our customer base has been really fascinating. So we started with a US-specific pool of respondents, and so that actually ended attracting a lot of non-US customers. If you’re a Chinese game company or a Chinese manufacturer and you want to get US customer feedback, it makes sense. Or you’re in Europe selling it to the US, you’re in LATAM selling it to the US. We had about We still have about 50 % of our customers outside the US. And so that’s guided us to build a much more global workforce. So we want to make sure that the people, our whole team that’s building this product a global customer base, always has different culture considerations in mind when we’re building UI or writing copy and making sure things can be localized and all that stuff.
[00:23:12.160] -Justin Chen
I think that was definitely unexpected, but I think has really allowed us to build a more interesting company. So now we’ve got people all over the place, from South Africa, Kazakhstan, to LATAM, to Greece, and Pakistan. So pretty awesome. I think that was pre-pandemic that we started seeing that trend and continue to ride that totally global and remote workforce.
[00:23:38.460] -Jonathan Denwood
So you got these pool of individuals that give feedback. How do you get these individuals? What is the right type of individual to do this type of feedback? Because you could say, Oh, it’s just anybody, but it isn’t really because I’m only surmising this. It’s a particular… Did that take a long time to find the right pool of people and attract the right people?
[00:24:09.300] -Justin Chen
We tap into the same… There’s a whole industry of companies that explicitly build what they call consumer panels. And so we tap into the same consumer panels that a Procter & Gamble would use when they do their market research. But the way they will do it is their Insight team will work with an external market research consultant who will then go work with these panels and They’ll create these long form surveys. They’ll collect a bunch of data. They’ll do a bunch of manual data quality cleaning and compile the results. And we try to automate all of that into a more simplistic single question approach. So we’re not going out and sourcing the people as much as partnering with different panels. And then we build a layer of our own data quality and audience targeting on top of all of those. And the quality is definitely the biggest challenge in where we spend the most time, because as you can imagine, if you incentivize people on the internet to do something, they’re going to try to game the system. We spend a lot of that.
[00:25:07.510] -Jonathan Denwood
They would never do that, Justin. Never. That shocks me, Justin. That really does. That insight shocks me. I’m sorry, a bit of sarcastic English.
[00:25:18.490] -Justin Chen
We spend a lot of our effort pruning quality and trying to improve the way that we reject people. On a given poll of 50 responses, we’re probably rejecting over half of those as we’re able to detect if they’re not paying attention or they’re just not doing it earnestly. And by asking for that written explanation, that gives us an important data point for gaging that engagement. And so if you were just buying traffic to your live EBT test and people were just randomly clicking, well, you don’t know if they actually meant that. But if you ask them to explain it, at least they’re forced to give some some thought to it.
[00:26:02.110] -Jonathan Denwood
Before we go for a break then, so you said it’s all been bootstrapped. One of the linked to this question, do you think that was the right decision? Do you think you should have taken investment at an earlier stage? Would it have really helped in accelerating this process, or are you totally happy with your decision to just bootstrap it?
[00:26:25.640] -Justin Chen
I don’t think it would have… I think it would have steered down the wrong path. I’m happy with the the slower evolution because I think we built up so much, I guess, knowledge from the content iteration and probing different directions. And I feel like if if we were funded, we would have picked one of those from the very beginning and just gone super hard in that direction. Even if the unit economics maybe didn’t make as much sense, it would have been like, do it at scale even if you were losing money. And I think it would have put us in a really bad place. Our previous business was also self-funded. We saw a lot of our competitors be forced to shut down or forced to pivot their business model just because, well, the board and investors say that it’s not working out. But from the outside and from our perspective, we always thought, no, that’s a great business. Why are they changing it? They had a good thing going. It’s just that it wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t big enough. They had to just keep taking wild stabs at different things. Eventually, a lot of them just shut down.
[00:27:31.060] -Justin Chen
We didn’t want that to happen to this business, and we wanted to allow it to have the natural evolution that would give it stronger legs in the long run. It’s just allowed us to build it the way we want to build it. Even going fully global, I think, would have been a challenge in the very beginning. I think they would have forced us to be in the same location and have an office if this was 8-10 years ago. My business partner and I have never been in the same place. We’ve always been in two different cities across the 18 years that we’ve worked together.
[00:28:05.270] -Jonathan Denwood
So it probably-That’s probably why you can keep working together for 18 years, isn’t it?
[00:28:10.110] -Justin Chen
Yeah, we’re not bothering each other.
[00:28:13.930] -Jonathan Denwood
Sounds like the perfect marriage. Sorry, I’ll get you into trouble there. We’re going to go for our break, folks. It’s been a fantastic discussion with Justin. I think we’ve covered some good stuff. We got some good questions for the second half. We got a couple more messages from our great sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. It’s been a great discussion. I think Justin’s actually warming to my English humor. He’s grinning, he’s not scouring. But before we go into the other questions, I want to point out we got a great weekly newsletter, aimed at the WordPress community. To get this great rag, which I write myself, I scour the internet for you, beloved tribe, finding the latest tech and WordPress stories that interest me. Plus, I write a little commentary in my sarcastic English humor. What more could you ask for? And to get this rag, all you have to do is go over to Wp-tonic. Com/newsletter. Wp. You’re not typing it, Justin. You should be…
[00:29:27.860] -Justin Chen
I got it up there.
[00:29:29.330] -Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, that’s That’s it. I always watch our beloved interviewees, how they type the address. Wp-tonic. Com/newsletter, and you can find it. Writing it. Yeah, that’s right. Sure, Justin. Over to you, Kirek.
[00:29:51.250] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, the question that I have is, what would be the biggest mistake that you’ve made connected with your journey at Pick Fu. And when I was looking at that question, I couldn’t help but think, When did kung fu panda come out? And it came out in 2008, the same year you talked about.
[00:30:09.970] -Justin Chen
Oh, I didn’t even realize that. So maybe it’s the name.
[00:30:13.860] – Kurt von Ahnen
But what do you think is the biggest mistake that you could share publicly? Like, Hey, this is a learning moment.
[00:30:23.940] -Jonathan Denwood
Coming on this podcast?
[00:30:26.690] -Justin Chen
I don’t know if I’ll give a specific mistake, but I think a common one that we made a couple of times that maybe will resonate with others is thinking that maybe a high pedigree to hire or a high-profile consultant will save the day, whether that’s I think a lot of times as entrepreneurs, we’re obviously not great at everything. And so you want to bring in someone maybe who’s good at sales or good at marketing or maybe an all-star designer that you’ve seen on stage and thinking like, Oh, well, once we get that person, they’ll just come in, they’ll understand our business and they’ll make an impact. I feel like that’s almost never paid off. And it’s always a really expensive experiment, and it’s really disruptive. It really causes you and the team to doubt yourselves. It’s like, Oh, well, we brought in this guy, and then we’re trying to follow everything that they do, but maybe they just haven’t been around. They really don’t understand the business, and they’re trying to inject their way of doing things, which isn’t necessarily what’s right for your business. And so I guess I would just caution people against that.
[00:31:38.500] -Justin Chen
Not that you shouldn’t try it, but just put some guardrails around it. Don’t let it be too disruptive We’ve allowed people to come in and say, Hey, I’m changing how we’re doing everything. I’m going to do it my way. I’m going to fire all your people, and I’m going to bring in my own people. And it’s like, Okay. And then they will leave. And it’s like, Okay, well, that just That just disrupted a lot of stuff. And I guess- Well, that caused a lot of chaos for the little guy, didn’t it?
[00:32:09.790] -Jonathan Denwood
Banking it, you get the invoices.
[00:32:13.280] -Justin Chen
Exactly. So Yeah, don’t allow the hero… I don’t know. I think there’s a word for it, but don’t allow that savior complex to derail your own journey.
[00:32:28.400] – Kurt von Ahnen
That’s pretty dang insightful. I mean, because we could pull some really big names out of the ether and say, look at Tony Robbins, look at Grant Cardone, look at Dean Grazioni, look at those guys. And everyone goes, oh, they’re so successful. I want to be just like them. And it’s like, if you injected Grant Cardone’s personality into your day to day life in the position you’re in right now, people would beat you in the street. So I always find that stuff interesting, and that’s pretty dang insightful. It must be because, Justin, I’ve been living in America for now for almost 18 years, but I’m a joint citizen.
[00:33:03.540] -Jonathan Denwood
I’m a US, but for about 40 years of my life, I lived in the UK. All those names that Kirk mentioned, they’ve done me personally no harm, but just hearing their names, I just cringe. Everything that those figures represent about American culture, It just resonates, negativity in me. But they’re hugely successful, and they have a nice tribe, don’t they, Justin?
[00:33:40.140] -Justin Chen
Yeah. And I think it’s entrepreneurs not having the confidence, and they’re feeling insecure, so they’re looking for someone else to give them the path like, Oh, well, you just got to follow this journey, or, I’m going to come in and I’m going to save your business because I know how to do this, and I’ve done this a million times before. So I think you know your business best, and you should have the confidence to take a lot of that data and still hire great people, but don’t hand over the reins, so to speak, and just say, All right, you’re running this.
[00:34:15.280] -Jonathan Denwood
Well, I think it’s all about what they’re doing. If you want a Facebook campaign and you’ve got no experience in Facebook hiring, I think educating yourselves and knowing the fundamental elements of running a Facebook campaign so you can make a judgment call. But should you run it? Probably not. Building a website, if you got no money, you got to do it. As a startup, you got to do it. But when you get past that stage, do you want to really do a total rebuild, or was it best to call somebody in. So I think if there’s specific outcomes and a specific skill set that you don’t have, I think it’s fine. It’s when you bring in these general in this general, this savior complex that you mentioned, I think that’s when you’re going down the wrong road, isn’t it?
[00:35:18.120] -Justin Chen
Yeah.
[00:35:18.920] -Jonathan Denwood
It’s a bit like doing two, isn’t it?
[00:35:21.260] -Justin Chen
And I definitely echo your point about trying to learn it and trying to do it a little bit just so that you have the context of not only hiring that particular individual, but also being able to talk about their work and judge it a little bit, right? If you’ve never even seen what the Facebook ad manager looks like, then you may be confused about the things that they’re talking about or what they’re even doing. As an entrepreneur, you might as well try everything. Part of this is the learning experience. That’s what we love about it, is just being able to get our hands into all the different aspects of the business because they’re fascinating. You’ll try it and you’ll be like, All right, I don’t want to do this. I’m going to bring someone in to do it. But at least I have a passing understanding I could talk about it and be a judge if they’re doing a good job.
[00:36:11.960] -Jonathan Denwood
From a personal savior, let’s go on to a technical savior, AI. Ai is going to do everything and save everybody and every quasar semi-failed business model. You just add the words AI to them and then you get investment straight away. I’ve been rather cynical today. I had my fourth cup of coffee. But seriously, I can see how maybe AI can be very directly linked to your own business. I would imagine you and your partner and your key people in your company are been having a lot of discussions. I’m only surmising this, but I would have thought so. Maybe you can tell us what your own thoughts are and what discussions you’ve been having in your own company and how you see it affecting how your own business goes in the next 12 months to 18 months, Justin.
[00:37:17.200] -Justin Chen
Sure. Yeah. I think in the very beginning, you had to be cautious with AI, I think, because when it was the first ChatGPT 3.5 or whatever, I felt I think there were a lot more hallucinations and things like that.
[00:37:33.430] -Jonathan Denwood
I have those every day, Justin.
[00:37:35.080] -Justin Chen
But I still think there needs to be caution, and I think maybe people trust AI too much. The way that we like to position ourselves is that while you may be using AI to generate content, you’re still selling to actual humans, so you should still get feedback from actual humans. That is how we would like to pair ourselves with AI. But on Within the tool, we’re working on building an AI market research assistant. Right now with the poll results, you might get 50 to 100 or 200 written responses from all these different people. And going through all that individual feedback and distilling out the trends can be quite time consuming. So we’ve built in AI summaries and even a way to chat with your your poll results and ask it questions based off all that written feedback. And so that’s the first step towards Having this assistant where it used to be someone from our team that would maybe help you or an actual market research consultant. But AI can serve the purpose of that. The next steps would be to build in more AI on the creation side of things, so helping people write the questions and give guidance.
[00:38:49.250] -Justin Chen
And I think the way that business is going to be changing is that there’s just an expectation of some base level of AI in every tool now, because I think it’s not Not so much AI-specific tools, but everything should have some AI, because we all have some data or we’re trying to guide the user through something, and AI can help on all those different things. So even I was playing with Zepier the other day, and they have a lot of A lot of these tools have a really nice… You just tell me what you’re trying to do, and they’ll guide you like, Oh, cool. Use these three blocks, because their AI understands all the different components that Zepier can do. If you’ve some form of UI in your software, I think there’s going to be expectation that AI will be able to help people configure it. If there’s some data that you’re dealing with, I think there’s going to be expectation that AI has some analysis or recommendations based off that data. And then internally, we highly encourage, we’ve rolled out ChatGPT plus to the whole team, and our expectation is that everyone tries to use it for every aspect of their job.
[00:40:00.290] -Justin Chen
I think a lot of employers are just expecting people to try to be more productive with it. I don’t know what the reality of that situation is going to be, but at least experimenting with it and at least trying to not be fearful of it, try to embrace it. And asking, what we encourage is just get back to the roots of your job, even. Ask, Hey, as a marketer, as a customer success person, what are some things I could be doing that might be better for my job? Or how do I do this? Obviously, for coding, it’s great for syntax, great for breaking down problems. So really not being shy about it because there’s no one judging you. The AMA judge you a little bit, but no one’s monitoring the queries that you’re giving it. It’s a private way to get feedback on things. Instead of looking for Stack Overflow It’s like, go ask AI.
[00:41:02.370] -Jonathan Denwood
That would never save a load of time, wouldn’t it? Over to you, Kurt.
[00:41:10.200] – Kurt von Ahnen
Justin, it’s been a great chat. I get the last question. The last question is, if you had your own time machine, HDR Wells or a TARDIS from Dr. Who, and you could go back to the start of your business career, you and your partner, what advice would you give yourself?
[00:41:30.490] -Justin Chen
I think, generally, to focus on scaling the team and delegating more. And I feel like we’ve always been as engineers and then also really wanting to learn different aspects of the business. We’ve been very hands-on, which I think has been good for the most part, but I think has been… That could be a limiting factor when you feel like you have to be involved in everything and not empowering other people to take over when appropriate. So giving away your Legos, as they say. So I think that would be the broadest theme that would probably would have helped and would still… It’s still something that we’re working on to this day, because even as we scale the team, we tend to be very involved in a lot of day to day things, and trying to get out of that is incredibly difficult as a founder. So that would be my advice, or that’s what I would change.
[00:42:27.560] – Kurt von Ahnen
That’s sound advice. I found myself in the same position with my agency. I was doing everything as a one-man shop, and then I was like, Why am I… I’m not even good at graphics. Why am I doing graphics? Just because I know how doesn’t mean I should. So cool.
[00:42:41.020] -Justin Chen
Exactly. Yeah. And you think you’re just going to be faster at it because like, Oh, I already got all the contacts. I can just whip this out faster than telling someone to do it, but that’s not really the point.
[00:42:49.780] -Jonathan Denwood
No.
[00:42:50.690] – Kurt von Ahnen
And I’ll just go on record as saying, if those pictures were an A/B test over your shoulder, I would pick the one that says the narrows.
[00:42:58.320] -Justin Chen
Nice.
[00:42:59.060] -Jonathan Denwood
So, before we wrap it up, where are you? Where is the company? If you don’t mind me asking, how many people work for you? And if you don’t mind me asking, how many paid customers do you have?
[00:43:14.760] -Justin Chen
So I’m in Los Angeles. My business partner is up in San Francisco.
[00:43:17.430] -Jonathan Denwood
No, I mean, how many people work in the company? Sorry.
[00:43:20.770] -Justin Chen
Oh, we’re about 18 people now, fully remote, full-time people. Like I said, all over LATEM Europe and the globe. Paying customers is difficult because it’s usage-based. And so we have people coming back, and maybe they’re authors, and they come back every year because they write a new e-book or something like that. But yeah, we definitely have helped thousands of different customers across all the different industries. Yeah, and we’ve grown in a self-funded way.
[00:43:58.170] -Jonathan Denwood
It’s been a great discussion. I think we’ve covered a load of stuff. Justin, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and more about Pitfoo?
[00:44:09.200] -Justin Chen
LinkedIn is probably the best way. You can find me, Justin Chen, on LinkedIn. I’m pretty active there. Then, if you want to check out Pickfu, you can find it at p-i-c-k-f-u. Com, you can sign up for me.
[00:44:21.220] -Jonathan Denwood
What was the path that led to the name, actually Justin?
[00:44:28.620] -Justin Chen
So it didn’t have to do with kung fu panda, but it was related.
[00:44:33.980] -Jonathan Denwood
Oh, that’s a shame. I thought that was quite a good story, actually. How do you create a story so that you did it for that? That would be a good story.
[00:44:41.020] -Justin Chen
So we did take the fu suffix because it’s the mastery of something. We wanted something that was… It was like the master, something really good at picking for you, also, which works, pick for you. Then it was just really short at the time, and Twitter was coming out, and we wanted short URLs so people could share them. We like that. It could be a verb. We have a lot of customers saying that they pick food when they don’t know which option to do. It’s worked out. It’s very memorable. It stops many people, and they’re like, Wait, what is that? Tell me what that is, or are you just cussing at me? It’s a good conversation starter.
[00:45:23.000] -Jonathan Denwood
Well, at least it’s pronounceable. We have people that have company names, and I practice them consistently before the show. The more I practice, Justin, the worse my pronunciation gets, and it’s hilarious. I can’t even pronounce the name of their company. But they take it in good cheer, actually, because Justin, it’s been a great discussion. I really enjoyed it. We’ve got some great guests coming up, folks. We’ve got some great conversations. We will be back next week. We’ll see you soon. Bye.
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