Zero to $8M ARR in less than 2 years | Raul Kaevand, co-founder of Instantly.ai | SaaS growth

hello everyone so today I am joined by Raul one of the co-founders of instantly dot AI they've had some crazy success over the last one to two years which I'm buzzing to to dig into um so roll give us a quick rundown of who you are and what you do and then we'll we'll take it from there yep nice to be here man thanks for the invite so quickly maybe I've done online marketing for 10 plus years had a couple of agencies couple of failed startups and then two years ago we created instantly for our own agency to have a tool that we can actually use because a lot of tools got too expensive so we created something came to the market with completely new pricing built it for ourselves which is why people in ages are loving it I have four co-founders and now we built a team of almost 30 people uh yeah growing fast building fun stuff in the lead generation data sales information game and yeah now I'm here man nice nice okay cool good summary so let's like rewind um because you said some interesting stuff there about 10 years in marketing uh multiple agencies failed businesses stuff like that so let's take it back to the very beginning like how did your journey start in the business world like what was that first side hustle or Venture that I guess wedded your appetite so I think I have like uh two different ones so I went I'm from Estonia and I went to University in Denmark where I studied marketing and design and programming I found out really fast I'm like [ __ ] that design [ __ ] that programming so I went on the marketing route and it when I was in university I started like so many side projects but it was just like some like small tiny cool ideas some blogs my first like big project if you can name it that made money was actually a Facebook page uh in Estonia about a famous politician uh leave it like a meme page and it got really popular it got fifty thousand users like page likes and Estonia only had like three hundred thousand Facebook users at the time so like everybody knew about this page they were talking about this on the radio and companies started reaching out asking to like I post there so you can see like my road started as an influencer I got paid to post how about that was like a random stuff man it was like restaurants offering their services and then some like charity stuff that was like where I made my my first money online and then I got the the bug for online stuff and I tried to build a more like service at business like legit agency and my first agency or like my first actual client came from a website design agency and I reached out to companies with very shitty websites and said like hey I already built you a new website which I didn't actually have but it was just like an angle and when they responded I just quickly got a WordPress template copied their website text over it and said hey you want this like 500 bucks and that's how I got my first agency client and yeah did that little bit but I cleared it into SEO pretty quickly and I was like I did a few years like SEO agency stuff oh wow I didn't know any of this and so how is you reaching out to these WordPress clients was it like cold like just manual cold email or medical demon I went to there's a page like uh I remember like if you remember like before your time there was like phone books and stuff it's like an online phone book in Estonia where you can see like companies just went through website and it's like contact one by one but yeah like now that you mentioned it was called email yeah in the UK we call well I don't know they've sit around Yellow Pages there's a big book like if you wanted to order a takeaway if you wanted to call a business you would like go to the letter in the yellow like this big book I remember that wow that's old school it just shows you like how good we have it now like how privileged we are we can just literally go to a website and download date of like our entire ICP people used to go through uh a book and have to call people okay that's interesting um okay so SEO agency um I didn't know that that's that's surprised me so that's why you guys are pumping out so much content on that side um what happened after the SEO agency so I I started working together with one of the biggest agencies in Estonia and they had they were like this like old school uh it's like Ad Agency just doing like physical ads posters and stuff they didn't have internet marketing section so it came in and I was like their go-to guy for like SEO everything like online marketing red Facebook ads so just like help them a lot that came in at right right time it was pretty new I remember we had to like pitch the biggest beer factory in Estonia that they need a Facebook page and they said like no it was like that time where people like businesses didn't know like how useful it actually was and I did like it's like pretty much everything that you can think of an online world but the SEO stuff was the simplest I built my Agency for around like for that time it for me was like a lot of money like 5K a month and I was just like chilling I got super lazy man I stopped doing Outreach I just had like some big clients that brought in money every month I stayed at home chilled did a little bit of work and then at some point like customers start dropping off and off and I had to find like something new and then I started dabbling with uh some like startups tried to build some like apps a little bit different kind of Niche went after that world wow wow wow interesting the good thing about SEO I think I I don't know maybe you're disagree with me here but like if you're getting started in the agency World SEO seems the way to go because your customer lifetime value must be insane right because for SEO it takes so long to to start seeing results and so these clients have to stay with you to start seeing those results so LTV must be like 6 12 18 24 months um I always I always thought about that because like a lot well every SAS company who's um serious about growth does SEO and it must be like it must be such a good agency to start um okay wow you've done a lot um so I had I had a look at your your background no I didn't do anything too deep but I noticed you worked at a company called um sales process.io now if you're in the internet money space um you're probably familiar with sales process it's uh Nick Osmond's one of his old companies right talk me through that period what you know why did you get into that how was that and you know how did that impact your sort of trajectory so I think that was like one of my like lowest points before I went there I didn't have almost any money I was like struggling like thinking about what I can do like I had all these experiences all these connections like everything like I could have started like a regular agency I could have like started another like a side project but I wanted to try something new and I randomly saw his uh Nick Osmond's who's like an orgy genius like everything that we built like is like mostly around that that he like taught us and I saw the ad and it was like make 20K as a remote salesperson and I was like no like this can't be real so I went on the webinar jumped on there checked he showed the number showed the [ __ ] deck showed it like people are actually making this money and it was like a sales sales type of webinar was like on board at the team and I was like yeah [ __ ] it like let's give it a go and then I started there started learning everything went super hard added uh apartment of New York as my phone wallpaper to motivate me I was like sending like manually like every day hundreds of emails again we used to close there and just manually doing the Outreach and that was like where we started to get uh the seed idea for instantly because you had to do it manually there wasn't tool that allowed you to add multiple email accounts to one campaign just like one account one email and it stood manually one by one by one but doing that taught us a lot like how it works from reaching out finding clients one of my biggest successes there was I didn't go after the list that everybody else was using I found a different one which like is crunch based like most people like know it now but nobody was using it so I had to say gold mine and I booked like 80 something demo was my first month there and got really good at just like booking demos and also on the sales uh sales side combining it like this Canadian US style selling with the calmer European more consultancy type selling and yeah just helping people build their businesses which was like to offer so pretty like could offer like simple actually helping to make money it actually works if people put in the work I just like learned from sending emails to sales protecting domain but most important like how to do the sales calls how to process them it's like so crazy like to this day I just jumped on another sales call so I'm like dude trying to sell me something just like told Nils not a co-founder and instantly like how bad the sales processes are for people like I still have it made like it is like the structure and everything is missing for so many people that we learned from sales process and we incorporated up to our agency sales feed after sales process so that was like how we could start with our agency to get generate leads everything we learned from the sales process and then combining it with their own stuff that turned into instantly so it was like amazing amazing experience like learned so much such a valuable skill and they gave everybody online should learn sales like if you just think old emails like you can find a partner that does sales but if you go through it you understand the process it's going to make your life so much easier and like it's almost impossible not to succeed you just have to put in the numbers reach out to enough people do enough sales calls you can't fail like literally can't fail if you have a good offer wow yeah I think I think it is so important getting people on the call is one thing right it's actually like getting them to buy in on the philosophy and you know um getting them across the line especially as if you're selling like agency services that there's a bit on the the higher ticket side um you know you need those sales skills okay you use the word the words we and us a lot there when you were speaking did you meet your co-founders during this period or so it's uh it's a mix for example my oldest friend co-founder who is Rayo instantly I met him he was the classmate of my ex-girlfriend and like the only good thing that came out that relationship was like rare and like the bone we had and before instantly we did like bunch of other stuff with rare like we started the online store we tried the Shopify the Drop Shipping stuff that print on demand stuff so we built a lot of different stuff and then like instant it was the final one then the developer uh I found on Reddit there was like a face I posted a lot in like Indie hackers and Reddit to find co-founders again I didn't have a project just reaching out with my marketing background and looking for developers somebody that can work on something and we actually started a different company working a different company before instantly it was to find cheap travel tickets travel like flights but it was exactly right before kovid covet hit like it's like run and then he reached out after like two years randomly on messenger like hey I have this new project and his project was he went to Great similar like chats for AI there was like AI copywriter and we tried it we tried to pitch it most people didn't want it and then we turned it into Echo email tool because that was what we needed in that moment and the needles I met at the sales process we're both sales people there and like same stuff we had a bond we did like daily calls with Nils we did script Wars like daily practicing every day how to handle objections how to get better at sales uh and then after that we met Nils in Mexico just randomly went there with friends he was there again got like Mexican Bond started another agency together and then which turned into instantly in them wow wow there's a lot of history there then because like um how I discovered you guys was I think you were just like posted on Twitter and people were talking in these like communities like hey there's this new tool doing this deal and like from an outside perspective I know this is very like naive but it kind of seems like I don't know this product just came out of nowhere and like you had this crazy Journey but like to get to that start point you guys have done so much like you've failed so many businesses you've tried so much um I think it just highlights like the kind of Journey you have to go through to to get that like to get that win you have to take so many losses um I find the the sales Pro Stock sales process story really interesting as well I might have to talk with you more about that um offline but so you're mainly you um you operated you owned like agencies I guess why why did you have this desire to go to like software to SAS was there like a was there something you noticed was maybe somebody told you to go down that path like why did you go off to SAS thing is just like good timing um I had to run done software before but like software isn't easy people underestimate like how hard it is to build this option like to this day like we have one of the best developers and like still bugs come up and stuff you have to like build this stuff so I wasn't really into like we need to build like sorts around it but as raisins grew it was just like uh obvious export in the market everybody was charging per email account so we were buying for a lease Insurance Agency Google accounts per account and then we're using like different tools for warm-up for account plus sending account through costs just like flu and then yeah I told you submit our developer like reached out and talk is working about working on some new project this is the perfect timing like we need right now like Outreach should let's figure this stuff out and when we started talking we went into also like the warm-up there's some warm-up apis out there but the developer checked into it the cost and turned out is actually uh like on the database side relatively cheap to build it and all the other people are just like overcharging and that was like one of the big things that we came into Market with this unlimited warm-up you can connect as many accounts as you want which made it successful but it all started it came from our own need for agencies we built the tool for ourselves we use it every day that's why we had to make sure it works it's great and actually helps you get results so we took away like all the fluff everything that a lot of tools have that are not tied to their Northstar like getting results and just super simple clean get yourselves as fast as possible and that's just building software for ourselves what's the main reason yeah yeah yeah okay yeah I like it um I think most success stories come out of somebody like scratching their own itch and then they realize that there are a lot more people out there who want to scratch that itch and so like a business is born um so you've seen like both sides of Defense right you've seen like service based businesses you've worked at them you've owned agencies um and now of course you're a SAS founder um you know instantly growth aside because clearly it's going very well but you know what do you prefer like being in SAS or like agency owner because they're very kind of different um you know service-based businesses very one-on-one with your clients a lot of human interaction whereas SAS slightly different more leverage what are your thoughts on that so I think it's it changes it's it's a spectrum and I couldn't have done one without the other but now when it's going well like sauces easier better more scalable uh like The Leverage of code is insane and there's no not many like one-on-one touch points as the service business but I wouldn't start out with software like even just I have no experience with serious business I have no experience marketing creating software from scratch very hard very difficult we locked out with our developer with the marketing with the niche it's I think rare case but now there are no more about sales I would say like we closed our agency few months after we launched instantly because it was going so well because we have the same problems as every agency who had uh like [ __ ] clients just like stress uh all of this like bad talks about doing one-on-one calls very time consuming the money was like great at the time like needed it but the real big money is in software so I think software is more of the end game but starting out I would still I would still start with a service business yeah I know I think I think a common mistake people make when they try go straight into software is what's the point of software right well it's to like automate things and I think what people do when they try to go straight in software they try to automate things that don't really need to be automated and so they just create these random tools that don't solve a big problem whereas if you start doing things manually well then you understand the challenges of doing that manually you you understand like what problems you're solving and then you build the software to solve those problems and so you're just solving a bigger problem which means you're going to find like product Market fit um a bit easier um how so when you started instantly obviously you guys were just using it mainly as like an internal tool how did you initially start to like you know spread the word um start getting those like first users so it was again I think rare but we combine a creation software while we're doing agency calls we show them instantly we have our own tool this is what we're going to be using for you and the first agency clients were the first instant users we didn't do any other Outreach or marketing before we launched an appsumo we're just a big launch but it wasn't publicly open it was just us doing Outreach for our agency clients nice and was that like did you have like two split offers did you have like a done for you so you'll you use instantly for them and then like I've done with you where it's like well you can log in and use instantly but we'll like you know get your leads and stuff like that did you have like a similar setup to that or in the beginning it was only done for you we did everything for them we just like show them we're going to use this but we mentioned it on a call that let's say uh you want to do it on your own we can just hand everything over you can just log in take over as the same thing we did once we decided to close down the agency they had their separate instant accounts you just hand them over we recommended different partners that can use it so but then some people actually went the drought but in the beginning it was most like serious because you know like people are lazy they don't want to do stuff so we just told them we're gonna do it but we can hand it over nice that's a good downsell create your own software business so you can downsell people to interest and I like it's like a it's a it's an interesting funnel um okay and you you briefly mentioned it there appsuma um for those like who aren't aware like what happened there talk through that process like um why why did you decide to go for it and like I guess how much of an impact did that have on like the instantly story so I wanted to appsumo launch ever again I won't recommend it for everybody but it was amazing for us like that's the main reason why we got so successful and made the splash because we had a very unique launch strategy you shouldn't do up some more in hopes of creating sustainable mrr like it's lifetime deals you just pay once and they're there forever you shouldn't do it to get Revenue but what we did it for was to fill our warm-up pool so if people don't know to do call limit warm-up you need a lot of people communicating between each other and one option is to buy just tons of old accounts we didn't want to do it we want only real human accounts so we launched an app similar straight away got like thousands tens of thousands of email accounts into our warm-up pool it's a similar like chicken and egg problem that Tinder had in the beginning like the Apple is so good but if you go on and there's nothing there it doesn't work so you need to feel it in the beginning and that's what we used appsumo for and the funny thing is we were uh like debating in our team like how to do it exactly should we do it there's it wasn't like an easy decision but a couple of days before the launch in appsumo there's a like a review section with a reviewer Tool uh out of five uh stars to see like how good it is and we got like two stars is that like yeah it's like hit or miss can can't be like that good and then we turned out to be one of the highest grossing like one of the best launches like really good reviews but went also very hard a lot of people abandoned it once they jump on up soon when they get launched all of our Founders we were in Barcelona then we ordered like six pizzas and just like throughout night when it's like the gates open we were there doing support we didn't have a support and we weren't prepared at all we were doing it live it's like sleeping a couple of hours waking up doing it again and we were very responsive on the optional page and on intercom to helping our users which turned out to be one of the keys because white was so successful and after that the very important thing we did was we were very strict with apps from users like after it was over our initial deal I think was for two months we shortened it for like I don't know six weeks or something because we just want to go into mrr already we didn't want to give lifetime deals more and we ended it was very strict like there's like no more we're not going to launch an episode no more We're not gonna do Black Friday deals after that we're gonna go straight into mrr and that's what all sorts of companies should be doing app so much just as like launching board but your main goal is to find Mr which appsumo just helps to do it from like branding wise marketing wise anywhere out there but other than that it's uh it's very difficult so everybody out there that is thinking about it be very careful it's it's not as easy as it sounds interesting okay cool gonna unpack that but yeah I like I think so I think apps have been launching on appsuma for a while but I've definitely in the last year seen like a rise in what I what I could only describe as what seems like as pump and dumps you know like crypto where people would launch these coins and it'd be so much hype and then boom they'd just poof like disappear I feel like a lot of that has been happening with SAS products recently on appsumo like um you know they'll someone will spin up like a LinkedIn Outreach tool or like a data you know they'll be like a a database or something and they'll just launch it and you know and then nothing will happen so it also from the consumer side it seems like you need to um like be careful but so with your launch how many users did you have before you launched an appsumo realistic was like 10 or something a little bit maybe more that we had on the agency side but like no users were using it just for themselves our original launch was just on appsumo but they are Developer is insane we prepared for the database and everything to be scalable to handle the volume but obviously still there's always going to be hiccups some bugs something not working and just have to go through them and have developers online to fix them they weren't very prepared didn't have a lot of stress testing before the launch how many how many users did you get from appsuma are we like talking I mean it sounds like it's in the thousands or we're talking like tens of thousands like how how many users are we talking no I don't think it was ten thousand I think it was between three and four thousand but what made it like harder for us because we allowed like unlimited accounts so that you can multiply it by many for email accounts for warm-up and sending wow okay and that this will happen in the space of like two months from from probably having a handful of users on your product to probably get into the stage where I feel like the average product LED SAS company it takes one two three four years to get you know to the to the size of thousands of customers and you guys did it in like two months that's that's pretty crazy um okay and so let's kind of fast forward a bit to the present so like how's how's growth going for you at the moment you don't have to show numbers but just like generally speaking um like since the app Sumo launch how are things going natural growing really well steadily uh SEO is a big part we're doing a lot of content our focus is a lot of organic social YouTube just everything content now we launched ads as well we haven't done much or any PPC at all so going seeing if you can make that channel work as well but it's mostly mostly still organic just the word of mouth and uh good product good reviews people recommending it even Optimum users are upgrading so there's like so many different Avenues where the growth is coming from but most of it's like organic giveaways SEO our main keywords it's all branded if you like Google instantly I think we're before the dictionary word instantly yeah yeah wow wow that's plus from all your um your SEO agency is you know putting that to America okay so you guys are gonna I feel like um and I'm not I'm not gonna share the number I feel like you guys are gonna hit a big milf Milestone this year in terms of like um revenue and that's you know you've basically gone from zero to this crazy milestone in less than two years um if if you could like pinpoint it to sort of like three or four things that have really really like contribute to that success like what what would those be you probably briefly just touched on it there but okay so it's really good question I would say one of the biggest Parts is having an offer software service whatever that's if it's B2B directly correlated to business growth if you help businesses grow it's gonna make all of your sales efforts much easier because you're hitting on their priorities that's what insta does it just helps you make more Revenue we use instantly to grow instantly because it's so good at generating Revenue so that's the biggest part uh second part is building it for ourselves if you have to use it every day yourself you're gonna make sure that it works that is good and then putting a lot of effort into customer support and I don't mean only like listening what people want in reality most of the new features that we're building came from us not from users a lot of people say like listeners obviously should do that but users vary so much they want different things we've always had very clear Northstar what we want to do again connecting to first point helping people make more Revenue that's how we build features we still haven't built a feature that people have been asking us from day one how can I add signatures we don't have a signature we're the only tool doesn't have a signature feature because we realistically don't see it impacting growth as much as a lot of features that we can build so having that growth build mindset or the focus building all of your features around that and then we've been going [ __ ] crazy on the marketing bro like like with like all the founders still to this day we do weekly YouTube videos we do podcasts like you're doing we're doing uh content we lose Facebook group there's over 18 000 members there we're doing lives almost weekly there uh we post stuff like if it's on YouTube it's there forever so it's like getting higher and higher all the time then SEO we started early then there we have Partners Affiliates our own Outreach because we have a tool we're going to send out emails there were a lot of that growth needs thanks to all these things we're doing uh short form Clips we started doing uh what else you're doing emails email flows uh like intercom flows that you helped us set up like these kind of things if you look at it yeah the growth is amazing everything but we've like done so much work with so many different channels in place so many different people's in the right spots to have success and that's yeah that's like one of the biggest biggest things and then maybe the last one is just shipping cool shipment spilling cool stuff that people like that actually can use and some other stuff are going to be like game changers we're going to be launching like a couple of big things like very soon this month and it's being on top of my not getting lazy not getting complacent a lot of people get still like super motivated we just had a team called before this about the new features what to build what do we still have the fire in us and I feel if you're just doing it randomly if you don't have the passion it's not going to work out uh as well yeah well okay that that was that was valuable like I think what this all ties into really is because I guess why how can someone wake up every day and still have that fire you kind of need like I don't think motivation is enough to cut it because you know we all motivation comes and goes and I think this all ties to like how you have solved you you are solving a problem you had and so you know it inside out like something you said there was so I guess unconventional right that literally the the advice is to SAS Founders like build what your users want right listen to customer feedback and build exactly what they want and you've literally just said you didn't build a single feature requested it's all down to you guys and you know most people would say you're on a path to failure if if you do that but like you've just completely blown that out of the water and I like that and I think from work with you guys as well I've I just the general sentiment is you are a bit unconventional in like your approach you know just because other companies are doing it this way doesn't mean you guys have to do it that way I think that's something I've I've like really admired and you can see it like um in the in the features you've built like the signature you know every other company we're like yeah sure but you're like well we don't think that's going to get people more revenue and so that's that's a North star metric um okay interesting so you guys have uh you know it's fair to say I'd say you're like trendsetters in like the cold email space you know since you guys have launched there have been a few similar products come out um you guys definitely introduce this unique mechanism of um uh like unlimited sending accounts which I feel like still only a very small percent of the market are aware of I feel like there's still so much more um like penetration to happen there like for people to become aware of this like corporate teams and stuff like that but um what it's it's clear to say you guys are ahead but like what are you doing to stay ahead and how does that how does that affect your decision-making process with these sort of similar products coming out you know people trying to take your market share um like how does that um affect your decisions it used to affect us more uh in a sense so it's like it's motivating for us it makes us like puts a fire under our asses to get stuff out faster especially for a developer we're now using it as our developer motivation tactic every time my competitor launched something you just send it to the slack chat and then you know like I'm gonna build it I'm going to add this like super quickly or this weekend I'm going to do it like that uh that's like how we view it but we've now taken like a high level overview and we got into that tunnel vision in the beginning where we if somebody that in the beginning copied us built something new and was like super loud about it or like we have to build it now and we actually have built a couple of these things but we got lost from the track like our own uh the floor that you mentioned before the North Star an hour have more clarity on that and we're building stuff now like big stuff that other people don't have other people in Niche don't have we're building in building them in the inside way super clean super simple still unlimited a couple of stuff like right now we're gonna launch today tomorrow one big step one big thing and then end of the month another one another gonna be game changers hopefully that's what we want to make them make them be and I think it just comes down to again that fire that like interesting we think about it like why aren't other people building this other teams have like 30 20 developers why aren't the business and I don't know like I honestly don't know maybe it comes down because they're not using it but there's I think one more after these two things they're going to launched this month that we want to have like a huge big thing and then we want to like focus on those parts making it as simple as possible because there's still like so much Innovation to be had like email is not going anywhere people are going to still use it there's so much money they've made so many more additions that are that works so well with cold email like a lot of people are building like LinkedIn Twitter automation stuff like that there's like so many different ways where we can go we're not in a loss of any ideas but we stopped focusing on cost or competitors that much and focusing on what we want to what we see helps people make money interesting yeah well I mean this is just uh a baseless assumption but you could you could assume maybe like you guys are working towards this North Star um because you kind of set the trend and you know a lot of these products are probably just following in your Trail and so the new features you're launching they're launching but by the time they launch it they're what uh three six eight months behind I mean that's just a launch right you guys are probably already thinking like three four features ahead um but yeah definitely don't want to focus on your competitors especially if they're like not innovating as fast as you right because then it's just um you're not you're gonna stop your growth um what do you because there's a lot happening um in the last few months with like uh cold email with like um warming up you know uh some it seems like the platforms like Google and Outlook Etc are like cracking down um what do you think the future for cold Outreach looks like um I think it's gonna be in instantly like all the stuff that uh are gonna be like difficult with other providers we're gonna provider we're going to provide them as simple as easy as possible so there's like nothing to worry about pretty much like that's the goal and to make it as simple as possible for users to use everything in one platform this is like one app one platform goal it's pretty much like what we're aiming for what we feel is the future because right now it's like segmented it's bringing it all into one place I think that's that's future like organic simple simple way nice okay cool got it um all right so I mean you're what 18 months like two years into into the SAS founder Journey now um there seems to be especially in like the money Twitter sphere right uh it's a very small bubble you know software has well SAS has been around for uh decades at this point right but it seems to be a bit of a gold rush at the moment uh with these I guess young entrepreneurs who have perhaps started an agency they've um you know they've upgraded their lifestyle they now have like a lot of cash coming in so they're starting to look to software because it's a good asset right but what are some misconceptions you think people have about starting a SAS company because I don't think it's as easy as it's made out to be yeah it's it's very hard so the main book I always recommend for people is called peopleware which talks about software and so if you think about it there are no like software problems in a software company it's all people problems you see like a person have to go in and fix it until we have Chachi PT uh or like a co-pilot whatever like do this for us but it's still managing people and every problem we have like if you're shipping slowly it's not because of solder code or software it's because your developers aren't working still need to manage them if you're having a lot of bugs or like downtime it's not because again the code it's because people aren't you haven't put in uh firewalls and stuff to stop that from happening we don't have people online to prevent that so it's a lot of people messing still putting people in the right places like it is with any other company but once you get past that hurdle then it gets like better but then you have another uh hurdle which is like the scalability from the text side plus the teams that because it's if people are used to service at business we get two three clients every month now if you get two thousand customers over a month how are you gonna handle that from the software database side and from the customer support side how you can offer support for them how you're going to make them not leave and there's so many other promises going to come into your life like dealing with churn uh looking every like how can you make people stay longer what you should build like we mentioned like the competitors everybody building yourself now with the no code automation or no code software Builders it's so easy like you mentioned the code rush there's going to be competitors that can be pretty much what you're building so you need to have some kind of Advantage before you go into it if you just think it's a cold rice I'm gonna go into it you might make some quick work and that's like fine for maybe like some people but if you're talking about building a sustainable software such as it's much harder you need to think about the team your co-founders who you want to work with customer support being prepared on every every like Avenue and if you can do it like then great then go for software software is amazing yeah got it I think yeah like just building the product right the MVP like building the software is just literally step one right you need to ship new features you need to then if you want to scale that that means bringing a team on board um so yeah it's it's the same as any other business right all businesses have like um their difficulties but yeah I definitely don't think getting started in SAS isn't a case of just spending the 20 30k on an MVP and boom like you've got your you've got your 10x multiple exit on the books it's definitely not that easy um okay if you let's say um I don't know instantly got shut down tomorrow you know they they'd had enough of instantly like um what business would you start it could be it could be like a SAS company but you know are there any other sort of verticals that you know interest you a bit or excite you that's a interesting question I would say I would take a break man I would just chill go go to cabin uh at Alaska and make music like that's what I would do but if I need like you would come to my head I need to start a new business I would if I still have the same team probably software if I'm by myself and if I can use my resources maybe again then the software like I have some ideas but I probably wouldn't start an agency I'll probably I've been looking more into like investing maybe like engine investing just helping other companies going in as consultants now I have like a lot of experience both sides and raising money and building a [ __ ] company I think I could be of use for some smaller like a cool startups and also I wanna the next business that I want to be into like if I go in big I want the kpi to be the North Star like saving lives I saw a video but Mark Grover's Channel they did like drones in Africa that send blood and Medicine everything this is like their kpis saving human lives compared to mrr return so I wanted a little bit more I don't know what you call it philanthropist like help people yeah so something a little bit different anglement wow that was a very wholesome answer right you could have just said yeah man I just spin up on you something yeah I'll just scale to you know 10 minutes okay no I like it I like it um no that's a wholesome answer okay so last few questions um what does the what does the future look like for instantly you know how how are you planning to to take over the world yeah so I don't know when this podcast is going to go live we're going to launch two really big things to two weeks this month so in may already you're gonna see what those things are and then we only have one piece left to build uh unified one called email Outreach app then we're gonna say we still feel like there's so much potential with instantly uh we have like gotten some offers or some investment offering stuff like dabbling that scene like what's out there we're also dabbling in seeing if we can acquire something that will be useful for us so both sides selling and buying but right now we still have our eye on the price we have the motivation not thinking about like full exit or something like that but at some point probably maybe depend on like what goes on but right now it's just like still focused on just being the best damn tool out there right it's gone okay um all right so you recommended one um for for like SAS specifically I don't know if you're much of a reader but what are like two books or you know three books or just resources that you would um recommend for people who you know it might be in the SAS space looking to level up or you know might be an entrepreneur looking to get into the SAS space like what are some books or resources that have like really inspired and helped you so software specifically people wear that's amazing and maybe for like mindset that you mentioned we're doing things like unconventionally I like the book rework I don't know the author is some really bad like the orphan names and then for maybe some like different angle is it's called sum 40 Tales of afterlife I think it's really interesting short stories about potentially like what can happen uh after we die just to like open up your mind think of different solutions so like I also like like I can't read only non-fiction like Business book yeah devices like switch fiction non-fiction fiction non-fiction and I don't know if there's anything else like my resources like I like audiobooks I like podcasts a lot and what I felt I did wrong before like also gracing money or networking there's so much like random information out there so like recommending random books for people that don't maybe have use for them Instagram there are so specific things for your Niche what you're struggling right now if you want to start your business go listen to the software Founders podcast like listen to this podcast uh hit me up like network with those people that you need in that phase if you want to learn sales then go learn sales books like sales books I can remember recommend as well there are a couple of good ones that are in Spiel it was what was it let me Google I think it was like consultancy type selling uh I can maybe essentially later you cannot link I don't remember it but it's like really good like the structure of helping people understanding them if you can actually help them instead of like this [ __ ] type sentiment like stuck in down their throat I really like that one and there's very simple book words that work uh for copywriting and just using it on sales calls on your emails just simply simplifying your language I forgot a lot of it but I remember when I was at sales process it worked close a lot nice wow okay lots to go off there I'm gonna look into some of those um send me the link of the sales uh sales book I'll definitely add that in it'll be interesting okay um so last two questions before we finish um a bit of a random one but I guess it um lets us understand you on a personal level uh level if you had to eat one meal for the rest of your life what would that be sushi we're talking like what what would it be like the main one right now I'm in my Asian food era it's so good man I can eat it so much and I feel good after it like you know I use like pizzas and like all this like heavy stuff like pasta but I always feel bad after it I feel like I like a column bro I just want to like curl up and just be on the couch no one do anything if it's sushi something nice fresh I'm ready to go nice I like that okay cool all right so well that's it thank you very much um the only other like final question is where can people you know find out more about you instantly stuff like that where can they find you yeah so instantly.ai you can try it for free use for free and if you want to check out more of my stuff Twitter uh my name wrong guy and I think you're gonna put link down because the name is unorthodox hard to how to pronounce