Name: How They Built A Startup While Traveling ($500,000 / year in revenue)
Uploaded: 2020-03-28T16:31:31.000Z
Duration: 26 min 21 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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They're paying us an average of about 100 bucks a month, a little bit over that.

And so we're making half a 1,000,000 in annual revenue.

Everyone today, I haven't interviewed for you guys with a couple who built their start up while traveling.

We talked about how they started their company, the Strategist.

They used to stay productive while traveling on the text back that they used Thio build their system.

I personally learned a lot from this interview, so hopefully you will, too.

And that's ah, looks like candy dot io and user feedback tool.

And so we help other software companies keep track of feature requests and bug reports from their users that they can build a better product.

So what I saw was it's like a list of feature requests where people can like up boat.

No, don't know their cell phone with you.

And how long have you be running the company?

I think I left my full time job about 3.5 years ago, but I guess we launch canny almost 2.5 years ago.

Okay, so that was your job at Facebook as we're going to react with Facebook.

I started an anti left pretty much right?

So I kind of stayed there for my year and 1/2 while Andrew kind of worked on an earlier version of King, I guess on.

Did you did you leave Facebook to work on this Start up?

It's different flavor of the start up, and so back then was called product pains and was a community where people can post vote on future requests for any product publicly.

And so we had a couple companies using it, and eventually the company's wanted more and more features.

And we kind of turned into a sass tool in Reaper.

Ended his canny and so, Yeah, I was similar.

Yeah, I mean, eventually we found that we needed to make money.

And the earlier product pains the earlier version Waas very consumer focused on.

And so there was not really a business model behind it.

And so we basically flipped it into assess tool.

And so we charge businesses to pay to use the platform.

Yeah, on how were you, like, how could you be so confident that, you know, you left your job just not too comfortable.

It felt like, you know, I want to get into start ups.

And it felt like the things that I was learning at a big company weren't really relevant to start ups like sales and marketing, including and all that.

And so, yeah, I felt like I had had to, you know, take a risk and go do it.

You know, I have an idea that I was excited about and yeah, it's turned out great, E.

I mean, I think when you're going to start ups, there's there's no guarantee on, and this is our first venture together on.

And so there was definitely, like this feeling of you don't know what's gonna happen.

You don't know if you're gonna be successful.

And it definitely felt that way for a long time with product pains.

We just didn't really know where it was going for a long time.

Um, and then we made our first dollar or 1st $20 then we were like, Okay, there's something going on here.

How long did it take you to, you know, make those first?

It was, like a year and 1/2 since, like, Yeah, but we were really focused on, you know, we're building a community like there wasn't even a way for people to pay us.

And so we're just focused on growing this community with users giving feedback to companies.

And then companies started asking for the features and we said, Hey, would you pay for those?

And then they said, Yeah, kind of happened naturally, that we turned it into a money making business, which is great because we're bootstrapped.

And so we wouldn't be able to really continue doing this the way we want it to without being able to charge those stores and make money off our work.

Uh, so It's being 2.5 years since the launch seas along.

And like, after that, Like after all that?

Because you tell us about how the company's doing.

You know, in terms of maybe the number of employees revenue numbers, you don't much care.

Um, so we have 450 customers, and those are paying customers, and, uh, they're paying us an average of about 100 bucks a month, a little bit over that.

And so we're making half a 1,000,000 in annual revenue, which feels great for food shop company.

Half a 1,000,000 is enough where we can support it.

We've hired three other people on their all remote.

So our team is in UK, Estonia and Seattle, and then we're here in Toronto, and, um, yeah, we're really excited about where we are.

I went to the University of Waterloo, and I studied self fringing, and I I studied in a design program.

It was a joint program between York University and shared in college.

Um, yeah, it was like a regular for your program, but very, very much graphic design focused unless, like, digital tech focus.

Yeah, eventually on my way to doing kind of product is mind you, I design, right?

Tons of my friends went to our lead on a sleigh for for engineering and eventually participated in a bunch of hackathons which really opened my eyes to tech and San Francisco in general, on dhe.

I just really gravitated towards that and less of what I was studying at school, which was a lot of, like, editorial design packaging, stuff like that.

And so I just pretty much focused on that and did a bunch of internships.

And then eventually, um, yeah, I found my self at Facebook.

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How They Built A Startup While Traveling ($500,000 / year in revenue)

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