382: Walls.io: Bootstrapping Solo to Over $10M ARR - with Michael Kamleitner

Michael welcome to the show hi om thanks for having me my pleasure do you have a favorite quote something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us yeah yeah I do I I did think about it a lot and uh since uh since I've been a founder of two SAS companies uh bootstrap both and both time the solo founder I I really love this quote which is taken from a book from Sarah Lacy uh and she originally titled her book once you're lucky twice you're good and I adapted that for myself uh

since I'm a two time two times founder once you're lucky twice you're stupid because sometimes I really felt very stupid doing it twice at the same time alone and bootstrapped the book is very good though and uh definitely also recommendation yeah that's the key there it's not that you're a second time founder it's that you've built two companies in parallel and I think that's a really interesting part of of your story as we were talking earlier number one your bootstrapped number two you're a solo founder number three you have built these two companies in parallel

and number four you're not in Silicon Valley right like all the things that people say you need to be doing so it's going we're going to have some fun with this conversation and figure out what you've done um you know because you've you obviously done something right here why don't we start by you telling us about walls IO what what does the product do who's it for and what's the main problem you're trying solve and then also tell us about the second company SWAT IO sure sure happy to do so Omar so uh W IO

is uh of course it's a B2B SAU product in the social media marketing space and and our pitch is that wo engages your audience with user generated content and by that increases engagement and brand awareness whether that's at events or um or on your website or on your mobile app anywhere you want to use user generated content to increase engagement that's where wo comes in uh and uh the second company SWAT iio uh is a social media management tool so that's a very very classical software category a tool that allows social media marketing professionals to

streamline their Community Management their content planning analytics everything that the social media manager does every day give us a sense of the size of the business where are you in terms of Revenue size of team number of customers all in all we are now more than 65 uh team members that's about 45 coming from swo and about 20 from from wo we do we are coming from the same parent company we are still sharing an office so sometimes it's hard to say which who's working for who which company so it's 65 in total and I

don't disclose any Revenue numbers per se but uh what I can tell you what I'm very proud uh proud of and also thankful for all my team is that we have been able to cross the 10 million US Dollars uh annual revenue both businesses combined okay so let's um let's talk about how you got started I think you you started SWAT iio first and then about a year later you launched walls IO so why don't we go back to those days like what year was that and and what were you doing at the time uh

yeah let's go back down the memory Memory Lane U that's almost 15 years ago I think I used to be a software developer myself back then and uh I still remember 2008 found it super super exciting when Facebook first launched their their first public AP platform so I was dabbling around in my bedroom building tiny little and I would say stupid little applications on top of Facebook and out of that I've created my first business which was a tiny B Boutique uh software agency focusing on building marketing apps on Facebook and other social media platforms

um so that was the first real business I I I created or founded myself uh however pretty quickly I became aware that I don't see myself in running an agency forever I wanted to do product so I was uh I was happy that and and and uh blessed I would say that from the agency business I was able to develop the product ideas together with my team uh for both SWAT iio and walls iio and you're right swo was was founded or created first as a product that's pretty much 10 years ago in 2013 it's

sometimes hard to to pinpoint the exact date because there used to be long periods of prototyping and being unsure whether this is the self-sustainable business until we really jumped into the cold water and said okay now let's make this a real product and then I think two years later or one yeah one year one or two years later we did the same thing again uh with wall areu okay so let's talk about SWAT first so 2013 how how did you come up with the idea you know you said you wanted to start building a a

product business business get out of this agency business I remember those days by the way I remember when everyone said Facebook apps were the thing that were going to change the world and you know there was kind of like this gold rush to go and build these these apps were you just constantly looking for a product idea around that time and trying to figure out how to get out of the agency business or was this something that you know opportunistically you you came across and decided to pursue yeah so both both happened at the same

time I was trying to find uh ideas myself and we we did site projects here and there but nothing really really stuck and nothing really turned out viable but the good news was we only had to look very close at our agency customers to basically find the ideas ready made for us so uh the companies we were working with like you said social media apps were the hot sorry forgive my uh pardon my French back then and suddenly huge or bigger companies and Brands started to build Facebook communities and they were having trouble because once

you have a certain community size of community you have to deal with lots of incoming customer requests with Spam you have suddenly two or three people posting at the same time and you need a tool to manage that it was not really a big invention on our end but we just saw what our what our bigger agency customers were having trouble with and then started to build a solution for that okay and let's talk about like what what you did in terms of you know validating the idea was this was this more about okay you

just started building the the product or did you did you kind of go through and do the you know customer validation thing and interview some of your customers like how did you get to a point where you were like I'm confident that you know we're going to invest time and money into building this product we're going to bootstrap right so you don't have the the the benefit of of you know having raised any money and you've got an agency business to to keep r running at the time uh so that's a lot of questions to

unpack first uh we didn't do what uh usually what today you would recommend uh to do like doing customer research valid validating a product IDE we were way too naive to I was way too naive to do that also for a very very long time I really thought like this yeah this is a side project really maybe I can sell it to 10 or 20 agency customers that would have been already like paradise for me so uh now nowadays swo has I think more than 700 customers right so uh but so the vision wasn't wasn't

fully developed yet in my in my head to be honest yeah so we but on the on the so that's the that's the criticism I would see for myself looking back what we did right is that we uh were working on the product very closely with our future customers we really made sure to to build the first prototype not within months probably even within weeks and get our customers their hands on it and start using it they didn't pay yet of course but they gave us a lot of feedback which mostly helped us in really

finding that sweet spot and later reaching what you would call product Market fit although I have to say it's also dangerous if you only have like a handful of existing agency customers who give you feedback that can also very easily drive the product management the product Direction into a wrong uh into into a wrong way so you get easily easily distracted by a single customer who has these crazy demands and crazy ideas which might sound right for them but will never be applicable to a broader number of customers so that was difficult to navigate and

if I'm honest there's still I think even to this day you will still find the odd feature in our product that clearly can be traced back to one specific customer who had a lot of uh who had a big word who had a big presence in our in our minds and and therefore influenced the product product management how long did it take for you to get your first 10 customers and did they all come from existing agency clients yeah I would I would say uh the first 10 customers definitely took more than one year something

between one or two years uh so it was really a kind of slow process but that has also that also has to do with some lessons I had to learn during that time we can talk about that later and those first 10 to 20 customers they were not exclusively uh existing agency customers luckily luckily uh what we achieved was that these ear agency customers then started to spread the word and then new customers were were joining so after this one or two year period we were pretty sure that we have a viable product on our

hands something that it's worth to really go not all in but definitely uh definitely allocate significant resources towards okay so it took a couple of years to get the first 10 customers for SWAT and presumably you it wasn't you know an easy thing to do because you've still got to run the agency you've still got to get money coming in pay the bills you know keep the lights on all that stuff while you're allocating resources for for a fair amount of time without generating Revenue so that sounds like a challenging situation anyway but in the

middle of that you then decide let's launch another product how did that happen sort of sort of yes so uh just to get the timeline straight the the second product wasio was launched one or two years after swo and at this point I was already pretty much committed on on swo although you could you could you could ask me how committed was I when I came up with the second with the second product so was probably not fully committed yet uh again again this came the idea for wo which at at its core is a

social Med media content aggregator so it it collects user generated content from all sorts of social media platforms uh the idea for that came again from a very specific customer need or or it wasn't actually a customer it actually was a a friend of mine who was throwing an throwing an party an event at a co-working space we didn't have so many of those IND Vienna back then and we just wanted to create a fun element for this for this event a video screen collecting and encouraging everyone to post on Twitter and on platforms which

are now forgotten like like four square if anyone in your audience still remembers that we didn't have Instagram back then so the idea came again from from uh close uh close Ally customer partner and once we built that for this event suddenly other people were asking for it so again I had the feeling maybe this could be more than a side project a oneoff project maybe we could productize this so it was very much the same the same uh or similar story on how we came up uh with the idea but of course in hindsight

I might have just said no and focused on the first idea but I just couldn't say no to a great product idea that was a that was put right in front of me I'm curious you know when we talk about the two products today they are clearly different serve a very you know clear purpose and and need but in the early days you could kind of put them both into a social media app bucket right so it possibly it would have been as easy to say let's just build all of this into one product did

you go through that thought process where it's like why aren't we just you know building this Uber product for social media that does all of these things versus saying no let's just do this completely different completely separately its own brand it's you know how did you make that decision that's a great question we we did consider that for a while uh the the issue that I saw and and still see if you want to have like this 360 social media Suite that that Beast that can do everything we would not have been able to pull

that off uh in the way we were bootstrapped so this there would have been way more like other competitors which we otherwise wouldn't have to face bigger competitors funded with hundreds or at least dozens of millions of uh of capital who were able to offer this Suite with way more features there was not just swo and and wo there was there was uh social media paid advertising there was a monitoring or listening so if you really want to have wanted to compete in this sweet with this sweet approach we wouldn't have been able to to

create all those products in our bootstrap situation so that was off the table and I think another reason for for uh for deciding to have two independent products which later became also independent legal entities legal comp like separate companies another reason for that was to really allow both products and later both companies to uh grow and and develop on their own on their own individual growth trajectory so they weren't like tied to each other so strong they could all both find their way uh which also of course at one point gives you more flexibility uh

when you're looking for partners maybe at one uh if you at one point decide to to look for m&a scenarios or if you're looking for Investments That uh at a later stage I think that's all easier if you have uh mostly separated companies separated entities who can go who can go their own way but still uh you are absolutely right I'm not saying this was the absolute right or or best decision it uh turned out well for me and for our companies but who knows who knows what would have happened if we went the other

way as you suggested so I'm not saying this is like the only the only solution or the best the best one neither but that was my thinking back then you know when we were talking earlier you said to me you know mixing agency and and product doesn't work at least you know for us looking back at it now you know things things worked out got you to where you are today but I'm guessing trying to do both cause more problems than maybe you know you wanted to deal with at the time yeah sure uh that

that is true the question of course is always do you really have a choice uh especially do you have a choice when bootstrapping because you have to pay your bills and your salaries somehow right if you if you're not lucky enough to to get that capital from some earlier venture or I don't know from from Friends families fools you will have to to bankroll the development of your SAU product somehow and I think in general having a working agency software agency business uh is a great way to to bankroll that first one or two years

of product development but as you said rightly it comes at a cost and and it has to be navigated uh very consciously things are probably only learned along the way and which in hindsight slowed us down unnecessarily I guess the biggest and in hindsight of course obvious learning is trying to have as dedicated as possible uh personal resources for agency and product as possible so in the first year or so we didn't have that we have we had a handful of Engineers uh really we didn't have much else than Engineers to be honest and they

were available for work both on product and agency now of course uh what happens and I'm hearing that from similar founder stories so I don't think we are I'm unique in that I think a lot of people go through that a lot of bootstrappers by the way are coming from agency backgrounds it's also a very common uh uh treat so the the mistake was not to have like separation in resources so of course short-term Revenue was was calling like a agency customers asking for it that's super important project that has to be done by four

weeks and of course what that meant is for the next four weeks nobody would work on our product everyone was focusing on the agency project yeah we would get some cash flow but we didn't have focus and that definitely cost us a lot of time at least in the first year maybe even a bit longer until I understood that there's no way to build for me at least for us at least uh to build a to have enough um velocity in building the product then by basic Bally installing like a firewall and making absolutely clear

that the first engineer moving them over to the product side and he is not allowed to have to do anything with agency projects then as soon as as I saw some traction move over the second engineer and so on and so on you could do the same with marketing and sales although we were like very much engineering G back then kind of beyond the you know in the first 10 customers for both walls and swad were you selling basically to both products to the same type of customer to to agencies that was a big overlap

and for a long time we didn't have we need well at first we didn't have neither sales nor marketing Specialists so as so many bootstrappers I had to I had to not level up but change my roles I was first very much focused on engineering then building the product ideas then I had to do marketing then I had to do sales so so basically it was me for a long time time trying to sell and Market those products and yes it helped that the target audience has a very big overlap which of course the the

Persona is a social media marketing professional so so that certainly helped although there were also a lot of differences in terms of the markets we were playing it swo was very much focused on German speaking uh markets W it was worldwide from the get-go but still there was there was overlap and that certainly helped so let's talk about growth so one of the the the the bigger growth channels for you as being content and an SEO like what was the approach you took what was the thinking as as you were starting to build out your

kind of marketing plan here because I I'm guessing at the time you were the marketing team right so is this just you on your own figuring this out in the beginning yes although uh although marketing was the F marketing was the first position I could actually I'm not sure maybe I'm mixing up marketing and sales one of those were really the first positions I could really afford to hire a professional I think at swo it was sales and at marketing it was uh at wo it was marketing which makes sense because one is more direct

sales heavy the other is more Self Service product Le so yes for w it was definitely marketing so for wo being like very self-service focused and having a worldwide target audience we we felt like going all in on the marketing side made a lot of sense and uh we were pretty early in in in that new software category of uh user generated content tools we didn't even have the word ugc back then I think uh so that meant there was still a lot of uh space in terms of of content marketing and therefore and therefore

effective SEO and so that that definitely helped that wouldn't work today if I would launch a ugc tool or a social media marketing tool today it's very very hard to to uh to be successful with content it it will take it will take forever since the spaces are so so saturated back then it was still possible and of course it's still even today worth it pursuing such a such a such an approach because uh organic organic SEO is still the only thing that really uh that has the best scale still while while other channels might

be uh clocked or saturated sooner or later uh owned organic profile on SEO is is what what uh what always works so you you if I kind of recap that it was you feel that one of the reasons you were able to get content marketing and SEO working was largely to do with with timing you were pretty early you know entering that space around user generated content and um the market wasn't as as saturated as it is today with so many social media tools so that helped you create content and start ranking faster and and

getting discovered by customers certainly but of course uh of course it was still necessary to to provide really uh really great content that was actually uh valuable for for users existing users potential leads so so there's there's no no way around that if you invest in content and make sure it uh it's really high quality and we did our share of mistakes here as well like uh hiring external agencies who would like churn out out piece after piece after piece but uh really not ideally aligned with our customers needs so in the end we learned

hey we should really do it ourselves or at least learn how to do it ourselves first before we let someone uh uh someone from outside uh doing it so we we did our share of mistakes we did also a few a few a few good uh few a few intuitively smart things like uh making sure that uh that we we we gave away a lot so uh very early on we started to give away free licenses to to ngos to nonprofits and we just asked for links in in exchange hey please uh mention us as

a sponsor uh uh link here's our logo please link it on on your website they usually put it uh put it somewhere in the footer so it's linked from every page uh so over time that really helped us help really helped us build a a good link profile yeah yeah that's that's a that's a good strategy in terms of going after Nos and and those sorts of organizations I'm I'm assuming they they have like pretty decent kind of domain ratings right very often yeah yeah yeah it happens a lot it could be organizations in the

academic space which tend to have very good uh very high rated domains even if the single the single link is not like as valuable if you do this constantly and over years there's a lot of things happening positive things happening I want to go back to what you just mentioned about uh High ing agencies to to turn out content and that not really working and i' I've seen that over and over again many many startups go through that that process some uh maybe are six more successful than than others but it's not the first time

I'm hearing we eventually had to bring it inhouse I know it's quite some time back many years ago but if you had to summarize like what was the biggest difference between the type of content uh these agencies were producing versus the type of content you are able to produce in house like how is it different and and what specifically do you think made the difference in terms of resonating with your your potential customers and helping to drive leads well I would like to start with saying I I'm not even like throwing uh any agency we

have been working with under the bus here I think it was I I really think it was more like our own mistake to to uh to Outsource work prematurely before we even understood it ourselves so uh we didn't know enough about our customer profile we didn't know enough how uh we could provide value so and and and if we don't know um who are the closest to our customer how should an agency know there's always at least one or two layers between the agency and our end customers uh it's I think it's it's almost import

uh impossible uh to to breach that Gap so we first had to had to start to learn ourselves what kind of content provides value uh who we are going to Target on which channels and stuff like that once we figured that out we just were able to to create content that was much more uh aligned with those uh with those uh requirements and with those goals so maybe if we would have done it the other way around invest uh and build a knowledge first on our own and then work with a super professional a agency

it might have turned out uh differently I think the the big mistake here was hey we don't need to hire our own marketing professional we can immediately Outsource this like from a CEO perspective I thought like hey I know I understand I need to do or I believe I I I I need to do content marketing I currently can't afford a full-time professional let's Outsource this without Outsource it with without having any personal experience or expertise with content marketing and that is a recipe that of course it's bound to to to go wrong um I

should have first invested in my own in-house marketing professional who could then guide an agency and and really uh make it work I think that's an important advice for if you are a single found solo founder and you have like a certain uh area of your experience for me that was engineering SL product you got to understand those other important an areas first sales marketing before you hand it over to someone completely outside of your organization yeah I think you're totally right and I it's not just content it's everything right it applies to most or

all the things I guess yeah I I remember somebody saying to me many many years ago that you Outsource stuff that you have got to handle on you understand and then you want to you know get somebody to to help run that so you can free up your you know your team potentially to do something else and that if you don't really have an handle on it if you don't if you're not really doing that well yourself and you Outsource it chances are the problem is just going to get worse yeah exactly and that's the

same thing today when you when you don't think about agencies but uh think about even lower how should I say lower price Alternatives like I don't know going to to upwork or fiverr.com it will be the same thing if you don't understand the the the task and how it should be done correctly yourself will never work similar probably also similar if you if you start thinking about Outsourcing these tasks to an AI great idea but you should have understood the task first before you put it into jet GPT right the the other growth channel that

you were able to get working was paid advertising and as you and I were talking earlier the interesting thing here was that you got search ads working but not social media ads and I think it's a little ironical that you know you're you're selling a social media product and yet social media advertising wasn't you know wasn't effective or helpful and yet search ads were so one just just kind of help us understand what you went through what you tried and then I have a few few other questions I'd love to ask you about that well

uh yeah you could say it's ironic you could even also say like it's almost embarrassing but uh but it's the but it's the truth well I mean search ads of course or yes luckily worked out pretty soon and and without too much hassle of course search ads work because of the clear clear buyer intent and once our category was starting to be established there was enough volume people looking for social media management tools or people searching for so even social media walls which is like lower volume but still there's enough intent there so it was

easy to to uh to work with that and make it also work uh with a with enough return on investment because both my companies both our products were at a comparatively high price point so we never never went like a low price strategy so it was relatively easy to recoup uh whatever we paid for clicks or for conversions through our customer lifetime so figuring out paid search was relatively easy although it has to be said it's not getting easier over time so uh everyone I think well maybe it's different in consumer uh in consumer land

but in B2B software land I think paid advertising has a clear tendency also to to to to reach a glass seating to saturate also getting more expensive to more competitors you have so it's not all fine and easy which brings me back to my first point that uh organic SEO and reach is basically the Holy Grail that we are all looking for now to the to the social media paid advertising I mean in hindsight it's clear what we made wrong here uh advertising on social media uh doesn't doesn't hook into an existing buyer intent but

uh does aim much earlier in the customer journey of your future client your future customer and I think uh while that is uh pretty much obvious what we did understand is that for catching or or touching a customer very early in their Journey like when they even don't know that there is a demand for the problem we are solving uh we need to we need to provide much different and much broader for example content to make such a such a funel work we we just didn't do it uh we we we just uh we sort

of understood that there is no intent yet but basically use the same copy the same landing pages the same ebooks uh and addressed with the same material addressed the customer who is much much earlier and doesn't even know about us yet well I guess that was bound to be a failure and we wasted quite some money on uh on that we are still working on it by the way it's not it's not done for us yet of course uh if you broaden up your fundle in this way that usually means you need to invest more

uh in creating the the the appropriate content and that's not always easy for for a bootst company but we're getting there and uh uh we also learning still a lot of where we can uh where we ideally can uh reach our our audience LinkedIn is a is a very interesting opportunity that works better than many other platforms so yeah we're learning yeah so I think now that you you you describe it that way it seems pretty obvious but it's a very easy mistake to make and until you get clarity on what stage of the customer

Journey the buyer is at and it's very different when somebody is looking for some kind of user generated social media tool on Google and finding you and the intent is to find a tool buy a tool Etc versus somebody disc discovering the ad on Facebook while they were you know checking a feed about what their friends were up to and they may potentially still be a buyer but one there's no intent two they may be so early in the journey that they don't even realize they need to be creating user generated content right so you

have a you have a whole different type of you know education kind of process you need to go through before they'll even be thinking about you know looking for a tool like yours absolutely and and it took us a while to to get clear on that or to understand that that whole customer Journey uh like thinking about where where is this social media marketing professional what could what how could we create Demand with them how could we explain our solution educate them on that and also very often that like I mentioned before that that means

creating investing more into content I mean a Google search ad is pretty easy to create even like 100 variations of it yeah but for for targeting a customer in this early stage you will probably maybe need something more uh visual something more emotional you might have to into video and stuff like that and yeah that took us a while to to figure out and to allocate the right resources to it to get that going the the other channel which has turned out to be crucial for for helping Drive growth over the last couple of years

and and possibly helping you cross that 10 million ARR Mark uh has been working with Channel partners and and doing Integrations so you know Integrations can mean a whole bunch of things right and Partnerships so just tell me what what that meant for you and what what was it that you were doing that that finally started working so this is mostly about the second company about wo because we have a really strong Channel partnership program there it actually happened uh in 2020 right in the middle of the of the pandemic back then wall here was

still to a large extent used for for events for trade shows uh conferences all of which didn't happen anymore in in March 2020 so uh as a as a solo founder uh that kept me awake for quite a while until we uh luckily understood that our product these social media content hubs were working in a great way also in Virtual events which were then of course uh seeing a lot of traction in the middle of 20120 so our thinking was how can we get the most out of these uh of these industry industry Trends and

for us it was clear we need to be we need to bring our social media content hubs into as many virtual event experiences as possible technically that was very easy because our product is basically a standard widget an iframe widget uh which can embedded anywhere so that was easy we didn't have a lot of technical integration to do now it was all about identifying as many potential platforms as possible look at the biggest ones those was the most traction and then setting up a lightweight partnership program integration program that allowed us to integrate our product

into theirs and what that really means is we want to be part of their app Marketplace most of these most of these platforms all of which are 10 have 10 have a tendency to be larger companies than ours all of them have like an app Marketplace a list of integration Partners we want our logo we want the wallo logo to be included in these app marketplaces so that their customers can easily find us maybe they also have no idea about using social media walls in the virtual events but they will find us in the marketplace

can uh can start a free trial and hopefully uh become customers like that so that turned out to be a very successful uh initiative of strategy we later first of all it it it helped us to survive the the pandemic year the first one uh while we saw quite a significant drop in Revenue in the in the first two quarters we were actually able to balance that out in Q3 and Q4 largely by our partnership program uh so it was really a good decision to do that and we data branched out and uh uh extended

the partnership program to other categories of software platforms event platforms first and we later added digital signage Solutions we are now adding HR and employer branding uh platforms so we are continuing and extending that partnership program now in terms of day-to-day operations I I think you've stepped away from SWAT IO and and are focused on on walls iio now I want to understand like how you think about positioning the two products and differentiating them from competitors now SWAT I owe kind of more of a traditional social media management tool in a super crowded super saturated

market so why I want to understand what you do there to to position and differentiate yourself and then the same question with walls like you know the this idea of social walls is there are more and more products around that do that in different ways so again how do you how do you differentiate how do you make it clear in terms of your positioning to your PO you know your your ideal customers that you are the the best choice for them well uh this is a real struggle for both companies ongoing I think for so

many for so many sou companies out there let's be honest honest with ourself uh there's hardly any software category or SAS category that is not crowded and oversaturated uh we all know those uh uh SAS landscape logo maps right where you can see hundreds thousands of logos and honestly no customer can differentiate us put the pricing page Pages next to each other it's extremely hard for a customer to decide uh what product is is the right match so uh that that being said uh we we followed we did follow different strategies here for waro we

uh made two very clear decisions early on which are to most extent still still valid and in place uh the first the first one was a super sharp focus on uh in markets we were clearly saying hey we want to focus on the German speaking markets we have a great Advantage there we speak the same language we're in the same time zone and we understand their legal and later privacy related uh requirements like gdpr and things like that so we were very focused on th on those on those Market where our frankly bigger and sometimes

maybe better product-wise better uh positioned us competitors had a very hard time to uh to compete if we would have focused on me small or medium companies that would have been harder because they don't care so much about gdpr for example so at the same time while we were focusing on German speaking markets we were focusing on Mid larger size companies uh and also larger uh ACB larger larger contract value and that combination allowed us to find our our Niche although it's not such a small Niche and we are still growing uh growing from that

market and that turned out to be a successful uh decision however I have to say especially since as you mentioned I I put down my operational duties at squat. iio I'm now in an ownership role which means of course I'm very very tightly working with the management team but what we also see now is that for growing further than we are at right now and we have to think ahead of course we will have to reconsider both of these uh limiting factors both the market shall we ever play Only In the German speaking markets and

also shall we only play on the mid to uh Enterprise sized companies uh the latter one we already started to relax by starting to offer a self-service model with swo two years ago and we will see what my management team comes up with in terms of uh in terms of geographies and markets so it was a good decision for a long time but it has to constantly be uh be reconsidered now similar with with wall the market by now is is also pretty uh pretty crowded and again I think the answer is uh positioning and

uh trying to explain to your customer to your potential customer why you are so much better than that uh cheap competitor that undercuts your price constantly and uh a lot of that answer is in quality of service how fast is your aggregator working is it working with official apis or are you scraping which is very unstable so product quality really is something that you will in my opinion and I think of myself as a product person always comes first in differentiating like making clear the product value is better investing and double investing into your your

product value you uh secondly as I mentioned yeah the pricing and the positioning should make that also clear that you are a high quality solution that you don't want to compare yourself to the $10 per month uh competitor that you're are completely different beast and that's the challenge of course in for marketing and communicating your value not not going to be easy but it's the only way uh it's the only way you will survive if you are in a market where there is very lowc cost competitors or new new entries onto the market I wanted

to talk a little bit about your role as a founder and one being a solo founder and two running two companies at the same time when people listening to this interview or listening to you could easily be mistaken for thinking well you know he had it easy he got lucky it worked out for him he's got this you know this this uh these two businesses that have have both you know survived and thrived but there was a time when you realized you know this was a big struggle this was affecting your personal health it wasn't

necessarily helping you know the the growth of the companies so give us a picture of that give us a picture of the struggle so people can understand you know the the both sides of of this journey here I want to take the the the opportunity and first uh State something completely clear while I often talk about that I created the product and I came up with this idea and I did that of course it was very often me but uh I wouldn't sit here almost 15 years later with two uh with two profitable sarce businesses

if it wasn't for a very very strong team uh that is working behind me not on a co-founder level of course it's different but uh I I have people on both my teams who are working with me for 10 years or more and without them it would not be possible so if I can or want to be uh like like remembered I want to be proud of something is that uh at least a few times I really had a good uh a good intuition to pick the the right person the right people for my team

so and that being said you are right a lot of and that's going back to my to the quote I initially uh threw threw into the microphone this once your uh once you're lucky twice you're good or or stupid there is of course a certain amount of luck involved I also won't deny that we had a very great timing being right in the right moment uh of uh in the right moment of time focusing on social media that was exactly the right time that is partly luck partly intuition honestly if I would have started 10

years later I would probably have had maybe a similar intuition about uh crypto I might have failed most likely with that intuition so it's not that easy you also uh have to have luck and of course there was all this organic uh development of my two companies I think I hope I was able to explain the history of how we came to swo and bsio that a lot of these things happened uh from a point of uh Nativity and not having like super strong vision and I'm fine with that uh that's I'm not embarrassed by

that or anything it was just the way I I evolved personally as an entrepreneur but that being said that's how I ended up in this double CEO role uh nobody in their right mind I guess would do this in a planned way two like you said two companies two times bootstrap two times solo founder that's that is not healthy uh at least for most people I mean maybe if you if you if you think you're IL musk you can do that and run 10 companies as a CEO but I think most uh most human beings

should uh focus on one thing uh but it is what it is I had what that's that's what I woke up with and you're right it took it took a tall it took many years of of of being focused only on work and having no no balance at all with private life and that certainly wasn't healthy wasn't healthy all the time luckily it get never got to a point where where I really had to like I don't know uh pull the emergency switch or whatever but uh I might have been close to that more importantly

I just realized uh how I'm like uh making my own life harder by this constantly switching back and forth like I mean there is no multitasking really you just switch from one task to the other and some people do it faster than others but you always lose time with context switching and I had that 10 10 hours a day at least U switching between swo and Wario so at one point luckily I realized this is not ideal not for me personally but more importantly it's not ideal for the companies for both companies because because we

had two growing products both had a lot of potential and I'm very sure that uh by remaining in that single or double coo role uh that cost us time or potential uh which we would have achieved faster if I would have made the step back from one of the companies earlier I'm not complaining uh it I think in a way it was necessary like I said for my personal trajectory as a Founder uh it all has probably some some some meaning in the end but uh it might have been better to to make such decisions

to step down from one earlier all right um we should wrap up let's get on to the lightning round I'm going to ask you seven quick fire questions what's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received so uh I think I think it's about networking and and and what I believe networking really should be um it's not that you're connecting sending someone a LinkedIn connection request and once they have accepted start selling to them uh for me networking really means investing a lot in onetoone relationships and that usually means you offer your help

you give a lot of things uh you you pay forward until you finally maybe uh ask for a favor in return that's that's so so trivial and obvious but yet so many people think networking is sending out as many LinkedIn request as possible I also am a believer in duners number which I think says you can only have meaning full relationships with about 150 people and I think even that number might be too high so uh I think uh having like a small but meaningful Network goes a long way what book would you recommend to

our audience and why it's an older book I think the first edition is 10 plus years ago but they had a a reprint or rewise Edition lately it's called in search of stupidity 40 Years of high-tech marketing failures by meril Chapman and it's basically it does what it promises on the cover it's super fun stories especially for people who have been in the industry for more than five or 10 years who will uh uh revisit a lot of fun marketing failures from the days of IBM to Microsoft up to HubSpot it's really a fun read

and very much recommended that's super interesting I'm definitely going to read that book um what's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder I would say it's openness and eagerness to learn uh and to learn from everyone in your organization whether it's your co-founder or whether it's a customer support agent being on eye level and being open to learn from everyone what's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit I would say it's doing a personal time audit and I'm sure for those who are not familiar the concept is that for at least

a month you make a very very uh detailed log of every task of every of every task you do with the goal of having a really good understanding what am I actually spending time on and you can do this with a Google sheet I'm doing it with a software tool called time time UL L um um whatever you do it's very insightful and I'm kind of addicted to it by now and and I keep doing these time audits to optimize and to be aware of my time being spent I've been thinking about doing that as

well but I'm uh I'm afraid what I might learn from that experience that's a very good point and it is very revealing and it can be scary and it can hurt but I think that's the point of it yeah what's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time and wanted to build a third business in parallel uh okay first of all I go on the record here uh I'm not going to found a third SAS company in parallel I'm I swear to God I'm not going to do

that I can also go on a record if I ever found another company it will not be in the social media space but uh that's a different story so I don't have any crazy business idea per se but what I really would love to do is to do something in the physical world like in-person events for example I'm super huge on on on community on getting together sharing uh so something like like a conference or a Meetup it doesn't have to be a business per se but that is something I would be very interested in

doing and who knows maybe uh I have some ideas maybe there is something happening in 2024 right what's an interesting all fun fact about you that most people don't know um okay those who are working with me they know it by now but uh but everyone else probably not I'm uh I'm a huge I'm a huge fan of the country of Greece actually I been in Greece every year for the for my whole life starting from age age one and I also yeah yeah so I like my parents brought me there and and I have

been there every year sometimes more than once a year so obviously I love the country and yeah that's that's a fun fact that some people know but not everyone and finally what's one of your most important passions outside of your work yeah uh I would say I would say my friends my family my friends that's that's the only that's the only thing that is as important as work and where I spend as much time for and with yeah I totally agree okay great well Michael thank you so much for for joining me and and unpacking

the the story of the last 10 or 15 years in in a relatively short amount of time appreciate that if people want to check out the two products they can go to walls.io or swat. and if folks want to get in touch with you what's the best way for them to do that easiest of course is look my name up on on LinkedIn if you prefer email that's Michael walls.io please don't hesitate to get in touch if you if you want to share something or maybe even if you need some help somewhere please please let

me know thank you so much it's been a pleasure uh I'm glad we got to to do this and I wish you and the team the the best of success and uh a successful New Year as approach it thanks a lot om it's uh it's been a it's been a pleasure it's been fun and it's been an honor to be on your show my pleasure too cheers