Nick Fogle went from being an attorney drowning in student loan debt to teaching himself to code, building a successful SaaS business, and ultimately getting acquired for a mid-7 figure sum in 2021.
After graduating with a job and a deep recession in 2008, He made a bad situation worse by taking out student loans and going to law school.
He graduated and became an attorney, but he realized he couldn’t pay the debt on an attorney’s salary.
Desperate to get out from under the mountain of debt, he decided the best way to pay it off was to start his own company.
Nick couldn’t find a technical co-founder to help with the startup idea, so he drove a shuttle bus for minimum wage while teaching himself to code. Then, Nick worked my way up the ranks from lowly intern to lead engineer at a publicly traded software company.
For five years, he spent every night and weekend and even used his PTO to work on his startup, Wavve. In 2020, he could finally pay off his student loan debt and leave his day job.
After selling Wavve for a mid-7-figure sum in 2021, he took everything he’d learned about retention and turned it into a new business, Churnkey.
What you will learn
- Discover how Nick Fogle transformed from a debt-ridden attorney to a successful SaaS entrepreneur, creating a multi-million dollar business from scratch.
- Uncover the trials and tribulations of entrepreneurship, from the initial failures to the breakthrough success of Nick’s first venture, Wavve, and his subsequent business, Churnkey
- Find out how Nick leveraged a unique opportunity in the burgeoning podcast market, turning a seemingly niche product into a subscription model success story
- Get an insider’s perspective on the importance of perseverance, product-market fit, and the willingness to pivot when initial business models don’t pan out
- Plus loads more!
Transcript
Jeff Bullas
00:00:04 – 00:00:53
Hi everyone and welcome to the Jeff Bullas show today I have with me, Nick Fogle. Now, Nick went from being an attorney drowning in student loan debt to teaching himself to code and building a successful software as a service business. We sometimes use the term acronym SaaS and ultimately, getting acquired for a mid-seven figure s in 2021. After graduating with a job and in a deep recession in 2008, he made a bad situation worse by taking a student loan and attending law school. He quickly built up a debt of $250,000 and realised he couldn’t pay the debt down as we went up from the mountain of debt. He decided the best way to pay it off was to start his own company and this could have gone pear-shaped or it could have gone well. And apparently, it went very well.
Jeff Bullas
00:00:54 – 00:01:26
Nick couldn’t find a technical co-founder who helped with the start-up idea. So he drove a shuttle bus for minimum wage while teaching himself to code. This sounds a little bit like a side hustle while driving a shuttle bus, doesn’t it really? Then Nick worked his way up the ranks from lowly intern to lead engineer at a publicly traded software company for five years. He spent every night week and even used his PTO to work on his start-up, which we’re gonna find out what that was in 2020. He’s finally able to pay off his student loan debt and leave his day job.
Jeff Bullas
00:01:27 – 00:02:16
After selling Wavve for a mid-seven-figure s in 2021, he took everything he’d learned about retention and turned it into a new business Churnkey, and we’re gonna find out about what Churnkey does and we’re gonna find out what his business wave did. So, welcome to the show, Nick. It’s an absolute joy to have you here dialing in from the USA. I’m dialing in here from Sydney, Australia, which some people have heard of and some haven’t. But we’re a long way from anywhere over here, but that’s OK. We’ve got zoom to fix that problem. So Nick, tell us about where did this? Was there a drive to become an entrepreneur or you sort of fell into it? But really, for me, it almost sounds like you became an entrepreneur because of
Jeff Bullas
00:02:16 – 00:02:25
a cash flow problem and trying to solve a problem as in being under this mountain of debt. So there’s different ways to start a business to be motivated, isn’t there?
Nick Fogle
00:02:26 – 00:02:49
Yeah, sure it is. And, and first of all, thanks for having me, Jeff, really excited to get in, dive into this discussion here. Yeah, it’s funny; motivation is a fickle thing. And sometimes you have this intrinsic drive and then other times you have this feeling like you’re being crushed, like I’ve got to do something about it. And you know, you, you
Nick Fogle
00:02:50 – 00:03:28
do the right things you go through life. People say, hey, if you want to be a success, you need to check these boxes; you need to go to university. , then maybe you become a doctor or become a lawyer and like, you’ll make all this money and, you know, mo money always sounded good. Hey, I’m gonna be a successful, fully functioning adult one day and, you know, be a lawyer, it’s gonna be fun. It’s gonna be like a lawyer. Law and Order episode. , you know, I, I had this vision of what I thought that would be like. So I finished law school and became an attorney and, I quickly realized you don’t make the kind of money, particularly starting out. You don’t make the kind of money that you need to pay down that student debt.
Nick Fogle
00:03:29 – 00:03:57
And I was at a point in life where I said, do I really want to be a lawyer? I wasn’t really enjoying, the work that I was doing, the pay wasn’t particularly great. , and these student loans were accruing interest at a rate of $50 per day. So it was like every day just to pay the interest. I had $50, and I, you know, couldn’t even pay that. And so I was like, yeah, how on earth will I ever go to my grave with this debt? How will I ever pay it down?
Nick Fogle
00:03:58 – 00:04:25
And I did a lot of thinking and trying to figure out what, what kind of job could help me to pay this down. And I looked at it as well. Only a few jobs in the world could help me do this. I don’t want to go back to school and do something else. I need to either be in sales which at that time I had no interest in doing sales. Sales is a role where you could have just uncapped potential, or could start a business and own that thing
Nick Fogle
00:04:26 – 00:04:59
and then have some kind of exit or, you know, have more control over my income. So that was the internal dialogue that I had with my wife at the time we were recently married and she was like, are you kidding me? Like you’re not gonna be an attorney? Everybody thought I was crazy here. They say you’ve got, your parents must be so embarrassed that you’re going, I had a lady tell me that your parents are gonna be so embarrassed that you went to law. School, you’re not practicing as an attorney anymore. , so on its face it seemed like a silly decision to me. It didn’t, it. It seemed like the only logical thing to do.
Jeff Bullas
00:05:00 – 00:05:27
Yeah. It’s interesting. Isn’t it that culture, family, and parents expect you to do a proper job? I left, you know, I did a teaching degree, and I did it in a time when the government paid for university and college, which is a novel idea today. But I think countries are rich enough to pay for that today. Really. But that’s another topic on its own.
Nick Fogle
00:05:27 – 00:05:43
Oh, yeah, you’ll get me down to you. You’ll get me fired up talking about the, at least the American education system because the government is in a way paying for it by backing these loans and there’s no incentive for institutions to cut costs when you’ve got loans that are backed by the full faith and credit of the US government.
Jeff Bullas
00:05:43 – 00:06:20
Yeah. So, we, yeah, we both open that can of w, because I, I, but I do like the fact that I had free education and, so I’m very, very grateful and very thankful. So, yeah. And I left teaching after about five or six years because I hated it. , and, got into the technology industry and loved it and been playing there pretty well ever since. So. , yeah, but parents sort of see their Children as doing, you know, the normal society, you know, things, engineer, nurse, doctor, teacher, you know, whatever.
Jeff Bullas
00:06:20 – 00:06:37
So, and there’s a lot of people actually leaving university, not even going to university but becoming a tradie. In other words, you know, and they’re becoming a new rich almost, aren’t they? Whatever rates they’re getting paid today. So, yeah. And the great thing about a tradie is he can’t be replaced by a, I really can he or Yeah, that’s a good point. At
Nick Fogle
00:06:37 – 00:06:38
least, not yet.
Jeff Bullas
00:06:38 – 00:06:55
Not yet. Ok. So you’re, you’re quite motivated by a huge mountain of debt and you’re going, ok. I’ve gotta, I’ve gotta work my arse off. So you started. So what did the idea for was wave the first thing you started? Is
Nick Fogle
00:06:55 – 00:07:25
that right? No, it was not. I mean, it would be, I don’t think I would have any room to talk if the first thing I created just happened to be successful. I think part of being successful as an entrepreneur is having some early failures and some big failures where you’ve sunk either capital or time or tremendous effort to say that it doesn’t pay off. That’s really how you learn and develop that muscle of perseverance. So, yeah, sorry, go ahead.
Jeff Bullas
00:07:25 – 00:07:31
So what, so what were the sort of little 1st, 1st failures? What happened?
Nick Fogle
00:07:32 – 00:08:07
Yeah. So I was working a day job because, you know, I had to pay the dues as a software engineer and, and funny thing enough, you know, the software engineering, it turned out to pay better than the legal degree I have or the lawyer job. So it was like, ok, well, I’m doing a little bit better now. This was about three years out of law school. And I’ve been wanting to start my own thing. I’m still chasing the entrepreneurial passion. The first thing I started, if you really want to go to the first start up, it was, it was an embarrassing failure where I realized that without any kind of capital or any connections,
Nick Fogle
00:08:08 – 00:08:43
it’s very naive to just say, oh, I think I can find that software engineer to like help me build this, I’ll give them an equity and I couldn’t find anybody that’s gonna do that, like build this thing with no income for free. So I just start working and I’m working, making little side projects, little side technology businesses all along and never really find anything that has that kind of market appeal or opportunity. But in 2016, I met my co-founder. It ended up being my co-founder at wave. But we had this thought that it’s, it’s fun to talk about sports with your friends.
Nick Fogle
00:08:43 – 00:09:20
And this is a very common thing. Everybody wants to after a game or during the game, be able to talk in real time, but also having something that’s somewhat asynchronous. So like being able to have a group and you can all leave your feedback there. Audio is best in its native format rather than having to type something on Twitter or just text it. So, having a real conversation seemed like this big opportunity. And this was 2015 when we started this, we called it Talk Sports. which that name we got like a cease and desist order pretty quickly should have known from law school, right? Like maybe I should do a trademark search here. But anyway, we spent about 18 months
Nick Fogle
00:09:20 – 00:10:02
grind. I built out this whole platform had a mobile app, Apple, I OS app, an Android app. You know, it’s kind of like this field of dreams mentality of like if I build it and if we build this really appealing thing that we think is valuable, people are gonna just give us money, hand over fist or venture capitalists are gonna come in and say this is a great thing. Here’s some money to keep building it out and that didn’t pan out. So we struggled to commercialize it. We also struggled to grow a big enough audience to actually get venture money. So we were about 18 months in and we were about to throw in the towel on this business. So, yeah, it’s kind of
Jeff Bullas
00:10:03 – 00:10:12
a, are you building this as a side hustle while you were working at, as working in engineering programming and software for a company.
Nick Fogle
00:10:12 – 00:10:47
Exactly. I was at a company called Black Board. , here in the US, it’s a large publicly traded tech company and, I was traveling, I was going off flying, you know, different countries doing implementations and it’s a really busy job and every little bit of margin I had, even like using, as you mentioned, I was using some PTO time to actually work on building this out because I needed all the time. I could have. So a lot of late nights and weekends. , a lot of, you know, blood sweat and tears just building this. And we got to the 18 month mark and it was clear
Nick Fogle
00:10:47 – 00:11:09
that I couldn’t put forth any more effort. I, I didn’t want to because if, if this wasn’t gonna be a viable business, it wasn’t, you know, just a fun hobby. I mean, it’s fun to build things, but not to that extent. , so it, it’s kind of a last ditch. He Mary still working the day job. , figuring we’ve got to find a way to get more eyes into the, onto this thing that we built.
Nick Fogle
00:11:10 – 00:11:34
, the problem we uncovered at this time though was that audio doesn’t share well. So we tried to like share audio snippets from the communities that we, we had all these different sports channels, people with different teams, we had a lot of activity but there was no viral loop in it and you talk, you hear a lot about virality. You used to hear about this, you know, more before people were focused on building profitable businesses. So all you needed was a viral loop. We still thought that at the time. But
Nick Fogle
00:11:34 – 00:12:09
I said, OK, well, let’s find a way to share this audio in a better format. This was right about the time that video as a medi was really picking up. And now, you know, video tiktok, it’s the only medi that people are consing, it seems. But back then it was like just starting to pick up. So so maybe there’s a way we could start taking all of this great audio, these great sound bys here and just share them on social. So we created a tool, a pull an all nighter built this thing out literally all nighter to build a way to take an audio file, you upload mp3.
Nick Fogle
00:12:09 – 00:12:42
You have some artwork. If you’re a podcast, you throw your cover art there. And we would, we had all these different designs where we could animate an interactive waveform. So all all sorts of cool engaging ways to turn that audio into a video. And the system did that. It was very manual, like we would have to manually or rather my co-founder was manually having to create these. The customer would say, oh, I love what you guys created. Can I pay you to make some of these for me, we were still, by the way trying to sell this whole behemoth that we created. And
Jeff Bullas
00:12:42 – 00:12:46
so this audio, you were turning into like an animation, is that
Nick Fogle
00:12:46 – 00:13:35
right? It was, it’s, yeah, it was a full video file. So it would be like give us MP3 and we’ll spit out this really nice engaging interactive waveform on your cover art. And you know, a native video people have seen this before. The the term is called audiogram and they’re becoming less popular these days because people are preferring just like, you know, a full on video. but they still do pretty well. It’s better than just, you know, having text files for instance. But this was the first way to, we kind of commercialize that concept of an audiogram. We’re the first ones to do that and we learned a lot about building a business in the process, like doing things that don’t scale, trying to just brute force this business into being successful. And a key ingredient of that was
Nick Fogle
00:13:36 – 00:14:14
early on, we’re doing these things that don’t scale and that somebody would message us say, hey, I really want that thing you have, I’m willing to pay. And that was new to us. Like we have people actually wanting to give us money for something they don’t want this whole beautiful platform we’ve created, they just want the simple video. It’s a simple problem and a solution that we had So we’re manually creating these for people using the system we had and , we got a long way, I think we got a decent amount of revenue and it, it was recurring revenue too. So it was like a monthly subscription. You’d have this, you know, all these files and templates and things like that, like that you could use and you could come back and upload your audio when you needed to.
Nick Fogle
00:14:15 – 00:14:19
So that was kind of the, the basic origins of what would become wave,
Jeff Bullas
00:14:19 – 00:14:32
right? OK. So when did you really get traction? Was it from that time where people started paying you for creating them? And you put that on subscription? Is that how it worked?
Nick Fogle
00:14:33 – 00:15:00
Yeah, I mean, that was a very early form of attraction and some just very basic product market fit that we hadn’t seen before. We’re not having to reach out and try to sell this big platform to radio shows or podcasters or anything like that. There was people coming to us inbound and saying, hey, we want that. So that was step one and seeing that there was a small opportunity here and we thought it was going to be very niche. And I was so skeptical of building anything else at this point. I was like,
Nick Fogle
00:15:00 – 00:15:14
let’s just, you know, use this revenue, we can maybe make a little bit of extra money and we can keep working on the platform. So we kept the platform thing going for about six months until we were getting so much revenue from wave that we were like, this is the thing.
Jeff Bullas
00:15:16 – 00:15:22
So did you move it to? So you moved it to subscription model instead of project by project model? Is that what you did? It
Nick Fogle
00:15:22 – 00:15:53
was a subscription model from the beginning at the beginning. Yeah. Yeah. So, and the manual thing was like, hey, if somebody is gonna ask us to set this up and we’re gonna charge them, I think it was only 12 bucks a month or something. So it was like nominal fee for the amount of work that went into setting up. So we had to make sure that there was some subscription revenue and to be fair, like, you know, we were hosting the files for them, there was a lot of, you know, ongoing cost to it as well. , but that was, I would say that was like, step one in understanding, we had an opportunity
Nick Fogle
00:15:54 – 00:16:08
and there came a point where it was like, are we going to double down on this or just keep treating it like a little hobbyist project? And, this is when we really started to think about scale. So we might, I was telling you before we started recording here that,
Nick Fogle
00:16:09 – 00:16:37
my business partner went on vacation and he had been the one that was manually handling all these and I was handling most of the tech. And, you know, the actual behind the scenes work. And when he left, I’m having to do all this work. This is, I, I cannot do another one of these. We’re gonna automate it. And when I created the ability to design your own, it really opened up the floodgates for suddenly, people were like, oh wow, I can do this really quickly. There’s not this one day turnaround time.
Nick Fogle
00:16:37 – 00:17:05
People started sharing it more and one little hack we had, we were still thinking through like, you know, virality and like, how do we get more eyes on this? We had a little watermark on the free tier. So like, yeah, you could come now, since we’re not having to do the work, you can design your own, you can be on a free tier, but every video is gonna, you’re gonna have a time limit and it’s gonna have a watermark and that was really instrental to getting more eyes on it. So somebody would share, we have like, like the Dave Ramsey show started using it
Nick Fogle
00:17:06 – 00:17:38
and they have so many people on the Instagram feed watching it. Suddenly, we had all of these people that had seen or other podcasters that had seen The Little Wave Watermark and they come to our website. So we really started to take off at that point and then COVID came along and suddenly everybody was creating a podcast if you recall. I mean, everybody a lot of people didn’t have any business creating a podcast. And that was good for the business because we had this huge tailwind of creators that wanted to have this visual collateral for their audio.
Jeff Bullas
00:17:39 – 00:17:58
Yeah. So what happened for you to exit? So you really, you, you got some big attention through AAA bigger show. And then that obviously would have been a bp in revenue and then you would have become attractive for acquisition. Is that and then someone approached you or did you go to market?
Nick Fogle
00:17:59 – 00:18:42
That’s a great question. There were a few different moments and this is I’ve realized now this is pretty common when you start a business. There are a lot of different firms that are out there. Some of these are private equity, some of these are individuals and they just want to have a, a cash flowing asset and that might be a small, it might be a small brick and mortar business, might be a vacation rental or it might be a software company. The first instance we had where there was any kind of acquisition thought was Spotify came to us back in like 2019. I don’t think they knew how early we were or how small we were because the conversation ended pretty quickly. But it just got our real turn and like, oh wow, this thing that we built
Nick Fogle
00:18:43 – 00:19:34
there is long term exit potential and maybe a dollar on our ownership in the company, a dollar value. So that’s when we started getting intentional about building something that we could potentially exit one day. So we met with a business broker in 2020 I think the business was doing, we might have been doing half a million a year at that point in recurring revenue. And the, you know, the business brokers, they serve an important function, but they take a huge cut of any transaction fee. It’s like 10 or 15% of the overall sale price, which is it’s huge, huge amount. If you were like a stakeholder, early stakeholder in a start up, you might own that much of the company. So we figured we might move to market with a broker at some point in the future.
Nick Fogle
00:19:35 – 00:19:57
And we were starting to tweak the business in ways. And I think another thing that’s valuable for meeting with the professionals who sell anything is understanding what is the market value in this asset, a house or a business. We realized there were some flaws with the business that we needed to address. One of the biggest flaws we had was churn. you know, as you can imagine with podcasting, you have a lot of people
Nick Fogle
00:19:58 – 00:20:39
who have this idea. I want to start a podcast, but podcasting is hard. It requires a lot of ongoing work, editing, you know, guests, it, yeah, I’m preaching to the choir. Here is a big commitment. And a lot of the people that would use Wave, they would sign up, they just started a new podcast and we call it pod fad. I don’t know if that’s like an industry term or not, but they would, after two or three months, they would turn out of our product because the podcast, they were like, oh, I’m taking a break from podcasting or I’ve decided I’m not gonna create the podcast anymore. And that turn was like 15% a month of our whole customer base that would turn out. And it’s like, well, we, if we want to grow, we’ve got to replace that whole 15% by growing faster.
Nick Fogle
00:20:39 – 00:20:56
So we found that when meeting with these business brokers who were helping us understand valuation multiples and how, and, and the things that make a business more attractive, churn is a very important part of that. So we spent a year working on churn and figuring out, ok, well,
Nick Fogle
00:20:57 – 00:21:36
what are some ways that we can reduce churn? Our first mistake was spending a fortune on consultants, we figured, oh, yeah, we’ll just hire like the experts. They’ll come in, they’ll tell us what to do and they’ll just fix it. And often times when you get consultants, it doesn’t always pan out that way. So after a few months and a lot of money spent, we kind of went back to the drawing board because we weren’t seeing the early indicators that, that term rate was reduced. And we started working on our platform and our product and we came up with some techniques that helped us over the next year to cut our turn in half. So by the time we reached that point, it was late 2020
Nick Fogle
00:21:37 – 00:22:03
we were like, ok, the business is healthy, profits are great. We’ve doubled or maybe even tripled at that point. And we said, let’s call this broker up. And so we called the broker and they’re like, all right, great. Well, early 2021 let’s meet up again and we’ll list you and we’ll do everything. Well, crazy thing happened. So, and this is, it’s weird how things happen in life. But within a span of about a week, we had four or five inbounds from
Nick Fogle
00:22:04 – 00:22:24
potential acquirer just randomly like different ones and maybe it was a function of the timing. There was a lot of capital flowing around and people were looking after COVID, you know, and stimulus and everything. A lot of people were looking to make investments, they hadn’t made investments or acquisitions in the year leading up to that. So everybody at the end of the year was looking all right, where can we allocate capital?
Nick Fogle
00:22:25 – 00:22:57
And we had a bunch of conversations and we found the best offer from the best potential partner to partner for the future because you build something you don’t want to just throw it to the highest bidder, you want to find the right fit who’s going to take care of your baby. You know, you think you built. So we did and it saved us a lot of money by not having to use a broker. So we were very fortunate with the timing on in a lot of different ways, it really helped us to kind of maximize that evaluation and then the, the proceeds from the sale as well.
Jeff Bullas
00:22:58 – 00:23:09
Cool. One of the did you selling a business can be great? But then quite often there’s a thing called golden handcuffs. In other words, you have to work in the business for the next 3 to 4 years. Did that
Nick Fogle
00:23:09 – 00:23:39
happen? It did not. And that was an important part of finding the right acquirer because some, some acquires they want and it’s usually more strategic acquisition. Like if if it had been like a big company that wanted to bring us on, they might require that. We had automated a lot for this business. So it helped us to be able to just kind of say, hey, we’re gonna do a 90 day transition period where we’re still here. We’re available, we’re gonna help you on board and transition all the tech to you and your team
Nick Fogle
00:23:40 – 00:23:57
that was really important to us because we were ready for a change. We’ve been working in the audio and podcasting and media space for about five years. Or six years at that point and we were ready to move on to something different. So it was important to us to negotiate that and make sure that wasn’t part of the expectation there. Yeah.
Jeff Bullas
00:23:57 – 00:24:50
And I’ve had conversations with, you know, multiple friends of, one hasn’t exited because they wanted 4 to 5 years. , one had enough clout to go. Ok. , you pay me this cash, and I’m not staying on and so it, so, yeah, it’s very, very important. Otherwise you end up working in a business where you’re not in the driver’s seat anymore. And I can imagine it would very frustrating to have those golden handcuffs so well done. That’s fantastic. Now, this is where we pivot to your next business because it sounds like you’ve obviously seen issues with churn. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So Churnkey, which is your new business is about maximizing subscription businesses. So
Jeff Bullas
00:24:51 – 00:25:01
I’m imagining that the idea came out of the problems you had with your own churn. And that’s why you created it. Is that the reason behind coming up with this idea?
Nick Fogle
00:25:02 – 00:25:47
That’s exactly right. And this is kind of my thesis that’s been evolving over the last decade in entrepreneurship. It’s really around proximity to a problem or an industry is probably the best way to find an idea that you can commercialize and bring the market in a big way. And, you know, with the first example, we were really proximate to creators people in audio and we found this small seemingly niche problem. At first, the problem being that audio doesn’t share well. And we started very laser focused after the previous failure, we were laser focused on this small problem and grew that into something that could be a viable business with Turkey. It was pretty cool because
Nick Fogle
00:25:48 – 00:26:36
we weren’t just like looking for ideas for the next business. We were very keen on solving this problem for other businesses that we just solved for ourselves. We knew that there were, we call it subscription fatigue, every listener and you are aware of this idea that you have so many subscriptions at any given time. Now, everything is moved to a subscription model that consers, they want flexibility. You want the ability to maybe pause a subscription. Sometimes circstances change. Like during COVID, there’s a lot of price sensitivity. People need discounts and they, they have cash flow constraints. And what we realized at wave and what we furthered with Turkey was, there’s this big gap in subscription transactions. So there’s this idea that,
Nick Fogle
00:26:37 – 00:27:05
well, businesses don’t ever want to lose a customer if that customer is still even the least bit profitable for the business. And customers don’t always want to cancel a subscription. But there are other things that mitigating circstances that could force them into that. So we, we kind of create this really great middle ground for both end users and the businesses, it’s a win, win that otherwise wouldn’t happen without some of the techniques and things we have in place. So, yeah, that whole arc of
Nick Fogle
00:27:06 – 00:27:37
we’re in the thick of this problem churn and our business is being crushed by it to OK, we’ve solved this for our business. Is this applicable to other businesses? And we talked to other businesses of this. Yes. Gosh, my churn is so high. if I could just solve this, like we would be able to grow to our targets. And we realized, ok, like this is our next thing. So the month, literally the month that we close that transaction to sell wave, we launched her publicly and made it available to other businesses.
Jeff Bullas
00:27:37 – 00:27:45
So, and this is what’s often the key behind any successful start up or any business is solving a problem.
Jeff Bullas
00:27:47 – 00:28:01
So, so you’ve identified a problem with your own business and then you’ve turned it into a new business, which is Churnkey and what’s the URL for that chunky.com
Nick Fogle
00:28:02 – 00:28:04
dot com.com?
Jeff Bullas
00:28:04 – 00:28:42
Ok. Ok. So what does Churnkey do? Give us a, give us a thbnail sketch because what is great about Churnkey from what we’ve been talking about is that almost every business now is trying to work out a subscription model because one it is seen as more valuable for acquisition. And now we’re even so basically, it’s a $20 a month newsletter or a $20 a month software as a service provider of your company. And we’re now seeing it even creeping into the retail area with, I think you mentioned Wendy’s are selling slushies under subscription model. Is that correct?
Nick Fogle
00:28:42 – 00:29:22
Yeah, I think it was a ga, gas station like a, convenient shop. And there you see it everywhere though. I mean, you really do. I mean, car washes have all moved to subscription revenue. I got off a call a few months back with a waxing franchise. They do waxing, and cosmetic stuff and you can have a subscription to that. I mean, gyms are a great example. They’ve been around forever. , we have mostly focused on software although we do serve some brick and mortar subscription businesses and the, the change over the last 20 or 30 years that is moving a lot of things to the subscription model is that companies used to have to charge a much larger upfront fee
Nick Fogle
00:29:22 – 00:30:02
to say, oh, well, if you want the software, we’ve got to take care of all of the cost at once. And now businesses can say, oh, well, we can continue to improve the software rather than delivering it as like a one time, you know, download, we can continue to improve it over time. You’re gonna pay us like a maintenance fee and you’re also able to get it for a cheaper price. Now, in some situations, the subscription economy has gotten a little out of control when you have slushies that it’s like, hey, yeah, do our membership save 10 cents a month? But there is a, a very real reason for both businesses and consers, why for where this model really does work?
Jeff Bullas
00:30:02 – 00:30:12
OK. So give us an idea how Churnkey works in terms of how you, how you reduce churn maximize revenue.
Nick Fogle
00:30:13 – 00:30:38
I’ll give you the, the first, the 32nd introduction to like what is churn? We like to think of churn in two different ways. One is voluntary ch where somebody says, oh, I don’t want this anymore. I’m gonna go cancel it and they click that dreaded cancel button on the website. And the other is involuntary turn, which is increasing across the board right now because of new payment standards and things like that where cards are failing at very high rates.
Nick Fogle
00:30:38 – 00:31:16
And then oftentimes these people end users, customers, they don’t actually want to turn. It’s just like a card update that needs to happen. And most people have received the emails before, but it’s an issue with procrastination. It’s like I’ll get back to that and then you, your subscription is automatically canceled. There’s this whole hassle like do I go back and update it? There’s like a collections component to it. So it’s inefficient. So we actually solve all kinds of term for customers. So we look at voluntary trend and for voluntary trend that again, that’s somebody clicks the cancel button what happens? Well, we help to facilitate a better middle ground between the business and the customer.
Nick Fogle
00:31:17 – 00:31:47
So a again, a customer does not want to lose or a business does not want to lose a customer. They’re willing to help you out. Give you some flexibility. Maybe you want to pause your subscription because you’re not using it right now. Maybe you do need a discount. Maybe you need a contact support. Like there are a lot of different types of offers that we can help facilitate on behalf of the business so that we’re able to meet the customer in the middle. So we have this flow, we call it an off boarding flow. Somebody selects why they’re canceling.
Nick Fogle
00:31:47 – 00:32:25
And we have some intelligent offers that are served up based on who that customer is and what is most likely to save them from canceling. So that’s one part of it. And then in the failed payment side, we have some really sophisticated models we’ve developed around running cards at the right time to make sure that they go through successfully and then having really well written personalized campaigns that are segmented that get customers attention and help them to take action really quickly on things like card updates. If a card is failing and it’s expired or it’s not going to be updated. Otherwise, then you’ll have an email campaign that can go out
Jeff Bullas
00:32:27 – 00:33:11
fascinating. And the, the other thing that’s interesting too is quite often, especially with you go to cancel a subscription. Sometimes a challenge is because like you said, there’s two types of, of problems with churn. One’s intentional and the other is accidental. The intentional one is where you’re going. I am leaving. I don’t want this anymore. The other one is accidental, which is the payment side typically. So, but the interesting thing is , that for you as the person paying the subscription, whether you’re a business is what are all these subscription I’m paying for? And how do I actually cancel them because I’m not using them anymore. And I, I there was someone who’s actually had
Jeff Bullas
00:33:12 – 00:33:59
a software that identified that within larger enterprise where they identified savings of like 1 to $2 million a year of subscriptions to software that the company wasn’t using. So that’s one, in other words, one of the best things that happened to me was one of the card I was using for paying for subscriptions actually, basically expired. And I think I saved myself about $2000 a month. So it was fantastic. So, but subscription, so what’s your target market for Churnkey? Is it larger enterprise? Is it small? Is it newsletters? Is it software as a service? What is your, I suppose, sweet spot for churn
Nick Fogle
00:34:00 – 00:34:44
it, it’s evolving. And you know, as with any business, your customers, your ideal customers can change over time. And when we started out, we were looking for customers to look like us, like other businesses that had similar attributes, similar vole, relatively small S and B style. And I think we quickly realized while we had a lot of success helping those businesses, we saw that there was a lot more upside to be had by moving to mid market and enterprise and serving larger higher vole businesses. And over time, our focus has transitioned, We still do have a really solid book of business from SM BS and software businesses. But we’re moving into different areas. And I think that’s where there’s a lot of interest in me. I my background before law school was behavioral economics and that’s the thing I love about
Nick Fogle
00:34:44 – 00:35:26
this off boarding experience where we can intercept cancellation intent and we can leave both parties happier customers happier. They have a better arrangement that works for them. Business is happy because they haven’t lost that customer, but they otherwise would have lost. Were it not for turnkey? And we’ve saved, you know, sometimes we’ll have people ask us like, isn’t this a dark pattern in this, you know, a bad thing to do? Like, no, we’ve saved customers millions and millions and millions of dollars through some of these offers by having the flexibility or discounts or things like that for their subscription and we save businesses millions and millions of dollars. So it’s a win. It’s truly a win, win situation. For both parties. It’s pretty cool.
Jeff Bullas
00:35:26 – 00:35:36
Yeah. Alright. So you’re evolving your target market but it’s more leaning towards a larger enterprise market place. Is that where it’s heading? You think?
Nick Fogle
00:35:37 – 00:36:06
Yeah, I think so. Yeah, and we’re, we’re continuing to do some deep product research into where is the most opportunity both for our business and within the subscription industry as a whole. I’m really excited about brick and mortar because you know, car washes and some like these are, these markets are underserved by technology. So I think there’s a really big opportunity to move into some of those markets that are a little more, they’re a little newer to the or a little more recent entrance to the subscription business
Jeff Bullas
00:36:06 – 00:36:18
model. And there are also a lot of them are very proven and large networks, especially in the United States out there. So big chains of different retail businesses that could benefit from you helping them.
Nick Fogle
00:36:18 – 00:36:24
That’s right. Probably not the slushy subscription business, but have to ask me in a year from now if we’ve served them yet.
Jeff Bullas
00:36:25 – 00:36:50
Ok. So the other thing that I’m curious about is you’ve launched the business? But how did you go and get customers? Was it boots on the ground? Was it an email marketing campaign? Was it paid social? Did you, was there a breakthrough? , in terms of a large, a few larger customer or something? Tell us, how did you get traction in sales and marketing and what marketing did you use or did you use any?
Nick Fogle
00:36:52 – 00:37:29
This was a harder one to solve once we, we knew we had a, we knew we had something businesses needed. It, it was very clear and early we had some early customers when we said, hey, we’re gonna be starting this thing. We’re gonna do a beta. Are you interested in? Overwhelmingly? We did like a, a list, early wait list and there were like 20 businesses on that waitlist and they almost all came and on boarded tour and it was great. But after that, it was just quiet. It was crickets. I said, what is, what is going on here? The things that have worked for our last business, we thought we could just, hey, we exited business. We got this thing all figured out, we’re experts. Now, let’s just do it again.
Nick Fogle
00:37:30 – 00:37:59
And what we found was that the inbound channels where you, we do all this inbound work and some viral loops and stuff while that works for conser type businesses does not work for B to B which is what Trink is. We serve other businesses. So very much a sales driven process where we’re, I’m on linkedin or Twitter and messaging people and recording loom videos to say, hey, you know, this is your product. We could save you X amount per year. Your customers will be happy. There are all these benefits come look at it and
Nick Fogle
00:37:59 – 00:38:25
it was a very slow process at first, but I think what’s changed recently, this helped us to grow faster. So, like, I think two years ago that was kind of the motion. It’s like very manual, very hard outreach. There’s been a lot of awareness that churn is a problem. Churn has become a bigger problem over the last two or three years. And there are people at organizations whose job that is now to just focus on reducing churn.
Nick Fogle
00:38:26 – 00:39:09
So we now have like a name for people at organizations. We can reach out directly. It’s like, hey, this is, you’ve got a quota here, like you’ve got something you’re accountable to, you need this. And we get a lot of inbound now too just because we’ve put in the time and pay the dues to build out all this very high level content around retention strategies. So we, yeah, we’re really focused on subscription analytics, putting out the content, doing podcasts, doing webinars, you know, it, it all adds up. So it’s been a very long slow path where we’re finally seeing fruits after years of working at it. So, yeah, it’s a different cadence. This business has much more upside to our last one.
Nick Fogle
00:39:09 – 00:39:44
And I, we’re, we’re there like we’re beyond where the last business was now. And it’s kind of like, OK, well, where’s the limit? And I think that’s the cool thing is, you know, it’s like you start from nothing. You lay brick after brick, after brick and eventually you’re kind of at a point you’re looking at, you’re like, ok, well, like, you know, we’ve got a lot of opportunity left. Like, where do we go next? So, it’s, now it’s less of a question of like, where are we gonna go get customers? It’s like we know customers are in these different channels. What is the priority? And that’s a pretty cool place to be, but it took a lot to get there.
Jeff Bullas
00:39:44 – 00:40:30
Yeah. Well, I think the opportunity here is certainly one. Well, especially in the digital space, it’s, it’s usually global, but then is it something where you can dominate the industry globally? You can maybe wanna play in a niche where do you see yourself in terms of that, the opportunities you do seem large because there’s so much software as a service, subscription models, for example. And then we’ve got physical retail stores, we’ve got gyms. So there is certainly a wave of subscription models that are, are very much part of the business psyche now is that we gotta go subscription as a service, but basically it is part of what we do. So the market, have you identified the size of the market you think? For you
Nick Fogle
00:40:30 – 00:41:05
guys, the global subscription market is a trillion dollars a year. It’s, it’s insane. And that’s global. That’s across software and brick and mortar. I mean, gems and everything. So it, it really is a matter of being very intentional and saying, ok, well, this is the market, that’s where we’re, we’re feeling cool. I think that’s a big thing in business is, you don’t want to be pushing things when you feel like you’re having to really push things on your prospects. It’s gonna be much harder to close deals and have that kind of moment. So it’s identifying, ok, these are the markets that need our product the most desperately.
Nick Fogle
00:41:06 – 00:41:42
And maybe there’s an educational component that you need to work on to get them educated on what you do, maybe that’s going to conferences, that sort of thing. But yeah, like we, we do have some ideas of next steps. We’re still very busy with most, mostly just software businesses. That’s the bulk of our Book of business. But we are seeing the pool from brick and mortar and I love working with those because the businesses are so interesting. You know, if you think about a car wash, it’s a fascinating business and the economics of a subscription for that are really interesting too. You have different margins, you have different payback period and we can help with all of that.
Jeff Bullas
00:41:44 – 00:42:10
You must come across a whole range of different subscription models and industries and I’m sure some of them you’re going, oh, I didn’t know that could be made into a subscription model and sometimes they shouldn’t be like maybe slushies shouldn’t be because we’re actually just keeping Children and people with sugar through slushies. Right. It’s like, ok, selling an addiction product really isn’t
Nick Fogle
00:42:10 – 00:42:12
a cigarette subscription or something?
Jeff Bullas
00:42:12 – 00:42:35
Yeah, that’s right. Well, alcohol addiction. So let’s do slushies because that’s a sugar addiction issue. So, are there any industry just seeing that, are emerging or the ones that are so software as a service is basically the first it was done, Any other emerging areas that you, you, you that have raised your antenna or you found fascinating,
Nick Fogle
00:42:36 – 00:42:59
I think any, any high vole business that’s going to require a lot of work for, you know, typically what do you do? If, if you’re a GM and your payments fail, you’re going to send it to collections, You’re gonna cancel the membership, send it to collections, you pay, what do you get like 10 cents on the dollar if that, you know, for the debt? And it’s better to have something upfront that can help you with that
Nick Fogle
00:42:59 – 00:43:39
or you’ve got somebody up front at the counter at the gym, who’s saying somebody says I want to cancel my subscription. Well, you gotta go in, you gotta meet with them. There’s this all this headache involved and you’re paying for people too. So I think the brick and mortar space is definitely interesting. And then moving up market to larger software businesses is another big opportunity. One trend we’ve seen since COVID where everybody went on this hiring spree, they doubled their head count. And suddenly it’s like, oh no, we gotta get back to basics and have a cash flow positive business. We gotta have, we gotta look at our margins, we’ve gotta be profitable. And suddenly businesses are like we’ve got to do more with less people.
Nick Fogle
00:43:40 – 00:44:00
And a big thing that we help automate is all of the time and tedi that goes into making sure you’re collecting revenue from the customers that owe you and also making sure that people aren’t canceling who could still be a customer. So we facilitate and automate all those transactions. So yeah, a lot of, lot of opportunities still out there.
Jeff Bullas
00:44:00 – 00:44:58
Yeah, it’s what I love about businesses being an entrepreneur is the creativity that emerges. And both and the people I chat to like yourself. and many others is that it’s a creative endeavor. A lot of people don’t see businesses as creative endeavors, but they certainly are like, you’ve got to take an idea, you’ve gotta produce something and then actually the reality is you, they need to sell that something. There’s many starving artist rights and there’s many starving entrepreneurs. So look, one of the ones that, which I’ve been involved with the company, which is and I think maybe they didn’t coin it but creative as a service where videos are created for marketing across social media and are done in an automated way as well. So that’s one interesting area, creative as a service.
Jeff Bullas
00:44:59 – 00:45:55
So, but the other thing too is you’ve got this incredible range of subscription models from $5 a month, two thousands of dollars a month and depending on, and then you’ve got like sales force essentially as I think is a, is a, is one of the best examples of software as a service that has made a lot of money and a lot of people have copied as well. So, and then you’ve got different varieties and hybrids of software as a service and whatever or creative as a service where the sales people are selling it. So it’s not like pull out your credit card and buy this. It basically then goes through the accounts of companies who are buying it, which is maybe $10,000 a month for a creative as a service. So, have you seen any of those that hybrid, big end of town?
Nick Fogle
00:45:56 – 00:46:24
That’s a really great question. We actually have some customers like that. And usually it’s like if somebody’s on a contract or if they’re paying via wire or ach, they’re not pulling out a credit card. U usually what we find there is that they’re more interested in understanding their customer health metrics. So we have some ML systems. We’ve worked for years building an ML model that can help predict churn or customer happiness So that, that’s one thing we have that I didn’t really mention.
Nick Fogle
00:46:25 – 00:46:54
it’s a, it’s a nice tool for understanding how’s the business trending, how can we forecast growth, retention, that sort of thing? But yeah, and to the point about, you know, the business is like sales force is actually a good example. We’ll keep using that. They’ve got a lot of customers that are on these tiny plans that are $15 a month or maybe don’t quote me on pricing, but they have a smaller tier, middle tier and then like a big enterprise contractual tier, that’s probably 100 K to a million a year. So we can serve part of that. So we’d serve like
Nick Fogle
00:46:55 – 00:47:25
with our cancel flows and payment recovery. There’s a big book of business, really large book of business that we can help automate because you can’t throw a customer success manager on a $15 account. You just can’t do it. So why not have something that’s automated rather than nothing at all? So that’s really where we come in with those kinds of customers is part of the book of business. And then for the larger accounts where it doesn’t make sense to have automation because you’re paying somebody to manage that account, at least having some kind of customer help suite. So you can understand how are these customers feeling?
Jeff Bullas
00:47:25 – 00:47:40
Yeah, that’s really, really good to know because quite often the cancellations happen. You don’t know why. So you hope you help in that sort of diet to capture sentiment. So on. Do you, we
Nick Fogle
00:47:40 – 00:48:14
do so much around that? And that’s really cool. It’s, it’s one of my favorite parts about the business is that we’re able to do really cool topic clustering. So we have businesses that have, you know, 100,000 cancel sessions and a 90 day period, just as one example. And we’re able to consolidate all that feedback into topics so they can understand. All right, well, this the lack of this feature is why a lot of customers are canceling or this price point for this cohort of customers is too expensive because we got all these customers turning out of it. So it’s all kinds of business intelligence that we can enable there
Jeff Bullas
00:48:14 – 00:48:41
too. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. OK, cool. So one final question before I ask the other question that I mentioned at the beginning. How is A I impacting your technology development and business? Are you using it? Is it in the basically development? Y you know, journey that you’re looking at? Where are you up to with A I?
Nick Fogle
00:48:42 – 00:49:02
Yeah, good question. And they, they say also that once you’re past 35 you’re more of a skeptic around new technology than an early adopter. And I definitely, since that transition with the A I boom, as I crossed that, that point, a nber of years back where with A I, I’m like, oh, is this really gonna be as
Nick Fogle
00:49:02 – 00:49:37
powerful or as impactful as they’ve been saying for years? And it, I mean, it is, it, it’s pretty mind blowing. We have it built into our products. So even with copywriting and things like that, if somebody is wanting to work on personalizing copy for customers, we can take a lot of different attributes by the customer and personalize the off boarding experience using A I. So it’s kind of an augmentation function. And then we have I mentioned a customer help model where we have machine learning that uses A I to actually help predict customer turn. So that’s another interesting facet of the business where A I is is starting to make a big difference.
Jeff Bullas
00:49:38 – 00:50:30
Yeah. OK. Interesting. Yeah, I think it’s the application of A I, in other words, what? And I think the software engineer said it to me recently said that basically just don’t use A I for a. So identify a problem and can A I solve that problem? That’s right. So obviously, it comes down to can A I scale something that I’m doing manually, for example. And A I is the middle of a huge development at any rate. So a great book, the next wave by Mustapha Solf Sophie is actually a really good insight into I suppose the future of A I but in a very practical way and also the guard rails needed for it. So in terms of advice to people that are listening to this entrepreneurs,
Jeff Bullas
00:50:31 – 00:50:57
you’ve been a founder twice now. You did it, you did your first one as a side hustle. This obviously is not a side hustle. You generated enough cash on exit to actually fund this. Just raises another question quickly before we get into that. Did you went go and raise money from venture capitalists to fund Churnkey or did you just bootstrap it yourselves?
Nick Fogle
00:50:58 – 00:51:42
We were, we are mostly bootstrapped. Yeah, we are, we are fortunate to have had an exit. And as you kind of alluded to, we, we were able to deploy a lot of the proceeds into this business, which is a luxury I’ve never had and it does give you so much more peace of mind and time to build. Just enough time. So yeah, we, we have taken capital and it’s been a cool, it’s been a cool position to be in though because we didn’t desperately need the capital and that does kind of flip the script when you’re raising it, you have traction and have bootstrapped to a certain point, then you can get capital on much more favorable terms where you’re still in control and calling the shots for your business.
Jeff Bullas
00:51:43 – 00:51:54
Yeah, in the words, you feel like you’ve got, you’ve got control and could call the shots rather than being going to a venture capitalist requiring money with a bear ball, which is not a good look generally, is it?
Nick Fogle
00:51:54 – 00:52:11
Yeah. Well, and it goes back to the heart of entrepreneurship. It’s like a lot of times people are entrepreneurs because you don’t want to be employed. You don’t want to feel like somebody else is pushing you in a direction that you don’t want to be going. And often times, you know, the, the best case scenario is you find a venture capitalist that’s totally aligned on what you want to do
Nick Fogle
00:52:11 – 00:52:39
and everybody is friendly, everybody is happy that doesn’t always work out as you can imagine. And often times people get forced onto this hamster wheel of like, oh, I’ve got to raise my seed round. I’ve got, oh, I’m not on track to hit my series a target. Are we gonna run out of money? So it’s kind of like the mathematics and venture don’t work for most businesses. So when a business is funded, it’s like either you’re gonna get 100 X or you need to crash and burn in like a year or two trying.
Jeff Bullas
00:52:40 – 00:53:24
Yeah. No, it’s, you’re in a very fortunate position because of the hard yards you did on the first business as a founder and start up. So what are maybe two or three tips you’d offered to, founders start ups? , those cos you’ve been playing in the digital business space, which is what fascinates me is because the digital business space typically allows you to reach the world with your idea and scale it to much bigger than, you know, selling cheese in the local town square. So what are some tips that you would like to share that you think are really important in your, what you’ve learned along the way as founder of two successful start ups,
Nick Fogle
00:53:26 – 00:53:45
I would say first and foremost, the market is gonna be the provider for ideas, not you. So it’s, that’s a hard thing because oftentimes you wanna build something that’s in your head and you can start and try doing that, but the odds are pretty high that that’s not actually what people are willing to pay for.
Nick Fogle
00:53:46 – 00:54:25
So I think that’s a big part of it is if you’re gonna start anything as a business, it needs to be something where there’s a market that’s willing to pay before you even start building it. And this could be, you know, there, there’s a market that’s already established and nobody is doing that business well, or that you could do it better. That’s one way. But if you’re starting something that’s totally novel, it’s like you should exercise a lot of caution there because there, there’s probably, there are a lot of people in the world, there’s probably a good reason somebody hasn’t filled it yet. , particularly if it’s a broad idea so that I think that’d be one. It’s just like listening to the market before you get sold on an idea that you have, nber two would be,
Nick Fogle
00:54:25 – 00:54:59
once you’re in that mode, you’ve found something that you think the market wants, it could still probably be something that’s not a successful business. So you need to be open to that possibility. And sticking into that initial space you’re with is gonna give you a lot of power over time. So we, before the call started being recorded, we were talking about, we’re talking about luck and to what extent does luck play a role in success, either personally or for a business. And I think of luck in terms of surface area. So
Nick Fogle
00:54:59 – 00:55:32
by giving yourself more time and more reps, more attempts, more conversations with potential customers, you’re gonna really hone in on specific problems that you could solve. So it may not be the first problem you set out to solve that people are willing to pay for. It may be the third or the fourth. But if you stick with it long enough that pers the persistence is gonna increase the chances that you’ll get lucky and find something. So it’s really about that balance of if you stick with something long long enough, eventually you’re gonna find something that people are willing to pay for. Yeah. So that would be, I’d say my top two recommendations that
Nick Fogle
00:55:33 – 00:55:44
it’s taken me a long time to understand that component and really put it into practice and if I were starting over again that would be the first and foremost considerations of something I’m starting.
Jeff Bullas
00:55:44 – 00:55:52
Yeah. So, really, what you’re saying is that, you might have the best idea in the world, but the market’s going to tell you what is the best idea in the world.
Nick Fogle
00:55:53 – 00:56:10
That’s right. Yeah. Is it really a good idea while the market is gonna tell you? I mean, it might be a great idea. It’s not a great business. You know what I mean? Like it could be whatever idea you have. Are you, are you in the business or is it your goal to just have ideas or is it your goal to actually make money and have some kind of successful business outcome? And
Jeff Bullas
00:56:10 – 00:56:59
the other one you mentioned is just the, the endurance required and the persistence required to succeed because you might find that you got your timing wrong by a year or two. But if you last long enough, you actually, you almost stble into a market that develops around you. This also happens. Yeah. And that is fascinating because you know, a lot of people give up easily or burn a lot of cash, take expensive offices because it’s an ego trip, not a business trip. So, yeah, so one other question before I ask the question about what brings you the most joy in life and what would you do for nothing if you weren’t being paid? Did you create a minimal viable product? First for Churnkey?
Nick Fogle
00:57:01 – 00:57:34
Yes. In a way, we were able to build this some things that worked from our last business and then we started af Freshh and created roughly the same thing as like its own business and separate platform. And it’s a very basic off boarding float. It still took a long time to build. I think that’s the difference in selling to businesses versus consers is you can have just a simple tool, doesn’t have to look pretty if it solves a pro a real problem for a conser, that’s gonna handle it. , but for businesses like, hey, you’re connecting to my business, like this needs to be, there are higher table stakes.
Nick Fogle
00:57:34 – 00:57:48
So the minim viable product we had was definitely more than what we had at wave, but it was still just enough to make sure that this is something the market’s going to pay for and we can iterate and move from there.
Jeff Bullas
00:57:48 – 00:58:24
Right. Ok. Yeah, because the MVP model, minimal viable product is certainly tossed around a lot in the industry. And it’s true, you don’t want to build the issue with building something fully formed is that you’re assing that that’s, is what the customers want. And as you know, the reality is that the market is gonna hit you in the face, like you might have the best idea, like, you know, Steve, you know, Mike Tyson’s idea about, you know, everyone has a great plan till they get hit in the face. And that’s what the market does to most businesses. So that’s the
Nick Fogle
00:58:24 – 00:58:47
reality. It really does. It’s such a hbling thing too and you’re gonna be hbled as entrepreneur regardless. But I mean, we had that, that 18 month period of, I mean, I can’t count the nber of hours and cost that went into that business and we were building something that we thought people wanted rather than building like the most basic version then talking to customers. So yeah, that’s a lesson. I, I will not repeat.
Jeff Bullas
00:58:47 – 00:59:03
All right, our final question, which I’d like to ask all my guests is what brings Nick the most joy and would do it for free even if you had all the money in the world. What brings you joy, Nick.
Nick Fogle
00:59:04 – 00:59:22
I love helping other entrepreneurs. I think that’s something I’ve developed over time, having done it and having been in a situation where I’m just totally trapped financially and figuring it out the hard way and spin a lot, spin my wheels a lot over a decade, getting out of that mess.
Nick Fogle
00:59:22 – 00:59:59
And it’s a common scenario. We see it a lot today. You know, you got loans, you got something stopping you from pursuing that thing that you want. You know, my biggest value in life is really about making steps that move towards freedom. Freedom looks different to everybody. for me, for me it means like, oh, I don’t have to worry about, you know, how am I going to pay my bills this month or next year or? You know, where am I gonna send my kids to school? Like those kinds of questions where it’s like I’ve got enough covered here with the business I have where it’s fine. I can focus on other areas or the areas that bring me joy.
Jeff Bullas
00:59:59 – 01:00:10
Yeah. So I guess that’s a kind of roundabout way of answering your things for you. It’s kind of a value centric approach around freedom and then helping others find that freedom that brings me a lot of joy.
Nick Fogle
01:00:10 – 01:00:54
Yeah, it’s, that’s great to hear because I think helping other people is one of the key factors of happiness even revealed by, you know, Harvard research over about 87 years of study is that at the end of the day, it’s community and people that make you ha provide happiness, it’s not stuff. And as long as you’ve got enough money to pay the bills, it takes that stress away, and then you can double down on, the relationships that matter, I suppose that’s the best way. And so thank you very much Nick for sharing your ideas and your journey. It’s been, I’ve been fascinated by hearing about your journey. It’s it’s just
Nick Fogle
01:00:55 – 01:01:19
to dive into being han as well and also and hats off to you for what you’ve done. It’s a really great story and I look forward to hearing more about Churnkey I’ve got a maybe a couple of people I could introduce you to maybe down the track as well. So, so we’ll, we’ll chat off off air. , about
Jeff Bullas
01:01:19 – 01:01:21
that. Sounds great. Well, thank you for having me, Jeff. This has been a pleasure.
Nick Fogle
01:01:22 – 01:01:26
Yeah. Thank you. It’s been an absolute joy for me actually to have a chat with you. Thank you.