Chapter 1: What is the focus of The Top podcast?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. In the last episode, number 32, you learned from Anthony Zhang and the secret he uses to pay college students three bucks to literally build a business for him. Okay, Top Tribe, our guest today is Alex Moore. He is the CEO at Baden, who is known most, I'd say, for their boomerang Gmail plugging, which makes emailers everywhere more productive.
He graduated from MIT in 05 and has an extremely strong engineering background based out in Mountain View, California. Alex, are you ready to take us to the top? Let's do it, Nathan. All right, I know you're sitting there in Mountain View with your cold brew hunkered down. I'm here in the Appalachian Mountains hoping my Redskins can pull off a win next week, a big NFL fan.
So walk us through, tell me what, first off, what does Baden mean?
So Baden is a Burmese word that means foretelling the future through magic.
Interesting. Okay, now Boomerang, walk people through what the Boomerang Gmail plugin is. Is that your main product?
Yeah, that's our main product. That's the bell cow for the business. So give the pitch, yeah. Yeah, Boomerang's a tool that helps you use email way more productively. So you can get notified if someone doesn't respond to your messages. You can schedule messages to be sent at a time where they're more likely to get a response.
And you can include a red receipt in the emails you send out, as well as just snoozing emails and a couple other tangential features.
So I can't wait to dive into this. And Alex, just so people have context, again, we have really young students that listen to the top. They're part of the top tribe because they want to learn from entrepreneurs and figure out how to drop out of school and build their own business.
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Chapter 2: Who is Alex Moore and what does Baden do?
And that's in Mountain View, right?
Yeah, all in Mountain View. Cool. So walk us through, why did you start Boomerang?
Yeah, great question. So it came from extreme personal pain in my previous life. Good place to start. Do you have an HDTV?
You know, I don't watch TV. I don't even know what HD means.
All right, well, if you did have an HDTV, you would be able to say thank you to me because I helped shave 10 cents off the cost of it.
Okay, tell us that story.
So I was working as an analog circuit person at Analog Devices in Boston. And I was in the lab a lot, working with oscilloscopes. I really liked it. But as I started to have more and more responsibility, I started to spend less and less time in front of my oscilloscope and more and more time in front of my email, trying to coordinate with people, making sure they got back to me.
And there was really nothing good to do with an email that was like, you know... You know, somebody's like, oh, I'll get that to you on Thursday. Well, you need to make sure they do. And there was nowhere to put that, you know, like you could flag it, but then you'd end up with 60 flag things. You could move it to a folder.
And so it was just like, somebody's got to have a better way to do this and couldn't find one. So I decided, you know what, still young enough to do this and decided to go out and build one.
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Chapter 3: What is the Boomerang Gmail plugin and its main features?
Your product is sort of your marketing because you've got a lot of free users. They tell each other about it and you get a lot of organic growth that way. then we've started to experiment with some paid channels. Some stuff's working. I'm not going to share with you the stuff that's working best because as soon as it gets known, it stops working.
Alex, what's working best?
Yeah, I can't tell you, but as soon as people start doing the same thing, it stops working so well.
Is it billboards or something online?
something online. Okay. Is it, but we started, you know, this is, we're five years in, you know, so we've done the love hanging fruit stuff. Um, I mean, if you start out, like do a little bit of SEO, make some pages, you know, you'll get some free Google traffic. You can get a long way with some pages, um, using your email list.
Well, like until you really have revenue coming in at scale, I mean, you can't, you can't do anything with paid anyway.
Um,
Well, so help us understand, because again, there's entrepreneurs just starting out that are wondering, should I start paid or should I not start paid? You've been around, you've been doing this for five years. It seems like you're extremely data oriented. You made, you know, these HDTVs cheaper by 10 cents doing something I don't understand, but it sounds really intelligent.
So $5 and 15 bucks is what people pay you, is what they can pay you. Are you selling to individuals or companies usually?
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Chapter 4: How did Alex Moore come up with the idea for Boomerang?
Yep. So we found that what makes the most sense, and it's kind of cliche, but we found that just really trying to go the extra mile and give really good customer support to everybody is really the thing that works best for us.
So you just do it broadly. Do you have a big support team or is it?
We got two folks who handle support for us. And most of the time, they can keep it going. If we have a really crazy day or something, I mean, there have been days where the whole team was doing nothing but support email. But most of the time, they can keep it rolling.
Well, and that's such a great, I mean, what you just said, I think is really interesting. We talk with a lot of entrepreneurs who maybe are developers, and they go, should I make my developers or my marketers do support? And it sounds like you even, Alex, maybe, is it true to say in the last week, you've answered at least a support ticket as CEO?
I think I've answered exactly one in the last week. What we do is we rotate. Support is something that, well, for one thing, it's really hard to do as a founder after a certain point of time because you're just too close to it. It's your baby. And it's hard to kind of disassociate that. But we try to give each of our support folks a day away from support every two weeks.
So every other Friday, somebody is off of email. Oh, great. Doing something else, working on something else so they don't burn out. And on those days, we rotate someone else from the team onto support.
Got it. Okay, interesting. So you have a rotating schedule there. Exactly. Okay. Walk... I just ran out of coffee, so I'm like in shock, and I'm wishing I could reach to the microphone and steal your cold brew and chug a bunch of it. Walk me through, though. Walk me through, Alex. Do you guys think about customer acquisition costs? I'm about to make up a term here.
Do you think instead of like a download acquisition cost, are you tying all your metrics back to downloads?
So the problem we got is as a browser extension, it's really hard to link someone who comes onto the website and downloads to somebody who then starts using the product and do that in an accurate way. So I don't think I would be... You shouldn't do what we do unless you have to. Got it.
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Chapter 5: What is the pricing strategy for Boomerang?
It's like Startup CEO, a Field Guide or something. I read it like six months ago. Got it. In a lot of ways, it was sort of like talking to an older, wiser version of myself and But I wouldn't say that I necessarily follow a CEO exactly.
Okay, great. I look everyone I talked to that's interviewing from Silicon Valley. The answer is almost Elon Musk, Elon every time. He's a great guy. He's a great guy. Everybody loves him. That's great. So okay, number three, Alex, what is your favorite online tool? Like boomerang?
I'm a big fan of rescue time.
Okay, how do you use rescue time?
So it's an app that you install that basically monitors what you do on your computer.
Valuable.
And then it generates some really helpful reports that says, okay, last week you spent four hours reading news websites. And it's really interesting to kind of get a sense. I had no idea how I spent my time before I had that. And it turns out I spent an awful lot of time in email. I guess that's not a big surprise.
But it was really helpful for me to just kind of see, okay, and I haven't really changed my behavior all that much, but it was just really helpful to have a sense of, okay, here's what I'm doing every day when I'm on my computer.
Mm-hmm. Okay, great. Well, listen, you're a busy guy. You're building a great company, cashflow positive, big team. I'm curious, yes or no, do you get eight hours of sleep every night?
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Chapter 6: How does Boomerang acquire customers without a sales team?
Bye-bye. Coming up in episode number 34, you are going to hear from Neville Medora, the greedy Indian who said, quote, the plumbers love me and my email marketing. This podcast is produced by Oration Recording and is sponsored by Eddy Communications and Roanoke, Virginia's Grandin CoLab, the premier workspace for entrepreneurs and growing companies.