SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Getting Your First $10k/mo In Revenue with Ben Fisher of CartHook.com EP 203
10 Mar 2016
Chapter 1: What inspired Ben Fisher to co-found Lean Startup Machine?
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Chapter 2: How did Lean Startup Machine evolve from a weekend experiment?
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Good morning, Top Tribe. I've got Ben Fisher with us this morning. He is a New York City-based designer and hacker. He co-founded Lean Startup Machine and Alchemy, which was acquired by Red Rover in 2013. He's got more than a decade of experience working with award-winning companies, including Volkswagen, Burger King, Disney, and IDEO.
His entrepreneurial work has been featured in Forbes, Esquire, Gizmodo, Mashable, Harvard's Neiman Lab on ABC World News, and many, many others.
Chapter 3: What lessons did Ben learn from the ascension of Alchemy Labs?
Ben, are you ready to take us to the top? I'm ready. All right, so let's do this. So first things first, your current company is called Cardhook. Before we talk about that, though, let's go back to Lean Startup Machine and Alchemy. Which came first? Lean Startup Machine did.
And actually, it's sort of funny how there were companies or projects before Lean Startup Machine, which Lean Startup Machine was the evolution of. of those experiences, largely, you know, failing to start companies and probably focusing on the wrong stuff.
And at the time, um, lean start machine, like, uh, one of my partners at the time, he, uh, he'd come across like Eric's blog, lean startup, Eric, Eric Reese, correct.
Chapter 4: How did Alchemy Labs generate revenue before acquisition?
Um, was, you know, it, it was just a blog. His book hadn't come out.
and at the time we were in the new york tech scene like even startup weekend was only going around new york once a year so it was a really interesting period within at least within tech on the east coast um and a bunch of us had just graduated college we're sort of figuring out our today our first adult companies um adults mean like after after we uh had graduated into the real world and a lot of stuff wasn't working and you know the economy was kind of in
in the can. And so what we had was, um, I think especially for, for folks who are just out of college, a lot of people who get normal jobs after school, they'll have like a cohort or like a class, like in finance or even in advertising, um, or other industries, um, Whereas if you work at a startup or you're trying to build a company, you don't have that same sort of peer group.
And so the time, sorry.
No, I was just going to say, so I want to spend more time on your company. Lean Startup Machine was basically an extension of that.
Yeah, it started as a single weekend experiment where we were trying to have, like a hackathon is great.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Ben face when raising funds for his companies?
And we'd actually approached Startup Weekend about just having it. frequently having more startup weekends in New York. And they basically were like, hey, we don't know you guys. You're welcome to go do your own thing. And so what was more interesting to us was we're like, all right, well, it's cool to do a hackathon.
But what would be more interesting is if it was more skills-based because you release a bunch of folks and tell them to go build something in 48 hours. And after a while, you do that a few times, the results continue to be sort of chaotic. Some great stuff might come out of it. But at the time, the idea was there has to be a better way
Like what are the skills that we can learn so that we're not just spending a weekend trying, making the same mistakes over and over again?
Chapter 6: How does Cardhook help businesses recover abandoned carts?
Is there a way for us or a process to sort of try to distill what are the skills and like things to focus on that in a more focused way, quite frankly. And that was when we came across Eric's stuff and that was just really resonated.
And it seems like, it seems like alchemy labs kind of spun out of that.
Is that accurate? Yeah, well, so Alchemy, I mean, it spun out in the sense that it was my next company. I left Lean Startup Machine, I think, after about nine months. We went separate ways. Was it making money when you left it? Yeah, yeah. How was it generating revenue?
Chapter 7: What is the current status of Cardhook's revenue and customer base?
Just ticket sales? Ticket sales, yeah. It was one of those first experiences where it was four guys. We met at a startup weekend. We didn't really know each other. And, you know, we... we were really excited and interested, interested in enthusiastic. Uh, we started lean startup machine. Um, and then, you know, we were like, okay, this is great.
We're friends, but you know, we weren't necessarily great business partners.
Chapter 8: What advice does Ben have for aspiring entrepreneurs?
Like we weren't, it wasn't a great match. And so for me, that was one of the first experiences where I was like, wow, something's actually working. Um, at least initially, perhaps a little bit in spite of ourselves.
Um, and I mean, were you doing like 10 grand a month in ticket sales? What was the revenue?
Yeah, if I recall, it's been a while, but we got to a point, yeah, it was like 10 grand per weekend, right? So if you did an event, and that's not profit, that's just revenue. And a lot of the money, again, I'm going off my memory, but a lot of the money would go to pay for events. I'm sorry, the event space. We'd get a little bit of stuff subsidized by sponsors. We didn't pay ourselves anything.
Initially, it was really focused on just like we wanted to create an environment where it was... like we wanted, we were really the target market. Um, we were like, we want to be an environment around people who really want to, who are curious and want to understand how to build businesses.
Um, so let, let's move forward then into alchemy. So it looks like it's a 12 week course for advanced kind of software engineering. How did you guys make money?
Oh, uh, well, so alchemy was collaboration software. Um, I don't know. Alchemy was, I don't know if we're in the same URL, but I'm reading on Crunchbase. Okay. Yeah. Crunchbase, you can never really trust that stuff. But Alchemy was collaboration software that professional organizations and companies used.
to try to connect people's requests internally with someone who has knowledge that might be able to help them.
You can sort of think of it as, at the time Yammer had just started, it was sort of like a Google group meets LinkedIn, where what we would do was once a week we'd email everyone in the organization saying, hey, if you had one ask, if there was one thing you could ask the entire company for, what would that be?
And our software was just an email that came the same time every week, and it aggregated everyone's requests and then sent out a single email the next day that showed what everyone needed. It automatically incorporated their LinkedIn information so that people would have a social context of who was making the request.
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