SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
He Can't Code, So How'd He Launch MVP With No Developers?
18 Feb 2021
Chapter 1: How did Harris Kenny start his journey without coding skills?
Posting in IndieHackers, it's good, but it's only going to get you so much traffic. And there's a lot of people who are just sort of grazing there, not necessarily.
Have you converted some of this traffic to paid or are you pre-revenue currently? I'm pre-revenue currently. You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka. Now if you're hearing this, it means you're not currently on our subscriber feed. To subscribe, go to getlatka.com. When you subscribe, you won't hear ads like this one. You'll get the full interviews.
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He's the founder of Intro CRM, a simple CRM for self-employed and early-stage founders. He's helped grow dozens of hardware, software, and service companies for over a decade and also hosts the Pipeline, Meeting, and Hello Blink show podcasts. Harris, you ready to take us to the top? Let's go. All right. So very cool. First off, how's the, how's the podcast business going? You host two shows.
I do. Yeah. I host them both on transistor. I actually was using another host and I really liked transistor a lot for distribution. And yeah, in general, podcasting is going great. I like it.
Is it making money for you? Do you mean you sell sponsors or it's more like growth distribution?
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Chapter 2: What strategies did Harris use to grow his podcast audience?
IndieHackers, MicroConf?
Let's see. Well, IndieHackers is definitely a major driver of traffic for the site. What I'm hoping is that these integrations with Basecamp, Trello, and Asana, I'm going to be getting published in their directories over the next month or so. And I'm hoping that that's going to be really what starts lifting up traffic because...
Yeah, posting in IndieHackers, it's good, but it's only going to get you so much traffic. And there's a lot of people who are just sort of grazing there, not necessarily.
Have you converted some of this traffic to paid or are you pre-revenue currently?
I'm pre-revenue currently. I've offered like extended free trials, but I just finished the Stripe integration. So hopefully by the end of March, I'll have people paying. How many are on free trials? I had 44 people go through an alpha testing and I've had probably another 10 sign up since I went to beta like two weeks ago.
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Chapter 3: How does Harris monetize his podcast despite a small audience?
And what's your guess? I mean, what are you going to launch in terms of pricing? Is it 10 bucks a month, a thousand a month? How do you decide that? Good question.
I have two tiers right now. I've got like a $25 a month, which is probably high, but I'd rather have fewer customers right now. And then I've got like a sales coaching versus like a productized version of the low end of my consulting practice. where it's like check-in, accountability, and it starts at $250 and goes up. So I suspect that my MRR is actually really good. $250 a month? Yeah, and up.
So I think I'm probably going to have... Yeah, I think my MRR is going to be really good relative to my number of users because I've got a few clients who I think are going to roll over to that.
Interesting. And how do you make sure you're not cannibalizing your agency revenue? Yeah.
So I've basically... It's sandboxed. And these are clients who... Two years ago, I would have said yes to but now I would say, Hey, sorry, I'm too busy for that project. So the clients who I would basically have said no to, and I've created like a productized version where it's a lot less work for me. And because they're using the CRM,
It's a lot less work for me to know what's going on with their business. Like I don't have to get an account. You can just log in and view it. Exactly.
Interesting. And so explain, I mean, it sounds like the catalyst here really is this consulting business, right? So explain to us more, what is the consulting business? When did you start it and what are you selling?
Yeah. So I started about two years ago and I work with technical founders who have been able to get a sense of product market fed on their own. because they're often solving their own problem. They can get $250,000 to $500,000 in annual revenue, but then they sort of are like, okay, but now where do I get my next customers? How do I get to a million dollars? That's the sweet spot.
I've done other projects with venture-backed companies and things like that, but this is really, I think, the place where I can help out the most. We do some basic sales process work. I help them with discovery, help them with growing their existing accounts.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did Harris face while launching Intro CRM?
Her name is Lola Ojabawale. Her firm is called Lunch Pale Labs. They're in Atlanta. I've been working with Lola for a couple of months and she's phenomenal. She's really, really good. And she's been, there's just things that are complicated enough that I don't want to spend time trying to figure out. I've been able to get it to a point and then I hit walls and then it was like, now I need help.
And you just basically, when you hit a wall, you hit Lola jump in. Yeah, exactly. And then she does it in like a second. And so I've been passing more and more to her because I'm like, I'm really not that good at this.
That's hysterical. And do you just pay her retainer or hourly or what?
We do project based. Yeah, project based. So basically, that's sort of as we and, you know, she I'm using her notion. So I've been learning notion through our work together and say, OK, here's what's next. And usually what happens is I'll put together a wish list of like five things. We'll do the first two and then.
I've learned more over the last month and we'll scrap the next three and I'll put it, put another five up front. So it's nice to not be like locked in.
That's smart. That's really smart. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. I mean, this is, I think this is sort of the future too, is like, you know, you know, guys like us that don't know how to code and gals, we want to be able to control things without adding to our full-time developers, sprint pipeline, who are working on like brand new, big features. And like this no code movement is great.
Now, why did you choose bubble? Cause there's a lot of these sort of no code drag and drop sort of things. Why not like Webflow?
Yeah. I dug around and it just seemed like the right fit. Um, the reforms are really active and I just started poking around and I don't know, it just, for whatever reason it connected, uh, it made sense to me. And, um, Yeah, I think I probably could have done it with other tools for sure. But it seemed to make sense and be robust. I also liked that they were bootstrapped for a number of years.
So I felt like it was really validated by other people who were building stuff. And then they raised a bunch of money later. But I don't know, it felt more battle tested.
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Chapter 5: How did Harris acquire his first customers for Intro CRM?
He has sole freedom, can do whatever the heck he wants. Great lifestyle here. We'll see what happens as he builds intro CRM in a no-code fashion, all built on bubble. So no full-time developers turning on the paywall here shortly. We'll see what happens to revenue as he looks to scale. Harris, thanks for taking us to the top. Thanks.