SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How I bootstrapped to $20m in 5 years (and 3 growth channels I used to hit first 100 customers)
17 Oct 2022
Chapter 1: What is the background of the guest and their entrepreneurial journey?
Hey folks, hope your Q3 and Q4 is off to a good start. We just wrapped up Founder 500 in Austin, Texas. Hundreds of bootstrap founders showed up. It was an amazing time. I loved meeting so many of you.
This interview today is a recording from that session, which you're gonna love because now we have visuals, we have the founder teaching, and I made every single speaker include their revenue graphs and real artifacts in their presentations. Without further ado, let's jump in.
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Hello, everybody. Thank you. My name is Cody McLean. I'm the founder of a company called Support Ninja. The company was, it's a company based in Austin and Dallas, and it services tech companies based in the Philippines. My story is a bit ADHD. I guess a lot of entrepreneurs are kind of ADHD, but I'm going to cover so many different components of business and personal life.
So part of that is my own personal story growing up and why I ended up being here in the first place. Also, we're going to cover how I was able to bootstrap pretty much every business I've ever had, and especially Support Ninja, which ended up being a very successful business. It currently has over a thousand employees.
Then we're going to talk about some of the methods that I was able to use to build the business, as well as some of the insights that I was able to have actually having the access to peer in to some of these larger tech companies that we would end up servicing. Our company, again, it's an outsource support company.
We do everything from customer support, back office, content moderation, lead generation or data mining. So there's a lot of different areas and we service tech companies, online businesses, et cetera. A lot of companies would come to us expecting customer support, but they would end up finding out that there were many other avenues that we could actually help them with.
And that's a common use case that I think you guys will leave here with today. So one of the ways that much to the detriment of my CEO, he doesn't really like this, but I love it. So let's go back to 1849. So we had everybody going to Cali to try and strike it rich. So I kind of imagine that's basically a lot of startups.
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Chapter 2: How did the guest bootstrap Support Ninja and what strategies were used?
And with that, I was able to replicate that success and have thousands of customers that I was able to build over a period of a few years. And with that, it required that I had to build up a support team. And so the India that was managing my support team, I ended up co-founding another company with him called Support Monk. And so I helped him find other hosting come in and actually...
build out the team in India and we were able to build that together. And so I sold both my stake in Pacific Coast and Support Monk at around the same time. Here's a small team, the relatively small team that I had when I was maybe 22, 23, especially small compared to the team that Support Ninja is today. So we have Looking Forward.
So early on, I had a lot of imposter syndrome, especially when I sold my hosting company. I actually wanted to get back into hosting because I'm not a developer. I didn't know anything else. Hosting was the only thing I knew, but I wrote an article at the time that really did a detailed analysis into the hosting industry and it was becoming commoditized.
So in that, I tried to create another company called HostGalaxy that was going to compete against DigitalOcean. But just doing the metrics, it just didn't make any sense. And I really kind of sat with myself. I'm like, what do I do next? I honestly didn't really know. And so I put the host company aside. And then I thought for a while trying to figure out what is the thing I'm going to do next.
And I discovered that, well, I wanted to work with startups first.
i didn't necessarily want to be one i didn't want the risk involved in having to create an entirely new company and trying to validate this new model and that's a difficult thing to do and it's it's very risky and i thought an under appreciated thing that i didn't really realize was an asset or a skill was my ability to provide customer support since i've been doing since i was 14 serving servicing thousands of customers and
having to be on the phone 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday consistently for a decade, basically, and building out my own support systems. And I looked into the outsourcing industry, and I realized, well, every startup, every company, they need support.
And I saw that there was one company that was providing support specifically to startups and tech companies, and that was a company called Taskus. And so more or less, they validated the model. And I thought, wait, if there can be one company, there can definitely be more than one. It could be two or three, you know, however many. And so I looked at what were the things they were doing right.
I saw that they were targeting very specifically towards tech startups. They validated the market. They had some pretty large tech companies and I saw the things that they had and pretty much I'm a firm believer in fake it till you make it and basically look at your competitors and copy the best elements from your competitors. And so they had an office in the Philippines.
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Chapter 3: What growth channels contributed to reaching the first 100 customers?
So you have to have hard copies and they have a habit of having hard copies of information. So we had to transition them to working with the software, but trying to manage them remotely was a difficult process. So we were... So the software that I really like to use is called Pipify, and I was able to build the documentation around the process.
And that allowed us to say, build out this Kanban board similar to Trello, and then you can have the client onboarding card pipe, and then you can have another pipe for recruiting so that when that client is in a specific phase, it's going to hand all the information off to another department in the recruiting department.
And it's able to create a certain amount of automation that ties back into itself that allows you to reduce the amount of errors and processes and information that's effectively lost in Slack, email, or phone calls. So here's part of the example process just with Pipify itself. This is part of the client onboarding procedure.
And it allows you to say the entrepreneur, instead of having to go and update all the staff about the revised processes that you can just go in here and add, say a file upload field. And we realize that we need to have a copy of the ID for all the agents. And then now you make that a required field so that the next time they go through that process, it requires them to upload that information.
So it allows you to make sure that you're, you have more consistency across your entire department and operations. A little bit more of the example process.
And this also allowed me to have this Kaizen mentality that allowed the agents to feel like they were a part of the process instead of just being the static employee that was following directions from the upper management is that this allowed them to actually feel like they can add and they can update and they can help revise that process.
And it gives them a sense of ownership that they otherwise wouldn't have had typically in any kind of documentation type of mentality. And so going on to outsourcing creatively, there are a wide array of ways that you can actually outsource your company or use an outsourcing company to service your company as well. So one of them is corporate BPO, which is what Support Ninja was.
These are typically companies that you approach and you have KPIs, metrics, and you're handing off the training and the management to these companies.
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Chapter 4: How did the guest leverage inbound marketing for lead generation?
And they take on the burden of managing that for you so that you can focus primarily on scaling your company. And in doing so, it allows you to
offload the expectations of the kpis onto them so if they fail to meet them then that's something they have to resolve on their own but in doing so you're going to end up paying a much higher fee and probably get stuck into a contract and one of the things to consider with any corporate bpo is again staff attrition and what is their culture it's so easy just to look at the bottom line so often we would get companies and we would quote a certain amount of money and then they're like well this other company is charging us this much and we're like okay
that you know we don't recommend that but somewhere along the line they are cutting something from the process that they're not telling you and if even no matter how good a corporate bpo's training or onboarding processes if their attrition rate is low or they don't have a great culture to maintain those employees again you're losing this tacit knowledge that is really difficult to train so you should maximize having employees for the longest period of time
And this is also more ideal if you have a set process. So if you are in a growth stage and you know that you're going to need a certain amount of agents to service your customers over a certain period of time, that's what this is best for. If you need a small team, it's not necessarily the best idea for that. Then you also have staff or seat leasing.
Chapter 5: What personal challenges did the guest face while building their business?
And this is actually how I started Support Ninja. I was able to find a staff and seat leaser in the Philippines and they helped me to get everything done. effectively allowed me to like borrow their resources to start it on my own. And this is more economical. It's a lot cheaper. But again, you're now managing those staff.
They're just paying those employees and they're making sure that they're meeting the labor laws in that country. And you're still having to manage them. So that can be a little bit more workload on you. But it is cheaper and it is also more flexible. And it is great if you just need a small team for specific types of tasks. And then you have, last but not least, the specialized services.
So this is very good for, say, bookkeeping. I would say maybe one out of every three or four accountants, they probably outsource the bookkeeping service that you're paying them for. And you have firms that specialize in bookkeeping and they maintain and update their employees to maintain accurate information so that they're doing that bookkeeping properly for you.
And this is relevant for so many different areas. There are outsourcing firms that specialize in IT outsourcing, so you can outsource your IT department. There are firms that just do web development or web design.
So a lot of even creative agencies, they will work with these middle agencies to actually then allow them to reduce their costs and effectively work on the thing that they're supposed to be outsourcing or doing themselves, but they're really not, lol. And so then we have last but not least is outsourcing outside the box.
And so one of the ways that I was able to bootstrap Support Ninja is I just took the idea from really my experience of running a web hosting company is looking at all the various categories, say like back office outsourcing and looking at the sub niches within that category. What are the things that people are searching for that we can do?
and then making landing pages for those things the very like a late 2000s type of strategy like a content strategy and so we'd have like photo manipulation etc but in doing so it allowed me to see that a lot of the customers would come to us expecting customer support but we were able to see other avenues that we were able to service their company for
And so imagine like a popular ride sharing app that would, you would take a picture of your ID so that you can actually use, you could drive for this company is we would have the staff actually looking at driver's licenses so that we were actually validating those driver's licenses. Or there's another company, a very popular expense company that allows employees to expense receipts.
And they would have a feature called a smart scanning feature where you could take a picture of the receipt and then it would extract details. But that wasn't a smart scanning feature because they didn't have the data analytics team to actually do that. It was actually just a team of Filipinos in a room 24-7 actually going through those receipts.
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