SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Quick Way to Sell Your First Company For More Than $1m
19 Jan 2016
Chapter 1: What inspired Chad Wittman to start EdgeRankChecker?
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Chapter 2: How did Chad transition from a stable job to entrepreneurship?
Coming up tomorrow morning, guys, we hear from Jury Bolander. His healthcare startup raised $420,000 to handle your blood. Okay, Top Tribe, good morning. So many of you are talking about yesterday's episode, and you're also going to be talking about this one with Chad Whitman. Chad loves building things that matter.
He's the co-founder and VP of product at Dolly, and he was former founder of Edgerank Checker, which was acquired by Social Bakers. Chad, are you ready to take us to the top? Yes, I am. Let's do it. Okay, tell me first about Edgerank Checker.
Chapter 3: What strategies did EdgeRankChecker use to achieve rapid growth?
What year did you start it in, and why did you create it?
I think we started Edgering Checker in about 2012. And I was at an agency, we were doing Facebook analytics. And I found that we're doing social media management. And I found that I spent most of my time doing analytics and reporting. And there was this thing called the newsfeed that was driving me crazy. And I wanted to understand how to be the best social media manager around.
And so how do I drive more business for more people for better clients?
Yeah. So when did you make the transition, Chad, from inside the agency to full-time focus on Edgerank Checker?
Chapter 4: How did Chad negotiate the sale of EdgeRankChecker?
We were working on things for about a year and a half and then made the decision to kind of quit my job and start the startup and start doing this kind of full-time. And so it was kind of, managing stuff over a year and a half period before I made the jumps.
Okay. Got it. And, and, you know, we have a lot of listeners, the top tribe, they're always thinking about, you know, I have a corporate gig where I'm stuck in an agency and they're trying to transition out. How much were you just out of curiosity? How much were you making in the agency? And was that hard to give up when you transitioned out?
Uh, you know, I was, I wasn't making all that much.
Chapter 5: What is the business model of Chad's new venture, Dolly?
I'd say I was making, you know, maybe 50, 60,000 or something for me personally. And it was one of those things where my, my boss kind of came to me and said, Hey, I see this opportunity. I think you can make well over a million dollars working at an agency doing this. And he showed me this crazy spreadsheet that made basically zero sense to me of how I was actually going to do this.
I said, screw that. I'm going to quit. I'm going to do my own thing. That's how I see myself getting to a million dollars.
Got it.
Chapter 6: What challenges did Dolly face in the moving industry?
Okay, so you stopped. You did your own thing. So walk me through the growth of EdgeRank Checker. What were you actually selling and how could people buy it?
Yeah, so we built a Facebook analytics, kind of Facebook insights, and you know this better than anyone else, Facebook Insights at the time was absolutely terrible. So we sat down to essentially build out a website and a web application that enabled us to go do this at scale. So sat down, started building it. I think it took us about a month or two to actually build out kind of version one.
I had built the very, very, very smallest prototype, and that was starting to gain some steam, maybe 10,000 free users using the app kind of really regularly, some big brands.
Chapter 7: How are current valuations affecting startups in the sharing economy?
Took us about maybe two months to build out a kind of a professional version of that. We then launched it, uh, crossed our fingers, went to bed that night thinking that maybe what year was that? What year was that when you launched? That would have been probably 2012, I believe. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
I went to bed, wanted to see what happened to, you know, the next, uh, where we wake up with a lot of sales, not many sales. And I think we woke up to like five sales. So it was kind of like, okay, this could be really interesting.
Chapter 8: What lessons did Chad learn about equity distribution among co-founders?
At what price point? I think most of our plans sold at $30 a month.
Okay, so now you're at $150 a month and you're going, should I have taken that spreadsheet my boss was going to give me?
Right, right. Yeah, and it was actually really fun because that next day we had a little setup where when the email would come in with the receipt of a sale, it would make a little cha-ching sound. Yeah. And so the first one came in and it was like, cha-ching. We're like, hell yeah. You know, super excited. We got a couple more. Who is we, by the way? Who is we?
So my two other co-founders that were at the agency with me, we all quit. So it's Jason Norris and Kelby Hahn. And they're actually two of my co-founders at Dolly, which we can get into later. But yeah, so the little cha-chings were coming in and we had to shut it off after lunch because it was going cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching. It was like starting to have a little meltdown.
So it was super exciting feeling.
And just out of curiosity, because we have a lot of students that are maybe using their local entrepreneurship clubs to start their own businesses, and they're always having equity debates with co-founders. How did you three decide how much equity each person would get?
Yeah. So for the first business, it was kind of a really basic process of like, okay, let's start at 33% for each. And then how do we distribute it based on what else we could be doing? And so like my co-founder who was doing all the development, like he could have worked at, you know, Google or something or Facebook of that nature.
And so it was like, okay, how do we shift that over to make sense for him? So we started at 33% each. And then we adapted. And I think that's great for a small business model. When you start talking about VCs and Series A, that model changes a little bit.
Yeah, that's actually I've never heard anyone kind of articulate it like that, where you start with the baseline and go from there based on opportunity cost. I love that approach. I think it makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Okay, so take us forward. So you wake up in the morning, five sales, ching, ching, ching is happening during lunch, you shut it off.
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