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Hello. Welcome back to Rogue startups. I'm your host, Craig Hewitt. Today I'm chatting with Josh Ho, founder of Referral Rock. Josh and I have known each other for a few years. We're actually kind of brief competitors. I'm sure he doesn't even know when I owned a kind of referral or affiliate management SaaS platform a decade ago, it seems like now. But Josh is someone who I've known through Twitter and just really respect the company he's built at Referral Rock. In this episode, we talk about him as a founder and the journey that he's been on. Talk about the company hitting plateaus, not from a growth lead churn perspective, but from an internal and operations perspective and a team perspective, which I think is interesting. Josh and I talk about the difference from going from operator to leader to visionary status within the company. Definitely a place that he's at where he's out of the main part of most of the business. It's always the place where a lot of us want to get to is like, hey, how can I take myself out of the business so better and smarter people can be doing these things that will move the business forward more so than I can probably. So. Hope you enjoyed this episode with Josh. I sure did. Let's dive in. So, Josh, I have known you or known of you for, like, a long time. I think we run in a lot of the same kind of circles. You run referral rock and have for, like, a similar amount of time as run castos. How long has it been?
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I always, I always. The date, I always have firm in my head that I'll remember is the first paying customer. So it was actually June around this time of 2015. So, yeah, you know, there's the pre idea, building it mvp ish stuff. But then, you know that first, I think what some of our, one of my friends calls stranger money. Like, the first time that hits your account, it's like, yeah, huh. Okay, this is legit. This is real. And then, of course, there's like, okay, where can it get to? Where can I, you know, leave whatever full time, other income stream types of stuff to start to focus? But there's that. If you look on LinkedIn or anywhere else, it officially referral Rock Inc. Was, you know, 2017. And there's stories behind why that happened then, but that's essentially it.
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So, yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. And, like, I love chatting with kind of later stage founders that are still kind of, you guys are totally bootstrapped, I think. But, like, you cross the chasm from, like, do it all myself and then have, like, a contractor to, like, you got the whole team and you're the visionary, right? Like, are you. Are you pretty much there?
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Yeah, I'm pretty much there. And. And, I mean, there's obviously. There's always going to be stuff you don't enjoy doing, but I say the large majority, and it is within my capability to not have to do the things I don't necessarily want to do. Right. There's plenty of times where I had to tap myself on the shoulder and be like, all right, Josh, you got to pull us through XYZ because there's no one else that's going to do it. And I have to cut my, you know, my vision of being a visionary on hold and just, like, do the thing to make sure we're surviving and get stuff back on track and hopefully cover my tracks, and then, like, you know, I'm hopefully back onto the path I want to be on personally.
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Yeah. So how. So, like, I. We got close. Like, we raised some money and kind of had built out the entire team, got close to that. You know, whatever didn't work out, we laid off, you know, some of the team. I'm back kind of in the weeds to a fair extent with, like, sales and kind of marketing strategy, I would say. So, like, pretty hands off for, like, product success, support, development, for sure. Right.
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Not the whole shebang. You've got. You've got. Still got support.
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Yeah, I'm doing okay. I'm doing okay. But, like, how does that affect you mentally when you're like, I'm in visionary mode, and then I'm like, I gotta, like, log into activecampaign and, like, do something. Like, how is that hard?
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Yeah, it's just. Yeah, I mean, I guess it's sort of the. I don't know. I guess I try to flip a bit in terms of, you know, whatever little hacks I can do to make myself feel okay with those things. Right. So at the end of it, I know it's like, well, I'm the only one that can do it. Okay, that's fine. And then, you know, being like, okay. Taking a breath and being like, that stinks. That's like, I shouldn't be that anymore. That shouldn't be what I. And then you get over yourself and you have to have that moment. For me, it's just like, okay, well, can I be the hero? How can I think about this and almost reposition my brain to be like, okay, all right, let me block stuff out. If I sprint on this. Like, let's. It's kind of like time boxing. Let me think of the next three days. If all I'm doing is that, like, how far can I get? Usually once I kind of clear off and have my moment of, I would say, complaint and my own personal entitlement and my own just little. I shouldn't have to do this. Like, when those words come out of your mouth, you're like, yeah, and then you're also like, okay, but that's not going to help anything anymore. Let me go and dig in. And usually once I've dug in and once I've got the momentum and I'm in the thing, you're back into that maker mode that back on what we all know we're capable of because we had to do it before, and then you're into, okay, you know what, now I'm in there. Now that I've opened up activecampaign, and as long as I'm not letting that creep of, I shouldn't be doing this, come in. And I that usually I can get enough momentum to find the joy in the task again. Find the joy and the nuance of, like, oh, you know what? I'm crafting again, I'm making again and sort of, but setting up those blocks helps. Like, okay, it's two days in. How far can I get? And usually once you're in that, then it's like, okay, now I'm in there, and now it's, okay. Cause now, you know what? I'm the only one that can do it, right. You know, and you're just like, so that's what's helped me in those times. And to kind of, yeah, it's like that mind, mind shift change.
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Something. Like, I've been reflecting a fair bit lately on, like, we, yeah, we raised money. We kind of grew the team. We, you know, it wasn't going to work out. Right. Those lines were not going to cross. And so we had to, we had to downsize the team. And I've reflected on that a lot lately. And, like, what did I do wrong as a manager, you know, and as, like a, as the visionary? And I think, I think one of the things is I was, I want to say I'm too nice. I was too nice.
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I'm way too nice, too.
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And, like, having Superman syndrome a little bit where, like, I can just do this and I can own you salespeople getting your leads, or you marketing person driving more leads or you guys closing more deals or whatever. Like, I kind of always felt like it came to me where, like, I think. I think that's part of it, but I think it's also not. Like that's part of the problem. Like, part of it is fucking the box. The buck stops with you. Right. Ultimately, like, you're the founder. You are Superman. And I think we all need to empower ourselves to be that. But also, like, you know, fucking Bezos is not taking any sales calls. Right? Like, at some point, it is entirely on the team to do the thing, and you just say, that's the finish line. Like, how do you look at that? And then how do you. On, like, a day to day basis, when the team goes, there's a problem, how do you not go, well, I'm fucking Superman. Like, I'll just fix it. Because you could, of course. And, like, three strokes of the keyboard, you could just fix it. How do you put it back on the team? It'd be like, well, I don't know. How would you solve this problem? Or whatever that looks like?
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I mean, that is the harder, harder part, I would say. It's hard for me to. All I could say is what I could think about now. Right. It's hard to envision what I was like in those certain specific situations. But I would just say the biggest blessing I've had was I found a bunch of key people. So there are definitely a key people that I am a layer removed right now from the. I would say the individual contributor work. Right? So. And I. And I'm actually technically, like, two layers removed. Right. So there is a team of, I would say of player, coach types of people that are around me in different subject matters, whether it's the, you know, the tech lead for the tech stack and the software development and the infrastructure. So that's, like, one. And then I have a product designer who also has, like, been a product manager as well in the past with that sort of. That product hybrid. And then, honestly, the biggest stroke of luck I ever had was finding the person I now consider, like, my business partner. So that was super early. This back to where we started the conversation. That was 2017. That was the reason we incorporated, because I wanted to give him some shares. So it was. I worked with him for six months. His name is Micah. He's awesome. And I don't know where I'd be without him, because right now, a lot of those things was either with me working with him being like, okay, well, how would you solve that? But also knowing he had the wherewithal and he had my trust to do those things. Right. And then it's turned into where I was delegating to him and he was doing it himself. And then he developed a team, and he developed people around him that he could rely on some leaders and some other individual contributors. How we built our hiring pipeline around that, like, that's the golden thing I found. And so it was me just finding the one person to coach, not trying to coach the many, because I think I personally wouldn't have the patience to be coaching from scratch. Coaching like, you know, using a metaphor from kindergarten. Right. Like type of thing or at different stages and different roles that you might need at the company. And I was fortunate enough to find someone pretty early on that was able to handle a lot more than I kind of ever even foresaw.
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Yeah, yeah. And what kind of role.
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So luck, you know?
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Luck, yeah, yeah. What kind of role is Micah in? Like, what area of the company?
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So his operate, I would say he held off the other side. So as I look at the main divides of the company, it's like product and marketing is one side. And then as much as where I've. Where I sit and he has led up what I'll call operations. So it's sales and customer success are the big pieces of that. So anything really, like, I can. It's almost like the bookends I can handle the bookends of, like, I can bring them to the door. You know, he kind of walked them through, get the tours, and I'm architecting kind of the system. So I see the two sides of it.
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It's funny, I think I probably won't ever run another SaaS business. If I do, I won't do it by myself. Do you agree? Because you kind of largely are like a solo founder with some equity.
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Yes, I got it off the ground. So it was making revenue before. And when I first met Micah, he was essentially the first person that, well, I made a horrible first sales hire outside of myself that just went up in flames. And it was just a horrible mismatch. And I was at the point where I'm, like, dividing my time between taking sales calls and building the product. And I had a split calendar, so I'm like, days off or certain afternoons I'm doing this and coding and doing that and product. And what happened was I was in so much pain of that, and I'm just like, at that point, just like anyone that could take these calls, even if you're only closing, like, a very half of what I was, I don't care. I just need to get some relief on that, because, you know, everything was. Everything was, like, piling up. And he actually reached out to me, saw a job post, reached out to me. And if you ever met him, it'd be a funny thing. But one of his first things, when I talked to him, he's just like, hey, I can do everything you can do but code. And I'm like, okay, sure, but I don't care. I don't know if I 100% believe that, but that's okay. And go ahead. And, you know, I started routing sales calls to him. I was like, if you can do some of these sales calls and close almost half of what I. You know, what I do, it doesn't matter, you know? And he's like, okay, if this works out well, is. He's like, is. Is, you know, equity on the table. I'm like, if this works out, we could figure out, you know, yeah, something. And, you know, within six months. So, I mean, again, I did not go on. I can't tell you how I was, like, this is my perfect job posting to find this person. Like, none of that just blind, you know, blind luck type of thing, but also knowing when to hold on to a person and what to do with them and where they fit in your puzzle of what you're good at and what you're not. So I would agree. I would not do it without a founding team. Right. Of that rounds out those skill sets. Cause I know what I don't like to do or what I'm willing to do once, but probably don't care to do again.
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Exactly.
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Yeah.
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Yeah. That's a big part of it. It's like, we. We did the hard work, and we've gotten kind of gotten over the hump to some extent, you know? And so, like, I think that we look back and say, fuck, that was really hard. And all this gray hair is the result of that, I think. So. So, yeah, I think I wouldn't couch it up to luck entirely. I think you were, like, aware of, like, what you needed and. And humble enough to recognize, like, I need this kind of person. Maybe the luck was they came into your life at the right time, but, like, you got to be open to that, to kind of be ready to accept it, so, yeah, that's awesome. That's awesome. A founding team. Yeah, that's a big term, right? Like, we're not talking a dude that can code. We're talking, like, several people, probably, right? Like, I think if I. If I was going to do another sass. Well, first of all. It would be, it would be a huge swing. Right? It wouldn't be I can get to ten grand or 10 million ARR. It would be like we're going to get acquired by Salesforce or something. You know, like, and you need, you need. Yeah, like for me and probably maybe for you. Like I would need, I would need like an operations person. I would, I would definitely need like a product person and a lead developer.
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Right.
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And I would want to lead kind of go to market but nothing else. I think that's my capacity these days.
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Yeah. And I think that's the one that people don't think like you mentioned operations and that's one that I think most like when we started out or we don't think about. Right. And I don't think that most people think about that, how much that matters because everyone is thinking about, I'm going to, you know, launch a thing. All I need is a product and marketing. I think I feel like that the, the bootstrap audiences have been at least educated enough. They can't get around not hearing that they need to focus on marketing anymore. I hope now whether they come in and still believe to build it and they will come, but soon that'll hit them in the face and they will learn that they have to do some sales and marketing side. Yeah, yeah, I, but the operations side, no one talks about. Right. Like, no one talks about like, okay, what does it take to get all these boats running on time? Right. Like I hear when people talk about the advantage of speed and they always think about speed of like, deployment, speed of product, speed of like, getting out there in the market, that type of stuff. But I think strong operations actually is speed. Like, it's more of like how, what is the, your operating processes for like hiring or what is it for, you know, all these things, like, you know, just like managing support teams and managing all these training, internal training, like all these other, that just everything else gets bucketed into ops and no one talks about, you know, that everyone else talks about the main heroes on the front line of like, yeah, it's the product and the marketing. Right. But all the other glue that makes it all happen is like so critical.
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Yeah. And as a result it comes to you as the founder and you're like, whatever. I want to go with a rock star, man. I want to go with the shit that like, you know, that directly makes us money. And I think to our peril, we neglect the boring fundamental stuff. Very guilty. I think one kind of like scary thing is we've never had like an HR issue in our company, knock on wood. But like, if we did, what would happen? You know, like it would come to me or come to you, probably.
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I'm HR. I'm still HR.
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Yeah. And like, I don't know what to do like that. That's just a weird thing to think about. It's like, you know, especially, like, we're both in us, we have us employees. Like, there's some very serious, like, legal and regulatory compliance things that we could fuck up. Anyways, whatever. Put it on the list of stuff that I don't really worry about but is always there in the back of my mind. Right, yeah, yeah. You mentioned marketing. I like how you think about marketing. We've chatted a few times, just offline about kind of marketing and growth and stuff. I know you've done quite a bit of content in the past. Is that, is it fair to say, like, that's a fair part of your growth strategy today is like, content marketing and SEO?
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I would say. I'll say SEO is, has been a, has been our bell cow for many, many years. We started off on a good foot, mostly because I had some previous experience with SEO and search terms and things like that at a startup. I had a previous to referral rock. So I sort of, yeah, I kind of just used that playbook that I had, was able to rank for terms. Understood that, you know, what search could do in terms of getting attention and distribution. I would say now it is. And the reason I say SEO, because I would say it is, we have mostly written content for search engines. Right. Full stop. I would say content marketing in its truest form is probably a little different. Right. It's more of like, what you're doing on YouTube. It's more of like, stuff that is actually like, I would say the SEO content we're doing is educational. It's not thought provoking, it's not attention grabbing, it's not like thought leadership. It's not anything that is really going to elevate referral rack as a brand. But I. It keeps us in the conversation for the people that are looking for the software that we build.
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We've largely done the same. Right. We've got hundreds of blog posts and dozens of pages on the site. We get, I don't know, before helpful content, we got about 100,000 unique visitors a month. It's like 85 now. I feel like I'm, whatever.
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Yeah.
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But, man, I see an enormous change happening in the industry. Like, no shit. Our SEO consultant is only doing YouTube stuff right now. We were working another one who is like, I mean, I won't call him out by name, but, like, we started working with them and then he wrote something on Twitter. He's like, I probably won't ever write another SEO newsletter again. And then you see this stuff all over the place. I see one of the advisors in tiny seed runs a very, very, very successful big company that we all know. And he said to us, someone was like, hey, how would you grow your company if you were starting today? He's like, well, the shit I did to grow my company wouldn't work today. And that is content marketing and SEO. He's like, it just wouldn't work. And so I don't know what I would do. And so I see all those things and I see, like, and people are probably, like, yelling at their, at their windshields or their phones right now saying, craig, just fucking do something different. But, like, I think that we're probably not unique. And you might be in the same boat where, like, we did a thing to get us here. We're going to talk about plateaus and maybe this is how we'll transition. Is it like, we've kind of slowed our growth rate. Right. And that thing is not the thing that's going to get us to the next step.
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Right.
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Like, do you agree generally that, like, an SEO is just, you might, you might have.
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It's definitely different, you know? Yeah, it's definitely worse. I agree with it's worse. And why I brought up that nuanced difference between the content market, because we haven't done that other side. Now I think we have an opportunity to do that. And the way I think about it now is regardless of the trend, because the trend in SEO was for long period going up into the right. Like, if you knew how to do this stuff, there were more searchers coming online. Like, more. Especially in the years of, you know, zero interest rate stuff, you had just more businesses popping up that may or may not should have popped up in those, you know, if it wasn't that time. But there were just more buyers, right? Yeah, we all saw it and hopefully we benefited and, but, like, I just view it as, I don't think search is going away. I think the habits of the buy, at least for our buyers. Right?
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Yeah.
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If I'm thinking a lot of them are SMBs and just across the board, like, whether it's a well known tech company or it's a little e commerce shop or whether it's a mom and pop mosquito repellent company. Those are all customers, types of customers that we have, but they're still searching. So I don't think that's going to just drop off the table. If I was to start again today, I'd still invest in SEO. Would it get me to where I am today? Probably nothing. And will it flatline or will it diminish over time? Potentially, but it's still a skill set I have. It's still knowing how to rank, knowing how to build. Build something that I think is still a competitive advantage as much and maybe honestly, the people that are now saying they wouldn't do SEO. Great, bye bye. Like, less competition.
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That's definitely something I think of. Yeah.
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So I think about it as, like, I have that muscle and I think about it as an asset. And unless it just totally vanishes, like, which do I believe it will? No. Will it diminish? Sure, but still be, it's still super effective and super cost effective from, like, how many types of things? Like, still YouTube is good, but at the same time, you still have to build an audience. There's more of a social algorithm. There's more of a lot of other things. It's hit driven. It's a little more like just the other social media types of things, but does have some staying power because it does have search involved, too. So I think about it as layering and, like, it's still an advantage. And now we're looking for how can we layer on? We're still getting traffic and maybe it's going to drop by 20% next year, but still that 80% that I have, how can I capitalize on that better? So that leads us to, like, could we up our game on lead magnets? Right? Like, it may not be a new tactic, but at the same time, can we capture more? Maybe it dropped 20%, but did I get 30% more resonance with the 80% I was left over with? So that's the cards I have right now. So those are what I'm, what I'm continuing to play with, if that makes sense.
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Yeah. As you evaluate, like, okay, so kind of SEO is the base for this and we're going to add these layers on top of it. How do you think about, like, picking that one? Because, like, I always want to go, like, kind of closest to the customer and the thing with the most effect. So that's typically, like, lead magnets, bottom of the funnel, high buyer intent stuff. But then when do you go, like, off the website, you know, to YouTube or when do you go to influencer marketing or when do you, like, how do you think about, like, structuring that decision?
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I mean, with, where can I have an advantage? So because I have the SEO, what is going to play well with. With SEO, right? So one play, like, down the funnel, like we said, is like lead magnets. But here's another thing. Like, we've started doing some YouTube stuff. If I looked back at the original YouTube videos we had up for years, it was like, oh, my God, who left this channel? And. But when we kind of kick started it recently, in the past, like, I would say couple months, I'm like, okay, well, what do I have? So we started from a yemenite. Hey, we have these articles that rank well and get a lot of traffic. If I want to seed YouTube, I need to have a video version of this article that also may have some search terms. I don't know as much about YouTube SEO, but we have one for referral code. Referral code is a very generic, educational term. High volume, not the best conversion, but hey, there's eyeballs, there's viewers, there's vanity metrics going there.
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Brand.
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We made a video. It's a two or three minute video, and now we put it on that article. Views are getting that article. People are now viewing that channel a little bit. Maybe they'll watch the next video. So that's where I'm looking at, like, what is, what is something that I was strong in? Even if it's fading, and even if only 10% or 20% funnel, at least I can seed it. At least I can start the baseline of some YouTube metrics that hopefully will be tall enough to ride the ride of YouTube that will hopefully get blessed more by the algorithm because we're starting to generate, you know, subject matter content. They're getting viewerships, it's getting a few subscribers. Right. We're not full on trying the whole YouTube like, playbook, but let's establish a baseline there from what we have. So that's kind of how I've been thinking about it. I'm also thinking about, like, we do need to more actively have more of them, but where am I gonna place my time? Because I probably have enough time to really think about one channel with really good strength. Right. Like, another idea out of this SEO traffic is, you know, is, is a newsletter like a more media style newsletter? Is that. Is that something we could pull off? We're still getting people on our content, and could we taste them with a certain style newsletter? You know, whether it's like a morning brew or that type of thing. Could we come up with a creative angle? And again I'm getting the traffic today but can I convert it into more of an owned and then also I can promote my YouTube stuff there like so I'm trying to kind of flywheel these things together of what I have and patchwork it. But can I then make it become a first 1st party channel? Right now YouTube is like a second party channel for us. But can it become, have enough base, you know, same thing with social media. How do these things, what is going to be my one two mix? That is really going to hopefully make it so I'm not dependent on purely SEO and word of mouth anymore, right?
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Yeah, no, I love it man. I think just to restate what you said is we think about it a lot from our YouTube strategy perspective. The obvious one is product updates. We have a new thing. Hey, that's my favorite. And Ahrefs is always the example I point to is this is how you do SEO with Ahrefs. This is how you do keyword research. Ahrefs helps you do that. This is how you get your podcast live on Spotify. This is how Kaspus does that. We had to get all those boxes checked first. As a SaaS company on YouTube, I think that strategy is a little different. And then exactly what you said is we got a fucking 200 blog posts. There's 200 videos. Every blog post should have a video. They're super easy because I just go pull up the blog post, skim it, flip the camera on, talk for eight minutes and you're there. So yeah, I really like that. And I think I was chatting with one of our team members this morning about this and I said, hey man, he's in support. I was like, hey, I need you to be feeding me ideas because you're talking to the customers all the time. That's gold. And you see this in really high performing organizations where they have this customer product marketing and sales feedback, right? Like the shit that's going on in a sales call is the marketing collateral, right? Like the language that the customer is saying is the marketing collateral is the thing that's driving this is that getting the new people in the door is the questions that supports having, which is the content that marketing then creates. Like it's just, it should be this virtuous continuous cycle and we have been banging this drum forever. And, and like solace to newer founders, like it's never done, it's never done. And it is. I think it's everything, man. It's everything about like as founders who are a little more removed from like the front line. Super important. Like, I need to actually be seeing what people are talking about. Yeah, I just, anyways, that, yeah, that's, that's what we're doing. We're getting input from, from support about what customers are saying, product update stuff and then just content on how to do the thing in our industry. Yeah, right.
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Yeah. And I'd focus, like what we've done, we focused on the ones that, honestly, we just first went like, which are the blog posts that are getting the most traffic and those are probably the easiest ones. That ones you've had, you've probably paid the most attention to. So from like a quality content perspective, they're good. And honestly, sometimes if you haven't paid much attention because sometimes we, no, we're all busy doing all kinds of other stuff and you might outsource someone to write that content and then you go and look at it and you're like, yeah, I need to make some corrections. Hey, you know what? Craig's got some insights. Let's lay some new insights into this. That's the stuff that might be more attractive in YouTube. So we've actually used that as an opportunity to vet old articles and then go, actually, let me just talk through what I would change in this article. And then we have someone make those updates and then we do the video. So it's sort of like, can we parallel those things of using it like my time and attention to pay attention to a piece of content? Because again, you can easily get wrapped yourself into the founder, like, I shouldn't have to view, I shouldn't have to edit and vet content, but at the same time, you probably have the most insight. So it's like, but could I just talk through this quickly and then send it to my team to update it? And now I have an idea and now I can go and in an hour, bang out solid review, get that content leveled up and also come out with a great script that I can just go blab on YouTube, create a video, and now I've got updated content. I've got a new YouTube video on it that's feeding our channel and that's a nice little, what I'm calling vector energy. I could do that if I just do the parts of it that I enjoy and use that time as my own captive audience to kind of make it happen.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. I agree with all that. I'll just add one kind of layer to that is we don't just look at the stuff we rank for, but kind of the stuff we don't quite rank for sure. So if you're looking at hrefs, you know, they have like the, you know, position, eleven to 50 or whatever, but there's high search volume for, we'll make a video about that. Just knowing, like, hey, the blog post, for whatever reason, like, we don't have topical authority or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, we'll make a video about that thing in the hopes that it helps the blog post.
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So, yeah, yeah, I think those things. I think whether, who knows what are going on in the algorithms, but I do believe, like, the more you can attach your properties to those things, and Google's not dumb, right? Like, they know these things. It's like, okay, great. There should be a transition level of, you know, topical authority with YouTube plus, you know, this, who owns this, they know those things. You know, it's like, so I do feel like, yeah, maybe I'm not ranking for it, for the content, but hey, the video is doing well. If Google's smart, which I think they are, they're going to factor in all these things and using their own assets and their own real estate. Right. And if you're a fan and doing the things on their platform, like, the way that they serves their users. Right, like, you'll be rewarded for it.
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Yeah, yeah, totally, totally. I want to talk about plateauing because, like, well, I'll share from our perspective, and I don't know if you guys have just been a rocket ship the whole time. Like, we. Nope, we definitely, it's interesting. We grew very linearly in a positive way for a long time. That has slowed a little bit. We're definitely still growing, but it slowed a bit. And, yeah, it's challenging as a founder, you start to question a lot of your self and worth and ability. Sure. I would say we're still in it to a large extent. Like, I think we have some things that are working better than they were, but definitely not at the kind of growth rate that I want. How do you like, it sounds like this has happened. How do you look at it? How do you evaluate it? Where are you guys in that kind of life cycle?
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I would say we're at a, like, we had a similar start. I would say in terms of, you know, what we were doing was working and it was a fairly, like a linear type of growth, but to the point of where, you know, hey, early years, it's like, no, there weren't ever, like, I mean, aside from taking the outliers of the, you know, three months look, we grew 300%. We drew 400. Aside from that. But looking at spans of year and stuff like that, you know, there was a time that we were consistently like, 50% growth, 50% growth a year, and it's like, okay, cool, this is nice, right? This is. This is steady. This is controllable. We knew what we were doing. We knew what we were on, when to update in the product. We knew, you know, we felt like we knew what we were doing. And then we hit a. We hit a plateau. And it was post. It was, I think this is 2022, wherever it hit us, early 2022. So it was post Covid, post, like, existential crisis, and then, oh, crap, we're going again. Cool. Nothing to worry about. Okay. We're all inside, you know, all that stuff that we all went through, but. So this was early 2022, and we had. Our plateau was a. This one was a painful. I would say it was a painful year and a half of all. A lot of things we thought we had solved broke, right? So a lot of it was internal operations. Like, we talked about operations. It was, you know, things we did right, but then drifted and forgot to do again. Right. Like that type of stuff. But it compounded, and it compounded because we have a lot of internal people doing, you know, it's like, you know, onboarding someone that it's challenging for someone to launch a referral program. I don't know as much about your podcast audience, but I would figure it's pretty. Once someone is buying, hosting, they're starting to produce some episodes reasonably quickly, and they might be thinking about it forever before they even talk to you. But oftentimes for us, the average customer probably takes, I would say, 40 days to launch the referral program from when they even start to pay. There's a lot of onboarding. There's a lot of this and that. I would say that whole team had a. Had a big existential crisis of, like, leadership, of we had a person and all great people. They were like, we're leading the team. And she didn't realize. She didn't want to manage anymore. And then we also had two senior people, like, leave within three months. Not related, but it just imploded. Right. And from a five person team, when you have three senior people, one that wants to step down, still hung out there and tried to help us fix it. And to that leave, and all of a sudden you have the junior person that just joined the team going, what am I doing?
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Yeah, interesting.
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So, yeah, that happened. And I would say the challenging part for that, it was when you talk about leading indicators and lagging indicators, revenue still actually looked good. But the problem is like, if you look at the leading indicator of people weren't being onboarded correctly, like, it took a while for that revenue to show up and realize like, we had this drought of probably, I would say a year. And if any customers are listening, apologies for if you were onboarded during that phase. But it was chaotic and we, what we had working was no longer like, we couldn't implement. So it's like, you know what to do, but you can't, like, yeah, you gotta hire, you gotta figure out this. You gotta, again, buck up and take some calls or pull from other talent in other areas and stall product development. Stall other areas. And that's what happened. And it took, like I said, about a year and a half to right the ship to get it back to like, repeatable. And it's, those are the worst. It's like you had the problem solved and then one little thing crumbles and then another one crumbles and all of a sudden you're, you're sitting there with a pile of wood.
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No, no, totally. We didn't have the same situation. But I can relate in that the business kind of changes and the priorities of the business and the people and the things that the company needs changed. I think maybe that's the universal. Right. It's like your flavor of this will change and everyone will go through this, right? Like no one is this, like, no one's a rocket ship. Very few. You shouldn't plan on being a rocket ship. You should plan on probably what you and I did, which is just fucking, you know, grinding it.
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We'll just say grinding it out.
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Yeah, grinding it out. Right. Like, because I guess the reality of like, actually having the skills to build a great business is figuring that out, right? Like you might get lucky and you might, you might just be, what is it, beehive? You know, like, yeah, they're a little lucky, right? They built a great product, but I don't know that the skills of that founder or founding team kind of have all this stuff figured out anyways. Not to detract, great company, great product, all this kind of stuff. But like, I think you and I have experienced some things that they haven't maybe.
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Right, yeah, market conditions. Right.
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Market.
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Certain conditions, timing of markethood. Not that anyone could foresee the different things, like, if, you know, but those happen, but if it doesn't happen for you, and I think you're right, it's like, I think everyone approaches these, and you want to approach it with the optimistic dream as a founder, that you're going to be one of those. But the reality is most people aren't. Right. And then now it's like, if you're willing to grind, and that's what's really going to separate the ones is like, okay, I can pull through. If I'm not lucky and still make a good outcome, I could still squeeze this out, and maybe it won't be perfect, but. And I do want to play the game because maybe my cards do come up, and that's okay, too, right? Like, hey, I am. You know, I'd love to. I'm not jealous of them, but at the same time, like, okay, but, hey, I'm gonna play my game and I play the cards, and I can, you know, grind out an outcome out of it. Like, you know what? I want to do it again, that's a different question. Right.
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But, yeah, right, right. No, totally, totally. I want to ask about, like, the future of the business for you. And, like, I'm sure this is where I don't get. I don't talk freely about this stuff, but just to make conceptually, maybe you obviously hear about, like, oh, I grew the business, then I sold for whatever reason. And that is a good or a bad outcome, maybe, but, like, that's an outcome. Their outcome is bad, which is like, it didn't work, and I shut it down. That doesn't sound like it's you. But then the middle ground is like a couple different flavors of, like, I saw Ben Orenstein from Tuple recently. He's like, one of the founders promoted him to CEO, and Ben just stepped aside. Had Jason Cohen on the podcast about six weeks ago, and he did that several times. Obviously, different scales of companies, but I like this as an alternative path sometimes where, sure, you can sell the business, but do you want to sell the business? The world will always need referral programs. The world will probably always need podcast hosting. Do I want to sell the business or do I want to keep it, but not be actively involved on a day to day basis? Delegate, bring in someone as a GM or something like that. Just generally, how do you think about that?
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I would say there's probably depends, but for us, there's a lot I still have in this. In this vision. Right. So when we talked earlier about just being the visionary, I still have a lot of things to test out to see if they're right or not, if that makes sense. Right. I have a direction that I want to do with the product. I still have a lot of energy and a lot of ideas on things that I'm excited to try to see if they can work right. So that is exciting for me. And being out of the day to day, I can spend more time crafting that. Right. Or testing that. I can test an idea on a little widget on one of these high traffic blog posts. Do I get enough interest for this one little idea? Is there something there? It's taking a small bet, but probably not depending on my marketing team to do all that. It's like, okay, I can do that and I can figure it out. And now, do I spend some time, you know, crafting copy around this? Do I spend some time, like, you know, tinkering with the idea of prototyping this part of the product and then start to work with my product manager and some other things? So, yeah, there's a lot. I'm still like, I would say my, I don't feel like my work is finished, if that makes sense. So for me, it's probably like, until that is, and I don't, you don't know when that's gonna end. I was like, I've also questioned that. I was like, I could end tomorrow. That could end in a month. Likely not. I think in my head, it's probably at least a couple years from here. So that's one of the things that I think for me is I will have a challenging time hanging it up until either something just really crushes me from a day to day operation standpoint again, which could happen, or I just run out of this energy to want to answer these questions about my vision, so to speak.
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Yeah, yeah. No, I align a lot with that. Like, first of all, I kind of feel weird talking about this as we have investors, but to my investors, I definitely have a ton of passion for the business and the space still, I think maybe even more than ever as it relates to the content marketing and SEO perspective. Like, podcasting is in a better space than it's ever been. Yeah. So I think that there is some tailwinds there. I think YouTube confuses that a little bit, but maybe not. Yeah. And we. Yeah. From, from a business and a product perspective, especially. Yes. From a business and a product perspective, I really, I really like it. It is challenging to be facing this need for another layer of customer acquisition. You know, I think if you'd have said you can just hammer on SEO and content marketing, I'd have been like, cool. Cause like, really good at it. It kind of vibes with me, you know, personally, but it's not the reality. And so, like, I think that's the biggest speed bump, to borrow rob wallingism, the biggest speed bump for me is like, in a way, you're kind of like, adding that layer is hard because it's like, fuck what layer? You know, and who's gonna execute on it? And, like, is it me or is it someone else? Like that. That's kind of like not a whole new business, but it's a whole new channel. And that's hard at this stage to grind. That's kind of my hesitation or my obstacle, I guess, at this point. Otherwise, I fucking love the business. We're profitable, we're growing largely. The business is not dependent on me. We're going a week from now. We're going on vacation for ten days, and I'm bringing my laptop, but I'm planning on doing zero work. Pretty amazing. I pay myself well. Pretty amazing, all things considered. And so I do kind of kick myself in the head sometimes saying, like, stop. Stop bitching. Like, you actually have, like, a really great situation.
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There's a lot of people that would kill to be in your spot. Right?
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Yeah, yeah. But I think it's, it's what makes us a founder, right? Is like, it's, it's never, it's never done. It might be good enough, and I think maybe that's the difference. Like, it's good enough, but it's not done. And that's kind of where I am.
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Right? I. Right? Yeah. Like, for me, the bigger, like I said, the interesting things for me are on the product front. And also it ties with some of the marketing. Right. Like, because I think as I see it now, where I realize where the, I would say the stuff that is going to be the most effective for the business is in between that line of marketing and product. For us, like, because it is, we're a horizontal market. It is very widespread. Like I mentioned, all the different types of businesses, are they going to really care about, like, integration number four that is down there on their pecking order. We did this neat little trick. No. Right? Like, the things that are going to be important are these real needle movers that sit in that line of what is interesting to someone that is, like, familiar with referral marketing. Like, huh? I never thought about it that way. Oh, and the product does it that way. That's the stuff that I'm, like, really excited about. So this is in that crosshair of that. So that's enough energy for me. But then, like, I said the other part of the. Yeah, I agree. Is like, am I excited about trying to, like, stand up another, like, channel, so to speak? Not really. But where I am the most, hopefully, at least pulling over some momentum, is those other little parts of where I can get those transitory effects of the other one to maybe kickstart them. So I'm not starting from ground zero on those ones. So that's going to be. That's going to be interesting. Or what I'm doing is like, okay, can I allocate some money towards. I know there's a playbook here for better, you know, thought leadership content. I don't have the time to pull it off. I don't have the patience to sit and write these articles because I want to do these other things, but maybe I can find someone that can, like, there's enough established playbooks out there. You see Rand Fishkin killing it with, like, social and, like, creative articles. Like, yeah, you know, I feel like I have half the ideas but don't have the patience for the execution. Now, can I find a person that could help that? And then if we add that to our social channels and this stuff, like, could that. Could that work? I don't know. So more of my thinking is like, can I be in the founder operational standpoint where I'm taking more educated bets? So I might be researching these flywheels and understanding how this mechanic can work enough that I can vet and find the right person that can do that. And maybe that's a bet I'm placing. It's a $10,000 bet I'm placing for three months. Can we do this? Will it work with the rest of our channels? Can I get it off the ground with enough signal? Then that becomes a little interesting to me. Again, I'm not going to grind out all the things, but I get to do the fun part of, like, picking it apart, figuring it out, researching a bit. I won't execute it myself, but I'll know enough to know what good is.
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Yeah. Yeah. And that's a superpower, man. I'm in the same. I'm in the same boat, and it's like, you know, it's the who not how thing, to a fair extent. It's like we have this problem. Who can solve this problem for us? Like, you're not going to go become an expert in this thing, but. But you have the. All of the tools to decide that. That's the thing. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Josh, where is the best place for folks to connect with you so referralrock.com, obviously. But LinkedIn, Twitter, what's the best place?
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I'm still around. I'm around on both on LinkedIn and Twitter. I'm not as actively posting as I have in prior years. So I would definitely say I definitely check more DM's on on LinkedIn but people because, so I think that's a good place. I'm probably trying to place a little more energy over there, but I'm still watching, you know, Twitter. The challenge is Twitter. There's that whole dark DM section of people you aren't connected to. And Twitter's lately really erratic. But honestly, if people are there and reaching out there, I'll probably find it as well. But that's probably the best place. And yeah, I think that's it.
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Awesome, buddy. Thanks for coming on. This is fun.
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Cool. Well, thanks for having me, Craig.
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Yeah.
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All right. Talk to you later.
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Hello. Welcome back to Rogue startups. I'm your host, Craig Hewitt. Today I'm chatting with Josh Ho, founder of Referral Rock. Josh and I have known each other for a few years. We're actually kind of brief competitors. I'm sure he doesn't even know when I owned a kind of referral or affiliate management SaaS platform a decade ago, it seems like now. But Josh is someone who I've known through Twitter and just really respect the company he's built at Referral Rock. In this episode, we talk about him as a founder and the journey that he's been on. Talk about the company hitting plateaus, not from a growth lead churn perspective, but from an internal and operations perspective and a team perspective, which I think is interesting. Josh and I talk about the difference from going from operator to leader to visionary status within the company. Definitely a place that he's at where he's out of the main part of most of the business. It's always the place where a lot of us want to get to is like, hey, how can I take myself out of the business so better and smarter people can be doing these things that will move the business forward more so than I can probably. So. Hope you enjoyed this episode with Josh. I sure did. Let's dive in. So, Josh, I have known you or known of you for, like, a long time. I think we run in a lot of the same kind of circles. You run referral rock and have for, like, a similar amount of time as run castos. How long has it been?
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I always, I always. The date, I always have firm in my head that I'll remember is the first paying customer. So it was actually June around this time of 2015. So, yeah, you know, there's the pre idea, building it mvp ish stuff. But then, you know that first, I think what some of our, one of my friends calls stranger money. Like, the first time that hits your account, it's like, yeah, huh. Okay, this is legit. This is real. And then, of course, there's like, okay, where can it get to? Where can I, you know, leave whatever full time, other income stream types of stuff to start to focus? But there's that. If you look on LinkedIn or anywhere else, it officially referral Rock Inc. Was, you know, 2017. And there's stories behind why that happened then, but that's essentially it.
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So, yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. And, like, I love chatting with kind of later stage founders that are still kind of, you guys are totally bootstrapped, I think. But, like, you cross the chasm from, like, do it all myself and then have, like, a contractor to, like, you got the whole team and you're the visionary, right? Like, are you. Are you pretty much there?
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Yeah, I'm pretty much there. And. And, I mean, there's obviously. There's always going to be stuff you don't enjoy doing, but I say the large majority, and it is within my capability to not have to do the things I don't necessarily want to do. Right. There's plenty of times where I had to tap myself on the shoulder and be like, all right, Josh, you got to pull us through XYZ because there's no one else that's going to do it. And I have to cut my, you know, my vision of being a visionary on hold and just, like, do the thing to make sure we're surviving and get stuff back on track and hopefully cover my tracks, and then, like, you know, I'm hopefully back onto the path I want to be on personally.
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Yeah. So how. So, like, I. We got close. Like, we raised some money and kind of had built out the entire team, got close to that. You know, whatever didn't work out, we laid off, you know, some of the team. I'm back kind of in the weeds to a fair extent with, like, sales and kind of marketing strategy, I would say. So, like, pretty hands off for, like, product success, support, development, for sure. Right.
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Not the whole shebang. You've got. You've got. Still got support.
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Yeah, I'm doing okay. I'm doing okay. But, like, how does that affect you mentally when you're like, I'm in visionary mode, and then I'm like, I gotta, like, log into activecampaign and, like, do something. Like, how is that hard?
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Yeah, it's just. Yeah, I mean, I guess it's sort of the. I don't know. I guess I try to flip a bit in terms of, you know, whatever little hacks I can do to make myself feel okay with those things. Right. So at the end of it, I know it's like, well, I'm the only one that can do it. Okay, that's fine. And then, you know, being like, okay. Taking a breath and being like, that stinks. That's like, I shouldn't be that anymore. That shouldn't be what I. And then you get over yourself and you have to have that moment. For me, it's just like, okay, well, can I be the hero? How can I think about this and almost reposition my brain to be like, okay, all right, let me block stuff out. If I sprint on this. Like, let's. It's kind of like time boxing. Let me think of the next three days. If all I'm doing is that, like, how far can I get? Usually once I kind of clear off and have my moment of, I would say, complaint and my own personal entitlement and my own just little. I shouldn't have to do this. Like, when those words come out of your mouth, you're like, yeah, and then you're also like, okay, but that's not going to help anything anymore. Let me go and dig in. And usually once I've dug in and once I've got the momentum and I'm in the thing, you're back into that maker mode that back on what we all know we're capable of because we had to do it before, and then you're into, okay, you know what, now I'm in there. Now that I've opened up activecampaign, and as long as I'm not letting that creep of, I shouldn't be doing this, come in. And I that usually I can get enough momentum to find the joy in the task again. Find the joy and the nuance of, like, oh, you know what? I'm crafting again, I'm making again and sort of, but setting up those blocks helps. Like, okay, it's two days in. How far can I get? And usually once you're in that, then it's like, okay, now I'm in there, and now it's, okay. Cause now, you know what? I'm the only one that can do it, right. You know, and you're just like, so that's what's helped me in those times. And to kind of, yeah, it's like that mind, mind shift change.
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Something. Like, I've been reflecting a fair bit lately on, like, we, yeah, we raised money. We kind of grew the team. We, you know, it wasn't going to work out. Right. Those lines were not going to cross. And so we had to, we had to downsize the team. And I've reflected on that a lot lately. And, like, what did I do wrong as a manager, you know, and as, like a, as the visionary? And I think, I think one of the things is I was, I want to say I'm too nice. I was too nice.
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I'm way too nice, too.
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And, like, having Superman syndrome a little bit where, like, I can just do this and I can own you salespeople getting your leads, or you marketing person driving more leads or you guys closing more deals or whatever. Like, I kind of always felt like it came to me where, like, I think. I think that's part of it, but I think it's also not. Like that's part of the problem. Like, part of it is fucking the box. The buck stops with you. Right. Ultimately, like, you're the founder. You are Superman. And I think we all need to empower ourselves to be that. But also, like, you know, fucking Bezos is not taking any sales calls. Right? Like, at some point, it is entirely on the team to do the thing, and you just say, that's the finish line. Like, how do you look at that? And then how do you. On, like, a day to day basis, when the team goes, there's a problem, how do you not go, well, I'm fucking Superman. Like, I'll just fix it. Because you could, of course. And, like, three strokes of the keyboard, you could just fix it. How do you put it back on the team? It'd be like, well, I don't know. How would you solve this problem? Or whatever that looks like?
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I mean, that is the harder, harder part, I would say. It's hard for me to. All I could say is what I could think about now. Right. It's hard to envision what I was like in those certain specific situations. But I would just say the biggest blessing I've had was I found a bunch of key people. So there are definitely a key people that I am a layer removed right now from the. I would say the individual contributor work. Right? So. And I. And I'm actually technically, like, two layers removed. Right. So there is a team of, I would say of player, coach types of people that are around me in different subject matters, whether it's the, you know, the tech lead for the tech stack and the software development and the infrastructure. So that's, like, one. And then I have a product designer who also has, like, been a product manager as well in the past with that sort of. That product hybrid. And then, honestly, the biggest stroke of luck I ever had was finding the person I now consider, like, my business partner. So that was super early. This back to where we started the conversation. That was 2017. That was the reason we incorporated, because I wanted to give him some shares. So it was. I worked with him for six months. His name is Micah. He's awesome. And I don't know where I'd be without him, because right now, a lot of those things was either with me working with him being like, okay, well, how would you solve that? But also knowing he had the wherewithal and he had my trust to do those things. Right. And then it's turned into where I was delegating to him and he was doing it himself. And then he developed a team, and he developed people around him that he could rely on some leaders and some other individual contributors. How we built our hiring pipeline around that, like, that's the golden thing I found. And so it was me just finding the one person to coach, not trying to coach the many, because I think I personally wouldn't have the patience to be coaching from scratch. Coaching like, you know, using a metaphor from kindergarten. Right. Like type of thing or at different stages and different roles that you might need at the company. And I was fortunate enough to find someone pretty early on that was able to handle a lot more than I kind of ever even foresaw.
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Yeah, yeah. And what kind of role.
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So luck, you know?
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Luck, yeah, yeah. What kind of role is Micah in? Like, what area of the company?
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So his operate, I would say he held off the other side. So as I look at the main divides of the company, it's like product and marketing is one side. And then as much as where I've. Where I sit and he has led up what I'll call operations. So it's sales and customer success are the big pieces of that. So anything really, like, I can. It's almost like the bookends I can handle the bookends of, like, I can bring them to the door. You know, he kind of walked them through, get the tours, and I'm architecting kind of the system. So I see the two sides of it.
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It's funny, I think I probably won't ever run another SaaS business. If I do, I won't do it by myself. Do you agree? Because you kind of largely are like a solo founder with some equity.
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Yes, I got it off the ground. So it was making revenue before. And when I first met Micah, he was essentially the first person that, well, I made a horrible first sales hire outside of myself that just went up in flames. And it was just a horrible mismatch. And I was at the point where I'm, like, dividing my time between taking sales calls and building the product. And I had a split calendar, so I'm like, days off or certain afternoons I'm doing this and coding and doing that and product. And what happened was I was in so much pain of that, and I'm just like, at that point, just like anyone that could take these calls, even if you're only closing, like, a very half of what I was, I don't care. I just need to get some relief on that, because, you know, everything was. Everything was, like, piling up. And he actually reached out to me, saw a job post, reached out to me. And if you ever met him, it'd be a funny thing. But one of his first things, when I talked to him, he's just like, hey, I can do everything you can do but code. And I'm like, okay, sure, but I don't care. I don't know if I 100% believe that, but that's okay. And go ahead. And, you know, I started routing sales calls to him. I was like, if you can do some of these sales calls and close almost half of what I. You know, what I do, it doesn't matter, you know? And he's like, okay, if this works out well, is. He's like, is. Is, you know, equity on the table. I'm like, if this works out, we could figure out, you know, yeah, something. And, you know, within six months. So, I mean, again, I did not go on. I can't tell you how I was, like, this is my perfect job posting to find this person. Like, none of that just blind, you know, blind luck type of thing, but also knowing when to hold on to a person and what to do with them and where they fit in your puzzle of what you're good at and what you're not. So I would agree. I would not do it without a founding team. Right. Of that rounds out those skill sets. Cause I know what I don't like to do or what I'm willing to do once, but probably don't care to do again.
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Exactly.
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Yeah.
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Yeah. That's a big part of it. It's like, we. We did the hard work, and we've gotten kind of gotten over the hump to some extent, you know? And so, like, I think that we look back and say, fuck, that was really hard. And all this gray hair is the result of that, I think. So. So, yeah, I think I wouldn't couch it up to luck entirely. I think you were, like, aware of, like, what you needed and. And humble enough to recognize, like, I need this kind of person. Maybe the luck was they came into your life at the right time, but, like, you got to be open to that, to kind of be ready to accept it, so, yeah, that's awesome. That's awesome. A founding team. Yeah, that's a big term, right? Like, we're not talking a dude that can code. We're talking, like, several people, probably, right? Like, I think if I. If I was going to do another sass. Well, first of all. It would be, it would be a huge swing. Right? It wouldn't be I can get to ten grand or 10 million ARR. It would be like we're going to get acquired by Salesforce or something. You know, like, and you need, you need. Yeah, like for me and probably maybe for you. Like I would need, I would need like an operations person. I would, I would definitely need like a product person and a lead developer.
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Right.
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And I would want to lead kind of go to market but nothing else. I think that's my capacity these days.
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Yeah. And I think that's the one that people don't think like you mentioned operations and that's one that I think most like when we started out or we don't think about. Right. And I don't think that most people think about that, how much that matters because everyone is thinking about, I'm going to, you know, launch a thing. All I need is a product and marketing. I think I feel like that the, the bootstrap audiences have been at least educated enough. They can't get around not hearing that they need to focus on marketing anymore. I hope now whether they come in and still believe to build it and they will come, but soon that'll hit them in the face and they will learn that they have to do some sales and marketing side. Yeah, yeah, I, but the operations side, no one talks about. Right. Like, no one talks about like, okay, what does it take to get all these boats running on time? Right. Like I hear when people talk about the advantage of speed and they always think about speed of like, deployment, speed of product, speed of like, getting out there in the market, that type of stuff. But I think strong operations actually is speed. Like, it's more of like how, what is the, your operating processes for like hiring or what is it for, you know, all these things, like, you know, just like managing support teams and managing all these training, internal training, like all these other, that just everything else gets bucketed into ops and no one talks about, you know, that everyone else talks about the main heroes on the front line of like, yeah, it's the product and the marketing. Right. But all the other glue that makes it all happen is like so critical.
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Yeah. And as a result it comes to you as the founder and you're like, whatever. I want to go with a rock star, man. I want to go with the shit that like, you know, that directly makes us money. And I think to our peril, we neglect the boring fundamental stuff. Very guilty. I think one kind of like scary thing is we've never had like an HR issue in our company, knock on wood. But like, if we did, what would happen? You know, like it would come to me or come to you, probably.
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I'm HR. I'm still HR.
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Yeah. And like, I don't know what to do like that. That's just a weird thing to think about. It's like, you know, especially, like, we're both in us, we have us employees. Like, there's some very serious, like, legal and regulatory compliance things that we could fuck up. Anyways, whatever. Put it on the list of stuff that I don't really worry about but is always there in the back of my mind. Right, yeah, yeah. You mentioned marketing. I like how you think about marketing. We've chatted a few times, just offline about kind of marketing and growth and stuff. I know you've done quite a bit of content in the past. Is that, is it fair to say, like, that's a fair part of your growth strategy today is like, content marketing and SEO?
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I would say. I'll say SEO is, has been a, has been our bell cow for many, many years. We started off on a good foot, mostly because I had some previous experience with SEO and search terms and things like that at a startup. I had a previous to referral rock. So I sort of, yeah, I kind of just used that playbook that I had, was able to rank for terms. Understood that, you know, what search could do in terms of getting attention and distribution. I would say now it is. And the reason I say SEO, because I would say it is, we have mostly written content for search engines. Right. Full stop. I would say content marketing in its truest form is probably a little different. Right. It's more of like, what you're doing on YouTube. It's more of like, stuff that is actually like, I would say the SEO content we're doing is educational. It's not thought provoking, it's not attention grabbing, it's not like thought leadership. It's not anything that is really going to elevate referral rack as a brand. But I. It keeps us in the conversation for the people that are looking for the software that we build.
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We've largely done the same. Right. We've got hundreds of blog posts and dozens of pages on the site. We get, I don't know, before helpful content, we got about 100,000 unique visitors a month. It's like 85 now. I feel like I'm, whatever.
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Yeah.
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But, man, I see an enormous change happening in the industry. Like, no shit. Our SEO consultant is only doing YouTube stuff right now. We were working another one who is like, I mean, I won't call him out by name, but, like, we started working with them and then he wrote something on Twitter. He's like, I probably won't ever write another SEO newsletter again. And then you see this stuff all over the place. I see one of the advisors in tiny seed runs a very, very, very successful big company that we all know. And he said to us, someone was like, hey, how would you grow your company if you were starting today? He's like, well, the shit I did to grow my company wouldn't work today. And that is content marketing and SEO. He's like, it just wouldn't work. And so I don't know what I would do. And so I see all those things and I see, like, and people are probably, like, yelling at their, at their windshields or their phones right now saying, craig, just fucking do something different. But, like, I think that we're probably not unique. And you might be in the same boat where, like, we did a thing to get us here. We're going to talk about plateaus and maybe this is how we'll transition. Is it like, we've kind of slowed our growth rate. Right. And that thing is not the thing that's going to get us to the next step.
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Right.
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Like, do you agree generally that, like, an SEO is just, you might, you might have.
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It's definitely different, you know? Yeah, it's definitely worse. I agree with it's worse. And why I brought up that nuanced difference between the content market, because we haven't done that other side. Now I think we have an opportunity to do that. And the way I think about it now is regardless of the trend, because the trend in SEO was for long period going up into the right. Like, if you knew how to do this stuff, there were more searchers coming online. Like, more. Especially in the years of, you know, zero interest rate stuff, you had just more businesses popping up that may or may not should have popped up in those, you know, if it wasn't that time. But there were just more buyers, right? Yeah, we all saw it and hopefully we benefited and, but, like, I just view it as, I don't think search is going away. I think the habits of the buy, at least for our buyers. Right?
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Yeah.
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If I'm thinking a lot of them are SMBs and just across the board, like, whether it's a well known tech company or it's a little e commerce shop or whether it's a mom and pop mosquito repellent company. Those are all customers, types of customers that we have, but they're still searching. So I don't think that's going to just drop off the table. If I was to start again today, I'd still invest in SEO. Would it get me to where I am today? Probably nothing. And will it flatline or will it diminish over time? Potentially, but it's still a skill set I have. It's still knowing how to rank, knowing how to build. Build something that I think is still a competitive advantage as much and maybe honestly, the people that are now saying they wouldn't do SEO. Great, bye bye. Like, less competition.
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That's definitely something I think of. Yeah.
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So I think about it as, like, I have that muscle and I think about it as an asset. And unless it just totally vanishes, like, which do I believe it will? No. Will it diminish? Sure, but still be, it's still super effective and super cost effective from, like, how many types of things? Like, still YouTube is good, but at the same time, you still have to build an audience. There's more of a social algorithm. There's more of a lot of other things. It's hit driven. It's a little more like just the other social media types of things, but does have some staying power because it does have search involved, too. So I think about it as layering and, like, it's still an advantage. And now we're looking for how can we layer on? We're still getting traffic and maybe it's going to drop by 20% next year, but still that 80% that I have, how can I capitalize on that better? So that leads us to, like, could we up our game on lead magnets? Right? Like, it may not be a new tactic, but at the same time, can we capture more? Maybe it dropped 20%, but did I get 30% more resonance with the 80% I was left over with? So that's the cards I have right now. So those are what I'm, what I'm continuing to play with, if that makes sense.
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Yeah. As you evaluate, like, okay, so kind of SEO is the base for this and we're going to add these layers on top of it. How do you think about, like, picking that one? Because, like, I always want to go, like, kind of closest to the customer and the thing with the most effect. So that's typically, like, lead magnets, bottom of the funnel, high buyer intent stuff. But then when do you go, like, off the website, you know, to YouTube or when do you go to influencer marketing or when do you, like, how do you think about, like, structuring that decision?
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I mean, with, where can I have an advantage? So because I have the SEO, what is going to play well with. With SEO, right? So one play, like, down the funnel, like we said, is like lead magnets. But here's another thing. Like, we've started doing some YouTube stuff. If I looked back at the original YouTube videos we had up for years, it was like, oh, my God, who left this channel? And. But when we kind of kick started it recently, in the past, like, I would say couple months, I'm like, okay, well, what do I have? So we started from a yemenite. Hey, we have these articles that rank well and get a lot of traffic. If I want to seed YouTube, I need to have a video version of this article that also may have some search terms. I don't know as much about YouTube SEO, but we have one for referral code. Referral code is a very generic, educational term. High volume, not the best conversion, but hey, there's eyeballs, there's viewers, there's vanity metrics going there.
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Brand.
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We made a video. It's a two or three minute video, and now we put it on that article. Views are getting that article. People are now viewing that channel a little bit. Maybe they'll watch the next video. So that's where I'm looking at, like, what is, what is something that I was strong in? Even if it's fading, and even if only 10% or 20% funnel, at least I can seed it. At least I can start the baseline of some YouTube metrics that hopefully will be tall enough to ride the ride of YouTube that will hopefully get blessed more by the algorithm because we're starting to generate, you know, subject matter content. They're getting viewerships, it's getting a few subscribers. Right. We're not full on trying the whole YouTube like, playbook, but let's establish a baseline there from what we have. So that's kind of how I've been thinking about it. I'm also thinking about, like, we do need to more actively have more of them, but where am I gonna place my time? Because I probably have enough time to really think about one channel with really good strength. Right. Like, another idea out of this SEO traffic is, you know, is, is a newsletter like a more media style newsletter? Is that. Is that something we could pull off? We're still getting people on our content, and could we taste them with a certain style newsletter? You know, whether it's like a morning brew or that type of thing. Could we come up with a creative angle? And again I'm getting the traffic today but can I convert it into more of an owned and then also I can promote my YouTube stuff there like so I'm trying to kind of flywheel these things together of what I have and patchwork it. But can I then make it become a first 1st party channel? Right now YouTube is like a second party channel for us. But can it become, have enough base, you know, same thing with social media. How do these things, what is going to be my one two mix? That is really going to hopefully make it so I'm not dependent on purely SEO and word of mouth anymore, right?
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Yeah, no, I love it man. I think just to restate what you said is we think about it a lot from our YouTube strategy perspective. The obvious one is product updates. We have a new thing. Hey, that's my favorite. And Ahrefs is always the example I point to is this is how you do SEO with Ahrefs. This is how you do keyword research. Ahrefs helps you do that. This is how you get your podcast live on Spotify. This is how Kaspus does that. We had to get all those boxes checked first. As a SaaS company on YouTube, I think that strategy is a little different. And then exactly what you said is we got a fucking 200 blog posts. There's 200 videos. Every blog post should have a video. They're super easy because I just go pull up the blog post, skim it, flip the camera on, talk for eight minutes and you're there. So yeah, I really like that. And I think I was chatting with one of our team members this morning about this and I said, hey man, he's in support. I was like, hey, I need you to be feeding me ideas because you're talking to the customers all the time. That's gold. And you see this in really high performing organizations where they have this customer product marketing and sales feedback, right? Like the shit that's going on in a sales call is the marketing collateral, right? Like the language that the customer is saying is the marketing collateral is the thing that's driving this is that getting the new people in the door is the questions that supports having, which is the content that marketing then creates. Like it's just, it should be this virtuous continuous cycle and we have been banging this drum forever. And, and like solace to newer founders, like it's never done, it's never done. And it is. I think it's everything, man. It's everything about like as founders who are a little more removed from like the front line. Super important. Like, I need to actually be seeing what people are talking about. Yeah, I just, anyways, that, yeah, that's, that's what we're doing. We're getting input from, from support about what customers are saying, product update stuff and then just content on how to do the thing in our industry. Yeah, right.
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Yeah. And I'd focus, like what we've done, we focused on the ones that, honestly, we just first went like, which are the blog posts that are getting the most traffic and those are probably the easiest ones. That ones you've had, you've probably paid the most attention to. So from like a quality content perspective, they're good. And honestly, sometimes if you haven't paid much attention because sometimes we, no, we're all busy doing all kinds of other stuff and you might outsource someone to write that content and then you go and look at it and you're like, yeah, I need to make some corrections. Hey, you know what? Craig's got some insights. Let's lay some new insights into this. That's the stuff that might be more attractive in YouTube. So we've actually used that as an opportunity to vet old articles and then go, actually, let me just talk through what I would change in this article. And then we have someone make those updates and then we do the video. So it's sort of like, can we parallel those things of using it like my time and attention to pay attention to a piece of content? Because again, you can easily get wrapped yourself into the founder, like, I shouldn't have to view, I shouldn't have to edit and vet content, but at the same time, you probably have the most insight. So it's like, but could I just talk through this quickly and then send it to my team to update it? And now I have an idea and now I can go and in an hour, bang out solid review, get that content leveled up and also come out with a great script that I can just go blab on YouTube, create a video, and now I've got updated content. I've got a new YouTube video on it that's feeding our channel and that's a nice little, what I'm calling vector energy. I could do that if I just do the parts of it that I enjoy and use that time as my own captive audience to kind of make it happen.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. I agree with all that. I'll just add one kind of layer to that is we don't just look at the stuff we rank for, but kind of the stuff we don't quite rank for sure. So if you're looking at hrefs, you know, they have like the, you know, position, eleven to 50 or whatever, but there's high search volume for, we'll make a video about that. Just knowing, like, hey, the blog post, for whatever reason, like, we don't have topical authority or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, we'll make a video about that thing in the hopes that it helps the blog post.
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So, yeah, yeah, I think those things. I think whether, who knows what are going on in the algorithms, but I do believe, like, the more you can attach your properties to those things, and Google's not dumb, right? Like, they know these things. It's like, okay, great. There should be a transition level of, you know, topical authority with YouTube plus, you know, this, who owns this, they know those things. You know, it's like, so I do feel like, yeah, maybe I'm not ranking for it, for the content, but hey, the video is doing well. If Google's smart, which I think they are, they're going to factor in all these things and using their own assets and their own real estate. Right. And if you're a fan and doing the things on their platform, like, the way that they serves their users. Right, like, you'll be rewarded for it.
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Yeah, yeah, totally, totally. I want to talk about plateauing because, like, well, I'll share from our perspective, and I don't know if you guys have just been a rocket ship the whole time. Like, we. Nope, we definitely, it's interesting. We grew very linearly in a positive way for a long time. That has slowed a little bit. We're definitely still growing, but it slowed a bit. And, yeah, it's challenging as a founder, you start to question a lot of your self and worth and ability. Sure. I would say we're still in it to a large extent. Like, I think we have some things that are working better than they were, but definitely not at the kind of growth rate that I want. How do you like, it sounds like this has happened. How do you look at it? How do you evaluate it? Where are you guys in that kind of life cycle?
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I would say we're at a, like, we had a similar start. I would say in terms of, you know, what we were doing was working and it was a fairly, like a linear type of growth, but to the point of where, you know, hey, early years, it's like, no, there weren't ever, like, I mean, aside from taking the outliers of the, you know, three months look, we grew 300%. We drew 400. Aside from that. But looking at spans of year and stuff like that, you know, there was a time that we were consistently like, 50% growth, 50% growth a year, and it's like, okay, cool, this is nice, right? This is. This is steady. This is controllable. We knew what we were doing. We knew what we were on, when to update in the product. We knew, you know, we felt like we knew what we were doing. And then we hit a. We hit a plateau. And it was post. It was, I think this is 2022, wherever it hit us, early 2022. So it was post Covid, post, like, existential crisis, and then, oh, crap, we're going again. Cool. Nothing to worry about. Okay. We're all inside, you know, all that stuff that we all went through, but. So this was early 2022, and we had. Our plateau was a. This one was a painful. I would say it was a painful year and a half of all. A lot of things we thought we had solved broke, right? So a lot of it was internal operations. Like, we talked about operations. It was, you know, things we did right, but then drifted and forgot to do again. Right. Like that type of stuff. But it compounded, and it compounded because we have a lot of internal people doing, you know, it's like, you know, onboarding someone that it's challenging for someone to launch a referral program. I don't know as much about your podcast audience, but I would figure it's pretty. Once someone is buying, hosting, they're starting to produce some episodes reasonably quickly, and they might be thinking about it forever before they even talk to you. But oftentimes for us, the average customer probably takes, I would say, 40 days to launch the referral program from when they even start to pay. There's a lot of onboarding. There's a lot of this and that. I would say that whole team had a. Had a big existential crisis of, like, leadership, of we had a person and all great people. They were like, we're leading the team. And she didn't realize. She didn't want to manage anymore. And then we also had two senior people, like, leave within three months. Not related, but it just imploded. Right. And from a five person team, when you have three senior people, one that wants to step down, still hung out there and tried to help us fix it. And to that leave, and all of a sudden you have the junior person that just joined the team going, what am I doing?
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Yeah, interesting.
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So, yeah, that happened. And I would say the challenging part for that, it was when you talk about leading indicators and lagging indicators, revenue still actually looked good. But the problem is like, if you look at the leading indicator of people weren't being onboarded correctly, like, it took a while for that revenue to show up and realize like, we had this drought of probably, I would say a year. And if any customers are listening, apologies for if you were onboarded during that phase. But it was chaotic and we, what we had working was no longer like, we couldn't implement. So it's like, you know what to do, but you can't, like, yeah, you gotta hire, you gotta figure out this. You gotta, again, buck up and take some calls or pull from other talent in other areas and stall product development. Stall other areas. And that's what happened. And it took, like I said, about a year and a half to right the ship to get it back to like, repeatable. And it's, those are the worst. It's like you had the problem solved and then one little thing crumbles and then another one crumbles and all of a sudden you're, you're sitting there with a pile of wood.
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No, no, totally. We didn't have the same situation. But I can relate in that the business kind of changes and the priorities of the business and the people and the things that the company needs changed. I think maybe that's the universal. Right. It's like your flavor of this will change and everyone will go through this, right? Like no one is this, like, no one's a rocket ship. Very few. You shouldn't plan on being a rocket ship. You should plan on probably what you and I did, which is just fucking, you know, grinding it.
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We'll just say grinding it out.
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Yeah, grinding it out. Right. Like, because I guess the reality of like, actually having the skills to build a great business is figuring that out, right? Like you might get lucky and you might, you might just be, what is it, beehive? You know, like, yeah, they're a little lucky, right? They built a great product, but I don't know that the skills of that founder or founding team kind of have all this stuff figured out anyways. Not to detract, great company, great product, all this kind of stuff. But like, I think you and I have experienced some things that they haven't maybe.
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Right, yeah, market conditions. Right.
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Market.
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Certain conditions, timing of markethood. Not that anyone could foresee the different things, like, if, you know, but those happen, but if it doesn't happen for you, and I think you're right, it's like, I think everyone approaches these, and you want to approach it with the optimistic dream as a founder, that you're going to be one of those. But the reality is most people aren't. Right. And then now it's like, if you're willing to grind, and that's what's really going to separate the ones is like, okay, I can pull through. If I'm not lucky and still make a good outcome, I could still squeeze this out, and maybe it won't be perfect, but. And I do want to play the game because maybe my cards do come up, and that's okay, too, right? Like, hey, I am. You know, I'd love to. I'm not jealous of them, but at the same time, like, okay, but, hey, I'm gonna play my game and I play the cards, and I can, you know, grind out an outcome out of it. Like, you know what? I want to do it again, that's a different question. Right.
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But, yeah, right, right. No, totally, totally. I want to ask about, like, the future of the business for you. And, like, I'm sure this is where I don't get. I don't talk freely about this stuff, but just to make conceptually, maybe you obviously hear about, like, oh, I grew the business, then I sold for whatever reason. And that is a good or a bad outcome, maybe, but, like, that's an outcome. Their outcome is bad, which is like, it didn't work, and I shut it down. That doesn't sound like it's you. But then the middle ground is like a couple different flavors of, like, I saw Ben Orenstein from Tuple recently. He's like, one of the founders promoted him to CEO, and Ben just stepped aside. Had Jason Cohen on the podcast about six weeks ago, and he did that several times. Obviously, different scales of companies, but I like this as an alternative path sometimes where, sure, you can sell the business, but do you want to sell the business? The world will always need referral programs. The world will probably always need podcast hosting. Do I want to sell the business or do I want to keep it, but not be actively involved on a day to day basis? Delegate, bring in someone as a GM or something like that. Just generally, how do you think about that?
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I would say there's probably depends, but for us, there's a lot I still have in this. In this vision. Right. So when we talked earlier about just being the visionary, I still have a lot of things to test out to see if they're right or not, if that makes sense. Right. I have a direction that I want to do with the product. I still have a lot of energy and a lot of ideas on things that I'm excited to try to see if they can work right. So that is exciting for me. And being out of the day to day, I can spend more time crafting that. Right. Or testing that. I can test an idea on a little widget on one of these high traffic blog posts. Do I get enough interest for this one little idea? Is there something there? It's taking a small bet, but probably not depending on my marketing team to do all that. It's like, okay, I can do that and I can figure it out. And now, do I spend some time, you know, crafting copy around this? Do I spend some time, like, you know, tinkering with the idea of prototyping this part of the product and then start to work with my product manager and some other things? So, yeah, there's a lot. I'm still like, I would say my, I don't feel like my work is finished, if that makes sense. So for me, it's probably like, until that is, and I don't, you don't know when that's gonna end. I was like, I've also questioned that. I was like, I could end tomorrow. That could end in a month. Likely not. I think in my head, it's probably at least a couple years from here. So that's one of the things that I think for me is I will have a challenging time hanging it up until either something just really crushes me from a day to day operation standpoint again, which could happen, or I just run out of this energy to want to answer these questions about my vision, so to speak.
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Yeah, yeah. No, I align a lot with that. Like, first of all, I kind of feel weird talking about this as we have investors, but to my investors, I definitely have a ton of passion for the business and the space still, I think maybe even more than ever as it relates to the content marketing and SEO perspective. Like, podcasting is in a better space than it's ever been. Yeah. So I think that there is some tailwinds there. I think YouTube confuses that a little bit, but maybe not. Yeah. And we. Yeah. From, from a business and a product perspective, especially. Yes. From a business and a product perspective, I really, I really like it. It is challenging to be facing this need for another layer of customer acquisition. You know, I think if you'd have said you can just hammer on SEO and content marketing, I'd have been like, cool. Cause like, really good at it. It kind of vibes with me, you know, personally, but it's not the reality. And so, like, I think that's the biggest speed bump, to borrow rob wallingism, the biggest speed bump for me is like, in a way, you're kind of like, adding that layer is hard because it's like, fuck what layer? You know, and who's gonna execute on it? And, like, is it me or is it someone else? Like that. That's kind of like not a whole new business, but it's a whole new channel. And that's hard at this stage to grind. That's kind of my hesitation or my obstacle, I guess, at this point. Otherwise, I fucking love the business. We're profitable, we're growing largely. The business is not dependent on me. We're going a week from now. We're going on vacation for ten days, and I'm bringing my laptop, but I'm planning on doing zero work. Pretty amazing. I pay myself well. Pretty amazing, all things considered. And so I do kind of kick myself in the head sometimes saying, like, stop. Stop bitching. Like, you actually have, like, a really great situation.
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There's a lot of people that would kill to be in your spot. Right?
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Yeah, yeah. But I think it's, it's what makes us a founder, right? Is like, it's, it's never, it's never done. It might be good enough, and I think maybe that's the difference. Like, it's good enough, but it's not done. And that's kind of where I am.
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Right? I. Right? Yeah. Like, for me, the bigger, like I said, the interesting things for me are on the product front. And also it ties with some of the marketing. Right. Like, because I think as I see it now, where I realize where the, I would say the stuff that is going to be the most effective for the business is in between that line of marketing and product. For us, like, because it is, we're a horizontal market. It is very widespread. Like I mentioned, all the different types of businesses, are they going to really care about, like, integration number four that is down there on their pecking order. We did this neat little trick. No. Right? Like, the things that are going to be important are these real needle movers that sit in that line of what is interesting to someone that is, like, familiar with referral marketing. Like, huh? I never thought about it that way. Oh, and the product does it that way. That's the stuff that I'm, like, really excited about. So this is in that crosshair of that. So that's enough energy for me. But then, like, I said the other part of the. Yeah, I agree. Is like, am I excited about trying to, like, stand up another, like, channel, so to speak? Not really. But where I am the most, hopefully, at least pulling over some momentum, is those other little parts of where I can get those transitory effects of the other one to maybe kickstart them. So I'm not starting from ground zero on those ones. So that's going to be. That's going to be interesting. Or what I'm doing is like, okay, can I allocate some money towards. I know there's a playbook here for better, you know, thought leadership content. I don't have the time to pull it off. I don't have the patience to sit and write these articles because I want to do these other things, but maybe I can find someone that can, like, there's enough established playbooks out there. You see Rand Fishkin killing it with, like, social and, like, creative articles. Like, yeah, you know, I feel like I have half the ideas but don't have the patience for the execution. Now, can I find a person that could help that? And then if we add that to our social channels and this stuff, like, could that. Could that work? I don't know. So more of my thinking is like, can I be in the founder operational standpoint where I'm taking more educated bets? So I might be researching these flywheels and understanding how this mechanic can work enough that I can vet and find the right person that can do that. And maybe that's a bet I'm placing. It's a $10,000 bet I'm placing for three months. Can we do this? Will it work with the rest of our channels? Can I get it off the ground with enough signal? Then that becomes a little interesting to me. Again, I'm not going to grind out all the things, but I get to do the fun part of, like, picking it apart, figuring it out, researching a bit. I won't execute it myself, but I'll know enough to know what good is.
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Yeah. Yeah. And that's a superpower, man. I'm in the same. I'm in the same boat, and it's like, you know, it's the who not how thing, to a fair extent. It's like we have this problem. Who can solve this problem for us? Like, you're not going to go become an expert in this thing, but. But you have the. All of the tools to decide that. That's the thing. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Josh, where is the best place for folks to connect with you so referralrock.com, obviously. But LinkedIn, Twitter, what's the best place?
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I'm still around. I'm around on both on LinkedIn and Twitter. I'm not as actively posting as I have in prior years. So I would definitely say I definitely check more DM's on on LinkedIn but people because, so I think that's a good place. I'm probably trying to place a little more energy over there, but I'm still watching, you know, Twitter. The challenge is Twitter. There's that whole dark DM section of people you aren't connected to. And Twitter's lately really erratic. But honestly, if people are there and reaching out there, I'll probably find it as well. But that's probably the best place. And yeah, I think that's it.
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Awesome, buddy. Thanks for coming on. This is fun.
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Cool. Well, thanks for having me, Craig.
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Yeah.
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All right. Talk to you later.
