How to build a tech company (with zero tech experience)

Andrew: Abhi, how do I make this a win for you?

Abhi: I mean, honestly, ask the tough questions. Make it revealing for me. Make me answer your questions directly. I’m looking forward to this, specifically, because, you know, I’m in a pretty reflective mood and we’ve been going through a lot, so I want you to help me kind of externalize all these things.

Andrew: What’s the part that you’ve been looking at right now? When you’re internalizing yourself, what are you looking at?

Abhi: How do I grow as a leader? How do I continue to motivate my team? You know, they’re looking to me for answers on tough questions that I don’t necessarily have the answers to. But how do I still be transparent with them? How do I still give them something that they can relate to and can still rally behind? Those are all really important topics that I’m still trying to figure out.

Andrew: If you’re going to be open with yourself about your shortcomings as a leader, what would they be?

Abhi: I have no . . . I’m not a coder. I’m not a programmer. I’m not a tech mastermind, you know. Honestly, I’ve just gotten here through persistence, and it’s kind of hard to say, you know, that’s a tangible really encapsulated talent. So, you know, I need to figure how to make that translate to a leadership skill set, you know, to be able to still say, “Listen. Follow me. You know, work with me.”

Andrew: But you wouldn’t be worried about it if you hadn’t had an experience that you felt wasn’t as good as you’d like it to be.

Abhi: Yeah, definitely.

Andrew: Give me an example of that.

Abhi: Yeah. Sure. So, for example, our team hasn’t always been, we haven’t always had the best luck finding teammates. You know, we’re in Gainesville, Florida. And for a long time, the question my co-founder and I asked each other was, “Is it us, or is it Gainesville?” You know, we could always easily put the blame on the fact that we’re not in Silicon Valley or any other hub, or is it the fact that I haven’t packaged and sold Fracture the way it should be. I haven’t been able to lead and identify and sell Fracture really well. So those are the sorts of things I’m like, “Well man, I can’t afford to make those same mistakes now when it’s so frugal. I’ve got to find these people.

Andrew: You know, why don’t we keep what we’ve just said up until now I the interview, and I’ll just give the intro right now. You cool with that?

Abhi: Yeah. Absolutely.

Andrew: My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy. It’s home of the ambitious upstart. In case Joe needs it, we hadn’t. I usually do this before the interview starts.

Abhi: Oh, nice. Very [inaudible 00:02:18].

Andrew: That is for Joe. And as you guys have seen, joining me today is Abhi Lokesh. Abhi Lokesh is the founder of Fracture, which is a company that takes your digital photos and it prints them on glass. Now, I’m just, the whole idea that people are excited about this is so curious to me. But I’ve seen the excitement and I want to talk you about it. Speaking of challenge, you wanted, let me challenge you on that in a moment. But let’s stick with this, and then I’ll ask you about revenues and so on. But you have had a bad experience hiring people, right?

Abhi: Yeah.

Andrew: What’s this that you couldn’t find anyone? Everyone can’t find the right people. But tell me about your bad experience.

Abhi: I think our bad experiences really came from not knowing what to expect when we hired high level people, what they were looking for. The fact that, you know, we would hire a great webdesk, and you know, they’re looking for stability. They’re looking for the ability to jump in and get coding and start building. And I’m like, “No, that’s not how it works, you know. We’ve got to meditate this through. We’ve got to really fight to understand what page we’re on. You’re going to have to go through the learning curve that we went through. And that was difficult. So you know, we’ve had to let go of people.

And also, perfect, another example is, frankly, at the beginning, I just hired people that looked like me, you know, that were in their mid 20s, that, you know, were cool to hang out with, great to make immature jokes with, and that was about it. And it was very difficult to realize no more of that. We need to be more professional and need to hire.

Andrew: All right. Let’s break this down.

Abhi: Sure.

Andrew: I see two issues here that you had to deal with. The first, you were saying you would try to hire someone and actually, you would, and they’d want to just go and start to produce, to publish, to push code out there.

Abhi: Right.

Andrew: In fact, so one of my neighbors works for Expensify, and I asked him, “What’s it like to work there?” And he goes, “It’s so fricking fun. I’m new. I’m an intern,” he says, “but I got to push code out onto to the site, to live site on my first day.” And to him, that’s what excites him and what fires him up about working for Expensify. You’re saying you had the opposite where you tell your people don’t publish yet. Understand our whole process, understand how we go, right?

Abhi: Exactly.

Andrew: You tell me, so what’s the issue with that?

Abhi: I mean, what your friend is going through is an ideal scenario that I’d love for that to be the reality at Fracture. And the issue was that we just did things in such a patchwork roundabout helter skelter way to begin with, that if we let someone run rampant with our processes right now, we would just really stress them out. We would really [inaudible 00:04:52].

Andrew: What’s an example of the way that you guys have organized in a less optimal way?

Abhi: Sure. I mean, here’s a perfect example, right? My co-founder and I, and I want to correct you on that just because my co-founder deserves, in my opinion, 90% of the credit.

Andrew: Then get off camera. Bring him on. What are we doing here?

Abhi: Yeah. Actually, I had to go back to my house because we only have one conference room at Fracture. It was already occupied. So my co-founder, Alex, nor I, neither of us, are coders. You know, neither of us are hackers extraordinaire. And because of that, we really just fumbled our way through this software development process for the past five years. And when we were creating a customer e-commerce, shipping, logistics and fulfillment platform, that left so many holes, so many bugs, so many inadequacies that when we finally had the resources to build it right, we needed to find people with the patience to say, “Okay, you’ve got something that’s suboptimal right now. We get it. Let’s figure out what we can do with that, and let’s also work towards a future.” Striking that balance, from a higher perspective of someone who’s both patient and aggressive and can see the long-term and short-term, that was really just gold for us to find.

Andrew: All right. I think we need to catch up so that we can put all this in perspective. But as you might have noticed, I wrote down a couple of notes. The first is, I want to understand the patchwork of development that you guys went through when you were starting out, and why it’s so confusing.

Abhi: Yeah.

Andrew: And then the second thing is, later on, we’ll get to how you hired people who looked like you and what the specific problem was. But we should introduce this story a little bit by saying that you and Alex started working at a nonprofit, that’s how you connected.

Abhi: We actually, I was in a social entrepreneurship class when I was in undergrad. A mutual friend of ours connected us when he felt like us three would be a great team to work on an idea that we had in that nonprofit class.

Andrew: What was the idea back then?

Abhi: The idea was that we were encouraged to take the skills that we learned in that social entrepreneurship class and actually do something real with them outside of [inaudible 00:06:48]. And we decided to try and help the country of Swaziland in Southern Africa. And we didn’t know where it was. We couldn’t point it out on a map. But we thought that we could take what we had learned and try to apply to the HIV/AIDS Epidemic that was ravaging the country over there.

Andrew: What do you mean? What were you going to do?

Abhi: Sure. So we initially thought to ourselves we wanted to break the model of traditional charities, or philanthropy, where, you know, I can only tug on your heartstrings and ask for donations and show you pictures of crying babies so many times. We realized that we wanted to do something more businesslike, so we thought, “Let’s have a business model where we have a for-profit venture and any of the net profit would go directly to funding our research in our nonprofit initiatives.” And the first and only idea we had for a for-profit venture was basically an online art gallery where we would work with artists from all over the world. We would ask to license their art, and we would brand it under this nonprofit art gallery brand. Any prints that we would sell, we would package, ship to whoever bought them, and the net profit, we would then funnel into our nonprofit. That was the idea.

Andrew: I see. So what I’m fascinated about you and the reason I wanted to have you on here is because, actually, I didn’t necessarily even want to have you on. I didn’t have a feeling one way or the other. But I sat down here today and I saw that you were coming on and I said, “Oh yeah, the guy that John Gruber talks about all the time.”

Abhi: Yeah.

Andrew: The guy’s so fricking excited about your product, I said, “I’ve got to talk to the founder and see what he created.” But then I also said, “What’s going on with this company?” And here’s what got me excited. First of all, you don’t have a tech background and to me, that is gold. I want to know how you built this company in a tech environment without a tech background, and there’s so much technology involved in taking someone’s photo and bring it out to them.

Abhi: Yeah.

Andrew: The second thing is, you took something that I would’ve thought is very unsexy and you made into something sexy, where you’re printing out on glass photos. I thought the whole idea of photo framing and photo creation and photo whatever, putting up on your wall and however, that that was a solved problem, and you showed me that there is room to build a business on an idea that’s been around for centuries . . .

Abhi: Right.

Andrew: . . . if you can . . . Well, if you can what, I want to find out from you. You brought up at the beginning of this interview hiring, especially for someone who’s not a developer. I’m curious about that. And then when I looked at the notes here in preparation, I saw how you guys grew so rapidly fast getting customers, and I’m so fascinated by that. So that’s my agenda. That’s what I’d like to learn here and pass onto the audience. So let’s continue with this. This art gallery idea seems like a really good do-goodery idea. It seems like something that you guys were excited about. Did it work? What happened to it?

Abhi: It did not work. It actually failed pretty miserably. I think we sold probably 10 prints in the three years that we were trying to push it out there. I would say that 90% of that was due to our own lackluster efforts, you know, both Alex and myself and our third buddy were undergraduates, full-time at the University of Florida. And so, here’s what happened. Here’s how we were actually able to make something come out of that.

We applied for a grant to implement some agricultural research that we had been doing, and actually, fortuitously, were accepted, won the grant. It was a $10,000 grant. I was ecstatic. And in the summer of 2008, before our senior years of college, Alex and I found ourselves in Africa. And we were like, “Wow.” Like, he was just . . . It was an incredible experience, a surreal experience. And really, what that experience allowed us to do was take a step back in so many perspectives, right? We were in the middle of nowhere in Africa. Alex and I had all the time in the world to just talk to re-hatch everything we did right, we did wrong, what we wanted out of the next 5, 10 years of lives.

Andrew: Right or wrong as human beings?

Abhi: As students, human beings, as one of the entrepreneurs with this nonprofit art gallery idea, just why didn’t it work, all those things? And we started slowly circulating around this idea that just keep coming up, like, what if there was something in the overall concept of photo framing that was still relevant. What if we could actually build a real business about that? And here’s where I have to really explain the genius of Alex my co-founder. Alex is the MacGyver of our time, in my opinion. He can build anything from anything. He’s an engineer to his core. He’s a fantastic individual. And he said, “Listen. I really believe that there’s this ripe opportunity to create a new sort of photo framing, as long as we connected to the desire for people to actually want to print and frame their photos.

Andrew: Why . . . What I’m curious about . . .

Abhi: Sure.

Andrew: . . . is why did you it, what make you think that this was a problem that people needed solving? To me, and I was completely wrong, when I first heard you guys advertising on Daring Fireball . . .

Abhi: Yeah.

Andrew: . . . I said, “This is a little different. They’ll advertise once. They’ll get a little bit of a bump, and they’ll realize that the tech community wants new software. They don’t need new frames.

Abhi: Right.

Andrew: And they could go to the local store and have them framed, and you guys proved me wrong by coming back and back and back. And the audience, when he did a live show at WWDS . . .

Abhi: Yeah. DS.

Andrew: Worldwide Developer Conference is DC.

Abhi: Yeah.

Andrew: The Apple event, the audience all knew your fricking product. And I said, “These guys hit with something. There’s something about it.” And as I looked at social media, people got excited about it. So what I’m saying is I was completely wrong. What was I missing that you guys saw about the problem in photo framing that you felt we need to come up with something new?

Abhi: You know what, I don’t think you were completely wrong. I don’t think you were missing anything. I just don’t think you realized it. And I think that’s the . . . I think there is a key concept for us, even. We had a hypothesis, right? We’re like, “Listen. If we bring this to your attention, you will like it. But if we don’t, you’re just go on about your life.” Right? And we there’s kind of like an interesting nuance about some great ideas, or they may not be . . . You may not have a huge pain-point in your life without them, but you don’t necessarily know that they’re there. And all we had to do was really bring it to the forefront.

Andrew: I see. So to use the vitamin vs. ice cream analogy that Mike, the founder of FreshBooks, first said here on Mixergy, he said, “Look, a company could either be ice cream, which is nice to have. People will enjoy it when they have it, but they don’t die or miss it if it’s not there.” Or it could be . . . excuse me. The ice cream or the aspirin – excuse me.

Abhi: Right.

Andrew: And he said, “Well, aspirin is something that if someone has a headache, they’re really going to reach for and they’re going to be willing to pay for, and they’re going to be glad it’s there.” He said, “He wants to be aspirin.” And you’re saying, “No, you don’t have to be an aspirin. You could be ice cream where if you’re introducing your product to somebody, they get excited about it. Their lives aren’t over if it doesn’t exist, but their lives are enhanced and funner if it does exist.” That’s what you wanted to create.

Abhi: Exactly. And I will be fair and say, you know, we think there’s a small element of aspirin in our business model [inaudible 00:13:47].

Andrew: What’s that?

Abhi: It’s just the fact that, you know, people do, in fact, want to print and memorialize their favorite memories. But I’ll just use you as an example, and I hope this works. This might backfire on me. But when’s the last time you actually printed and framed a picture that you thought to yourself, “Oh wow, this is a great memory.” I mean, what are you doing with your diploma? What are you doing with any picture that you’ve had that you’re like, “Oh, this is a great picture. I should do something with it, but . . .”

Andrew: That happens to me a lot. I have a photo printer at home. I don’t even hit the print button from my phone for the photo printer.

Abhi: Right.

Andrew: When I do see it, I get excited about it. Like a friend of mine, I was at a dinner and I said, “I’d like to go flying somewhere.” My friend, the next day, hooked us up with a flight with a mutual friend, who I didn’t even know flew. And without me and my wife knowing it, he took a photo of the two of us hugging as we looked at the runway.

Abhi: Very cool.

Andrew: And the next time he came over for dinner, he gave us a framed photo of that. And I thought, “This is a really good idea. Why don’t we print out or do anything with any of our photos?” I should do it, and I never did.

Abhi: Exactly. I mean, so that’s a great one point, you know, data sample set. But that’s what we we’re really trying to sell. Our hypothesis was that if we connected the dots between the fact that he probably has tens of hundreds of thousands of pictures in your digital shoebox, and no real affordable slippery way to actually print and frame them. If we connected those dots, we could be onto something. And that was our general hypothesis way back in 2008.

Andrew: And by “slippery,” what do you mean now in the finished product?

Abhi: By “slippery,” I mean it has to be so smooth, so easy to order, so easy to work with that before you know it, you’re done. And I think that’s the elegance of a product that really gets us in this digital age where everyone’s obsessed with Amazon Prime. If you’re not a slippery product, if you almost find yourself falling into the order process without even trying, then we’re going to lose your attention, and we can’t have that happen.

Andrew: I see. And that’s why not having a frame around the photo is so important, that it’s just printed directly on glass.

Abhi: Right.

Andrew: It looks great on your wall, and you don’t have to take the extra step of figuring out what frame do I want around it, how does the frame go with my apartment? Does it go with the other frames? Is that it, or am I reading too much into your product.

Abhi: No. No, that is, that is exactly it, the point of, a competitive advantage for us. We exactly have the thing to ourselves. This needs to be a one-stop shop. Once someone orders a Fracture, or Fracture is one of their favorite memories, that’s it. Done. If they have to stray, get up and look about for a screw or I’ve got to hang this thing, then we’ve lost your loyalty. We really needed to make it that slippery.

Andrew: The website is fractureme.com. I’ve gone to it before. It’s still hard to get a sense of what it is. Even John – I don’t mean to keep going back to his ad, but he does such a good ad for this.

Abhi: Sure.

Andrew: And he’s a guy who I’ve seen wrestle with his ads for a long time.

Abhi: Yeah.

Andrew: And in a moment, I’ll do my own sponsorship message here at Mixergy, and I’ll probably struggle with it. But he just rips on it, and one of the things he says is you have to see it in person to really appreciate it. I’m looking at your homepage. There’s someone holding up a Fracture of two horses.

Abhi: Yeah.

Andrew: It just looks like an image. I don’t see anything that’s different about it.

Abhi: Can we talk about that for a second?

Andrew: Yeah.

Abhi: Because that’s a key point. That was one of the hardest marketing challenges for a product. How do you sell a picture of a picture, especially online, right? And that’s when we really started to delve into the world of video advertising and podcast advertising. We realized that the best sales tactic were testimonials and videos. And what better way to get a testimonial from an influencer, an early adopter like a Gruber, who we immediately sent the product. I have to give my chief marketing officer her, the credit for figuring out that podcasts were such a powerful way to get the message of our product across. They had to explain the product. If I left our product up to its own devices online to show itself off to you, it just can’t work. It looks like a photoshopped image, and that was a struggle for us for a long time.

Andrew: It does look like a Photoshopped image. I didn’t want to say it because I feel like what I said earlier about how I didn’t book this interview was maybe a little bit hurtful or insensitive.

Abhi: Not at all.

Andrew: And I thought . . . Well, I don’t mean it that way. I just meant it that I want to be open about our how process works, and so I didn’t want to now pile on and say, “But this also looks like it’s Photoshopped. I kind of feel like . . . I was just staying at the house of the guy who sold the BluBlocker sunglasses. What his name? BluBlockers. This guy had this huge, beautiful house in Hawaii. Sorry?

Abhi: Yeah. Go ahead. I’m listening.

Andrew: And the reason . . . One of the reasons why he got it is because he sold these BluBlocker sunglasses on television by not just showing the BluBlockers, but by showing you the expression on people’s faces when they put the glasses on. It was like, “Wow! This is so incredible.” It made you want to buy it just to see what these people were raving about.

Abhi: Sure.

Andrew: And that got him in [inaudible 00:18:41] made him incredible wealth. And I kind of feel like it must be the same thing with Fracture.

Abhi: Absolutely.

Andrew: I would have to say . . .

Abhi: It is. Yeah. One of our best testimonials is actually a video that a customer sent in of her boyfriend opening up the Fracture. And just the “oohs” and “aahs” and the expression on his face, I mean, that was worth a million dollars.

Andrew: I saw that. And you know what, and I couldn’t even see, I couldn’t see what was in this package. I can kind of make out that it was him and her, maybe even a baby in the photo, in the video, but I couldn’t even see it. All I could see is the excitement in his face.

Abhi: Right. And so, we really realized . . . So two things. We realized that podcasts were amazing because if someone like Gruber talks about the product, he has generated a loyal audience. They believe him that he’s not going to bullshit them with crappy products. He’s only going to endorse products that he likes. And we said to ourselves, “Okay, how do we really get ourselves, get Fractures in the hands of people like this?” And actually, the other method of advertising that really works for us was TV advertising, surprisingly.

Andrew: Oh TV, television?

Abhi: Yeah, television. Listen, I thought TV was dead from an advertising perspective, but we connected with Sandwich Video, which is out of LA. They’re an incredible video house, and they made a video for us that just was so powerful from a “why” perspective, and so well done, you know, that the actor in the video is showing off the Fracture from both angles. He was tilting it. You saw . . . You see the reaction of his girlfriend when she’s opening it, stuff like that. That hit the spot for us.

Andrew: What did he charge you for it?

Abhi: A lot.

Andrew: It must be like 50 to 100,000.

Abhi: Yeah.

Andrew: Right?

Abhi: Yeah.

Andrew: He is. . He does killer, killer work, the whole agency does.

Abhi: Yeah.

Andrew: And their stuff is just stunning, but it’s hard to get to work with him, and it’s expensive. And I think he famously turned down Slack when they asked him to create a video for them.

Abhi: But he did a great one, I think, maybe the second time around. But Adam is a great guy. I think we felt, we felt . . . I feel lucky because we worked with him now about two years ago, so, like, maybe we caught him at a slow moment or something like that. But man, he was super helpful all the way. I couldn’t give a higher recommendation to those guys.

Andrew: All right, so you had this idea. You said, “What if we could make it super easy for people to see, to not print out, to turn their digital photos into stuff they could hang on their wall.

Abhi: Right.

Andrew: Where did the idea of putting it on glass come from?

Abhi: So, it was Alex’s first suggestion, and it made sense for a number of reasons. Number 1, what’s the material that you most associate with a photo frame? Glass. We thought to ourselves, “Well, what if we could print directly onto it. The photo, the image printing world was undergoing a revolution and has been where you can print your material, you can print your photos on anything, right? Diapers, bibs, whatever the case may be. So we knew that there was a process out there for printing on glass. It was just a matter of researching which process yielded the best quality, and afforded us the ability to scale. You know, that was really important.

Andrew: You told April, our producer, that the first version was an actual inkjet printer that printed then print it on a piece of glass. I’ve had inkjet printers that could barely print on paper. How did you find an inkjet printer that could print on glass and not have it smudge?

Abhi: Yeah. So, here’s the story. When Alex and I got really excited about this idea and committed ourselves to it, we packed up our bags in Africa, in Swaziland. You know, tied up any loose ends, flew back to the States, and I gave Alex the rest of my savings from college. And he went to Office Max, bought a printer, and he had already preordered some other chemical materials in order to make the actual ink adhere to the glass and force fed that inkjet a piece of glass and printed onto it. And still remember him coming over to my house and showing it to me and us saying, “There is something here.”

Andrew: How much money did you have left that you used to do this?

Abhi: It was like $700.

Andrew: So $700 bucks went to an inkjet printer, I’m guessing one that just like let the page slide horizontally without any of the crazy curls that a lot of them do.

Abhi: Yeah.

Andrew: And that, plus what material did you guys put on glass that allowed the ink to adhere to it?

Abhi: I mean, it was just a, if I remember correctly, it was a chemical agent that allowed ink to stick to something like glass. So it kind of . . . It was the intermediary between the ink and the glass.

Andrew: So if feels like this is an MVP, a minimum viable product.

Abhi: Exactly.

Andrew: Totally. But is it the kind of that you can actually sell to people, or did you have to now go in and get the next level up before you could create a finished product?

Abhi: The latter. So it was kind where the only people who would have thought that was beautiful was us.

Andrew: I see.

Abhi: And we really needed to get the next [inaudible 00:23:22] investment to actually go forward and make something that we could sell to someone.

Andrew: Considering you had so little money, did you return the printer and get your money back so you can keep living?

Abhi: No. We actually kept that printer. I still think it’s collecting dust somewhere in our building. But I want to keep it just to put in the archive or a museum later.

Andrew: Like a historical artifact of how . . .

Abhi: Exactly.

Andrew: . . . FractureMe, Fracture started. FractureMe.com is the website.

Let me do a quick sponsorship message and say that this interview is sponsored by HostGator, like an alligator. HostGator offers you an easy way to build a website, and you can do things blog. You can do things like a membership site. You can do things like sell – right? – they even make it easy for you to sell on your site. I’ve interviewed several entrepreneurs here on Mixergy who said, “Oh yeah, HostGator, I’ve started my business on HostGator. And one of the reasons why people start their business on HostGator is because it’s reliable and it’s, frankly, fricking cheap. And if you go to HostGator.com/mixergy, it’ll be 30% cheaper than it is for everyone else. You can actually get one from them, and then laugh at all the suckeroos, all the suckers out there who paid full price. And when you do, I want you to think about an idea that you could put up on your site. And frankly, Abhi, as I’m talking to you. Excuse me, Abhi as I’m talking to you.

Abhi: Sure.

Andrew: I’m thinking of one idea that somebody could come up with. Tell me if . . . Do you guys have an affiliate program of any kind?

Abhi: We did. It wasn’t very successful, so we kind of put it on the back burner.

Andrew: Why wasn’t it successful?

Abhi: Again, I think it was really difficult for us to go through an intermediary to try and get them to impress someone else with the product. It was just difficult from that perspective.

Andrew: All right. Where do you guys get your images, like this stuff that’s in the art store, that if someone doesn’t want to take their own photo, where do you get that from?

Abhi: We actually do accept applications from artists who want to be a part of our art store.

Andrew: I see. Okay. So here’s what I’m going to suggest, then, guys.

Abhi: Sure.

Andrew: One thing that you could do is create a motivational poster, not like the old kind, but find something that . . . Here, let me see where to go. StartupVitamin, looking for something like what StartupVitamin does. These guys are making . . . I’ve got to have them on to see how much money they’re bringing in. Let’s see. Here’s one. Innovate or die. Here’s another one. Can I curse with you? Is it okay if I curse in this interview?

Abhi: Oh, [inaudible 00:25:39].

Andrew: All right. Good. Get shit done. That’s one of their fricking posters. That’s nothing but get shit done with a checkbox.

Abhi: There you go.

Andrew: Look, all it takes is to create some little thing like that.

Abhi: Absolutely.

Andrew: Then what you do is you go to Fracture. You have it put on glass.

Abhi: Yeah.

Andrew: And then you sell it on your website. And the art, if you look at StartupVitamins.com, frankly, don’t copy them, but use them as an inspiration. You, if you’re listening to me, can create stuff like that, and then go to HostGator and create your store where you’re selling this “get shit done” type posters and selling it as a Fracture also, and that could be as simple as that. And if you do some quotes from people who you admire and tell them that you’re posting it on here, they might even tweet it out. Easy peasy, whatever your idea is, even if you think my idea is really stupid and you’ve got a better one, just go to HostGator.com/mixergy. Show me how much better your idea is than mine by creating your store, start selling. If you do it because you signed up because of this interview, I will even help promote it. I will tweet your “get shit done” poster.

I should actually not ask you, do you mind if I curse. I should ask HostGator if they mind if I curse.

Abhi: I think it should.

Andrew: Yeah. I’m sure they’re fine with it. I’m sure they’ll be one of your first customers if you get a poster like that and turn it into a piece of glass and you start selling on your site.

Abhi: Yeah.

Andrew: It’s easy to get up and running. I want you to not just have ideas, I want to just fool around with those ideas online by hitting the publish button. And if you HostGator, It’s incredibly easy to get started. Go to HostGator.com/mixergy. A very little . . . In fact, nothing to lose. I was going to say it’s only a few bucks a month in order to get your hosting package. But they even have a 45-day money back guarantee. And whenever I go to HostGator.com/mixergy, I always read from the top of the page where I say you get unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, etc., where you have 4500 website templates.

Here’s what I always miss, and I should be doing this more. I should scroll to the bottom of the page where it says “once you sign-up, they will give you $100 in AdWords. They have a hundred dollar AdWords offer. They have a hundred dollar search credit for Bing and Yahoo. So you can actually get free advertising from their partners to promote whatever your new poster business is or whatever else you do on HostGator. Try it out for 45 days. If you’re not happy with it, if you don’t think it’s going to lead to happiness or wealth for you, you can cancel and move on, or you can just try another idea and another and another. It’s really easy. Go to HostGator.com/mixergy. I’m looking forward to seeing what you do. And I’m grateful to them for sponsoring.

My idea originally was that you can go to FractureMe.com, create an affiliate program, and then start selling. But if you guys aren’t dealing with that, I totally get it.

Let’s talk about how you did start, then. If that printer that you told me about wasn’t the solution for the first real MVP, what was the first step that you took, then, to build a business considering how little money you had?

Abhi: Sure. And you basically hit on it. At the very end right there, we needed money. So this is, then, the double edge of Fracture’s existence. We are a very capital intensive endeavor, because we had to build a physical product. And now, a lot of startups or companies these days go through that difficulty. So we had to figure out how much we needed and where we were going to get it from. And I went to first source I could think of, which is family. And I went to my father and a couple of his very knowledgeable stock investment buddies, and I said, “Listen. We have a crazy idea. We need $60,000 to prototype this idea and give us just enough space so that we don’t burn down our house, and we really need to figure out whether or not this thing can be a real success.

And I specifically remember the night he called me. It [inaudible 00:29:29] preface this, I made it very clear to him, I needed him to consider this a legitimate business investment opportunity.

Andrew: You mean your dad?

Abhi: Yes, my father. I wanted him to compare us to another stock transaction he would make. And if he felt we weren’t worthwhile, I wanted him to say no.

Andrew: Okay.

Abhi: And he took his time.

Andrew: What’s your dad’s background? What did he do?

Abhi: My father’s a doctor. So he took his time. He’s just a very seasoned, you know, hobbyist investor, and he took his time. He took almost a month, I think, and really weighed the pros and cons. And to his credit and to my everlasting gratitude, he called me, and he said, “You know what, we’re fork over that $60,000.” And I was ecstatic. I had never seen $60,000, didn’t know what to do with it.

Andrew: Really?

Abhi: Yeah. No.

Andrew: That what happens when you’re in the do-gooder space, you don’t see 60,000.

Abhi: Yeah.

Andrew: So, doctors are notorious for making bad investments.

Abhi: Yes, they are.

Andrew: Right? What’s the dumbest . . .

Abhi: They are.

Andrew: . . . investment you’ve seen you dad make?

Abhi: Man, he’s made countless little dumb ones on companies who he says, “Abhi, this [inaudible 00:30:29] just cleared at the Level 1 testing and Level 2 testing.” And it’s just that, you know, it’s such an out there medical marvel idea, but he believes in it, as any good doctor does. He wants to believe that there is a cure out there for numerous, you know, maladies and diseases. So I can’t fault him for that. It came from good intentions, but you know, it didn’t always turn out to be the best.

Andrew: What’s the best investment that he’s made that you’ve seen him do well with?

Abhi: Fracture.

Andrew: Yeah, that. What about Number 2?

Abhi: Probably a lot of Berkshire Hathaway, Class B. He’s just really, he’s a savvy dude. He knows what he’s doing with his money.

Andrew: I did that Berkshire Hathaway B, just because I needed a ticket to go see the event. And boy, I’m so glad that I did. It’s, it . . .

Abhi: Yeah.

Andrew: It really is like Woodstock for entrepreneurs. I felt so much more in touch with my inner entrepreneur, with my inner businessman, a lot more peace because of it. They did a . . . They do a great event there. The reason that this business is doing so well and we could really say that it is a good investment for your dad is it’s doing how much in revenue right now?

Abhi: We’re, we’re on schedule to do about 4.2 million this year.

Andrew: So that means you did about 2 million so far. No. Less than 2 million because you’re counting on Christmas being a really heavy month for you.

Abhi: We count on Christmas being a very heavy quarter for us, but even counting that, we’re still on pace to do that, even if we didn’t have that.

Andrew: So that means that over $2 million in the first half of 2015.

Abhi: Yes, a little under 2 million.

Andrew: Wow wee. Dude, that’s incredible, especially considering . . . here’s what you told April, the producer here at Mixergy, you said, “It took us five years to get 50,000 orders. And now, it takes us one year to do 91,000 orders.

Abhi: Yeah. We just crossed our hundredth-thousandth order.

Andrew: A hundred thousand. So in one year, you did twice as much as you did in the first five years.

Abhi: That is accurate.

Andrew: That is unreal for growth, and that’s because you figured out where your traction was. But let’s go back to your dad.

Abhi: Sure.

Andrew: He gave you 60,000. Where did the money go?

Abhi: It went straight into rent, printers, inks, testing, that sort of stuff, right off the bat. Within four months, it was gone, because we were just using it all on that sort of stuff.

Andrew: Where do you find a printer that can print on glass?

Abhi: Again, my co-founder Alex researched the world. He went all over trying to . . . We had had a couple processes, they each had their pros and cons. And he went and visited the facilities, talked to manufacturers, really did whatever he could to understand which process, which glass printing process was going to work. I actually want o kind of edit, you know, who we are as a company in a little bit. We’re not a glass printing company. That is definitely our first product – right? – but we want to be known as a photo decor company. Glass just so happened to be used.

Andrew: Photo décor.

Abhi: Yeah. The glass happened to be our first product, and it is our flagship product. I can’t deny that. I don’t want to be, you know, delusional sounding. But our goal is to go and advance beyond glass one day and really round out our product offerings.

Andrew: Okay. I can see that. So you get this machine.

Abhi: Yeah.

Andrew: You figure out how to make this happen. Do you have a first customer before the $60,000 is gone?

Abhi: Nope.

Andrew: Wow.

Abhi: No, didn’t. And you know what, what happened, so we got that phone call from my father in December of 2008, and we incorporated as an LLC, you know, a week later. And then by April, we had to go back to father and his investment group and say, “We need $400,000, because that’s what it’s actually going to take for us to purchase a full-sized printer to actually get the business portion of the company up and running, so get a website up and running, actually start getting customers, and that’s what we, you know, that’s what we had to do.

Andrew: And did your dad and his investment group pony up the money?

Abhi: They did.

Andrew: Wow. What’s the investment group that he’s a part of?

Abhi: It’s a small investment group between him and a couple of other doctors and a CPA that he’s just very comfortable with and who he really respects. They’re not, you know, a big time or even a small time angel investment firm or anything like that. But they . . . I give them credit for taking such a big risk on us.

Andrew: All right. So now, you’re in. You’ve got your money. It’s time to start getting some customers, right?

Abhi: Yeah.

Andrew: But before you do that, are we now starting to get into some of patchwork development . . .

Abhi: Yeah.

Andrew: . . . process?

Abhi: It starts right there.

Andrew: Tell me about that.

Abhi: So, looking back on it, it was pretty straightforward, right? I was a biologist by education. I was in the entrepreneurship club in college. But I had no tech background, so we already went over that, had no coding skills. I was responsible for all the investing, the finance, the net worth, and all that stuff. And then Alex, as engineer, was responsible for actually building the Fracture product, building the manufacturing process. And because he did have some level of web dev hacking and figuring things out, he took the role of CTO. And so, that was it. That’s all we had between us. And we didn’t know, or we didn’t have the ability to build a website, build an e-commerce system, a shopping cart, all that stuff. And we went through a couple of agencies, a couple of developers, land the patchwork just started to pile on, man. Like it was, it was difficult. And we did . . . We really didn’t have the resources to pay for what we thought in our mind was a high quality developer. We had to make do with what we had. We held it all together somehow for a long time, and it kind of got us to where we are, to where we were about a year ago before we really starting investing in sort of hires that would, you know, wouldn’t help us actually untangle that rat’s nest and actually [inaudible 00:36:08] legit.

Andrew: You know, Abhi, I’m trying to figure out what platform you guys built your site on originally. I’m looking at the 2009 version of the site and . . .

Abhi: Yeah.

Andrew: Unless I’m wrong, it looks like you guys built it yourselves from scratch.

Abhi: All of it.

Andrew: You didn’t use . . . Right?

Abhi: Yeah. You’re absolutely right. Everything was from scratch.

Andrew: Wow. And you could have used open-source software for it the way that HostGator, frankly, has. Or you could have even got to Shopify or Big Commerce and created a simple store. Why did you decide not to do that and create your own stuff?

Abhi: So, there are a couple reasons. One was that (a) I don’t think we . . . We didn’t know about all that existed, you know, about all of the options that existed and the pros and cons. But the other one was because the back end of whatever system we chose had to be so tailored to us – right? – because the backend had to essentially turn into this logistics powerhouse where you had shipping data, you know, fulfillment data, image data, things like that. And after Alex did a lot of his research, we realized that, you know, we had to go about this our way. I mean, we had to kind of build it from the ground up.

Andrew: Because you needed, somehow, the image to go directly into your printer, and when it came out, to come out with the label somehow that goes on the box.

Abhi: In a nutshell, that’s an oversimplification of it. But you’re right, because that’s . . .

Andrew: Give me an example of one thing I’m missing as I overly simplified, because I don’t want to do that.

Abhi: Sure. And I mean, for example, us working with customers, so they input their order information and the shipping information, and you need to be able to determine whether or not the shipping information is accurate, which vendor we’re working with. And yes, you’re shipping labels had to print out once the order was submitted. And here’s a perfect example. If they order six Fractures, our system had to be able to recognize, okay, what’s the best way to package those, you know, what’s the optimal number of layers of packaging to use, how much of each material do we use to package it. So those are the sort of logistics that our system had to be able to handle. And we didn’t know if anything on the market could handle that. And more importantly, even if it did, we sure as hell couldn’t afford it. So we definitely needed to figure out how to do this on our own.

Andrew: Okay. How much did it take you to build that first version of the product? The website that I’m looking at right now, which explains what the product does, it makes it easy for me to upload an image and then have it sent to me. How long did all that . . . How much did all that cost you?

Abhi: I can’t remember the exact cost. I’m not trying to hedge.

Andrew: Yeah.

Abhi: I would absolutely tell you if I remembered. As far as I can tell you how long it took us, so we got that investment from, the second investment from my father in April of 2009. And by December 2009, is when we first opened the doors to public. So we hit send on this group of invites that we sent through MailChimp to all of our, you know, friends and family saying, “Hey, come check out Fracture.” So, that’s when it got up and running.

Andrew: I see here that one of your professors told you you need to be laser focused on sales.

Abhi: Yeah.

Andrew: Why sales?

Abhi: You know what, it’s the only that matters to us. You could . . . We’re not like other companies where it’s daily active users or monthly active users, or some other metric that matters to us. The singular metric that’s really going to demonstrate our progress is sales. You know, and I was trying to report investor interest. I was trying to get hires on board. I was trying to connect with partners. And they all want to know one thing – right? – how are you guys growing? What are the sales like? And that was it. I couldn’t sell them on the sexiness of our idea or where we were or anything like that. The only thing that really mattered was sales.

Andrew: Okay. And so, you, now, had to start focusing on sales, and one of the first places you went for sales was TechCrunch.

Abhi: Yes. Yeah. So I mean, it’s that it’s every entrepreneur’s dream – right? – to get on the big TC. And we . . . This was 2010. And here’s the story. We had very small marketing team made of people just like me – right? – first mistake. And we set our . . . We’ve got to get some media attention. This thing is going to blow up. It’s just got to find the right outlet. And TechCrunch was an amazing outlet, as it is today. And coincidentally, they let it be known that they were having a photo. And we were like, “What? That is the perfect reason for us to get on Tech Crunch.” So my team and I simply bombarded TechCrunch’s tip line, e-mailed every editor we could, asked friends and family to bombard and e-mail, and one of them got through and we were connected. We were connected with John Biggs, an editor, and he wrote an article about us.

Andrew: I see it. Not just an article, look at this. The headline is “Fracture Glass Printing Makes Photos Snazzy.”

Abhi: Yeah. Yeah. Right. That was it.

Andrew: A great shot on the top of the post. It’s really very complimentary, and nice link over. And for some reason, he’s linking to your prices instead of linking to your homepage. One thing I notice when I look at this is the comments were very complimentary. For a brand-new product that very few people must have seen, to have this many compliments tells me that you guys were e-mailing people.

Abhi: Yes, we were. Not only were e-mailing people, I was beating the streets in Gainesville, talking to people and trying to find evangelists for our products, people who would use it. And Gainesville’s a small, tight community. And if I remember correctly, a number of those comments on that TechCruch article are from people in Gainesville, who we [inaudible 00:41:57].

Andrew: Yeah, like Susanna is in Gainesville.

Abhi: Yeah. Susanna Petty is a longtime supporter and one of the first Fracture customers we ever had.

Andrew: Megan, I think, and Chiquita.

Abhi: I don’t remember that.

Andrew: Chiquita seems to be definitely getting this as a present from my parents for Christmas, is what Chiquita said. All right. Did that actually lead to any sales, or was it just a nice complement?

Abhi: Sure. So, it did. And I believe TechCrunch has evolved since then, just because now that they’re so much even more vast and they profile so many products that back then, we still did get the TechCrunch bump and we still felt it. So again, here’s where we were. October 14, 2010, it’s a Thursday morning, I’m talking to an advisor. He’s sitting in front of our overscreen, and I refreshed it and I see the numbers start to go up, like significantly, like way more than I thought it should. And I thought to myself, “Something is going on. What is happening?” And we checked TechCruch on the off chance that we were published, and there we were. So TechCrunch actually led to another follow-up story by a website called Urban Daddy, which was, you know, just a product recommendation site for [inaudible 00:43:13].

Andrew: It’s like, he was supposed be like the daily candy for men.

Abhi: Exactly. Exactly. That’s the best way to describe it. And they even gave us a bigger bump. And you know, that’s when we really started to get our first sales from.

Andrew: So you start to get all these sales coming in, but it’s not enough to keep going back to this media and saying, “Hey, we’re still around. You should cover us again.” Right?

Abhi: Right. You know, you know what happened, we had the “dead cat bounce,” where we, you know, we got this initial upshot of sales. We got really high off of it, and then crickets for a long time. And that’s where I really was humbled and realized that marketing is not about getting on TechCrunch and it’s not about getting on TV. It’s about figuring out a process that actually gets your product out, and then following up and then sealing the deal.

And here’s a perfect example. We were on the “Today” show in summer of 2011. It did nothing for us. I was so surprised, and so taken aback. But we were expecting that to be it. I was expecting orders to just surge, and nothing happened.

Andrew: I get that. I mean, I get it. And even, frankly, if it does surge, what are you going to do? Go back to the “Today” show. It’s very hard to get repeat business from them. You mentioned as you were talking about the TechCrunch story that it was a bunch of people who are all like you. So that brings us back to what we started talking about at the top of this conversation. Think about one of the people who you hired, who’s especially like you. Don’t give me their name, but tell me, where did you find this person and what made them so similar to you?

Abhi: Sure. I found them as a fresh graduate out of the University of Florida.

Andrew: Okay.

Abhi: Without a tech background, likable, very, very humble, very smart, willing to do whatever it takes, and that’s it, you know. And that was the person in a nutshell.

Andrew: What made that person really good?

Abhi: What made them really good was they were willing to do whatever it took. They believed in the product. They had a lot of integrity and character, which is supremely important to us. And they were willing to sacrifice, I’m sure, a better paying job to come work with us, and you know, come work with Alex and I. But that was it.

Andrew: What was it about the way you that you introduced this that made this person say, “Yeah, you know what, I have other opportunities. I went to college so that I’d have all these opportunities. This is the one that I’m going to go for, even though it means a cut in my salary.”

Abhi: Sure. You know, then, back then, because we were close to the University of Florida, I made a number of presentations to classes at the University of Florida. I took the product. I sold the product. And I think I did a pretty decent job, you know. I showcased the product. And just like you at the beginning of this conversation, you kind of have that aha moment when I explained it to you in a way that mattered, when I said, you know, “What sort of photos do you have? Have you done anything with them?” Once I brought that up, it did seem to resonate and I didn’t have that hard of a time convincing people who, otherwise, may not have given us a second thought.

Andrew: So it was the fact that you were there talking about it with passion, and that you made it relevant to them by letting them put themselves in the place of a customer. And then they realized, as I did, “Oh yeah, this is something that’s needed.” All right. So you hired this person. You told us what was great about them. What’s the problem, then, with hiring someone who’s so similar to you? Think of a specific example.

Abhi: I mean, this happened with a number of people. They literally could not do anything different than I could. And that’s like a completely overlapping skill set, right? Like, I mean, forget complementary. If they [inaudible 00:46:49], they were literally on top of me.’

Andrew: I see.

Abhi: And I mean, we couldn’t have that, and especially in a challenge like ours, where this is a consumer product, you have to really understand how to get a product in front of people time and time again in a non-invasive way. You have to know digital marketing. That is a skill set. That is a discreet skill set that you have to learn and none of us had that.

Andrew: And so, do you remember the first person who you hired who didn’t have a lot of overlap with you who you felt like, “Yeah, this is me pushing myself and my company outside of our comfort zone into a new area. Bring it.” Who is that person?

Abhi: Herb Jones, October 2013, came in and, in my opinion, changed the trajectory of our company.

Andrew: How’d you find Herb?

Abhi: Herb was actually a mutual contact through the Gainesville community. He was running a local online optimization company, you know, search engine optimization and search marketing for, you know, other small businesses is what he did. And I mean, this is exactly, to show you how much he wasn’t like me, Herb is in his early 40s. He’s got four little girls under the age of seven. Completely different. Completely different than I am, and he knew what he was doing. He’s HubSpot trained. He’s, you know, he’s worked at Marketing Sherpa. He had a background with this. And he was the one guy where I looked at him and I said, “He could teach me about digital marketing.” That sealed the deal.

Andrew: I see. You know what, what’s cool about being . . . You guys were North Central Florida at something called the Gainesvillebizreport.com. They covered the fact that you guys, as a startup that hadn’t yet reached 50,000 in sales, covered your hiring of Jones, of Herb Jones . . .

Abhi: Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew: . . . in October 7, 2013. And they were saying the same thing you are, which is what makes this person really a great find is he has SEO, social media and e-mail marketing experience, and he’s worked for Marketing Sherpa, as you said. But what does it take to get somebody who’s already had experience and a reputation to quit his company to come work for you? That’s a really good find, but it’s a hard thing to convince someone to do.

Abhi: It is. And you know, I don’t it for granted to this day, and I never will. He believed in us. He believed in Alex and myself. He believed.

Andrew: But I believe in you guys. I’m not quitting Mixergy to come work for you guys. What do you have to say to someone like that that makes them, not just believe, but bank their family on you and their future?

Abhi: Sure. And that’s a great point. So, let me think about this. I’m trying to replay in my mind what I actually sat down and talked with him with. The first one was he believed in the potential of this as the company, as a product. As a salesman, I don’t know if there’s anything more exciting, where you’re coming in at the ground floor and saying, “Listen. I’m talking to you.” If you’re Herb, I’m saying, “Herb, you have the chance to build this company through the sales, through the marketing that you could generate for us. And of course, you know, he’s vested in the company as an equity owner. And you know, we tried to compensate him as well as we could. I think as an individual, he was looking for a challenge for a company that had huge ambition and you know, had shown some sort of growth, and we really fit the bill for him in that perspective. He was tired of working with, you know, the small mom-and-pop businesses who were like, “Just get me to the top of Google rankings.” Like, he didn’t want to hear that anymore.

Andrew: That’s what I . . . So I’m looking him up from back then, and he’s really, he’s online a bunch. He was not into the company that he ran. Yes, he could do it, but he was like a freelancer who was chasing customers who weren’t worth catching.

Abhi: Right. Exactly.

Andrew: And that’s what it was. So how did you know that that’s where he was? Did you guys put an ad and it happened to hit on him, or were you in the community and knew him and you got the sense that he was at a moment where he could be recruited?

Abhi: We were in the community. We knew him. I believe, you know, I had putting out the tentative feelers for, you know, a marketing individual because I wasn’t satisfied with where we were, and neither was Alex. And he knew that, again, sales was the name of the game. And you know what I loved about Herb, he came in. I gave him numbers and he said, “We’re going to hit them and we’re going to blow them out of the water.” And I’ll be damned if that wasn’t the best thing I’ve heard in a long time. You know, that’s really encouraging for someone like me who wasn’t having success with sales and knew that I didn’t have what it took, at least then. I needed someone who knew what they were doing.

Andrew: I had dinner with a few Y Combinator entrepreneurs who, in private, were starting to talk about, “This is one company,” they said. “We don’t know how to hire people because we’re not developers ourselves.” And they were asking the other developers questions about how to hire. They were looking to see if anyone else there could help them hire on their behalf because they felt if they could find the right first person, then that person could help them hire.

Abhi: Correct.

Andrew: I saw the struggle in their eyes. And frankly, I saw a lot of desperation there, too. I don’t know how Y Combinator accepted them, except that now that I think about it, they’re really solid people, solid entrepreneurs who know how to sell. So, I see that I guess that Y Combinator saw their sales skills were so strong that they could compensate for their development weaknesses. You had that.

Abhi: Yeah.

Andrew: Talk a little bit about what it’s like to hire the first people when you don’t know what they’re even, frankly, talking about at time.

Abhi: Yes. So, that was really difficult. I remember trying to put together job descriptions and being like, “I don’t know what any of these languages mean.” You know, I have no idea what Dollar Script does, and I’m probably really, you know, not ingratiating myself to people who want to think highly of me from what I do or do not know.

Andrew: Yeah.

Abhi: But I don’t know what any of that stuff means. And you know, I give Alex a lot of credit because he’s self-learned and self-taught himself a lot of this over the years to where I think he’s an incredible programmer now. But he still knew that he didn’t have what it took. So between the both of us, I had enough persistence, frankly, and he had enough knowledge to be able to sort through applicants to figure out what it is . . .

Andrew: Where does your persistence go? What do you do with persistence when you don’t know the difference between Java and JavaScript?

Abhi: Yeah. So again, if it was me by myself, I would have just kept going in circles for eternity. I needed someone like Alex. And I’m not going to . . .

Andrew: So, what would you do? Because I do remember . . .

Abhi: Sure.

Andrew: Who was it? Alexis Ohanion from Y Combinator saying that – I don’t remember exactly what he said. But basically, that sometimes the non-developer gets in the way, even though he’s very eager. And in your case, you had your eagerness and you weren’t in the way, you were helpful. So I’m curious. Where did you direct your energy?

Abhi: Sure. So, here’s what I did. I tried to identify every single tech hiring platform – Authentic Jobs, Corp, Dice, you know, whatever the name may be. And I did all of the other work around allowing Alex to put out the best job description out there. I took it upon myself to do that dirty work, because I couldn’t do anything else.

Andrew: I see.

Abhi: You know, here’s a great story. You know how I hired our current Director of E-Commerce? I Googled the shit out of him. And like, literally, all I did was I got really good at trying to find individual resumes online. So I went state by state and typed in, you know, “director of e-commerce, Kansas” and then I slowly picked up on what keywords were coming up with the best resumes, literally. And that’s how I found this resume his resume to get to him. I’m not proud of that. I wish I didn’t have to do that. But that’s what I did.

Andrew: It seems like you guys now get a lot of your new hires from careers.stackoverflow.com and authenticjobs.com, which I think you mentioned earlier. Is that right?

Abhi: No, actually. We do use them a number of times, and we have actually found a number of candidates. They’re definitely good at sourcing people our way. But of course, we have to be, as I’m sure you would agree, we have to be selective and picky with who we actually end up hiring. But we are getting better traction through using sites like that. Now that we have something to actually show them as far as what we’re able to, you know, offer.

Andrew: Talk to me a little bit about this patchwork now. Do you have a process? Considering that you don’t have an easy-to-read, or you didn’t have an easy-to-read sourcecode, what was you process for bringing on a new developer and not having him go crazy, but at the same time, getting him productive fast?

Abhi: So again, me as the non-tech guy, I can’t speak to all the process, right? And I would be butchering if I tried. What I do know is that when we decided to do it right, Alex put a huge premium on documentation. He said, “Do you know what I’m going to invest the most time in? Documenting what’s wrong and what’s right. And such that when we do get the right person on board, we will have at least as clear description of what we’ve done, how we’ve done it, what can be touched without blowing up the entire castle, and what can actually, you know ,be worked on to leap forward. And I really believe that’s how we had to focus our energy to [inaudible 00:56:08] and move forward.

Andrew: I see. All right. We got into that. Oh, by the way, let me see. Even as I look at your sourcecode, I see clarity on what you guys do. Let me see. For example, here’s a hidden note. Here’s where each [div ??00:56:26] will repeat, and only one [div ??00:56:29] per page you should be shown. And I think I’ve seen a bunch of those as I went through your site.

Abhi: That sounds very much like an Alex trait.

Andrew: That’s your level of specificity. So anyone, including me who’s reading it, should understand what’s going on on your site.

Abhi: That’s probably what happened. Yeah.

Andrew: Okay. All right. So that gets the product up.

Abhi: Yeah.

Andrew: That gets the hiring up. We haven’t talked about, now, traction. With the product that is hard for people to understand the value of unless they see it, talk about the next marketing technique that you used after you’d reached out to TechCrunch and some other bloggers.

Abhi: Sure. So, honestly, the next thing we did was Groupon.

Andrew: Groupon.

Abhi: Yes.

Andrew: Okay.

Abhi: Long story short, nearly killed us, did not work.

Andrew: Why not?

Abhi: We didn’t grasp the economics of what the Groupon offer was actually going to do to our bottom line. And what I mean by that was it erased our bottom line, and we couldn’t afford these Groupon sales.

Andrew: Why? I would think that you guys could figure out what your margins were. What is it? It’s like $20 is what you offered for $40 worth of glass printed photos from Fracture. That was the offer.

Abhi: Right. And here’s there . . . So breaking that even further, it was $20. Groupon takes at least 50% – right? – so I think it was 60/40 split. And on top of that, we added free shipping.

Andrew: Oh, I see.

Abhi: That’s why.

So then why didn’t you know going into it that you couldn’t for under 10 bucks deliver your product?

Abhi: I was so starstruck by being able to work with Groupon. To be perfectly honest, all of us were. And you know what, that starstuck appeal blinded us for months. We were so excited. So the Groupon deal ran in the summer of 2011, and we were so excited about the number of orders, the number of Groupon coupons that were being snapped up that we didn’t realize one very important thing, (a) every Groupon user is a procrastinator. Ninety percent of those individuals wouldn’t redeem their coupon until the six-month redemption time window was up. Six months from the summer is Christmas. And we did not realize the storm that was brewing and that we were setting ourselves up, and the hole that we were really digging ourselves into. And that’s why Groupon almost killed us. We couldn’t afford to fulfill those sales.

Andrew: Is it almost a desperation that you just need customers. You want to show the team that there’s activity. That you’re actually using these printers you spent so much money on.

Abhi: Yes.

Andrew: I see.

Abhi: That was really it. That was really it. Looking back on it now, that was a lot of it. I was so cooked, addicted to seeing orders come in that I really didn’t care from where. I didn’t care about the quality. I just wanted to see it come in, and that was a bad move.

Andrew: What was the next thing that you did?

Abhi: All right. So the next thing that we did was really, you know, fast forward a couple years of us stumbling around a little bit more. And we really . . . Herb came in. Herb came in and we really started building a marketing engine. For the first time ever, we were using terminology like a funnel, and the top of the funnel. And you know, retargeting and things like that. And slowly but surely, this picture was being drawn of us having an idea of where to get people for the top of the funnel, how to retarget visitors who landed on our site, how to, you know, e-mail market to them. What sort of marketing or advertising mediums, like podcasts and TV advertising to experiment with. All that stuff really started coming together after Herb came on board and said, “You guys really need to put a formula in place.”

Andrew: What’s your funnel look like? I feel like most funnels mean someone’s coming into the site, then you capture their e-mail address, then you have some time to nurture them before they buy because they need to get comfortable with you. But why would someone come in and give you their e-mail address to stay in touch?

Abhi: So. That’s actually one of the core tenets of our content philosophy. We need to make ourselves useful to our visitors and our e-mail subscribers in a way that is not just about buying Fracture. And that’s a key tenet of who we want to be, and our belief is that we really believe in talking about why you should be preserving your favorite memories, great ways to take photos. Basically, a content philosophy that was more evergreen and more genuine than just, “Hey, you haven’t reached out to us in a month. Here’s 30% off.” That can only work for so long.

Andrew: But you haven’t built yet. Right now, if I give you my e-mail address, it’s to get a newsletter.

Abhi: It’s to get . . . No. So, it’s to get more than a newsletter. It is to get that workflow of e-mails. It’s more than just about coupons. I’m not sure if that’s what you were referring to.

Andrew: Oh, I’m just looking at different pages on your site and whereever I see an opportunity to give an e-mail, it’s often to get . . . The reason I would give the e-mail is so that I could get the newsletter.

Abhi: I got you. And in that case, we haven’t done a good enough job describing what a newsletter would be other than just coupons or discounts. We really want it to be more about ways that you get involved with your photos, even if it meant not necessarily buying a Fracture at that point in time.

Andrew: I see. I see what the problem, by the way, is. The reason ah, ah ah-ing is I see on the left side of your site, there’s, on the left side of blog, is “SUBSCRIBE & SAVE.” “Get our sweet blogs by email and you’ll also get regular discounts in your inbox.” Enter your e-mail address, and then there’s a button that says “THIS IS AWESOME!” And I just clicked the button that says “THIS IS AWESOME!” Now it works. But before it didn’t, and it takes me to a form. I see. So before, there was just an issue.

Abhi: Got you.

Andrew: Got it. So, it seems like e-mail isn’t a huge part of your funnel. The funnel is get people to come to your site. By the way, I see you’re leaning as I’d said that. How does it . . . What are you feeling as I say that I clicked the ‘THIS IS AWESOME!” button.

Abhi: Oh, no. I was just thinking about there are so many things we need to work on, on our site, on our platform, on our content, delivery methods, that my mind’s always spinning with . . .

Andrew: So you’re here and going, “Aw, this should be so much better.”

Abhi: Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew: I felt that that’s what it was. So the funnel was what when Herb started to create it?

Abhi: Well, the funnel before was nonexistent. The funnel after him coming on board was okay. A lot of people in this day and age, once they go to a website, they’re there to just browse, right? Myself and you included. They’re there to just browse. And what we did was we worked with companies like Trueffect, which there is no first party retargeting and advertising solutions to, you know, basically be one of those ads that follows you around. You know, trying to be as genuine as possible. So not like trying to be very egregious and say, “Buy now! We’re awesome!” So just, you know, really just put a premium on high quality imagery, high quality advertising, you know, get you back to the site, offer content like how to take better photos, etc. Yes, offer discounts and promotions through the site.

Andrew: I see. What you’re saying is someone might hear about this thing called Fracture print on glass, come to your site and just get a sense of what it is. But just because they came to see how does this work, doesn’t mean they’re buying right away. The reason that you do retargeting is so that you can reach them afterwards, and then maybe they’ll say, “You know what, I saw that thing and I am now ready to buy it.” And they’ll buy.

Abhi: Yeah. I feel they’re really good at encapsulating the things I’m just trying to ramble about. So keep doing that. But yes, that’s it in a nutshell.

Andrew: I see. And your content’s really good, too. I see how you’re thinking about content marketing in a smart way. It’s like scrapbook crafter review. Instead of writing about your own products or about, “Here’s a new announcement from us. We just hired somebody new,” which is a really boring our sweetest hearts in the new which is a really boring blog approach that a lot of companies take. You’re showing people what to do with their photos.

Abhi: Yeah.

Andrew: Nine reasons our summer intern is awesome. All right, that’s very you-focused.

Abhi: Yeah.

Andrew: But here are quote for Father’s Day, an open letter to new dads, sweet round up of our favorite things from May, etc. So, I see what you guys are up to over there. What about podcasting? I, for a long time, never believed in podcasting as a vehicle because it means that when John’s telling people to go to Fracture, he has to also give them a discount code. I listened to him. I can’t fricking remember what discount code he has. I’m just going to go to Fracture right away and you guys won’t know that I came from John Gruber’s Daring Fireball podcast.

Abhi: Yeah.

Andrew: So, for a long time, I just didn’t believe in it. How’d you guys get open to it?

Abhi: Honestly, when we first started working with podcast vendors, we were desperate and open to anything, right? Like, you could have told us that flying airplane banners would attract John Holbrook, and we would have tried it. But you know, so we basically worked with podcasts because we were really curious to see how they work. And what we found is that working with a particular niche of podcasts, a early adopter, tech savvy, primarily male audience that really loved being on the cutting edge of products listening to someone who they trusted, that was exactly who we wanted to talk to.

And working with someone like your Daring Fireball and John Gruber was perfect for us. It really . . . What we liked about them is we had to get the product in their hands. They wanted the product in their hands. We sent them a Fracture, and they became customers. They actually became fans. If you actually hear any of those testimonials, you can hear the passion in their voice. Like, they’re like, “No, this is actually legitimate product.” And we thought we found something really powerful there.

Andrew: I see. Do you, then, do retargeting on him? I’ve noticed people do that with me.

Abhi: I don’t believe we do retargeting with him, no.

Andrew: I’ve got to tell you, that’s incredibly powerful. I’m not necessarily . . . I don’t think that he will want to do huge retargeting.

Abhi: Sure. Sure.

Andrew: But to then do Facebook ads to his fans afterwards.

Abhi: Got you.

Andrew: I’ve seen that HostGator now is doing that with me. LeadPages used to do stuff like that with me. It’s really . . . That, to me, makes a lot of sense because then someone who would’ve heard him talk about it but didn’t remember what it was that he was talking about or didn’t remember if it was Fracture.com or FractureMe.com, would see the ad and click over. All right. That makes sense.

Abhi: Yeah.

Andrew: So, is that the best channel for you guys?

Abhi: So, this is actually the crux of marketing, in my opinion, for all digital marketers, right? What is the best channel? I’m like, seriously, what gives me the best ROI. It is really hard to figure out. Like, marketing attribution is really tough. The best answer I can give you right now is yes, I believe that podcasts and TV advertising drive the best ROI. But I’m by no . . . None of us at Fracture are, by any means, satisfied the level of confidence that we have in that answer. Like, we just know that the ROI is above one. No, maybe above two, and we’re going to keep doing it. But we really want to dig in to understand the ROI of each of these channels.

Andrew: I see. And television, how’d you get started with that?

Abhi: So actually, we were featured on a DIY Channel show, the do-it-yourself channel show called “I Want That.” And what ended up happening was they featured. They asked us for a couple product samples. It didn’t cost us anything more than the cost of making them, and we shipped them over. And a couple of months later, we were on the show and every time we were on the show, sales spiked and visitors spiked. And you know, I can connect one and one. And you know, I was like, “Well, that just means we’ve got to do this a little bit more sustainably.” Reached out to Adam Lisagor from Sandwich, and we worked out a deal where we created a video.

We started working with the DIY Channel to market towards their audience. Their audience was actually really in line with the demographic that we wanted to go after. And we just learned a lot from that. So you know, Herb and Alex have helped me take it to the next level where we tried to do correlation studies between shows, you know, particular shows, particular times of the week, a particular time of day, and we [inaudible 01:08:33] identify, like, which DIY show works best, maybe it’s the [inaudible 01:08:37].

Andrew: How do you track that?

Abhi: There is no hard and fast method. We don’t have any software that we could build for it. We’re just trying a basic, like, correlation. Like, basic data correlation. So you know, we see the direct response traffic that comes from a show once it airs. And then we try and see the orders that come in, and we try and see if there are any, like, overarching trends that stick out.

Andrew: Now, the founder of Carbonite told me that he’s looking at times and locations where the ads are running as a way of figuring out which ad does well for him on radio. Radio is where he was big, I think.

Abhi: Oh, got you.

Andrew: But he didn’t have discount codes or anything trackable. Do you guys do trackable?

Abhi: We do. So, not on TV, but for example, podcasts we do. [inaudible 01:09:18].

Andrew: Podcasts you do. But television, it’s all time of day. When did this thing run?

Abhi: Exactly.

Andrew: Did we get increase in traffic that day, and we can . . .

Abhi: Yeah.

Andrew: I see.

Abhi: And, on that note, we’re actually trying to go away from discounts because, you know, not to call our competition or anything like that, but the world of photo product is so discount-driven, and we don’t want to be associated with that at all. You know, we don’t want to keep having to shove a 20% discount in your face to get your sale. So we’re trying to wean ourselves away from discounts.

Andrew: Yeah. I get it. It just makes it a little . . . Actually, I believe that if you even have just a “how did you hear about us,” people might pick where [inaudible 01:09:55].

Abhi: That’s [inaudible 01:09:57].

Andrew: That’s on the order page. And then John doesn’t have to, or your other guys who . . . Let me see. You guys also buy ads from the Hello Internet, Data [inaudible 01:10:06] and a bunch . . .

Abhi: Yeah.

Andrew: . . .of other places.

Abhi: Yeah.

Andrew: So, I don’t mean to keep talking about John, but I happen to listen to his stuff.

Abhi: Sure.

Andrew: So yeah, so he doesn’t have to talk about both FractureMe.com and his discount code, he can just talk about your site and know that some percentage of people will click that referral button.

Abhi: Exactly.

Andrew: You know, there’s one thing that I forgot to get to from our notes that I think is important. At one point, you and Alex said, “Maybe we need to give up on this. We need to figure out a way to make this thing work, to fix it, or we just admit failure and give up on this business.” When was that?

Abhi: That was 2013, you know, mid 2013 when we had been through a lot. You know, nothing was working the way we had wanted it to. Of course, it made progress, but we just weren’t gaining traction the way we wanted to. And you know, I take a lot of the fault for this. I felt like I just couldn’t deliver on the things that we needed to in order to get the sale out the door. You know, Alex isn’t responsible for bringing in sales, he’s responsible for getting the product out the door. And we really needed to figure out how to go big in the “get sales in the door” perspective.

Andrew: I was looking at where we connected, and it was because of you guys saw the interview that I did with AHeirloom, the cutting board.

Abhi: [inaudible 01:11:25].

Andrew: What made you watch that one?

Abhi: You know, Herb sent it over to me. You know, I devour online content when it comes to entrepreneurship and anything business related, and I was surprised I hadn’t heard about you before. He sent it over to me. And frankly, I just appreciated the honesty, the self-awareness. And I thought to myself, “I could talk to this guy. He would hold no punches.”

Andrew: I’m glad that that one turned out to be such a positive interview for me. Anyone who hasn’t seen it could go over to the site and just look for AHeirloom in the search bar and see that interview. It was a rough for me.

This one, on the other hand, was the exact opposite. I learned so much from you. I learned about the process for creating your MBP. I learned about marketing and how you figured out what your process was and where it was going to work for you. I learned what your revenues were. I learned that this idea of creating something that seems to have been invented before, or that is not necessarily . . .Well, it didn’t seem that revolutionary to me when I first discovered it. But now that I’m understanding what you’re thinking was behind it, I get it.

Abhi: Yeah. I definitely appreciate it. That’s it.

Andrew: All right. I wish that we were getting some kind of code here just so I could see how many people buy Fracture because of Mixergy. I don’t want a commission off of it, but I’d love to see. I don’t know, actually. I wonder. I think what’s going to happen is people are just going to get to know your company a little bit better. Some will end up buying. But man, it’s hard to tell.

Abhi: Yeah. Hey listen, that’s I could really ask for. So I definitely appreciate the opportunity.

Andrew: Cool. All right. Well, thank you so much for doing this interview. The website is FractureMe.com, if you guys want to check it out. If you like this interview, of course, subscribe to it so you get the podcast. But number two, go to iTunes and give it a rating. I’d love to get more people to discover Mixergy, and when you go to iTunes and rate it. I know it takes a couple of minutes out of your day. It’s huge for me and it helps more people discover Mixergy. So I’d appreciate it if you did that. And I’m grateful to you for watching this interview all the way to the end. Thank you so much for doing this interview with me.

Abhi: Thank you, Andrew.

Andrew: You bet. Thank you all for being a part of Mixergy. Bye.