Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters. I am Grizzly Adams, founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. Today I’ve got an interview for you that is, again, sponsored by my friend Scott, the startup lawyer who founded Walker Corporate law. I’ll tell you about him later in the interview.
For now, I would like you to imagine having to lift up your hand as an entrepreneur and declare that the first product, that the idea, just didn’t work. Painful, right? That’s one of the fears that we have when we go to sleep at night. Well, that’s what today’s entrepreneur did, and this is the story of how he ended up there and what he did to turn things around.
Aydin Mirzaee is the founder of Fluidware, an Internet software company that focuses on empowering feedback for its client. Its flagship products are fluid surveys and fluid reviews.
Aydin, welcome.
Aydin: Thank you, Andrew. I’m really glad to be on the show. I’ve listened to interviews for years. It’s cool to be on here.
Andrew: It’s an honor to have you on here. Here’s something that I didn’t know about you until we started chatting before I hit record. At 13 you couldn’t get a job, and you did something that I don’t know too many 13 year olds do. What was it?
Aydin: Yeah. It was all about the stock market back in the day. Basically, I thought since I’m too young to get a work permit, and I can’t work at The Gap and places like that, it’d be really cool to do something for a summer job.
So, my brother and I put our money together and we convinced our dad to open up a trading account for us. We started day trading, just buying and selling on a daily basis. We would have CNBC on the whole day and be trading and doing all that stuff.
Call it beginner’s luck. Call it whatever you want. I like to think there was some skill involved, because we read a whole bunch of books and we kept watching all these interviews. Anyway, we did pretty well.
My dad saw this and said, ah, I have two financial geniuses here. Let me put in some more money. He did, and that was right around the time where basically everything started to tank. It was the big, I think 2001, crash of the NASDAQ. I think everyone lost money.
But, the point was we also lost a lot of money. We lost everything we had. Of course, we gave our dad a really good financial hit, too. Things were pretty upsetting at that time.
I think at that point my brother and I looked at each other and we said, we have to not only make this money back, but we have to show that we’re capable and we can do great things. I think that was one of the very first points in my life that I had a big failure. I said, we can’t leave it like this. This can’t be the end. We have to recover. I think it was a good lesson back then.
Andrew: Why didn’t that send you in the other direction of saying, you know what, maybe if the stock market isn’t for me then maybe business isn’t for me. I let my dad down. I’m never going to risk this kind of let down again.
Aydin: I don’t know. I guess it was one of those things. You don’t want to let your dad down. Maybe just culturally I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to show that we were capable, we could do things, and achieve great results. I think it would’ve bugged me for the rest of eternity if I’d let that failure just be it…
Andrew: …What do you mean by culturally?
Aydin: I don’t know. I think just the way that you’re brought up. At least in my family it was always about let’s achieve great things, let’s set the bar high. Failure was not acceptable. At the same time it was just one of those things.
You always want to look back on your history and say that you gave it your all. Ultimately, you just want to have a good story. It wouldn’t have been a good story if we had just left it there and said, yeah we tried something and it failed, and then we just stopped, and that was it.
Andrew: I see.
Aydin: There had to be more.
Andrew: Was your dad into trading stocks? Or was he an entrepreneur or risk taker?
Aydin: Oh, God no. No. Are you kidding? I mean, later on in the story if we get to it. But, no. Are you kidding? He’s one of the most conservative people you’ll ever meet.
When I first left my full time job at Nortel he basically said, I don’t know if I want to talk to you. He’s definitely super conservative, old school. I love him to pieces. I get my work ethic from him for sure. But, yeah, it’s not one of those things that was encouraged. It was always about go do your Bachelor’s degree, your Master’s degree, do our PhD, post doctorate, do whatever you can. Work in a company and work your way up there.
This whole entrepreneurship mentality wasn’t definitely something we were brought up with.
Andrew: And so you were at Nortel, but you still, somewhere inside, had this entrepreneurial bug. Did you get to express it while you were working at Nortel?
Aydin: Okay. So here’s the thing about Nortel. When I first started working there in 2006, you’ve got to keep in mind that we’re in Ottawa. And, Ottawa, back in the day at least, was kind of this telecom city. Nortel was this giant. To work at Nortel was a pretty prestigious thing at the time, before things went downhill.
Yeah, when I first started working there it was super prestigious to get that job. The first three months were amazing. Every day I was learning things. In three months they put me in charge of a team of developers. It was really funny, because after our projects and everything were over they turned to me and would say, how long have you been here, 10 or 11 years. I was like, no I actually just started three months ago. It was just shocking. There was a lot of opportunity there.
The challenge was that you can’t move up fast enough. This is going to sound ridiculous, but my internal goal was either I make it to VP within five years, or somewhere along the line I realize that it’s just not going to happen and that’ll be it.
Andrew: It was VP, you said, or out?
Aydin: Yeah.
Andrew: Okay.
Aydin: That’s what I said. Like I said, it was a pretty ambitious thing to want to do. But, very quickly I realized that at that sort of company the culture wasn’t there. You had to pay your dues, spend the time. You had to do these things in order to make it big. I did some adventurous things at the company, too. I really tried to do things, and I think I had some very good success. Ultimately, I would’ve had to spend my time there in order to justify the position.
Andrew: And when you realized it wasn’t going to happen, did you leave right away, or did you start a startup on the side?
Aydin: Well, that’s the thing. To be fair I never just left it to die. Three months in my brother was in Montreal, I was in Ottawa, and my parents were in New York. My parents are still in New York.
Long distance phone calls were an issue. At that time Skype first came out with its API. We took a look at that and said, oh, what if there’s a way that we could have free phone calls on our cell phones. We’re not going to have computers all the time. Back then we didn’t have smart phones.
We said, can we use Skype or VOIP or something else so we can initiate free phone calls between each other. So, we started working on that. Three months in, probably, I started working on this on a nights and weekends basis. I started to do that.
I would travel to Montreal every single weekend and work with the guys pretty much around the clock 36 hours straight. I’d get them to not party on the weekends and instead work on this startup thing. It was not easy to do. Remember, these are first year students, and the first year you party. I was saying, no, you shouldn’t party, we should do this. We did that.
Basically, the startup started three months while I was at Nortel. That was the first thing we all worked together on.
Andrew: How were you going to make Skype phone calls on those old dumb phones? That would really have excited me back then.
Aydin: Yeah. We did this really hacky thing in the beginning. Later on it became a way more legit way of making this stuff happen.
The way it worked is if I wanted to call you, Andrew, I would grab your cell phone number. I would put it in a text message. I’d send that text message to, we called the company back then bOK. I’d send this text message so bOK would call me, and it would call you, and it would connect the both of us. So, both of us get this incoming call on our cell phones that’s running through our Skype server.
Of course, this is completely against Skype’s terms and conditions. But, we just did it anyway. We figured out Skype has all these provisions not to let you run more than one Skype instance on a given computer. We found all sorts of hacky methods, as many of them as we possibly could. We did that. It was cool.
In the beginning it was free. In North America it was free. People started using it. All of a sudden it became real. Within a very short amount of time all sorts of phone numbers that we never…Because people initiate the calls, we saw who would come in. We were like, oh we don’t know this guy, we don’t know that guy. Holy shit, people are using this, it’s crazy.
All of a sudden it became serious and we started thinking now we have to move away from the Skype thing. We have to make it more legit. We started to turn it into a real business, or we wanted to do that.
Andrew: Why didn’t you? Or did you?
Aydin: We did. It was right around that time when Jaja, Truphone, and all these other competitors came out of nowhere. Remember, I was in Nortel. I didn’t really know too much, but all these guys started raising, like, 10 million, 15 million.
Here I am, I don’t even know what venture capital is. I’m like, really? They pay you money and then they take part of your company? That’s kind of cool. I said, if they’re doing it, 10 million sounds like a lot of money, we should probably do something about that, maybe raise some ourselves. Of course, meeting with people here in Ottawa they said, “Look, you’re 21. No one’s going to give you venture capital.” It’s not the same Silicon Valley mentality, right?
So “No one’s going to give you money, plus you’re doing this Internet thing, this is kind of a telecom city, it’s not the place, you should probably try Silicon Valley.” So I said, “Okay.” I didn’t quite understand why, now I do, but anyway. I went back home and was like, how am I going to reach out to people in Silicon Valley? What I did was I looked all across the Internet and looked for every VC I could find and of course if you know someone’s first name and last name you can guess their e-mail address and so I sent hundreds of e-mails [?].
I think I was the world’s most infamous spammer and you know the funny thing is I got all these top tier firms, Sequoia, all the big ones replying back not because they thought the idea was so great to do this phone call thing but they were like, “Holy shit. You put your video pitch on YouTube and you’re sending it to us via e-mail. That’s so creative. We should meet and talk.” Remember this was before Google. YouTube and as the early days and it’s super commonplace to do this now but back then it was innovated.
Andrew: . . . Bach in 2006.
Aydin: 2006, 2007, I don’t remember the exact date, but yeah, it was around then. It must’ve been either late 2006, early 2007, something around those lines. Then, all these blogs started writing about this. Valleywag took to blog post and coined my name as LonelyDork15 after LonelyGirl15, their original YouTube character. And Andrew, for the longest time, you searched for my name, the first thing that show was LonelyDork15. I was like, “Thank you, guys! Now my profile is screwed up forever.”
Andrew: How did we miss that in our research? LonelyDork15!
Aydin: Oh God, you’re going to search for it. Okay, so . . .
Andrew: I’m doing the search right now. I see it on Gawker. March [?] 2007.
Aydin: It’s terrible. They call me the slicked-back, slicked-hair salesmen and all sorts of things in there. Anyway, ultimately they call me an idiot. All sorts of people start commenting on this and other blogs write about it. And then, what happens is, I’m like, “Oh God. Someone at Nortel is going to find out I’m doing this and it’s not going to be good.” So I pulled off the video. But that made things even worse. So, then people started saying, “Oh, wonder boy, did you raise this money? What happened?” It’s a long story. I can go into this. But eventually we had a lot invested . . .
Andrew: I see it right now. I see on the video on Gawker it says, “This video does not exist.”
Aydin: Ah, Okay. Yeah, right. I pulled it off. Then what happened was, eventually we had an investor come down. The video did a lot of things. It’s a long story but the ultimate thing that happened was all these people started commenting on these blog posts. My mentor at the time Ellie and I started looking at this and we said, “Holy shit. Why are people, why do they care so much that they have to spend the time to read this and some unknown character from Ottawa and they’re just going to comment on it and criticize everything I do?”
And so we looked at that we said, “Hmm. Isn’t there a way to make money off of criticism?” That was kind of the first thing that we were thinking about and at that time, you know, end of 2007, Bach was kind of winding down and we kind of realized that we couldn’t make money after this whole ordeal. That was the idea that we came up with for chide.it and that was beginning of 2008.
What we wanted was to create the world’s first anti-social network, in the sense that you would put up videos, material on the web, and you would put up a bounty and then other people could come in and criticize, and you know, constructive feedback, criticism. And then, basically you would distribute that money to the people who provided the most value. That was the idea, that’s what the company first started as.
Andrew: But, before we continue. Bach didn’t succeed because you couldn’t raise money? Is that it? And then other competitors, I remember, JaJa at the time, those guys were able to raise money and so, is that what the problem was? That you couldn’t compete with them because you couldn’t get funding?
Aydin: So, it’s funny, alright? This ended up as a case study in a bunch of Canadian entrepreneurship text books and things. It was really funny. So, they brought me into the class afterwards, after the students did the case study and they said, “Well, here’s the guy you read about in the case study.” Students are voting as to why they thought Bach didn’t work out. The vote amongst the students was, “Oh, he didn’t have enough experience.” Right?
But it’s one of those things you can apply to anything. My belief was the reason it didn’t work out was because I wasn’t working on it full-time. That was the biggest lesson I learned from that whole ordeal is that if you want something to succeed, of course you are going to put all of your time and effort and energy into it. You know, a startup takes up all of your time and more. You just can’t run a startup on a part-time basis. There’s one lesson I learned from that whole experience, it was that. I said, you know what, the next thing I do is going to be on a full time basis no matter what.
Andrew: I see, okay. Yeah, I’m looking here at the notes from your conversation with April. Nortel R and D. You were at Nortel from 2006 to 2007. From 2006 to 2008 you were working on bOK. So, there was a lot of overlap.
Aydin: Oh, yeah, yeah. I was at Nortel until the end of 2007, so that full two years. bOK was in the background. Then, in 2008 it was break from Nortel and then start new things.
Andrew: Right. I went back and took a look at screenshots of Chide.it.
Aydin: Okay.
Andrew: The first one, I told you about this. One of the first ones that I saw right at the top said, Chide.it is a community where it’s not only okay to criticize, it’s encouraged.
Aydin: Yeah. It was a terrible idea. That’s what we learned. That was the first idea that we wanted to start. We spent a lot of time and we built it. We finally came up to the launch point. Really, what the idea was…Did I already explain this, or was that in the pre-interview?
Andrew: You were saying that…I get the idea that people were criticizing your video and you thought, hey this is fun. I’ll create this antisocial network where we’re all just criticizing things. That seems like a lot of social networks right now, frankly. There’s a big part of reddit that’s like that. Why didn’t Chide.it, then…In fact, before we get into why it didn’t take off, you launched it on your own. Let’s talk about how you built it, and then understand why it didn’t work. What did you build, and how long did it take you to build it?
Aydin: I guess we worked on it for probably four or five months, something along those lines. Maybe it was six when we finally declared failure. Really, it was myself and Eli, my co-founder partner. And there was my brother and a good friend of ours, Sam. They were still students at McGill. They were kind of the developers working on the software. I did a little dabbling in the code. Ultimately, we worked on it and it was, again, more of a nights and weekends thing for them. I was working on it more full time. We prepared it for launch.
I remember this was one of the really interesting scenarios. I remember there was some sort of startup event where you’d get to pitch your product. Like, 10, 15 people would come in. They’d do 60 second pitches. Of those 10 or 15, six would be chosen, and they would get to present to the whole crowd for 15 minutes on what the idea was. We thought this would be a great launch platform for our product.
So I drove six hours to Waterloo where the event was located. I forget what it was called. It was startup something. Anyway, I drove to Waterloo for six hours. I went there and did my 60 second pitch. It was awesome, because I got voted as the sixth highest person. Later on I found out the whole thing was gamed. Everyone had friends and things voting for them.
Anyway, I was chosen as sixth. What happened was the first five people took so long that there was no time for the sixth person. That was the day we were going to launch the product, like, many months later. That was our launch date.
I was pretty bummed as you can imagine. I drove six hours to get there. So, I started talking to people in the audience. I said, you know what, I’m going to talk to the investors and pitch my idea and things like that.
The vast majority of people said the obvious which was, you’re telling me that you want people to post their ideas and material on the Internet so people can publicly criticize it. That’s your idea? I was like, well when you put it like that it really does sound like a bad idea.
Anyway, I was pretty bummed. I didn’t get to present. I didn’t get a good reception. So, I had to drive back. On the way back there was an accident somewhere on the road. It took me, I don’t know, maybe 10 hours to get back. That whole night I didn’t go to sleep.
I went back to the team. They said, how did it go. I was like, it went amazing. All we have to do is make a few modifications and this product is going to be the greatest thing that anyone’s ever seen.
I never talked about that story until probably two years after that event. It was one of those situations where you hit a low point but you have to internalize it and not communicate it with the team. That’s what we did.
But, ultimately, after that event it continued to not succeed because people just didn’t want to pay in order to get their products up there for public criticism. We realized…
Andrew: …Oh, they were also going to pay to put their product up there.
Aydin: Right, exactly. I mean just the concept of paying for criticism was something that people weren’t receptive to. We realized that the word criticism was a bad, bad word and that we should really stay away from it.
Andrew: I see. In a moment I’m going to ask you why. But, let me do a quick plug here for, I’m experimenting, by the way, Aydin. I’m trying to find ways to not put the ads in the beginning of the interview, but put them in the center, and frankly, I haven’t yet found a way to slip them in and make them feel part of the conversation.
Aydin: Okay.
Andrew: So I’ll just say, “I’m interrupting.” And I’ll do this here. The ad is for this guy, for Scott Edward Walker of Walker Corporate Law. I say it a lot, that he’s this startup’s entrepreneur. I don’t know if I make a clear enough… if the message is clear enough. Why do you need a startup entrepreneur? And I’ll tell you why, Aydin. You probably know this already, but I’ll tell the audience why. I used to go to my dad’s lawyer to get legal advice. The guy didn’t understand how to structure a company so that I can eventually get shares. He didn’t understand any part of our community.
Then I wanted to, at some point, give options to my people. First of all, he didn’t understand how to do it, and then when I found a lawyer who did understand startups and did understand how to give shares and options to my employees, he was upset by the way the first lawyer put together my company. We’re talking about the previous company that I ran.
And so that’s my point here. You go to the average lawyer. He doesn’t get the startup community. The way we launch companies, the way we build companies, the way we grow them, and give shares and so on is so much different from the average ‘mom and pop’ company that starts out. So you want a lawyer who understands it. So having said that, let me zoom back in on me. Sorry, Scott.
Having said that, the next issue is you go to one of the top firms. And here’s something that I didn’t understand. Top firms aren’t excited about making money from a new entrepreneur. What they want is a share of the business, or they want a whole lot of money. What you want is something in between, and this is the guy. A startup entrepreneur who doesn’t charge you like those crazy, big firms: Scott Edward Walker. It feels, frankly, like the right lawyer, but the wrong way to squeeze the ad into the interview. What do you think, Aiden? And I’ll ask the audience too, but what do you think of the way I just put it in a [??]?
Aydin: I think that Scott is probably one of the most well-known… I see him everywhere. I think he’s on…
Andrew: [??]
Aydin: Yeah, I feel like he’s the startup entrepreneur that… sorry, the startup lawyer that entrepreneurs trust. That’s ingrained in my brain. So I think his advertising is working really well. And like you said, there are a bunch of people that I’ve heard that from, so it’s just [??].
Andrew: Maybe what I need to do is to not so much disrupt you.
Aydin: He’s well known even in Canada. Let’s just put it that way.
Andrew: Oh, right. He doesn’t… I don’t think… I don’t know what he would do with Canadian companies. But maybe here, this is what I should do. I should be doing something like ta-do-ta-do this. What if I put my video on top of his like this, make it small? What if it’s just him in the corner, like this, maybe just a logo, and me back to big, and then instead of cutting in the interview, I am just giving him a small logo? I don’t know. A small placement.
Aydin: I thought it was fine showing his website. I thought that was cool.
Andrew: Oh, it was. All right. I [??] like this, and then what I’m selling is that little spot right there.
Aydin: No, I thought that was really cool.
Andrew: All right. Back then to the interview. I love this playing around part. I’ll figure this out. But until then, I’m going to have a whole lot of fun just playing with all the different technology that I have here to do the stuff like that. Alright. Do you remember when you realized you yourself [??] it wasn’t working, where you said, “Hey, I can’t keep fighting this losing battle. It’s time to say no.”?
Aydin: Yeah. I mean, it was really simple. So we didn’t raise money, and what we had to work with was whatever savings I had when I was at [??], which wasn’t that much. I figured I’d probably have eight to ten months’ worth.
Andrew: Roughly how much money are we talking about that you saved up?
Aydin: Sorry, what was that?
Andrew: How much money, roughly, did you have that you saved up? It’s been so long [??] talk about it.
Aydin: I think I had about 20,000.
Andrew: Okay.
Aydin: So given things that you’d spend on the business and a car and rent and things like that, I figured that I’d be able to last at least ten months. It turns out that I had to make that last a lot longer than 10 months. But yeah, so the money was running out, and it’s really fun because you get to wake up and you’re like, “do-do-do-do, bank accounts are going like this.”
And the opportunity for revenue and customers is still non-existent, so you start to think to yourself, “Okay, this is not going in the right direction.” And really what it was, it was just a lot of customer feedback. So we wanted to go in and try and convince people to get on the site, and they just weren’t receptive. I think people would do favors for us and say, “Okay, sure, I’ll get on there if I really must.” But it’s just people weren’t receptive to the concepts. I think that the business idea had a fundamental flaw, and that’s the reason that we wanted to switch.
Andrew: What about this? I’m looking at a version of the site that you had up in 2008, early, early 2008. What I see is “Ask.com, Can it Survive?” “Google’s Secondary Search Boxes” is another conversation topic. “Downsizing in North America and Hiring Abroad,” “American Elections and Daffy Duck.” It seems like at some point it became user generated questions that people were supposed to get critical about, but I didn’t see too much criticism when I looked at it.
Aydin: Yeah. Right. It didn’t really take off very much. That was the idea. The point was to post content. That was our original strategy, to try and get user generated content in the sense that people would, again, post things that are controversial or post opinions. The idea was we need to get the community to criticize those.
Andrew: And battle it out.
Aydin: Yeah, exactly. We had these things called chides for points. It was just terrible, terrible.
Andrew: Do you remember…I had that with my invitation site. The business wasn’t going anywhere. I was feeling terrible. I would just keep imagining destruction. I would keep imagining how I couldn’t turn it around. I would be embarrassed to have run it. Do you remember any of your feelings at the time?
Aydin: Oh, of course. You look around six months in. What are your friends doing? Your friends are getting Master’s degrees, PhD’s. They’re getting married. They’re getting promoted at work. They’re doing all these fun things.
And what am I doing? I’m doing this startup thing. It’s going nowhere. There are a lot of feeling of self-doubt. And not just in the beginning there. Because even once we changed the concept and moved onto what we do today, there was a period where I think I went without salary for 18 months, roughly.
You start thinking to yourself, am I really as smart as I thought I was. There’s a lot of self-doubt. The self-doubt is what starts to hurt and starts to make you think that maybe I’m not cut out to do this sort of thing. You really have to suppress it. Yeah, there is…
Andrew: …How do you suppress your self-doubt? How do you deal with it?
Aydin: How do you deal with it? Everyone has different ways to deal with it…
Andrew: …What did you do?…
Aydin: …For me it was just one of those…You know, I think I listened to a lot of Tony Robbins tapes, if you know who that is. I think the guy’s awesome. I still follow him and listen to his stuff today. For me, that was good motivation.
But, at the same time it’s a lot of just not wanting to fail. It was the same concepts from when we talked about the whole stock market incident. It was really, do I want this to be the story? That I took off and did this thing for a year and a half or two years, and this was the outcome? Is this going to be in my life resume? You just can’t have it.
The opportunity is now you have an amazing story to tell. That’s what I kept telling myself. It was like, if I’m able to turn it around, just if, that would be one heck of a story…
Andrew: …Yeah, and it is…
Aydin: …that I’ll get to talk about one day. So, I was…
Andrew: …It is. And now, you saw, that’s what I picked up on. I said, that you got that low and then turned things around. And, now, Fluidware is just shooting. It does make for an exciting story.
Aydin: It does. Once you’ve been there and you’ve been that low…I remember, Andrew, this one time we came close. This was when we later on shifted to the new product and things. It was a Tuesday. The person who does our finances came in and said, guys we’re short 5,000 dollars for payroll.
I remember just almost feeling so sick to my stomach. I wanted to just go outside. Anyways, it was a really sick feeling. It turned out that she made a mistake, some sort of rounding error, and we actually did have enough money. But, we didn’t find that out until a day later. That was the most stressful afternoon of my entire life.
There are times like that where the self-doubt really, really kicks in. You just have to understand that it’s a rollercoaster ride. I forget, I think it was the COO from [??] Cameron Herold. He said that once you realize that it is a rollercoaster, the great thing about having those low moments is that you know that you’re also going to have the moments on the other end.
As long as you recognize that and you can identify it saying, oh, I’m having one of my low moment thoughts. Okay, I understand. That’s okay, because I’m going to have one of the high moment thoughts in probably two days. It’s just going to be fine. Anyway, that’s how you start thinking about it.
Andrew: You declared failure, you told April Dykman in the pre-interview. How did you do that?
Aydin: We declared failure and we said that this idea is not going to work. And…
Andrew: …Publicist?
Aydin: No, just internally.
Andrew: Okay.
Aydin: See, the problem is we even failed to generate enough attention and traffic. People knew we were doing this Chide.it thing, but they didn’t really know what. And what it came down to is we started meeting with a lot of people.
As we were talking to them we met this one guy at Carleton University, a local university. He basically ran this business plan competition. We said, yeah, we have this – we started calling it a feedback platform. Because we learned criticism, people don’t like the term. So, feedback platform.
He said, well students submit business plans to me. Then, I distribute them to these judges, and they provide feedback. Is that what you guys do? I’m like, that’s exactly what we do. Of course.
That was the first. He paid us 10,000 dollars to build him this site where students could apply online and then other people could provide feedback.
While we convinced ourselves that we could use some of the code, the reality is we basically had to start from scratch. We hired people. Some are still with the company today. We paid 15 dollars an hour when they could’ve gone out and accepted really expensive jobs. We paid them for 30 hours a week when they could’ve, you know, but they worked 50 or 60.
We built the site. We delivered it to him two months later. That was the very first version of FluidReview. The reason we took the site is that we said one day we’re going to make it its own product. We’re going to get every business plan competition in the world. They’re all going to be customers. We thought that was great.
Two months in we delivered the product. We burned the 10,000 dollars. We were back at square one, and the worst part was we don’t actually have a product. We have this super hard coded thing that’s only going to work for this guy. It’s not going to work for anyone else. We were like, damnit we did it again. Is this failure number two? We can’t sell this to anyone else. Anyway, it was just a disaster.
As we were looking at this we realized that when students apply to business plan competitions they fill out forms. The only part of the product that we actually spent the time making customizable was the forms component, so that he could throw in his own forms questions. In 2008 we had this drag and drop interface where you could drag in questions, and build these forms, and rearrange them and do all that stuff.
In 2008 that was super impressive. People would see that and say, wow, you’re doing that within your browser? That was cool enough that we said, hey what if we just took that component and we made it its own product? Maybe if we do that we can, in the interim, generate some cash so at least we don’t have to all go out and get jobs again. That was basically how FluidSurveys was born. That was…
Andrew: …And then when you launched…Sorry?
Aydin: I was just saying that was how FluidSurveys was born. That was the genesis. It was we have this FluidReview thing that we want to do. But, we don’t have any money yet and we’re desperate for cash. So, what if we just took the form component and made it its own product?
Andrew: Got you.
Aydin: And that was FluidSurveys.
Andrew: What was the revenue going to be from that?
Aydin: Very good question. We were thinking of doing a subscription service of sorts, very much like what we’re doing today. But, in the beginning we wanted to focus mostly on the enterprise space. Because, this is going to sound dumb, we thought that you’re not going to make it. There were the SurveyMonkeys of the world, for example, out there. We just didn’t think that they made a lot of money.
We just wanted to sell this to the enterprise market. The first avenue that we were going to target was local federal governments within Canada. That was going to be our first thing, because we were in Ottawa. There’s government around. We thought it was a natural fit.
We needed an angle to get in. The angle at that time was accessibility. Because federal government had this thing where all of our surveys have to be fillable by anyone – if you’re visually impaired, get a screen reader, whatever it was. They passed all these rules and regulations, and there was no one out there that met it.
We thought this was an opportunity. Because we did try and sell this drag and drop form builder, but the problem was even though it was easy to use and everything it wasn’t enough of a reason for people to make the switch. It wasn’t enough of a leap in technology. So, the first angle we wanted to go at was this accessibility thing. We decided to focus on federal government first. That was the first avenue.
Andrew: I see. How did that work?
Aydin: It was interesting. You’re going to love this story. We met some guy who introduced us to some other guy who introduced us to this other guy who told us about how federal government has these accessibility standards and no one meets them. That if we meet them then that’s going to be really good.
And this was our last opportunity. We were so close to running out of cash at that point. If this wasn’t going to work it would’ve been over. So we got invited to this meeting to show him what we had built. We didn’t know this, but we walked into the meeting and there were 50 people in this meeting. It was all across the board, gigantic boardroom, every single decision maker from every single federal government department across the government in public opinion research, sitting in the same place. It was like, almost magical. Everyone was sitting there.
Of course, the Internet doesn’t work. I’m like, okay, I don’t need to use the Internet. I’m just going to pull out my laptop, load up Linux, then run the server and do all that stuff. I didn’t realize that that was being displayed on the projector behind me. Everyone freaked out. They’re like, you expect us to do these things. That took us five minutes to explain. No, no, no, I swear…
Andrew: …Oh, they’re not recognizing that what you’re doing is just trying to simulate the web experience on your computer.
Aydin: Exactly. It’s easy to use, I promise. Anyway, we loaded up. But the problem, Andrew, is with surveys, you create surveys, you deploy them, and then you analyze the results. The problem is we only had the creation part of it. Because we had this form builder, and you could create things but you couldn’t do much of the other two. So, that was a problem.
During the meeting we spent so much time on the creation side. I don’t even know how we did that. But, we spent the full hour on the creation side. We didn’t even have a chance to go to the other portions. When they asked about it I said, yeah, yeah, we’re all about drag and drop and we can do this thing. So, we walked out.
Anyway, then they asked us about pricing. We’d never thought about pricing up until that point. Eli’s about, I don’t know, 20 or 30 years older than I am. He’s been there and done that. He’s had a publicly traded company before. When they asked, I was like, surely he must know the answer to this question. I turned to him, and I’m like, holy shit he looks just as bewildered as I do. That’s pretty bad.
Before any of us had a chance to say anything time was running out. People had to go. The guy turned to us and said, but it’s lower than 25,000 a year, right? We looked at each other and were nodding very quickly, yes, absolutely, no problem, under 25,000.
So, we walked out of this meeting. As soon as we knew that we were in the clear, you know, gigantic high five. We thought we’d made it. Of course, it was quite the opposite of that just going forward. But, we had that brief moment of success. I think that moment of success, even though brief before reality hit us and it wasn’t everything we thought, was enough to give us enough fumes to run on for the next little while until we could actually get the first customer within federal government.
Andrew: How many customers did you end up with?
Aydin: This is something I’m really proud of. I think today we reach over 70 different departments or individual departments within larger departments and things. I think you can say we are the standard survey tool within the federal government in Canada. That was pretty impressive.
Andrew: What do they pay? Is it under 25,000 dollars?
Aydin: Oh, of course. It actually came out to a lot lower than that, average price point, you know. There were a lot that were under 5,000. Again, it was an annual cost, so it was cool.
That’s when our original model started. We charge up front, we get all the cash up front, and the great thing about that is you have cash to work with. And, two is volume. We got one, then the second one. I mean, a long story, not to dwell on it, but they didn’t believe in software as a service. They said, you want us to trust our data on your servers, and who are you again.
It was one of those things. I didn’t even know. We had reliable, awesome people tell us, there’s no way you’re going to convince them to do this. Anyway, it happened. Once we got the first one it went well after that.
Andrew: How do you get others? I understand walking into a room of people who are decision makers who need a product like yours that has the accessibility features that they’re now legally required to get in software. I understand them signing up? Where do you get the next batch of customers?
Aydin: It was a lot of just doing research. There was a lot of cold calls. Those early days were lots of cold calls and lots of cold e-mails. We did all sorts of lunch and learn programs where we would offer a free lunch and invite people to come over and learn about the product. We did demos…
Andrew: …You mean people who do surveys. You’d invite them over and say, can you tell us why you’re using the survey software that you’re using, what do you think of ours, that kind of thing?
Aydin: It was more here’s our survey software and here’s how it’s awesome. Not to show off or promote, but we have a really, even back then, we had an amazing software tool. It was just so easy to use, and we really focused on those advanced features that you wouldn’t get in more the entry level tools.
We always had this enterprise mentality. Every time we’d have customers say, well, do you do this, if we didn’t we would go back and quickly build it and make it happen. These lunch and learns not only became a source of us finding new customers, but it was also our market research at the same time. Because we would see what people would gravitate towards, what we were missing, and things like that, and we’d just keep building and making the product better and better as we went.
Andrew: Let me see if I understand it. You were starting to make cold calls, and that brought in customers. People were hearing you talk about your survey software and they said, okay, I’ll try it. Then they became customers?
Aydin: No, no. It was more of I’d call you and say, hey Andrew we’re hosting this free lunch and learn. We’re going to be showcasing our FluidSurveys software that’s being used by these clients. We know that you do surveys in your department. It happens Friday at noon.
People want to come in for a free lunch. So, they would bring in other people within their departments. They’d see the software. They’d be impressed. Then, we’d just keep following up and following up…
Andrew: …And it was companies and government agencies?
Aydin: We first focused on federal government.
Andrew: Okay.
Aydin: Then, we went off, and once we started doing well there then we went after provincial departments, then cities, then colleges and universities. We realized you can’t boil the ocean all at once. We went after segments and tried to dominate segments. Probably all the way up until end of 2011 our focus was mainly Canada. We didn’t even look anywhere else. It was just all about Canada. We did get customers elsewhere, but it was really focusing on establishing a super awesome brand name in Canada.
Andrew: Lunch and learn is unbelievably time consuming and expensive, but I guess it pays off. Because, what was your price point at that point?
Aydin: Yeah. Let’s say an average of 5,000 a year.
Andrew: Got you. Because you’re selling a product that’s in the thousands of dollars you can afford to take people to lunch to really get to know them, to talk to them, and to walk them through your product.
Aydin: Yeah. It’s not as time consuming as you would say. I mean, literally, it was an hour event…
Andrew: …I’ve got to invite people over to brunch every other week, and here in San Francisco it’s a pain in the butt to think of where do I get their e-mail addresses, how do I coordinate it.
Aydin: Yeah. There’s a lot of work up front. But, once you’ve done it a few times, and you have your contacts and things, things seem to become more efficient.
Andrew: Okay.
Aydin: That’s what it was. We really got to know these people. It was marketing research at the same time. It was awesome. They were in Ottawa. We were in Ottawa. It just made a lot of sense. We built a lot of rapport with these guys. I think the vast majority of them, I still remember customer names from those early days. I don’t know our customers today.
Andrew: April asked you about growth in the pre-interview. You told her revenues for 2008, 2009, and 2010, and they’re significant. Do you remember what you said? Because if you don’t, I’ve got to read this from her notes.
Aydin: Yeah. Basically, in 2008 we were four or five people. Collectively, we made a whopping 18,000 dollars…
Andrew: Four or five people in the company, 18,000 in…
Aydin: All of us. We like to think we’re pretty smart people. We looked at this and said, well, why don’t we send someone to work at McDonald’s full time? We could make more money and the rest of us could just chill. In 2009 I think we did five times that. So, in 2009, remember, we had this product and we’re getting these government departments. Things were working out.
We made about 100, or 110, or something like that. In 2011 was when we made 500. Did I do that right? Sorry, 2010 was when we made half a million, roughly, in sales. That was about the point where we said, okay, this thing is going to work. I’m not saying we’re going to be a gigantic company, but at least we know we’re going to survive. That was the point where we knew were going to survive.
Basically, we worked through 2010. In 2011, now the product was good enough that we started focusing on getting more customers internationally. That wasn’t because it was Canada and we were Canadian and that sort of thing. Now we had a good enough product that we were going out there, and competing with the best of the best in the industry, and winning over customers.
What we tried to focus on in the beginning was there were these other companies, and they sold inhouse survey systems that you’d install on your own servers. And, they cost 60 grand. We went in and we said, here’s our philosophy. We’re an SaaS based product. We have all the advanced functionality, except we also reinvented the interface every step of the way. So, you’re not going to need a training manual to make this stuff happen.
That was our pitch. We started getting customers a lot like that. That was the main way we did things. You couldn’t for the longest time, like, upgrade and just pay us online. Until the point that, you know, we learned. I think I read a blog post somewhere that SurveyMonkey made. I forget what year it was.
They made $35,000,000 in sales online off the do-it-yourself market. And of course they make a lot more than that today. But I looked at that and I’m like, holy shit, there’s a market online. Like, what are we doing? And then we, in Ment Law [sp], we created a do-it-yourself type sign-up and upgrade and doing all that stuff. So we had the enterprise side, we had the other side, and then the smaller side led to the enterprise side. And so it was this really nice cycle of things.
Andrew: Why wouldn’t someone use a cheaper product from SurveyMonkey?
Aydin: So here’s what SurveyMonkey does really well. Right? So they have an amazing product that, if you’re creating like a do-it-yourself survey and you’re trying to just do the basics, amazing tool right? No doubt. The second that you start to get into some more advanced question types, and you want, like, enterprise functionality and role management and sharing and permissions and, you know, advanced branching logic and, you know, dimensions in your reports.
And when you start to get more complicated, that’s when you want to look for an enterprise product. And in fluid surveys ultimately it’s an enterprise product. And of course we have, like, the lower-end versions as well. And we have that because we can do that too now that we have, like, the enterprise side. But we’ve always traditionally been an enterprise- focused company.
Andrew: I see, it’s the advanced logic. And boy, actually I don’t even remember all those things that you were talking about. I’m looking right now at the features, and I can see things like piping and looping, which means, based on an answer someone gives you, you give them the follow-up answer, and then based on that answer you can give them another follow-up. Can you give me an example of something?
Aydin: Sure. Let’s say that you were doing a survey, right?
Andrew: Yep.
Aydin: So let’s say that you sent this out to all of your listeners, like, everyone who’s listened to something in the last month. And you list all of the different interviews you had, and you’d ask them, “Which one of the following interviews have you listened to?” And then let’s say you choose five out of the list of 20 that are there. And let’s say that you want to ask the same exact two questions for each one of the interviews a person listened to. “Did you like it? What would you have improved?” Right?
Andrew: Okay.
Aydin: So with Fluid Surveys the way that you would do this, which is a lot faster, is that you’d use looping. What it would do is, it would take your choices, and it would loop through those two questions and type in all those fields. So poor Aydin when you watch this interview, “Did you like it?” you know, “What could you improve?” Right? And then the next person would come in. So these are some of the things. I mean, there’s a lot of advanced logic. Keep in mind that there’s survey software out there that costs, like, $60-80,000.
Andrew: I don’t know that people would have understood what you just said if they’d never created a survey with logic in it. But once you create a survey with a little bit of logic, you realize that most survey software out there, the basic stuff I’m talking about that’s easy off the shelf, to do what you just said you’d have to create ten follow-up questions. Two for each of the interviews that the person selected. It becomes a real pain.
Aydin: Yeah, and we do a lot of other things. Right now, for example, we have an offline survey product. What that means is, it’ll go on tablet devices, and if you don’t have an internet connection then you can still fill out surveys. So what people use it for is, we have a customer that goes out and does inspections.
So they take these devices and they use a survey almost as a form that they fill out. And they might do a home inspection or something, and then they’ll use a camera question type to take a picture and store that question. And then they have a signature field with their hands and they can sign that. So we have all of these more advanced things that come up that aren’t, like, in the very basic tools out there.
The needs start to become more complex for different things that you’re using. You might want to do, for example, scoring, and to say, “Well if the person does this thing and their score is between this and this, show them these particular questions.” Or you might want to say, “I want to graph this company’s net promoter score every quarter for the last two years and I want to set a baseline back on that.” You might want to do things like that.
Andrew: Now I get that it’s way more intelligent than the software that I’ve been thinking about. Definitely more than SurveyMonkey. No offense to them.
Aydin: No, SurveyMonkey is one of the companies that we really respect out there. They invented the do-it-yourself space. Their name is almost synonymous with surveys. So we honestly don’t consider them a competitor. We target a different segment, really. We never come across them. They’re just two different markets.
Andrew: What ever happened to fluid review?
Aydin: We originally parked it for a while, and in 2011 when we started making more money and we had more revenue, we finally had enough resources to dedicate full-time people to it. And “full-time people” meant one developer. And remember, we were bootstrapped this whole way. We never raised money.
Andrew: To this day, you’ve never raised money? It’s complete bootstraps?
Aydin: To this day, we’ve never raised money. Yes. That’s why it was more difficult. And there are a lot of reasons why never raised money. Remember, in the first start-up I tried to raise money, and it didn’t work. And Elliott, my co-founder, he raised probably $80 million in his lifetime, and he was like “I’m never dealing with VC’s again.” And so, one of those things. I’ve heard great things about VC. I have friends, and they say the most amazing things.
Anyway, so we did it. And in 2011, we put one guy full-time on fluid review to build up the product, and it finally becomes this customizable product. So we go on, and we try to get business plan competitions to start using us. And we do, we get a lot of them. But very quickly we realize that business plan competitions have no money. That was really bad. And we were like “Damn it, did we screw up again? This is the third time. What the hell?”
But the good news was that, after talking to a lot of people, and this whole process of people applying online, some judging happening, and the people making decisions, it turns out this thing applies to a ton of different things. The very obvious ones are grants and scholarships, but then we started getting into loans, and admissions, and fellowships.
And then we started doing reality TV shows, so if you wanted to get onto some reality TV shows, you would apply through us and submit your video, and then the judges could review that. We started getting some private golf courses. We started getting some cities who wanted to give out building permits, and of course you have to apply for those.
We had this high school from Brooklyn sign up. Why did a high school from Brooklyn need us? Why are they going to pay us $5-6 thousand a year? And it turns out they hire teachers. For their type of school they have special needs, and they go through that.
And then we had a fire station sign up. Why would a fire station sign up? It makes no sense. Why are they paying us this type of money? And it turns out the volunteer firefighters need to apply and get that certification, go through a process. And it just seemed limitless. It was like we hit the jackpot, almost. It was accidental, but we just realized that fluid review has so much potential.
And the way the two products are related is that fluid review is surveys, plus workflow. The cool thing about is, fundamentally it’s the same thing. Because you can accept the applications, but then there is workflow. There is judging involved, and it’s not just about having the online application process. Because no one wants more emails. And a lot of online application processes, all it means is that it goes to an inbox somewhere. But that’s why we call it a fluid review because it’s all about the review, and everything that comes afterwards.
That really started to take off, and it was really good news. 2011, we first realized that, and then we just kept growing the product past that point.
Andrew: Do you still do outbound marketing to get customers?
Aydin: In some cases we do. More on the fluid review side, as opposed to the survey side. The survey side is really anyone who wants to do a survey knows that they need to do a survey. Really our goal is to find those people who have the more advanced needs, and to try and be in front of them in the search results that they search for. And it’s a lot of search and ad- words and things like that.
On the fluid review side, we go to a lot of conferences. We try and get to as many as we can. The good news is there is somewhat of an established industry, at least in terms of grants and scholarships, and the universities all go to the same sorts of conferences, and foundations go to the same sorts of conferences, and governments do. So it’s a lot of conferences, and we’ll do a lot of chatting, and they’ll refer us to people, and that sort of thing. But yes, that’s primarily how we go about it.
Andrew: And when you say “we”…are you still going to these events?
Aydin: I don’t go to these events anymore. Every now and then I’ll show up to one event to keep my skills sharpened, but otherwise, as of yesterday, we’re 53 people in the company now.
Andrew: You told April there was a time when your bookkeeper said “Hey guys, payroll is due in a week, and we’re $5000 short.” What did you do about that? How did you get out of that?
Aydin: We did a lot of things. It turned out the bookkeeper made a slight mistake, and we actually had enough money. But, in the interim, until we realized that, we started getting creative. I think I called my parents and said, well could we borrow just a little bit for a short amount of time. We just did things. Fortunately, it didn’t have to come to that.
Andrew: I see.
Aydin: It was just a slight mistake.
Andrew: Wow. What a set of ups and downs here. Do you feel like now you’ve made it?
Aydin: I feel like we’ve come to a point where we have a solid customer base. We deliver a lot of value to customers. We have a road map. Both products are growing over 100 percent every year. If things are on the up and up we’ll probably hire another 10 people by the end of the year. Our plan is to double, again, sales next year. Things are definitely heading in the right direction. For us, it’s about…
Andrew: …Do you double every year from 2010?
Aydin: Sorry, what was that?
Andrew: You doubled sales every year from 2010?
Aydin: Yeah, we’ve more than doubled sales every year from 2010.
Andrew: Okay.
Aydin: First of all, how do we spend the next five years? From one perspective, I love the FluidReview industry because it’s so ripe. There’s so much opportunity. I think it’s a several billion dollar market. I think someone can be, just like eBay is to auctions, we can be, FluidReview can be for online applications and review. I think that can be us. That opportunity really excites me.
When you think about how big the market is, we’re just barely scratching the surface. There’s still a lot of education going on. More and more people are realizing that this sort of product exists. On the survey side, we’ve done really well. We’re going to continue doing well on the enterprise side.
But, we’re also going to be introducing another product this year that we think is going to provide much needed innovation in the survey space.
Andrew: Can you say what it is?
Aydin: The product is called Pulse. It’s built on top of the FluidSurveys platform. The main goal of it is to really deliver a solution around surveys and customer satisfaction as opposed to just being a generic tool.
The problem with a generic tool is you’ll have an enterprise customer that will get several thousand dollars’ worth of value from it, or more, and then you’ll have someone that’ll say, to me it’s worth 19 dollars a month. Because it’s depending on how you use it.
With Pulse what we’re trying to do is deliver value as a solution. So, everything from keeping a pulse on your customers, showing you who’s at the risk of cancelling, who has potential for upgrading, and where there’s potential for more business. It’s really taking things at companies who do surveys well and turning it into a solution.
Andrew: Alright. I want to share with people what they can do to follow up on this interview, and then I want to ask you about the books and courses or products that you recommend. And, you recommend three of them. Frankly, one of them is a fantastic book called “Pitch Anything.” Let me just ask you, why did you recommend “Pitch Anything” as one of the books?
Aydin: I actually learned about “Pitch Anything” from an interview that you did. I saw that. I subsequently went and read the book. I think he didn’t have an audio book at the time. So, I didn’t listen. I didn’t get the book until the audio book came out. But, I listened to that interview that you did with, Oren, I think is his name…
Andrew: …Yeah, Oren Klaff.
Aydin: Yeah. I listened to that interview probably two or three times. I just thought it was awesome. That’s how I learned about it.
Andrew: What do you like about him? What was useful for you in your business?
Aydin: For me, what I learned is it’s always good to negotiate from a position of power. I think that’s something that really is the biggest point I got from everything that he’s [??] It’s always something that we…In partnership negotiations and when selling to customers we always want to come in from a stronger position. That’s something that stuck with me, and I think it’s a valuable lesson for people to have.
Andrew: For me it was the idea of prizing what you’re doing. So, you’re not going to ask investors for money from a position of weakness, like they have all the money and there’s the prize that you’re supposed to win. Rather, you should be prizing yourself, and they should feel like you’re the prize that they’re trying to win. Anyway…
Aydin: …Yeah.
Andrew: I’ll say that as a follow up here. If you have a Mixergy Premium account you should go and check out both his interview on Mixergy, which I think was one of my best, and his course. His course is called “Use These Persuasion Techniques Almost Like Mind Control.” In there he talks about how to raise money. The course, and the interview, and so many others are part of mixergypremium.com.
Of course, if you sign up I guarantee it, and if you stay subscribed you’re going to help us to continue to grow here at Mixergy. The reason I can get a researcher and an interviewer and all these other people is Mixergy Premium members. So, thank you if you’re a member, and if you’re not, go to mixergypremium.com and sign up.
Aydin, that was one of three resources and people that you recommend. The second one is “Lean Startup.” Why?
Aydin: “Lean Startup” is a really awesome book that exemplifies how people should go about doing product development I think. Or, not just product development, but business development and anything. I think you interviewed my friend Harley from ShopBy here at some point…
Andrew: Yeah. I didn’t know you guys were friends…
Aydin: And you talked about…
Andrew: You do live in the same city…
Aydin: Yeah, we’re good friends. He talks about the concept of the lean stuff applied to business development. It’s always a concept of testing small batches, trying something, seeing how it works, and getting feedback before you mess a lot of time into something.
I remember this one time. We were within FluidSurveys. We wanted to know if this word cloud idea was a good idea and if anyone would ever use it. We built it, and every time someone went there it said coming soon. But, what it would do in the background is send all the developers an e-mail. We got enough of these e-mails that everyone was saying, okay people want it let’s build it now.
Andrew: Oh, that’s great.
Aydin: That was a concept that we learned from that book. That was cool.
Andrew: Finally, you mentioned Tony Robbins. He has all kinds of CDs, all kinds of books, videos. He must sell mp3’s too. He must have modernized to that level. Which of his programs do you like best? What do you recommend?
Aydin: I think if you’re in business he has a six hour tape on sales. It used to be called “The Power to Influence.” I think he may have changed it to something else now. He rebranded it to something different. But, he basically has these six hours on how to sell. In the early days everything I knew on how to sell was from those six hours. That was really awesome…
Andrew: Really? Do you remember one tip from that?
Aydin: Sorry, what was that?
Andrew: Do you remember one tip that you learned from that?
Aydin: Sure, absolutely. When you’re doing a sale and you hear an objection, most objections are not killer objections. You don’t have to address every objection that people throw at you. It’s all about saying, well if we’re able to solve that one little thing do you think that is something that you’d want to go ahead with. If they say, no I still wouldn’t because of blah. You want to try and spend your time and energy on the real objections, because everything surrounding is just…
Andrew: Ah, not all the objections, but you keep asking, if I could solve this objection would that make you buy. And, they say, no there’s another one. You do it again and again until you find the one or the ones, the objections that are most important to them and those…
Aydin: Yeah, and you have to be clever about it. It’s not like this repetitive. There’s some art to it that he describes. But, yes, fundamentally that’s exactly what it is.
Andrew: I was trying to do a search for a sales CD from Tony Robbins. I can’t come up with it, but…
Aydin: Search for power to influence, and…
Andrew: Oh, I do see power to influence on Learn Out Loud, a company run by a past Mixergy interviewee. And, it is here. Can we actually get it for free from them? Buy it from third party. No. But, he does link to Tony, no, it’s not available on Tony Robbins’ website. It doesn’t matter. Alright, someone…
Aydin: There’s a new name for it. I forget what it’s called, but there’s a new name. They are still available.
Andrew: Would somebody please find it and put it into the comments. I’m looking here and I can’t do it fast enough. So, instead of talking about that and ending there I will just say that before we started you said that we can give a discount to people on Mixergy who want to try to FluidSurveys. Is there a code, or do you want to make one now and then go create it later?
Aydin: Yeah, sure. Just use the term Mixergy, and basically we’ll offer a 30 percent discount to anyone who wants to sign up and use this software to create surveys.
Andrew: Where do we type that in? The code is Mixergy. Where do I type it in? I’m now clicking the signup now. You don’t even want me to start with the paid version. You want me to start for free I think, right? So, I click on start…
Aydin: Right, yeah. Basically, you go to fluidsurveys.com, signup, and we have a free plan that a lot of people use. If you do want to upgrade and get some of the extra functionality at some point there’ll be a place that’ll ask you for a discount code.
Andrew: And that’s where you type in Mixergy.
Aydin: Exactly.
Andrew: Got you. Alright, cool. Yeah, I see. I can use 150 responses. I can do real time analysis, unlimited surveys. All that for free. Oh, 150 responses per survey. They can all check it out on fluidsurveys.com.
Thank you so much for doing this interview.
Aydin: Thank you for having me.
Andrew: You bet. Thank you all for watching, or listening, or reading. Bye, guys.
