Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy where I interview entrepreneurs. I’m so looking . . . I’ve been looking forward to this for so long. This is a guy who you’re about to meet, who I’ve emailed back and forth for a long time. I don’t think we’ve ever met in person. He has built . . . He has listened to Mixergy for a long time. He has built a company and sold it. He is now running a company that’s super intriguing to me. I wanted to ask him how he did this, how he came up with this idea because he was kicking around a bunch of ideas looking for something very deliberately.
And today, Gaurab Sharma, the founder you’re about to meet . . . Excuse me, Gaurav Sharma, I mispronounced your name. Gaurav Sharma, coming to us direct from India, which I’m super psyched about too, is here to talk about how he created, and built up, and grew a company called JustCall. It is a cloud-based phone system that works with your CRM and help desk.
We’re going to find out how he built it, how he became an entrepreneur having a bad experience at a job, and so much more thanks to two phenomenal sponsors. The first is a company that I introduced him to a while back, it’s called Toptal. And things didn’t work out the way I expected, but we’re going to find out about that in this interview.
And the second is a company that’s a brand new sponsor of mine. It is the company that will help you create not just great landing pages, but whole funnels that will help take a stranger, introduce them to your company, and close sales because they’ve got these incredible widgets, I’ll talk about that later, they’re called ClickFunnels. But first, it’s so good to have you on here, Gaurav.
Gaurav: Good to be here.
Andrew: What time is it where you are?
Gaurav: It’s 4 a.m. right now, 4:10, 4:15, yeah.
Andrew: Do you ever feel like, well, at some point, “I made it as an entrepreneur, I don’t have to be up at 4:00. I should just have the world come to me on my terms”?
Gaurav: No, actually, I’m used to these sort of times. As an engineer, it’s totally fine for me. These are the most productive hours, I guess, for me. Yes, I’m a bit old now, I’m 30 plus, so, yes, it becomes a bit difficult for me now. But that’s fine. It’s all hustle, right?
Andrew: Yeah. I feel like at some point the world should just take my word for it, no they never do. The world should just come at my schedule, no it doesn’t happen that way. And the more you think that the world should happen in your schedule, the more you’re building your own or digging your own grave. Let’s talk about revenue. Where are you guys with JustCall?
Gaurav: So we’re closing into about $3 million ARR now. I mean, that’s 250k a month, basically. It’s recurring revenue . . .
Andrew: Wow. Where were you last year?
Gaurav: We were about 1 million.
Andrew: Okay. Why do you sound so nonchalant about it? I feel like the person I texted or emailed with years ago would have been psyched to be here. Do you feel like this is not enough?
Gaurav: No, this is actually. And this is . . . I’m, like, very, very excited about this thing. Probably it’s 4 a.m. I guess, that’s . . .
Andrew: Give me an example of a use case for JustCall. Who would use it and to do what?
Gaurav: Sure. So JustCall is basically for either sales teams or support teams. So anywhere where there are five people or more in a team making calls and using a CRM, it becomes very difficult to track things like who is calling what, who is . . . You spend almost two minutes every call to log in your CRM. If you’re making 50 calls a day, you’re losing like 100 minutes a day. So that’s a good use case for JustCall because JustCall helps you make calls, receive calls, texts, and this automatically gets logged into your CRM.
Andrew: Okay. And what CRMs are you working with?
Gaurav: So we work with almost all the popular ones, ranging from Salesforce, Pipedrive, HubSpot, like you name any of the good ones, we almost, like, integrate with all of those. So about 25 of those, yeah.
Andrew: I see Zoho, of course. Zoho is just really killing it with all these different products. I remember asking the founder of Zoho, “How are you going to survive? Like, you’re copying Google.”
Gaurav: Yeah, they’re killing it.
Andrew: Yeah, they’re killing it. There’s so much space for these products. So, if I had a call come in on our main number and I picked it up, I wouldn’t have to go into Pipedrive and record it. It would get recorded?
Gaurav: Yep, you’ll get logged there like you had a word with this guy, this is the call recording. If you select . . .
Andrew: Call recording and everything?
Gaurav: Yep, yep.
Andrew: Oh, that’s huge. So we use Pipedrive for everything, you’re in my Pipedrive. So if I wanted to make a sales call out to you, or if my assistant did, right now if she emails you, I see what she’s been emailing with you. If she calls you, it’s completely lost . . .
Gaurav: Yes.
Andrew: . . . but I would be able to record it? Got it. You did have a job that, to me, felt like pretty damn good working at USB. What did you do at USB, the investment bank?
Gaurav: UBS.
Andrew: It should be UBS.
Gaurav: Yeah, it’s a Swiss investment bank. So I was right off of college, I joined that bank as a financial analyst. So it wasn’t doing investment banking, so I was part of an M&A team. I worked there for three months.
Andrew: That’s it?
Gaurav: Yeah, that’s all I’ve done. That’s all my job experience. That’s everything I’ve done in my life till now [inaudible 00:05:02].
Andrew: What happened in three months that made you say, “Forget it. I’m not doing this”?
Gaurav: A few things. One, the money was good, the money was really good there, but you were working almost 17 to 18 hours. So you didn’t have time to spend that money, obviously. Right? And since my college probably school days I was, like, very entrepreneurial from very beginning. I had a couple of businesses before that. So I always knew that I have to do something, I have to build something on my own. And if I’m working 16, 17 hours for a client sitting in China or somewhere, I can obviously work for myself and make things go. So I was working 16 hours there, I used to come back to my place. I used to code all night then go back to office again. So I was just logging for almost 20 hours a day for almost a year or so.
Andrew: What were you coding when you came home at night?
Gaurav: So that time I was building this product called Twtbuck, which was first of its kind Twitter advertising platform.
Andrew: Twitter advertising platform?
Gaurav: Yeah. That was, like, around 2010. It was a contextual advertising platform. So if you tweet like, “I hate my car,” it’ll show you an option, you know, tweet about a Tesla car and you get paid like a buck for that, something like that.
Andrew: What happened to that?
Gaurav: It worked for almost . . . So I run that for almost two years. So the typical problem happened that I started . . . So I started charging very low for that product. So we had a huge following, we had a good number of advertisers because I was charging like a cent a tweet or something like that to the customer. So I could never scale the revenue. The use case, everything was, like, scaling and everything, but I couldn’t scale the revenue. So it was not a success in that terms.
And I stumbled upon this idea of creating a analytics platform for Pinterest because Pinterest was beginning picking up that time. So I built this platform called Pinpuff 26th Feb, I built that because I still remember that date because the life almost changed from there. So I went to sleep, morning I wake up it was, like, viral. I think Mashable or some blog covered it. And I was getting thousands of people on my site crashing because it was on a simple, small, shared host, HostGator or something. So, yeah, that’s when.
Andrew: What did it do? So the way that . . . I’m looking at the Mashable article from 2012, it called it Klout for Pinterest, and I saw a bunch of people refer to it that way. Klout was a service that told people who had clout, like who was an influencer and who wasn’t. And that’s what you were doing on Pinterest, helping to identify people who are influencing others?
Gaurav: Yeah. So, yeah, absolutely. So Klout used to give you a score on the scale of 100. So similar way we built . . . not we, I mean just me. I just built a system which can give you a score on the scale of 100, it also started giving you the price of your pin. So if you pin for some brand, you should charge them this much. So that’s [inaudible 00:08:11].
Andrew: So you saw the value of it. Here, I’m looking at a screenshot it said, “Perfect. You’ve been added to our beta list, your Pinfluence score is 86.08.” You went down to 0.08 at the time. What were you basing this influence on?
Gaurav: Just to add to that, I also coined the term Pinfluence, so it’s a part of urban dictionary now. So, yeah. So like a simple sort of empirical formula on this, like, a lot of engagement metrics like repins and what sort of pins they are doing out there like in quotations or are these like e-commerce. So it was a huge big formula that I wrote about it and the crawler started crawling all the data and all that. So, yeah, I build something. It’s like nine years back, almost.
Andrew: Okay. And so, you built it out, people started going into it, it started going . . . Was there a viral hook in there? Was there a reason? There was, what was it?
Gaurav: Yeah, it was. So people started mentioning their Pinfluence score on their LinkedIn. So, I mean, at that time, people used to put it like, “I’m a Pinterest influencer, my Pinfluence is this much.” The viral part hook was obviously, firstly is this, the bragging factor. And second was whenever your Pinfluence score was created, we launched something like what Klout folks were doing, like if you have a x amount, x number and higher clout or Pinfluence score, you’ll be connected to the branch to get some free stuff or whatever.
And third thing was like that that really was a learning for me, that whenever someone’s Pinfluence score was generated, people were asked to share it on their Twitter and, you know, spread the word like, “Hey, my Pinfluence score is this much. Check yours here for free, whatever.” So I think the tweet link really worked for me and we got about 100k users in a month.
Andrew: Wow.
Gaurav: Yeah. Yeah.
Andrew: Who is Amrita Sharma?
Gaurav: So that’s my sister.
Andrew: And so, why was she listed as the founder of the company and quoted as a founder of the company instead of you?
Gaurav: Funny story. I mean, to get some PR, obviously you need to have a good story, right? So, the story, the pitch was that here you have a young female computer science engineer who has built something, so . . .
Andrew: 20-year-old especially.
Gaurav: Yeah.
Andrew: Declared Pinterest addict.
Gaurav: Uh-huh.
Andrew: Got it. But you were the one who built it?
Gaurav: Absolutely.
Andrew: Okay.
Gaurav: So, yeah. So we have been building things, running small, small businesses together. So when we built Pinpuff, we thought that we needed a story to get published on all these big blogs, like “The Next Web” and all those big blogs to start with. And that’s when we needed a story where we can connect with the person who’s writing it. So we just came up with a story that, “Okay, there’s a young female plus engineer, plus interest in data,” and all that. This got a good story for us and then we got covered and we got like 100k users in a month.
Andrew: Did that help? In retrospect, was that actually useful?
Gaurav: Absolutely. I mean, that’s how we got covered. Because if it was me that hey, just another guy . . .
Andrew: Well, just another guy with a startup?
Gaurav: Yeah, yeah.
Andrew: Got it. Okay. Tell me about a mistake that you made that now looking back, what do you look back on and say, “Now that I’m smarter, I would have done things differently”?
Gaurav: I think I should not have sold that time.
Andrew: Really, why did you sell?
Gaurav: I was very young, right? I mean, plus my previous business was not doing that great. And I come from a very . . . from one of the good colleges . . .
Andrew: Who wasn’t doing well?
Gaurav: So the previous one, the Twtbuck business was not doing that well. All right. And I come from a very good college, so my parents were obviously expecting me to be in a good earning position by that time. Obviously, I mean, that’s a normal thing in India, obviously. So it was a pressure on me like, “Hey, I have to do something because it’s almost I’ve spent almost two years on this startup thing of mine but it’s not working. It’s not going anywhere. What should I do?”
So by that time, also, I was planning to, you know, move to U.S. for probably MS or MBA. So getting acquired and moving to LA was, I think, the best option for me in that sense. You’re getting paid to move to the U.S. instead of spending money on the college, right? So, yeah. So that’s why I decided to. But I think when the business is growing so fast, because we already signed up almost 400 businesses as well for our upcoming paid sort of feature. So we helped Nissan launch their car in the New York Car Show, and that’s when we sold. I mean, had I not sold that, I don’t know, it would be a different story.
Andrew: How much did you sell it for?
Gaurav: It was a small amount of . . . Not that, but I got . . . I think what really was the good part of the deal was that I got a chance to build another business.
Andrew: Build another business. So you sold it to Science. I told you before we started, I know Science as the investor and kind of incubator. I didn’t realize they actually bought properties. Why did they buy this?
Gaurav: So they were planning to do something around Pinterest and advertising or something like that, and they wanted something like Pinpuff to add the analytics part to their product of their service. And they also wanted a tech guy, a CTO sort of guy, who can be the founding part [inaudible 00:13:57] team member for that business. So they were playing around with some idea there and I was building this thing. So there was a good match. So they bought the Pinpuff. They asked me to move to U.S. and, yeah, so we started new company called HelloSociety.
Andrew: They asked you to move to the U.S.?
Gaurav: Yeah.
Andrew: Wow. And so then you came . . . How did they connect with you? They just saw the software and wanted to see if there was an opportunity?
Gaurav: No. So on Pinpuff I got an email from Mike Jones, like, “Hey, I want to . . . ” So it was like contact@pinpuff.com and he was like, “Hey, I want to talk to the CEO.” And I was the guy being contacted. So I replied for my other Gmail account like, “Hey, yes, you wanted to talk to the CEO, here I am.” And that’s how we started the conversation. And again, same way we had a almost long chain of emails going on. And finally when I decided like, “Okay, I’m going to U.S. now.” And I woke up my parents at 3 a.m., that a.m., I was like, “Next week I’m going to U.S..” So yeah, so that’s how I break the news.
Andrew: Wow. It became HelloSociety, this is an agency?
Gaurav: Yeah. So it was a mix of it. For the agency, we started as a tech company. It was like a video influencers, analytics and all those things. But eventually, the business model turned out to be agency model. We sort of signed up influencers, all the top influencers on Pinterest. And we had a tech product as well where they can connect with the brands and, you know, do a lot of marketing stuff.
Andrew: Okay. So, at some point, you stepped away from the company, right?
Gaurav: Mm-hmm.
Andrew: But the people at Science liked you enough that they were thinking about something with you. And you like them, and you also you’re part of like . . . I was in LA at the time, you were part of the LA tech scene, right?
Gaurav: Yeah.
Andrew: You were getting to know stuff. Let’s talk about then what it was that attracted you to Science enough that you would create another company with them, and what it was about them that made them like you so much that they would invest in you, essentially, to come up with something?
First, I’ll talk about my first sponsor. It is a company called Toptal for hiring developers. I introduced you to Toptal, what were you looking to do? This was years ago. What were you looking to do that you talked to Toptal?
Gaurav: I was looking to hire the best people actually.
Andrew: Do you remember what company you were with at the time? I see, this was 2016. So let me see what you were doing in 2016.
Gaurav: So I started my new company, the SaaS Labs here in India, and I was looking for different kind of people. Anyone from tech, anyone from strategy or consultancy, anything like that, and I just wanted the best people because I made some money, so I had some money to spend. So I just wanted to add the budget, so I just wanted to hire the best. And that’s when we . . .
Andrew: Because you were going to have developers internally and also incubate companies and . . .
Gaurav: Yeah.
Andrew: . . . invest in them? Got it. You were basically, as you told me before we started, going to take this Science model, that’s what Mike Jones’ company is called, and bring it to India. Got it. What do you think of Toptal?
Gaurav: Amazing talent. Brilliant. So people normally . . . I mean, the people in my network I talk to, they normally confuse it with Upwork or something, but it’s totally different. It’s totally different. There’s one thing to go to a good showroom, and there’s one thing to go to a free market. I think that’s the key difference here. So if you want a branded staff that works, then Toptal is your thing. So I think that’s the only difference. And the quality in the difference. I think the website mentioned 3% top talent.
Andrew: Yeah, they began testing people. And you did find that that is true, the top 3%?
Gaurav: No, absolutely, absolutely. And as a value, that’s a value part of it.
Andrew: Now truthfully, you didn’t end up hiring from them because?
Gaurav: Because I figured out that I am not that rich yet. My budget was not that great. And what I was looking for was actually ahead of time. I should not be hiring strategy folks just when I’m starting up, it should be a bit later in the path. Because now, just a couple of weeks back, I was going through Toptal again because now we are in good position to talk to some strategy folks how we can spend our profits, what can we do about it? So I’m expecting to hire someone from there very soon.
Andrew: Okay. I will say this, they’re not the cheapest, I think you’re going to be surprised they’re not as expensive as it might have seemed back then, or maybe as it was back then, but they are the best of the best. And if you’re looking for cheap, there are tons of platforms to find them.
Whenever you’re ready to go hire the best of the best, then, yes, it will cost you a little bit more. Don’t go and hire from Toptal. Go and have a conversation with Toptal. As you can see, there is no obligation. All you do is you go to toptal.com/mixergy. Yes, you do end up locking in, when you use that URL, 80 hours of Toptal developer credit when you pay for your first 80 hours. But there’s no obligation, you hit that big button on the page, you get scheduled for a call with one of their matchers, the matcher will get on a call with you super fast, they’re incentivized to get on a call with you super fast. And then they’ll introduce you to a few developers who match your needs.
If it’s a good fit, great. If it’s not, you don’t have to do anything. As you can see, they will leave a good impression on you because they know that they’re going to be here for a long, long time and they want to do the right thing by you even if it hurts, meaning they don’t sell to you now. Sometimes actually, I’ve had people say, “Andrew, they turned me down because I don’t have anyone to manage them. They just didn’t want to work with me.” I say, “Great, now you feel good that they’re not just there to take your money. When you’re ready for them, they will be around for you.”
So if you’re listening to me and you want to get started, go to the special URL, it’s toptal.com/mixergy, to get that 80 hours of developer credit. That’s toptal.com/mixergy.
All right. What was it that you think they saw in you that made them say, “Look, we’re going to figure out something together, explore a hangout, stay here in our space.”?
Gaurav: I think what I built with Pinterest, the Pinpuff thing, was very unique. It required a lot of talent to pull that off, because there was no API from Pinterest that time, so I had to scrap everything out and figure out something. And the way the tech and the business mind sort of work together, so I think that sort of maybe have impressed Mike Jones, I guess.
But I’ve always been a business sales guy. That’s a good sort of USP or selling point for me, I guess. So probably that was one because when I was a part of HelloSociety team, it was not just about writing code, it was also about strategizing, like, how the product should be, what we can do about different things, how we can price things. Well, I used to talk to the sales folks as well. So I think that was a value-addition, that was something I was bringing on the table. So probably that’s what they saw.
Andrew: I do find that they, as a team, LA in general likes people who could sell in the tech community. But they as a team, especially are good that way. They’re super practical in a way that feels almost old world and out of date with tech, and at the same time, they’re super techie in a way that makes you go . . . Like I remember actually, here’s an example. Mike Jones was talking to the founder of Docstoc at somebody’s office, I was just hanging out in there. The guy asked him a question, it was Jason. Jason says, “I got a question about SEO.” Mike Jones literally sat down at Jason’s computer and started showing him what he should do to SEO his site. Like he’s sitting there and just talk, right?
That’s what we’re talking about with him. He’s not there to invest in you and just give you big picture ideas, he’ll push you out of that computer, if he needs to, to show you something practical. So, what are some of the ideas that you’re kicking around when you’re working with him?
Gaurav: So, then eventually the things that turned up was HelloSociety. So that’s what we finally built through that.
Andrew: But wasn’t there a period there where you told our producer, “Look, I was just sitting around trying to come up with products. We were focused on too many products and I said, ‘All right, now I’m actually going to sit and focus on one thing for six months.'” But what is that one thing? Is that the evolution?
Gaurav: That’s when I left Science and moved back to India.
Andrew: Oh, got it. Got it. So JustCall came back in India?
Gaurav: Yeah.
Andrew: And the reason you went back to India is you saw what Science was doing and you said, “I have enough money, I have enough resources, enough knowledge, I could bring this to India”?
Gaurav: Yeah. So HelloSociety started becoming an agency model and I’m a techie, like, big time, so I just wanted to build something again. That was an itch that it’s time to build something new. So I thought like, “I really like the Science model, but I like it better if we can build products which are making money from day one. Plus, you have your cost benefit for being in India.” And plus I was about to get married, so obviously three, four things added up and made sense to move back to India and figure out something.
Yeah. So when I moved back to India, I didn’t have . . . I just had this plan to, you know, start something like Science, but that’s all I had. So I took a break, thought about things like what can be done, built a lot of small, small stuff here and there.
Andrew: Like what? What’s an example of something that you built but discarded?
Gaurav: A lot of SaaS products, a lot of extensions, Chrome extensions, like record a GIF, record a video from extension, Chrome, or something like that, a lot of email verification, like anything that can make me some money and I can prove to my parents that I was not a foolish person to, you know, leave a good gig in U.S. and move back to India where you have no plans what to do.
Andrew: Which of those made money?
Gaurav: Together they were making fine, now they were making about 20k, 30k a month.
Andrew: Really?
Gaurav: Yeah.
Andrew: These little Chrome . . . What’s one example of something that did really well?
Gaurav: So what I did was I built a lot of tools on Etsy.
Andrew: Etsy?
Gaurav: Yeah.
Andrew: Like what?
Gaurav: A lot of like . . . Again, so analytics is my favorite part. So there was one around analytics for your Etsy store and how you can improve it, what should be the right pricing for your product on Etsy, what should be the right tags for your Etsy products. A lot of, like, those stuffs. Then a social media studio for Etsy products. So, yeah. So, I was learning few things like you can always target some communities and build products around that. So I focused totally on Etsy, built three, four products around it. At the peak it was making about $30,000 a month.
Andrew: Your dad’s a serious guy, I get the sense. He was in the Air Force, right?
Gaurav: Yeah.
Andrew: Did he look at you with pride? Did he say, “Okay, this makes sense. My son’s smart”?
Gaurav: Yeah.
Andrew: He did?
Gaurav: It started making sense. So once things started going in my [inaudible 00:25:27], but they were always supportive. They were always supportive. When I was leaving my job, also, like, they were pretty supportive on that. Because they knew that I’ve been doing this for long and I won’t be sustaining in a job for long. So they were actually just estimating when I’ll be leaving. That’s all.
Andrew: I guess if you have a kid who leaves a great job within three months, you realize, “All right, maybe this is not going to work. Let’s not force it. Meanwhile, he does really well on his own, got it. Okay.” Then why did you . . . If all these different plugins were doing well, why not say, “I’m going to stick with Etsy.” Or, “I’m going to stick with a collection of small plugins.” Why did you say, “I’m going to say to myself, ‘find one thing, focus on it for six months.'” Why make that change?
Gaurav: So I saw [inaudible 00:26:13] investing around that time. So I was talking to other entrepreneurs, and I was seeing that folks, they have some big ideas, actually, that they want to do something, build something big. So that sort of was a eye-opener for me, actually, I guess. Because I was like, “I have experience, I have built products. I’ve sold two businesses before. So it’s time to build something long-term. Because now I’m married, why should I have a business which should look like a full-time job, right?” I mean, being an entrepreneur is some time also taken as a jobless person. So I just wanted to have something like that. So, yeah. So I started SaaS Labs, the sort of Science thing-ish here, thinking about building something big, something we can sustain for years and probably go IPO, that was the target.
Andrew: Okay. And so through that you said, “Look, I’m going to invest in other product but I also need one that’s mine, something serious. Even if it means giving up $30,000 a month in revenue, I have to find something that’s so . . . ” Oh, yeah, I see in your face, the way that you just shook that off. Got it. And so the idea for JustCall came from?
Gaurav: Yeah. So, I started hiring folks to grow those Etsy things, firstly, to have a support team, to have a sales team, who can call and increase the spending and all that.
Andrew: You hired salespeople for what?
Gaurav: To sell the products to bigger Etsy teams, and we also started spreading our products to Shopify as well.
Andrew: Oh, so you started hiring salespeople to call up Etsy store owners and Shopify store owners and start selling your software to them?
Gaurav: Yeah, yeah.
Andrew: Freaking hey. All right. Okay. So this was really growing and those people said what to you?
Gaurav: Yeah. Yeah. So they said, “Hey, if you can get us local U.S. number, we’ll be able to perform better, I guess.” And that’s what they said. And I was like, “Okay, we can get a Skype or something.” But Skype didn’t make sense to us because I would have no idea what exactly they’re doing. So we wanted a phone system which we can . . . So that I can track things. I can train those folks, like, I can listen to their calls, like, what exactly they’re talking about and I can train them.
So we search internet, we found few things, a few products, we didn’t like it. So being a coder myself, obviously, me and a couple of our engineers in the team, we sat one day and just built something that can make calls. And when you make a call by pressing a button in your Chrome browser, that’s magic. So, yeah. So that’s how we thought like, “Okay, this is working for us.” So, we used it for almost two months, three months inside.
Andrew: And all it did was what inside? Just one button and it makes a call or did it also record it?
Gaurav: Both make call and record it, and it gave us a link to the recording.
Andrew: Okay. And the calls, I’m guessing, you probably were not using Twilio. Were you?
Gaurav: Yeah, we were.
Andrew: You were, okay. So you were using Twilio and then what did you use to record and save the files?
Gaurav: So Twilio records all your files in AWS.
Andrew: It does?
Gaurav: Yeah, yeah.
Andrew: I didn’t realize that was part of their system. Okay. All right. So all you did was create a front-end for Twilio?
Gaurav: Yeah, that’s all. That’s, again, a value-add. And that’s one of my . . . Probably the best sort of learning in the near time period because earlier we were focusing on all the free APIs. Like when I built a social media scheduler for Etsy folks, when we built things around Etsy, we were all working on the free APIs. But when we started using Twilio, a paid API, it became way easier to build a bigger business because we knew that they’re not going to pull their hands off anytime any night. Because . . .
Andrew: Because it happened to you before?
Gaurav: Yeah. It happened, yeah.
Andrew: When did it happen?
Gaurav: Two times. I mean, firstly, when I was running my first, first business, the Twtbuck one, the Twitter one. One night . . . I mean, one morning, I wake up and I see that Twitter is like, “Okay, your app is deleted because you’re using too much,” something like that, and your business is gone. Similar thing happened with the Etsy thing. So I had this social media scheduler thing going and Facebook comes up and say like, “Okay, no more posting on the profiles from tomorrow onwards, [license 00:30:41] on that.” Right. So, I mean, that doesn’t work in a business. And when you’re taking annual fees from your folks, you have to make the returns and refunds and everything like that so that’s very painful. So we thought that it’s a good model to figure out all the paid APIs in the world, and you can build a lot of things around it as a value-add, even charge a subscription fee for that.
Andrew: So that became part of your thinking. What paid APIs are there out there? So these guys built the superpower features, you paid them a little bit and you get to bring it, but how do you make it more accessible to everyday people? Because Andrew is not going to go to Twilio and create an account and have it record, got it. Got it. Even though, frankly, with Zapier, I could do it.
Gaurav: Yeah, you can do it but there a lot of things that’s involved that sales and support teams need, like call transfer, put a call on hold.
Andrew: Right. But, you know, no doubt about it. So, this is kind of a side note, I don’t know if she wants me to talk about it, so I won’t give too many details, but my wife was talking to Jeff Lawson who created Twilio. At one point, she just went to Zapier, and I think maybe one other tool, and she created a tool with Twilio as a backend. And I forget what it did, it probably did some doo-gooder thing.
Gaurav: SMS?
Andrew: Pretty amazing. Yeah.
Gaurav: Yeah, absolutely.
Andrew: All right. Let me talk about my second sponsor and then we’ll come back in here and continue with the story. Second sponsor is a company called ClickFunnels. Do you know ClickFunnels?
Gaurav: Yes.
Andrew: What’s your impression of them?
Gaurav: They’re growing very fast, that’s what I know and I just want to know, like, how.
Andrew: You know what it is? I think a big part of it is the founder’s big mouth and likeabilities, like super nice guy, talks all the time, like, he’ll go give presentations. You do a summit tomorrow, he’ll go and talk, he’ll be there for you. And not just show up in, like, half-sleepy, full-on smile. This is the worst thing I could say because he’s got that Mormon smile. Like you know that they’re always super happy, he’s got that. You feel like . . .
Gaurav: Energy?
Andrew: Yeah, that’s all it is. So for years, I thought, “I really like this guy.” I don’t want his fricking software because I could do this on WordPress. What do I need it for? Somebody on my team went and just signed me up for it. Set it up. The fricking page was . . . He probably doesn’t like how I use the word fricking, it’s too close to a curse. Russell Brunson I mean, the founder of ClickFunnels, he’s like, “Come on, Andrew, be nice.”
And still, we put it up, it was starting to collect registrations for this live thing that I was doing. It collected email addresses. On the backend, we were collecting people to sign up for our chat bot. The thing was working. I go, “All right, who cares? A few bucks a month, I’ll keep it working.” It’s actually producing better than anything else. It kept improving only because anyone on the team can go in and make these quirky little changes. So if they’ll watch a Mixergy interview and they’ll hear some little change works, Rebecca can go and change it. Marisela can go and change it. Michael can go and . . . everyone goes in and they make these changes. And they see in the A/B test how well it works.
And even us, we pride ourselves on being a developer, like not developer-centric company, we got a developer, we can code our own stuff. It outperforms it. And so there was someone, I wish I could remember who it was, who just sent us an email saying, “Andrew, every time you talk about this thing on your site, you lead people to a page it makes no sense.” I said, “Oh, yeah, you know, we could do better. Michael could code it.” And then Michael said, “You know I could spend some time changing it, but why don’t you just have Rebecca do it in ClickFunnels?” So Rebecca did it in ClickFunnels. Now we’re selling.
Anyway, I have sold, no doubt, with one ClickFunnels funnel, over a million dollars in sales. I’ve been showing it to every guest because I’m kind of proud of it, let me show you too. It’s like should this be beneath me to even be proud of it? But I am proud of it. Look at this, this is the Two Comma Club gold record showing that I have two commas in my sales funnel. That means over a million dollars, because there’s two commas in a million, of sales from one fricking funnel. That’s just one of them.
Gaurav: Well, that’s congrats on that. Yeah, that’s impressive.
Andrew: So here’s what I’m going to do, everyone who’s listening to me is super smart, they could create their own landing pages, funnels, everything. You got all the tools, you think you’re better than this, this is probably, you think, for somebody else, for marketers, for amateur, don’t do what I did. Don’t make that mistake. Go and try them out. And I’m going to give you a free access to it. All you have to do is go to clickfunnels.com/mixergy, clickfunnels.com/mixergy.
When you do, you’ll get to try it for free. Even the best of you will see improvements with it. If you don’t just cancel and move on. If you do and make it to the Two Comma Club, please say, “Hey, Andrew, I heard you talk about it and I signed up.” They’ll also give you my funnel, the one that’s doing so well for us. All you have to do is go to clickfunnels.com/mixergy, check it out, and you’ll see the whole thing.
By the way, I’m looking at the first version of your website. On the bottom it says, “Here’s our phone number, cell and regular telephone.” And the number is 0123 . . . ” Never mind, got it. It’s a fake phone number on the bottom. I thought you were giving us like an Indian number on the bottom. It was just you . . . I guess I’m looking at a very, very early version of the site.
You know what’s interesting? Were you guys in the App Store in the beginning?
Gaurav: Yeah, we were. But all everything was bad. Everything was bad looking.
Andrew: Why did you launch it with everything being so bad? Weren’t you worried that Mike Jones would see it and go, “This guy just lost it”?
Gaurav: No actually, with all the new things that we’re building, I mean, our attempt is to be faster than just how fast JustCall launched. I mean, that’s one of the things I realized that when we wait a lot for launching, that thing is going to fail. That has always has happened with me, I guess. But, yeah. So it’s better to launch it with one feature, and let it build it up from there through your customer feedback. So we are totally proud of what we actually launched. I mean, we are happy and we are lucky that we actually launched it and didn’t wait too long to, you know, launch the product.
Andrew: I’m looking here at “Hacker News.” You were three years ago very, very public on “Hacker News” launching JustCall for your sales and support team, right? And you were looking for what? And nobody commented on that, by the way, it went nowhere. There are a bunch of things that you posted on there, and it didn’t get, like, a lot of traffic.
Gaurav: Not even the Product Hunt one, yeah.
Andrew: Product Hunt didn’t do well either, wow. Oh, here’s one. Show HN, appointment scheduler with built-in phone system. That’s what you call JustCall.io back then. The feedback was, “Looks interesting, well done.” You come in and you say, “Thank you. Please do give us a shot and share your feedback.” Boom, crickets, nobody else responded. Did that turn you off? How did you know that that’s not an indication that you’re making a mistake?
Gaurav: No, I mean, we normally post on these platforms in any case, even if I’m launching, I don’t know, whatever thing, a random thing, I’ll be putting it there because it gives you a link back and probably some views here and there. I never expect anything out of these things. Because your customer is actually not hanging out there. It’s all same fellows like us who are hanging out there and they’re not always my customer. If I’m building something developer only or something like that, then it’s going to work on Product Hunt or “Hacker News.” But till that time, it’s just not going to work, it’s just going to give me some early views or visits on the website. That’s all.
Andrew: Okay. So where did you get your first customers then?
Gaurav: So, obviously, first 100 should be always be pulled. So we started mailing a lot of folks. I myself started emailing a lot of people I could see on LinkedIn like, “Hey, this is something we’re building, you have a sales team, would you like to give it a shot? Would you like to give it a shot?” So a lot of that sort of customers. Because I was myself writing all these emails, so some of the early customer really liked it.
And eventually, one of our actually customer, the very early customer, I think the 10th customer, I guess, he actually came all the way from U.S. to visit our office and offered us some funding and amount which we didn’t take, but it was really awesome and it was like really a game-changer in terms of what we were thinking about the product. So the whole tech team, everyone, were like shocked like, “Oh, wow, that’s happening.”
So, yeah. So first 100, obviously through emails, you have to pull those folks by anything, and you have to do that. There is no other option to that. Then the things really moved when we started integrating it with other CRMs. So when we got about 10, 15, 20 customers, they started asking us like, “Hey, I’m using Pipedrive, can I, you know, log this call into Pipedrive?” Like this interesting, because we didn’t know anything about it, because we just started with the phone, that’s it, a phone which can make calls. That’s all.
So once we got this feedback like, “Hey, can we do this thing? Can we . . . So this is my business process, this is how we do things.” We started learning a lot of things about how people are doing sales, how people are doing support, so we started building things around it. And that’s when we started picking up. So we got listed on Pipedrive. So from Pipedrive, we just started getting a lot of organic traffic. And soon, we explored almost all the CRMs in the market.
Andrew: Because whenever you plug in, whenever you create something, they have an incentive to go and promote it?
Gaurav: Yeah, yeah, that’s what . . . So because whenever . . . yeah.
Andrew: Did you ever use the name Alexander online?
Gaurav: Yeah, I did.
Andrew: You did?
Gaurav: Yeah. Yeah.
Andrew: Because?
Gaurav: Two things. Two things. Firstly was, so I was building a lot of things in my name, and they were not working out at all. So I was like, “Okay, I’m unlucky for myself. So I should figure out some other identity.” And the thinking was like, “I should have a U.S. or a English name instead of an Indian name to reach out to more than my first few customers, so it’ll be easier for me to reach out to those folks.” So that’s when I started using a different name altogether to pitch, to email folks with that name. And it sort of worked.
Andrew: Alexander Sharma or Alexander something else?
Gaurav: It was Alexander Cruz. So there was a story behind . . . So there was a whole story again, again a learning from my previous startup.
Andrew: What is it?
Gaurav: So it was like Alexander Cruz is this Spanish guy who went to Oxford. So there was a random story, again, built up.
Andrew: This is what you would tell people as a way of, like, giving some backstory to who you were?
Gaurav: That’s what Alexander would tell people.
Andrew: You know what? I have to tell you, I think most people don’t appreciate that. I changed my name to Andrew Warner, it changes the game. People don’t pay attention the same way. It’s like they think . . . especially, I have to say especially with India, there’s a sense that you must be some guy sitting at some call center and you’re just there to be a pain in the neck and is firing off a bunch . . . They’re not taking you seriously as an entrepreneur. Like you never change. I thought you were here in San Francisco, because from what I can tell, you never changed, I guess it’s on LinkedIn, your location. And so you come across on different apps for me, as being there. And I think that’s a good move too.
Gaurav: Because there are preconceived prejudices out there, which make people think about it. Yeah. So just to overcome that it’s an easy hack to overcome that and you can move on and build things.
Andrew: Yeah, I feel like you know what? Absolutely, 100% we should do that and then it becomes a story also, I don’t know if you do this. I started telling people, after I got to know them, I go, “Yeah, you know, by the way, my name isn’t Andrew.” And then just bring them into that secret, which is not really a secret, creates a closeness and we laugh a little bit. You do that too?
Gaurav: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s a good funny moment now because now I’m properly using my name to build the business. Because I think I’m no more unlucky for myself, but it’s a funny thing. We discuss this thing all the time.
Andrew: How do you spell Cruz? I wonder if you ever sent me . . . Oh, no. Did you ever send it to me?
Gaurav: No, never.
Andrew: No, never. No. It’s so funny that I discovered that. I’m, like, hunting down everything as we’re talking. Okay. You started getting customers, one of the things that you told our producer was that you did SEO early on. What worked for you in SEO?
Gaurav: SEO we were, like, ruthless on the SEO part. So I’ve been blogging a lot since my school days, so I’ve learned SEO, like, for almost many years. So there are a lot of things that have worked for me and no one, I can’t see those things in any of the guides. So we use all of those in learnings of mine through for SEO. Simple ones, we build a lot of pages obviously, we build a lot of pages around the keywords. We stuffed a lot of pages with keyword obviously. But then again, we target a lot of searches like calling for HubSpot, or HubSpot telephony, or something like that, right? So all the searches that we can target, which were containing the intent to buy, so we started targeting all those sort of keywords for SEO. We built a lot of pages for phone numbers, like phone number in Japan, phone number in Australia, mobile number in Australia.
Andrew: I’m looking at Ahrefs, this is one of our partner tools, to check you out. You must use this a lot. You created phone numbers, you created landing pages for phone numbers themselves, too. I can see here. Like, who’s calling you from 266696, etc.?
Gaurav: Yeah.
Andrew: That was an experiment. Did that work for you?
Gaurav: That worked. So, I mean, I’m not sure if it worked in terms of bringing the business in, but yes, it does bring traffic.
Andrew: Here’s one that does really big for you, VoIP dialer. You guys are all over that. You created a web page called click to call using VoIP dialer and that’s on your site, that’s doing well. Call listening, that did big for you?
Gaurav: Even we use Ahrefs, so yeah.
Andrew: What do you use Ahrefs for? I feel like I’m underutilizing it, but it does give me insight into what people are doing. I just feel like I’m missing something. What’s a big feature that I should be paying attention to with this?
Gaurav: I think you always feel that you are underusing it because there are so many things. I mean, until now, I was doing the SEO part myself, like till whatever time we did it because we did only in the early days only. But now that we have profits coming in, so I just want to reinvest those profits. So we are figuring out where exactly we can invest. So we just want to double down on what things that worked for us. So SEO is one of those things. So I think a couple of months back only we got an Ahrefs account and we gave it to our marketing team to figure out. I have no idea, it’s a huge, big [inaudible 00:45:42] I mean, every time I open a tab, I think it’s a new page I’m first time visiting it.
Andrew: Yeah. And the thing that it does for me is it lets me understand what are people doing? What are some of the pages that they may not want me to talk about? Or it may not, like, bring up but I could see. Is ViralWoot one of your web pages, one of your sites?
Gaurav: Yeah. That’s also ours.
Andrew: Yeah, I see that even ViralWoot now is linking to JustCall. Okay. I get a sense of that. The first people were coming in from SEO, coming in from your posting on different social networks. Then the other thing that was working for you was building plugins in for other CRMs, that was big. I think I saw you did a post maybe on “Hacker News” or something about how you priced wrong, you told our producer about that. Talk about pricing, what was the mistake you made?
Gaurav: Yeah. So we changed our pricing a lot of times. So we started with a very small pricing. That was, again, a mistake of ours. We realized very early that, “Okay, we are not charging people that much as per the value.” So we were, like, charging super low on that. So we did a lot of experimentations on the pricing part. So should the phone minutes or the call minute should be a part of the plan or not the plan because the call minutes are a cost for us, right? Because we have to pay to Twilio for that and it’s a variable cost for us. So we can’t really make it a part of the phone, the plan, the subscription plan. So we played around with a lot of ideas, a lot of changes to increase our price slowly and slowly. Then I also wrote a post on, like, how our pricing was bad and something like that, and how we fixed it. And even that fix was rolled back after like three months. So, yeah.
Andrew: What was that fix to the price that you thought was going to solve it but wasn’t?
Gaurav: So, yeah, it’s a funny thing. So early on I had a talk with one of the . . . So I got a random email from a VC like, “Hey, we really like what you’re doing. [inaudible 00:47:45] I’m going to call.” So I got on a call and we were talking about the pricing model, it was per user per month, obviously. And he was of opinion that per user per month is not going to work, you should have packages like 5 users, 10 users, 15 users. So after the call it was like, “Okay, it makes sense.” I don’t know why I thought that.
And I talked to my team that, “Hey, we should sell the packages not like per user per month.” So we just moved all the way from per user per month to a package sort of solution, like 5 people team, 10 people team, 50 people team. And the people then . . . is when the customers started coming and they were like, “Hey, I have six people, what can we do? We should go for a 10 people team? That doesn’t make sense. Can you give me a discount on that?” So it started creating more problems for us. So we rolled back to a per user per month sort of plan again. But that blog picked up really well. We got a good traffic on that.
Andrew: Does that convert into customers? Like do people who go in and say, “I want to understand how to price my software better,” end up becoming customers? They do?
Gaurav: Yeah. Because they’re normally all the SaaS entrepreneurs. So plus, we target them through a chat box inside. So, yeah.
Andrew: So I’m on the site right now, I don’t see anything about number of minutes that I get when I sign up. It’s actually much lower than I thought, 25 bucks a month for one user and then there are discounts if I get more users, but where are you capping my minutes?
Gaurav: So the calling is like the gas for your car. So you can always add credits to your account, and you can make calls for that. It’s a prepaid thing.
Andrew: Got it. So this doesn’t include the minutes? In addition to this, I pay for the minutes. And that makes sense because you’ve got people. It’s not just number of minutes that people are on, it’s also where they’re calling. There are some countries that it’s super expensive. And then if you’re calling somebody’s cell phone, that’s even more expensive.
Do you find that people care about that?
Gaurav: Initially, they used to but now it’s fine because the costs are not that high. I mean, if you’re doing 100 minutes calls a month or something like that, or whatever, it’s just 5 bucks, 10 bucks. So it doesn’t matter because the kind of value that we bring on table, it’s huge. I mean, through our regulations, what we pitch to people is that we are saving you 375 hours every year, every agent. And that is almost about . . .
Andrew: How?
Gaurav: How, because . . . Again, let’s say you’re making 100 calls a day, or 50 calls a day, and you spend almost 2 minutes logging every call, like, “Okay, I had a call with this guy, this [inaudible 00:50:22].” Instead we’re just automating that. So you’re saving almost [inaudible 00:50:28] and that’s almost about 375 hours a year per agent.
Andrew: And you know what? It’s not even the hours, they’re not going to do it. Nobody sits down and actually types anything in.
Gaurav: Exactly. Exactly.
Andrew: So I had this sense, when I saw the business, that eventually you were going to become a CRM too, slowly creep into it. The name though is JustCall which is kind of boxing you in. Your past philosophy is focus on one thing, I forget where I saw it, it was a comment on some message board where you said focus on one thing. Do you feel like you can switch beyond, that you can expand beyond just making phone calls?
Gaurav: We’re actually doing the texting and we are pretty strong and solid in that. So we have about two-thirds of our rate. Like one is we can always launch a different product altogether CRM-ish, because we have now integrated with all the CRMs, we know how CRMs work, right? So we have some good ideas like what people are actually looking for. And we have given almost thousands of demos now for our product. So we know what people are looking for in the CRM, what they don’t like. So you can actually launch a new CRM product as such, or if we want to add we can always add it to JustCall but if we do that, we have to rebrand it. And we don’t have that much energy right now to, you know, rebrand the whole JustCall thing. So the good part is we are bootstrapped. So there’s no pressure from anywhere to do such things to move faster or anything like that, but already we are growing about 100% this year.
Andrew: Hundred percent growth year over year?
Gaurav: Yeah. So as the base is growing, the percentage growth is shortening because we’re not doing anything extraordinary right now. But now we are starting to spend money in the growth. So I’m going to U.S. I mean on 2nd of September, so we are sponsoring a event there, then I have a lot of meetings, sales meetings. So, yeah. So now we are starting to invest in the business again.
Andrew: All right. Let me close out with this, I remember it was a Mixergy listener who said, “Hey, Andrew, notice how many people are telling you in their interviews about calls, and notice what you always do is talk about collecting email addresses, and getting permission, and following up. You don’t talk about calls.” I said, “Okay, fine. Jamie Kennedy come on and teach it.” And he did a course, it’s available for anyone who wants to watch, it’s mixergy.com/courses. You do need a membership though to get it. The challenge I have is getting people to pick up the phone. What advice do you give about getting somebody to actually pick up the phone? I think my customers, especially if they bought recently, they want to hear from me. What do I do to get them to actually know it’s me?
Gaurav: I think what we normally pitch to our sales, so the people who are using for their sales teams, we pitch them local presence. I think you should have a local presence for your phone number. I mean, you can make a call from a same number, but internally we can show a caller ID which is a local presence sort of number so that the chances of people picking a local number is higher than people . . .
Andrew: So you’re saying look, if I’m if I’m dialing from a 310 . . .
Gaurav: That’s Santa Monica.
Andrew: I should be dialing from there . . . right, 310 Santa Monica. So will you change the phone number based on where they are? Your software will do it?
Gaurav: We have the feature for the add-on. You have to pay extra for that.
Andrew: I pay extra and then you’ll switch my phone number based on where they are so that they see that . . .
Gaurav: Local presence.
Andrew: You know what would like? I would like an automation that just texts them first, it says, “Hey, it’s Andrew you just bought from me, I want to jump on a call with you one minute, I’m going to finish something.” And then dials in. Can you do that? I don’t want to do it manually, can I automate it?
Gaurav: So we keep getting a lot of customization offers, so that’s where we are launching our professional services business as well.
Andrew: You’ll set this up, or you’ll do the work? What’s professional services for you?
Gaurav: So we keep getting ideas like these all the time, how to automate the workflow. And this keeps us giving the ideas. So if it’s a part of a product line, we build it. If it’s not, we just charge extra for it and we build it.
Andrew: And you will build it for me extra, if that’s what I want?
Gaurav: Yes. I mean, I have to check with [inaudible 00:54:41] discuss with you.
Andrew: And not necessarily that’s what I want. but you’re saying that’s part of your business. You know, that’s how Mike Jones, I forget what his first business was, that’s how we came up with it. He basically had a client who needed something that was a little bit different. He built it for him, but he made sure that the client gave him permission to use it for something else. Sorry, what were you saying?
Gaurav: I think it was user plan or something like that.
Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that started out as a product for a single client, you know that. Are you still staying in touch with Mike Jones?
Gaurav: No, not for the last couple of years now. Since I got JustCall thing, I’m not even in touch with my friends now.
Andrew: Wow. Why did you decide to do this interview with me? What’s in it for you here?
Gaurav: A lot of things actually. One is, like, I was, like, boxing in myself a lot. I was not been in touch or in, like, limelight . . . not even limelight, I mean, I was just not out there.
So I just wanted to open up now, to show up that, “Okay, we have been building a good business here,” so that people can know about it. And also, I’ve learned a lot of things which I just want to share. So through this thing, if I’ve shared anything useful or hopefully I’ve done that. So I just want to do that, I want to share more because the way we have built a business in a very sort of cost effective way. So in 2.5 years, we have raised [inaudible 00:56:06] I’m really proud of [inaudible 00:56:11]
Andrew: Sorry, in 2.5 years you raised what? We were losing you for a second there.
Gaurav: We have raised $3 million in ARR.
Andrew: Wow, profitable, you’re still profitable to this day?
Gaurav: Yeah. So we are almost . . . so our . . . I’ll [be open 00:56:22] our net margin is about 56%, 56% is our profit.
Andrew: Net margin is 56% you said?
Gaurav: Yes.
Andrew: Good Lord. Wow. Wow. And you know what? And the software’s super polished. I was sure you raised money. I was sure . . . That’s why even in the intro, I was talking about, like, how much Mike Jones liked you enough that he invested in you. I didn’t realize it was your own people who helped you understand the problem. I thought it was while you’re working in Science, other people who were working in there helped you understand the problem. No, it’s you. Good Lord, so you did find the thing. The thing that you were looking for, not short-term, not like exciting in today, but exciting in the future, it’s going to be a big business.
Gaurav: Absolutely. I just want to put it here like so I’m big time bullish on remote and cloud. So JustCall basically solves both the problem, the remote thing and the cloud thing. So all the businesses are going remote now, so they all will be needing a remote system and obviously on cloud.
Andrew: I’m with you on that. All right. For anyone who wants to go check it out, it’s JustCall.io. The site looks really hot. I’m excited to have you on here. Thanks for listening over the years and for coming on here and telling your story. You’ve heard me say this before, the circle of Mixergy, my dream was I do interviews, people listen to the interviews, they go out create something big and then they come back, they step up and say, “Andrew, I’m ready. I’m ready to tell my story.” I’m excited that you’re here telling your story.
Gaurav: Awesome. It’s a checklist in my life goals. So it’s a check now to be on Mixergy, yeah. It’s pretty good day for me now.
Andrew: Right now there’s somebody who’s listening who’s going through the same thing. They know they got something in them, they’re listening, they’re absorbing, they’re building, I would like them to not just thank me but to find a way for them to thank you. What’s a good way for them to reach out to you?
Gaurav: They can reach out to me on gaurav@justcall.io through email, or you can follow me on Twitter on Sharma, S-H-A-R-M-A, G88, SharmaG88.
Andrew: All right. And your email address is just first name@
Gaurav: justcall.io.
Andrew: @justcall.io. All right, guys, and I want to thank the two sponsors who made this interview happen. Number one, the smiling people who actually created phenomenal software that’s all business ClickFunnels. Go check them out at clickfunnels.com/mixergy. And number two, if you’re looking to hire or if you’re just considering or curious about whether Toptal’s right for you, there are no obligation, you just go to toptal.com/mixergy and your eyes will be open to a whole new way of hiring.
Thanks so much for doing this interview, and I’m out of here. Bye everyone.
Hey, it’s Andrew and before we close out this interview I want to tell you I’m recording this a little bit after the interview was recorded and I’m here with Jack Barker, the finance person that I was introduced to from Toptal. We’re going over my books for the year and things are looking good thanks to Mixergy Premium members. If you’re a Mixergy Premium member, thank you so much for supporting the work that we do here.
Yes, I keep mentioning that you get extra courses taught by proven entrepreneurs like one of my favorites, you know, is the founder of DuckDuckGo, keeps growing and growing his search engine even though he’s competing with Google. And the reason that he’s doing it is because he figured out a way to get traction and came back here to teach it.
So, anyway, you’re getting a lot of courses taught by proven entrepreneurs, but I want to also acknowledge what we are getting here as a team by being a Mixergy Premium member, you are funding the research, the people, it’s not just research into guests who show up, but research into guests we politely turn away because our research shows that they’re not really fit to be here to do these interviews. So thank you to everyone who’s a Mixergy Premium member. If you’re curious about what it is or how to join, go to mixergy.com/premium. Bye.
