Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy, where I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses, because I love entrepreneurship. I love business. I love people and I love good fricking stories. Joining me today is somebody who I thought his business was much smaller than it is, but it’s even though it’s new, it’s huge.
Here’s the deal. You know how it feels really easy these days to sell online. You know, you set up a Shopify store, we’ll commerce store, boom you’re in business. But in reality, if you think about the steps involved in doing it, it’s still a process. I mean, if I were to say to you, go create a store right now, eco I don’t, I don’t really want to do it because there are more steps involved in it than say creating a new Instagram account.
There are more steps involved than say telling somebody here here’s a picture of what I’m offering. Just Venmo me. Well, joining me today is Ruben Flores Martinez. He is the founder of cash drop. They want to say they want to make it easier for people to sell, but they already are doing it. And it’s everything from your local restaurant down to someone who just wants to sell, um, baked goods from their house to apparently kids are using this to sell slime.
And I invited him here to find out how he built up his business and to see. Well, really to just tear the story and see how he’s making this work. Despite some challenges that I’ve seen competitors have. And we’ll talk about that here. Uh, we can tell the whole story, thanks to two phenomenal sponsors. The first we’ll host your website, right?
It’s called HostGator. I’ll tell you later why you should go to hostgator.com/mixergy. And the second, if you’re doing email marketing later on, I’ll tell you why you should go to send in blue.com/mixergy Ruben.
Ruben: Thank you so much for the time out there. I’m excited to get, share stories.
Andrew: Ruben you told our producer that one of the things that you notice is a problem that I see forever. I love food trucks. I’m in Austin. Now, food truck, culture’s big. Here. I was in San Francisco was big there. The pain in the ass of food truck is I have to wait and freaking line like an idiot for 10, 15 minutes, sometimes longer for the, for the pleasure of getting to order something that will then take.
15 to 30 minutes to arrive. And I always wondered why don’t they just put a fricking QR code or URL on the side of the truck and let me go and order online. And I’ve seen people try this in so many different ways and they fail. I, I feel like you’re making some progress, but what let’s talk about the problem.
Why isn’t it taking off already? Why are they making us all wait in line?
Ruben: I think, you know, the customer adoption thing is there, it’s a merchant adoption problem and it has to do with infrastructure. Like you said before, like it seems like a really easy thing to adopt, but from the merchant standpoint, that’s a big process in this. It’s very complicated. Right. And you know, I, when I, when I started the company, I kind of came across a stat that said that only about 8% of the world’s commerce was.
And that kind of blew my mind, you know, like we live in this era of axes and everything hyper convenient, but yet such as such a small fraction of all of our payments are done online, what we know it’s a more convenient
Andrew: But you know what? I do see them, they have the square app now, thankfully, or some device that allows me to use my phone or watch to pay for it. They clearly have digitized to some degree, but it’s only the payment part.
Ruben: Yeah, I think that that’s, you know, kind of the frontier that we’re at and like, kinda like extending it now where, you know, instead of having a cash register or a square reader that people have to travel to you to swipe their card, how they give merchants access to the billions of dollars of hardware that’s already in their customer’s pocket and you create a better experience, right?
Like it just feels a lot better. To walk into a Starbucks and instead of having to go wait in line and then go for your coffee, you can sit down, put your coat away, scan a cure, coming in your coffee shows up when it’s ready. So I think that that’s, you know, the issue that was as I w I asked myself the same question, why are more merchants doing it?
And I just realize it is very expensive. In difficult for them to do so. So I think that we just needed to create something that made it a lot more accessible for merchants worldwide to actually put those QR codes everywhere to actually provide that experience that all the customers are begging to.
They’re already used to it from the top, you know, top of the food chain, like the McDonald’s of the world, the Starbucks of the world, right? Like they’ve invested tens of millions of dollars into their technology stacks. So in a way we want it to be. Democratize it to as many people, regardless of stage, right?
Like, I want you to go to the smallest of the small, whether it’s like somebody, they just
Andrew: it seems like what, you’re what you’re saying to me though. Ruben is Andrew. It’s not that they don’t want to. It’s just that it’s too difficult for them to set it up. They’re not seeing a line of people waiting for food and feeling. This is great. they just feel like that stinks, but you know, what stinks even more is I’m going to have to go online and figure out this whole internet thing and figure out how I could let people order online and knock to get screwed by the company.
Got it. And that’s where you step in, how much revenue you guys doing Right.
now? How much, how much are you processing
Ruben: We’re processing tens of millions of dollars. We have some really exciting partnerships. Uh, a year. Yes. Uh, we were less than two years old. Uh, obviously the pandemic really helped us, uh, accelerate particularly in the hospitality industry. But I think to that point, you know, like it, it’s a high tech problem with a very low tech solution.
It just requires a human approach and really understanding that like us as like tech founders and tech people would kind of live in this little bubble where we feel like everything is instant and easy. But a lot of the bulk of business owners and, and real entrepreneurs, they’re not necessarily tech savvy.
They don’t really have the time or the th the, the ability to, to really get these things. They’re just worrying about selling the next taco to make sure that the deal for their family, right. Like, That’s where I think that there’s a giant disconnect between the tech industry and the people that we’re here to serve.
And I think that that’s what that’s really was the biggest motivator of, of, of the cash or print was like, you know, what, if I put myself out of business because my entire software career getting started was charging people to build them websites and Shopify
Andrew: That’s
Ruben: I was part of what. That’s what I was known for before I call myself part of the Shopify mafia.
Right? It is it isn’t cheap. And you know that you’re going to, you know, eventually they’re going to come back to you. You’re going to charge them $120 an hour for support because they don’t know how to change their inventory or add another thing that frankly, to me, it takes two seconds. So I think that that trace, this are of mistrust and it’s just, it just leads people to not adopt these things because they feel like, well, it’s a lot more painful for my customer to have to go wait in line, but I really have no better.
Right. So I think that we really need to do better as technology providers, to be able to understand those human factors that will enable people to feel that they can do it, to make people feel that they can afford it. Right. And that’s when you start really seeing this interesting uplift, you know, of people, all kinds of know in all kinds of.
Stage is using it. Like you said, we have people that are selling tacos out their garage window because their mom has a really great beach area. You know, a recipe all the way to food trucks, to food host hotels. Now we’re doing 25,000 people’s, uh, events. Now we’re moving on to stadiums and it’s really the same technology, or I like this idea that you should just be able to order from your phone when you’re sitting in your couch and you saw a cool Instagram photo, like.
The future everybody wants, but what are we doing to make sure that every single merchant out there truly has the ability to just launch that in just a few minutes without feeling that’s too difficult
Andrew: And that’s your thing. You want to make it so easy? They could create the store from their phone, not a desktop, not need a developer to come in and help out. And That’s that’s what you were doing. You said you were developing Shopify stores on the side and the reason you were doing it is because you had a startup called sugar.
I think it was. And it, it wasn’t making enough money. And so on the side you were doing contract
Ruben: how I pay the bills. Exactly. Exactly. So I was always a sugar. It was basically a data company. So they deal with, we wanted to make it really easy to collect a lot of preferential and psychographic data about customers and help them make decisions faster. I don’t know why the fuck we started with restaurants, but they deal with like, Hey, you’re in New York city.
You’ve never been, this is little algorithm that is like Tinder, Alaska, a few bunch of questions and they learn your preferences. So when you’re in the middle of Manhattan, you never been there and you’re fighting with your wife where to go to dinner at the thing would just say, Hey, here’s your top three minutes.
Don’t even think about it. Just, this is where you go. So that was the idea of. Pursuing the data around it made it really incredibly difficult for fundraising. There was no revenue coming in, so I needed to get invented how to pay the bills. And that’s, you know, most of my career as an engineer has always really been about helping somebody start advertising something to sell or selling.
And that was like the, the, the, the common thread for me is, and I kind of had this epiphany. Where was it? Look, maybe the first 20 years of the internet was all about connecting with each other, but the next 20 years of the internet is not that we’re, hyper-connected, it’s about selling shit to one another.
I like, I feel like that’s what everybody wants to do now. Cause we live in this era of hustle, this era of entrepreneurship, everybody’s got a million dollar idea in their head, everybody. So now it’s just, how do you just make it so effortless for them to try? Maybe you have a 1 95, but you have this random thing that you just feel could be a side hustle, but then all of a sudden you don’t want to go through the time of creating the website or the Shopify store or paying $30 a month for this $30 a month for that.
And you just want to see if in the weekends, your homeys from Instagram would just buy something, right? Like that, that’s the, that’s the things that we’re leaning into. And we’re seeing a lot of success from it.
Andrew: Okay. So talk to me a little bit more about sugar. I’m fascinated by companies that don’t work. I feel like there’s still enough to learn from those and we’re not mining that information. And so your idea was Andrew wants to go to dinner with. Instead of giving him Yelp and forcing him to read a bunch of reviews, we’re going to give him three options.
He could pick one of the three and move on and you’re going to build those three options for me, based on what what’s the big data issue that you had?
Ruben: Yeah. So I was obsessed with the Myers-Briggs, uh, framework, uh, years ago. Right. And then, you know, the name sugar came from this kind of like parallel to the Myers-Briggs that I kinda told myself, like, you know, yes, you, we may know your preferences, but I feel like choosing a restaurant or choosing a place that you really vibe with.
That’s the keyword vibe mood. It’s the. Intangibles besides is the food that I think matter when you make decisions. So I, I went in to find this parallel between personality traits and things that are psychographic in nature alone with your raw preferences, to try to match it with Russians and provide the right ambience, the right setting, the right people go to their right.
So it was a little bit more of a deeper connection. So that the interface when you started was just a bunch of little cards, kind of like. But, but instead of asking you about people would say, Hey, would you rather go to us steak dinner? Or would you rather eat a cup of noodles? Right? Like, would you rather eat, you know, this or that, this or this?
So it would collect a bunch of data and, you know, I’ve reversed engine here, the Myers-Briggs frame. You know, from like a long format, 30 minute test to a swipe test that was starting with 15 swipes, then you move up to 50 and it had about 98% accuracy and we can predict your Myers-Briggs personality type.
And that’s where the sugar, uh, game was like, the sugar was about we’re all a little gummy bears and all the little gummy bears have different colors. And depending on your preferences, you kind of belong to this. The family of gummy. So like you’re a red gummy bear. You’re a blue gummy bear. You’re, you know, whatever.
And that kind of told us about like, these are people that kind of share. Common traits with you like the blue sugar bears. Now that we know what type of preferences and psychographic triggers you guys have, then depending on where you start going, the, where you started going and spending money, you can kind of create a lot of really interesting patterns to feed it back into the loop, to make recommendations better, faster, and more effective for those people that shared things with you.
At least that was the vision, but, uh, um, you know, we weren’t necessarily chasing the money and that’s again, Uh, the fundraising. I mean, there’s a lot of good speak about the subject, but I mean, obviously from the 30,000 foot view, you know, there wasn’t necessarily a lot of clear idea on the monetization they deal with to kinda like become the next generation Nielsen to some degree and start using that data and selling into larger providers and product manufacturers and distributors.
And so on apple, that just kind of record a really long undertaking. And I mean, I raised $50,000 of angel money, so that was. That was you made it a really steep hill. And I mean, the rest, I’m not going to like to say this, even with cash, I’m just a good old Mount of good old racism. I mean, like me being a Latino founder in the tech industry, when less than 1% of the venture dollars go to black, Latino founders, you know, you don’t really realize that till after the fact of how much more difficult it is that you have to prove yourself to
Andrew: How do you know that it’s racism?
Ruben: It’s how the, you know, that it isn’t because a lot of the things in America suffer from this. I mean, there’s, these are the things that are deeply rooted in the power structures, particularly when you’re talking about capital, particularly when you talk about access, right. That, that, you know, you see this time and time again.
And I can’t really feel it every day. I just walk around and I just feel so fucking blessed to be able to be the one that breaks through, but it forever ruin. There’s a hundred others that I know that just go overlooked all the
Andrew: you tell, could you tell when people were talking to You was there something else?
Ruben: You can’t tell in the moment. Right. And you try so fucking hard to not be that guy. Right? Like you just don’t want to be the token Mexican. You don’t want to be the, the, the one guy out of the room. Right. So you don’t really think about it in the moment, but when you look back kind of realize like, you know, in this happens to me, like when I started raising capital for Castro, right.
Um, I started bootstrap. Right. Uh, I had no money. I was going to make random than the month, you know, when sugar died. And then I was like, those moments is where I just keep digging deeper. I’m like, I’m already in for the hole. I’m just going to keep going until I hit China. Right. So, you know, I started knowing that I build MVP, we got a bunch of, um, you know, a little food trucks that were making us, you know, tens of thousands of thousand transactions, you know, every month it was like, it’s an interesting start.
And I knew, okay, if our revenue model is $5 convenience fee for every dollar of GM. This many to pay rent. Right? So I just kind of got to get myself to this boomer once I got to that point relatively fast, I mean, a matter of weeks, I was like, I think this could be something I try for it with sugar for years and years and years, you know, within really get any amount of traction that we have here in weeks and something that I literally just built in my, in my apartment over the last month, just like coding 24 7.
And I was like, I think it’s time to go back to the circuit and try to, you know, get some capital to take this to the next level. When I started knocking on doors, like nobody it’s like, it’s like people that even take the time to listen to what I had to say. You know, it went to Milwaukee, went to Chicago, I started asking people and it was just this, this, I don’t even know how to explain it.
It’s a
Andrew: it, Chicago and Milwaukee too. Like when you tell me I went to Chicago and Milwaukee, I think, to do What To raise money.
Ruben: fundraising? I mean, like all of the investors that I, you know,
Andrew: Francisco?
Ruben: Well, that’s why I started right. I’m here in the Midwest. I started here and, you know, I got connected to some people in San Francisco. I got connected to some, you know, uh, to some accelerator programs, to some investor funds and stuff like that.
And I just kept hitting brick walls and I didn’t understand why. Right? Like I had traction, I had revenue that was a lot of promise. We were growing really fast. It just didn’t make fucking sense. Why, you know, and. I’m trying to ask for $150,000, $200,000. And, um, I just got very lucky on LinkedIn. I met a guy that had a really long network.
The next thing you know, he connects me with, uh, Jared from Harlem, Harlem capital in New York. And then he gives me a term sheet within today’s. They connect me with Eric Paley, you know, at founder collected, like they give me a term sheet in 24 hours. I got connected with Siam. So she gave me a terms within two hours, right?
Like it just w I, I did find the tribe and then everything kind of caught on fire from there. But again, looking back, it’s just that this is a really gigantic bias problem in industry where a lot of funders color have to work twice as hard to get half as far, they have to have companies that have far more traction to have more.
Proof points, you know, relative to the stage they’re at, because we don’t look good on paper, right? I’m a, I’m a Mexican college dropout. I was undocumented all my life. I taught myself how to code on YouTube because I couldn’t go to university. So, you know, I feel like this, a lot of bias problems there, but you know, it is what it is.
Once you kind of break through you break through and you’re shine brighter. I am very, I feel very, very fortunate, but getting here was not. Was not easy and I’m definitely the exception. I have so many peers that share similar stories to mind that just don’t have the opportunities that I was given. So that’s something that I’m very vocal about.
Andrew: You were born in Guadalajara, Mexico.
Ruben: I was worrying well, how to Mexico?
Andrew: And you, you told our producer that you would go selling, what was it that your parents had you sell ISIS?
Ruben: Yeah, so, so that’s, that’s cool. Uh, so there’s, this, this is a little desserts in Mexico called bullies, right? And it’s like, you know, our Fresca, you know, like or chatter hamika like Mexicans are very, uh, uh, um, uh, popular with those. They’re like, you
Andrew: watch what you’re moving on your desk. You’ve got, I love the energy that you have. Um, but just watch what you’re doing on your desk. Uh, because it comes across on the mic.
Ruben: All right.
That’s
Andrew: you seem to move so much? I’m watching you and I love that you’ve got this, like, can’t sit still energy. I just want you to be aware of the microphone as you’re doing
Ruben: Okay. I am I’m I’m I’m crossing my arms. Uh, so yeah, Bali’s are these, these sweet treats basically. So, so you grab, you know, uh, it’s call our Fresca, like or chatter, and then you put them in this little baggies and you freeze them somewhere like a Popsicle, but it’s like in a tide back. So you eat it by like literally just biting into the bag.
And I started a little business when I was about 12 years. Uh, 11 years old, um, you know, outside of my doorstep. And when I had I, every Saturday, that was a traveling flea market. So, you know, you had sellers from all over the city that would literally come and build these makeshift tents or put towels on the floor.
And that was all of the infrastructure they needed to run their business. And it was every Saturday for over a hundred, for over a hundred years. So like every single side of that, we literally opened up. My door and there was just this gigantic labyrinth of commerce in front of me. And, you know, I grew up, I grew up poor.
Um, my parents were highly educated chemical engineers, but they had no opportunities. So, you know, my dad was.
Andrew: why.
Ruben: That’s just how third world countries are, man. Like, you know, like you have very advanced degrees. I spent six years in college, did a thesis and the there’s just the market’s so hyper competitive and that pituitaries are so, so, so few. And, you know, I grew up seeing my dad just hustle, you know, out of necessity, right.
Like whatever he had to do to put food on the table. You know, I never went to sleep hungry and that was one of my biggest inspirations. So I’ve always had this ideas of like businesses and hustles and how to make money, how to get ahead.
Andrew: Meanwhile though there were periods of your life when you were the breadwinner for the.
Ruben: Yeah. So when I started that business, you know, I started, as my goal was to buy the PlayStation two because there was no fucking way my parents will ever be able to afford it. And I, you know, I went through a game or face I was 12 years old, so I needed to find a way of like, how do you buy something?
That’s may literally only for American kids, you only see on TV, but I need to have it. Right. So I started having my mom make me these freeze pops, and I just had this little woven basket. And every Saturday I would just go hustle. I know I had a lot of charisma and a lot of energy, so I would just go and just tell people stories and get them to buy my little free spots.
And I actually had a lot of success. And then I started doing every day, you know, I worked in a very industrial neighborhood, so it was a lot of businesses around me, you know, throughout the week, people that made, you know, that’s a lot of. Dan in factories and tire shops and leather tenders and shoemakers and recycler businesses, literally within two blocks of my, my neighborhood.
So everybody has a home, a home business, so I would start selling every single day. And then the empire grew. And then, you know, um, yeah, I mean, I was 13 years old and that was her sole income, uh, for a family of five. And I didn’t know that at the time, you know, only till years later I realized that, but.
Um, there was just a lot of internal friction, honestly, from my parents. Like not having opportunities there literally, you know, surviving of what their third, 12 year old kid is
Andrew: Did they resent you for being the person who is doing, did you
Ruben: I don’t think they resend to me, I think there were sent that themselves. And there was this moment that I forgot, I think is one of the most difficult, like childhood memories that I have, where one day I just didn’t want to go sell.
And my parents were very frustrating. There was like bills to pay in the next few days. And they were very, very tight for money and I refused to go sell. My parents were like, literally very mad with me almost crying and they literally just lock me in the door and then they went. And that was like a really, really fucking difficult moment in my life.
And a few months later, my dad. Left. So he, he went from what I had to Milwaukee, you know, for a whole year to work. So I didn’t see my dad for over a year. He just went, you know, with one of his brothers that lived there to work just shitty jobs, just to make enough money, to be able to come back and bring us with him.
But I haven’t seen my dad for a whole year, everything a few weeks after that. So. I don’t think he resented me. I think he resented himself in the situation. And I feel like that bow was the moment where he just knew that there was this sacrifice and needed to be done in order to provide me and my siblings with more opportunities.
And that’s just it like nobody going to ever wake up and say, I’m going to fucking leave everything behind. Go work as an. 3000 miles away and perhaps never see my family and nobody will ever want that is something that you’re forced to do. Uh, and it’s something that I wear very proudly in my sleep, but also I use it as a reference point to really understand, you know, who I am, but also who I’m here to serve.
Right? Like the vast majority of. Entrepreneurs and food truck owners in the hustlers are those people. They share similar stories and I want to be able to translate the story of tech and giant numbers in generational wealth and, and everything we have access to. Cause a lot of resources in the world.
Why are we able to translate that to these people that have the work ethic that they’re manufacturing everything? Ew. Ew, Ew. Ew. But they don’t have any ownership. They don’t have any access to tools that can really take them to the next level. And that’s honestly what I feel my purpose in life is that’s what I want to do with gossip.
And we do it every day by literally making it easy for people to turn their dreams into a reality.
Andrew: All right. Let me take a moment. I’m gonna tell people about my first sponsor. It send in blue Rubin. I don’t think you guys do email marketing on your platform.
Ruben: Not yet.
Andrew: not yet, but I saw the smile on your face is coming. And here’s why it’s so important. You want as a business to have a direct relationship with your customers.
So when it’s time for you to offer something for sale, or frankly, even to just get feedback and see what it is that they need or what you’re Not doing, right. Or what you could improve it. Email is the way to do it because it gives you that bi-directional communication with your customers allows you to come back to them later on.
When you have something new to offer, every business should have an email list. If you don’t have one, yet.
you have lots of options. So why should you send in blue? And here’s the beauty of sending blue. They give you all the marketing automation that you need. So if somebody keeps clicking on links that tells you that they’re interested in one topic, you don’t sell them something else, but you can follow up with the thing that they see more, most interested in.
If they bought something, you don’t try to sell it to them again, unless it’s obviously consumable, but you can say thank you for buying and then try to offer them something else. All that intelligence is built in and send in blue, super easy to use, but here’s what else they have that you won’t realize.
Until much later on a price that doesn’t get jacked up. A lot of email marketing companies give you free to get started, easy to get started, and then they Jack up the price. And meanwhile, by then you’re kind of stuck and they know they got, you send them blue. Doesn’t do it. And if you use my URL, they’ll give you an even lower price to get started and make it super easy for you to stay a customer.
Send in blue.com/mixergy. Send in blue.com/mixergy. You’ll get a great low price. Go check them out. And I think you’ll, you’ll be happy with them. And by the way, if you’re not andrew@mixergy.com, that’s my email address. I always want to know. Good, bad, ugly. Just random about all of my sponsors. I booted sponsors before people didn’t love them.
I only keep sponsors that you out there in the audience. Tell me you love. Uh, just keep giving me feedback on it. Alright, Rubin, I see the problem that you saw as a developer, the first version you told our producer, you wanted it not be as precious about it. As you are with sugar, you wanted to create faster.
What did that first version look like? And then we’ll get into how you got it into customers’ hands.
Ruben: Yeah, so. With sugar. It was really, really it system, a design, everything needed to look pixel perfect. Everything needed to be perfection. And, um, you know, when I killed sugar and I started cost shop, I just told myself, like I needed a complete 180, like gone and do the complete opposite of what I’ve done for the last three and a half years.
And I’ll never look back. First thing was. With sugar. I chased the data. There was all one data, no money. I’m going to do the complete opposite. I’m just going to only care about money. I want to become the inception of money. Right. Uh, and the thing also up here with design, I’m going to do the complete opposite mission of focus on just the utility, not how it looks.
I just want it to be as simple as possible, bare bones as possible. So I chose, you know, like everything. Everything with the design of Castro is very stock. We used to stock colors of the phone. Like the blue that we chose is the stock iPhone blue, the stock font stack shapes. So my goal was to make it using the bare bones, uh, elements and just something that would just put out there just really fast.
So I put the MVP in about three weeks. Um, I already had a lot of experience behind the scenes with a lot of payment processor, like Stripe and a lot of those things from, from things that I had been working on. Whether it was with sugar or like just you just side gigs over the years. So it just made it fairly easy for me to get started.
Uh, but I just wanted to focus on the utility, make the product as bare bones. But I think in hindsight is a great decision, but again, because the people that we serve are not tech savvy for the most part, right. They need something extremely clean. They don’t care about the bells and whistles and about what it looks like.
They care about the utility of what the product achieves. And I think that going into that direction was a great. Uh, um, way for us to really just declutter and remove all the unnecessary shit that people don’t care about,
Andrew: Okay. And so you launched it with the idea that people were going to not even need a Stripe account. Right. You had your own Stripe account for processing credit cards. You were just going to using the account that you had. Well, actually, how did you do payment?
Ruben: you wish to drive them. So, yeah, we wanted to make it as frictionless as possible. Um,
Andrew: I mean it doesn’t Stripe have a, they have a plan that allows you to create, is it sub-accounts I’m sorry, I don’t understand
Ruben: you can, you can create, you can create some icons. Now, Don do the first one. You’ll get an as bill and then you’re going to have to fight it out with the IRS, but reporting income. And it’s a giant fucking tax mess
Andrew: the downtown, do you did the tax mess?
Ruben: Well, the thing is when you, when you, when you become the processing account, irritates the list, a lot of problems, because you know, IRS is going to report the income as if it was yours, but when it was the merchant, so it’s just an accounting
Andrew: but is that what you did?
Ruben: eh, for a very short time. And
Andrew: So it was, basically like I have my own mixer. Do you Stripe account?
Ruben: yeah,
Andrew: own Stripe account and you use it for got it. Okay. And then Stripe has understands that there have a lot of customers like you, who also are, are basically empowering others. And I forget what that program is called and that’s what you
Ruben: Stripe connect. Yeah. So Stripe connect, uh, enables you to create, uh, individual siloed merchant accounts that you can connect to transfer money with. Uh, so that’s the preferred method, uh, obviously, but yeah, you know, still our idea was. Let’s get people from zero to money in the bank in 15 minutes, that’s always been the vision, right?
Like we want to make it super fast. And so I think, you know, when we started the product, that was the first thing that we wanted to achieve. Now, the second thing that we wanted to achieve it was this key insight that I had about like, I think for e-commerce to really get to where it needs to over the next 10 years.
We have to understand about what’s the biggest thing, holding them back. Why is it that we have things like Shopify and square, $200 billion companies, each of them, right? Yet still only 10% of the world’s commerce is digitize. I feel like there was. There was this thing that wasn’t translating. And when I spoke to a lot of small business owners, I kind of came to realize that it wasn’t a tech problem.
It was an economic problem. A lot of people felt they was expensive or they couldn’t afford it. They just, there was this entire sense of, of, of money, money, money. I said, look, we’re making it really easy for you to get started and we’re just not going to charge you anything, right? Like it’s going to be 100% free.
There’s no commissions, there’s no monthly fees, but every single time that you sell something, I’m going to add a tiny convenience to the customer. Right? So then the more money you make the money, more money I make, I’m just going to focus on the merchant, right. And make sure that I can empower you to sell as fast as possible and as much as possible.
And that at the time was a little, I had turned her for some people in the industry. Charging the consumer was the way to go, but honestly it was the secret sauce for us to explode overnight. And I really, you know, to this day, believe that the biggest disruption that we really introducing is not so much about the product and what it can do, but it’s really about rethinking the fundamental economic model of digital commerce.
And I think that that’s, that’s going to be the biggest thing for us. It still
Andrew: when I look at this, um, deep dish key lime pie slice for $7 and 50 cents, you’ve got a service fee of $1 and 13. That’s your fee. That’s where you make your money.
Ruben: It’s a 5% convenience for you.
Andrew: Okay. And so then there’s service fee. And then in addition, I see fees and taxes, what’s fees and taxes.
Ruben: Yeah, so it, like, I think you’re looking at a, um, two, three, I believe there, uh, within the group that they have the, that you can add, the group itself can add specific service charges of they do the like there’s there’s restaurants, or like concept like hotels that will add a 20% service charge, you know, to the total.
So that’s what you’re seeing there for fees and taxes to us is like, you know, depending on the, uh, the tax rate in Florida is about 700. Uh, and then the 5% community. So for us, we charge 5% convenience fee from the total to the customer.
Andrew: Got it. All right. So what you’re saying is you add your fee on top that took away some of the fear that they had, that you were somehow going to make money from, from them every month. And that they’re going to have this big bill that they’re stuck with forever. Got it. All right. And so I see the first version when you went out and got your first customer, who was the first customer, a food truck,
Ruben: So our first talker customer was a food truck in Milwaukee, Wisconsin called my soca. So I was acquaintances with, uh, with the owner and then, you know, um, he launched it. He was very bullish on it and we actually became a first and Lester had sushi. He gave me $10,000. Um, and he became our first client and first investor.
Andrew: So here’s what I want to know. You went to him and you said, this is my pitch. He said, look at all these people waiting in line for 20 minutes to get a taco that they’re miserable, which by the way, so freaking true. I can help you with this. Instead of waiting in line, all they have to do is pay with this QR code and order and sit down.
I get that. I see why he would be interested. Now, did you say to him create an account and now like list all your menu items on it? Or did you do the service for him in the.
Ruben: No, he did it.
Andrew: You said to him, here’s the account, go set it.
up and do it. And you watched him type in all of his different taco options. You watched him at his, uh, actually you didn’t have to do, uh, uh, his bank information at the time. Right?
Ruben: The benefit is that the, my circles menu is about 10 items long. So yes. I mean, it wasn’t necessarily like something I really big undertaking, but yeah. I mean, part of the vision was like, in order for this to really be gigantic, it needs to be self-serve right. So that’s
Andrew: the
Ruben: of the
Andrew: he had to use it.
Ruben: Yeah, exactly.
Part of the fine tuning on the apps creation was for me to be able to understand, to make it fast and easy enough for them to actually do it themselves. And that’s, that’s been something that I’m very obsessed about, always how people use the product. So, yeah, I mean, that was the initial tasks. Like, here you go, download the app, set it up.
Do you have any questions on queue? I’m here for you, but the goal is for this, for tens of millions of people worldwide to do it themselves. I can’t scale that. I need to figure out how to, for you to do it.
Andrew: All right. So Rubin, he sets it.
up. He gets a QR code. First of all, he’s got to print the fricking QR code. That’s a pain in the ass. Nobody’s got a printer.
Ruben: Well, the thing is he didn’t start with a curator. It started with a link that it’s all
Andrew: on the side of his truck?
Ruben: on it. No, no, no, no, no. That they, the bread and butter use-case for us, none new with QR codes, the better bread and butter for us is when you create your car shop, shop, you get a link cash up that whatever cash up.
Isn’t the marketplace. So we don’t have a website. When you go on your browse for shit around you. We wanted to leverage the distribution inherently already within social media profiles. My sarcasm about 5,000 followers are very devoted. So I was like, look, people are already. The future of on-premise commerce begins before they even set foot in your business.
It begins
Andrew: so wait, he didn’t promote it. It wasn’t people seeing his truck and waiting in line who typed in the URL, you’re saying it’s, it was that.
Ruben: But they use or flow begin like this. The people that were waiting in line 30 minutes ago were at home. They’re thinking maybe I’m hungry. What am I going to eat? They come across somewhere a Masonic, or they thought about him. The whole I’m going to go to my circle to order, but the only way for you to consume us, our products is to go to the truck waiting on.
Pay for your shit, wait for your taco and then move them. So I was like, look, the future of this is once they do hook them with a good post on Instagram and you get the 500, 600 likes, why don’t you just say, go to the link in my bio and you can order. So by the time that you get to the truck, your shit’s already waiting for.
That was the use case. It wasn’t about cure guts of up preventing people that by the time they were home, they could go to his Instagram profile link in bio topic, plays the order. And then by the time they got to the truck, their tacos were already waiting.
Andrew: Got it. And that was where the majority of people doing that, buying off of his social still to this day,
Ruben: still to this day, the QR code is just to prevent overflow, but it’s to train people the next time they should buy the, if you have to scan a cure, could own location. You’re already too late, but it’s a great opportunity to then say, look, the next time you can find us on Instagram or, and take that going this and this click the link in our bio order at home.
Get a text when it’s ready and then you get in. Come pick up your shit. Now you don’t have to. And waste hunt.
Andrew: Okay. So he does it, then I’m assuming you go out to other food trucks and you say to them, this is working, but I’ve got to tell you Rubin, most food trucks do not have a great Instagram.
Ruben: I disagree. But the thing is. Most small business owners have some sort of following, right? I’m not talking, not all of them have 10,000 followers. Not a lot of them only have 5,000 followers. Some of them have 500, but when you have to understand, is this at as successful small business at the scale of these food trucks probably needs about 50 to 80 covers a date to be successful.
Andrew: Okay.
Ruben: So they need about a certain amount of GMV to hit per day to kind of cover the bills, present profit margin so they can put food on the table. That’s how these people are thinking about. So when you really do the math like that, if you really need 50 50 covers to be successful, cover the bills and you have 500 Instagram followers, your.
It’s to talk to those 500 people to try to come 10% of them. Right. And you know, this is the beauty of the world that we live in because you can create distribution relatively easy. So yes, not everybody has a great social media presence, but for the most part, every single small business owner that’s on Instagram can at least get a hold of it.
People and talk to enough people to be able to create a steady flow and, you know, a lot of our most consistent, more successful smart food trucks don’t have a thousand followers yet. They do the majority of their traffic on social media. And I think that that’s a really key insight there that we always try to advocate and show small business owners.
Because that’s the, the customer acquisition mechanisms that are already inherent with their social media profiles is game changer. I mean, it’s, it’s a really powerful position. Now. You just have to make it really easy for them to transact and give you their money before they can go to the 10,000 other competitors you have.
But I think that that’s how you build really easy loyalty from a small-scale perspective. And you know, it only amplifies the more followers you have obviously, but, uh, it’s not that hard to get started in it. And you don’t need that many people to create a successful.
Andrew: I guess I thought that most food trucks are something that people go to when they’re in the area. So they go to, then they go to an area. They like the food truck. They’re great. In line, they order your. You’re saying that people will find a truck online, they’ll follow them. They’ll be connected to them.
And then later on, they’ll decide that they want to go and order. Okay. Um, I had no idea. All right. So then do you go and get other food trucks or do you start to, well, actually today is the majority of your business food trucks or is it Instagrammers and other social media people who are.
Ruben: I think about 60%, 55, 60% is hospitality. Right. Not just food trucks. Like I said, we serve as food trucks, grabbing the restaurants, food halls, hotels, I would have, you know, uh, and then we have a really large channel partnership coming with one of the largest payment processor in the world. So they’re putting cash up in the hands of 2,500 salespeople all over the country to convert a lot of their brick and mortar hospitality.
So we’re very excited about it. So it’s about 55% spread. And what’s interesting. What started happening is. The restaurant started adopting and relatively quickly because of the pandemic. Right? All of a sudden, you know, there was complete cut off to brick and mortar traffic, and everybody was scrambling for a solution.
So restaurants with like the, the very, very clear, uh, value proposition. So, you know, yes, we started getting a few more food trucks, but then we started getting Robyn go restaurants. And the next thing you know, I’m going off to Florida to launch a 15 venue food hall in west Palm beach. Uh, you know, and to this day, they’re one of our largest merchants would do a hundred percent of their entire, uh, um, um, uh, payments buying.
So they’re doing, you know, 10 million a year in sales plus, and we process every single dollar that goes through that entire food hall. We process it where they’re pointing this out. So what’s interesting. Here is cash. Strep is a very simple. I think to launch and adopt, right? It can be, again, like you said, 13 year old kids in California launched your side hustle, selling slime with their moms, for selling Pokemon cards.
But you know, as easy as it is to launch the back end of cash app is very sophisticated, very robust that I can actually take your business from various. Two very large. So we, you know, they, I mean, we connect with a lot of, you know, credit card processing hardware. You can do self checkout kiosk. You can do stop facing points of sale.
You can sell with QR codes and links on Instagram. So it’s the apps that puffers very modular to adopt for a very wide gamut of use cases for commerce. And I feel like. As the restaurant industry started adopting us. It’s just organically led to a lot of people on different industry asking, oh shit, can I use it to sell this?
Can I use it to sell my tickets? Can I use it for my church? Can I use it for this? And then it just kind of went from
Andrew: okay. Rubin, I’m going to come back in a moment and ask you how you expanded to all those places. But first I should say my second sponsors, HostGator, anyone who needs a website, you go to hostgator.com/mixergy. When you do, you’re going to get hosting. That just works. It’s easy and it’ll scale. We’re actually talking to them about how they should be promoting their more robust services because HostGator has it.
Most people don’t know it, but when you’re getting started inexpensive and just works is a great way to do it. So go to hostgator.com/mixergy. You’ll get all of that and an even lower price when you use my URL, hostgator.com/mixergy. So Rubin, what was your process for going out and getting more customers, more people to use cash.
Ruben: It was Instagram. My Sorcha right. Puts the link in their bio and it says, Hey, you can tap this link in our social media, on Instagram profile and then place an order. Right. So that was, that was the first thing that it kind of helped us to kind of point the finger to, and then from there it was just a lot of dams, you
Andrew: You personally sitting down and DM-ing,
Ruben: yeah. And what ended up happening is what was that?
Andrew: Did you get penalized by, by Instagram? For DM-ing so much.
Ruben: You just have to know you, you have to know the system a little bit. Yeah. So, I mean, there is a limit on the answer you can send, so you kind of have to work around the kinks of Instagram marketing, but, um, You know, as of, as of three months ago, the vast majority of our traffic was still in my word of mouth, just through social media.
What happens is my circa adopts the system. People love it. Right? Cause it’s easier. Grass is a dink customer has been waiting for for months anyway. Right. And then their peers and competitors see in this, they’re asking themselves what, what the fuck is this Kashrut thing? Oh, it’s free. Oh, I can set it up myself.
Boom. Right. And that’s where it’s key for the self-serve loop to be. Very very intact, right? Like, uh, and that’s what ended up happening. Like it, it didn’t just happen in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, my circus connected to small businesses all over the country. So you start seeing these really random uptake of like next thing, you know, we had a taco shop in, in salt lake city, caller stop at Theo’s because they’re like third cousins with his Sue’s here in Milwaukee and they also own a taco truck.
So they downloaded it and set it up. And then in Florida and in Arizona and all of a sudden, like people. Calcium doesn’t necessarily have digital density. We have what’s called digital. We call, uh, we don’t have physical density. We call it digital density, which a lot of our merchants are like one or two degrees of separation from each other on social media.
So it’s not like we have entire neighborhoods of merchants where everybody uses cash drop is digital communities that follow each other. They
Andrew: Ruben. I still don’t get though how they would send you. So I’m on their website right now. I see cash drop, right? I mean, sorry. I’m on their Instagram. I see cash drop right there in the one link that they have in the bio,
Ruben: Yup.
Andrew: they posted maybe five times a year to 4,400 people. How does it, I mean, I’m not disagreeing.
I’m just saying I don’t understand it.
Yeah.
How does.
Ruben: Stories are a femoral Raza. Most people will present their story. Then they will in their feed because it goes away after 24 hours. And now you can do swipe ups or you can do laser. You just say Lincoln bio and that’s that’s, that’s what happens. So the story form is really cool because you can talk about daily specials.
So things happen every single day and they go away. Whereas your feed is the more interesting permanent stuff. So that’s how you’re sending in creating these communication mechanisms with.
Andrew: Okay. All right. And that’s not what I’m seeing here. What I’m seeing there is more like their website then their, their stories feature. Okay. And so that becomes your thing. And then DM-ing is one way that you do outward. I see the inbound people are spotting you on, uh, on, on sites like theirs and businesses like theirs.
What else do you do to be more proactive? What’s your sales outreach like today?
Ruben: Yeah. So, uh, we’ve, we’ve taken a really interesting path to that. So, Um, we we’ve done a lot of, um, um, Inroads with, uh, with a small scale regional influencer community. So I have a really thriving, um, um, partner program. So they dos and you have, you know, you have influencers there have like 10, 15, 20, 30,000 followers that are like very, very dial in a particular community.
You know, say we have, for example, eat Migos in, in, uh, San Antonio, like trusted figures that a lot of small businesses know them. Like. Foodie. So he’s always going down and eating the best food in San Antonio. So we wanted to create a partnership program to tap into people like, like Chris, like Migos, to be able to help them kind of broker and spread the word about cash up and help us close a concept, almost like a decentralized way of selling through somebody that’s already very trusted in the community.
And given that our profit margin, you know, it gives us a lot of luxury. You know, or 5% straight margin, uh, we’ve been able to create a lot, a really interesting, very, uh, symbiotic relationships with people like Chris, where they go on, they tell people about cash up, they help them close the up and lunch or accounts to help promote them and kind of kickstart the business.
So that’s something that we’ve done extremely well that we’re scaling. Uh, also, you know, we’ve, we, like I said, we’ve been working a lot of channel partnerships, so we figured out that we can. You know, uh, solve this very strong existential pain, pain points for a lot of the older payment processor, incumbent in the space where a lot of their merchants were, you know, jumping ship to toast and square because, and they’re vertically integrated.
So we have some channel partnerships with some of the largest payment processors in the, in the, in the, in the world where, uh, again, they’re after the processing value volume kind of like Stripe, but we’re the N you know, um, the. Uh, interface that connects the consumers with the merchants.
Andrew: one of these channel partners that you’re working with, that’s referring customers to you.
Ruben: yeah, Serrano, Oregon was global payments, um, uh, starting with one of their subsidiaries Heartland payments. Uh, the other one is under NDA, so I can discuss it, but they’re just as big. Uh, so again, That’s been really helpful for us. Um, we were going to embark on about 2,500 other sales, uh, salespeople. Uh, then they’re going to use cash shop as a sales, you know, thing to, to convert a lot of their existing brick and mortars the service about 500,000 brick and mortar all over the country.
But they also do stuff for resorts and casinos and Disneyland and the NBA and like stadiums. So they’re the ones broken in a lot of these partnerships because a lot of. On-premise payment experiences that they do for all the merchants and service our legacy. So they have this really big existential problem to modernize the payment experience and a lot of their existing merchants before they jumped ship to somewhere like toaster square.
And that’s where we come in. So that’s been an extremely symbiotic relationship with took almost a year to build, you know, we’ve been building an on this for almost a year. People thought we were crazy, but it’s like turning a giant container ship in the middle of this west canal. Right. It’s going to fucking take longer.
But once it’s going in the right direction is going to fucking move. So now, you know, which is the more of the first 50. Now we’re going to do it to the first 150 reps all the way to, to, uh, 2,500, uh, in, you know, that’s, I think creating the decentralized sales process through partnerships and, and, uh, affiliate programs.
That’s been. The, the big strategy for us. And it just of, you know, helps us conduces really great brand presence on social media that kind of keeps the inbound coming as well. So, you know, we’ll do a lot of really cool stuff with, we’re very blessed to have a lot of really cool investors that are, you know, celebrities like David Grumman in Miami has been one of our most, uh, powerful, uh, um, Just advisors and mentors and friends that, that, you know, he’s such a big, uh, player in the hospitality Orleans constantly talk about cash drop.
So that’s just giving us massive visibility and a lot of op album. And we’re, you know, he’s introduced us to a lot of other, other investors like food debt, for example, who’s Kim Kardashians, best friend. He’s like one of the biggest foodie influencers in the world. He just has to show. That just dropped in discovery plus, and now he’s on team up.
He’s always advocating and moving. We’re doing a lot of really cool campaigns with them. So pursuing that, I has always also been really powerful for us because we just kind of have the brand is very conducive, you know, to create a lot of. Fun partnerships because we’re not necessarily locked into one particular vertical.
We can do stuff with food guy. We can do stuff with data. We can do stuff with a lot of foodies, but also verticalized those things where we want to go into e-commerce. When we go into digital assets, you know, we just locked in investment deal with one of the biggest recording stars of the moment. Right now, I can’t talk about what it is, but we’ll be announcing that in the next few months that we’re going to be
Andrew: Where they’re selling something digitally
Ruben: What was it?
Andrew: where they’re selling something digitally.
Ruben: Yeah. I mean, think about this now, when you start putting the pieces of like, you know, stadiums and concerts, like, you know, think about like how many times there’s merchant your concert and like you just not even gonna fucking wait in line. Cause like, if you thought food trucks was bad, try buy a t-shirt on a Kanye west concert or like a big concert like that.
W w you know, Tom, how much money is left on the table on, on large context,
Andrew: Right where people say, I’m not going to wait in line. I don’t get, I don’t get how we still have lines. When everyone has a phone in their pocket, it should be, they should just, And especially with COVID, they should say now, no more waiting in lines, it’s unsafe for people. Go use the app and then we’ll tell you when your food’s ready or when your t-shirts ready or whatever.
Ruben: And that’s the thing, right? Like there’s a lot of politics in the, in the, in the FinTech space, right? Like there’s a lot of legacy in the FinTech space. And for us, you know, to some degree partnership with the establishment has been really powerful for. Do you help them modernize their experience and keep their customers happy?
And that’s a really great way for us to create a giant step function of growth for ourselves. While also being able to tell is, uh, this, this story to the people that are just getting started and becoming the path of least resistance and the launchpad of entrepreneurship for people that are just about the lunch.
So we kind of have the best of our worlds and that’s kind of where the vision for us is because then it allows us to point a finger to the people that are just getting sound bites. This can be you in five years and you can do a right now, you can go from zero to money in the bank in 15 minutes, and you can be as Dave Grutman, right?
Like you can be as big as this. You can do this. This is the app that you need to start right now is just slanging tacos out your windows in your mom’s house. But this is the same product that you can be here if you have 50,000 customers at your next venue. Right. So I think that, that’s the interesting thing about.
Scalable, the platform can be across different verticals and across different stages because at the end of the day, it’s the same fucking use case, which is interesting part, right? The idea of, you know, not waiting in line to buy something. It doesn’t matter if it’s a taco or a hoodie or a, you know, like, or a beer.
I mean, like. Really is vertical agnostic, but it’s been fragmented, you know, over time. And I think that that’s, what’s really preventing mass adoption. So casual shirts to just say, look, anybody that has any idea of any business do want to sell. This is the app where you can write. There’s be a chat bot that asks you, what are you trying to sell?
How are, do you want to fulfill your orders? Whether it be shipping or delivery or pickup or digital download. And then this will be the hub that kind of connects all the pipes behind the scenes. So you don’t have to worry about it. You
Andrew: all right, I get it. You’re basically saying, look, all those, all those amazing cash register apps from a toast and the others You could do away from that with them, people can just use their phones to order their phones, to pay. And the merchant doesn’t have to pay a fee for it. The customer pays a convenience.
That’s the answer, by the way I did go to on Instagram, as I told you before. Of course, as soon as I follow them, Instagram tells me about other places I can follow, including Zocalo Zocalo, of course also uses cash drop and they also use you almost like a link tree where. One page that you create that looks great with all their links to their website, hours of operation, and of course, to buying. Um,
the one thing that stands out for me is first of all, the page looks great. Cash drop is on there in the URL and at the top. Do you think about maybe creating a URL that’s or allowing them to customize a URL is that matter anymore? Or our customer’s businesses willing now to just use whatever tool and just like, they don’t need link tree to give them their own URL.
They don’t need cash drop to anymore. What are you finding?
Ruben: It’s symbiosis route like the merchant, these bells and whistles are nice, but it’s because we’re looking at it from the tech perspective, they just, their business themselves just fucking care about making sure people can buy tacos and they can make as
Andrew: Uh, they don’t care that they’re, they don’t have a vanity URL. They don’t care that they don’t have their own.com. No, they just want, just make it easy for me to buy.
Ruben: exactly. It’s like, it’d be nice to have these things like these vanity things are nice to have, but at the end of the day, the product delivers so much value on what truly matters, which is making the purchase experience seamless that everything else like they’re okay. And that’s the symbiosis, right?
Like selfishly. Can we create a vanity URLs probably, but it’s better marketing for us to be able to have the cash up URL. So I think that this is where the business is really start wearing cash up as a badge of honor, because they’re using the platform, but they’re also conveying a story, right?
Andrew: are you, are you giving them a commission? Are you giving them a commission for promoting it?
Ruben: no, absolutely not.
Andrew: Yeah. I like how you’re disgusted that I would even ask. Here’s why I asked though on CA on, on, uh, the Zocalo website, it. says a link to their hours and so on, but he also has a link to launch with cash drop, earn money with an
Ruben: Yeah. Oh, so, so that’s, so that’s a different thing. That is an affiliate, uh, landing page. Actually, we do have, uh, deals, so we don’t give marketing commissions for autonomy Castro. They choose little to do because they love us because that’s how much they love the product.
Andrew: Do they make an affiliate
Ruben: it. That’s what makes the virality go through.
But we, we did launch an affiliate program with some of our merchants where they can push this landing page links where businesses can sign up through that, through these landing pages. And when the new businesses make a transaction that the merchant existing merchant they’ll let the new. Makes makes a commission.
So yes, uh, w w this of like the same system that we use to scale through our, uh, uh, influencer, uh, uh, affiliates. So we’re actually applying that to our existing merchants as well, so that they tell each other about cash drop, but, you know, they just talk about us because we save them money because we make
Andrew: is it an ongoing affiliate commission or is it
Ruben: Yeah. Every single, every
Andrew: if they get a new merchant to sign up, they get a new merchant discount. They get a new merchant to sign up and every single order generates revenue for them. Got It Okay.
Ruben: It can be, it can be a one-time or it can be ongoing. It depends. It depends on the, on the, on the, we can kind of turn that on different ways. Yes.
Andrew: Okay. So let me see if I can understand everything here. Number one,
Ruben: Yeah.
Andrew: the big thing that you’ve realized is what seems easy to us because we’re developers or because we’re techies or because we enjoy the process. Is a pain in the ass for other people. And to look for those pains in the asses for other people, number one, number two, when there’s a problem, instead of saying the world should be better than this, you decided, you know what?
I think the reason that they don’t have tech, I think the reason the world isn’t better than this is because the. It’s just too hard for them. And my job is going to be to make it easier. And let me ask you this. How did you, you’re not in the food service business when people were signing up for Shopify, they weren’t in the food truck business trying to create a website.
How did you piece that together?
Ruben: Um, growing up in Milwaukee, the red. So my family immigrated from Mexico to Milwaukee when I was 13 and I grew up there. And, you know, Milwaukee is a very service industry, heavy town. So I was a tech nerd writing code, but a lot of my friends were bartenders and servers and you know, the worked in restaurants and you just always saw it as like, I was a tech nerd with apps and everybody hated it.
In Milwaukee, they fucking hated technology. Right. And it’s easy to dismiss them as like, oh, you guys live 20 years in the past, but you know, I’m very inquisitive by nature now is trying to understand why. And you kind of realize it’s like, it’s not a technology problem. It’s almost always an economic problem.
Right. Because it’s, it’s difficult on purpose that they can charge them risk almost like the whole fucking thing. I think people look at technology. Like we look at McDonald’s ice cream machines. They’re always broken because they that’s, you paid to fix them. And that’s where they don’t have any incentive to make them better.
Because you know, you’re going to have to pay at technician every two weeks to come and fix your fucking ice cream machine with something. That’s something, it’s something, frankly, that’s not that difficult to do. Right. Like I think technology is kind of becoming a little bit like the broken. Ice cream machine for these restaurant owners.
And they just fucking hate us. Honestly, they, they, they hate it. And when you ask why, and you realize like, oh, this is actually something, they shouldn’t be that difficult. How do I put myself out of business to provide a better merchant experience? I mean, the tables turn and people actually fucking like it.
And guess what? When they like it, they advocate about your product. They tell their friends, they tell everybody, and then the inbound is there and you don’t have to sell you. Just tell the story and focus on providing. The right customer experience and, you know, maybe sometimes their requests for you to be outsider of these industries to truly understand the problems right.
That these industries have, and then just be able to be, you know, a different perspective on fixing that, fixing it. So I dunno, it’s a little bit of luck, SIS circle circumstance, but I think also like just growing up around so many people that work in that industry, LPT with the perspective.
Andrew: All right. The website, the website is cash drop.biz. And I want to thank the two sponsors made this interview happen. The first one, you need email marketing that will scale with your business, but the price will not suddenly jump up. It’s all the marketing automation features that you didn’t even know you needed, but wait till you see how powerful they are.
You should go to send in blue.com/mixergy. And when you needed a website, Easy and inexpensive go to hostgator.com/mixergy. Reuben. Thanks so much for being on here.
Ruben: Thank you for the time.
Andrew: on.