Coding Your Dreams into Reality: Lessons from an Engineer turned Entrepreneur | ButterCMS Jake Lumetta

0:00I was just so interested in building building building building building building and coding coding coding coding coding. I think being an engineer, and it was two of us, I think having two engineers paired up was actually a detriment because we just wanted to just code all day and we didn't want to talk to customers. We didn't want to have to figure out how to sell this thing. We didn't want to have to figure out how to market it. You know, it was much easier to just code. Let's just write code and have fun. Yeah, totally. Okay, so it's like, you know, overall, it's really a pro, but, you know, if engineers listening, just like keep in mind, stay close to the customer early on.

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1:09Second, automatically assigning the right reviewer and number of reviewers to pull requests. Third, having co-review automation that auto-request changes. And finally, by automating PR approvals and merges. To learn more about how GitStream works and to try it out free for your team, please visit gitstream.cm or search for Gitstream in the GitHub marketplace. Hey, what's up, everyone? Welcome to Dev Interrupted. This is your host, Dan Lines, co-founder and COO at Linear B. And today we're joined by Jake Lumetta, founder and CEO at Butter CMS. Jake, welcome to the show. Thanks, Dan. Thanks for having me.

1:49This is a blast. I'm really excited to be on. Yeah, it's totally awesome to have you with us today. we have a really, I think, great, I would say, story or kind of background about you. And we love telling these types of stories on the pod. Usually we're doing it something like, okay, individual contributor, engineer, going into an engineering leadership type role, you know, director or VP. But in your case, we have also a pretty cool transition from engineer to founding your own company. We're also going to touch on building B2B products versus B2C. So we got a really, really excellent show. But what I want to do is let's start from the beginning.

2:39Some background about you. Could you tell us a little bit about like your career progression and then leading into, I guess I'll just call it butter, leading into butter? Sure. I'll keep it super high level, I guess. career wise maybe started in middle school high school always just kind of was interested in computers and building and tinkering around with my own desktop computers and hardware and stuff like that got into the web when that started coming around Mac Media Flash back in the day remember the first time I saw some websites built in Flash I was like oh man that is awesome holy shit yeah how does that how does that work like how is that even possible really and that question really I don't know kind of set the tone I guess for my career is like I was so curious of how do you build that really cool stuff that I was seeing online.

3:26And that curiosity led me. Went to school for computer science undergrad and have been really interested in just building and startups and entrepreneurship kind of my whole life. Yeah, that's great. I also did the comp sci undergrad. Where'd you go to school? I went to Michigan State. So I was born originally from Michigan, born in Michigan. So I went to Michigan State, computer science. Yeah, that's really cool. I think you've been a founder at other startups or like what's your entrepreneurship situation? Sure. Yeah. I've started and failed at, I'm kind of losing track how many startups at this point, honestly, but I think it's like in the four or five range.

4:07And, you know, like I said, I've always just been really passionate about entrepreneurship and trying to make a go of my own company, you know, and I've tried it that many, many times. And so like in high school, I started, I didn't know it at the time, but it was like a content business. It's called Bonafide Reviews, which is a hilariously long, hard to spell name. The domain was available. And basically, there's a way for me to get free hardware as a high school kid. So, you know, I do the content site and I would email all the hardware companies, AMD and NVIDIA, etc. Try and get like free video cards, mice, monitors, you name it, speakers to review.

4:47And they would send it for free. And when I found out this was an option, I tried to make a go of it. So I built out the website in PHP. That was my first time using PHP. And so, yeah, I hand coded. I guess I hand coded a CMS for that company, which is kind of funny to think about. I didn't know. I had no idea what I was doing at the time. I'm in high school. So I didn't know what a CMS was or anything like that. So that was Bonafide Reviews. That one worked out actually okay. I made decent ad money on it. But I learned that a content business is really hard because you have to keep creating so much content.

5:16And I tried to recruit writers for it. and that's a grind yeah it's a grind you're always under pressure like always constantly yeah yeah then i tried to yeah i tried a few other startups after after bona fide review i tried to a social shopping startup which if i had to kind of describe it it was like kind of like pinterest but it was designed for people doing really technical complicated shopping where you would go to like, like basically if you're trying to shop for hardware, or like HDTV or something really technical or complicated. You had the ability to go and use like a bookmarklet and kind of go around the web.

5:56You can go to Amazon. Do you know bookmarklet is this? They used to be like really popular. This is before like browsers had plugins and stuff. But basically, it was like a browser plugin. Yeah, yeah. Now there's like updated versions of that same concept. Yeah, exactly yeah exactly so so we built that and um and it was designed to allow you to again comparison shop for really technical stuff that was who i was interested in because that's coming from the bona fide reviews background anyway so i built that out and i learned that i learned lessons like kind of all these and i'll maybe touch on those real quickly but um i handed we sort of built that company in a vacuum didn't talk to anybody it was myself and another engineer and so we were just like building features, building features for maybe six months or something like that.

6:40And like, oh, what if we could do this thing? And like, oh, we need to probably do this. And like, we need to be able to undo that. You know, we just built like future after future. And it was super fun. It was fun like coding and like building all this crap. But then we actually started to get people to try and use it. And surprise, surprise, like no one used it. I tried to get my wife to use it. And the first thing she did was she went and added a purse. She like went to like a purse site and like added a purse. I said, no, that's not, that's not what it's for. It's like you're supposed to be shopping for TVs or, I don't know, computers or something like that.

7:10And it's kind of funny to think that because it was like, holy shit, you know, it was kind of like a Pinterest-esque. If I was smarter. Consumers will do whatever they want. Yeah, exactly. So, but that was painful. We spent a lot of time building that. No one used it. So, yeah, don't build in a vacuum without talking to anybody. That's an obvious lesson, but a big mistake that they made. Another one was, and then butter's coming up here. Another one was a company called WinkFid, which is a silly name. But it was an online speed dating app or website. It wasn't an app. So it was a website. So you could like, we would connect you with 10 other singles and just like in five minute, you know, kind of speed dating fashion.

7:53And you'd pay, I don't know, how much we charge, 20 bucks. What year did you do that? Was that like during the time all of the dating apps were happening or before? um this was around 2009 2010 um there was another do you remember hearing about chat roulette yeah yeah i remember uh yeah so it was chat roulette became really popular right around the same time we were doing that people were like oh you're like chat roulette we're like no we're not like that but um yeah chat roulette was probably got scary but it was it was like an interesting concept. Yeah, an interesting concept. Yeah. So just coincide with that.

8:31But it was also really weird for me personally because I was married at the time. So like, why was I building a dating startup? So some lessons learned from that is like, you know, building a company is really, really hard. And so when it gets really, really hard, are you going to be passionate enough about what you're building to like continue with it? And as a married guy, I just couldn't get super passionate about dating sites, I guess. Yeah, that's also a great lesson. Yeah. You know, choose something that is going to have longevity with your interests because you got to be all in. All in for a long time.

9:05Yeah. Also, I learned that we can get this kind of hits of the B2C versus B2B point. Getting consumers to pay money is very, very, very, very hard. They get someone to pay you. I think, again, we were paying like we were charging like 20 bucks or something like that to do this event. It was it was really hard to get anyone to pay us any money. Yeah. And then did some other ones. But yeah, then finally kind of landed on butter. is my most recent venture. I've been working on this for quite a while now. Yeah, that's great. I mean, we're going to dive into Butter a bit. Really love that you kind of went over your journey because there's a lot of lessons in there.

9:37I think sometimes, you know, if you're an engineer, like I remember when I was an engineer before I founded Linear B with Ori, I kind of just thought, okay, if I'm going to do a startup or be an entrepreneur, it has to be like you raise a$100 million round. Because it's like the ones that you read about. But really, there's amazing lessons on, I don't know, side projects, turning into something, starts and failures. So really encourage everyone to try something. You'll learn and go from there. And those lessons usually lead you to like a big like hitting on something. One thing I wanted to ask you before we move into Butter is, you know, having that engineering background, like the engineering degree.

10:31Was that like a pro or a con when you started these endeavors that you just went over? In my case, it was certainly a pro. I mean, it was kind of a prerequisite, honestly. Like I wouldn't have been able to, you know, I don't have a bunch of money or something like that. and I was just working like a normal job. So if I couldn't have built it myself, then it would have been really tough. You have to have a lot of conviction to like start pulling money out of your own piggy bank to pay someone else to like build something for you. So unless you can go straight off the bat and convince investors to, you know, give you some money.

11:02And you got to have money. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So in my case, you know, being able to kind of dabble and to sort of build and be creative and kind of experiment, you know, having that background as an engineer certainly helped. But it doesn't mean you have to be an engineer, obviously, to be a founder, for sure. And in some cases, in an interesting way, like in that Shopify example, where I was just so interested in building, building, building, building, building and coding, coding, coding. I think being an engineer, and it was two of us, I think having two engineers paired up was actually a detriment because we just wanted to just code all day.

11:36And we didn't want to talk to customers. We didn't want to have to figure out how to sell this thing. We didn't want to have to figure out how to market it. It was much easier to just code. Let's just write code and have fun. Yeah, totally. So it can, yeah. Okay. So it's like, you know, overall, it's really a pro, but you know, if engineers listening, just like keep in mind, stay close to the customer early on. Don't go like six months without talking to a user. Yeah. So I have like a, I have a note here about ButterCMS. You described it as scratching your own itch. Like what, what did you mean by that?

12:11And how did ButterCMS really get started? You've always hear this, or it's a common thing where like, oh, you know, why'd you build this company or whatever? And like, oh, I was just kind of scratching my own itch. And prior to Butter, I had never done that. I was never like scratching my own itch per se. And so - Yeah, you were creating dating apps when you were married. I was creating stuff that I thought people wanted, right? Yeah, which is super hard to do. Yeah. So in the case of Butter, again, just kind of building on my journey of like, it's really hard to get consumers to pay money. I never try to be a B2B company.

12:43and then my own personal experience is where I was leading engineering at a couple venture-backed startups. And basically, we were building an energy marketplace, sort of a marketplace platform, kind of like a Kayak or Expedia, but for energy. And we were doing that using Django and Python. So we weren't using WordPress or CMS or something like that. It was a proprietary platform we were building out. And then the CML came to me one day and said, hey, Jake, we need the ability to write blog posts for this for the site when you have to do some marketing i was like okay cool how do we do that uh well i've heard of this wordpress thing so let's just go ahead and try and use like wordpress and sort of get it to mesh and and integrate with our custom django site and that was uh an insightfully kind of painful experience because we didn't want to just put wordpress on a subdomain this is a little bit of a technical detail detail here but you know for seo reasons it's it's better to have your blog on a subdirectory so like your site.com slash blog versus a subdomain where you just do blog.yoursite.com.

13:44Technically speaking, it's a lot easier to do the latter. We just put it on a subdomain. But again, for SEO reasons, we wanted it to be tightly integrated. So if you try and achieve that, there's a lot... Again, I don't want to get too far out of the technical weed, but you have a Django site and you have the WordPress site. You're trying to get both of them to serve different sets of URLs and routing and all this sort of stuff. It was just a really big, painful headache. So yeah, basically trying to get WordPress to work with a modern technology stack was really, really hard. Fast forward, that company got acquired by a larger company.

14:14And then I ran into the exact same scenario where it was literally like a deja vu scenario. So I went through that twice. Maybe it was fate. Yeah, it was the same thing for sure. You know, it was like, wow, this is crazy. And the second time around, though, I said, hey, no, no, let's not go the WordPress route because of all the lessons that I learned. Let's try and use, you know, some other CMS. But again, basically, this is where Butter came from. It's like there weren't really any good options out there that basically the only options that were out there were like free open source kind of Django CMSs.

14:48you know and there were maybe a handful or less that from a developer experience were really easy to kind of work with but the marketer experience was lacking and so you know we used one of these free open source cms's i handed over to the marketers and the marketers hated it they're like i can't do anything i can't upload images i can't reside like we can't schedule things to go live blah blah so so i won that battle but i lost the war basically and so i took a step back from this and i'm like okay how should a cms work you know again this is kind of scratching the own the niche piece here. It's just like, you know, WordPress is great.

15:20It's been, it was built 20 years ago. So how should a modern content management system work? You know, and that's where really kind of the, the origin of Butter came from. And so I founded Butter with like three kind of core pillars of like things I wanted as a CMS. Again, speaking as an engineer. So the pain was really kind of on the developer side. It wasn't so much on the marketer side because the WordPress UI is like fine enough to like write blog posts and whatever. But on the engineering side, what I wanted was I wanted the CMS that could work with any technology stack that I was using, whether it's Django or Ruby and Rails or React, etc.

15:54I wanted a CMS that I didn't have to host and run myself. So that's why we're SaaS-based. Because with WordPress or a traditional CMS, it becomes like this entire stack of software that you need to run. It comes with its own templates, its own front-end, CFS, HTML. It's got its own business logic. It's got its own database, etc. So it's just really heavy. It's this massive stack that you have to run in conjunction with like your core business, which is really your like your main focus. So no one really wants to do that. Like you want to see that, but you don't really want to have like two parallel systems running and have to maintain a backup.

16:30So that's why we went to CMS or that's why we went to SAS approach. And yeah, so these are some of the kind of like the core the core billers that I founded Butter on. Yeah, that's awesome. What I really like about it, again, coming from the engineering standpoint, is you experienced a problem as an engineer, like high pain, high difficulty. And then you said, all right, let me, I had this twice in a row at least. Let me go solve it for other engineers. That's usually the formula that I see that works really well coming from a technical background and then moving into a product solution. and now you're the head of your own company.

17:10So that's amazing. Is there any, like, we did touch on it a bit, but is there any piece of advice or like something that you learned through that motion that you wanna share with the audience? I guess with Butter, kind of going back to my journey as an entrepreneur, one of the lessons learned is like, you need to talk to customers as soon as possible. And so with Butter, that's where I started actually. I really tried really, really hard to like not write a letter code until I had spoken to, to several people, you know, bought them coffee. I said, how, you know, is this a pain for you? Like, how do you kind of, you're running a real site?

17:47Like, how do you do blogging? You know, is this even a pain for you? So I try to talk to a lot of people and sort of validate in an honest, you know, to myself as a way I could, like, is this really actually a pain? Is it worth like spending time on? It is so, so hard to kind of do that because it's so fun and tempting just like to build some shit. But the thing is like, having been on this journey and I feel so fortunate, if you find something that works and you want to like actually make a go of it, you're going to be committing, I don't know, especially if you're bootstrapping five to 10 years of your life to it.

18:18You know what I mean? You want to be just like, you really want to kind of vet this thing out as early as possible. And so, yeah, so that would be my one kind of piece of advice as far as like approaching, if you want to turn it into like a real, you know, like a real endeavor, like a real business and such, try and have some customers lined up out of the gate and build for them as early as possible. That's great advice. I mean, it lines up with everything that I've learned as well. So, you know, perfect advice there. And now we know like Butter CMS is successful, but what was it like? Take me to the beginning-ish stage when you're kind of like transforming from like engineer, I have this cool idea, I'm like coding stuff, to CEO, founder.

19:02What was that like for you? it's a good question because in my case there was because i bootstrapped butter there was not a really a clear delineation point of like oh today you know yesterday i was an engineer but today i'm the ceo or like i'm the founder you know that never happened um congratulations you're now the ceo yeah exactly so um if you go the bootstrapping approach you know i think you'll find you know that to be the case if you i suppose if you raise money though there's maybe that's a clear event that can delineate. But even to raise money, I mean, typically you have to have some customers or some revenue to prove it out.

19:41But yeah, in my case, again, when I bootstrapped, there really were many transitions from engineer to CEO. The first one is obviously getting a customer. It's night and day. When you go from tinkering on a side project or whatever, to having someone actually pay you money, it changes the game. Monumental moment. I mean, that's like a moment in history. Yeah, it is. How did you get your first customer? Scrapping and clawing. Just scrapping and clawing through my personal network, talking to as many people as I could. And it just got lucky. I knew someone who knew someone who maybe knew someone who had a pretty kind of simple site.

20:23They weren't like a large enterprise. They were a small startup, and they needed to add a blog to a Rails site, and this sounded perfect for them. And that's what I was marketing butter as at the time. And so I engaged with them and there was all sorts of bugs. They were like trying to get it to work and there were all sorts of bugs. I remember hopping on a call and like just, just doing anything and everything I could to like get this guy to be happy. And then, and then I was like, you know, would you be okay paying like 19 bucks a month for this? You know? And they were like, yeah, you know, of course.

20:53But for me, I was like super nervous to ask that. It was, I didn't know if I was like maybe 19, I should be like nine a month or something. Like, I don't know. Like what's the right number here? And so, yeah, so anyway, I got them to sign up for 19 bucks a month. And it was huge. With that first customer, kind of what I learned is really the price doesn't matter, you know, or even the first 10 or whatever. It's more like going from a free mode. I'm getting something that free to I'll pay almost anything. Yeah, I mean, you probably want to do it like over a dollar or whatever. But like, you know, it doesn't really matter if it's like 19 or 24.

21:35Yeah. Or, you know, you'll figure all of that out later. But the huge thing is like someone said, yeah, like I'll put up some money for it. Right. Put in my credit card or send me an invoice or whatever that is. I remember when that happened at Linear B, it's like a moment that you say, okay, we're starting to see a little bit of fit here. Yeah. It's important too, though, you get like, you know, real customers. And so real customer means not your best friends, you know, not your uncle or something like that. I mean, that's cool. That's good. I'm not trying to like put that down. But, you know, I mean, if you're being truly honest, like, can you go get people who you have no idea who you are, have like no allegiance to you to like pay you some money?

22:13Can you get that first one? And then can you go get the next five? You know, and then can you go get the next 10? Yeah. If you do that, then that's amazing. And you're, yeah, you're on to something. Yeah. That's a really good point. I would totally also say there's a difference, but from like, uh, friendlies, super friendlies to like organic, I have like zero relationship with this person or company. Yeah. Um, that's also like a amazing moment. Yeah. It's really validating. What's the structure of, uh, by their CMF, like employees and like, what can you tell us a little bit of where you are now?

22:50I mean, basically, yeah. As a bootstrap journey, it looks very different than a venture-backed journey. With bootstrapping, it was just being super scrappy. So day one, it was me building everything, doing the outbound sales, answering the support tickets, all the stuff. And then over time, you start getting some revenue. And in my case, that went all back to freelancers, consultants in the most frugal, scrappy way that I could to try and help kind of build things out. And yeah, I don't know. Then kind of fast forward, you know, now we're really in kind of company building mode where we're hiring.

23:30We just hired a director of marketing. We actually just hired a director of sales as well. So these are like really just kind of pivotal, you know, pivotal hires for us. Yeah. Yeah. You know, we have an engineering team. We've got a marketing team, customer success team as well. We hired out last year. So yeah, it's, you know, so now it's just completely different. Like now it's all about team focus, you know, so I don't spend time coding anymore. It's just really just trying to get the best talent and build an amazing team. Yeah. So, I mean, that's really like my next question for you that now that transition from I'm hands on with the product, I'm developing.

24:06Now you're saying it's more into like a team mode. And how does that feel for you from an engineering standpoint, like not doing that anymore? you mean like not doing like coding or anymore anything yeah yeah you know it's definitely as a creative engineer you know i'd be lying if i said i didn't miss that you know it's just like that is that is certainly an enjoyable part of the journey and i definitely enjoyed that that part of it but uh you know like there's that kind of aspect of when you're creative and you're coding and you have an idea for something you get into that like flow and you're just building something and then you kind of at the end of the day you step back you're like this is awesome like Like, look at this thing that I built.

24:45You know what I mean? Yeah. That's super enjoyable. I would say, you know, now at this point, for me personally, now it's just a whole different set of challenges to solve, which are awesome. Like, things that I never thought that I would have to worry about or think about or, you know, figure out solving. And some of the things that, you know, don't happen when you're just kind of working on a side project. So these are new challenges and just the opportunity for me to grow, to continue to grow professionally. So, yeah, if you welcome that, if you're excited by that, then it's an amazing journey.