1M Users in 3 Months, Pivoted, Then Tripled User Count | James Clift, Durable

0:00We want to make owning a business easier than having a job. Go to school, do what you're told, get a degree, get a job, and you can buy the house, white picket fence, American dream. That's not true anymore. About three and a half million people have signed up for Durable to launch their business. More than half are net new. Now all of a sudden you're going from making 20 bucks an hour to 100 bucks an hour or 200 bucks an hour for the exact same work. What's the bear case, the case against being a solo founder? You're responsible for every decision as the solo founder. You have to own product, sales, customer success, hiring, firing, culture.

0:33It's hard mode. What's the case for solo founding? For me, it was actually the solo founding took a lot of that pressure off because now it's just on me. I think everyone in the world should own a business. Business ownership is just such a powerful thing that everyone should experience in their life, truly. You've got a company that has incredible growth and traction right now, and you started solo. So maybe you could share a little bit more about what Durable started as and where it is today. Yeah, so we'll start with the mission. We want to make owning a business easier than having a job. Very personal to me.

1:09I've not been employed by a company I didn't own since I was about 16 years old. So I've kind of never been interested in jobs as a concept. And then Durable, the initial thesis was essentially in business in a box for service companies. So I ran a bunch of service companies in my past. One was a home services business doing windows and gutters. It was kind of that idea of, hey, can you just take all the stuff you need to start a business, put it all in one software package, make it much easier to start and grow. So initial thesis, we're not that far off that initial thesis right now. But AI has kind of made that a thousand times bigger, more possible and more ambitious.

1:53So right now with Durable, essentially you have a business, you go to Durable, you put into the text box and we start building your business for you. So we'll build a website, help you get found on chat GPT and optimize your SEO. There's agents that will do customer responses, outreach, marketing. We're launching some new stuff around financial accounts and payments. So essentially the goal is to have the human do the physical work and the AI do everything else in abstract away, all the business parts of running a business. So a lot of solo founders in our platform too, which is kind of awesome.

2:27Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, you know, if you look at sort of the history of technology and the internet, a lot of this has been how do we shift these offline businesses into doing more both, you know, online when it comes to actually attracting and converting and, you know, servicing and communicating with their customers? And then also, how do we help these businesses actually be successful on sort of the back end of running a business beyond that too? So I'm really curious, kind of, if you look at sort of the overarching trend of, you know, taking smaller businesses and bringing them online, what are some of the businesses and software companies that you kind of admired leading up to this world where Durable is now effectively able to pull a lot of these services, a lot of these products together.

3:14I mean, there are all these different, like for instance, website builders in the past. I'm curious what were some of the ones that you really looked up to in the prior eras? Yeah. So Shopify is the canonical e-commerce platform. I think what I've always admired Toby and what they built, but it's the ability to serve a net new business owner as well as a massive enterprise. I think that's a really rare trait and they've always been about the small business owner about the entrepreneur and i think it's also the the most challenging market because you have a new business owner with just an idea which is a very hard problem like how do you make that person successful and what does that cohort look like if you got 100 new business owners how many of them actually generate like the gmb to be profitable or whatever so i think shopify's done a really amazing job at building that out from the e-commerce perspective and that's been a lot of the i mean the original inspiration was, okay, no one's done this for services specifically.

4:13And the software looks a lot different. And I think the customer profile looks a lot different. With e-commerce, you have this long tail of very successful businesses doing billions in GMV. With services, you have higher probability of success, but lower probability of having like, call it billions in revenue for that business. But the average customer can get to 100 ,000, 200 ,000, a couple million dollars in revenue with relatively simple businesses so you're looking at a bit of a different economic profile but also i just love services generally and it's kind of been like i had a business like that in the past it was almost like my favorite business that i've ran before and then i think too with services the like the economics of owning a service business are so much better than working in a service business so i see a lot of people that have like an amazing skill set they're doing really hard i mean physical labor creative work and craft um and they're basically a 20 margin on the the late their own labor right so if you take that person with the same skill assume the business stuff is solved then oh now all of a sudden you're going from making 20 bucks an hour to 100 bucks an hour or 200 bucks an hour for the exact same work so i think the the business side of it for me is what is actually like theoretically the easy part to solve and it's the do you actually have the skill and the craft and the ability or just the energy to go do the work that people want to pay for i think that's what i love about services and also it's a larger part of the economy than e-commerce like most businesses are service businesses at the end of the day and most actually most companies america are service businesses with no employees so it's kind of the biggest tam but super fragmented and really challenging but yeah I think Shopify is really strong.

5:59Um, it's been a few more like recent ones that have kind of bundled up services and you have like website builders have added on a lot of these other capabilities, but yeah, definitely Shopify is the canonical example for me. So there's something really cool about how, when you look at AI and AI adoption, I mean, a lot of the talk that we have is about it going towards code generation, right. Or, um, or, or doing sort of like, you know, fairly basic agentic tasks for businesses. But then you look at sort of what technology has done for solo founders, like in the tech world, it's made it so that a solo founder who knows something about product and about, you know, the technical things required to actually build applications, they can go and they can actually build products, get them out there with a much smaller footprint in terms of team.

6:48It could just be one person. Something that it seems like you're doing with durable, which is really a big unlock, because it's saying, hey, you no longer need the big footprint that you need to have, you literally can be this solo operator of a business. And it essentially will cause more people to start companies, right? Yeah. Similar to how AI will cause more people to start startups. I'm curious sort of how you think about these service businesses and what you've observed when it comes to people who are joining durable and sort of starting to use it what are what are you seeing and observing about them that's sort of a new wave of of the way these businesses are started and built it was a crazy belief i think everyone in the world should own a business and is going to and i think it's kind of the natural evolution of ai is you have a human which i still think is very valuable in this equation a human has like the creative ideas the energy and the physical ability to i mean maybe robots at some point will fully solve it end to end but um and i look at the like there's never been a shortage of human ability or and or energy to go out and like produce economic value right so that's why you look at ride sharing like people will drive for uber because they'll put the work and do that or doordash or whatever the whole gig economy but the challenge of the gig economy is all of the benefits of that go to the company owner i mean uber yeah to uber to doordash right so if you take that same idea of like hey could you have your own private driving company that has demand solved and your business is solved and what does your hourly rate look like there so it's just kind of can you match supply and demand from a human perspective so short answer is yeah i think we'll just see way more of the the buried entries getting a lot lower um i think the challenge with code generation for the average person is there's challenging to find that they're there sometimes right okay you can make, not everyone's going to own an app business.

8:44There's limited demand for that. And the code is not, it's really fun, right? It makes you feel very creative and it's very powerful. I mean, the tech is incredible too, but I think what we look at is, Hey, can you actually just solve the business? So what does a business need? It needs marketing. It needs customers. It needs customer success. And if we can solve that, then we have lots more successful businesses with lower risk. Because ultimately, I think what you've got is you've got a product, which is something that we just understand people need, right? Which are these different services that people provide versus startups where it's often much murkier as to whether or not somebody really needs the product.

9:29And in fact, it's still to be determined sometimes multiple rounds into the company if they actually truly have product market fit. So it's a completely different type of business where there's less ambiguity around people's needs, but there is ambiguity around like how does a person actually go and manage all of these things. You can be really good at providing the service, but you might not necessarily be the one who's best at actually acquiring new customers. It's just a different sort of skill set. So I'm curious when people come to Durable, where are they at in their journey building companies, building these smaller businesses?

10:05where are some of them really truly net new are some of them they're they're trying to transition and kind of level up because they realize that they have something but they really need to like you know continue to invest and kind of growing their customer base can you give a little bit of an overview of kind of how people actually approach the the company and working with you yes we've got a pretty large scale so about three and a half million people have signed up for durable to launch their business um more than half are net new so it's so half of them are or more than half of them are actually launching their business as a brand new business yeah brand new or in the first few months so they might have some revenue they have an idea of what they want to do so it's not idea stage you're not brainstorming what business you want to launch but like hey i want to start a new pet grooming business or porch decorating is one that we love right now it's a huge business man you go and like decorate people's porches for halloween and you make like hundreds of grand a year it's really interesting um so i think we see a lot of the long tail of business ownership too.

11:02So it's not like, there's obviously like your big categories around home services or health and wellness and fitness. But a lot of businesses that I wouldn't have dreamed existed that are really interesting. So there's niches everywhere. And then, yeah, so they're net new. They might have a few customers, but they haven't got online yet. So that's the first thing they come for is, Hey, I want to create an online presence. I want to get my first like marketing going, which is SEO, GEO, getting found on chat, GPT and Google, and then creating advertising and following up with my customers. So a lot of them are, yeah, the main goal is just getting online, getting customers.

11:40And then for an existing business, it's a lot of it is done through word of mouth right now. So they're just getting customers through referrals and they want to actually operationalize that business. So that's a bit of a different problem set, but also it's all about customer acquisition, follow-ups, payments, invoicing, all that kind of thing. And in terms of what you're doing with these sort of net new people who are starting their businesses, they might have a little bit of revenue, but they definitely have a sense of what is they're going to be working on. I'm really curious, sort of, you were in that position yourself because you started, I believe, a window cleaning business.

12:15Can you share a little bit more about kind of how you ended up doing that, what that was like what you learned from it and then ultimately you didn't go directly from that to uh to building durable there were a bunch of other things in between yeah um so I'd be curious to just hear about sort of what that experience was like when you were running your own service business yeah so for me it was second year university um I didn't want to get a job and I wanted to make some money and there are these franchises. I don't know how big it is in the U S but in Canada, it's like college pro painting. So you pay a franchise owner 20 % of your sales to go paint houses and they kind of give you a playbook.

13:01For me, it was, Hey, what's a service that has demand low barrier to entry to start. So and I had done some labor before, like I was doing like tree chopping at one point. It's probably one of my last jobs like residential tree trimming. So okay, I can, I can do the physical work. so I think it cost maybe 10 grand to start I bought like an old GMC Jimmy that barely ran for two thousand dollars bought the ladders bought the equipment and then you I think I found a franchise guide on the internet and use that so it's like hey how do you actually go sell but the biggest thing is how do you get customers right and then I also hired two of my buddies to do the labor.

13:42So a lot of that was understanding marketing. I think a huge part of it. And it was like, Hey, you have your uniform, you look presentable, you go knock on doors. I did door to door sales for a lot of this stuff, which I think is just a good lesson for any entrepreneurs go knock on doors for eight hours and you're going to learn something trial by fire in terms of sales. And so it's just a, it's kind of the perfect business to learn business to me, right? Like it's a pretty simple business but you still have employees you have insurance you have labor you have sales you have customer success um that business did i think it was 40 000 in revenue in three months which was a lot of cash for a 21 year old paid for my next year university so and then gutters too you cleaned out gutters which is just like you get the ladder and you put your hand in a gutter which is fine um so i think with our customers it's typically someone that has an experience doing the thing so they have a skill set but a lot of the business stuff is really scary so like i don't know how to make a website i don't know what seo is i don't know how to send an invoice so it is a lot of just net new learning and previously they would have hired a consultant to do a lot of this work so you hire like there's no shortage of smb agencies you can hire very expensive and mediocre and just kind of the arbitrage there's they they charge a lot for not delivering much right and i think the the difference with ai and like the set of tools or primitives that we built is my goal is for somebody to actually be able to enter into the text box on durables like hey what should i do today right because we have context right we know what stage your business is at how much traffic you got leads like everything about your business lives in durable from day one or day one when you started with us at least so i think the ultimate goal with ai is to be able to say hey what should i work on and we'll know like hey you have no leads go get some leads or you have too many leads follow up with those leads this invoice wasn't paid so it is having this ai business partner that really understands your business, but also understands the market and, hey, you're operating in this neighborhood.

16:09This could be a better opportunity. So I think this, we're barely scratching the surface of like how good AI is for a local business and how much it can actually just deliver on like leads and growing your business. But then you actually have to solve the functional stuff. So you can't just be like, hey, here's some text advice. It's like, no, go get your website online like get more reviews on google is usually the main thing like hey go get four customers that you know do some work get a google review get a referral like it's a lot of these playbooks that are institutionalized for a successful business that the business owner that the net new business owner just doesn't know yet so i think ai can just solve all of that from an intelligence perspective and let them focus on the real work but yeah i think the the big lesson from services for me is actually just like margin on labor so i own the business i had two of my buddies working i was charging them out at 30 bucks an hour and paying them like 15 and they were happy i'm like why are you guys happy like yeah like i'm making margin like yeah whatever we don't have to do much i'm like okay interesting but i think that's just like the like okay if i'm doing the work i make the 30 dollars an hour i'm charging them out at and i make the 12 dollars an hour and margin on both these people.

17:24So you make like 50 bucks an hour and just, it seems silly to not be the business owner to me. It's just so obvious, right? So I think whenever I see someone that's doing really great work, I'm like, hey, you should start a business because you can just do better on your own and like be more in control of your schedule, your time and all those things. It's interesting because in that world, back when you were doing this, when you were, I think you said 21 and you were doing this with your buddies, it was like the amount of actual work needed was not nothing to actually to actually do this so it's like you like that you kind of had a passion for it it sounds like or at least an interest in you know being able to start something that had a little bit more scale so you had sort of the margin on the labor and all of that uh but at the same time it sounds like your buddies were just not interested in doing anything other than showing up yeah and and like perhaps there's this aspect of the goal i think you said it with your tagline the goal now is to make it so effectively that's kind of what it is yeah like you it should be as easy as possible as low friction to do anything other than just the showing up yeah and that way that way sure like it made sense for your buddies back then to say well we're actually happy to take half of it because you know we realize there's all this other work needing to be done but nowadays it's like well they could actually have a lot of that done for them and they maybe could be the business owners at this point yeah 100 and i look at like durable's not employing everybody but if you think about it that way it's like hey you have this ai that does all the business work for you and it sends you a text message once a day like hey here's your schedule for tomorrow here's how much money you're going to make or even on sunday be like hey i want to work 20 hours this week um and make this much money like can it go figure that out so these these questions that seem pretty challenging now are actually not that challenging right if you're in the right market and there's like there's obviously demand constraints on some things but ultimately it's like yeah can you just show up and do the work and get paid like that sounds great right and i think for me as the like i love entrepreneurship i really don't like a lot of the business ownership stuff like it's quite annoying right like i don't like dealing with taxes and insurance and like work safe like compensation stuff like it's just death by a million cuts.

19:38Right. And I think for me, like, can you just do as the business or what you're uniquely good at and not have to spend any mental energy or time on the stuff that one isn't that like, it's obviously important, but it's not valuable. Right. So business is thousands of tasks that are so important, but actually not valuable. Right. Like filing your taxes is incredibly important. You just got to do it though, right? It's not adding a multiple to your business, not adding revenue or customers. So I think a lot of it is, can we get the technology to a point where one is just solved and you don't have to think about it.

20:18And then two, can you have agents working proactively just to figure out how to grow your business, right? To whatever scale you want to. So I think for me, it's actually this like idea of human plus compute and whatever the human goal is the compute can help them get there so it's this sliding scale of like oh put all the power behind this and i'll pay a couple thousand bucks a month but my business is going to scale or like hey i'm pretty comfortable just i don't know make me i don't know a couple thousand bucks and like just find me some customers this this this month and and that's like all all we want to do and all the time we want to spend there but i think it's just a lot more fluid than we give it credit for like business ownership primarily oh you either own a business or you don't like ah there's something in between here that's just like you know everyone's got a business and it's how much energy you're putting into that is how successful it is or how much compute you're putting into it but it's not this like totally all-in binary thing all the time um i think that's also the utopian worldview of ai is like hey work as much as you want and have a filling life around that which is exciting as well you know i feel like when we first were speaking about durable you had maybe just closed the series a at that time so you already were kind of off to the races this was about maybe two years ago uh so or i think you said the the way you were able to sort of time stamp it was around uh gbd 3.5 um you know the world is was obviously very different when you started durable before raising you know the multiple rounds of funding and certainly it's different than it is today what was it that caused you to start it then and what what were you thinking about at that time and how is how is sort of the new unlocks change things I mean proactive agents were definitely not something you could be thinking about um back when you started durable so I'm curious what was the initial sort of vision that you had and kind of how have things evolved since so we were pre AI.

22:16It was late 2021. I'd sold my previous company in 2020. That was February 2020. So right before COVID, I'd planned this around the world trip with my wife, like, Hey, I'm not going to work for, I mean, as long as I can not work for, and we're going to go travel the world. And it's like, nope, shut down. So I was just sitting on my, sitting on my ass during COVID. And it's like, I guess I'll start another business and actually had a side project that was in the remote work tooling software space i was working on with a friend um so that got a lot of organic traction and just it wasn't really the business i wanted to build i was like i don't want to be in like productivity tooling for the next 10 20 30 years um and then long story short i applied for something she saw it on x um twitter at the time for something called the founder fellowship so that was south park commons they're a fund um it was a deal that looked too good to be true it was like hey we'll give you 400k before you have an idea like okay that sounds great um so i never raised venture before with the last company either um so i got into that program and then their whole thesis is hey spend time in that negative one to zero stage figure out what you actually want to build and what you want to do and durable it was in one of those phases where i'm like hey we shut down the other actually sold the other business um we decided to shut down then we ended up selling it, but it was more, a lot of the stuff happened pretty quick.

23:40I'm like, what do you actually want to do? I want to ever know in a business, right? Like that's kind of the only thing, like I believe deep down to my core is that business ownership is just such a powerful thing that everyone should experience in their life, truly. And you ask any friend, I'm like, I was like, yeah, start that business. Sounds good. Like, oh, like my wife's a nurse. I'm like, yeah, you could start your own, like she's in eating disorders, like start your own eating disorders consulting thing. And like, it's great. So I think it's just really core to what I believe. And there's a ton of value in it.

24:09So it's probably one night I wrote the pitch deck. And like, I think when you know what you're going to do, it happens pretty quick. So it was probably five hours pitch decks there. And it's really not far off what we're doing now, which is business ownership sucks. It's a user experience problem. make it way easier focus on services there's no Shopify for services that exist right now I think the biggest difference is the the initial scope was more kind of closer to a franchise model so like much higher ticket prices so instead of paying 100 grand for a franchise which gets you xyz leads website marketing systems you pay call it 10 grand so 10x like the value of franchise for 10x less i think what ai and so we were operating that business for about a year um seeing okay traction and then i started seeing what was happening with gpt it was 2.5 at the time like okay this is the future we have to build something with this so we did an internal hack week and built the first version of our or the next version of our website builders we had a website builder that was non-ai within the platform um we built an ai website builder in about a week launched that and that just took off went viral um that was 2022 so about a month before chat gpt so that product just grew from zero to probably a million users in three months significant revenue and i was like okay this is like pretty interesting um and we actually focused on that website product for a year and a half.

25:49And it was kind of an interesting distraction, right? Like great business, but not what we wanted to build and not really the market that we wanted. Part of that market, but not the entire thing. So now that we're four years later, we're actually right back into the original thesis, right? Which is cool, which is, hey, not the franchise thesis, but the, hey, business in a box for service business owners that's like AI powered. How should founders think about that? So for instance, you said that you kind of had this this diversion slightly where you had this thing that you put out there that got a lot of traction really quickly, a lot of pull.

26:27Some people could potentially have that pull their entire sort of long-term business in a different direction. It sounds like you kind of continued to orient towards the business in a box, like make it really easy. And you started, you sort of realized the website was a component of that but I'm curious sort of you know when you start to see traction somewhere and maybe in an unexpected way or much stronger pull than you thought like what's the lesson that you've taken away from that that you would maybe give to other people if they experience something similar yeah we have a really I've thought about this a lot so we went all in and not all in on that pull right when you see something that is taking off you especially when you're starting from nothing yeah you go all in right so we fully committed to that product we fully spent all our engineering effort on it um we were in that world for yeah about a year and a half just fully building the best ai website builder we possibly could so i think what change one at some point you start to look at the macro right is this is there i mean i don't really believe in like moats moats but like is this actually a market that we can win right so that's there is how it's probably the most competitive space in the internet website building so there's hundreds of incumbents there's now vibe coding and chat gpt and like your horizontal players in that space and then just the economics of like how much value are you building right what's the max you can charge for a website that delivers value and um can does the churn profile make sense right so at some point you make the call of and there's other paths we could have gone right so i think running one retro is like yeah we could have just leaned into code generation been the next like vibe coding platform we were in a good position to do that um maybe we should have done that right i don't know the right answer to that one i think there was um there's also a non-obvious market at that point too, right?

28:32So like expanding from websites to code gen, or it was, hey, we've got these cohorts within our data, they're getting a ton of value from the website product. And there's obvious features to build on top of that. And that was the customers that we've been focused on since day one, which is, hey, independent service businesses, they can't hire people to do this. They want to do it all themselves. So we just saw enough in the data that made sense. But yeah, there's no perfect answer there. I think when you see traction you you run it out as much as you possibly can and push as hard as you can until you hit that next wall then you figure out like okay is this the wall we need to break through is there like another adjacent wall and like what's the right hill to climb um because if we solve the and we still have the best website product for small businesses um it's just the just what is the the terminal value of that business right and i think also looking at what foundation models you're gonna be able to do um everyone's gonna go everyone's gonna be able to chat gpt and make a really good looking website they can do it now but you need a slightly complex prompt so it's also the integration of all the things together sort of how it how it really comes into play yeah yeah and i mean even website you can make it look good but like hosting and performance and seo and geo like there's still a lot that's there but you're also just competing with the text box now, the general text box.

29:53So I think it was more of the macro decision and competition change too, right? So our like vertical line started getting less vertical then at some point it's like, okay, do you try and force that thing to go parabolic again? Or do you actually just focus on building the right business and making the, not a tough call either. I think it was more just, hey, add more value to a more specific user and more specific customer. And it's probably good, right? Sometimes people talk about narrowing the focus and that means like narrowing the product. Sometimes they mean narrowing the focus in terms of narrowing it on the customer.

30:31It seems like in many ways, what you've done is you've narrowed in on the customer versus narrowing on the product. You have a fairly expansive product. I'm curious when it comes to building these expansive products, sort of what you've learned about sort of when to expand, and when to listen to feedback about things that people want. Are there any interesting learnings from that? Because you have so much surface area that you couldn't do recover at any point. AI has changed that a lot, right? So being a single product usually is not the best decision right now because you can vibe code a new UI very quickly.

31:15That actually is pretty close to production ready in a lot of cases, right? So I think the way we look at it, one, we've just designed the team in a way that can move very quickly on new products and more surface area. So we have, I mean, small engineering team still, I think we're six engineers still, but we've, six engineers are like, I don't know, 60 agents. So it's the, we built the technical capability where a new feature is not daunting. so the risk is actually more are you building the right thing for the customers that will they actually use it and then making that decision now is part of it's certainly listening to customer feedback but one thing i try and avoid about customer feedback is the minutiae of customer feedback on specific ui so website's a great example everyone's like oh i want to be able to change this button or add more components or customize this and it's all about like editing customization whereas no they want a better website that looks what they want it to look like it looks better right and it performs better so I think with AI you need to be able to really understand what they're trying to solve and ideally skip the middle step of solving it through UI.

32:35It's like, hey, most AI products are input-output, right? So you need data and contacts, and you need a website that looks amazing and performs really well. For booking and scheduling, you can get into this huge rabbit hole of time zones and multi-factor and calendars. But really, what do people want? They want jobs booked, right? So I think you can really understand the business problems and try and abstract those in a way that you can solve them in the most efficient way possible from a product perspective because one building ui has very little value now because it's easy to build but also from my perspective no one wants to click on a bunch of stuff anymore right like ultimately if no one logs into durable and they get a text once a day that's a better experience right or they get an email or um i don't get a phone call whatever that is so i think having the the primitives solve like the output problem so you still have stuff that lives as artifacts and you can log in if you want but ultimately it's really i think ai generally is input output right what does the customer want can you solve it and where we're going with a lot of these agents is just describe the thing you want solved and it will be solved and it could be as simple as like i want more customers okay go solve it or hey i want to follow up with every lead with a specific message and once they pay an invoice ask them for a review and here's the review tax so i think you have to build stuff that's really flexible and lets the customers describe what they want and the beauty of having the user base that we do is we can really narrow in on kind of the language that people are using the problems they're experiencing and then we do try and solve that in in a bit more of a unique way because yeah traditional ui i think is just like the marginal value of that is so low now for for those two reasons it's easy to build and people don't want to use it people don't want to use it i mean there's a there's a solo founder i work with and they work with doctors and um they were trying to build this interface for the doctors to go in and use their product and the doctors said could you just could you just do it for me yeah and and there's another there's another company i know that they their realization was wow you know what we have really talented people who use our product they're really smart people they run their own businesses but at the same time they shouldn't be the ones using this product we should have agents using this product because the agents have a lot more time on their hands to even use the product so it feels like there's so much of an aspect of can you actually remove some of these things that were maybe assumptions that they needed to be in place and in this case it's like the user interfaces yeah yeah even the way we use tooling too right we've got all these amazingly beautiful complex dashboards set up i just go into the chat like hey what happened yesterday yeah right and it's just i think a way more natural way of working with tools and software is like people like natural language right it's like it's how we speak how we communicate it's um and the other advantage is that you have trillions of dollars invested in this being the UI, right?

35:46ChatGPT, Claude, all these user experience. It is the way that UI is going, which I think opens up harder problems to solve too, right? So if you're thinking about input output, then those outputs can get a lot more complex. And I think the challenge and the advantage that we have is like, we do have millions of people that are starting brand new businesses, like making them successful is a really hard problem, right? But if we solve that, then that's trillions of dollars in gmv and success and like economic value created right so i think you can choose harder problems now and you should choose harder problems now because you have to assume that the models will keep getting better and better and will will make your product obsolete it probably already is obsolete but like at least like in the next six months it will be again right so I think it's a really interesting time to build it's definitely the the most challenging time to build in a way too because of all these macro factors that are happening too now previously prior to to durable you started another company you got it to millions in profits and you had a really small team and this is all before AI sort of gave people the level of kind of leverage that they had.

37:02I'd be really curious to hear kind of what it was like starting that company. If you could give sort of the audience a little bit of background on what that actually was and sort of your reflections on how you were able to build such an effective organization with such a small headcount and then juxtapose that to what it was like solo founding Durable and what that actually looked like. It was a very different scenario, different time too. yeah so visual cv was post-university i had not got a job after graduating i was in an accounting program and remember just distinctly going to one of those recruiting events where you have a bunch of like 25 year olds in suits that are like hey come work for deloitte i'm like i don't know that sounds that fun i might try something new um so we had actually um won some money with like business plan competitions which i thought was a ton of money it was thirty thousand dollars and we're Like, let's go start a hardware company with that.

37:56So there's this wilderness period of two and a half years where we're just trying stuff. So I had a web design agency. We're writing financial advice on seeking alpha for money. I'm like, I've never made investment before. I'm like, hey, buy Apple stock. We're just hustling, right, to like not get jobs. And we ended up building a recruitment software that helped people host online job fairs. so again i keep going back to the job world even though i never had a job for some reason so i got a little bit of traction with that we hosted some big events probably made hundreds of thousands of dollars um at some point i was like hey like i need to probably get a job so i went down to san francisco i was talking to buddy about getting a sales job with his company and we decided to give it one last shot at like the entrepreneurship thing like hey I'm not quite ready to throw in the towel.

38:50And we were in the process of trying to offload the online job fair platform and met some, some people that had like had this asset, like visual CV, um, which was a 2000, probably 2007 legacy product with a little bit of traction. So we ended up acquiring it for a hundred thousand dollars. Um, and I was like, Hey, nothing else to do. Let's just rebuild this thing. See what happens. I'll give it three months. And we rebuilt it. We relaunched it. Um, three months in turned on a paywall six months in it was doing like 20, 30 grand in revenue. And then within a year and a half is doing a couple of million bucks in revenue.

39:32I'm like, Oh, that was not that hard. Um, and running the retro on that business, it was like, it was an online resume builder and portfolio builder, um, competitive market, but we just executed really well on on seo and online marketing and built a really good product and it was also just like a bit of an interesting time where resumes were changing and the job search was moving a bit more online so we just had this there's there's a period where there was we're the we're top three so probably the third biggest one on the internet but there's a dozen of these companies doing really really well um so just a good time for that market um but yeah simple product small team um i think that was a very narrow scope so we we could have a small product team and not a ton of surface area um i think the and then yeah very profitable from like year one so that was a blessing i mean i wouldn't call it a curse but it was it kind of changes the dynamic of what kind of business you're going to build like so the second you take distributions you never stop taking distributions right um so we we definitely ran that with a specific margin with the goal of, okay, we're going to have a couple hundred grand in cash flow monthly and make sure that's like baked into the financial model.

40:48So it's definitely a different approach. It's not like a, certainly not a, like a YC approach or a startup approach or a VC backed approach. But yeah, we built a really good business. I think for me, it solved the stuff I was trying to solve. So it was a kick and I work remotely. I lived in Argentina for a while. I mean, it did very well financially, which is great. The only missing part was, wasn't really a space that I was that passionate about or interested in. So I never had a job. I'm like building a resume platform that millions of people are using. I'm like, yeah, it's kind of interesting.

41:21But I think the key is just, you don't know what's going to work. um i think the you need lots of shots on goal and um i wouldn't it's hard to be like yeah you should just do a bunch of stuff either like you have to be systematic about how much time you spend an idea or a concept um but markets are a lot bigger than you think they are a lot of the time too like you you could have asked me and like before we did is resume building gonna make us millions of dollars a year like i don't probably not but apparently it did especially because of how competitive it was yeah it's like a high churn like you you're by nature your customers churn if they get a job so high churn competitive low arpu um but yeah just it worked and we executed well right um and you and you had a co-founder how did you how did you meet how did you decide to work together in that scenario yeah so you're someone i met in my my last year university so we're doing those business plan competition together like engineering physics major technical guy um brilliant um so i think yeah we just kept building a bunch of stuff together um over the years and yeah we we probably launched 15 projects together over that time right so it's very very mercenary i think in search of the thing that was gonna be successful or like at least keep us from getting jobs um so yeah we trying to think when he left visual cv probably three years in um yeah it's it's really interesting though because uh it's a sign of like a really good sort of co-founder match when people can navigate 15 different ideas together you know because that's like the old at that point the only thing that's sort of the the commonality is the people yeah Yeah.

43:13And it's funny too, cause we like, we weren't like close friends either. Like we didn't hang out a lot. We're very different personalities. Um, but I think it was more the, we just really want to make it work. Right. So we had four, like two other people that started with this and they, they went and got jobs like pretty, pretty closely on. So I think we're just like, Hey, we can somehow survive this wilderness period and make this work. um then i think too the i mean clearly having someone who can technically build stuff was extremely valuable and still is um but yeah he definitely brought a different i mean a very valuable and different skill set and i think the other part of it for keeping that team small is like you have a few i'm trying to think of how many engineers we probably had maybe three engineers on that whole thing so it was a very very lean team um so yeah i think if you have the right person the right product you don't need to build a huge team and to be fair like both of us were probably not that good at building teams then anyway so like it wouldn't have gone well if we tried to hire a bunch of people so when you were solo founding durable because that is if i understand the timeline correctly you joined south park commons and you're doing that solo right you didn't have any person that you're working with at that point yeah what um what was the was it sort of just a happenstance thing?

44:34Was it I'm intentionally going solo? Is it I'm actually talking to people about potentially being co-founders? What was your journey? Everybody has like a slightly different journey. The other thing that's worth noting is most of the people I end up talking to who've worked on companies before, they had co-founders in the past. They didn't necessarily have negative co-founder experiences either, but just for whatever reason, it ended up being solo for the second or third company. So I'm curious kind of how it all came to be for durable yeah so i had a co-founder for the project in between visual cv and durable good friend brilliant guy um it was just kind of complicated right so it was kind of the like maybe we're in different positions in terms of runway and risk i think is a lot of it with co-founders so like hey how much how much time can you actually spend on this and do do you understand what you're giving up right so i think that's that's really challenging for a lot of people as you um you start looking at opportunity costs right like oh i could make this much money working for amazon or i could consult for this much and i everyone i talk to that i've ever thought about starting a company with like like that just never goes right you cannot be doing the math on like like the rational choice is never to start a software company or i need to get a job in three months that sort of thing yeah so i think there was more that like i was feeling that pressure because i wanted to provide that for my co-founder there right so it's okay i want to make sure that you're happy and you make money but i don't know if this business can support that right it certainly couldn't at the time yeah um so what ended up there is like he's when i got a job and like it ended very amicably but it was more just i think you need a lot more time than you want to make a company work right it's always three years for some reason right like it doesn't take three years for a thing to take off but to find the thing that's going to take off usually takes way longer than than you expect it to right and you might get some traction somewhere it doesn't work so i think the the timeline there is um really challenging for most people you have to be in a position where you can't just eat that runway for as long as you can right um so there was that and then at another person I was working with same deal it's like hey like really strong technically but it's like I just want to stop doing this math all the time it's like hey like I'll just figure it out and we can pay people salaries we will and that will make sense but I just wanted some time to really figure out what to do and what I wanted to work on and just I think for me as a person I feel so much responsibility for every I mean everything and everybody so if there's a co-founder like I actually feel like I have to make them happy right or take care of them and that's now another responsibility I have to worry but not just me eating which I'm okay with but like now this person's family is my job right so I think for me it was actually the the solo founding took a lot of that pressure off um because now it's just on me and like we had obviously some runway but I could just think about the business and what I wanted to build and like kind of be more creative and it opened up like just a lot of the and south park helped as well like obviously raising money from day negative one is also helpful there but i think for me it's like hey you have kind of this blank slate of what you personally care about want to build and that could be either good or bad but at least it's mine right and i could make make the mistake myself and um if it's failure it's on me right and i'm the only one impacted by that at that stage which i think just it's really freeing in a way and yeah with other people's involvement it just felt the pressure felt different now you have spent and you continue to spend a decent amount of time in the bay area and the united states but also you're based out of Canada you're based in near Vancouver can you share a little bit about sort of your philosophy around where to build how you thought about what you want to build, who you want to build it with, because I think that there's often a lot of talk about, oh, the only place to build is San Francisco, maybe New York, but really just San Francisco is sort of the end all be all.