181. The One Sales Question That Took Him from $0 to $100K MRR

0:00Imagine this, you're in college, staring at your entire life savings,$2 ,016. and you decide to hand it over to a kid from your dorm because he has 10 million Twitter followers. No business plan, no guarantees, just a chance to learn how to make money online. I'm not sure you'll believe me, but I gave my entire life savings to a random kid in my dorm. It turned into a 750 ,000 follower business. No plan, just risk and hustle. So I ended up living in a tent for two years and drove 60 ,000 miles in a branded camper van because if you're not obsessed with your business, Why should anyone else be?

0:37We built PodPitch with$3 ,300 and no code. Now we're doing over six figures a month. You don't need to be technical. You just need to hit go. This is Ryan Atkinson and you're listening to the Alfred Podcast where we uncover the secrets of building and running successful businesses. I am so excited for today's episode because most people would call that reckless. But for Parker Olson, it was just the beginning. That gamble turned into a Twitter account with 750 ,000 plus followers, a profitable blog, and the first chapter in a wild entrepreneurial ride. From living in a tent for two years to driving 60 ,000 miles selling snacks, now running PodPitch, a company using AI to help people land on podcasts like this one.

1:14Today, Parker's company is doing over six figures a month, and he built the first version with no code and no technical background. His story is about experimentation and the massive opportunities hiding in unexpected places. Parker, I am so excited to welcome you on here today. Thank you so much for the opportunity to be here. Yeah, Ryan, thanks for having me, man. It's nice to meet you and I'm really, really excited to chat. So I appreciate you letting me come on the show. It's going to be so good. And I want to call back to that intro here and talk about your founder story. You gave your entire life savings to someone in your dorm to learn about like Twitter.

1:47Let's talk about that. Bring us back to that time frame of what your mindset was when that time was. Yeah, yeah, definitely, you know, not an advisable decision. Granted, you know, 2016 bucks, not that much money. But to me, it was all the money to my name at the time. You know, I'd always been interested in entrepreneurial pursuits. And I'll just never forget the day I met this kid, Nick Neve is his name. And he's on his phone and he was the first kid I met at college. And I'm just curious. I'm like, what are you doing on your phone? And he was wearing this just like bougie watch, but clearly a blue collar kid.

2:21And we became friends and he finally showed me he was running these Twitter accounts. And basically he was going on and sharing retweets with other Twitter accounts, putting up content, driving traffic to blogs, and then collecting money primarily from advertising from his own blogs. Wow. So I was like, okay, this is awesome. I'm in. And he was kind of like, yeah, all right. And I'm like, no, like I'm serious. Like I want to do this. I want to learn about this. And you know, he's like, okay, yeah, yeah. And so I was like, you know, F it, like I'll give you all of my savings. You know, I like put all the chips in and just like all the chips are in.

2:58Like, I'm clearly serious about this. Like, I want to learn. I want to do what you're doing. I love the idea of making money from your phone. Like, that sounds lovely to me. Amazing. I want to ask you love the idea of that. But like, what do you do next? Like, what was the Twitter account? Like you started? How did you grow to 150 ,000 followers? You're in college while you're doing this. You like you literally bet the house on this and it works. Talk to us about the Twitter account building to 750 ,000 followers. So the name of the Twitter account, it does not exist anymore. Unfortunately, I think you can find it on Google, but it was called Shit Your Parents Say.

3:28And it took me a while to come up with it. And I knew that, you know, he basically said, OK, if you give me all your money, I'll show you exactly how I make money, what I do. And then I'll help you grow a Twitter account and think about how do you grow a Twitter account. But you're going to need a good like account. And so when I came to him with that idea, we both agreed it was a really solid idea for two reasons. Number one, you know, the TAM, right? Everybody has parents. So it's sort of like highly relatable. the second component of this um which i didn't realize at the time but he told me about was probably the primary audience is going to be these like maybe like high school kids who are gonna think it's funny like it's sort of this like adolescent humor and because of that um we could run blogs that target high school kids and some of the highest paying keywords at the time were keywords revolving around colleges.

4:21So when you went into Google ads and you search like highest paying keywords for Google ads, you know, there were a bunch of like insurance keywords. And then when you get out of the insurance realm, kind of the next big ones were like college based keywords. So we really, really liked that angle. I want to ask as well here. So you grew this to 750 ,000 followers. How long did it take you to like grow that? How did you grow it? And talk to us about introducing the blog as well, because that was another way for you to have profitability while doing this as well. Correct. It was really the only way I was making money.

4:50So how the system works is you are just building an audience on Twitter. You can still do this anywhere today, build an audience, and then you're funneling that audience somewhere where you're monetizing them. And in this instance, the monetization value proposition here was through advertisers. So we would make a blog and it basically was a listicle blog. It was like top 10 party schools in the South, best religious colleges, like, I don't know. And the idea is obviously, yeah, if you build a bigger Twitter account, you can funnel more traffic and you can make more money. Now, how do you build a Twitter account?

5:22You know, great question. And it's not something I would have really probably been able to do on my own off the start. So you asked me how long it took. And to get to the first hundred thousand followers, it took about six months. That was the most painful part of the process. And how I got there was I would put out some content and we would see what content organically was doing well. And then him with his 10 million followers, he would retweet some of my best tweets to basically cross expose. It's still, from what I understand, the number one way a podcast grows is you have the host go on these other shows and you swap hosts and then you're sort of exposing podcasts to different audiences.

6:00So he helped me really get to 100 ,000. Once you're at 100 ,000, it sort of opens up the door to start trading retweets with other accounts that are really between like 100 and 500 ,000. And the entire sort of business, the entire system was put up a new blog post once a week, be tweeting, you know, at least two to three times daily. And then literally as much as you can during the day, trade retweets. So I'm DMing another account and I'm saying like RT question mark. They might respond and say why? And then they'd send whatever posts they primarily want me to retweet. And then another post that's really just an advertisement running traffic to their blog.

6:40Gosh, that's so interesting. We could talk so much more about like the Twitter system in place, but I do want to get to Podpitch where you're now doing six figures a month here. Before we do that, you have an important part to your story, which is Forage. Specifically, talk to us about from living in a tent to driving across the country like a branded brand. That's what I'm more curious about. I do want to hear your story as well. Yeah, yeah. Everybody loves that. You know, the Forage chapter for me was all about just like grit. Like in my mind, I was like, okay, yeah, like you make a startup successful by just being like so perseverant and willing to do anything.

7:15That was sort of the mentality, like all in mentality. You hear about this all the time. That did fail by the way. And we'll get, we'll get to that. We'll talk about it. So yeah, early on COVID hits and I'm still working my job. And I had just gotten off of doing 18 months of dieting. I was trying different diets and I fell in love with whole food eating and functional mushrooms, medicinal mushrooms sold at Whole Foods and felt compelled like, whoa, these make me feel really good. I want to help introduce these to people. Other people will see how good these make them feel them. So I start making, you know, granola in my kitchen and then I'm just storing it in my room and my room gets crazy.

7:52And so I just, I say F it, like I'm going to move into my backyard and throw out my bed to make an office. Like it was sort of like for myself to be like, I'm going in on this. And so every single day when I woke up in that tent, I knew like what I was focused on. And so that was sort of the ethos of moving into the tent. And then I actually loved living in the tent and stayed in the tent for about two years while I kind of like developed the brand and sort of just bootstrapped, raised some money, like kind of grew the core. And then to the van component, right? We ended up getting a really good opportunity to basically sell our product through this massive distribution network called KEHI.

8:28So healthy foods really are primarily distributed around the US through two primary distributors, UNFI and KEHI. KEHI reached out to us. They saw an Instagram ad and they were like, hey, we think your product could be really awesome. We'll open up these distribution centers for you and let you sell into all these stores in our distribution centers. And I said, awesome. But COVID was kind of waning. It was really hard to email people, get in touch with people, like people were busy. and I thought, okay, well, no one's going in person anymore. That's a great opportunity to go back to in person. And, you know, I was like, cool.

9:04All right. I'm getting rid of the tent. And we bought like a 1995 vintage Japanese pop-up camper van. I still own it. I love that van. So sick. So like the driving wheels on the right side and we got it branded, wrapped in the brand and I hit the road to literally go to like grocery store headquarters in the regions we could sell in and get a meeting and show them our product and sell our product into the stores. Like to me, it was as simple as that on some levels. Yeah. Parker, what that reminds me of is the shoe dog story of Phil Knight when he started selling Nikes is he was literally going to like track events with a bunch of Nike shoes and like his trunk opening it and saying like, Hey, test it out.

9:46It sounds like it's a super similar story with your story of like grit and like going around the nation just saying, hey, at my van, you want to book a meeting with me, essentially. I love the whiteboard. I would post on LinkedIn a place like me in the van and I would add somebody's name and I'd be like, I'm 867 miles away from your headquarters. I'll be there in two days. Like, can I have a meeting? And then I'd tag them. And a bunch of people on LinkedIn, right, would sort of like weigh in. People loved it. And yeah, I ended up booking, you know, quite a few meetings with some pretty senior people at like pretty legitimate retail chains around the nation.

10:16Oh, dude, that's so, so cool. So I want to continue talking about 4-H here. I mean, we are going to talk about pitching, getting to Six Figures Month listeners. I promise we're going to get there. Talks about the journey though. How long did you do it? Was it a success? I mean, did you have that successful exit that everyone dreams of? Talk to us about that. Yeah, definitely not. Definitely not. Yeah, I mean, I worked on it for three and a half years. I never took a dollar from that company. Didn't take any pay. Wow. And it was such a good lesson for me. At that time in my life, I was like, you have to be all in.

10:47you know, you can take no pay, you just persevere, like you figure it out. And at some point you get across the line. And the reality is nobody cares. Nobody cares. Like if your business is not profitable and you can't raise dollars and you can't pay yourself, like there isn't just some angel that's going to be like, wow, you've worked super hard. Yeah. This lovely exit. And so for me, like the really big learnings there were number one, what we were selling was a vitamin, not a pain pill. So it didn't solve a problem, right? It was sort of this like, I had to explain to somebody why it was a good thing to buy and it was expensive.

11:24And part of that lesson is it's really hard to part with people from their money. Doesn't matter how much money, it's actually more, in my opinion, the act of somebody giving you money is really hard. And I learned that. I'm so grateful for that lesson. That was sort of like number one lesson takeaway for me. And then the second takeaway for me as well is like, you can have as much grit, perseverance, whatever, but if the financial model does not make sense, the business does not make sense. Like hands down, hands down. From what you know now, obviously no angel is going to go save you. You know what you know now.

12:02Is there anything you would do differently though to like maybe make it successful? I'd love to hear just that reflection. Yeah, totally. I think at the time, you know, we were trying to raise money and that's what everybody was doing. It was like raise money because that's how you grow. I would have stayed as small as possible to really validate like the business model and how it could scale profitably and actually be real business before just trying to sort of grow just to grow, right? Like we were growing, but in an inefficient way and not building a model that could have ever sustained itself.

12:35That's been a really big shift in the past five years that like 2020, 21 timeframe, throwing money at investors, grow as fast as you can. You saw some companies like fast.com had like$100 ,000 in revenue with like 100 employees or something. Like it was like insane. Like it's growing profitably now. And speaking of profitability, we lead to Podpitch here. So let's talk about Podpitch. First, before we dive into building the first version for yourself with using NoCo tools, what is Podpitch? So Podpitch is basically an automated media outreach tool. So primarily right now, PodPitch is focused on helping people research and identify the most relevant podcasts for them to go be a guest on, to help become a thought leader, get in front of the right audiences or share their story, right?

13:18And so it's an AI tool and it's built on top of one of the largest podcast databases in the world. So AI can go through that whole database, identify what podcast you'd best be a guest on and help you do outreach to them to get you to become a guest on the show. Yeah, and we're using it in Uflip and I personally love it. It honestly saves us a ton of time, gets that cross-promotion strategy as you talked about here. So I endorse it from the Uflip side, but I want to talk about the founding story of it because as much as the listeners love to hear that Uflip's using PodPitch, they want to know the PodPitch founding story here.

13:46So no code tools, you build this yourself. What led up to PodPitch and how did you start developing this? Yeah, so the iOS update hits, if anybody remembers that in 2021. Basically, it became really expensive to acquire customers online. And my story being in the van, blah, blah, blah. I got invited on some pretty cool podcasts. And those podcasts ended up leading to really awesome work opportunities for me personally and for Forage. And so I sort of leaned into the strategy and was like, oh, maybe podcast guesting is interesting. And then I quickly found out there's so many podcasts. It's so hard to get in touch with people.

14:21It's so painful and time consuming. And around the same time, I was learning this awesome like code free tool. It was a data collection tool called Bardeen. It's still around. I still love Bardeen. I'm waiting for them to like make me an ambassador. Yeah. And yeah, I basically learned how to build data sets, build first party data sets. And I built these first party data sets of like entrepreneurship podcasts or food podcasts and then was sort of doing more automated outreach to them. And that was like the very first step of building this concept for myself. Interesting. So you're doing this like yourself and just saying like, okay, I'm gonna fiddle around like entrepreneurship podcasts, automated outreach.

14:59Great, great, great. This is all going well. But when did you like that light bulb moment? You're like, holy smokes, I have a business here. Yeah. Yeah. So my current co-founder, he was a founder of other consumer packaged goods brands and we just became friends. And we both, I feel like sort of admitted to each other of being like, we don't think either of our businesses are really going to go anywhere. We're kind of like, it's time to almost like cut off and move on. And we want to work together. And so we started looking at different ideas and I showed him this tool that I built and a few other founder friends were really interested in me helping set up the same system for them.

15:32And so we were like, maybe there's something really interesting here. And so we started to try and sell it basically. And we sold our first 10K of MRR off of this like code-free, like janky, like I was like coding. I'm so non-technical. It's like painful how non-technical I am. It's like janky, like, oh my God. I wish I could show just like screenshots of my screen of like trying to like pull data and manipulate data. And it was so bad. But what? people were paying us. And so that's what was important. And we sort of just followed that thread. So I want to ask as well. So you're doing about 10K in MRR a month, which is obviously you're listening, your ears should be perking out because that's$10 ,000 a month and reoccurring revenue, which is a huge deal.

16:12Who is like your first customers and how did you price this? Was it those founder friends that were like, Hey, this looks awesome. I'll actually pay you for this. Or how did you guys get your first customers? I want to get tactical advice here. Great question. So So it was founder friends and pricing discovery is really challenging. We still have challenges in terms of pricing discovery. We have customers that look at our pricing model and are like, I would pay 10x for this. And then there's people who are like, I would never pay that. And you're like, damn, who's right and why and when? And so, yeah, it was discovery.

16:41We would say, hey, we'll pay this. We think if you were to go and hire somebody to do this, this is what it would cost. And our product is discounted on that effectively. So yeah, at first it really was kind of these like founder friends in network, but we did hit a wall. So like we got up to 10K, kind of hit a wall, saw churn, kind of like saw like a slight dribble and we're like, okay, this might not work. And around the same time, somebody who I showed the tool to said, hey, you know, I think this tool could be really helpful for PR agencies. And we said, awesome, great. And I started just getting calls with PR agencies.

17:16I was just railing people on LinkedIn everywhere being like, hey, I think I'm building something really cool. Will you give me 20 minutes and just tell me if you think it's cool or not? And it was relentless. And people would come on these calls and they'd be like, wow, this could be really cool. I wish it did this or could it do that? And I'm like, yes. And then we sort of had an engineer starting to work on some things. But the money was still not coming in. And this is where I come back to the learning at Forage and my current latest biggest takeaway where it's so hard to get people to part with their money.

17:48And we started making money after we started asking one very simple question on these calls. So I would share the product. They would say, wow, that's so cool. And I would say, okay, what would make you pay for this right now on this call? And sometimes I would preface it because it can be an awkward question. And I would say, hey, do you mind if I ask you an awkward question? And then everybody says, yes, of course. And then when you ask it, it's not as awkward. It's so good. I still love that question today. Whenever there's a hard conversation, you always lead with it. And I would ask people that.

18:19And you know, then they start telling you the real stuff. Everybody wants to be supportive. But as soon as it comes down to even them giving you a dollar, that's where you'll really know if you're onto something or not. And that's advice I share all the time now. Like if you want to build something, ask somebody to pay you on the spot. And if they pay you on the spot, you'll know you're onto something. And if they don't, you know, you're not quite there. Yeah. Well, what I love about that, like sales technique is like what we can call it here is like it really gets down to like why are we not going to do this and that undercovering like their problem points like well like i have to talk to x y and z like oh well we have another supplier right now that's when you like can really address those issues i'm sure that's a tactic like why you use it so you can address those real hard issues and yeah and for us it was like what we found before we were asking that question we were going down one path because everybody was like this is what you should build this is great this is great as soon as we started asking that question, we went a different path and very quickly, like somebody paid on a call and that person that paid that concept that we sold them is now what we've scaled.

19:18Oh, dude, that is so, so cool. And I'll talk about investment as well, because from Forage, like, you know, you took on investment money, that changes who you report to, that changes expectations, that changes goals. How did you decide to lean on like a more bootstrapped way at the beginning? I love that you're that. So we upfront, when my co-founder and I got together, we sat down and we were like, okay, we've attempted to run businesses. We know that it's not fun and games. We know that you better be really careful what you get yourself into because everybody's like, I want to be an entrepreneur.

19:49I want to be an entrepreneur. I want to start a company. I want to be financially independent, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Sometimes you think you want that, you get into that and then you're stuck and it's shitty. And so we decided, we were like, okay, we don't want to sell something where people are going to pay us under at least several hundred dollars a month. We do not want to raise money. And we want our sales cycle, i.e. somebody to be able to say yes and pay us to be under a week, which I really loved. My co-founder really pushed on that. And I'm so glad he did because I was listening to these people who are giving us good feedback.

20:24And I'm like, it's a normal sales cycle, blah, blah, blah. Like, no, no. Like I really agree. And I'm so glad for my co-founder, Neil, for that advice. Yeah, I want to ask, now that you have done investments with like raising money and also being bootstrapped, tell us who getting angel investment is for and tell us who it's not for and tell us basically who bootstrapping is for. Great question. Yeah, I think, you know, there's probably no line in the sand. But after experiencing what I've experienced, like there are certain industries where bootstrapping is maybe possible, but it just extends how long it will take significantly.

21:00For us, like me and my co-founder lived without a salary or paying us ourselves for six months. And I, you know, I lived in New York City and was just cutting into savings. So it was inherently risky. And so, you know, it can be helpful. It probably would have been helpful. We probably would have been more comfortable if we had brought on the right investor. I just think we both early on, and especially in the consumer products, good space, that space just requires so much money to get to a scale where you can become profitable. I chatted with a founder friend the other day. He's doing 150 million.

21:30Last year he did 80 million. And this year will be his first year that he's profitable. Yeah. Let that sink in, Ryan. I'm intentionally not saying anything because I want everyone to just listen to what you just said there. Let that sink in. When I talked to him and I was like, yeah, you know, we're doing this much. We've basically been profitable since like day one. and he was like, you were more profitable than I was last year doing$80 million. Oh, and I want to hit on your point as well that you said earlier, like when you get into entrepreneurship, like know what you're signing up for here.

22:03I had a friend the other day, he's like trying to launch a drink brand, like some sort of drink. I don't know exactly what it is, but I text him like, Hey man, like I saw you're launching this. It's like super cool. Like, let me know if I can ever do anything for you. Like I'm an entrepreneur. I get how hard it is. And he's like, we'll do. And he's like, blah, blah, blah. And he's like, I'd love to hear from like Mr. CEO. And like, obviously he's like kidding stuff, but I was like, trust me, you'll learn that is the biggest blessing, but that is also the biggest curse in your life. If you are not careful of having a CEO entrepreneurship title.

22:30Yeah, I know. I said for a long time, I never want to be a CEO. Being a CEO sucks. Like do not idolize. And also, you know, going into entrepreneurship, it's so easy to get wrapped up in like the romance and the lore and like founder mode and like, oh, so cool. Like you better also be really just diligent in just being unbiased about the business and the state of the business. Cause it's so easy to lie to yourself and be like, well, if I raise this extra dollar or I go into this extra dollar of debt, it should work. Like I've seen, and I know many founders who have gone into a ton of personal debt and like not ruin their entire lives, but probably set themselves back financially and personally and like traumatize themselves maybe for a decade.

23:14Yeah. You got to be careful, like what you're getting yourself into. And of course it takes reps. Like we don't want to scare people that are listening here. Like it just takes reps, like really understand like what you want to do and you'll get good at it for sure. I mean, you're obviously good at this now because obviously you're profitable. You're hitting six figures a month in revenue, which is amazing. I want to talk to you. What channels are strategies driving your growth right now? I think for us, our product that's on the market has never existed before. And it solves such a painful motion.