How to Launch an SMB Product | Jay Myers, Founder of Bold

Building a product is the easy part. With the right resources, you can build just about anything. But once you've done that, how do you launch it? How do you get people to know your product even exists? And how do you do it on a tight budget? Jay, the founder of Bold Commerce, has launched dozens of succesful e-commerce products. In this episode, he shares the detailed story of how he launched Kickbooster, an affiliate management program for kickstarter campaigns. If you're planning ...
Building a product is the easy part. With the right resources, you can build just about anything.
But once you've done that, how do you launch it? How do you get people to know your product even exists? And how do you do it on a tight budget?
Jay, the founder of Bold Commerce, has launched dozens of succesful e-commerce products. In this episode, he shares the detailed story of how he launched Kickbooster, an affiliate management program for kickstarter campaigns.
If you're planning to launch a product for SMBs, you don't want to miss this one.
02:57 - Startups have this superpower
09:25 - How to validate
13:27 - How to launch a kickstarter
17:26 - Get the most our of early customers
22:52 - Get close to the problem
31:43 - Focus on long-term value
Jay: 0:00
The mindset that we were at as a company at that point was let's throw as much up against a wall and see what sticks.
Pablo: 0:09
Welcome to the Product Market Fit Show, brought to you by Mistral, a seed-stage firm based in Canada. I'm Pablo. I'm a founder turned VC. My goal is to help early-stage founders, like you find product market fit. Today we have Jay, the co-founder and CPO of Bold Commerce. Bold is an e-commerce company that provides checkout-related products for e-commerce merchants. They're based in Winnipeg. They have 400 employees and have raised $50 million to date. And the topic of today's episode is how to launch an SMB product. Jay, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure having you here.
Jay: 0:46
Thanks for having me, man, really honored to be here.
Pablo: 0:48
I'm looking forward to this chat, you know, especially because SMB is just such an interesting space, especially for startups, right? I mean, if you think about consumer SMB and enterprise in the consumer side, the wallet is not the same as SMB. The value props are not as clear as SMB because SMB is a business. And so if you could clear ROI, there's real spend there to be had. On the other side, enterprise, you got to go through procurement. You got to go through long sales cycles, and that's not easy for a startup. Not to say you can't build great consumer enterprise businesses, but SMB is kind of the sweet Goldilocks in the middle. And so I'm curious to explore that space. Now the flip side of that is because it's such an interesting space for startups, there's a lot of noise. There's a lot of activity in the SMB space. And so, you know, today we're going to really chat about how you launch a particular product, Kickbooster . The context of it all, you know, for listeners is, you know, Bold Commerce, unlike many startups out there – most startups have one product. Bold Commerce, you guys have dozens of products, which means you've launched, you know, dozens and dozens of products. And you have a lot of experience with launching products. And so today we'll dive right into one of them. Just maybe a little bit of background, you know, Kickbooster is a platform for crowd funders to manage their affiliate and influencer campaigns. And so let's start right at the beginning, Jay, like kind of where was the company at when you came up with Kickbooster and what's the origin story there? How did you come up with this product?
Jay: 2:19
Yeah, for sure. Bold was started in 2012. Kickbooster came about around the end of 2014. The mindset that we were at as a company at that point was let's throw as much up against a wall and see what sticks. We were early, very scrappy, willing to move fast, maybe make mistakes, iterate. Often a startup early on, that's one of your superpowers as a startup is you can iterate very quickly. As you grow, your output increases, but speed actually sometimes slows down. You introduce more. You're a little bit more careful about security and QA processes and other things that are important. But just in, you know, in your early days, you're able to move fast. So, you know, we had this mindset of – we knew we cared about commerce, and we knew we wanted to solve problems for merchants. And we had a lot of ideas of what that meant. So we really approached it as trying a lot of different things. And that's kind of how we became this company with a suite of products. They all revolve though around commerce. Kickbooster was an interesting one. And because it falls a little bit outside of what you might think of as commerce, but we agree that it's part of the commerce journey for a lot of brands. And that is this crowdfunding experience. It's the way a lot of brands launch now. You know, instead of going to a bank to get a loan, or maybe to get investors, you crowdfund your product, you get some money. It doesn't just get you money. It also validates the idea and it gets a lot of early backers who also then become little mini advocates. And if you've ever met someonewho's backed something on Kickstarter, they've probably told you about it because they're excited about it. You have this like little mini ambassador for the product as well, too. So it's a great way to launch a product. And so actually, someone we knew, they were a partner and a friend, actually had this concept. We ended up doing it together, but this was how it came about. He had this idea for affiliate tracking for crowdfunding. And what that means is if you think about an e-commerce website, affiliate is easy to do you. Someone posts a link somewhere. It could be like, you know, on a YouTube, social media. It could be an email. Like most of the links you click in Buzzfeed or Mashable or somewhere else, those are affiliate links. If they're talking about a product and you click on that product, and if you end up buying that product, that brand is paying Mashable 10, 20%. If you Google top 10 sunglasses, all of Google's search results are gonna be a whole bunch of pages that have top 10 sunglasses for the beach, for fishing, for golf. And those are all affiliate sites. Like any ones of those you click – and usually, fun fact, they're ranked top to bottom based off of how much money they make off of affiliates – <laugh> has nothing to do with the quality of the sunglasses. So that all existed for e-commerce stores. But in the crowdfunding space, it was impossible to do. And there was companies like Mashable, some of them, and there was others that would do like these Kickstarter review videos. You'd see them on social media. You'd see them on YouTube. People would get the product or the prototype early and do video reviews on it. And they would link people to the campaign. And the creators could pay that person like a onetime fee, but there was no way to actually track if someone clicked, went to Kickstarter and pledged, you know –
Pablo: 6:04
Why not? It's because the purchase happened on third-party Kickstarter or Indiegogo website? Is that the challenge in tracking or what was the issue?
Jay: 6:13
Yeah, just from a technical standpoint, the issue is, and still – or was, and still is that as a campaign creator, you create this campaign on Kickstarter. You know, you put your video, your description, what it is. You create your pledge amounts. Then your backers, people who pledge to you, they go through the Kickstarter checkout and they pledge to it, and it all happens on Kickstarter. And then it's a Kickstarter thank you page. You have no access to the thank you page, if you will, or anything post checkout. So you can't put your scripts on. You can't put your Google analytics in there. Actually, you can. Sorry. Google analytics is one thing that you can do. But you couldn't put any custom code through the checkout or after. So affiliate software usually has you put some code either on the checkout before, during, and after the checkout so that you can attribute a link click to an actual purchase. And that's how then campaign owners pay them out. But you couldn't do that with crowdfunding. The way we actually ended up doing it was through Google analytics. Google analytics has the ability to track the point that you can narrow down. If we, at the end of a campaign, got an export of all the backers, we could connect it with Google analytics, sync it up, and it revolved a bunch of processes, but we could then match clicks to people that actually backed it. And it was actually a bit of a manual process. Here's the part I think that was key though. It was the person that came to us. His name is Scott. He was a partner. But he had this idea of using Google analytics and a couple other tools. He was using Zapier for different pieces to connect, and you pushed to Google Sheets and connect to Google Analytics. He pieced it together in his head and he did it and he tested it and it worked. And then he built this landing page, and he called the company kickbooster.me and built a landing page and explained that you could do affiliate tracking for crowdfunding, and he would manually set it up for people. Then he had a form where people could pay $300 to get access to the setup. It wasn't software at the time, even. It was just piecing together a bunch of preexisting tools that he would manually set up and then a brand could track. And so he created this landing page, kind of put it out in the crowdfunding community. There's Facebook groups, wherever. He ended up selling just over $10,000 worth of people taking out their credit card and paying, saying, yes, I want this service. But then he actually wasn't – well, that would've taken him – he wouldn't have had the time or the manpower to set them all up individually. He was thinking he was gonna sell a few of them. So then he approached us and he said, "Hey, I have this idea, but I want to turn it into software that can do it. I don't want to manually do all this. Let's turn this into software that automates all of this," you know? And always like the first thing you think is like market validation and are people willing to pay for it? And he the most perfect thing – is he actually got people to take out their credit card and pay for something, because the ultimate vote, you know – all your friends, if you have an idea, will tell you that's a good idea. Maybe one or two friends might be honest with you. But the ultimate vote is if you have an idea and you say to your friend, "Hey, I've got this idea for your business," and if your friend says, "Oh, that's a great idea," the next thing you should say is, "Great. Give me your credit card. Do you want to be my first customer?"
Pablo: 9:56
Exactly.
Jay: 9:56
And your friend will say, "Oh, well it's not that good of an idea. I'm not going to give you my credit card." But you just said it was a good idea. And that's often the case is we want to tell people it's a good idea, but the credit card is the ultimate vote. So he did the ultimate thing in collecting payment before he actually even had a product. So he ended up refunding everybody. He lost $300 because he had to pay the credit card processing fee of refunding – but arguably maybe the best $300 he ever spent to validate the idea. We ended up building the product, brought it to market, and it's done very well. But it was perfectly validated through people willing to take out their credit card and pay. And then once the software was there, people happily paid for it.
Pablo: 10:40
Right. Okay. So let me ask a few kind of clarifying questions. The first thing is when Scott, right – so is Scott working at Bold or is he just like a friend doing his own thing on the side, at that time.
Jay: 10:52
He's a partner with Kickbooster.
Pablo: 10:55
At that time he was an employee of Bold though, when he kind of came up with –
Jay: 10:57
No, sorry. No, no, he wasn't. No, he wasn't an employee at Bold. He was a friend that we knew, came to us with this idea. So, you know, yeah, and this is an interesting thing maybe worth touching on. You know, we had a very strong development team at Bold. We often had people coming to us in the startup community saying, "Hey, do you want to invest in my startup?" And we would often ask like, "Well, what do you really need? What's the money for?" And 9 out of 10 times it's to hire developers to build it. So what we decided as a company is – Bold isn't a company that invests in startups as a company. What we decided, we took a portion of our company and we called it Bold Labs. And we took about 20, 25% of the company. And we worked on kind of experimental things that were loosely aligned to our core thing, which was commerce.
Pablo: 11:57
How big was the company back then? How many people were there?
Jay: 11:59
Between 50 and 60 people. So we weren't super big yet, but enough that we could have a small team experimenting with some of the stuff. Like, I think it probably took like three to four people and maybe three or four months to build out the first MVP.
Pablo: 12:12
Timing, you know, obviously is quite an important thing when you think about, you know , launching new products. Can you remember, like, where was – this was 2015, right? 2014, 2015, is that right?
Jay: 12:24
Yeah. I'm trying to remember the exact launch date, but it was probably early 2015.
Pablo: 12:27
Okay. Kickstarter at that point – I mean, now everybody knows Kickstarter. I think they did back then, but it was kind of having its glory days. Right? Like it was like pebble launches with like $15 million. Like that was the timing. Were you at Bold, like when he came to you with this crowdfunding idea? Did that fit into a bigger thing? Like, were you guys already thinking or looking at crowdfunding at all, or he kind of opened your eyes to the crowdfunding space and how it tied into e-commerce?
Jay: 12:55
Yeah, we weren't thinking about – like we all knew what crowdfunding was. There's a whole bunch of people – we actually got all of our staff one year a whole bunch of pebbles, <laugh> the watches. I still have one. <laugh> But we were very aware of crowdfunding, but we didn't think that it fit into the bigger picture . But crowdfunding is actually really interesting specifically with Kickstarter – is taking a bit of a step back in – as a crowdfunder, usually what you do, if you do it right, you start with a landing page. If you have an idea for a product before you even launch your crowdfunding campaign, you have like a teaser landing page and like you make a video or you talk about like whatever the product is you're going to solve. You maybe make like a silhouette video and get people excited. And then you run some ads. You get some influencers and you promote this landing page. There's various ways you can promote it. But you get people to enter their email address, to be early, to get early bird access. Like you're going to have only 500 early bird spots on your Kickstarter page. So you get like 10,000 email addresses. Then when your crowdfunding campaign goes live on Kickstarter, you have a list of 10,000 people to email who are probably going to back. And then what that does is once it gets backed, if you reach your goal quickly, it ranks high in Kickstarter, which means you're going to start getting more backings, and you kind of get in the hot and trending. And it's kind of like a snowball effect. Remember, Kickstarter is not an e-commerce platform. They're very clear in saying like, when you back something, you're pledging to it. You're supporting it. You're not guaranteed a product. And sometimes you don't get a product because things fall through. It's a prototype. You have to have a working prototype, but really that's the requirement. And so when it's done – so if I back a – let's just say I back like the world's lightest hoodie, for example. I don't know. And that now when it's done, the campaign owner gets a CSV of everybody who backed it, their names and the backing amount, like which – you can pledge at different amounts. And really that's it. You as a campaign owner now have to collect a whole bunch of information. If you just want to ship the hoodie and you'd have no options – and the hoodie actually would – you got different sizes, but you can't select sizes when you're backing it. You just say I'm backing the world's – so you got to collect sizes. Maybe you have different colors. You got addresses now. Smart campaign owners, they always have this – maybe you want to now upsell the world's lightest toque and gloves and socks made out of the same material, sold to it. But there's no way to do that in Kickstarter. So we also built out what's called a pledge manager, and it's essentially to now take – so if you have a successful campaign and 10,000 people backed your campaign and you're selling this hoodie, it can trigger an email that goes to all those people saying, good news, the campaign goal was reached. We are going to start shipping the hoodie soon, but we need to collect some information from you. It goes to kind of a sales flow that says, okay, first step, let's select what size of hoodie you want – extra-large, great. Do you want to add another hoodie for 25% off? You can get it for a friend. So you can add another one. While you're at it, do you want to add the matching gloves, toque, or whatever else? Do you want to add whatever? Do you want to add the – you can upsell all the way through and then charge for the extra add-ons. And so we manage all of that as well too, post. And then what a lot of brands do is they end up having an e-commerce store. So Kickbooster is also just a true affiliate app for e-commerce. So now if you take your e-commerce store, you can use Kickbooster just on e-commerce to track like your influencer marketing and everything else. But what's really cool is you can keep all of your links and your people that were affiliates through crowd-funding, so that when you launch your store, you can kind of turn them all into affiliates for your store.
Pablo: 16:53
And one of the things I wanna touch on there is driving traffic, right? Oftentimes founders will be like, yeah, like I'll put up a landing page, but like, that's the easy part, right? How do I get people to go there and actually – especially like, if you're not just taking emails, right, and you actually want them to pay. Scott had already done some of this, but I assume at some point you kind of took over the landing page and started working with Scott on, you know, driving traffic to it. How did you do that? How do you do that, just in general? How did you do it with Kickbooster? Where did you get traffic from, and how did you move it over to that site?
Jay: 17:25
Yeah, the thing that's important early on for any software app company is your first 10 customers. Think of them as your marketing channel. And so your early – it can be 10. It can be your first 100. I don't think you need to draw a line, but your first early customers, you should stay as close as possible to them, understand their – from a product standpoint, you want to be close to them to understand product and like, how can you improve it, how can you iterate, how can you make it better. But from a marketing standpoint, you want them to have an amazing experience, even if the product isn't perfect, that you're communicating, you're working with them. You're letting them know like what what's up, what's being iterated, what's changed, what's the next version, just really being involved. Sometimes I download an app or some software that I would classify they're in the startup stage. And like, I try to – there's no onboarding. There's no one reaching out. There's no support. I'm directed to like a help article on everything. The chat bot – just not a person. It's the most annoying thing in the world. And it's just a horrible experience. You know, you think about some of the companies that have really blown up – is they leverage their existing customers.
Pablo: 18:37
Yeah, that's the part I really want to dig on. Like, you know, I think once you have 10 or 20 customers, it doesn't necessarily easy, but you can understand the kind of techniques to get those to refer and just, you know, provide a great experience. But how do you get those 20 customers? And what does that mean? You post on a – the details of it, right – like you post on a forum and you're like, "Hey, check this out."
Jay: 18:56
Yeah, we leveraged a lot of different communities. So there's forums. There's like a lot of communities where they're – well, Facebook groups and forums where there's like help forums. People ask questions, like, how do I know – and you can look for specific things, like, how do I know how much my people sending links – or what's a great way – like everyone who has a Kickstarter campaign is looking to drive traffic. And we had this tool that helped with that. And so we knew it worked. We knew it was a great resource. And so we had to just find people looking to drive traffic. Another way we did it was we found people that were already leveraging communities. So there was this one brand that, they had a lot of – there was like an outdoor like backpack, different things. So they had a lot of people doing YouTube reviews on their products. I guess what they did was they had a campaign and then they did make a whole bunch of prototypes. And they sent these prototypes out to a whole bunch of YouTubers who did like Kickstarter reviews. And so if you go on YouTube and you search like Kickstarter review, you'll see people doing reviews for Kickstarter products, because when some – that's a strategy of people running a campaign. But at the time, people were doing these reviews on YouTube and making no money because there was no way – well, they probably had other ways that they were monetizing it through ads and through some – maybe they were paid like a lump, a onetime – like a $1,000 fee one time for doing a review or something. Yeah. But we knew there was – like we were the world's first affiliate tracking software for Kickstarter. There was no one else before us. So we knew there was – they were definitely not getting any affiliate revenue for it. When we found campaigns that we saw – like if you take the campaign, take the title of the product and then search that in YouTube and see if there's blogs and see if there's articles and see if there's YouTube, if there's content out there. We would just go to the campaign owner or go to the people writing the content and just say, "Hey, we have a tool that can help track every click through, whether you want to pay them or not. Even if you don't, instead of giving them a link directly to your crowdfunding campaign, you could just use Kickbooster just to simply track."
Pablo: 21:13
So did you do that? I mean, in a sense, like, if you think about the strategy, right, like you're solving a particular pain point. In this case, you know, it's around affiliate marketing with crowdfunding campaign. So you've got to think about, okay, who's having this problem. And obviously it's people that are, you know, hosting crowdfunding campaigns. So did you go after – you could just go on Kickstarter, look at all the crowdfunding campaigns and just start hitting everybody up. Is that what you did? Because it sounds like you went almost one step further, which is like, okay, the people that most want this are not – they don't only have a Kickstarter campaign. They also are trying to do something like affiliate marketing. So they have a YouTube video of some third-party influencer. And so they're kind of closer to the problem. Is that kind of the way you thought about it?
Jay: 21:52
That's exactly the way we thought about it. Often with software, if you find someone already doing a thing, and your software makes that easier or makes that more trackable, then you will have someone willing to take out their wallet and pay, because it's one less thing you have to convince them of. Like, we didn't have to convince those creators that, hey, you should have bloggers and YouTubers doing reviews on your campaign. They were already doing that. All we had to say was we have a tool that can track everything you're already doing, can track every sale that comes through all – like we noticed you have seven blogs and there's three YouTubers doing reviews on your products. If you use Kickbooster, if they use this special link, they can track it all. They get a dashboard that they can see where all their backings are coming through. If you want, you can incentivize them with like 10% or 20% or a referral bonus to people that back. I guess the takeaway there is the closer you can get to the problem – you know, like a lot of times software is – you build software and you go around looking for a problem. If the problem already exists, it's there, you can like put your finger on it and your software just comes in between that, that's where you need to be.
Pablo: 23:10
Yeah. That makes sense. And I like the example, because you know, you have this kind of like – if you're selling to more traditional B2B, you can always cold call and like that's another way, you know. You could just start calling, start dialing. Yeah, it's not really like the best way to qualify, but at least you could just do volume and do it every single day. But when you're selling, you know, strictly online, and as more and more – in the e-commerce world, as more and more people are, like, there's not really – you can't call these people. And so then you start thinking – and I do wonder what your thoughts are on this – like, should I just do, like – should I just pay for it? Like, should I just do Facebook ads and pay for click ads and just like start that way? Obviously, those are super useful to leverage. But I wonder what your thinking is on the first – like getting those first a hundred customers in an SMB context, whether you would ever say, yeah, we'll just go and run a pay for click campaign or Facebook ad or IG or whatever, or whether you always would try and go to this more manual approach, which, you know, may be more time consuming, but kind of make sure you're really getting in front of the right people.
Jay: 24:10
I think Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn ads, whatever you're running, I think they're fine if you're not just looking at it as customer acquisition. If it's looking at it to, okay, I need to get a hundred customers, like if I just launched software today and I need a hundred customers, because I'm going to take those a hundred customers and I'm going to sell them up to the higher versions of my products. I'm going to offer them our full consulting package. I'm going to service the heck out of them. And if I can acquire them for a decent cost through social media, great. But if I have like one product I'm selling, it's $59 a month or something, and I have nothing else to add, it's a bit of – very few people see success running just ads on social media. You have to have more like – that's like the tip that gets them in, and then you need to increase the value of those customers once they come in. If you have to do it, sure, it's fine, but like longterm, it's not a strategy that wins, especially in SaaS. And most software now has a recurring billing model. And this is such an important point. Almost every SaaS company has a growth curve that looks like this in the beginning, it goes up, up, and then it flattens. I call it the subscription death curve.
Pablo: 25:33
Right. And if you increase your spend, you just start hitting kind of higher and higher CAC. In other words, like you just can't – it's not like you can just dial up those a hundred and make – okay, I'll just spend more money, get a thousand. You can, but your CAC will just go through the roof.
Jay: 25:44
Yeah. And the higher you get, like if you have a million customers and if you're churning 10%, like if you're turning a – the bucket is dry, so to speak. So what happens is – if that's how you build your business, I'm concerned. But the ones that I see that are very healthy, the majority of their traffic comes through referral channels. And so, you know, if you think about like – there's what's called a viral coefficient and brands that grow virally. They track this. And so what this means is if you look at like Clubhouse, like recently it took off like crazy, it's kind of gone down a little bit recently, but the reason it grew so fast is when you installed Clubhouse, you got five invites and that was it. You didn't get one. You didn't get unlimited. You got five. So everyone thought strategically about like who they could invite. So I'm a big proponent of, if I install your software or like anything related to subscription billing, if I install it, and if I get like three invites, that I can invite someone and they will get like a month for free, like something very, very lucrative, not just like – like most software you install, there's a link, it's like share with a friend and they get 5% off. And it's just like a generic link. And I can share it with as many people. Like, I'm not going to go post that on my Facebook. Hey, everyone, click this link and get the software. That just doesn't happen.
Pablo: 27:22
And you know, I hone in on this because at the end of the day, everybody can get a product built, one way or another. Right. I think about people starting a startup and what are the hard parts and the easy parts and coming up with – coming up sounds like you just have the epiphany, right. But the whole process of customer discovery and really nailing a kind of top number one, number two priority value prop is really, really hard. And then from there, to like having a product built is actually like the easy part. Just time in. You're going to get it. And then the other hard part is going to market, right, which is how are you really going to get out there in an efficient way? And these are the sort of things we're talking about. And a lot of times that's, you know – if I just think as a VC, like I got these pitch decks, right? It's like go to market, oh, you know, Facebook ads. Right. <laugh> It's like, okay, fine. But it has to be more thought through than that. And that's where these manual ways of – and the strategy is who's got the pain point, where are they, how can you get the closest to that person, right, to the person who not only has like part of the pain point, but the full pain point of what – if they have the full pain point, what would they be doing. And that's the way to think about and find them, right, and then get in front of them and solicit them kind of manually, hand-to-hand combat. But it's more effective. You build deeper relationships, and you probably learn more, I would have to assume in those conversations where somebody says – because they'll say no or they'll say yes, and there'll be maybe some qualitative answers around it and you'll see, oh, okay, it doesn't work for these sort of crowdfunding campaigns. It works better for these, because, you know, 10 people said XYZ or something like that, which you don't get on pay-per-click or anything that's too at scale.
Jay: 28:53
I've seen recently a few software launches of where they bring in – they find the ideal customer, and they're a decent recognizable brand, and they bring them in with some equity early on. I've seen this happen now a couple times, and it works really well. And they bring them on to help with the product roadmap . But then also they are the early advocates. They're the early case studies. They're part of the press release. They have like some big names early on, and bringing in a couple customers – and this depends, of course, on the industry. If your customer is a stay-at-home person, like maybe there isn't a – but there still could be, of course, right. There could be. I guess everyone's a stay-at-home person right now. But if they're tied to a recognizable brand, like if you can bring in someone who's recognizable in that space, so like if you're making software for horseback riding, find the like three very recognizable people, tell them what you're doing, ask them for their ideas, and potentially offer them some, equity for nothing, but to have them on early as advisors and part of the go-to-market, that can be a big growth hack.
Pablo: 30:12
Now I have to ask this question because a lot of people, you know, first-time founders really early on – one of the things you mentioned is, you know, when Kickbooster happened, you guys did have 50, 60 people. That's still a meaningful organization from a first-time founder perspective. How much budget did you allocate to this? Take dev aside. Building is building. But you know, how much budget did you allocate to Kickbooster, more or less, early on?
Jay: 30:40
Developer salaries aside?
Pablo: 30:41
Take developers aside. Like basically really marketing, like how much, you know, was allocated to it, or would've been?
Jay: 30:50
I bet you honestly, less than like 20, 000 or 30,000, like I don't even think that much, to be honest. We needed a really strong site product. And then our strategy was to like infiltrate, and Scott was very involved in the crowdfunding community. He was active in all the forums and the groups and Reddit threads. That's really, really important, having that person. Then we needed the product and the material and site to support what he was doing.
Pablo: 31:28
And did you ever stop that? Did you ever stop the – like, because he put it out and he got way too much, like too many orders. Then he came to you. You started building. Did you ever stop or did you just keep taking orders? He refunded everybody, right? So I guess at some point you paused it – or how did you do it?
Jay: 31:42
I think this is an important thing that we've learned over the years at Bold is you can do things that make money that don't build your business. And so we could have done this. We could have actually – forget software. We could have just kept this thing up. We probably could have charged $500 or $1,000, hired a team and manually set this up for everyone. And we would've had this like, agency that would've been manually doing this, and it probably would've made profitable, but we didn't create value, like intellectual property that we had. I remember one day, sitting around with like the four of us, our founders. And I said like, you know, "We could take our whole software team and we could mow grass all day and someone could pay us a hundred dollars an hour, and maybe we're paying our software developers $50 an hour. Why don't we do that?" And it was super clear. Like, I remember everyone saying like, well, because we're not a grass mowing company. And I'm like, well, yeah, that's why we don't. But it was hard. Sometimes the line gets a little bit blurred when it's still software, it's still development. But you have to know what increases the long-term value of the company and what doesn't.
Pablo: 32:57
How did that kind of real launch go? How quickly did you get to, you know, some meaningful number of customers and meaningful revenue?
Jay: 33:05
It was slow. Like it was one by one. It was like, we would get one Kickstarter campaign, they would use it, and then another one a couple days later. But every campaign that used it, we asked them if they would put this kind of like banner on their campaign that said – I can't remember exactly the wording, but it's something like powered by Kickbooster . When some of these campaigns started doing well and people saw that, they would click on it and learn about Kickbooster, so that helped. It's a flywheel. The first push is hard. The next push is still really hard, but a little tiny bit easier.
Pablo: 33:49
Even though Scott was able to get those $10,000 worth of orders, it still took a while. You almost would think if that's the case and when you launch it kind of for real, just going to explode off the bat.
Jay: 34:00
No, it still took a while. Yeah. Like I don't remember the exact numbers of like how many came in and how fast, but I just remember it being slow, and it was like, each one was kind of like a little celebration, like hey, we got another one, got another one.
Pablo: 34:13
And then it starts to build over time. And now, like, can you give me a sense of how big Kickbooster has gotten?
Jay: 34:20
It's the number one tool for crowdfunding affiliate tracking. You know what? Let's see if I have some of the stats. You know what? It's crazy numbers. I don't know if we have them on the site or not, but it's like hundreds of millions of backings have gone through a Kickbooster link. So like, we've directed , um, I don't know the exact number off the top of my head, but it's very, very substantial.
Pablo: 34:51
Thousands of campaigns, I assume.
Jay: 34:54
Yes. And it's gotten to the point where – so the money comes through us and we pay out affiliates, and it's not uncommon for us to be sending automatic payments to like, to Mashable for $50,000 for a campaign. That $50,000 is 10% of what they actually sent.
Pablo: 35:19
That's super helpful. All right, well, look, we'll wrap it up there, Jay. This has been great. We've gone into a bunch of different aspects of launching an SMB online, you know, SMB e-commerce, but really this applies to any SMB, SaaS, any SMB software that you're launching digitally, and really gone into the weeds around the most important pieces, which are figuring out a real pain point , validating it, and going to market in an efficient way, in an effective way in order to really get in front of people who truly need your product. And that's led to incredible success for this one product within the other many products within Bold Commerce, many, many of which are extremely successful as well. So thanks a lot, Jay. It's been a pleasure chatting with you today.
Jay: 36:11
It's been a lot of fun. Thanks for having me.
Pablo: 36:12
Thanks so much for listening. If you want to see more content, check out pmf.show.