Yash from Momentum (00:01)
Hello and welcome back to Building Momentum, the show where we peel back the curtain on the exciting and often chaotic world of building a successful SaaS business. I'm Yash, your host for this show where every episode we bring you the stories and strategies of founders who've been in the trenches, conquering churns, scaling their teams, and building products that people and businesses love. In this episode, we'll be chatting with Josiah, the founder of MyMarky .ai.
They're a powerful AI social media platform that can help you create 30 days of content in five minutes or less. And we're excited to hear their story and the lessons they've learned along the way. We'll be dissecting the wins, the losses, and everything in between. So buckle up. Grab your headphones and get ready to dive into the world of SaaS founders. Hey, Josiah. Thank you for joining in. How are things? How's it going?
Josiah Coad (00:48)
Hey, Yash, thanks for having me on the team. Going great. Good to be here.
Yash from Momentum (00:53)
Awesome. Thank you. Thank you for joining in once again. So tell us a little bit about you, your background, about MyMarky, and we'll take it from there.
Josiah Coad (01:02)
Sure, yeah. So, yeah, Josiah Coad, and I'm calling in from Austin, Texas, where it is way too hot for being 9 am I am a software engineer, and I have been in Austin for around four years or so now. I've worked at a few companies here, but most recently I was at Tesla, where I started Marky, and I worked on it for...
Yash from Momentum (01:12)
-huh.
Josiah Coad (01:33)
about in total about 10 months or so around nine months really on the side as a side project that never really from the beginning was intended to take over my job and have me leave Tesla. But that's how the cards fell. And so yeah, around October of last year, so about what is that seven or eight or nine months ago now, I left Tesla to go full time on on this startup.
Yash from Momentum (02:03)
So tell us, what's so special about Marky that it made you give up or leave Tesla? Tesla is a great company. What's so special about my Marky, or Marky as you call it? If you can talk to us a little bit about what the product does, how did you come about that idea, why you started working on it, that will be extremely.
Josiah Coad (02:24)
Yeah, absolutely. so Marky, what's cool about it. So what it does is it, you just put in a URL to your website and in just a few seconds, you'll start to see content that we've created for you and are suggesting to publish it across your socials and you just click approve on what you like and we take care of the rest.
And so for many solopreneurs entrepreneurs that have something, their business that they're passionate about, they're excited to share with the world, but it's either they don't know how, or they honestly just don't have the time, right? Yash, like we're all so busy. So the idea of publishing content and curating it and, you know, keeping up with the trends across, I think seven main social, the major social media networks that we support.
Yash from Momentum (03:09)
Yeah.
Josiah Coad (03:19)
is just totally daunting to most people. And so really what Marky exists to do is to help people share their passions with the world via effective marketing at one 100th of the cost. So traditionally, yeah, yeah. So we're really looking to disrupt the industry of social media marketing. And we have our eyes on even beyond social media, but right now we're really focused on social media.
So if you really want someone that's good at managing all your social media accounts, they really start at around 2000 a month. So we are on a mission to actually make that same quality and same offerings at 20 a month. And why I'm passionate about it is because we started, like when this idea started, I had in my mind, my parents who are both solopreneurs,
in very different ways. So my mom is a college consultant and she's super passionate about helping kids in high school get into college and find the college of their dreams and pay for it with scholarships and all that. So it's a real noble mission that I'm really proud of her for pursuing and helping kids do that. And I've seen how she's been able to really turn kids lives around by giving them a vision for their future.
So I'm really excited about that for her, but she actually lives in the state of Idaho in the USA, which is the lowest state in education. And so it's really hard for her to get her mission out, her knowledge. And so if she could have something where she could share her knowledge across all the social media platforms and have global reach, that would be absolutely huge for her. But right now she is...
She hasn't ever posted anything for her businesses on any socials. And so there's a huge gap there. And the idea of a solopreneur, like my mom paying $2 ,000 a month to get someone else to do this is, you know, totally out of the question, but $20 a month could is definitely reasonable for her. So that's my mom. And then my dad is in a similar spot as far as he's an inventor. He loves inventing. He's an electrical engineer. He's really good at it, but he
Yeah, he has absolutely no interest in being on social media and in marketing his products. So yeah, there's kind of a big gap there. And you know, the rise, I don't know, I'm sure you've heard of it, the rise of the solopreneur, probably a lot of our listeners on this tape are solopreneur, you know, and so there's a real big, it's a global movement. It's a global phenomenon that's happening. And I think Marky is the SaaS that's going to meet that need when it comes to marketing.
Yash from Momentum (06:11)
awesome. Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of people are now preferring to become a solopreneur, just sort of one person companies or OPCs. And they need effective channels to make sure that their message or the service that they're offering or the things that they're working on reaches to as many people as possible. And so I think Marky fits the bill. So give us a stock of.
where we are. So what's the size and scale of operations? How many customers do we have? What size are we at this point?
Josiah Coad (06:51)
Yeah. So we're at about a 40 K MRR. We were, I think at 20 when you and I started talking. so Marky is, has had a track record of growing at about doubling every month and a half since launching in September of 2023. And we have seen, you know, some ups and downs. The, we also just finished a campaign on AppSumo, which was pretty successful.
they, yeah, we just finished a 60 day campaign on AppSumo. I think we grossed around 770 ,000 of revenue. obviously AppSumo takes a large chunk of that, but that's what the product gross on AppSumo. of, of the campaigns on AppSumo, they've done over 200 ,000 campaigns and they told us that we were in the top 3 % of campaigns they've ever done.
And we are currently at around 11 employees, although as of today, we are onboarding our 12th employee. So super excited for that. A new friend and engineer.
Yash from Momentum (08:03)
Congratulations on that.
Congratulations on that. And so can you, so of course, over the last about a year or so, less than a year, you've scaled from one person operation, like just you yourself trying to build and find customers and trying to figure out whether there is enough need in the market and identifying use cases and things like that to now scaling to a 12 people team. What?
What is the difference in the challenges that you've solved when you were building versus when you are now scaling? So if you can talk a little bit about that.
Josiah Coad (08:41)
Mm -hmm.
Definitely. Yeah, that's actually something I am pretty passionate about thinking about. And I wrote a, like almost a blog article, really just a post on LinkedIn about it. cause I tracked in my notes, I like, I think every time I heard my one time, my skip manager at Tesla say every order of magnitude growth is of equal difficulty.
So when you scale from zero to one person, a customer, that's the same difficulty as scaling from 1 to 10, which is the same difficulty as scaling from 10 to a 100, same difficulty of scaling from a 100 to a 1000 and a 1000 to 10 ,000. So there's different challenges, right? But as far as the relative difficulty, I would say that that's about the case. And if you think about the relative, probably drop -off rate of maybe a lot of listeners on this call.
And myself included, right? Like most ideas you'd never get to that first customer. But what I would say to people that are just starting out and, you know, have an idea, you know, it's going to be really hard to get to that first customer, but it's the same amount of difficulty as getting from one to 10. There's different challenges. So I created a table actually of on the columns it's.
zero to one, one to 10, 10 to 100, 100 to a 1000, a 1000 to 10 ,000, which is the range that we're in right now. So we currently have around 3000 paying customers. But I find it really interesting to look at, okay, yeah, how does the business, the challenges that you're facing change as you grow and scale? And so for that, I think why, I mean,
As a lot of software engineers and entrepreneurs, you know, we have a lot of ideas. Most of them never get off the ground. Most of them never get that first customer, or maybe they'll get a first customer, but it's really hard to figure out how to get the intent customers. And you know, those first few steps are some feel like the hardest. And so yeah, that's when you are working to get that first customer, what I call that is consultancy stage.
So as a software engineer, I am really excited to want to build software, right? And so what I'd recommend to my fellow software engineers is hold back, don't build software too early because software is a sunken cost. And when you're testing something out, you want to reduce sunken cost as much as possible. And so how you do that is your first customer, you don't even build out a system for them. As software engineers, we want to think in systems, right? Because systems scale.
Yash from Momentum (11:29)
Yeah. Yeah.
Josiah Coad (11:29)
We want to do things that scale, but as most people know nowadays, the famous essay by PG is, you know, do things that don't scale. And so that first customer, you view yourself as a consultant. And so for me, that was, you know, can I find one person that I can just manage their social media for them? I'm not writing any software. I'm not building any system. I'm just, they're paying me. But that's the thing is you've got someone to pay you to do a service. And that's what's.
Personally, I know there's a division in Split here in the software world because you know, you can't, personally for us, we've bootstrapped. So getting people to pay us to do things has been our way of validation because I mean, every idea sounds great, right? And if you go to anyone with an idea, most people are going to tell you that sounds great, but until they put, but people really value their ideas by where they put their dollar, right?
And so I didn't want to leave Tesla or take big risks if I didn't know that actually people value this. It wasn't enough for people to give me lip service that, yeah, that's a good idea. Like if people are willing to pay for something, then it's a good idea, right? And so when you're going to the first customer, view yourself as a consultant, find someone, don't do this for free, find someone that will pay you because that validates that this is actually a need for them. And in the meantime, as a consultant, you are...
Yash from Momentum (12:25)
Yeah, yeah.
Josiah Coad (12:49)
honing your craft and you're learning and you can take notes down about, this would be so much more efficient if I built the software or the system, but hold yourself. It's really hard to do this as a software engineer because you want to get to the code, right? But like, hold yourself back. Don't do that. And that way you're not sinking costs because as soon as you sink cost into software, then you start having a sunken cost bias, right? Where you fall into the sun cost fallacy where it's like, well, I know the customer you.
Yash from Momentum (13:03)
Yep.
Josiah Coad (13:18)
And it happens subconsciously because since you already have written software, you're going to try to, everything's now a nail because you built a hammer. And so don't build the hammer too early. So be a consultant and get someone to start paying you. And that's how you get your first customer. And that's not how I think most software engineers or, you know, entrepreneurs think. They think about, I need to build this business that's super scalable. And you try to get your first 100 customers before you have your first customer. And so that's the consultancy stage.
And then you move into the, the friends and family stage. And so this is where now you're finding, up to 10 between one and 10 people and still don't write any software as much as possible. So Marky started as a Google sheet. With a glorified, it was basically a glorified Google sheet. It was a Google sheet that had a, just a little bit of JavaScript. You can write script inside a Google sheet and, and then you can call APIs and stuff.
And you can even hook up Zapier and no code solutions to do this. So our backend was basically just a no code solution. So this won't scale to like hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of people, right? But it will scale. It will help start to scale from that one to 10 people. So this is where you start. You can allow yourself to start thinking in systems, but still I'd recommend as much as possible not to write code. Because again, you're trying to minimize risk and risk is sunk in cost. And so...
Yash from Momentum (14:15)
Yeah.
Yeah.
about it.
Josiah Coad (14:43)
You know, do something. So for us, it was Google sheets with a little bit of JavaScript, just written in a script that was written by GPT that then called some Zapier, right? So like, again, basically I had sunken no costs and allowed me to iterate and really, I mean, I was on zoom calls with these people every day. I was like, they were like, you know, I was, it wasn't like a SaaS model in the sense that, it's just transactional. I don't know these people. Like, I mean, it was, it was my friends and family. Right. And so.
Yash from Momentum (14:52)
huh.
Josiah Coad (15:13)
That's how you scale to 10. And then from 10 to a 100 you've now entered the business phase. Now that's not the company phase yet, but it's the business phase. So, that one to 10 is called the side, the side hustle phase. So that's when you're like, you know, you come home, you're done between 10 PM and 1 AM you like do a little work, right? And that's how, so we were in, we were in the side hustle phase for probably around five months. And that allowed us to, and you know, it was,
It allowed us to iterate on these, these 10 people without basically sinking any costs. And then we went into the, and so then finally we got to like these people were like, I really like this. And at this point, you know, I hadn't sunk in any money. I didn't something that much time into it. So it's minimizing my risk, but it's like, okay, these people are, and remember these people are paying for it. So it's validation, right? And then you can move finally, once you have 10 people are consistently paying for your software.
Yash from Momentum (16:04)
Yeah.
Josiah Coad (16:11)
Then you can start thinking about writing or your software, your system. You can start thinking about actually writing software. So that's where then I hired on a, a front end engineer, to part -time to start coding out the website. My brother is a UX designer, from Apple. He's actually our CXO now, but he was working at John Deere at the time, but I got him, you know, paid him hourly to design out the designs for it.
And this was the first time that we actually like started putting some real money into the company because, you know, it takes money to build software. And so I was building out the backend, but we were paying Eli to do the UX and then the front end engineer. And that's when we actually built a website. And, you know, we first showed it to these 10 people and, and then, and then that's when we actually started opening up to the public. And so.
You know, that was like, that was a pretty exciting time because now you start getting people that you don't know that are using the software, you know, and that's like the first time that it's like, these people aren't just like doing this because they want to be nice to me. Like these people are actually doing it because it helps their business. So yeah, that's.
Yash from Momentum (17:13)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, they're actually finding value in what you're doing. So it basically, you transition from your users knowing you first and then knowing your software to your users knowing your software first and then you, right? Which is a phase where you sort of actively start to listen to what their needs are. And these are people who come in cohorts instead of.
Josiah Coad (17:32)
Mm -hmm.
huh.
Yep. And then you.
Yash from Momentum (17:49)
And these people don't have requirements. They have problems. And then you try and figure out solutions to those problems. And by the way, I made that mistake before Momentum with ClientJoy. So we also had ClientJoy, which was our own SaaS company. It was a CRM for freelancers and agencies. And we started building it before we started offering it as a service. And the sunken cost policy is a real thing with entrepreneurs. It is.
Josiah Coad (18:16)
Mm.
Yash from Momentum (18:17)
It works subconsciously and it's extremely powerful. The more you invest, the more you want to invest. And you think that the next piece of investment is going to fix things. But what was broken is actually you'll have to go back in time and then fix it. So that's absolutely true. So the next thing that I want to understand is the scale at which you are, which is roughly about $40 ,000 in MRR. And...
Josiah Coad (18:23)
Mm -hmm.
Mm -hmm.
Yeah.
Yash from Momentum (18:45)
doubling almost one and a half months. At this point of time, how are you dedicating your time? So you're also a back -end engineer. And so how much of your time goes into building the product versus how much of your time goes into figuring out your GTM channels and then scaling them? What does that look like?
Josiah Coad (19:04)
Mm -hmm. So yeah, after you hit that 100 customer mark, you're moving out of the business stage into the company stage. And for us, that was a lot of, I've had to, so that's when you really start scaling yourself. You just can't do it all yourself anymore. Right. And so we brought on my CTO joined at around that transition point and, he, and then the seat, my CXO joined around that transition point.
And that's when we started hiring on chat. We have 24 seven chat support. so we actually have three people on our team that just handled that. and so. Yeah, it's like an actual feels like an actual, and then there's, you know, a lot of legal and financial that I'm having to deal with now, like transitioning an LLC to a C corp and making sure our tax remediations and all this stuff that you don't think about and feels like, you know, it's distraction from building the software, but I'm like spending a lot more time on that now these days.
Yash from Momentum (19:56)
Yeah.
Josiah Coad (20:02)
I still love coding and but I mean honestly these days probably 20 % of my time is spent coding I review a lot of PRS but Most of it is spent around strategy and yeah meetings with other people and helping unblock them and building out the structure of the company to allow others to work.
and contribute to the highest degree.
Yash from Momentum (20:34)
So this brings me to the last question for the conversation that we're having today. And this is not a question to you, but it will be a question from you. So we've got a small tradition at Building Momentum, which is where every founder who comes on the show, we ask them, what is the biggest question about building the company that they're building right now that they have in front of them? So what's the biggest question that you have in front of you that you would like our next guest to answer?
Josiah Coad (21:04)
Mmm.
I think it would be around how do you go about thinking?
about when it's the right time to either niche harder or open yourself up to more markets and more customers.
Yash from Momentum (21:22)
Huh.
That's an interesting question, and I will be asking our next guest about this. Thank you for your time today. Thank you for joining in. For all the people who are watching this, thank you. I hope you found value out of this episode. We will see you again soon. Until next time, bye.
Josiah Coad (21:43)
Yash. Goodbye, everyone.
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