Yash Shah (00:00)
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 technology business. I'm Yash, your host for this show where every episode we bring you the stories and strategies of people 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 Mike from SpyFu.
SpyFu helps you look through everything your competitor has done and is doing. Every keyword, every ad, every variation and every rank over the last 18 years. They have 7 billion data points for over 109 million domains. We'll also understand their work with Rival flow. 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 building digital products. Hi Mike, how are you doing today?
Mike Roberts (00:49)
I'm doing great, thanks for having me. It's gonna be a good time, I can tell.
Yash Shah (00:52)
Awesome. Thank you for taking out the time and thank you for joining us. And so let's start with the absolute fundamental basics. What are the key, what is the big bad problem that you were trying to solve with SpyFu, which you're solving as of now as well. And what is Rival flow all about?
Mike Roberts (01:09)
Sure. So you can go to SpyFu and type in any website and see every keyword that they rank on on Google. You can see all of the ads that they buy and everything that they have ever bought over time. So you can kind of see the entire evolution of their, of their internet marketing strategy. Interestingly, you can also use SpyFu to track your own progress. Now I tend to tell people you should actually use Google search console for that, but
But people tend to like to use the same tool that they're comparing their competitors to. And as it turns out nowadays, you know, we've got, we've got like data on like 1.6 billion keywords. And so you, can kind of see all the big picture of where you're ranking on Google and, and how that moves daily. Cause it's, it's updated daily and like, you know, pretty much all the countries. So it's a, it's a, it's a pretty big platform that captures
everything that's going on. So the big problem that we solved that I've kind of been trying to solve for honestly like 10 years is to create like an SEO workflow that won't, you know, sort of that works is relatively easy, not like overly technical, right? Like, you know,
The like making something that's not overly technical makes it so that anybody can do it like you can hand it to your Your mom or you can hand it to like somebody that's not particularly skilled You know not technical But also that it won't tank you sometime, right? so that they're not like trying to create some kind of black hat thing usually When you create like an SEO workflow, I've been around the industry for like 25 years or something, right? usually Something that you're doing is either shady
or it's too hard or it doesn't work. One of the legs of the stool doesn't hold up. So I've been trying to figure out how to like build that perfect sort of, that perfect thing, right? For a very long time. And along comes AI and makes it so that it suddenly became pretty straightforward to do. And so we built that. And what we do is we look at, like, here's your scenario.
Yash Shah (02:43)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Mike Roberts (03:06)
Your most annoying competitor steals your top spot on Google. Right. And you're like, that was actually, that one kind of hurts because it was, it was actually one of the good ones, like something that I actually wrote. I'm the founder. I wrote that I wrote that blog article and now some idiot is outranking me. Right. Like it was clearly there's this fine. It's fine. It's it's looks good, but it's not as good as mine. but why does Google think that there's this better?
Yash Shah (03:11)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Mike Roberts (03:35)
And then we just don't really know. so we either like go, you what are you kind of feel bad about it? And you don't really know. You feel a little bit judged. So this is the problem that we solve. So what we do is we read your competitor's page using Chat GPT. And then we read your page and we say, what questions are the answering that you're not? And what questions are they answering more thoroughly? The reality is, is that you may have a curse of knowledge. You're actually probably the good one, the smart guy, right?
Yash Shah (03:42)
Hmm.
Yeah.
Mike Roberts (04:01)
You
knew what you were writing. You know the whole subject so far in and out that you forgot what it was like to be a beginner. And that's why they're outranking you, right? So then we just use AI to fill in those gaps so that it just, it flows perfectly into your article as if you wrote it. And all you got to do is copy and paste it. show you right where to put it, right? So that's the problem that we're solving. The crazy thing is, is that I figured doing stuff like this.
Yash Shah (04:09)
Yeah.
Hmm.
Got it.
Mike Roberts (04:26)
would improve your ranks, you know, would give you like a 15, 20%, but predictable lift in traffic. But what really happened is that we wind up getting like these 2X boosts. So actually in aggregate, if you run this on like say 10 pages on your site, you'll end up with about a 40 % overall lift, but they come in 2X lifts. So you double your traffic on some and some of them just kind of like
Yash Shah (04:32)
Mm-hmm.
wow.
Mike Roberts (04:53)
you don't get an impact from. But the aggregate winds up being 40%. And now that we've been doing this for about a year and a few months, I have long data from thousands of customers where they've plugged in their Google Search Console. so can see that statistically, this is all true. And I've done videos and so on where I just kind of like YOLO into customer accounts and show people. So it works.
Yash Shah (04:55)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Mike Roberts (05:17)
really well. it's a it's kind of like, I just I don't even care if you all buy it, you should just use it. Because all I really care about is creating value in the world, you know?
Yash Shah (05:23)
Hahaha
Yeah, no, absolutely. And I'll have more questions about this. would it be a like and tell me if I'm understanding this correctly or is this a fair way to put it, which is where, you know, up until the AI revolution sort of came about, I wouldn't say it's over like we're still in it. you were with SpyFu, you were in the business of giving me insights and telling me where you stand and sort of I was able to run my own benchmarks.
with my competitors and then I have the insights and then it's completely up to me to do whatever I think is right. But with Rival flow, specifically from an SEO standpoint, I now know what are the points of where all can I improve? But then I can also go in and then get it fixed using AI as well. So classic case of sort of an idea being ahead of time, but then technology
following suit fairly soon. Would that be a fair way to put it?
Mike Roberts (06:18)
Yeah, well, I mean, in reality, like when I when I launched SpyFu back, I mean, that was actually in 2006 or 2007. My like confidence level as a marketer was, you know, like, I was basically, I was basically an engineer that had learned some marketing, right? Like, I was kind of like, not overly confident that anything that I said, if I were to give you advice,
I'd be like, you know, you're probably more of an expert at like the marketing side than I am. Well, so now, you know, it's 20 years later and, and I've like, I'm like a keynote speaker. I've done a lot. I've marked it. I've brought many products to market successfully. Right. And so now like my perspective is you probably
Yash Shah (06:59)
Mm-hmm.
Mike Roberts (07:05)
I can probably give you good advice. And so I baked that into the product and you know, that's been an evolution, but like now I'm more interested in just being like, here's the answer. Just go do this. It will work. I promise. Right? Like just everybody just do this. It's going to be good. but that was not the case, you know, when I, when I launched, when I launched my food, that was more of like, I was a data guy and I figured out.
Yash Shah (07:16)
Hmm.
Yeah. Yeah. Good.
Hmm.
Mike Roberts (07:29)
that
it made sense to make a reverse phone directory, but for Google, right? you know, and then make it really big. And that's kind of how it was. So.
Yash Shah (07:34)
Yeah. That's an
interesting way to look at it. So one of the questions, and so by the way, I use SpyFu for, I'd say, close to at least half a decade, if not more. And that has helped us craft our strategy for the previous company that I was running, which was a SaaS product, CRM sort of a product, where SEO was a big part of our GTM. And then Google Ads as well.
The thing that I wanted to understand from you is, SpyFu seems like that product, which is very, very easy to over-engineer. Where as a founder, while you're building it, until you've reached a significant milestone, let's say, let's say that is $100,000 in annual run rate So until you reach $100,000 in annual run rate, it's extremely easy to think that, I don't have enough data, or I don't have enough, like the right charts, or I'm not showing the right insights.
or whatever the case may be, and you would go in and just keep on investing more and more into the product. So tell me, was it like the first zero to the first $100,000 in revenue for you, in annual revenue?
Mike Roberts (08:40)
So the way that this was, the way this has worked is before I had SpyFu, I had another software company called Web Scraper. The product was called Web Scraper Plus. And what it would do is you would let, could like sort of have this a WYSIWYG interface where you could take a date off of a website and put it into a spreadsheet or database. like I made it easy, you know, back in, you know, say 2005 or 2004. And
Yash Shah (08:51)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Mike Roberts (09:06)
And one of the things, like customers would always come to me, you know, because really the product was more of a solution or it kind of, you could basically leverage it. We basically often sell some consulting along with it, which wasn't my intent when I launched it, but it's just how the product worked. Many people just didn't, as easy as it was, they needed help. So we helped them. And
Yash Shah (09:23)
Yeah.
Mike Roberts (09:31)
And the thing that was kind of like frustrating about the customers is they weren't really very creative, right? They'd be like, I want to scrape this website and then make another website that's exactly like it. Like I just basically want to take all of the data from this site and put it into my own. then, and I'm like, why just like, I'm like trying to give them ideas. Like, okay, like scrape eBay motors.
Yash Shah (09:46)
Yeah.
Yeah
Hmm.
Mike Roberts (09:54)
and like
scrape Kelly Blue Book and then find the good deals or like, don't just try to like scrape Google results. then like, I literally was trying to give the idea away. I'm like, just make it like, make it so you can search something in reverse, make it so that you have two different data sources and then connect them. This is how you create value with data, but nobody really gets it. Right. So I've made a, I wanted to make a prototype that just showed people how it worked. So I made this thing called Google spy.
Yash Shah (10:04)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Mike Roberts (10:21)
and then did a press release, because back in the day, we didn't really have like social media. So that's what I did. I launched it with a, pardon me, a press release and it got into like the Wall Street Journal and crap like that. So then I sat on it for a while and then I built a prototype. And when we ultimately built a prototype and launched it, we actually wound up launching to probably $20,000 in MRR because we'd already built a
Yash Shah (10:22)
Yeah.
Hmm.
Mike Roberts (10:50)
a bit of an audience, right? Like there's a, it was free for a long time. And I'm a
Yash Shah (10:52)
Hmm. Yeah.
Mike Roberts (10:54)
believer that free is, you know, you got to something away for free because people will get up on stage, you know, at like conferences or whatever, and they'll like talk about free tools. People will shill your free tool, but they're not gonna, but they're not gonna talk about something that's not free, right? So keep something.
Yash Shah (11:01)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Mike Roberts (11:14)
in your product that's meaningful, that's free. And SpyFu to this day is still, like you don't have to create an account to go to SpyFu. You can go to SpyFu right now and type in a website and you can see the number of keywords. You can see the top, you know, top five, top 10 of everything. You can browse around and there's no limits. You don't have to create an account to do it. So.
Yash Shah (11:21)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Mike Roberts (11:35)
As time's gone by, I realized that that's not necessarily the surest path to incremental wealth, actually. But I think it's useful for the world. You know, I think that it's nice to have like things on the internet that you don't have to like create an account and like have and constantly be upsold. It's nice to have valuable data that's available for free on the internet.
Yash Shah (11:46)
Haha, okay.
So, yeah, and so thank you for that because you saved a lot of agencies a lot of time because we'd use, so whenever a client would come in and they'd have a request, if they were looking for an SEO agency, a lot of my friends run digital marketing agencies and they'd use SpyFu to sort of identify the gaps and convert that into a presentation and make it part of the pitch, right? And so that way it was sort of,
part of the tool stack, not just for the marketing team, but also for the pre-sales or the sales team as well when they were pitching to clients specifically for agencies as well. so, tell me, like one of the other things that I wanted to understand was on the idea around the free versus paid as to there are the significantly, I mean, it's very, very visible that there's significantly more things that I can do on SpyFu for free.
and versus most of the other platforms that I could name or I could use. so what went is the only thought process was that if we offer and create just value for free, then we'll be talked about more, more people will come to use it, or you're just sort of trying to break the internet and be like, hey, know, I've created something valuable. here it is for everyone to use.
Mike Roberts (13:15)
So like, some of the things that I did then...
weren't necessarily well informed. And some of the things that I did then aren't necessarily best practice 20 years later, right? So like one of the things that you could do that worked then would be to like make every page on your site indexable, you know? And so at some point we did have like a really large SEO footprint.
Yash Shah (13:25)
Hmm.
Hmm. Hmm.
Mike Roberts (13:39)
too large, like so much traffic that we actually couldn't handle it, right? Like we get like 10 million uniques per month and like straight up people would just be like, hey, I know your brands. I don't know why I know your brand, but like I did some search on it, you know, like, so that is no longer best practice.
Yash Shah (13:39)
Hmm.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Mike Roberts (13:58)
Unless you have, I mean, you really have to have truly unique and valuable content in order for that to work. And then of course it dilutes the rest of your brand. So it's not necessarily, you have to be really careful with doing that kind of thing. But back in the sort of 2008, 2009, 2007 timeframe, and frankly through like 2014, that was a pretty good strategy. And then we adapted.
So yeah, I mean, think that having a really big, like a very large number of indexable pages helped us, but we just had innovation, right? Like before there was SpyFu, there was no way to do what SpyFu did. Like if you wanted to know the keywords that your competitor was ranking on, you just have to guess and check, right? There wasn't, yeah, like we...
Yash Shah (14:40)
Yeah, I would guess create a spreadsheet and yeah.
Mike Roberts (14:43)
Everybody, everybody that's like, it's about a $500 million a year industry now. Right. And it's a very fragmented marketplace with lots of sort of copycat competitors or competitors or whatever. Right. Like it is what it is at some point, everybody copied us. Right. That's how they, that's how it works. But, but now there's just like a bunch of products that do similar things to SpyFu. and,
Yeah, I mean, that's just the way it is. It's harder to differentiate. It would be very difficult to do what we did. But because we innovated, because it was a singularity, like it had never been done before, and it was free, like it's just, that works. And it probably always will. Yeah, I mean, that worked.
Yash Shah (15:20)
Ha, yeah. Got it.
Mike Roberts (15:26)
with Nacho Analytics, like another company, I just don't do things that have been done before. And so that's like a gift and a curse. That's frankly the worst possible way to start a business is be like, you know, first thing is I have to like make something that's never been done before creating a market where nobody actually just, nobody actually said that they wanted the thing, you know, like you just have to like,
Yash Shah (15:28)
Yeah.
Hahaha
Yeah.
Haha.
Mike Roberts (15:51)
That's not the right way. The fastest way is to find something that exists, an existing market, and to make some incremental innovation.
Yash Shah (15:56)
Yeah.
So the other thing that I wanted to understand was why create a separate brand? Isn't that just a lot more headache? Why not just build it as an add-on within SpyFu or an additional module that is available on higher tiers or something like that? Why create a separate product?
Mike Roberts (16:18)
That's a great question. It might not be the best choice. I'll tell you why we did it, and then I'll tell you why it might not be a good idea. So the thing is, that Rival flow.
Yash Shah (16:25)
Okay.
Mike Roberts (16:30)
does something that's quite different than what SpyFu does. The core value proposition of SpyFu is download your competitors' keywords and ads and spy on people. Rival Flow is improve your existing content with AI. It's a different, totally different value proposition. And it's very important, I think, for us to say improve existing content with AI. Like those five words.
Yash Shah (16:46)
Bitch.
Mike Roberts (16:55)
It's not like you're not like, we're not building new content and, it's important that the content already exists because that's what makes the model work. And we're improving that existing content and we're doing it with AI, like all those things, every word in that matters. And that like little razor's edge in my view is the most important part of the marketing, that product, defining what the brand means and, and all that. The product.
Yash Shah (17:00)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Mike Roberts (17:18)
also has different scales or as you know, like it, actually has incremental costs. Every writing project that we do entails a decent amount of AI analysis and, it has real cost when you like go and browse around SpyFu frankly, you know, it doesn't really cost us. It costs us some, can quantify it, but it's fine. Just keep browsing around until you're super happy that you've
Yash Shah (17:31)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Mike Roberts (17:44)
you know, got a lot of data, right? There's really, it's an all you can eat platform.
So if we make the all-you-can-eat platform so that you can just also share it with all of your team members, that's not really a proper way to scale it. You have to pay for additional people, additional seats. On SpyFu, it's like 15 bucks. It's not very expensive to add additional people, but it does scale that way. With Rival flow, it's like, you know, really the cost increments are going to be in the number of pages that you improve, you know?
Yash Shah (17:55)
Hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hmm.
Mike Roberts (18:14)
I don't care how many team members you want on your team, you can have an infinite number. And I feel like that makes sense and is a point of virality, right? So, you know, like, because every person that uses it and gets to understand it is a node.
Yash Shah (18:22)
Hmm.
Mike Roberts (18:28)
of sneezing, you know, that can, that can tell other people about it. So I want more people to use it. I want you to invite all your team members for free. And I would frankly want that to happen with every product, but there's like group buys, right? With SpyFu, if I'd made that happen, like group buys, like we have like 25,000 people using like a single group buy account at some point. I'm like, you know what I mean? Yeah. It's a big thing, you know, like it's, it's a weirdly large.
Yash Shah (18:32)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Wow. wow. Okay. Yeah.
Mike Roberts (18:57)
business model, group buys. Like it's bigger than, like it's bigger than, I estimated it. It's bigger than Ahrefs. Like it's a pretty big business. Like group buys and aggregate. Yeah. So like, it's not, it's not, it's not nothing. But I understand it's a different market. It's kind of like.
Yash Shah (18:59)
Yeah.
Okay.
Mike Roberts (19:14)
It's kind of like when I had a web scraper, which is a perpetually licensed software, like the people that buy that download the keys or whatever, or cracks. It's not really my customer. doesn't, I think, you know, they're also a viral note, right? So anyway, the reason that we create another brand is because it's not the profit model isn't in perfect alignment with SpyFu, right? It's obviously still SaaS, but it scales differently. And I don't, I felt like it would be more difficult to combine those two and.
Yash Shah (19:18)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Mike Roberts (19:41)
the benefits of having a separate brand or having, having, being able to define that those five words associated with that one brand would be better than letting people get confused. That said, we wind up co-branding it. Like, and I didn't realize how incredibly valuable the existing brand that the recognizable brand that is SpyFu is. Like, because SpyFu has a lot of goodwill. Like,
Yash Shah (19:49)
Hmm.
Okay.
Yeah.
Mike Roberts (20:06)
a huge
amount of trust and goodwill that we built up that I just take for granted just walking through my life, right? Like, I'm just like, it's by food. But but people are like, if I just tell them about Rival flow, absence SpyFu they're like, Rival flow, you who are you? And then, you know, and then I'm like, hold on, we have a look at this. It's a pretty big difference.
Yash Shah (20:09)
Yeah? Yeah?
Yeah. Yeah.
It's another product, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It is a huge difference. while you seem to grasp that, I'll add one more anecdote to this, is that when you said yes to join us for this conversation, I literally walked up to my co-founders, came in and said, hey, you know, the SpyFu guy is going to be on our show. Because everyone in the
in the growth team knows SpyFu as a platform. You're like the first person on this show whose product like we've used and all, right? So to be honest with you, I didn't have to do research and all for this conversation, right? Because typically what would happen is if there's a guest who says, yes, I will sign up to their product and I'll check out and then I'll figure out a few questions. I'll write notes on who their ideal customers are and stuff like that.
Mike Roberts (21:00)
Yes.
Yash Shah (21:15)
I didn't do any of that. I knew that. So there's a significant amount of good brand image or goodwill that SpyFu carries as well. The other thing that I wanted to ask and understand is like, tell us about a growth experiment that you felt convinced that this will work. So some experiment that you ran in terms of growing SpyFu or growing Rival flow.
Mike Roberts (21:16)
Yeah.
Yash Shah (21:38)
The Rival flow could be more recent. But tell us about an experiment that you were convinced that logically, rationally, this makes sense. Absolutely, this has to work. But then for whatever reason, it didn't. And how did you figure that out? How did you know that, this is not working? So if you can share a little more on that.
Mike Roberts (21:58)
Mean I I have run so many tests, you know, so many tests so much split testing It's a big thing that we do try to like try to like optimize optimize stuff, The the biggest one okay, so I'll tell you kind of like The one that is that I have
Yash Shah (22:03)
Mm-hmm.
Mike Roberts (22:24)
that I'm sort of still not. I'm not not sure I kind of know. Oh,
Okay, actually, okay, I'll tell you, I'll tell you, I'll tell you one. I'll tell you one. It's probably the biggest. I'll first I'll tell you the biggest mistake, like, kind of like the quintessential like mistake that every, every software person makes. And it's like, it's almost like the first mistake that I ever made. Right. And that's, call it, I call it like sort of the Kevin Costner field of dreams, build it they will come. It's like the build it and they will come mistake. Right. So you spend, so I spent like 15 months building this product, WebScraper.
Yash Shah (22:51)
Yeah.
Mike Roberts (22:56)
And I mean, nights and weekends, I had like consulting gigs in between. The real thing probably took maybe two years to build, but honestly, I give it 15 months of my life. I would fall asleep.
Yash Shah (23:07)
Mm-hmm.
Mike Roberts (23:10)
on my couch writing code. And then I would wake up in the morning and keep writing code. And then I would like, I'd like go to the coffee shop and I'd be writing code. And this is like every single day of my life for 15 months, I wrote this code and I'm like, this is the greatest product that's ever been made. It is so good that I'm going to be instantly rich as soon as I, as soon as I launch it. Right. So I put it out the, you I get it out the door and I put it on all these back in the day. There were these like shareware sites or whatever that you put it on.
Yash Shah (23:29)
Yeah. Yeah.
Mike Roberts (23:39)
And I published it to them and I'm like, okay, now the money is going to happen. Right. And, you know, I mean, you probably know what the, what the story is, but the story is I made three sales or so in like, in like, I don't know, two months or something. Right. And, know, like it was, I made like, like $600 or maybe, or maybe a thousand dollars or something like that.
Yash Shah (23:43)
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Mike Roberts (24:02)
And I had to go back to work. had to go get a job. I kept working on that product and I ultimately got it to the point where it was making me $3,000, $4,000 a month by just continuing to like not work on the product, but the marketing and, and the product that had some problems. But that's kind of like the fundamental problem is you think that if you just put it out the door, that it's so good that people are going to love it. Okay. Now I'm a smart person.
Yash Shah (24:19)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Mike Roberts (24:25)
I spent 20 years in business. I'm relatively successful. I've got multiple companies under my belt, right? So one day in like roughly 2020, right approximately after the fall, if you want some kind of follow up conversation, where we talk about not joining the likes. So like I had a company fail.
Yash Shah (24:29)
Yeah, yeah.
Mike Roberts (24:44)
and catastrophically and crazily. And so at the end of that, I'm like, you know what? That was fun. We were going to go huge. It was going to be big. Now I want to do the same thing, but with SpyFu, right? So I'm like, we're going to make, I'm to take every centilla of profit that I have, right? All of my money, right? And I'm going to make it so that we have more data than anybody in the world.
Yash Shah (25:01)
Yeah.
Mike Roberts (25:08)
Right? I'm going to build the platform that can basically encapsulate all of Google. Right? And so we're going to basically build a platform capable of 100xing our data. And so what I'm like, OK, so we set out on this path. But I'm like,
What I need to do is like, let's say 10 XR data and then measure. I don't want to tell anybody about it because I need to understand whether doing this inherently causes people to either, you know, more of them buy or more of them be retained. I need to understand the fundamentals, right? Like what actually is happening.
Yash Shah (25:38)
Yeah.
Mike Roberts (25:43)
are they doing it? Meanwhile, as we're doing it, we're launching multiple countries and we're making the data update live, fresh, fresh to the second, Updating the entire site to go along with this and have more functionality. But because I'm so focused,
on the science of it to like measure whether or not it impacts people's behavior. I never announced it.
Yash Shah (26:11)
wow.
wow.
Mike Roberts (26:12)
Because science, right? Because science. So I've never,
so we did all this, right? SpyFu in like 2021, 2020, maybe had like 50 million keywords. We now have like 1.4 billion keywords. But every month we have like 1.6 billion keywords tracked. It's bigger than Ahrefs and SEMrush. For every keyword, I'm sorry, for every website,
Yash Shah (26:35)
Yeah.
Mike Roberts (26:40)
For every page, we have about twice as much data and 10 times as much paid data, PBC data, right? It's enormous and updated constantly. And I've never launched it because what happened is we get it all the way to the finish line. And I'm like, maybe I'll tell somebody about it now. shit. The AI, AI revolution. We've got to like make some stuff. So then we make Rival flow and we build all of Rival flow. And then, you know, I get to the end, you know, now we're at like, and I'm like,
Yash Shah (26:59)
Yeah.
Mike Roberts (27:06)
do now? Right? Like, do I launch it? Like, should I? I think the answer is to launch it to like relaunch to launch something. Because clearly it's a mistake to have not to, you know.
Yash Shah (27:07)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
wow! Wow! It's also like after a certain amount of traction it seems a little weird also that how do I launch something that's like already popular right? but yeah, makes sense.
Mike Roberts (27:18)
Yeah.
Yeah, well, I mean, I have to tell everybody about it and the way that we
sort of structure our communications is like kind of bursts, you know, like I don't really know the way to do it really, just kind of like have a...
A theme, if you will. So that's a...
Yash Shah (27:44)
And so communication sort of, so before I let you go, the last thing that I wanted to understand from you was at some point of time, were, I think, you were a company that worked in one place, right? So you had an office or maybe a few places. And then now I think you are a 100 % remote company, right? And so,
What are some of the, so communication of course needs to change significantly better, but like why do that? So why, isn't it more inconvenient to have a remote team instead of having like all hands on deck in one place, walking over someone, pat their shoulder, there are no flus around. So why?
Oh, I'm sorry, there are, I think in US there's a bird flu or something like that. But why do that?
Mike Roberts (28:35)
It's a great question. so honestly, the reason of course, so we had an office, I still have an office building, I still still own the office building. And, but we don't go to it, like, we just don't. We go to it maybe, like, every like once every, at least once a year, at least once a year. We have, we have, we have, we have like some party there. And
Yash Shah (28:42)
Okay.
Hmm.
Wow, okay.
Haha.
Mike Roberts (29:00)
And so it's like this, like I actually always thought for sure that at some point at the end of the pandemic that we would go back.
Yash Shah (29:07)
Yeah.
Mike Roberts (29:08)
But let's roll back to the beginning of times, right? When you first founded the company, right? I mean, you had your founding team. But it's like the first day that you hire your first employee is the first day that you lose your actual freedom, right? Because you have to go to the office.
and set an example. I don't go to the office because I need to go to the office. I go to the office to show people how to work. Like to show up to like, you know, you lead by example, you know? And so I can't, I can't just like, like I'll work until four in the morning until five until like, until eight in the morning. I'll just keep working. Right? Like I work, I don't stop. only, that's all I want. what I do. I mean, I have kids. I'm a dad.
Yash Shah (29:29)
Yeah? Yeah?
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Mike Roberts (29:52)
I do the things, right? But I don't really have a problem with motivating myself. And I am intrinsically interested in solving problems, right? Like, I just like doing this stuff. If I could, if I like, I'm not really going to retire. Because I just will keep solving problems, right? So like, that's not, yeah, yeah. So I like doing it.
Yash Shah (29:58)
Hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah, there'll be newer problems to solve.
Mike Roberts (30:16)
But when I go in, when I hire people, I want to show them how to work, how to think, how to operate, how to work. And I think that that's an important thing. But you lose that freedom. And actually, I think that I prefer having that freedom back.
You know, even though I actually miss my employment, you know, miss hanging out with my team, I would miss hanging out with my family more. And I also, we've, we've obviously done it. We had a chance, we had an opportunity to, to, restart that thing. And we were like, man, it's such a burden. mean, it's a lot of, I mean, okay, look my office, I couldn't have a better like commute. I skateboard across the park.
Like my house is on one side of the park, my office is on the other side of the park, and I skateboard across it. It's the best possible commute. Like my office is like, you know, it's got like five, it's got like 12 kegerators in it and like video games and ping pong. It's a beautiful place that anybody would want to work. But I would rather just like come and sit down and start working and not like you have to even brush my teeth. do brush my teeth, but.
Yash Shah (30:57)
Haha
Hahaha
Mike Roberts (31:23)
But broadly speaking, it's a more, I get more done. I'm able to get more done. And so I didn't think that I would prefer it, but I do. And I frankly think that everybody does. There are probably some people that should be in the office because it doesn't, they're probably not very self-motivated. The people that don't need that make up for it.
Yash Shah (31:26)
Yeah. Yeah.
Mike Roberts (31:45)
Right? So the high achievers, the ones that actually get things done, lots of them, lots of things, like they get, they get 30 % more done. And then the other people get like 80 % less done, but they were like less efficient in the first place. And ultimately, you know, that's sort of the challenge or the rub or whatever. You have to sort of, it all like evens out in a sense.
Yash Shah (31:53)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
It sets off, yeah.
Yeah,
yeah. And so while we may not say it, but this is the first thing that you first time that I heard this as a reason. And now that I think about it, at the top of my head, it seems to be true. So while I may not say it, that I come to the office for the convenience of having to like just call an impromptu meeting or have an important conversation with a coworker, out with them and so on and so forth.
But subconsciously, this is one of the things that it sort of happens in the head, which is, hey, know, look how hard I'm working or look how hard that person is working. And, you know, it's something that I would subconsciously want them to look up to or try and do that as well for the organization. Interesting take, Mike. And I want to thank you for.
for taking out the time and for all the people who've been listening or watching this on YouTube or Amazon Music or Spotify, you already have a SpyFu account but check out Rival Flow. so do check out Rival Flow, sign up for it, and you can connect with Mike on LinkedIn. His username is MrSpy, which is something that I realized just earlier. But thank you, everyone, for joining in and for listening. And thank you especially, Mike.
for joining us for this conversation as well.
Mike Roberts (33:22)
Thanks for having me. I will note also that Rival Flow you can sign up for without a credit card. just like, you know, you can, and you can do, you can do, you can do plenty of improvements. So, you know, it's lots of people use it that way. I mean, I just want you guys to get value in anything that I produce. So it's, it's, it's pretty much what motivates me. It's been great. Thanks for having me on.
Yash Shah (33:37)
Yeah.
Awesome.
No, absolutely, Mike. Thank you for taking out the time. We'll connect soon, Bye.
Mike Roberts (33:46)
Right on.
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