📈 What’s Maropost’s secret sauce for hitting a 50% EBITA? 🎯
In this episode of SaaS Cast, Ross Andrew Paquette unpacks the story. No frills, just the raw journey of disciplined growth, strategic bets, and a dash of audacity
🚀 For SaaS players chasing big profits with bootstrap grit, this one’s for you.
⚡️ Powered by: Build with Assembly
📈 What’s Maropost’s secret sauce for hitting a 50% EBITA? 🎯
In this episode of SaaS Cast, Ross Andrew Paquette unpacks the story. No frills, just the raw journey of disciplined growth, strategic bets, and a dash of audacity
🚀 For SaaS players chasing big profits with bootstrap grit, this one’s for you.
⚡️ Powered by: Build with Assembly
Welcome back to another episode of the SaaScast. Here we keep it simple no jargon, no fluff, just straightforward insights from some of the heavy hitters in the SaaS world. And today we're thrilled and excited to have the founder and CEO of Morrowpost Ross. It's great to have you with us. You've built a truly remarkable business. It's not every day you see Canadian company rise in the ranks of Deloitte's technology Fast 500. You stand tall as one of North America's fastest growing marketing automation platforms. So, yeah, great to have you on the show. How was your Thanksgiving long weekend?
Speaker 2:Thanks, Jason. Thanks for having me. I was unadventful, unfortunately, since I'm over in Sweden and forgot about them.
Speaker 1:What's the weather like in Sweden? Hopefully it's warmer here than there in Canada.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sunny, but cold, I'm not sure how it is in.
Speaker 1:Canada, but yeah sunny, it's been freezing. It's like single digits right now. All right. Well, let's dive in. Let's roll it back a bit. Can you share a little bit about your journey? What sparked the idea for the business and what inspired you to dive into marketing automation?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so actually I was in sales originally for an SMB email marketing platform called Campaigner. This is now going on 15 years ago, 2008. Wow yeah, my first real job in tech, I guess you could say after university or what I would call semi-university and I spent about two years or a year with that company, a year with one out of the US, and realized the support and sort of service that customers were getting back then was absolutely terrible compared to the price points that they were paying. And why did I get a basic platform built up and then have 10 customers, do a half a million of revenue per year and live in my apartment and have a small team and just kind of go from there?
Speaker 1:And so you made this ambitious kind of like I'm going to bootstrap it, I'm going to chase innovation, I'm going to make impact, and so where did that take? You Talked through those first couple of years. What was it like?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it was so pretty unique because I was also working at the same time that I was starting Baruppo, so the income I was generating for myself in a in another sales role I had not selling marketing automation, coincidentally, selling ERP software to the construction project management space, which was dramatically different, so you know went from $50 or $200 a month deals to, like you know, 500,000 a year, 5 million a year contracts, and so that was a really exciting period because not only was I traveling like crazy, I was watching the development of the Mariposa platform and we had a few customers at the time, people I had worked with or sold historically was able to get them on board.
Speaker 2:And yeah, then from 2014 to 2016, we basically went from about 300,000 of revenue to about 22 million in revenue and I think wow through most of that process we had maybe you know, 20, less than 20 people in the business on that ladder end, so there was just like an insane amount of growth. You know which I was the infrastructure behind it that's for sure.
Speaker 1:So to 22 million in revenue. Did you have any capital to support that growth?
Speaker 2:No capital at all, no, and we were insanely profitable back then. We were around 70% free cash flow.
Speaker 1:All right. So what's the? What was the secret sauce for getting that? That? That CAFO and a lot of hard work and so high, A lot of everybody had a lot of different jobs.
Speaker 2:I would say, like I was at the in the earlier stages of that, I was the sales rep and also the support rep and also the billing rep. So I had a couple of different aliases in our Zendesk account or our QuickBooks account at the time to communicate with clients. But that's, you know. Really, one of the core areas was just assuming that we're not assuming, but believing that we're running a business and that this is the only way. Like I didn't have any experience in the capital raising arena, so every time we would, you know, spend a little bit more, I was thinking, hey, I'm spending money that we may not have next month if we lose a client or something happens that could truly impact the business. So a lot of that I wouldn't call it fear at the time it's certainly fear or paranoia would drive a lot of those, you know, cash flow-centric decisions.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I think the fear of success and the fear of tomorrow is, you know it's on every entrepreneur's mind, but you know you definitely chose a path, you know that's not walked as often. I think venture capital takes the center stage most of the time. You know, we see these shiny valuations. We don't very often see the blueprints of success from you know, inspiring entrepreneurs who have accomplished incredible things, like bootstrapping a business to. You know the ranks that you've risen to and you know, and now have this opportunity, not just to service a Canadian market, a North American market, but you're also international as well.
Speaker 1:And so, yeah, I think you're a great testament for today's theme, which is you know how do I go from bootstrap to breakthrough and what's that experience like, what's that journey, what's the? You know the reasons to do that today and then just where you see the future of bootstrapping going. And so you know, on that note, let's dive right in and talk about the bootstrap experience. And so we know it's a road less traveled. It's got to have its own unique hurdles that are different than you know if I raise venture funding. And so you know how did you navigate those times and keep on a growth trajectory, like that revenue bump that you did with such a small team. It's incredible.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I mean the obviously the typical areas of challenge in terms of building the organization, certainly in that high growth stage, was, you know, bringing on the right people. I would say that it was also very exciting at that time to work the amount of hours I would, which was like 18 hours a day, 20 hours a day, because I was doing a lot of the things that I love to do, which was meeting customers, talking about products, selling them products. So when I come back to the challenge side of things, it really became how do we scale this out? How do we keep the consistency in terms of our support? Well, at the same time, blending that with the profitability aspect.
Speaker 2:So meaning that when we're building up a team, let's say from a support perspective or development perspective, we're obviously not hiring people out of Silicon Valley. We were hiring a huge amount of our team out of India, in particular, so we're managing the cost profile but at the same time, are we getting and maintaining that quality that we're looking for? And so, while it was definitely the most exciting or one of the most exciting times in the business, the challenge was really moving that from Ross and Coa, as I still like to say today to a truly scaling organization. That was very painful. I would say it's October 10th, 2023. I would say from 2016 to now. We're just doing it now.
Speaker 1:Wow. And so when you were on that journey, what books, what mentors, resources helped you along that journey? I don't think it's None Okay. Yeah, I would say this yeah, go ahead. No, so, absolutely none. So it was just that painful learning through mistakes, through impacts to revenue, and so what would be your advice? If founders are considering this bootstrap route, it sounds like each experience is pretty unique. Then what's your advice for things to keep an eye out on during that stage?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it depends on the individual and the shifting direction slightly. Just in terms of your question, the challenge that, or the question that always comes up right, is what's the hardest stage of growth? Is it zero to one right One to five, five to 20, and so on and so forth? For us, the zero to 20 year old and those stages in between, that was the I wouldn't call it easy or anything like that, but that was much easier than what's called the 50 to 100 stage.
Speaker 2:Because zero to 20, and I've watched a few other businesses do this the founder can do a lot. If the founder has a sales skill set or background, they can be very strong on partnerships and growth and, of course, converting those customers. But if they don't have that, it's going to be really, really hard to get to 20 million, which is obviously still significant, and so you still see a decent amount of companies get to this kind of 5 million, 7 million. Sometimes rarely do they crack 10 if they don't have that strength. And so I think for us, when looking back, it's about figuring out where your individual skills lie, whether you're one founder or two co-founders or so on and so forth, and then understanding what are we absolutely going to need that we don't have today, and I know that sounds very obvious, and this is why when people raise $10 million, they go up to hire all those people, but they don't think, well, how am I going to be a value to the company if I'm not the one selling the software, designing the software, writing code rate, if you've got a technical co-founder or being just a general operations expert or having an operations skill set? And I think people get really bogged down in terms of figuring out where they fit in there versus the raising capital in that example.
Speaker 2:But when you're bootstrapped you have to really just learn as you go in as many areas as possible, and that's inherently going to keep the cost down. So we went from one stage as anybody who knows me, I'm not a huge fan of talking about myself, but I'll try my best to do it today, since it might be helpful when we got to this $22 million realized we need like a hundred more people in this business it came out to. We actually did the analysis a couple years after that. There was about 64 people doing the job. After that I was kind of doing myself so whether that was coming up with something for product innovation, responding to support tickets, dealing with customer success, areas of focus and growth. It was that many and I think that's what makes these bootstrap founders much more unique. But they need to be mindful of how do I then scale this business after some years and that's, as I mentioned earlier, taken seven years for us.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I think what we're walking away here is you got to be a little bit of a Swiss Army knife and have enough experience within each area that helps grow a business from finance to marketing, to product to sales and I think the three ingredients I would look for if I'm going to take the bootstrap route is one I've built up a strong enough position within the market as a thought leader for the market that I will sell to. It is easy to access and I'm viewed as a thought leader. And then, as far as resources go, I think zero to one is a great book. The hard thing about hard things is another great one. That's definitely helped me along my journey, although they're just books, but if anything else, they're a suitor being like, wow, that's a way worse situation than I'm in right now Thank God, I'm not in that one Then it served its purpose.
Speaker 1:But Shunning external funding, Ross, that's like both daring and inspiring at the same time, especially that moment where you're like we need a hundred people to do what we were doing. And so what were the core principles and values that acted as your compass, providing you a sense of direction and grounding not to be tempted, amongst all the challenges and struggle, to just go out and do what so many others were doing, which was take money.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I would say everything came down to work ethic. I know that can fall under a value, can fall under principles, discipline yeah. Yeah, I mean we can get into like integrity and trust and all that kind of stuff, like leaving that aside and looking at the realities of building a bootstrap business and how you get there. There's a lot of people that will say, well, you're not going to hard work your way to a hundred million. I disagree with that. I literally do, say you can hard work your way to a hundred million.
Speaker 2:Do I think that one or two people can hard work their way to a hundred million? No, I don't think that. But when I look back, every time we talked about the principles and values, principles have been easier, but the value side of things I always used to say it wasn't just about being customer first. I would say now that's our approach for sure, because of course we're trying to apply our, not try them. We're working to always apply our values and our principles across a 400 person plus team. But it all came down to work at my co-founder at the same time, or my, you know it became a co-founder a couple years in. He would work you know, he's an engineer, technical co-founder. He would work 48 hours, even more to the player I'd be like please go to sleep. So when you've got that marrying of that work ethic between two people, they'd one on the business side, let's call it one on the technical side. I mean, that's where, obviously here, the magic really happened.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no kidding. So that's a perfect segue into, you know, thinking through team building and culture. So you know we need teams to be motivated. We need them to be skilled because they're handling multiple roles within a function. So much making Thanks. When financial resources are limited because you've chosen the bootstrap Model, how did you go about a attracting the right people and then, more so, getting them to accept your approach of bootstrapping to build the business? Yeah, and during those hard times, you know keeping them focused on innovation and impact.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I would say that was never our challenge because we weren't hiring that many people.
Speaker 2:In the US in particular, where I think there was kind of questions, concern, inability to Connect with the model, would be the case, we've of course, done that now, which we can get into with our current team, and we happen to have, I wouldn't say Stumbled across by any means, but certainly found the right people within the market that have the extreme level of experience but, the same time, come from you know the non New York, miami, chicago, you know San Francisco, not to pick on any of those areas.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah where you know they're coming from, the Midwest, where it's like, yeah, we want to. We come from a background where people built businesses. Either our families did in their in their history or we worked at, you know, the more gritty Industries before we got into the tech space. So they still have that appreciation.
Speaker 2:So I'm getting a bit ahead of ourselves in terms of, yeah, where we were, but at the time a lot of our headcount was coming, you know, out of Canada, certainly a fair amount, but then also out of out of India in terms of the other market where we add, you know, at least half, there's not more of our, of our team, so we weren't running into as many of those questions. And I think you know again, back in 20, you know 14, 15, 16 we were still in that, like we being the industry, we're still in that infancy of these crazy valuations, crazy capital raise. Of course people are going out of raising 10 million, 20 million, 30 million, but it was a little bit earlier on, before the you know, capital abuse of nature. That's, yeah, come to light it, you know, apply.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and now we see it being corrected and exactly very pronounced and and much needed way, and so I guess you know that's a perfect segue into when you think about, you know, budgeting and how crucial of an aspect that becomes right making every dollar count while ensuring it isn't stunting growth. That's definitely a dedicated balance. So you know, how did you, how did you do that? Right, I think you know, throughout this conversation, you know we've heard, like look at other Countries to build your team, right, look at other markets to build them. I'm sure that can definitely help you do more with the last, but we're some of the other, you know, I would say, key Ways that you're able to. You know, balance that for sure.
Speaker 2:So, funny enough, like I've actually spoken a few times on this live and it's the one topic, because it's the number one question I always get is how did you build a, you know, a hundred million dollar company doing 50% free cash flow or 50% EBIT are, yeah, or what have you? And I always feel like a bit of a crazy person because it's really just two areas. You mentioned one already which is just and in an argument, when I say people management, I mean the management of them, I mean management of the locations they're operating within, management of the cost profile you're looking for and, unfortunately, balancing that which is is Ultimately gonna be harder and it's like when you have the bootstrap conversation, which is just like it's gonna take you a couple years more to get to the same place. I'd you know you hear this from other people who bootstrap the businesses and thinking of the guys at MailChimp in particular and stepping back the. That is one of the main areas and it's just harder for people to For the, for the average person in tackling the average leader in tech. To think of that.
Speaker 2:I think I could hire these three people in you know a high-cost location, or I could literally hire 50 people in this lower cost. Okay, is it gonna be harder to manage them? Harder to you know? Potentially not grow the business, but grow whatever area they're in, whether it's support and say development or so on. But that is one of the core areas and, like I said, I feel like a crazy person because it seems so obvious. Or it should be right. Yes, the second part, which is equally is, is simple, is literally just not paying less price for everything. I think people have gotten so comfortable with signing up for every she's my fucking SaaS product available on market that it's just like you it's no wonder it's a death of a thousand cuts.
Speaker 2:So, whatever I and, of course, no different than yourself, I have lots of friends and sass, like you know, going through the market that we're in now Not only now, but now, or the last 24 months, like you know, what am I? What am I doing? You know, make send me the list of all your employees and send me the list all the SaaS solutions you have, and Just by looking at that, I'm like here's how you break even. Either, unfortunately, you have to remove these people from the business and start doing more of their jobs with the people you have, including yourself, and here are all the solutions that you probably didn't even know you had signed up for in the first place. Let's get rid of those and and within that.
Speaker 2:I have like. There's been more than a Number, more than 10 examples where they went and did, though ran through those two exercises. All of a sudden, this business is breaking. Not to say that's everything at the end of the day, but that's at least where they got to.
Speaker 1:Gotcha and so, like the other side of you know, like, like budgeting is around, you know the product development, you know that what you're going to invest into the IP of your business and so you know you built teams For other functions of the business in in other markets and I'm sure you have. You know engineering talent in those other markets. Have you explored you know other ways of you know maybe it's in your early days or you know when you're scaling up of ways to you know co-create with product, co-create product with you know other types of partners, maybe it's. You know your cloud provider, or, yeah, you know Whatever it might have been. What were those things you explored and did any of them have an impact on helping you do more with less?
Speaker 2:So, funny enough, we were actually the opposite of that, which is between myself and my CTO. We both, or neither of us, believe in integrating third-party technology into our platform. That doesn't mean we don't have hundreds of tech partners and so on, sure, but we really didn't believe in that and I think that has benefited us greatly because we ultimately were beholden to anybody else in terms of our right I don't mean our like our tech stuff from a code perspective.
Speaker 2:But, like you know, there's I see a lot of businesses now where it's like you know they're affecting the outsourcing a function. It's like you don't control that. What if all of a sudden, they try to take that function? Yeah, so I think I think where we were, as you were asking that question. What was really interesting is that how we develop the product and how we have today is where, as our mutual friend, michael from from Vidya, I would say, is, yeah, the CEO is also the chief product officer and sometimes that's different or difficult Sorry, right, goes back to that old skills.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we were having at the start, and what I mean by that is if you don't have enough Vision, like real vision, right, there's this vision, yeah, there's vision.
Speaker 2:You know, with the founders any of the founders are, you know, effectively have this absolutely phenomenal, you know, head of product it's gonna be a real challenge because the runway is just not there in terms of whether it's product market fit, whether it's, you know, being able to to drive new sources of revenue and, like we're seeing in the market today, right, people don't really have a viable business. They just raised a lot of money and dumped it onto this like relatively simplistic idea. So I would say that you know. Back to your question about, like, how we sort of prioritize that side of things or where we were competitive, it was because the vision was quite a bit extended. You know, I mentioned earlier that you know our path from a gross perspective of you know, was our scale perspective was 2016 until basically now we're finally seeing it on the product side. It was the same, the vision that we had back in 2016. We're talking about depressing a little bit, but back in 2016 is now just being realized, like, and I, when I say yeah, I mean we're done.
Speaker 1:I think we're just we're just really just getting started yeah right away just getting started on.
Speaker 2:So that can be tricky, but the good thing was is we always Knew it was consistent through the organization. Whether we executed well was another story, but at least we were consistent in like here's who we are today and in being a marketing automation solution and here's who we want to be tomorrow and being marketing automation, retail, e-commerce and and help desk in particular.
Speaker 1:What's your, what's your advice to? To founders who, again, you know you just said hey, we've realized our vivid future that we set out, you know, a long, long, long, long time ago, and so it can often feel like you're chasing a carrot, you know on a never-ending journey, right, and so you know evoking a a plethora of emotions, depending on your team and and and and when you are in a business. So what, how did you manage that? Like I Go through that every day, struggling to manage it, chasing that, that carrot. So what's your advice?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so is the question you mean in terms of managing the carrot around, the vision of the product or Just the sort of business direction the length right, like, yeah, like the length.
Speaker 1:Like we I think we're all, as entrepreneurs, a little bit over ambitious, and and justly so. But like, how do you manage your own expectations, your team's expectations, like I Mean, you just hit that milestone this year, right? It a lot of positivity and optimism.
Speaker 2:I mean, okay, I think that's so, just believe it. I think, yeah, I think you have got to be, like you just said, a believer and be ambitious with those beliefs. I actually, to be honest with you, I frequently know just you know, and to the friends, family or someone in passing that there's not enough ambition out there. There's too much. You know, it's like everything that we're seeing the world today, everything is the tinder of uber. You know, yeah, you're a bit like how do we do it faster, how do we sub build a business faster, how do we sell it faster, as opposed to saying I want to build a next XYZ version of Salesforce or IBM or or got it.
Speaker 2:You know whatever that means in terms of that scale, and I think that's what relates to that ambition. But even if I took it back, like, let's say, I Follow their stock price a lot, so I'm gonna use them as an example. Let's say I'm I'm a Santa right, which is, let's call it, a newer version of of Gira. You know that. And there's not common, all these companies.
Speaker 2:If I were them and I hope they do this, since I own some of their stock the first thing I would have done, you know, maybe two, three years in, if I could go back from Mariposa too. Yeah, that's what we did. So I maybe shouldn't say that I would be thinking about the other product lines that are gonna be Complement, where I think people get caught up as, like, we just want to do this one thing and we want to do this one thing really well, as you're seeing or sorry, as we're all seeing right now, that doesn't work very well in terms of scaling any of these businesses, and people are seeing a lot of pain because it's like they don't have a second line of revenue.
Speaker 2:And Right, that's the really important factor to think about ahead of time. Am I building something that can have another line of revenue, which you know there's most of the time there is, but I'm not considering it early enough or early on enough? Is that going to impact our ability to to do that later? So what I mean is right are we configuring our database correctly?
Speaker 2:Are we thinking of the? Yeah, you know the architecture that we're building from early enough doesn't have to be a meeting, yeah, but has to be a little bit earlier than you know. I Six months.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's funny you say that because almost in every single conversation I have with SaaS founders, there's two you know cobbler stones and they happen in this priority infrastructure. So governance compliance, even one as simple as I sell to retail and I accidentally chose the wrong cloud provider because I can't get business, if you might be jumping on that one.
Speaker 2:This is a yes before about like sort of like budgeting and cost. Yeah this is an area. So I've managed for last well, since the founding of the company, our relationship with our first server Providers so the rack space, pure ones, yeah. So I think our first company was like server monster or something like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah now be a little class exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, wasn't yeah it wasn't like yeah, doesn't really inspire a lot of confidence actually no and nor did it at the time. I'm like I'm pretty sure these guys are plugging in servers to keep right off online.
Speaker 1:I'm like, I'm not gonna be able to keep them in my mind with fans, just exactly, 100% everything.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're getting calls. They're like, yes, somebody tripped over a cable and your application awesome.
Speaker 1:So all the servers fell down and they're all in millions of pieces.
Speaker 2:We hope you have a backup, absolutely, because we don't know though, exactly now, the the issue is, you know, like you said, with with choosing your cloud provider, you make the wrong choice there and doesn't necessarily mean actually does you choose the wrong provider. These are not things you can unwind right now. We were talking earlier about removing SaaS products or removing, you know, headcount. Yeah, you can't just call up Amazon and say, hey, guys, I just don't want to pay this month, right, can only yeah, they're half my bill. Unfortunately, that's not a reality.
Speaker 1:No, and then I well, here's the other thing we're talking about budgeting also the cloud provider. You choose their source of funding non-dilutive cash, like just money waiting, and also there is source To co-sell with. Yeah, and in your early days, if you can co-sell along a giant hundred percent.
Speaker 1:You know. You know we've helped tons of SaaS companies that we work with. Once their infrastructure and application is in a place to scale and grow and Microsoft believes it can you know they're willing to To co-fund your success, both in, you know, monetary, to get you to that place, yeah, but then also help you unlock that growth, and so I think that's key area.
Speaker 2:I couldn't know another.
Speaker 1:Another area that's been, you know, very hard for for companies, irrespective of what state you're in, bootstrap or scale up is, like you said. We need to be placing more bets and building adjacent products that unlock new revenue streams or or solve adjacent problems that customers are willing to pay for and great, that's a heart like a. Detecting those opportunities is very hard. So I agree with what you said founder led sales and product until the moment that you can't Feasibly do it because you're exhausted, and that's a fine line, absolutely. But you're likely see those signals in those opportunities a lot faster and be able to capitalize on them quicker.
Speaker 1:The challenge then becomes how do I go and build it? Because I've got my core team building our core, our core platform, keeping it operational. You know again, probably in a lot of ways doing modernization for their application, because you know they didn't think. Microservices and all the things that you said that are very hard, yeah, undo. So, learning that from the first time around and now you know thinking about I got to build all these new Products to create new revenue streams. What's your advice for how to, how to approach? That Approach was prior. Well, I mean there's the capacity Standpoint. Right, like how do I is there, you know, was there a percentage of time that you would place into To new ventures, building new ventures versus yeah meaning our core platform.
Speaker 1:You know what, what? How did you do that balancing act? And then, more so, you know how did you, I guess, prioritize if a customer said I'm willing to pay acts for a feature, and your entire team set to an OKR to deliver.
Speaker 2:That was a tough balance, for sure. Yeah, I mean, it would see, as we were sort of discussing and we can get into, you know, some of the acquisitions we did, in that we really struggle to do what we're discussing right now or previously around launching new products. Like I said, we're just now seeing the the semi outcomes of of that. But you know, we got into M&A to sort of speed up a little bit of that process and we can come back to that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, no. I I mean that that's kind of where I was going with it, Like there's so many different paths. M&a is one of them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I know we had no plans to acquire our businesses. I would say that I was like, actually it was very much against it. And then I realized that when we were you know, go back to what I was sharing around our products said, you know, we, if you called me up and said, hey, how do I build a marketing automation platform, I could explain that in 15 minutes. But when we would be discussing internally, how do we build an e-commerce platform? You know, we start getting into taxation, multi currency, multi store, all of these elements. There's a lot of unique nuances there. And so we ended up acquiring a couple different businesses to really help that. We didn't acquire them so much for the technology and they struggled with some of the things we talked about a few minutes ago around the infrastructure costs and and so on.
Speaker 2:So I think it was a. They were positive outcomes, all but very challenging, but they set the stage for what we were going to build internally and I think that's a big piece is that when we acquired these companies, we knew we didn't want their technology per se at least not, you know, in the in the long-term future, but all of the logic that went into it, all the nuances that we would think about. How is the customer engage you with building a store? How does a point of sale system get, you know, organized to be the most efficient for for the users of Lou lemon, as an example? That was, you know kind of our path there to accelerate that. And I also think you know, going back to some of the stuff we talked about prior around the team side is when we didn't have enough of that not vision aspect but the innovation or product Development, design side of things. We achieved that by doing these acquisitions.
Speaker 1:Got it, yeah, and and so yeah. Mergers acquisitions, I agree, is another way we can look in. You know previous playbooks like the, the well symbols, wave accountings, touch bristros. They use Consultancies that would co-invest in their success and become equity partners. Multiple different paths and and definitely, things you have to explore when bootstrapping because, again, you should. You know, delivering value as fast as you can is is definitely gonna be the race that you're playing.
Speaker 1:No and so I guess, as we kind of like think about the future of bootstrapping, you've been on a whirlwind journey. You've been through it, you've come out, you know more resilient, I'm sure, and you've still got a smile on your face. So it, it didn't break you not always, but yeah, more days than not is is the goal. And so what piece of advice, if you could only leave one For founders who are considering this route? What would it be?
Speaker 2:and we don't quit, which sounds super lame, but it is that.
Speaker 1:I mean, how do you ensure that? What's what's your? What was your support system to ensure you didn't quit?
Speaker 2:not much, I think it goes back to that commentary around like positivity and optimism. I was saying like about, about those outcomes were discussing the product side of things. I think that if you allow yourself to have any sort of Negative mindset, I don't be like of course is gonna be horrible, days right, alternate, stressful, I mean yeah fired one business, right I I've. I actually have a hard time remembering a full year of my life Because it was all me to, and yeah, now, as you said it, stop a smile my face for the most part I.
Speaker 2:You know, when I come back to them, I, you have to have that pride in terms of of what you're trying to accomplish and so, yeah, yeah, I have to go back to that, just that positivity, and that that's Optimism more than positivity, I would say, because it's gonna be yeah days, no matter how you cut it. But if you can come out of those scenarios with like, yeah, but there's always gonna be a path, I think that's what makes founders founders right. Is that, I should say right? But is that there's always a path? You know that you, that you can continue on and bootstrap founders more so than not. So then, Cash flows getting tight, right, what is the path to doing so? The faster we are getting to that answer, the more successful we're ultimately gonna be. And if we're not optimistic about it, well, we don't have a lot to hold on to so true, I mean For me, the.
Speaker 1:The advice I would give founders is ensure that are gonna go down the bootstrapping path. Actually, you're respective. Now that I think about it Truly truly, be very passionate and inspired about the problem you are solving, because if you are not, you can probably go into battle, you know, a few times, get a few scrapes, but you're gonna hit that that one road bump that just knocks off all four tires and you'll be questioning whether to To put on, to put them back together or or to look in a different direction and yeah, and I think bootstrap really brings that out, just because you
Speaker 1:have all of them on come on Comfortableness, and so what's the way that we? We know that we truly have that passion. It's something that we can't keep off our mind. The problem keeps on Evolving. You start to see others talk about it and it becomes contagious. But you know, as we kind of wrap things up here, ross, the, the journey you've been on, the blueprint that you share today, I think these are all gonna give us some unfair advantages as we we grow as founders, even if we're not gonna take the bootstrapping path. But I'm sure our listeners would love to continue learning from your experiences. Some probably want to reach out and say, dude, tell me the like, the unfiltered version. So what's the best way for for our listeners to connect with you or follow along on your journey in the next? Yeah?
Speaker 2:here's to come, probably something I should do more of, but, like social media, I'm not very active on. But Instagram and Twitter it's just at Ross, andrew, and then obviously my email, ross, at Miracost comm.
Speaker 1:Perfect. Well, thank you so much again for your time, thanks for the inspiring chat, and I can't wait to see what you and the team unlock next for your, for growth and innovation and, of course, the impact that you're gonna make within so many marketing teams.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks so much.
Speaker 1:Jason, I appreciate you. Okay, take care my friend. Thank you.