#204: He Sold a Majority, Gave Up Control, and Became Indispensable - Matthew Bullis

Speaker A: Be flexible. People overemphasize the value of what they've done in the past. Look at all the great things I've done. It's like living in the high school glory days, but that doesn't merit a lot. You can't expect people to give you credibility for what you built you. As an entrepreneur and a bootstrap founder, your real value is surviving anything and solving any problems. So if you take that mentality to heart and say, I can survive anything and I can solve any problem and I can create value for myself and others around me, you'll find that even under any difficult situations, people like people of value. Eventually, when I saw things weren't done properly, I began to speak up. The seasoned leadership saw that I had value in my opinions. And so when people see value in people, they want to be part of your team. I began to win other executives over at, uh.

Speaker B: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Practical Founders Podcast, where every week we hear an amazing story from a serious founder who built a valuable software company and did it without big funding. I'm your host, Greg Head, and this week my guest is Matthew Bullitz, the former CEO and founder of RapidWorks. RapidWorks makes software for subcontractors in the construction business. They got their start in a very narrow segment of concrete pumping, and I won't say they it was him who built the product and got it going. It's an amazing story of growing in a little segment, solving a big problem for them, expanding the software, expanding their market, expanding his vision, getting investors, and eventually expanding the leadership team which he's now part of. He's no longer a CEO as the company is much bigger and acquiring and so forth. So he's a happy member of that journey. And now with AI at RapidWorks, it's a great founder journey story with Matthew Bullis. Welcome to the podcast, Matthew. Good to see you.

Speaker A: Hi, Greg. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.

Speaker B: I'm excited to, uh, ask questions and share your story today. It's a really amazing story that you created with your company RapidWorks and everything you've done in your life here. I know you're still running around and busy, involved with the company that you founded and you used to be the CEO, uh, there. So where are you based and where is the company based? Great.

Speaker A: Yeah. Today, company's headquartered out of, uh, Boston. It used to be based out of here, Denver, where I currently live. But as the company grew and we put together a more senior leadership team that had the experience to take the company to the next Step. Uh, we wanted to be close to the private equity that backed us. Wavecrust, in addition to, they have a great resource. One of the good things about private equity is that they bring a lot of resources. So they were able to kind of concentrate a lot of leadership and talent at our Boston office where they're located. So it made sense.

Speaker B: So do you go back and forth to Boston and do you have a Denver office?

Speaker A: I do. I work from home in Denver and then I travel back and forth to Boston quite a bit.

Speaker B: Well, that's a little bit of a culture change. Denver has a different tech culture than Boston. The big, you know, the big game there.

Speaker A: Yes, absolutely. I did try to, uh, kind of, uh, build things up here in Denver. But talent wise, experience wise, private equity wise, the whole market is just wasn't mature enough. Um, so it made better sense to look elsewhere.

Speaker B: Yeah, great. So you did raise some private equity, some growth equity from Wavecrest. And Deepak has been on the Sidwani, uh, has been on the podcast from Wavecrest talking about what's going on. He's been on a couple times. I've known him for 15 years. Very, uh, practical guy, uh, who put us in touch here. So let's just start with, uh, RapidWorks. What is RapidWorks these days and who's it for? What kind of software is it? I know it's a little multifaceted because you guys are growing and do more than one thing now.

Speaker A: Yeah. The easiest way to explain to people what is it that we do is, uh, two parts you have to understand. First part is that, uh, we deal with subcontractors in the world, people and machines, companies that show up to job sites to perform a task. Sometimes they bring a lot of labor, sometimes they bring very specialized machines to the site. And so they're dealing with uh, basically field operations where there's an equipment operators, a uh, job site, and they have a yacht yard full of assets of people. And so they're uh, construction in a lot of ways, or site services. And so our software is the operational software that runs their business from quote, all the way down to cash. Meaning, you know, what, what do they need to actually win a job and then how do they ultimately end up getting paid and how do, uh, how do they automate that? So we're a platform that handles the entire logistics and operations of these companies that have to send things out to get things done.

Speaker B: Yeah. So it's a specialized ERP or a, uh, practice management run your business system of record company. Right. That we rely on this, the scheduling, the dispatch, the invoices, the resources, labor, who's got that truck and who's got this and. Yeah, who are the people showing up there to do this and all that?

Speaker A: Exactly.

Speaker B: Okay, so it's really important. Uh, and there are countless, let's say vertical erps run your business for all these different kinds of business. And construction is of course a huge industry and you serve one slice of this huge industry.

Speaker A: That's correct. So if you think about at the top of the pyramid, there's always the construction or the general contractors who organizes everything, but often they're not the ones who actually perform the work. There's many subcontractors, Right, that actually work for those general contractors. So think of our software as specializing in servicing many of those subcontractors that come and go from those construction sites or simply other sites that are being renovated or regular services that needs to occur out in the field.

Speaker B: And as you guys have grown from one type of contractor, now you serve multiple contractors. Like almost a multi vertical kind of approach, right? Not just the concrete pumping where you started.

Speaker A: That's correct, yeah. We're trying to do something uh, new. New in the sense that uh, there's been a lot of point solutions or specialty software for, you know, one particular vertical or another because they weren't able to homogenize the various different workflows. And the complexities have to do with different pieces of assets. And so that's what really makes us unique is we've gone from specializing in one equipment type, let's say the concrete pumping where we started, or concrete placement. And we've expanded to crane, we've expanded to hydrovac, we've expanded to uh, porta potties, other site services, uh, roll off bins, all things that, where you have drivers and trucks and assets that need to be moved and they need to be scheduled and built, et cetera. So we're trying to aggregate many of these subcontractor verticals or site service, uh,

Speaker B: and are they different apps for the different verticals or is everybody running on the same platform with its customizations for the different vertical subspecialties?

Speaker A: That's a great question. We're in the midst of solving a, uh, one unified platform. So we do have multiple industries and what platforms. But we've also grown not just organically, but inorganically, right through acquisitions. So we have number of different platforms. And what we're doing is taking all the things that they have in common, things that we have learned and figuring out how, how do we Homogenize that. Uh, so we're about halfway down the journey of how do we bring all the softwares together into a single unified platform? It's no easy thing. That's why it's a challenge. And we're having a great deal of, uh, success and fun and maybe a lot of challenges along the way as well.

Speaker B: Yes. Uh, well, you've signed up for the challenges. A few years ago you raised growth equity and brought in a CEO at about the same time. We'll go through that. So you could build this even bigger. You could have said wave bye bye and sold it off to somebody. But you're part of this scaling up journey now, right? Ah, out of the scrappy startup. Maybe you're the scrappy startup guy, Matthew, and uh, you know, you took it a long way, so that's really part of your journey. Can you share how big the company is now with employees, customers, revenues, this kind of thing?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think some of it may not be entirely accurate, but I'm going to give you a rough, uh, ballpark. Right. And so we're coming up on $20 million in car revenues. We have, I believe, across all the, uh, sectors, all the different verticals, um, maybe coming up on a couple thousand customers across different industries. They're segregated across, you know, these different sub verticals. The best way I look at it is that we process on an annualized basis, um, millions of several million job site tickets. So imagine like the old days where guys used to show up with quadruple copies, you sign them and job something gets performed and then it goes back and forth. So in terms of our, uh, ability in North America, we handle millions of these job tickets on an uh, annualized basis. So we do have a pretty big reach.

Speaker B: That's right. And how many employees in the company these days?

Speaker A: I believe we, you know, you go through normal cycles. When I sold back in 23, we were just shy of 30 people and we grew very fast with Spend mode to unify the platforms, et cetera. So we got up to about 150 some odd. We're down a little bit from that.

Speaker B: Yes. Right, okay. The normal compression in the SaaS, uh, world the last year, something like that, the settling in kind of period. That's great. Well, very exciting. And is it growing fast? Is this like a rule of 40 company or are, you know, are you not profitable but you're trying to grow faster and all that thing?

Speaker A: We're aiming to be profitable by sometime next year. We were profitable when we sold to wavecrust. And obviously one of the part of the growth strategies that you spend fast to grow fast. And so I would say yes, we are growing, but uh, you know, as a board member and as being backed by private equity. Not growing fast enough.

Speaker B: No, you could always. Now you're on the board side now. Yeah, I want more. He says.

Speaker A: That's right.

Speaker B: Yes. Okay, well, we'll talk about your journey before and after. You had growth equity partners and new CEO and leadership team. And you're a member of that leadership team now. Right. You're not, you're not a person in charge.

Speaker A: Yeah, I've transitioned primarily being the one man show. That's uh, in essence, you know, as bootstrap founders, we really do everything right. Whether you're the COO or CEO, CEO or cfo, it really doesn't matter. You have to do it all now. With, uh, WaveQuest coming on board allowed me to focus more strategically on the long term vision and plan for the company, how to be successful in the different endeavors that we have. And so I've taken on um, the, I guess more permanent role of chief strategy officer. But sometimes that doesn't last either. Right. So I've actually bounced around from that to hey, you know what?

Speaker B: And you fill in here. You used to do that. Yeah.

Speaker A: Yes. We're having problems with product. Uh, so uh, Matt, why don't you jump in as the inter chief product for a while to straighten the ship. And uh, uh, did that. Actually I just hung that hat up or in the midst of hanging that hat up. And then we found that, you know, we need more help in engineering. So why don't you assume become the interim head of engineering to kind of move things along so you get moved around in whatever capacity.

Speaker B: Yes. And so you're still rowing the boat here, you know, and committed to the vision, making it big. I mean some founders can't imagine themselves doing that and others say it's more important for the company to achieve its vision and I'll play whatever role I need to solve the problem. And it sounds like that's what you're doing.

Speaker A: That's exactly right. I have a lot of uh, uh, friends and family that's vested in the business. So it's really less about me and more about all the people that's been along this journey. And also I'm very loyal to our customers and I want to do our customers right, uh, all the things that we started. So the success, uh, and the long term growth of the company is more important than, than anything personal for myself.

Speaker B: Well, that's great. And you're still an owner in the company, Maybe the biggest shareholder or pretty close. Something like that, yes.

Speaker A: Um, so that's one of the advantages, being bootstrapped founder and new grow, is that you still, uh, at least for a certain amount of time, you still get to wear the hat of being. Yeah, I'm the largest individual shareholder, and that does come with a certain bit of pride and responsibility. So, yeah, it's important. And that's what gets me up in the morning every day, is that I have pride in the business because I am part owner of the business.

Speaker B: That's right. As I say, you got the tattoo still on your arm. You know, it hasn't come off yet, so. Yes, for RapidWorks, and I know it didn't start as Rapid works there. Can you say about how much, uh, you raised from your friends at Wavecrest Growth Capital?

Speaker A: Um, we didn't make that information publicly intentionally because we wanted to have some sort of a competitive advantage, but it was a meaningful amount. It really helped us accelerate.

Speaker B: And as a bootstrapper, you got a little piece of that and rolled the rest of your company. And there's money that goes into the company to help grow and not be profitable for a while so we can expand. And, you know, it's like, it's very exciting. You created this, let's say, single, focused, scrappy industry leader that attracted the attention of money and senior teams as a platform to grow to even a bigger thing. Uh, speaking of construction. Right. More floors on the building, Something like that.

Speaker A: Yes, absolutely. As founders, you always have to make a decision for you and your family, and what stage you get, how much risk do you just keep piling on and, uh, what rate of growth are you happy with? Because you can go at it for a very long time if you want. Right. If you have the right focus and you have the right dedication and the right work ethic. Absolutely. But as that value of what you're building keeps growing and growing and growing, at some point, I, uh, feel like most people have to have that conversation with themselves to say what's prudent. And at what point do I take some chips off the table? Right. And so that way I can inject the business with, uh, more funds to grow faster. And so whatever chips, you increase the

Speaker B: risk because you've de risk a little bit. Right? Right.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And so whatever chips you take off the table, if you do it right, you should be able to get that back in the back end. Right. As the company grows.

Speaker B: Oh, my Gosh, two bites of the apple. Two big bites. Good for you.

Speaker A: You.

Speaker B: Yeah. And did you instigate this process saying, you know, we're getting bigger? I don't know if I'm the guy to take it to the next level. I could use some, a little, I could use some partnership, I could use some help, I could use some um, I mean that's one of the things that growth equity offers. Not just a little check to you know, um, take some money off the table, but like their scale. Experienced, right. The team and the uh, platforms and the strategies and the potential exits and so forth. Did you create that yourself and say, okay, I'm going to go do this or did that come at you and you said, I'm open to it.

Speaker A: We actually were looking and so we got to the point where at about just shy of $5 million in revenues, and we did, we were very successful in the concrete pumping industry. So we felt like, hey, you know what, we were very successful. But it took a long time, you know, it took from 2016 to 2023. So it was not a short journey, it was a seven year journey. Get to the point where we've achieved ah, market dominance and success in this vertical. And that was a very long timeline. And now obviously we're profitable, we had additional resources. So I'm not going to say the next industry was going to take the same amount of time, but we felt like we had a good thesis, I felt like the company was on good footing, we had a good platform. We've achieved tremendous amount of success getting to 80 to 85% of a market. It's not easy to do. And so I wanted all these other sub verticals, but I simply did not have the bandwidth to tackle multiple industries simultaneously and scaled them fast enough. And so I began to uh, began to start searching in 22. I said, hey, we're coming up on running out of Runway and the industry that we're at, which means we need more Runway, we need more tam, which means we need more professionals, we need more money and we don't want to struggle through the next one as hard

Speaker B: as we struggle through the first one.

Speaker A: And that's the journey. I saw, you know, I saw the writing on the wall and I said I need this to move faster and I am unable to do all these things on my own. So I'm going to, to need professional, experienced executives to kind of come alongside and boost this business to the next level.

Speaker B: Including which I think maybe came with the package, the investment package. A, uh, CEO that was uh, been there, done that three times. CEO Tim Curran, who knows the industry and knows this. Was that part of your plan as well? Which is I've taken it this far. Uh, you know, I can be part of the team. You deliberately did that.

Speaker A: Absolutely. It was part of the package which was that hey, we're gonna go get, we're uh, going to raise some capital but I'm going to m make get this ready made team. That's what made it so compelling to work with Wavequest was that I wasn't just going to get some financial resources, some, some support along the way. No, I was going to get a true partner. And as long as you know, I think for founders you have to worry about, hey, how much control am I giving up? As long as you're okay understanding that you're not always meant to be in control of everything. And some people, uh, control. I wasn't one of those. I was more interested in growing the business and we had a significant la. Just like a lot of bootstrap companies, uh, which is you lack experience at the top and so you can de risk significantly by bringing players that's done it before that knows how to properly scale a business. Otherwise I would have been feeling in the dark and certainly I was capable of figuring those things out. But how much feeling in the dark do I want to do versus you know what? I want to put somebody that's ready made that says this is the next step. That's the next step. This is the next step and having kind of a path charted out. And so it was a good opportunity for me to personally learn and also in a way for everyone in the business to learn and grow to from being a beach, uh, you know, kind of bootstrap founder led company to be more professional organization.

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Speaker A: That's correct. That's a good way to put it.

Speaker B: Yes. And, uh, we'll talk about how that's going, you know, for better or worse, and your decision process for giving up some control and making this shift and so forth. You know, in the old days you built companies bootstrapped or funded or whatever, and you built them and then sold them and you tried to get out as fast as possible because it wasn't any fun or something like that. But these days, this growth equity, private equity, staged excess it is the most common for practical software founders. Almost everybody says, nobody comes up and says, I'll give you 100% and you don't have to go on day, you know, day one in the new company. There's some exceptions. We have had some on the podcast, but mostly it's, I'm going to sell apart, get some funding, grow to the next level. I'll still be part of it, it'll be different, and then we'll do it again and I'll grow it. So, uh, last month we had somebody European, uh, from Austria, ended up in California and sold a company that got eaten three times in a few years. A substantial part of the platform became actually the platform for the larger company as a whole, but he had to live through that. So the phases of life there. Matt, that's really exciting. Let's go back here. So you don't strike me as somebody who came out of the construction industry and said, uh, there I was pumping, you know, and there was no software for it like dentists do and others do. What is your background and how did you get going here? I know it's a little bit of a long story, but it's important to hear some of your crazy background, we should say.

Speaker A: It's interesting because here I am working in tech and software, but I actually was born and raised in mud brick hut without running water and electricity. So as primitive as you can imagine on this small undeveloped island off the coast of, uh, uh, South Korea. And uh, uh, yeah, I lived very, very primitive and simple, I think. Uh, my mother used to do laundry on Saturdays and we would uh, at the local or, you know, pond close by. And um, we would run around naked until our clothes dried and literally put the same clothes Back on. So I grew up very, very primitive and through series of tragic events. You know, my father passed away when I was young. Uh, we had to move to kind of the slums in Seoul and then eventually ended up getting adopted to the. So yeah, when I came to the

Speaker B: United States, uh, not as a baby, right?

Speaker A: No, not as a baby, as an 11 year old and I did not speak a word of English so it was a little bit of challenge getting adjusted. But my ah, sense and a desire to succeed was probably maybe too abnormal because of the fact that uh, I had been cold, freezing most of my life, I was starving and so having lack of the basic essentials that human beings would need to have a comfortable life, didn't have those things. And because of that my sense of urgency to succeed so that I wouldn't have to be hungry, so that I wouldn't have to be cold was very real to me.

Speaker B: Probably off the real than me, would you say?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And so I worked hard and uh, I went to college. I actually had another startup, uh, interestingly enough, more blunders, uh, you learned, you go through life and you make enough blunders and hopefully you learn uh, something from them. But it was interesting enough, uh, we started three, uh, of my college friends and I started a shopping cart software when the Internet was first coming to and everybody's building their own shopping carts instead of having off the shelf shopping cart. So we made one of the first iterations of kind of this off the shelf, uh, shopping cart, um, with some really bright people. And I think in the first year we had like $250,000 in revenues and we got a cash offer for like $56 million in uh, so is this

Speaker B: with the dot com, the whole dot com bubble, Recognize those multiples?

Speaker A: That's right. Absolutely right. Um, and at the time a company by the name of globe.com went IPO and they had a million dollars and they were valued at a billion dollars. So as my friend saw it was like we're worth $250 million. We shouldn't sell. Of course we're not going to sell more money. So um, anyways, things went badly. I ended up parting ways because I was, I was the only one who voted to sell. And so I ended up departing and the business kind of sputtered uh, out in a positive ways. Um, so yeah, I worked in the tech industry. Then eventually my brother, uh, who actually did not do well in high school, my adopted brother, oldest brother, uh, so he's literally a high school counselor, told him hey, listen, college is not for you. You should go and find, trade work or go do something. And so he did. He went out and worked as a concrete pump operator. Like a line pump where you tow behind the pickup truck and you have a hose and a hopper and you kind of pour concrete. That's what he did then he eventually was good at, eventually became a dispatcher, office manager. Then he thought, hey, I think I can actually create software. And so he had enough insight to say, let me try to create a piece of software. And he did. He gave himself a job.

Speaker B: So your brother was the one who said, I've been doing this and we could use some software to do this better.

Speaker A: Yes. So he's the one who's the genesis of this whole thing. So he turned into a classic American entrepreneur. Small business owner. People that give themselves a job so they don't have to work for anybody else and they make a good living doing it. And he did that from, like, 1999, just as I was creating this, you know, dot com, uh, shopping cart companies, because that was the wave. Then the Great Recession happened, right where he was selling very old software as a perpetual license. And things really trickle down to a grinding halt. What is that? Uh, 10, 20 years he had been doing this. He had about 5% market share, and his revenues had dwindled down to, I think, next to nothing. I think by the time I took over, he was down to like $20,000 a year. And so he was like, matt, you're a smart guy. You've done business, you know, technology. Take this business off my hands and help me do something. So I thought maybe, okay, let me look into it. So let me come up with a thesis that I think can be successful. And so I realized, okay, you work in construction some way. Okay, got it. And looked at construction as there are general contractors, subcontractors. Oh, you're dealing with machines? Well, there's subcontractors that are labor heavy, like, you know, framing, and lots of manual, uh, labor type of work. But I see you're dealing with equipment. I started breaking these things down in my mind that says subcontractors, different verticals of equipment, labor focus, et cetera. So I said, okay, if I win all of the market in concrete pumping, what other industries other can I go to? And there was cranes and there was Hydrovax.

Speaker B: And you were thinking about that, uh, uh, in the future, there's always that question of whether Jeff Bezos thought beyond books in the beginning of Amazon. And he kind of says he didn't but I think he did right someday. Think right.

Speaker A: So in the beginning, that's what I thought of. I knew that long term I didn't want to be a small business owner where I just give myself a job, like a lifestyle business. I wanted to grow into something. So I felt like, yeah, the path was vague, but I at least had a path that made sense to me, common sense. So I said, let me give it a try. So I took over the company and, uh, began, went to work.

Speaker B: Did you buy the company or is he still on the cap table or how does that work?

Speaker A: So he still still a very small bit on the cap table, but yes, he is. So I ended up taking over 90% of the business from him and, uh, left.

Speaker B: So he'll have a prize when all this is said and done.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. Good for you.

Speaker A: So, uh, then I made blunders again, which is I decided let me offshore this thing. Uh, I know business, but I don't necessarily. I'm not a programmer. So let me spend, uh, some personal.

Speaker B: What year was that? Right, roughly?

Speaker A: This is 2014.

Speaker B: Right about. Yeah, Offshore was starting to become normal. Still hard, still risky.

Speaker A: So I spent a year, spent, uh, a lot of personal money to have the software made. And I realized at the end of it, what I got back was not going to be sellable. It did not do, uh, what I wanted to do. And so I got mad, like all founders do when things don't go their way, and decided, how hard can this be? So, uh, I threw away everything and decided to start over and became a coder myself and decided I'm going to create my own software because I know what business, uh, people need and I know what everyday people need. And so I wrote a piece of software and then by.

Speaker B: Okay, so let's stop you there. This is a little crazy. Uh, these days people say, then I AI Vibe coded something and hired a real engineer to do it or whatever. But you learn to code, uh, with AWS and modern cloud technologies.

Speaker A: No, no. I decided back then the web was inst. Still did not offer the fidelity that I was looking for. So I decided to continue on the Windows desktop environment for truly operational software. I thought the web was still too lightweight, uh, that I could do more with the desktop application. But I did take a hybrid approach in the sense that cloud was starting to be one of the complexities of hosting your own SQL servers on site for customers. I knew those were going to be complexities. So we started with our own private, uh, servers in the Rack where uh, we would host a database and so they would just host the application front end of it but the backend would be all on our rack space and where we'd manage our own servers and all the complexities of managing the backend for them.

Speaker B: So. And construction wasn't saying this all needs to be the modern stack, they're just saying and you could go back a few years and use what works. So you got something together. Did you build an MVP or a shippable product that was, worked?

Speaker A: Yep, it took me a little while. By 2016, yeah, I, we were, I was able to build something and begin selling.

Speaker B: Okay, so it was you right?

Speaker A: Yes. Uh, my brother was a sales guy so I retained him as the kind of, he had the, he knew the industry, he knew the customers and so he became my right hand guy as to uh, kind of sell the companies and I became the guy who uh, was writing the software by night, uh, and helping to sell by design day.

Speaker B: Okay, and how did you survive back then? You're bootstrapping but did you live off savings or did you yes. Have a day job or something or a night job?

Speaker A: I was fortunate enough to have uh, be somewhat uh, successful prior to that. So it wasn't the end of the world or most imperative it was a struggle. I'm not going to say listen whenever you're burning lots of money that it's easy but maybe I wasn't the typical Bootstrap founder in the sense that I wasn't starting from with nothing and trying to get by uh, more it was long term success of the business was what mattered more.

Speaker B: Well it's a little bit of a myth about bootstrapping. If you have nothing like generally the advice is don't quit your day job. Like you gotta survive here. So you gotta if, but if you can be really frugal and then fast to uh, revenue you can support it yourself, you know. And more so these days of course. So were you running around to these companies and sitting with them and hearing their features and building it and getting another deal and so forth worth like?

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. So the key, one of the key reasons why we were able to be successful to go from a perpetual license software where my brother had less than 5% of the market to getting to 85, 90% of the market is our closeness to our customers. I actually sat down in many of these offices and worked for weeks, watched them actually experience problems, see the struggles of the business and understood how they ran their business and their pain points of their business and how technology and software could help, uh, ease some of those chaos. All of our customers, they call themselves essentially chaos managers. And if you can organize some of that chaos, uh, you improve the quality of life tremendously. That's the value that I was seeking, which is that how do I help them contain and manage the chaos of what they do every day through a platform that makes it more manageable that they can actually get some of their time back with their families. I'm dealing with, we're a B2B software, so we're dealing with other business owners that are literally working 24 hours, hours a day. They don't have, they don't take a day off. Um, and because they have a chaotic business. And so being close to them and understanding really the ins and outs of the business is what made us more successful than others in this industry was that we were invested in our customers business as much as they were invested in the business.

Speaker B: And you didn't come out of that industry, your brother did. But you sat with these people and you were right there. This is an interesting question, question for founders who know their industry or founders who are coming into a vertical. They don't know. Like you weren't able to ask these concrete, uh, pumping subcontractors, what features do you want? What are you Googling? Right? What's important to you? They probably had a few things. How much of what you built that was magical for them, did they not ask for by name yet? And you just saw it around the office and you said, said they don't know it, but they have this problem and they're not asking for it, but they have this and they think they want it this way, but this would be better, you know, were you able to connect those dots?

Speaker A: So some of it was customers asking for specific features. But what I would tell you is that I generally, uh, don't necessarily look at the feature that they want. I actually just keep going, moving up. Why do you want that feature? Well, because it does this. Well, why are you doing that? Well, because of this. Well, what is causing that? Keep moving up, uh, as high as I can until I get down to the root reason, the genesis or the inception of why are they asking for this feature then? What I figured out is, uh, that well, I can not only solve the problem they want me to solve over here, but I can solve a lot more problems if I instead build this feature or offer this module or change the workflow, how they do things. And so I can solve series of problems. So what I would say Is a lot of times I went to our customers not to say hey, what would you like from us? Instead I just said hey, I know you spend 60 hours doing this or your guys can only manage. A dispatcher can only manage 20 jobs on a live schedule. Can I see how they do things and what they do and just watch. And so I began to dissect why are they one person can only manage 20 jobs a day as a dispatcher. Right. And since then we've been able to now create a model where a single dispatchers can manage 60 plus jobs. We have some customers with a single managing 4 to 5x the amount of jobs uh, than what they used to manage.

Speaker B: Wow, that's amazing. And it's kind of amazing, right? You figured out the situation and designed a product and then built it and then came back and how did that work? Like what we think of in the modern AI world, it's less about the coding, it's more about the customer intimacy and making these design decisions and fast iterations and all of that. How long did you do that fast cycle single entrepreneur thing before you had a development team and little support?

Speaker A: Uh, I think about first two years I did it all myself. So I did the onboarding, I did the training, I did the website, I did everything. And then uh, uh, my brother mainly he dealt with all of the sales operations. Then um, luckily I didn't have to deal with too much of the accounting end of things because my ah, sister in law uh, was also a controller. So she had lots of financial experience working at uh, big companies like EA before EA bought HQ and others. So she had professional experience and so she was able to run uh, our uh, you know, financial operations, all the billing and collections on the side to help us out. And so at least I was able to remove some things to a trusted resource that handled the business. Business well.

Speaker B: Right. And about how much was the software a year? Was this like 5,000 or 10,000 a year or something like that?

Speaker A: Uh, it was a per user and I can't remember the exact dollar amount we started at, but I believe I started at something like $30 per user per month.

Speaker B: Right. Okay. So this wasn't big enterprise software. These were, it's kind of small business and few seats and really important problem and all of that here because we

Speaker A: mainly started with scheduling and so you have to price it appropriately. Right. We were the small, we were new, we had a brand new solution and so I wanted a price point and it was very conscious decision which is that uh, I wanted A price point that people couldn't tell me. No.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: If I saw your dispatch solutions and scheduling, it's like, at least it's worth $30 a month. Okay, so just give me that. Right. And so it was obviously priced very, very low to kind of get out there and take over the market.

Speaker B: Yeah. So, uh, then was it just, let's get a hundred of these and a few hundred of these, or did you have other things going on, uh, building out the team, going to cloud, I don't know, expanding from just scheduling. Right. This whole thing started in this laser corner. Right. And then now you have multifunctions and bigger teams and all that.

Speaker A: But, yeah, so the process, as we began to pick, uh, up more and more customers, we started growing. You have more resources now. Hey, great. You know what? Uh, we're gonna need an official, actually tech support and person who trains. And so we began making hires that says, hey, you know, we want to bring in industry insiders that can connect with the customers. Uh, then eventually, you know, what I can't maintain to continue to troubleshoot and fix bugs and add new features, etc. So then, yeah, you start adding on, hey, I need a guy come in to handle, you know, uh, dealing with tickets and processing bugs and et cetera. So we started adding more and more people. And the typical bootstrap process is wherever the more most fires, you know, biggest fires burning, you hope that's right. You throw a person at it and hope that it, uh, doesn't end up on your desk again.

Speaker B: And how did that feel? Was that exciting? Or were you always behind and under, resourced and starved or, you know, was that an exciting time or a brutal time?

Speaker A: It is actually very exciting, but also it's amazing. I will tell you, as, uh, a bootstrap founder, how fast you can spend money that comes. Comes to end. So you're like, you're seeing your revenues grow. So in 2016, officially, when we got to 100 million, we decided we have, or, excuse me, $100,000. We have a real business, so we're going to start growing. So we go from 100,000 to 250,000 to 500,000. We're doubling. Right. So you think with doubling that you should have all the money in the world to solve your problems, but as soon as you throw people at it, you're like, wait a minute, how do I still not have any money? I just keep making more money.

Speaker B: And then how long did it take? This is a practical founder called Question for Bootstrappers. Uh, because we all procrastinate funding and we live frugally and do all that thing. How long did it take when you started with your brother and started coding and selling and so forth, how long did it take till you were able to pay yourself a living wage?

Speaker A: I, um, would say three years.

Speaker B: Oh, that's pretty good.

Speaker A: Yeah, it wasn't too bad.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's pretty good.

Speaker A: It was three years. It wasn't a large amount, but it was enough that it paid most of my. I wasn't in the red anymore, let's

Speaker B: put it that way. Right. Okay. It wasn't to the point.

Speaker A: Uh, it's no longer a charitable cause. It's actually something.

Speaker B: Right. Uh, and so that requires a little constraint because you can get ahead of yourself and let the expenses go and keep writing checks into the business and do all of that. Great. So what were some of the. In between this and, uh, 2023, when you got some funding and help and things expanded to a new level? Is there anything else going on in there that, uh, was a major milestone or crisis?

Speaker A: Yeah, I would say, um, mistakes burn hard in my mind so I can not repeat them. So I made another mistake, which is the company was picking up steam. Uh, we were picking up more and more businesses, and we were becoming important parts of all these different, uh, businesses. And mission critical. And then we had increased our prices to, let's say, $60. We just decided why not go for 10%, 20%. We just set a double. So went to $60 and things, uh, were going great. I also knew mobile was going to be the next generation. Right. You got all these businesses depend on people out in the field doing work. And so I needed a mobile app. But this industry is very blue collar. So back then people were like, no, I'm not installing your mobile app, uh, on my phone. So you can hand that data over to the CIA and FBI. I don't want to be tracked all the time. So these guys wouldn't install our mobile app. And so I decided, okay, what if I do?

Speaker B: Cause I'm imagining, right, showing up with the iPad or the iPhone and doing the signature or whatever the thing is. That's right.

Speaker A: It's such a common place today. But back as even, you know, most recently as 2018, 19, when we first made the mobile app, no, these guys wouldn't install it. It was a pain. The owners wanted it installed, but the operators, they did not want this thing installed. So I said, okay, what if I gave you a ruggedized tablet? Like, you know, like an Actual tablet that was in your phone that you ran the app. So you can see you're cringing already. So the mistake.

Speaker B: Hardware, the hardware.

Speaker A: That's exactly right. So then, uh, I, I'm going to make ruggedized hardware that they can't say no to. Uh, but we didn't have the resources, but the company was in good footing because, you know, we were growing, et cetera. So I decided, well, I need some seed capital to break into mobile because we don't have something with mobile long term, we're not going to be successful. So I didn't want to go to the venture capital or PE route. So I said, you know what, let me find an industry partner that believes in our story that we're going to take over the market and if we take over the whole industry, we might be some benefit to them. Um, so then, then I went, met with a number of different people. One of them happens to be construction forums and they're world's largest pipe manufacturer, uh, for this concrete pumping equipment and in the mining industry, et cetera. And I got along great and decided, yeah, I can see you winning, uh, with your strategy and with your product, whole market. And if you can aggregate the whole market, you guys would be a valuable partner to have. So I ended up, uh, raising a couple million dollars for a small percentage of the company, uh, where I was able to maintain still control of and I didn't have to sacrifice too much and I didn't have to write a big check personally. Um, so we made hardware. And the good news is that we ended up finding our way out of that mistake, which is eventually we were able to pivot everyone to the whole byod, uh, model. But I don't think we could have achieved it at the rate that we ended up achieving without actually proving those tablets and the application that it can replace physical job tickets out in the field. But it was a very, very costly mistake. I could have found in Hindsight, it's always 2020. I could have done it for a hell of a lot cheaper partnering with other hardware vendors, whatever else. But, um, yeah, instead of having thousand, uh, devices connected to AT&T that we're managing, hardware that we're buying, reselling and actually customizing, it was a disaster.

Speaker B: Well, now you get to say what all seasoned entrepreneurs do. When you build a bigger company and people are still not betting, you could say I've spent more, more for less.

Speaker A: Yes. And now today mobile is our probably one of the most profitable and most sticky products because it's so well Integrated with their workflows. That guys can't go out and do a job without a mobile application.

Speaker B: Yes. How did you get through Covid briefly? Like, was that a benefit or a curse or, um, even.

Speaker A: Yeah, we thought the COVID would impact us a lot more than it actually ended up impacting us. Reason being is that although a lot of social type of businesses shut down, construction didn't really stop. Right. Construction continued. Then you also have the political spectrum of different types of belief in different people around all these things. Right. And we work with mainly in construction, blue collar. So we work with people that said, screw it, Ah, we're just going to keep doing what we're doing. So we, we had a short blimp where things turned then as people realized, hey, it's not impacting young people the way we think, it's impacting the elderly, et cetera. And so things went on and actually our business improved even more because guess what? They no longer wanted to pass around paper tickets. Because you know what, paper tickets could spread. Uh, that's right. And so the whole digital workflow and not passing a physical paper ended up being even more boon for our business.

Speaker B: Okay, well, earlier you talk about, about post Covid, you said, all right, it's time. We want to expand, we want to grow. I got a vision. It's probably not me. Let's start exploring partners. How long did that partnered with Wavecrest Growth Capital. How long did that process take of you talking to all kinds of potential partners? Did that take a year or.

Speaker A: I would say in earnest. It took just between six to eight months before we identify. We settled on WaveQuest.

Speaker B: Good. So you had a good thing and you were clear about your vision and they were already looking for people. I hear them say that on the other side, we're looking for bootstrap founders that get to about 5 million and have won something here and they want a growth opportunity.

Speaker A: Uh, we were coming up on that 5 million. So as you can imagine, you start hitting the radar. I don't know how these private equities find the companies that they do. They're but really good at it, let's just say. Right. So I was being bombarded on a regular basis from I don't know how many different, you know, private, private equities and people that were interested that said, hey, we should talk, we can help your business. But I also didn't looked at many different options. So PE growth wasn't, uh, the only option. I thought about, you know what, what about a small percentage through venture Capital. So traditional venture capital was still being evaluated. Then I also thought, you know what, There are the SVVs of the world, there's Comericas, there's different actual banks, financial institutions, uh, where makes it easier to, you know, take 1x or 2x or 3x. Your car actually built some debt around that. So I looked at those options and decided, oh man, those covenants are so onerous. I was like, no. But I did look at those things just for the sake of looking at them to understand it. Um, I brought in a fractional, ah, CFO that had experience in this to assist me and guide me in this process. So that's one of the probably smarter things that I did, was I didn't want to go at this alone. I needed to run the business, but I needed somebody to be focused on this side of things. And so having a really good, solid fractional CFO assist me in this really took lot of burdens off. They knew, okay, these are the metrics they're looking for. This is how your financials, you got to go through auditing. All this prep work that we knew we were going to need, we were undergoing that was a major part of

Speaker B: the process as well is getting ready.

Speaker A: Getting ready, absolutely. And so after six months, you know what we decided, hey, you know what? I met Deepak. It's like, you know what, I like this story. I like having a partner that's capable of bringing on a ready made team. Uh, he introduced me to Tim during this.

Speaker B: And you suggested that like he doesn't do that for most of his, his companies. But like you said, I think this is the thing. And he said, I think we could do that.

Speaker A: Yes. And actually met Tim, uh, who ended up being our CEO even during the due diligence process when I went out to meet them. And so I felt like, you know what these guys are, they know what they're doing. I, uh, wouldn't skip a beat. And I like the idea of having the insurance of guys whole senior leadership team that had done it before because by that point we didn't have anybody in the senior leadership team besides myself. I was it. And so the business was at risk. Uh, there was a key man risk we had to carry a key man, you know, insurance policy, many different things. Just in case something happened to me, the business would have, you know, at least several million dollars worth to go find somebody to hopefully replace. So all these things were factors that we are dealing with. And whereas having somebody like WaveQuest resolved a lot of those things.

Speaker B: And so that is not part of the playbook. Usually it takes a few years, which is the founder keeps going and then they build a team around them and then there's a transition. It's some point if the founder wants to move on. If they don't, they keep going. And, uh, that happens just as often. But you had kind of set this up and you created your own custom transition, uh, plan here. So that's why you chose this, uh, growth equity partnership with Wavecrest. What other factors did you have to consider? We talked about the control. Right. That are not obvious, that are worth weighing here. So, you know, you can get some capital and a team and some support from people who've done it before. And what did you, I don't know, have to give up or invest here to make this success?

Speaker A: So I was fully aware that I would. They came in for majority, that I was going to be giving up control and no longer going to be the majority. But that was okay. That's what I wanted. But really the biggest thing I was looking for is, hey, I've built something to a certain level. Not just me, but my brother and our family. I had my brother, best friend, sister in law, nephew, working in the business. A lot of people in the business. And so as a founder, bootstrap, uh, all that is weight, right? Like a lot of weight that, uh, you have to be successful, you have to maintain. And so it was time for me to.

Speaker B: It's a big family to support.

Speaker A: That's right. So it was, I got to a point where I said, you know what? I need assurances that this business is going to have longevity that's going to grow beyond myself and it's not dependent upon myself and for everyone to make their own way during this journey as well. Right. To bring it on a professional, uh, organization and professional leadership where all of my family members and friends and then people, they have to prove themselves. Right. As a career, uh, no longer just working for, quote unquote, them, not you, Right?

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Right. Yeah. And so I thought this was a good time to do all of those things. And they all had some vested chairs and they were all going to get something back. And so I thought this was a good opportunity to do that. And yeah, it hit the biggest piece, uh, I'm looking for, which I was looking for, which is can the business survive indefinitely? And by bringing in somebody like WaveQuest, I felt like the business was going to survive indefinitely no matter who comes and goes. And that to me was more important than anything else.

Speaker B: And now you're on the board of this, you didn't have a board. You didn't even have a leadership team.

Speaker A: I actually did have a board. So when I brought, when I brought in the little bit of seed capital to make the hardware, that's when I formally established an actual board. And I had some very talented board members that were very wise that advised me in this process with Wavequest. And so having a board when you reach a certain level is critical. It's important because you can't think of everything. And having some very pointed board members that ask you very hard questions and that guide you through what you should and shouldn't do, um, made it a lot easier also, which is that I told the board, hey, this is good things. This is what I'm looking for. This is what I want to do. And so they helped me in that journey and process. So I would say before you raise capital, you should definitely have somebody or a board or advisors that can help you during that process.

Speaker B: So now you're transitioned pretty quickly out of being CEO. Now you're, is it Chief Strategy Officer kind of thing. So. And you know, and fill her in, uh, wherever is needed. As you described. What is the biggest surprise about this change in role? So a lot of founders are saying, wow, I don't know if I could have a CEO, another person, me reporting to them. But like, I don't know, some challenges and some surprising good stuff. What has surprised you about playing the role that you're playing now?

Speaker A: That's a great question. So everyone has their own idea of what's going to happen when you raise all kinds of money and do things. You get this ready made team, whatever. So I had my own ideas, which is that, ah, hey, it's great we're getting a new CEO, cfo, chief, product, VP of engineering. Uh, uh, I don't have to do

Speaker B: any of that stuff anymore.

Speaker A: We're getting like, I got five chief overnight. Okay. So I was like, five chiefs and VPs. This is great. They're gonna need me little to nothing. And I actually was under the impression that they would actually put me out the pasture pretty quickly. Was like, we're gonna learn everything this guy is doing and what he does, and he's gonna be more in the way than not. So we need to scale the business very quickly.

Speaker B: Take a few m minutes a couple.

Speaker A: That's why they gave me this nice title called Chief Strategy Officer. But he's got the industry expertise. We still need to count on him for a lot of different things, et cetera. That was my kind of perception that year or two that, uh, my role would be more and more chipped away, and eventually I would be twiddling my thumb, looking around, going, what am I doing here? Right. That's actually what I envisioned. And eventually they would say, hey, you're not doing a whole lot, uh, what do you think about separating? Blah, blah. That's actually what I thought.

Speaker B: Yeah. But that does happen, of course.

Speaker A: Yeah, it does happen. That's not how it played out for me. What it played out for me was that, uh, they saw that I was a true partner, that I was invested in the business, willing to do anything, and they also saw that I was willing and capable of pivoting to whatever they needed me to pivot to. So, hey, you. You're really good with sales. Go ahead and talk to all the enterprise sales, support the sales team. Hey, you're really good over here. Help me with this customer triage. Hey, you really good at, uh, a vision strategy. Help us here. Hey, you actually go. You're good at helping us with vetting M M and A. So I just ended up bouncing around to whatever the company needed strategically. And I think if, if anything, I have become maybe still too important to the business and more important than I would have thought. Maybe I'm patting myself in the back a little bit too much. But I would say there's a good symbiotic relationship with, uh, Wavecrest and all the other executives that, uh, they bring scaling experience, I bring industry experience, because now, after a decade, I am an industry expert. Right. And I'm also an expert in the business itself. So I would say, say we've reached a good place where I bring a tremendous amount of value in assisting professionals that do this for a living.

Speaker B: Well, Matt, one thing I could say is usually when founders get acquired in majority or did the whole thing, you can kind of set your clock and it's a matter of time. But in this case, it didn't happen. And it sounds like it was just as much your openness to contributing to the cause in a new paradigm, uh, in the ultimate sense of that word, and being a good team player and then actually having the capability to go improve things. Usually the founder makes themselves dispensable pretty quickly and, you know, kind of gives up or something like that. What is it about your mentality that allowed you to jump in? It's a little bit like somebody getting to a senior promoted to a senior role. The company grows, and then they get. Get demoted 9 times out of 10. Their spirit is Affected, and it doesn't really work. What is it about your, I don't know, your personality, your mindset that allows you to do that?

Speaker A: I would say be, be flexible. A value isn't necessarily, uh, people overemphasize the value of what they've done in the past or how they got to where they're at today. Right? So you think, look at all the great things I've done. It's like living in the high school glory days. I was awesome when I was in high school. Right. But that doesn't mean married a lot. And so you have to be more flexible than that. You can't expect people to give you credibility for what you built. Yes, that earned a certain level of respect and credibility in terms of, um, meeting people and being valued a certain way. But when I say flexible, you have to understand that you, as an entrepreneur and a bootstrap founder, your real value is surviving anything and solving any problems. So if you take that mentality to heart and say, you know what, I can survive anything and I can solve any problem and I can create value for myself and others around me, you'll find that even under any difficult situations, people like people of value, human beings are naturally drawn to people that bring value and solutions to the table, no matter what they are. And so even though in the beginning I tried to be quiet, to let the experienced, uh, executives, uh, do things their way, eventually when I saw things weren't done properly, I began to speak up. I began to say, hey, these are my thoughts, these are my opinions. I disagree. And what they realized that even the seasoned leadership saw that I had value in my opinions and they were thoughtful and how I was able to solve problems and approach problems. And so when people see value in people, they want to be part of your team. And so what they began to. I think I began to win other executives over as not just this honorary founder who operates in founder mode and runs around the fire hose and does whatever they want. What they saw was that, hey, he's actually bringing value to us. And don't forget, even private equity, you know, executives that bring in, they all have a vested interest, right? They all have something to play for, so they all want to win. These are not, uh, everyday people that are okay with, you know, failing. They all want to succeed. And so if you're helping them on that journey, for them to cash out and for them to make their shares worth more, they're going to bring you in close. And that's what I found throughout this journey, was that I could solve any problems with my typical founder mentality of I can solve problems, how do I solve them? I can work hard at them, I'm passionate about it. And those things began, uh, to bring value to the overall business. And if you stay that way, I think you will always have value in any business.

Speaker B: Well that's amazing and remarkable and aligned because now you have investors and you and everybody's got a piece of this and wants to grow like a World cup football team, you know, uh, out there, no matter where they came from, they're aligned for a major goal. Uh, so speaking of flexibility and change, we've got AI coming into software really hard, which you were barely at uh, cloud when you started. Right. And now we have AI. Can you briefly talk about what AI means to RapidWorks and whatever you can share. Is it uh, changing your product? Is it changing your product development? Is it changing your company? Is it of changing how you work?

Speaker A: Yeah. Ah, I think that's something that the whole world is wrestling with today, right? With AI. And really I like to put things in terms of AI. There's two parts to it. There is the utilization of AI and then there's the productization of AI. Right. And if you are a modern software company, you have to be effective at doing both. And really we're no longer just judged by the old metrics of car and retention and you know, all these different EBITDA, whether they're profitable, different kinds of things. As uh, SaaS companies, you also have to have the best in class process for creating products. And you cannot have the best process for creating product without AI in the middle of it to some degree or not. Right? Because you can make it cheaper, faster and better. And so AI, uh, utilization is extremely, extremely important because we're all going to be evaluated on not what, just what end product you make, but how are you making that product. And so that's something that uh, is near and dear to me personally. And at RapidWorks we're trying to absorb, I would tell you that we don't have it all figured out. We are all, this great wide world is in the same boat of trying to figure. It's an arms race to see who can figure it out better than the next guy. And so it comes down to how do you deal with this agentic workflows, the different models. Models, what tools, how do metrics, how do you measure people? So that is one part of the whole process and we are knee deep in trying to solve all those things and we're making good Progress. We still have a lot of work to do but we're getting there. On the other side you also have to have AI productization in some way because our customers are blue collar customers who mainly who go out to the field and do work. So we have to make AI real for we can't just bring AI to the table for the sake of having AI. Although it sounds nice to investors, at the end of the day you have to have productization in a way that makes sense to customers in a way that they can use it, that has a real world impact. And so we have number of different initiatives and ideas that we're mulling over. We're testing to figure out how we bring AI in a practical way to blue collar individuals and our customers that they can actually use. And the scariest thing about about AI is that uh, if you are a point solution, I don't think you're going to be around for very long because I can tell AI hey give me a scheduling software and these are some factors, it'll make me the software very easily. I think AI still will struggle for, you know, for a long time on this larger scale software that does everything. Because he's really good at making this point solution. But how do you get all those point solutions connected? Do your business really want to run 13, 14, 15, 20, 30 different point solutions that are all disconnected and depending uh, on what you do, you have to open up something different or do you want that one platform that's holistic, that's easy to understand, that's all connected. Right. So I believe with AI, which it's also done is created an arms race for RapidWorks to build our platform, to build that moat, to build it bigger, to have it do more, have it more all encompassing. So that way we're not a piecemeal solution that gets thrown out but we are the core system of record that really runs the entire business business. And so AI has a number of different things that we have to look at but we are not done yet in our journey. I would say we are just starting the journey or in the middle of the journey to be able to utilize AI uh in meaningful ways that delivers true value for our customers. Not just value for as a talking point to our investors or talking point to say we're innovative but actually value that can be monetized at our customers offices on a day to day. We're not there yet from utilization nor from a productization perspective.

Speaker B: Okay, well it's exciting and um, you know we're just getting started as we're saying. And the amazing thing this is back to when we first got PCs and we first got mobile and we first got cloud. We're back to the software isn't just good and what you do and a little better. It's uh, back to amazing compared to the alternative. And so there's gotta be things around this, your customers and their problems that gonna make, you know, people say, oh my God, that's amazing. Right? Yeah, we used to, you know, we used to do it this old way. I can't believe we used to do this old way in your software and now we do it this way so we have new chances to innovate with product and uh, you know, create new value out there. Well, that's an amazing story. We touched a lot here today. You still got a smile on your face and it's uh, you know, how fun is this after all this time? This is the point where I ask you to share some advice or perspective with the practical founders who are listening in the audience. Many of whom have system of records, more M than uh, half probably have some vertical industry software. They're getting started, they're using AI, they're up and running. What's the advice you give most often to bootstrap founders who aren't trying to solve it all with uh, VC funding or the AI Vibe coded app?

Speaker A: That's a great question. So when you're in the weeds and you're in the thick of things, forget to enjoy the process. I know some things are difficult, so it's hard to enjoy. But the reason why I'm smiling all the time nowadays, Greg, is I look back and even when we go through our pains now and we have plenty of problems, every business has them. I enjoy the process of solving them. And I guess the best advice I can give is that you have to, um. It's hard not to be myopic when you're in the middle of something. But the reality is this. Nothing is as bad as you think it is and nothing is as good as you think it is. You get all excited because you're like, whoa, I'm about to land the largest customer that I've ever had and I'm going to generate millions of dollars in revenues. And you're like, I'm, um, through the moon. I'm going to build a billion dollar business. All I got to do is land a, a few more of these. No, it's not as good as you think it is. That's the reality. There's a lot more to that and then also, wow, I just wasted $2 million of hard earned money making tablets and this blunder and I screwed up. Oh, man. How am I going to make this work now? You know what I was counting on? Um, my cash flow projections and revenue models. And it's like, now I look at this and I'm going to run out of money. What am I going to do? Right? And so nothing as bad as that. You end up, that's why you're a founder. You end up working through one problem at a time. And eventually it all is in the rearview mirror. Rearview mirror. And you look back and you go, how did I survive that? How did I do that? And so I would say, yeah, nothing is as good as you think it is, and nothing is as bad as you think it is. But all of it is part of the journey that I think that is special and unique to founders. Um, you should embrace it.

Speaker B: You should love it.

Speaker A: Just, it doesn't matter it's good or bad, just love it. Learn to like it. Yeah, like it.

Speaker B: And apparently run towards the fire. If you love problem solving, you love to, you know, uh, dig yourself out of all the stuff you've created. So. What an awesome story. Matt, thanks for sharing your story on the Practical Founders podcast of you creating, growing and, uh, being part of this, you know, really rapid growth, growth phase with RapidWorks.

Speaker A: Well, I'm happy to be here and appreciate you having me on. Yeah. You know, one thing also unique about founders, we also love to tell stories. And so anytime people ask, like, we're all proud of the hard things that we've done. So, Greg, I appreciate you giving me this opportunity to share my kind of my own story, to say, hey, look at what I've done, and pat myself on the back maybe a tiny bit. So I appreciate it.

Speaker B: Yeah, really appreciate it. Thanks, man.

Speaker A: Okay, uh, uh, thanks, Greg.

Speaker B: Thanks. Thanks for listening to the Practical Founders Podcast. I hope you found this interview interesting and, well, practical and useful. Please subscribe to the Practical Founders Podcast in your favorite podcast app and on, um, the Practical Founders YouTube channel. Stay tuned to hear all the amazing stories from successful founders who are winning their big prizes and doing it their way without big funding. You could check out my blog, all the pieces, podcast episodes, and information about my Practical Founders CEO peer groups@practicalfounders.com or connect with me on LinkedIn. See you next week.