Stuck at $50K ARR for 5 Years. Now $1.5M With AI Agents.

Speaker A: I was stuck on the 50k ARR for a long time and multiple times I thought I'm going to quit because that gives me much less money that I'm having as a full time employee. Right now it's zero team. So it's just myself and AI and I am on 1.5 million ARR. It's like 100 people working for the business right now or 247 self healing things that can break.

Speaker B: Hey, welcome to the SaaS podcast. I'm Omokhan and this is a show where I sit down with real founders and dig into how they actually built their SaaS companies. I've had almost 500 of these conversations now and I put out a new one every week to help you build and grow your startup. If that sounds useful, hit subscribe or check out saasclub IO to learn more. My guest today is George Georgiadis. He runs a software business doing $1.5 million in ARR and he does it with zero employees, just him and AI. But it took him seven years for five of those. He was stuck at 50k in ARR, putting in his own money just to keep the business alive. In this interview, George breaks down what finally got him unstuck. Why early on he turned down a million dollars to sell how he now runs his entire business, even the bug fixes with the team of AI agents he built himself and why he's now convinced he can't build a real company on his own with just AI. So he's hiring and building a team. So I hope you enjoy it. So tell us about Happier Leads. What does the product do, who's it for, and what's the main problem that you're solving?

Speaker A: Happier Leads identifies your anonymous website visitors. We identify them on your website, we qualify them using AI and then we engage with them. Essentially what we do. Imagine someone goes to your website and you have no idea who they are. Before they fill any form, we can identify their identity. We know exactly. For example, is John from IBM. And then what we do, we pass them through a qualification scenario. So we check if IBM is a good company for you or not. And if they pass those qualification checks, then we add them to an email campaign and, and we send them emails to try to bring them back to your sales funnel so you can contact them and book a demo with them.

Speaker B: Great. And tell uh, me about the size of the business, where are you in terms of revenue, customers, size of team?

Speaker A: Right now it's very interesting. Zero team. So it's just myself and AI and I am on 1.5 million ARR. This is something that didn't happen immediately, as you already know. Uh, this happened over the last seven years. And when really this uh, became a big business for me, it was the last uh, two years. Until then I was stuck on the 50k ARR for a long time and I did some magic and then I managed to bring this to 1.5 and

Speaker B: the business is bootstrapped as well. You haven't raised any money.

Speaker A: Exactly. So I tried to raise money. I failed and that's why I'm where I am right now.

Speaker B: Let's start with your background. It's interesting kind of where your story starts. You grew up in Greece. Tell uh, me about how you, you got into tech.

Speaker A: Yeah, so I study it initially and then I did a master degree in education. I wanted to get a government job and get a ah, salary of €800, which is in US dollars I think is around just for the audience to understand. Probably around $600 a month, something like this.

Speaker B: So you were in a place where you were basically, hey, if I could get a government job and €800amonth, I'll do great. So you moved to London at some point after your master's degree. And um, how did you get to a point where you, you decided to, to, to start this, this business?

Speaker A: I did 10 different projects until we end up with happierlit. And uh, fast forward to today. This is a seven years or seven year old business that uh, passed through a lot. Right. So you know my story. I started looking for funding. I failed. I had 88 people that came and gone. I had a lot of failures during this um, those years. And uh, I managed to figure it out over, you know, over experience. And I, I never had an mba, you know, I never had a degree in uh, knowing how to run businesses. But I always like that and I always try to figure it out myself how to do it.

Speaker B: We'll talk about that and we'll break down some of those things that you just mentioned. Um, so you basically had like 10 failed attempts at building some kind of business before you landed on happier leads. Tell me about like where that idea came from, why you decided uh, you were going to work on that and why this one was different.

Speaker A: One idea before Happy relates. I was building a software for cms. So imagine, uh, I don't know if you know there is something called Headless cms, which is essentially an API. So I was building that at some point. It was called CMS Driven and I was selling like 1, 2, 3 licenses at the point. Uh, it was a terrible MVP because the way I was approaching it, it was completely different. Uh, I don't want to go to go there. But it was a terrible business to be. But while I was running this business I had a need to see who is coming to my website because I was spending money on ads. People were coming to my website and then they left and then say okay, uh, what can, what can I do with 90 if 95% of people coming to my website and I don't know who they are, right? It's super hard. Imagine you have a coffee shop, 95% of people open the door with the go in and they don't buy the coffee and they leave. And you don't even able to get their, you know, email. So you can email them some offers later on so you can bring them back. So 95 people coming in and left and only five, they buy the coffee. That is a terrible business to be, right? So this is how everybody is running the business right now. They get 95% of people coming to their website and they leave. And that was the idea and I started looking for solutions. I found Clearbit at some point. But Clearbit was a huge enterprise vendor back then. So they quoted me 20,000 uh, US dollars for a yearly annual subscription always because those uh, enterprise deals. And I said, you know, that seems to be very, very crazy. I don't have that much money to spend on, on just identifying, you know, the visitors. And what I did is I built my own. So I like the idea. So okay, how can I build this my own and I start building it on my own. And at some point I built the very first website. The website was terrible. If you go to with a time machine, uh, you can, you can find the initial version of the website was uh, very bad. But fast forward, uh what happened back then I found AppSumo. And what happens in Appsumo is that a lot of people willing to try your software and pay for, for the software and become loyal customers long term because they buy a lifetime deal and they willing to fund your own project. So uh, I made my first 50,000 from my first campaign with Appsumo and it was money I used to further develop and build the appsumo and then I did another campaign and another one with them. So I did multiple campaigns to self fund in a way, uh, the business without getting external capital.

Speaker B: So how this was the day before the days of AI, You're a solo founder. Um, how did you build something like uh, even if it was like a super, super basic version of Clearbit, how did you go about doing that?

Speaker A: So you don't have to build everything yourself. So not, you know, the, there is lot of different layers there. So uh, let's talk about the initial technology because what we use today is not what it used to be before. What used to be before it was called uh, reverse IP lookup. So this is a technology that is just a database that matching an IP with a company. Right. You don't have exact visual identification there. So that is a uh, quite simplified version. Right. Obviously there is a lot more, more going on there. But um, what I managed to do is I managed to buy a database and try to use, build up everything else. I built up the UI part, I build up the mail campaigns, automations. So you build the business on top of the data. So there is nobody out there that builds the data, right. It's super hard for you to build all the data like the huge database, right? So you have to buy from somewhere. Even the big players, they buy from somewhere their own data. Then you build up the business on top of this you add some filtering layers, some qualify, you know, uh, to qualify the quality of the data. So you build up your proprietary technology on top of this. But behind the scenes the data, it's usually database that you can buy as one off.

Speaker B: So it's not that different from these days where people are trying to build on top of the LLMs and put their own special sauce on top of something that's being shared. Right, let's go back to that first version or the early version of the product. So you explain how you put it together. Basically the core was uh, reverse IP and then what you were building on top of that. The appsumo launches can be great because you get access to early adopters. It's a good way to basically raise money. But you're also selling lifetime deals which can potentially become crippling because all those people that you sold to six, seven years ago, you still have to support them today, right? Even if they're not paying you any more money. So how has that worked out for you?

Speaker A: Here's the truth. I worked this out and every two years they make all their money back. So what I mean with this, all the servers costs, all the data costs I do for them, right? So in two years time all this investment is gone in their own usage, right? So the people that using the tool, they, they evaporate this money that they gave me, right, this, this 50K that I got from my first launch, those people, they used those credits in just server costs on employees, you know, uh, everywhere. So I'm not getting back something immediately. But what this gives you is a period where you can ramp up. So it's like uh, if you never raise money right, so you get this 50k and you can start developing stuff and you have to do it fast. So you have to build things, things faster so you can escape the velocity. And then you start selling to people monthly. And by the time you're doing this, if you, if you do it right, right, then you can get the money that comes monthly or so so you can keep making more money from this. Obviously it can become a debt, but I figured it out a few ways how you can convert this debt into an investment. And I will tell you right now how I did that. So I use them for multiple reasons. It's not only about the uh, money is about reviews. So I get hundreds of reviews from them on the early days that nobody else would give you a review for the software. So you build in the first day something that is not super amazing, right. It's something that there is no enterprise that will come and buy for it because they buy the dream. They pay you because they know your platform might become after two, three years, Lemlist or something big. And then they can also exchange the coupon because the coupons, they have these coupons, they can exchange this for money. Right. So if you have now a Lemlist, Lemlist was also an option, I think. I think so. Ah yes it was. And a lot of people back then, they keep exchanging the coupons later on because now they see that this coupon has a value and it's something like this. So people invest and they, they feel that something can become better later. And uh, yeah, it's an investment for them and for you because now you have hundreds or thousands of people. Actually I have thousands of LTD's that they spread the world as well. So I got sales indirectly because they talk to someone and that person talks to another person. Then if you see on YouTube, I have a lot of videos that other people talking about my brand. So I just see videos from, you know, from appsumos that they just uh, talk about hyper elites.

Speaker B: Great. So there's other upsides beyond just the initial revenue of using something like appsumo. And as long as you understand what you're getting yourself in for now after the Appsumo launch, you got some needed capital to reinvest in the product, make it better, uh, you got some initial traction. Uh, you're doing about 4k in MRR. Um, or you said like 50k in ARR and then you got stuck at that. The revenue just plateaued there. And it wasn't just for a few months. It turned out to be for five years.

Speaker A: It was years. Yes, it was years. And, uh, many, many things was, uh, why, why this happened? So, number one, it was because I was a solo founder, so I didn't have anybody else. While I was going to the VC to ask for money, the business was going down. Then I was coming back to the business, the business was going up, Then I was leaving again to start raising again. So it was like this back and forth and nobody was in the business to actually push the business forward while I was trying to raise money. That's why my recommendation is if anybody want to raise money, one guy is running the business day to day like nothing happens. Like, if we don't raise any money, we continue running the business and the other guy is just focusing on raising money full time because you cannot do both. And what I'm doing here is very rare, even for a bootstrapped. Right. So what I'm doing right now is I'm having marketing, uh, and sales and development all run by myself. Right? So only very few people can do that. And I don't say this to brag, it's just that you have to know what you're getting into. Right. If you try to do what I'm doing, you need to understand that how difficult this is. Because the moment I imagine you have two levers, I start delivering more stuff and more people screaming on the other side to get, you know, to get the tool and get sales. And then I have to push sales. And the more I sale, the more I sell of my software, then I get more people want more development, more features, more things. Right. Or bugs that keep coming. So you, you need two people normally to keep pushing both levers at the same time. Otherwise you keep doing this.

Speaker B: Now tell me about what happened over those five years. Were you, Was it more like you kind of felt like the product was in maintenance mode and you were doing something else, or were you still like fully involved and just trying to break through but just not finding any way to do that?

Speaker A: Uh, I developed a lot. I was more, I can tell you, I was doing 80% software development, development, 20% marketing and sales. So that was the problem. That's why I was stuck there, because I should do more marketing and sales and the less software development and I Will tell you why I did, I did fail there. I didn't try to build something super small initially, something super focused. I tried to build all different tools around uh, the software because my idea was, and it's something that works right now because you know I spent seven years to build this, right? But if I was looking back then I wouldn't do all this like prospector enrichment email campaigns. I wouldn't do all of this stuff, right? But if you think about this, it was making sense back then because you identify the visitors and what most of my competitors do right now, and this is my competitive advantage is these people, they send them to clay, they send them to other platforms and now you have to buy additional software for enrichment, you have to buy additional software for sending the emails and you have to glue them together. So there is a lot of uh, cluttering there. And what I've said is I want the solution to do the whole end to end path, right? I want a solution where you identify, qualify, engage and you do this in a very quick way where you can buy the mailboxes from me so you don't have to go to buy from mailforge or whoever, right? So you can buy everything within one tool. And why is that? Because if I have everything within one tool I can support my customers because I can have 360 view. I know what is wrong, I can fix it very quickly. My white label users, they love it because they can do the same like they have everything in one place and they can set up clients very quickly. So essentially you drop the tracking pixel, you identify the visitors and then you can send email campaigns within one day. Imagine how cool this is, right when usually takes weeks to build email campaigns.

Speaker B: Ah, Are you talking about what the product is like now or what you were trying to build in those five years?

Speaker A: Right now it is like this. It took me seven years to build that. That's why I stuck building and building and building. If I was back then, I wouldn't do that, right? Because if I was back then I would just develop the identification tool, let it connect with third parties for days. Then I will just grew up the marketing and sales and at some point if I have enough resources I will build everything else around. So that was a mistake. I did. But that mistake that I did today really works because none of my competitors have the ability to send their mails directly and provision mailboxes as well. There is no platform right now can do 360 uh degree of what we actually do.

Speaker B: You're basically trying to give your customers a full end to end solution rather than having to pull together a whole bunch of different tools. It makes sense now, but during those five years where you're trying to build um, you know, a much bigger product and you already identified how you would do it differently and, and build a more lightweight product and focus more on sales and marketing. But was there a time in those five years where you just said look, this business is never going to get beyond 50k ARR.

Speaker A: Multiple times, multiple times. And I thought I'm going to give up multiple times on this. If, if I was looking back right now I will do something much more focused just looking into one business and uh, full time try to not raise money because I right now I know that I'm not able to raise money under this right now. Maybe I am, but you know, I don't want right now. But back then when I was trying to make this to uh, to work, I was trying to figure it out what I need to do and I didn't know what, what I need to do. I stuck on the 50k and multiple times I thought I'm going to quit because that gives me much less money, you know, that I'm having as a full time employee. And actually I start at some point even pouring money from my personal accounts into the business because it, it came in into a situation when I start borrowing money to the business from me personal and it was many times that I said I'm going to quit but uh, I figured out how I'm going to make this to work. Uh, I'm not a quitter, you know, because I said if I do this not work then I don't want to start another business after this. I did 10 different projects. I figured it out that you know, either I'm, you know, I'm very bad as an entrepreneur, uh, or there is something that I didn't figure it out yet and it was finally something I didn't figure it out back then. And it just, that's the thing is it takes you years to learn and there's nobody, even if you watch a video on YouTube that someone will tell you all the best tips if you don't experience them yourself. You don't really believe what people say. Like I heard so many times the right things that people said on YouTube or any of these podcasts and then I never implement them because if you don't experience the problems then you don't know.

Speaker B: It's very easy to hear advice, it's very difficult to internalize it and know, you know, what you should actually go and do. So very turbulent times over those 5 years. Revenue also is very flat. 50k. ARR. Tell me what changed, what happened, uh, at the end of those five years that started, uh, you know, the business started to grow. What did you do differently?

Speaker A: So it was mostly around. I never went into one of the departments deep enough, right? I was wearing a lot of hats. I was doing sales marketing, I was doing, uh, you know, development, software development, customer support, I was doing everything. But that didn't give me enough time to go into one layer and go deep enough. For example, Google Ads. I was running Google Ads, but I built a campaign, I throw it there. It came with the worst, uh, uh, cost per click, uh, very bad, you know, negative keywords that I never clean up. You know, when you do that, you're in unit economics, they don't work out at all, right? Because in the very first days and the first year, if you, if you don't, um, train the algorithm, I didn't have this pixel right to give all these negative signals to Google. I didn't do any of this stuff. So I start burning money. I was giving a lot of money there, but I didn't get my unit economics. And without your unit economics, you cannot grow the business, right? You have to have, uh, for every $1 you put in, you have to make 1.2 or, or you know, 1.3 to, to, to start grow. And um, yeah, so I had to go deep enough and I didn't do any email campaigns. And that was my, my worst, uh, thing because I was owning all of this data. I was having this 175 million contacts database and I didn't use it, I was selling it to other people, right? People were buying this data. But I, I never used the data. So I start sending millions of emails over, uh, you know, the last two years now. And uh, it actually, you know, it materialized. I tried to drive the costs down and how I did it and I know that not everybody can do this, right? And I will tell you why. Because I owned the email infrastructure myself. I built up mailboxes. I didn't buy the mailboxes from elsewhere because I'm selling mailboxes right now. So I build the mailboxes and I'm getting them right now with a very, very, very low price per mailbox. The leads, the emails, verified emails. I'm getting them with a very, very low price. Every single layer, right? From how you're going to send emails, uh, how you're going to monitor the emails. I don't have a real person right now monitoring. I have automations everywhere. And uh, obviously how chip it gets for me to get an email. The unit economics work and when the unit economics work, something really magic happens. You start getting the money back, you reinvest them back and you keep growing. And you keep growing.

Speaker B: Is most of your acquisition coming through cold email?

Speaker A: Most of the acquisition is cold email. It's the cheapest uh channel right now. And when I say cheapest sometimes people misunderstand me because cheapest doesn't mean you don't get a good leads. You actually get very good leads. And hear me out. When you go to Google, if you give to Google or Facebook or whatever, you give them a small bid, they throw you to you the worst leads. You have to give a very big bid to give you the good leads. The people that can spend more money with your better budget. Right. In email it's the other way around. You choose who you want to contact. So you do the ICP ideal uh, customer profile, um, filtering, uh initially. So you see I want to contact this company and I want to talk to this specific job title and you send the email. So you, you pay too little to get a mail uh, especially myself and, and too little to send the email because I'm getting those cheap mailboxes. And I can do that in scale. So I can send millions of emails over the year. Ah. And I can do that in a very specific targeted. I start very targeted initially and then I expand. I have like a strategy there where I prioritize the, my ICP and then obviously I can expand to more uh, to other territories. But the way it works is you can get exactly who you want to talk to and at the same time you can do it at scale very cheaply. When if you do advertisement and I still do advertisement but mostly around the high intent. So if someone search for website identification or someone search my competitors, that's my strategy there to steal from my competitors. I'm not doing it in a way that gives me cold leads, right? And then I try to convert them. I'm doing it more in a way that someone right now looking for the solution and can go either looking for my, to look for my competitors or they look for a software right now those are still good leads through to be targeted through Google Ads. But then when you go to you say I want to talk to this specific company. The best tool is the email campaigns.

Speaker B: So these days with AI it's become like too easy to send Email campaigns at scale. And, um, I think there's just so much noise out there that many people are just tuning out. So what is it different about what you're doing that's enabled you to get results? Is it just been a volume thing as a numbers thing in terms of.

Speaker A: First of all, it's a numbers thing. Number two, you have to do everything right. So email campaigns is a huge, like, we can talk about ours, about this, but just to give you an example, spf, dkim, all of this stuff needs to be settled, right? So you need to have mailboxes that deliver your message to inbox. That's the number one thing you have to do.

Speaker B: Then you have opposed to spam folders.

Speaker A: Yeah, so. Yeah, exactly. So you have to set up, you have to do some technical setup to make sure you don't send. And then, then there's a lot of principles like you don't want to send pictures or links inside. So you initially send an email, you try to get the reply back, and then you send them the link only after they reply back to you because you don't want to send millions of links that will be a massive spam issue. So you have to do all of these things right? And your message should be very, very simplified, not like jargons. You don't have to. People right now, uh, they, they are smart, they are going to understand even if you try to personalize and say something, you know, you know, I get this emails every day. It looks like so stupid when people tell you, oh, George, uh, congratulations in this, you know, uh, 1.5 million. Ah, we saw, you know, the article, you know, obviously I know that nobody typed this right manually. I know that they did it using AI. So for me personally as a founder, receiving all of these emails in my mailbox because I'm reading all my mails, I don't, I don't treat, oh, this is a cold email. I'm not going to read it. I'm reading everything right? And I do it because I want my mailbox to be clean and tidy. And I don't want to be any opportunity someone. I don't want to lose an opportunity, right? I don't want someone to send me an email and tell me, come to my podcast or, you know, I have a huge audience and I didn't look into the email just because I thought that it's a spam. So I'm opening the email anyway. And you know what that means is that a lot of other founders and executives, they open the email regardless Right. And they read the email. So what the worst thing for you to do is to write a paragraph giving them compliments that you don't mean. Right? So people like me, that I respect my time. I want to see if something very, very short, straight to the point, tell me how this can benefit me in a, you know, very, very tiny, uh, paragraph, and then I will tell you, I will send you a message back. This is, this is what I do. If I say, okay, that is interesting. I will message back if I see something huge like complimenting me. And all of this stuff, uh, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't make any sense.

Speaker B: Let's talk about how you've got the business set up today. So when you were at 50k ARR, you talked about a lot of people coming through the company, a lot of turnover, and then now you're at 1.5 million in ARR, you have zero employees. So how are you running the business today?

Speaker A: So mostly on autopilot AI. So I will explain how this works. So I have built a brain, which is the AI brain. It's everything built in house. I don't use anything else. Uh, obviously I use, uh, Claude and OpenAI the APIs, and. But when I say I don't use anything else, I mean I haven't used the intercom chat. I, I had this at some point and then I completely quit. I removed the subscription. It was costing me US$500 per month. Completely removed them. I built my own chatbot. And why I did that because from intercom you don't need all their features. You just need the features that match your specific scenario, right? So I built using vibe coding, uh, the chatbot I connected to my system. Now I have a CRM built by myself, connecting to AI chatbot built by myself, session recordings that can see what people do. Like similar to Hodjar build my myself all connected together, right? AI that, uh, analyzing those, uh, session recordings and what people do and analyze the behavior if they stuck somewhere, if they found, if they. If for example, they. There is a bug and they cannot move forward. AI can realize this and can build because I have all of these items connected together, can send emails to people, right? To unblock them. I have the library that I built where I have all these small video tutorials, help centers, everything in one place. So now imagine, let's uh, just take a scenario, you stuck somewhere and you ask the customer support. My account has 3,000 credits. Why it has 3,000 credits? Uh, it should have 2,000 credits. What it does it sends a signal through AI to look into the database and the code base and the code and they can find problems, identify bugs, fix the bugs. I have a lot of filtering in the middle so uh, so I can avoid something called a prompt injection because a lot of people might go to the chat and try to you know, delete the database or anything. So the AI uh, just push back. So I have all of these procedures that, that the software can self heal itself. I'm not developing new features on Autopilot, but I automate the fixing of the software. The fixing part. I have a list of KPIs right. I have a huge uh, I'm going to share all of this stuff over the next months with people on YouTube by the way. So I have like a huge KPIs for every single element of like I'm uh looking my metrics, my uh, you know, mrr, my churn rate, everything from that perspective. Then I'm looking on how is my uptime, my website is it up and running every single element. And then I have a reactive system using AI that when something goes wrong and outside within the healthy range automatically read this and fix self healing the system. So it's like 100 people working for the business right now or 247 self healing things that can break.

Speaker B: So your uh, your customers are interacting through this chat bot when they have issues and on the back end you're basically running these agents that are able to diagnose, troubleshoot and fix bugs and even deploy.

Speaker A: Yeah. And doing much more than this. Everything is built in house because I can have full control of this. I know that this, this is not an advice that anybody can do. You know, it's not something that uh, I'm telling people okay, go and build your own software because you know even vive vibe coding it's a lot but for me it was an investment. It was an investment because I start for multiple years I was keep changing software. Every time was something different. Imagine I had HubSpot at some point. Then I moved from HubSpot because I uh, it was very expensive for me. After, after a while they had like a huge jump into the pricing and then I start moving to Intercom and from Intercom then I did like a pipedrive and I was trying to figure it out how to connect all of this data together and how can I, you know, because you don't have the data together connected with an AI brain and they are all over the place. This is why you need people to make sense of them. Open to windows, try to figure it out what is here, what is there. So right now I have everything in one place. All the data in one place, all the AI in one place. I explained to the AI I have a giving them giving, giving it a personality. So I explained to the AI, you are George, right? You are replacing me. And you are, you know, your, your way of thinking is this, this and this, this is all the KPI metrics you need to take care of every day. And, and those are all the different tools. Like uh, you're giving them a palette of tools. You're giving them, you say you have access to chat, you have access to the app, you have access to the database, you have access to the code base, you have access to, you know, session recordings, you have access to knowledge base, uh, you have access to all of the systems. So now if anybody asks for anything, you know, figure it out. And either you know, from sending them a calendar invite or I have auto follow ups in a process where if people uh, you know, I send the first message, right? Then I don't have to do the follow up. And follow up, follow up. Like the follow up process is very simple because you just say, did you read my message? You know, do you have this kind of simple stuff? Right? So all of this is automated.

Speaker B: You're in many ways in quite an extreme case, uh, of you've basically vibe coded everything um, in house, um, where I think some people try to go down that path and then realize that uh, you can build stuff quickly and then the honeymoon period dies and then you have a lot of time that you need to put in to maintain and run and operate these kind of things. What I think is more interesting with you is that you went from a, a place where you were hiring people and rehiring and so on and the business wasn't growing, you got to a place now where you have zero employees. It's just you and AI helping you run the business and you've got to seven figures in ARR. But then you told me, actually I'm going to start hiring people now. Yeah. So tell me about why you're going back there.

Speaker A: So I did two realizations, right? And that's why when I say I don't want people to just copy me, right. I'm not the guy that you have to copy. What I'm saying here is to just, you know, if you're in the similar situation with me and you don't have any money and you start something new and let's say you think that VC is not the right route for you for XYZ reasons or you think that you don't want to spend so much time and energy following this path and you want to follow a different path, the path I chose to follow later on. Then this advice might be for you. If you don't willing, if you don't will to, you know, to spend a lot of your personal money, you want to do something yourself. So that advice only works if you are solo father, you are not going to raise any money. You don't want to spend a lot of money on external software. You want to build everything in the house and you don't expect a lot of employees anytime soon. Right? Because the way I built all of this in one place, it helps me as a solo founder. It might not help me when someone else comes in and says, let's say I hire a marketer. And the marketer says okay, let's see your Lemlist account or whatever, you know, to send the emails or send in blue. I don't know, I'm just throwing some names of newsletters and I say no, no, you have to go to Happy Release and do it from there. And then people say okay, how we can send an email with this HTML template. I'm just telling you an example. You will have to vibe code it. This is what, what will be my reaction. So you have the guys will say but I don't know how to vibe code it right? Because not everybody will know how to do it like vibe code the software right. Uh, that will be hard job for everyone to do. So that might not work for anyone. That's why I'm saying you don't have to copy me. It was my situation where I found the path for me. Uh, because I knew how to code as well and I used my skill and I used the opportunity of AI to marry those two and get a way out for different people. That might be something different for my situation. Back to this. Now I'm looking to hire. And the reason why I'm looking to hire is because I know that the business is not going to be one person. Uh, if you are one person, you are an operator. You're not a business owner. You don't own the equity. And definitely if you want to exit after 10 years, let's say you will not be able to exit the business if you are, uh, an operator. If you're, if you are the business. If something happens to me tomorrow, I will not be able to operate right? So I have to. Although I have A lot of help from AI. I still need to bring people into the team, and those people have to be very, uh, smart, intelligent people that can use AI and prompt and, you know, all of these nice technologies to move the business to the next level.

Speaker B: All right, well, I'd love to keep talking, but we should wrap up. So let's go on to the lightning round. I've got five, uh, quick fire questions for you. You ready? Yep. What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?

Speaker A: At some point, someone offered me 1 million to exit hyperlites, and I refused. And when I went to one of my, I don't want to call them mentors because I didn't have a lot big relationship with him, but I see him as a mentor because he gave me one good advice. He said to me, exit, take the money, George, take the money. Go build something else. Or, you know.

Speaker B: You didn't listen.

Speaker A: Yeah, I didn't listen. And my mentor back then told me, you should take the money. I didn't took the money. And, uh, here we are there.

Speaker B: What book would you recommend to our audience and why Book?

Speaker A: Uh, all of the books of Alex Hormonzi. 100 million offer all of. All of them from, from him. Uh, I think they are very practical. I don't really like books that they just talk about theory. I like books that they can teach you something that you can apply.

Speaker B: What's the best money you've ever spent on your business?

Speaker A: Oh, sales coaching. So I spent money to become a better salesperson. And that was huge for me because I was losing so much money, I was not able to sell. And when people were coming to the call and I was not able to identify the pain and pressure, their pain. And no, because this is a strategy. You don't have to become, you don't have to born salesperson. You just have to know the strategy, how this works. And when I learned that I didn't only increase my, you know, um, the revenue I was bringing to the table, I learned a lot about how to deal with my offers and, and, you know, sales also touching a little bit with marketing. So everything that I learned about sales, I applied them back to the website. So it was a great asset. I just learned a very, very nice skill that I can use for all my life because even if I quit happily today, I can go in and still, if I'm a good salesperson and I know how to identify the pain of the client and know how to put a pressure on it, and then, uh, Give clarity to them. Right. Because this is what you do as a salesperson. You just make them talk and make them sell to themselves. Right. So when you know how to do that, this is a great skill for anyone.

Speaker B: What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

Speaker A: Oh, to be organized in general. Uh, when. When I say organized from your calendar. Getting your calendar. My calendar is my extension of my hand. Right. So I want to see everything in there. If it's not there, it's not going to happen. And it helps me prioritize a lot about where I'm spending my time and how I spend my time. So I want to have a calendar. It doesn't really matter what time you wake up in the morning, what time you go for sleep. Uh, I'm not into this, you know, rituals. I just think that if you start, let's say, nine o', clock, and you finish, I don't know, 10 o' clock or whatever, you have to have an organized day. And you need to know from the day before what you're gonna do the next day.

Speaker B: And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

Speaker A: I'm doing reenactments. I'm doing some Wild west stuff. And, uh, yeah, I'm doing some Vietnam War stuff. A, uh, lot of reenactment guy. And then I play music. Uh, I like videography and many other. Many, many hobbies. I like to always learn something new.

Speaker B: All right, well, George, thank you so much for joining me. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. Um, if people want to check out happier leads, they can go to happierleads.com and, uh, if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Speaker A: They can talk to me on LinkedIn as well. Although it's a little bit too noisy nowadays, but, uh, yeah, reach out on LinkedIn or go to the website and just text if you gonna see the AI bot. Just say agent, and then I will appear after.

Speaker B: So, agent.

Speaker A: Agent talking to you. But then if you say agent, the real George will appear.

Speaker B: All right, that's good. Good insider tip. Great. Well, thanks, man. It's been a pleasure and, uh, I wish you all the best.

Speaker A: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure as well.

Speaker B: Cheers.