You are listening to the My Wife Quit her Job Podcast, where I bring in successful bootstrapped business owners to teach us what strategies are working and what strategies are not. Now this isn’t one of those podcast where we bring on famous entrepreneurs simply to celebrate their success. Instead I have them take us back to the very beginning and delve deeply into the exact strategies they used earlier on to gain traction for their businesses.

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Welcome to the My Wife Quit her Job Podcast. We will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle, so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here is your host Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit her Job podcast. Today I’m happy to have Erin Matzkin on the show. Now Erin along with her partners Heather Porter Joyce and Damian Toohey are the creators of the popular iPhone app, CluckCluck app which helps organize and simplify communication between parents and their kid’s care givers. Now what I like about Erin is that she’s a very caring mom who wants the best for her children. And as a mom she had a problem and came up with a very clever solution to solve using technology.
Now her app has been featured on TechCrunch, Business Insider, Real Simple as well as other high profile publications and it’s really something special. With that, welcome to the show Erin, really glad to have you on tonight.

Erin: Thank you. I’m so glad to be here and thank you for that lovely introduction.

Steve: Yeah. It’s a great app. I actually took some time to download it and fire it up.

Erin: Excellent.

Steve: So give us the quick background story; tell us about the app, how it works, and how you came up with the idea?

Erin: As you mentioned my cofounder, Heather– Heather and I have been friends for well over a decade. We are both technology lawyers by way of background, and we started work at the same law firm together and then we both worked together for many years at the Walt Disney Company at Disney Interactive which is their website– which is the part of the company that manages all of Disney’s website and mobile apps. So during this period of time, Heather and I– we got married, we had babies and we spent a lot of time together sort of discussing the challenges of work life balance.

One thing that we talked about a lot was how difficult it can be as a working mom to kind of come home at the end of the day and just really have no idea about what went on with your kids. I mean– for a baby you are like did they get a nap, how many ounces did they have in the bottle? For a bigger kid you want to know like did their homework get done? And then we talked about sort of other babysitting challenges like getting a sitter for a Saturday night. Then one day I was with Heather and she was trying to book a baby sitter for her own birthday party so she could go to her own party.

She was texting and driving which is terrible, texting all of her sitters to see if they could come over. Finally she said, “There has to be a better way to do this.” So the next morning after her birthday party I came over to her house. We were having coffee on her porch and we started hand drawing wireframes for what a mobile app would look like to sort of solve all of our child care problems. A week later, we were like. “This is a really good idea. We should get serious about this.” So we built some wire frames for real and then we were incredibly fortunate that our friend Damian was willing to do the coding for us, to engineer it and CluckCluck was born. Honestly we built it to solve our own problem.

Steve: So exactly how does it work? If you can just walk us through a use model.

Erin: Yeah, sure. So there are three main parts. The first is a booking engine. So you need a sitter for Saturday night. I personally have four people who I use on kind of a regular basis. So with the app you can send one invitation to all of your regular sitters at once. They indicate if they are available or not, and then you pick the one you want and book it. It will calendar for you and for the sitter and it will disappear for everybody else.

Steve: Okay.

Erin: Then kind of the main part of the app is what we would call the feed. So you can set up a little profile for each of your children with what you want to be notified about. That could be anything from again bottles or naps, for a baby to like sports practice or let’s say school gets out on Tuesday early, you could put that in their profile. And then give your babysitter access to this profiles while she is on the job, and just with quick one touch buttons she can give you updates on what’s going with your kids.

So she can just say with one click school pick up is done, homework is done, baby’s nap is done. She’ll also have access to all of your family’s emergency contacts. So let’s say she takes your baby to the park to play, she’ll have all the information with her just in case something were to happen. And then the last piece is the payment engine. So you can pay your sitter through the app and keep the payment history in case you need to export it to excel, like if you pay nanny taxes for example. And that’s pretty much it in a nutshell.

Steve: So in regards to– when the sitter hits the button you basically– there is no texting back and forth at that point. It’s just probably just one user interface where you look at to determine whether they’ve accomplished whatever you’ve setup for them to accomplish, right?

Erin: That’s exactly right.

Steve: That’s nice. So when you decided to design this app, did you have Damian this whole time or were you kind of worried about the technical challenges of developing an app in the beginning?

Erin: We were definitely worried about the technical challenges. Heather and I do not code ourselves. I wish I did. In my next life I will be an engineer. But we are– again we are tech lawyers and so we have helped various clients build many mobile apps, many websites. So we knew what that piece of the process should look like. So we were able to really sketch out a great level of detail, what the functionality would be. And once we finally got Damian on board– I’m not going to say coding was simple for him, but he had a clear road map for what it needed to be.

Steve: So you mentioned wire-framing a lot. So that’s terminology that only someone who is kind of experienced would use that sort of term. So were you developing apps in your job or?

Erin: Well no, I was helping. So when I worked at Disney, I would help the Disney business team to develop and build apps.

Steve: Okay. So for the listeners who don’t know exactly what a wireframe is, if you can just kind of describe that process that you went through, that would be great.

Erin: Yeah. It’s– pardon me for using weirdo technology terms. It basically just means like a graph of the app. So you create a step by step map of what it will look. So if you touch this button here, you will get a picture showing this is what the user will see next. So it’s just very clear what the flow will be as the user is working their way through the app. It’s not a difficult process but it can be complicated. You just want to make sure people don’t get trapped somewhere in a dead end and [inaudible] [0:08:54] whatever piece of the app they need to use next.

Steve: So do you use software for this or did you just do it on a piece of paper?

Erin: You can do it either way. We did a lot of it sort of by hand at first and then once we had it locked down we built it more formally with programming.

Steve: So have you used any tools like Balsamiq or any of those tools to wire frame the app?

Erin: No, not me personally.

Steve: And then how did you find Damian?

Erin: This is just– honestly just luck, the stars aligned. We had actually started out with a big development shop was our– they were our first partner and they were great. I will say that they were a lot of young guys who did not have children themselves. And as fantastic as they were I think they couldn’t really wrap their heads around what we were trying to do.

So after a few months with them, when it became clear that relationship wasn’t going to be productive, we parted amicably. About a week later, a friend of mine introduced me to Damian. Damian has three kids and it was like you could see the light bulb turn on. He got it immediately. And he was really enthusiastic about it, and has just found a fantastic partner. Damian is a natural rocket scientist, he teaches– he does aerospace engineering, he teaches classes in engineering and he’s the LA, he’s brilliant, and we are so lucky to have him.

Steve: So are you guys all doing this on the side? Then Damian this is side job for him?

Erin: That is correct.

Steve: Okay. And he has three kids, and he’s a rocket scientist.

Erin: Correct.

Steve: Okay. And he had time to code this up.

Erin: I think he doesn’t sleep, I think [inaudible] [0:10:33].

Steve: So that first company, where did you find that first company that didn’t work out, was it just through a service or something or?-

Erin: That was through a friend of mine recommended this company.

Steve: Okay, okay.

Erin: Former coworker of mine recommended the company.

Steve: Okay, and then as you were wire-framing your app, was there some sort of validation process that you went through before you all decided to kind of go all in on this project?

Erin: Actually not really. Damian was able to get a Beta app and running for us with a lightning speed. And once he had the beta app, we honestly, we sort of pressed our family and friends, and [Inaudible] [00:11:09] and we had a couple of hundred people, our friends and family tested out for us. And that was really the validation we made, several edits to the app as a result of that process before we publically launched it on iTunes.

Steve: Okay, so your Beta testers were mainly friends and family?

Erin: That’s correct.

Steve: Okay and how quickly did you get the Beta version out?

Erin: I want to say from the time we started working with Damian, maybe four months, and again remember he was sort of doing this on nights and weekends.

Steve: Okay, I was just curious, were you getting feedback along the way as you were developing that first Beta or was the first Beta just based on ideas that you guys just the three of you had talked about?

Erin: It was really just the three of us at that point.

Steve: Okay, and then once you started testing, or once you had Beta customers, did you guys make a lot of changes at that point, and what was the process by which you actually took feedback, because I have experienced developing software as well, and often times you get all sorts of feedback, and some of it might not jell with your overall vision for the app, so what was the process by which you kind of processed the feedback.

Erin: It’s a really good question. First of all we could see the path of the app where people are really engaging, and some things that weren’t being so utilized, so we knew where to focus our efforts. And I would say I think to some degree we were just lucky, we had friends and family who were pretty candid with us, and gave us some really excellent points of suggested functionality we had never considered, there was a lot of work around the calendar and piece in particular, around being able to blast one invitation to all of your sitters, and pick the one you wanted.

And so that function– we scrapped that whole thing and started over based on feedback that was– it was not friendly enough. And then we added some additional functionality, like the payment history and there is a time also you can have your set of clock in and out, when she starts and stops of her work, so you know how much you owe her. Those were things that were entirely suggested to us by our users. I do agree with you we received some feedback with which we didn’t agree, we didn’t feel like it was really going to work with our central purpose of the app, with our vision of the app. So there were some things that we considered carefully and discarded. But by and large the feedback that we received during Beta was really helpful.

Steve: And then why your app was in Beta, was it on iTunes for everyone to download, or was it just kind of a private Beta.

Erin: It was a private Beta, we used [inaudible] [0:13:43] which is the modern test flight, so you can just blast your app, only to people you want to have access to it.

Steve: Okay and then how long it was in Beta before you actually decided to put on iTunes.

Erin: I don’t remember exactly, it was a few months of testing.

Steve: Okay, and then once you decided to put it on iTunes, what was kind of your launch strategy?

Erin: Well, we are a small start up, we are bootstrapped, and candidly we were trying to get as much organic press as we could, because we did not have a gigantic marketing budget to spend. So we had then kind of cultivating relationships with a few recorders during the Beta process. And we’re incredibly lucky to have TechCrunch cover our launch, which was amazing. That was amazing.

Steve: So, let’s delve deeper into that, how do you TechCrunch to cover your launch?

Erin: So, my partner Heather who is braver than me, and cooler than me, she without time she applied for us to be in a TechCrunch pitch off, I don’t know if you are familiar with this or not.

Steve: Okay, no I follow TechCrunch for sure, I didn’t know that they have pitch offs.

Erin: They do, they have regional pitch competitions, where basically they take you usually five to ten companies, they give you literally one minute to pitch your company, and then the winners get tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt which is their big conference.

Steve: Yes, yes. I’m familiar with Disrupt, yes.

Erin: Yeah, so Heather applied for us to be in a pitch off and we ended up winning one of the prizes and getting a booth at Disrupt, in their start up early, and we just– we met a ton of really interesting and fun people, but also met a couple of reporters who offered to cover our launch, and in fact came through for us when we were ready to launch.

Steve: Wow. Okay. And so was that the magazine Real Simple on business insider or with these other people?

Erin: I will tell you, I think we were very lucky to get the coverage from TechCrunch because a lot of the other publicity start from there. The pickups from business insider and battle, and some of the other apps, Mommy press, I believe– I don’t know for sure, but I believe they probably came at that because people saw the TechCrunch article.

Steve: Okay, and then just hypothetically speaking, let’s say you did not win that TechCrunch pitch, what was some of the other things that you had in mind, like what was plan B and C and D?

Erin: I think you gave me a credit for being more organized when I answer. We were prepared to work with the PR Company, with a PR firm if we needed to.

Steve: Okay. Do you guys work with one now, I mean how do you get publicity today?

Erin: We do not work with one now, we do a lot of blogging and a lot of social media, and that gets us a fair amount of traffic. In a perfect world if we were– if we had decided to pursue VC money or something like that, I think we probably would be working with a PR firm, but we are really enjoying kind of this organically grown business, it’s been a lot of fun for us, it’s been a great adventure.

Steve: So let’s talk about blogging, so I run a blog, and…

Erin: You run a great blog.

Steve: So is this– thanks– is this blog– flattering me, it always works. Is this blog directly tied to the app or is it kind of an independent blog that…

Erin: No, it’s tied to the app; you can access that from the app web page.

Steve: Okay, So let’s talk about your content strategy, so what are some of things that you write about, and how does that tie into your app?

Erin: Well, we have found that the demographic who’s most humbly using our app is working mums.

Steve: Surprise, surprise.

Erin: Surprise, surprise which makes a lot of them, so we try to blog and write honestly about issues that we ourselves have tackled as working mums, whether it’s suggestions for how to make your day a little easier, or just want empathy for hey this is tough, we’ve been there, you are going to get through it. We blog about a lot of issues, about work and family.

Steve: So, having started a blog myself, I know that in the very beginning it’s pretty lonely when no one is reading, so how did you start that initial traffic burst with your blog?

Erin: That and the second question, Heather and I each wrote a blog, so we did blogging for a little while and it’s kind of what you are talking about, we are so alone in here, and no one’s reading it. And then each of us wrote a post that was very honest, mine was about why I had quit my big corporate job to become– to go freelance. In addition to the app, I’m also an attorney and I run my own small practice. So I wrote a post about why I had quit my big corporate job, how difficult it has been for me, and how candidly I was still mad that I had to quit, and that kind of turn the traffic.

And then Heather wrote a post about her experience, she at one point had quit her job to be a stay-at-home mum, and after several years at home returned to work force. And she talked very honestly about what an incredibly difficult transition that had been for her, and how off ramping, you’re taking time off to stay at home can be more detrimental to your career than people generally will admit in the media. And those two posts together somehow managed to drive a fair amount of traffic to our website. We still get head time results all the time.

Steve: How did you get the word about those articles?

Erin: We posted those articles in addition to like our CluckCluck social media accounts, we posted them to our personal social media accounts which links back, and the traffic all came from there.

Steve: Okay and how did you build– is this from Facebook, or twitter, what are your main social media outlets?

Erin: Our main social media outlets are Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Steve: Okay, so let’s talk about all those actually, let’s talk about Facebook first. How did you build your Facebook fan page?

Erin: Well, Facebook is a tricky one, right. Facebook– I’m going to get all boring a lawyer, I get away from that. Facebook has changed the way the algorithm works, so that posts by companies are becoming less and less obvious in your news feed, and so I think we rely less and less on Facebook, simply because it is not driving traffic that it used to.

Steve: Okay, so what do you focus on then?

Erin: I mostly use Instagram more than anything which is funny because our app is not naturally a super visual piece of media. And so we try to post a lot both serious posts and funny posts on Instagram about challenges of being parents or working parents.

Steve: I actually– I was just about to say your app is perfect for Instagram, because you can post all these funny things about your kids and your family. So do you get kind of personal on your Instagram account? I know my wife doesn’t like me posting pictures of my kids on my account. Are you guys wide open with that?

Erin: We do not post pictures of our children. I will certainly post pictures of the aftermath of our children. My son broke the window this afternoon; I posted a picture of the broken window.

Steve: So how do you mix Instagram posts with kind of more with posts that encourage people to check out your app.

Erin: That has been– it’s a challenging one, because you want your audience to be entertained but you also want them to know about your product. I really love our product and I believe in our product. I just think we try to keep it a fine mix of like “Hey these are funny relatable moments that we’ve had as working parents.” And then we usually– we will post a photo about one of our latest no– let me give you an example. We did it a post about going back to work after maternity leave and we found this great shot of this really gorgeous woman, who look professionally dressed. And so we’ll post something like that with a link back to the blog in the profile section.

Steve: So by link– because Instagram doesn’t allow links, so is it just like the typed out URL?

Erin: So what we do in your Instagram profile, you can– there’s one live link. And we update that link constantly with whatever our new blog post is.

Steve: I see so you make the post and then you say “link in profile” or something like that, right?

Erin: That’s correct.

Steve: And so how do you measure all these– how do you measure what’s coming in from Instagram and– do you guys measure where all of your downloads are coming from? Like the sources?

Erin: It’s hard to measure downloads. We are iTunes only. We are IOS only right now. We are working on an android version, but it is not up and running yet. So it’s hard to tell what brought somebody to iTunes. It’s relatively easy to tell where web-traffic to our website is coming from. And we do use like a Google URL shortener for twitter, for Instagram and so sometimes it’s hard to tell something has come from a Google search or from a URL shortener. Yeah there are many tools available that will tell you where your traffic is coming from.

Steve: So would you say that Instagram is one of your primary sources outside of your blog?

Erin: Yes. Facebook [inaudible] [00:22:44] a fair amount of traffic, but we have kind of seen that go down over the past six months and I expect it will continue to go down.

Steve: Okay, and then what are some of your strategies to get more Instagram followers.

Erin: I do not have any good strategies. Do you have any you would like to share with me?

Steve: Maybe I’ll find. I mean I’ve interviewed some people who base their businesses on Instagram. So I was just curious if you are doing anything special to get more ads. But I mean in a nutshell a lot of these people that build their following, they run contests, they do giveaways and that sort of thing.

Erin: You know we keep talking about that. We probably ought to get more sophisticated about it and do more about it, but right now no we haven’t tried any of those tactics.

Steve: Do you guys do anything paid advertising?

Erin: A little bit. We kind of dabbled to see what moves the middle. But I will tell you in terms of app downloads, the paid ads don’t seem to work as well as just some of the press coverage we’ve gotten.

Steve: Absolutely. So what is your– so you don’t have a PR firm, so how do you do your outreach today for press?

Erin: Oh boy! It’s– we try to be strategic about once a month. We look at our media plan and update it. But it’s really a lot of organic outreach; it’s me and Heather emailing editors, calling people, trying to let them know about the app.

Steve: So are these just editors that you know or they are just brand new cold call editors.

Erin: It’s a combination of both. It’s a lot of cold call quality emails though.

Steve: Okay, and do you guys use the service like Harrell or anything like that?

Erin: We don’t. We haven’t. I know some people have great luck with it, not us.

Steve: Yeah I mean you have to be like the first person to respond. Basically– I mean it’s been hit or miss for me, but I was just curious. So I had another question actually and this is just about the app, why did you decide to price it at 99 cents as opposed to giving it away for free with advertising? What were some of the thought process behind that?

Erin: You know we thought about that a lot and we played with several different models. But this was a big part of our beta test was how– what is the best way to sell it? What do people feel is the best value? And you know free with ads is not a great business model for most apps these days. It’s just that the ads– I think that there will be a great way to monetize mobile, but just banner ads and apps doesn’t tend to really get it done unless you are gigantic, unless you are a huge app. And also kind of we’ve used a bunch of apps without them and some of them don’t just look that great. It interferes with ease of use.

Steve: Yes definitely.

Erin: And we decided we really wanted this to be a clean and simple tool for parents and for baby sitters. And the keeping it ad free was the better way to go.

Steve: Did you guys run any tests to see whether it would generate more income than the download?

Erin: We– yes we did. And we believe that the download model works better for us financially as well.

Steve: Okay. Just a side story there is this pay app that I let my kids play but it’s ad driven. And every now and then they will hit the ad which pisses me off because it takes them to the seller website. Anyway, okay so let’s see– so now your app is on iTunes, what is the secret to getting visibility on iTunes?

Erin: That is– it’s really tricky. There are definite strategies to making your app more visible. If it’s optimized for both iPhones and for an iPad, that will help you definitely apps that are so general orient app that don’t have any mature content on them, that’s a better way to go. And ours definitely doesn’t have mature content, it’s general audience. Having the app available– this is something we are working on; having it available in multiple languages can be helpful. That actually would– will be great when it’s up and running for our app as well because a fair number of our app users English is not their first language.

Steve: Oh really, okay.

Erin: Yeah. Apple is a little bit secretive. There are some strategies to getting your app more favorably placed. But it’s all a little bit of a guessing game I would say.

Steve: So you didn’t do anything super special to kind of rank higher in the iTunes search algorithm?

Erin: No, things like downloads matter. And I will tell you a lot of apps out there pay for downloads. They buy downloads so that their apps appear to be more popular. And that’s is something we have steered away from for a variety of reasons.

Steve: Yes I know that there is companies in china where you just pay X number of dollars and you get like 5,000 downloads, a thousand down– it was actually just in TechCrunch I think, that article. It’s basically this person in front of like a thousand phones, like a huge warehouse array of these things and people are just downloading apps. Okay interesting. What about a strategy for getting reviews. Reviews probably help also, right?

Erin: Yes reviews help also. Maybe aside from sort of bribing our family and friends into reviews was…

Steve: Yes I will go give it a review right after this interview.

Erin: Oh thank you. That’s very kind of you. It’s actually funny enough that we are about to push an update the app-store, which I think it’s going to be a great update. But one of the things that we’ve done is made it easier for people to give reviews within the app, you don’t have to leave the app and go into the iTunes environment. You just prompt– you may have seen this. A lot of apps do this, Instagram is one of them. “Hey, would you like to give us a rating.” And for apps where there is royalty in use of attention, a lot of people will go ahead and volunteer to give the rating.

Steve: Okay yeah that would definitely make it much easier because I don’t– I rarely use– going to iTunes and actually give a review, right?

Erin: It’s not the easiest process.

Steve: Yeah, I mean I have that same problem with this podcast right. If people have to go on the web or iTunes to leave a review generally they are not going to do it. I actually went as far as to bribe people. So I know that works if you want try that.

Erin: Oh that’s good. That’s good [snore] I’m going to put that into our media plan.

Steve: So this is kind of like a technical product. Do you guys actually have to deal with support?

Erin: Yes we do. We do have to deal with support. I mean I will tell you the first version we thought we had beta tested it to death and after it had been live we found a small bug. So these things happen. Luckily again Damian is a genius. So he had a correction on that in about an hour.

Steve: Really? But he still works full time?

Erin: He does, it’s incredible. I don’t know how that man gets it all done; it’s very impressive, because we do get customer emails. “This isn’t working for me.” “Hey I thought this functionality was going to behave a little differently.” We just try to be really on top of that. We are not currently using a service. We are still doing that piece ourselves.

Steve: Okay, do you guys have a phone line or is this all basically email support.

Erin: No, it’s all email support.

Steve: Okay and do you find that because customers pay 99 cents for an app they kind of demand that things get fixed quickly or what has been your experience with customer support?

Erin: We’ve had a few customers who have taken out tact and felt that they either wanted to fix or they wanted their 99 cents back. But I will say most people have been pretty generous and not terribly demanding or mean with their feedback. Not really big with customers, we’ve been lucky so far.

Steve: Okay, and then given that IOS kind of gets updated all the time, does Damian kind of maintain all the code for all the different versions?

Erin: He does, I mean he uses his tool kit, yes, but he is a one man show pretty much, that’s correct.

Steve: He is a one man show, wow, it sounds like I should get a hold of this guy and pay him double whatever you guys are paying him.

Erin: I would never give you his contact and for my sake. No it really is funny though, because he — when Heather and I went to TechCrunch Disrupt which is the giant technology conference, which just everybody there has their own startup that they want to tell you about; people could not believe that Damian had coded the app. Like he was one guy had done it by himself, people were astonished by it. He is real…

Steve: Yeah, I know totally, I mean most apps these days have like a team of people working on them, right?

Erin: Yes, that’s much more common, and that’s where we started, we started with the team.

Steve: I mean the days are over where you could just put up some stupid floating app online to make a lot of money, right?

Erin: Oh, I don’t know YO, was really popular last year.

Steve: That’s true it was, that’s true. So let’s talk about pricing why did you settle on 99 cents? I know there is apps that are priced all across the board.

Erin: We have played with the price a little bit.

Steve: Okay.

Erin: But 99 cents seems to be the sweet spot where customers are — I think most people are willing to do the 99 cents price point. There have been a lot of studies about apps on iTunes. And it seems that there is a drop off between 3 and 99 cents. And there’s a drop off between 99 cents and 2.99, and then a big drop off after 2.99, if you go any higher than that. But 99 cents is a really common price point on the apps store. A lot of people don’t like to pay for downloads, but they’ll consider the dollar. And that just seems to be the sweet spot for us.

Steve: Okay, and did you guys experiment with some of the other price point? I was just curious what the fall off would be if you went to 2.99.

Erin: We did, so we’ve made it free for a while, we’ve made it 2.99 for a while, to see how it moves the numbers. And I’ll tell you making it free — oh boy, I hope this isn’t like two tricks where Heather is going to get mad at me. But making it free actually does not result in a giant increase, making it 2.99 results in a big decrease.

Steve: Okay, and so you guys gave it for free, but there was no ads, right? So there was free ones you weren’t making any money off of right?

Erin: That’s correct, we’ve done it as like promos, hey we are going to be free for the next week, that kind of thing.

Steve: Oh, okay, and in terms of that little payment part of your app. Do you guys take a cut of that at all or is it just…?

Erin: Yes.

Steve: Okay, so in a way that’s kind of internet monetization, right?

Erin: That’s correct, that’s exactly right.

Steve: So what carrier do you use to process credit card transactions in?

Erin: Currently we only have a PayPal integration, and if you use our versions of the app that plan to roll out additional payment options.

Steve: Okay, so the babysitter has to have a PayPal app and you have to have…

Erin: There’s only PayPal accounts, the PayPal functionality yeah.

Steve: So they have an account and then do you need a special account? Like website’s pin and pro or anything like that in order to accept payments?

Erin: No PayPal really handles the entire thing. At this point they can do the payment to the babysitter and then the tiny payment to us in parallel.

Steve: Okay, and so you just need a very standard, very basic PayPal account in order for this work?

Erin: Exactly right, nothing fancy, nothing special.

Steve: Okay, and so what are some of these — what are some of the other — like because I didn’t even know that you are monetizing that part of it. Are there any other ways to make money with the app, like I kind of applied that one app?

Erin: We have some plans to monetize the app in the future. Nothing I can talk about today though unfortunately I apologize for that. And nothing that [inaudible 00:34:14] to roll out and it comes in. I think that we are at least six months away from any different type of monetization beyond taking the convenience beyond the payments of babysitter.

Steve: Okay, now I know a lot of listeners out there they are interested in developing apps for iPhone and android. One question I had was why did you start with Apple as opposed to android, given that android actually has a larger market share at this point?

Erin: That’s a really good question; we did a fair amount of the research. And we had identified relatively online that really our demographic was primarily parents aged 25, to let’s say 45, with generally both parents working outside the home, vast majority of people who fall into that demographic are iPhone users.

Steve: Okay, now that makes total sense actually. And if you were to give some advice to listeners who want to start an app from scratch and they don’t have Damian…

Erin: Oh, good luck.

Steve: If you would just start all over again, could you kind of just walk me through the process that you would go through to create a successful app, as successful as your app has done.

Erin: Oh, yeah, thank you. Yes, so I think the — probably the most important piece first of all is to be very clear in your vision for what the app would look like, how it should behave, because if you go to a developer let’s say you decide to hire a developer to build it for you, the more vague your idea is, the more expensive it is going to be to build. Because you are going to have to iterate more — there’s going to be a discovery process to really clarify that idea to the point where an engineer can do the coding for you.

But if you could go down with it really — going with it really locked down on paper. So somebody could kind of walk and code, pick up your paper and understand the app, and how it should look and how it should work, you are going to save yourself a lot of time and pen.

Steve: So is this as simple as just taking a piece of paper and saying hey, when someone clicks this button, it goes to this page and how the flow of the app works?

Erin: Yes, I think it absolutely could be that simple.

Steve: And what about — one thing I forgot to ask you about was graphics. Who does your graphic design for the app.?

Erin: So my graphic designer is a fantastic woman named Kim. She is — actually I got to tell you this app was a Bourne [ph] racing at the beginning. Kim is the sister in law of one of my best childhood friends. And she was the graphic designer in Natal [ph] for a very long time. And now she works independently, she is freelance designer and she is amazing. So we — Heather and I are lawyers, we are lawyers by background, we are not super creative people, so sort of the logo and looking through was a challenge for us.

So we got her in very early on and hired her to create our logo and to kind of give us some style guidelines for the app, and I think that has made a tremendous difference. Her work took our basic idea and she made it beautiful. And that’s a big deal when you’re using an app. You want it to be stylish, and you want it to be good looking on your phone, so full credit to Kim for that.

Steve: So I’m just listening to all the different pieces that you need to come together for this app. It look like you need a coder, you need a graphics designer, and you needed two lawyers. So how much did you invest to get this app off its feet?

Erin: Well, the funny thing about doing this is [Inaudible] [00:37:46] raising is we didn’t actually end up cutting the cheque. I will say we paid Kim for her graphic design help, but she probably gave us the friends and family rates.

Steve: Sure.

Erin: Damian came on as an equity partner, so we’re not paying him an hourly fee or anything along those lines.

Steve: I see.

Erin: Yeah, so we have been able to keep ourselves pretty lean.

Steve: Okay and so is that– let’s say you didn’t have Damian once again…

Erin: Oh yeah.

Steve: Would you still have gone the equity partner way or would you have kind of paid lump sum, like that first firm that you used, did you pay them or was that an equity deal?

Erin: Without going into great detail, it was more of an equity deal. We did not pay them.

Steve: Okay, and so would you suggest that going forward for people who want to start their own apps and they’re not technical at all?

Erin: I think yes. In my belief, the best thing to do is to find technical co-founders, to find your own Damian. And I do think those people are out there. They can be very difficult to find, but if you are serious about building a product that you want to have a high quality functioning product, the best thing you can do is to have somebody who is invested in it with you. And either– there are some services out there that help match technical co-founders with non technical co-founders. There’s a website called Founder2be, it’s like a match.com for startups, where you can kind of go find the missing piece of your startup.

Steve: Oh, okay. Nice.

Erin: There are places you can go to try and meet engineers or whatever type of expertise you need.

Steve: Okay, are you down in the Silicon Valley, are you?

Erin: No, I live in Los Angeles.

Steve: Oh, you live in Los Angeles. And is everyone local to where you are or people are…

Erin: Actually Heather is based in Atlanta, but she’s back and forth to LA on a regular basis. And yes, Damien and I are both based in Los Angeles.

Steve: So how much would you expect to invest in an app?

Erin: That’s a hard question. So there are apps out there that are really simple like Yo that we talked about early that does literally one thing. And then there are apps that are incredibly complicated like Facebook. The price points on those apps are going to be wildly diversions. I think anything from maybe a few $1000 for something basic, to $100,000 to build Facebook from scratch; probably I’m sure it’s way more than that by the way, but a lot…

Steve: What about…

Erin: In terms Complexity.

Steve: What about from a different perspective. So you guys all work your job still, what about a time commitment? How much time would you guys say you devote to this app?

Erin: A lot of time, a lot of time. I would say it’s [Inaudible] [00:40:27] flows. Right before it launched we were, all three of us, probably working 40 hours a week on it.

Steve: In addition to your….

Erin: In addition to our day job. But then there are times where if we don’t have any updates, that we’re working on at the moment, no big press push, maybe it’s only ten hours a week. It really varies.

Steve: Okay. And so where would you say you spend most of your time now that the app is actually launched?

Erin: Now that the app is launched, we’re currently working on an update as well as working on Android, so that’s a fair amount of time. But marketing and PR is probably the bulk of it at the moment.

Steve: Okay. And then how are the duties kind of divided between you and Heather?

Erin: Heather and I are pretty much 50-50. And the great thing about having a co-founder like Heather is that we can both kind of pick up the spot for each other. If she’s having an insane week at her a day job, I can step it up and vice versa.

Steve: Okay. And then Damian of course, then rockets will not get designed that week I guess.

Erin: I know, right? Seriously though you have to meet him, he’s great. He occasionally has to go into a secret bunker for his job, where he’s like, “They’re going to take my phone away for six hours, but I’ll be back.”

Steve: So this company is government related then I guess?

Erin: Yes.

Steve: Oh, okay, okay. And he’s down in LA?

Erin: Yes.

Steve: I think I know which company it is. Well that’s cool Erin, any other advice that you would give out to someone who’s interested in developing an app? Were there any books or anything that kind of gave you a head start?

Erin: Not on the apps specifically. I’m a big fan of The Lean Startup, if you’re looking to start a business. I’m a huge fan of Ben Horowitz’s book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, which is about both starting a company and then scaling it up to a big company. And he’s part of Andreessen Horowitz, the large venture capital firm, and man does he have some good advice.

For me personally, I would say my best advice is just to persevere. A lot of small startups, a lot of app companies fail simply because the founders run out of steam and kind of give up. And Heather and Damian and I are pretty tenacious. I really attribute a lot of our success just being willing to beat our heads against the wall until something works.

Steve: And it sounds like in terms of maintenance, maintaining this app does not cost that much money because you have the engineer and then you guys obviously are working on it yourself, but you don’t have any outside help that you’re paying at the moment, right?

Erin: We do not. I think in my dream world if our app got gigantic, I’m sure we will at some point, yes. Sort of outsource or to insource, but currently it’s just us.

Steve: Do you guys pay yourself a salary or just all the money kind of goes right back into the app?

Erin: Right now all the money goes right back into the app. I could envision a day where we all might take a salary, but not yet.

Steve: Okay, and then what is the realistic time frame that you would give for somebody who wants to create an app?

Erin: Well, again I think it’s kind of very based on complexity and based on the talent and time that is there to be doing it, but honestly there’s phrase about the longer it takes to launch, the less likely it is to launch. And I think there is some truth there. You got to give yourself a few months to a year, but try not to go a whole lot longer than that.

Steve: Okay and then you highly recommend doing some sort of beta right away as soon as you can, and then iterating on it?

Erin: That has worked great for us. I loved that route. I know other people have done other things, but that was great for us.

Steve: Okay. Well, great Erin. We’ve been chatting, believe it or not, for 40 minutes already.

Erin: This is been really fun. Thank you again for having me. I very much appreciate it.

Steve: Yeah, really appreciate having you on. If you could tell the audience where they can find you, where they can find your app…

Erin: Yes, of course…

Steve: And get more information that’d be great.

Erin: So our website is www.cluckcluckapp.com, and you can find us on iTunes, if you just search for CluckCluckapp, like the noise the chicken makes.

Steve: And what about your Instagram account and your twitter account?

Erin: We’re @cluckcluckapp for both and same on Facebook, it’s just– search for CluckCluckapp and you’ll find us.

Steve: Awesome Erin. Well, thanks a lot for coming on the show. I had a great time.

Erin: Thank you, so did I. It was a pleasure.

Steve: All right, take care.

Erin: Bye-bye.

Steve: Hope you enjoyed that episode. What I like about Erin is that she doesn’t have a technical background, but she still managed to create an awesome app for parents. And it just goes to show that you don’t really need to know how to code in order to create a successful app. You just need to create the right team to do so.

For more information about this episode go to MyWifeQuitHerJob.com/episode71, and if you enjoyed this episode, please got to iTunes and leave me a review because when you write me a review, it not only makes me feel proud, but it helps keep this podcast up in the ranks, so other people can use this information, find the show more easily and get awesome business advice from my guests. It’s also the best way to support the show. And please tell your friends because the greatest compliment that you can give me is to provide a referral to someone else either in person or to share it on the web.

Now, as an added incentive, I’m always giving away free business consults to one lucky winner, every single month. For more information go to Mywifequitherjob.com/contest, and if you’re interested in starting your own online business be sure to sign up for my free six day mini course, where I show you how my wife and I managed to make over a 100K in profit in our first year of business. Go to www.mywifequitherjob.com for more information.

Once again I just want to thank Bigcommerce for sponsoring this episode. Bigcommerce is one of the best shopping carts that I recommend, if you want to start your own online store without having to worry about anything technical. They’ve got an incredible theme store where you can choose from a wide variety of attractive store designs, so you don’t need to hire a designer. And they also offer integration with Alibaba so you can easily find products to sell online.

So bottom line, everything from design to sourcing to payment processing is all built in, and you just have to populate it with your own products. And you can literally start your store in a matter of hours. Simply go to www.bigcommerce.com/mywifequitherjob, sign up and you’ll instantly receive one month free. Once again the URL is www.bigcommerce.com/mywifequitherjob, thanks for listening.

Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit her Job podcast, where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information visit Steve’s blog at www.MyWifeQuitHerJob.com.

Steve: You are listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast, where I bring in successful bootstrapped business owners, to each us what strategies are working and what strategies are not. Now this isn’t one of those podcasts where we bring on famous entrepreneurs simply to celebrate their success. Instead I have them take us back to the very beginning, and delve deeply into the exact strategies they used earlier on to gain traction for their businesses.

Now if you enjoy this podcast please leave me a review on iTunes and enter my podcast contest where I’m giving away free one on one business consults every single month. For more information go to mywifequitherjob.com/contest, and if you are interested in starting your own online business, be sure to sign up for my free six day mini course, where I show you how my wife and I managed to make over 100k in profit in our first year of business. Go to www.mywifequitherjob.com for more information.

Now before I begin I just want to give a quick a shout out to this episode’s sponsor Bigcommerce. Now Bigcommerce is a fully hosted shopping cart platform that allows you to set up your own online store in minutes. And as most of you probably know, I teach a class on how to start a profitable online store, and Bigcommerce is actually one of the shopping carts that I highly recommend in my class. Now here is what I like about Bigcommerce, unlike other competing platforms, Bigcommerce doesn’t really nickel and dime you with every little shopping cart feature. And when you sign up, you immediately have a fully featured and extremely powerful shopping cart at your disposal.

Now there’s also an incredible theme store where you can choose from a variety of attractive store designs, so you don’t really need a designer. And they also offer integration with Alibaba which is new, so you can easily find products to sell online. Now if you are interested in starting your own online store using Bigcommerce is as about as easy as it gets. Everything from design to payment processing is all built in, and you just have to populate it with your own products. You can literally start your online store in a matter of hours. Simply go to www.bigcommerce.com/mywifequitherjob, sign up and you’ll instantly receive one month free. Once again the URL is www.bigcommerce.com/mywifequitherjob, now on to the show.

Welcome to the, My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. We will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle, so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here is your host Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit her Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Albert Lee on the show. And even if you’ve never had of Albert, chances are that you’ve used his app called My Fitness Pal. Now My Fitness Pal is an app that helps you lose weight by keeping track of your calories and watching what you eat. And together with his brother Mike, Albert recently sold My Fitness Pal for $475 million to Under Armour. Now what’s cool is that they pretty much bootstrapped the entire business from the ground up.

And Albert is actually someone who I’ve known for many years and we mainly catch up at kids’ birthday parties of all places. Now here is what is funny, whenever we meet up, we almost always talk about our respective businesses, and I distinctly remember this moment five years ago when we were chatting, and Albert with his usual laid back head bob was like, “You know Steve, this is going all right. We are getting some traction and we are starting to hire some people.” And it turns out that that was the understatement of the century.

It’s cool how My Fitness Pal has grown to a giant with over 70 million users and has helped people lose over 200 million pounds in weight. Now what I find especially cool about My Fitness Pal is that it’s a business run by two brothers, Mike and Albert. And I’m totally inspired myself by how they completely bootstrapped and sold a $475 million company. With that, welcome to the show Albert. How is it going today man?

Albert: It’s going great. Thanks for having me Steve.

Steve: It’s too bad we couldn’t have Mike on today, but perhaps you can tell us the story about the idea behind My Fitness Pal and why you guys decided to start it.

Albert: Sure. So actually the company was formed about 10 years ago. It seems like an eternity to be honest with you. But what had happened was my brother had taken a little bit of time off and he was getting prepared for his wedding. Him and wife were having a beach wedding in Mexico. So one of the things they wanted to do where they were like, “Hey, we got to get in shape for this wedding.” So they went to see a trainer, and the trainer had talked to them. He said, “Hey it’s great that you are here. It’s great that you are trying to be more active in working out, but if you really want to see results you need to actually watch what you eat as well, and here is the way to do it.”

He can kind of handed out this paper notebook and a little reference guide. It said, “Track everything that you eat. You can see the calorie counts on this guide and just keep it in this notebook and make sure that you stay at a certain level and you will be good.” Even though it was 10 years ago my brother kind of looked at that and said, “Wow, there got to be some kind of software. There has got to be a better solution than me literally carrying around this notebook everywhere I go.”

So he looked around. There was some websites out there, there were a couple of apps for like the Palm Treo for example which was actually where my brother worked, but nothing that really worked the way that he thought it should. And that was kind of the impetus for building the first product. It was just something where he said, “I think I could essentially build something better.”

So he took it upon himself to do it. Luckily he had a little bit of time at that point. Once again he wasn’t working, that allowed him to kind of get the product launched. But he actually ended up going back to work, and MFP sort of remained a little bit of a side project for him.

Steve: Was the intention when he created the app, was it to actually turn out to be something huge, or was it more for just personal reasons in the beginning?

Albert: It was mostly for personal reasons. My brother has got a little bit of a strange story; probably like many people I think who end up starting businesses. He had started programming when we were both– when he was 10 years old. So when we were pretty little. My mom had actually gone back to school to get a degree in Computer science and she would drag him along to the classes, and he ended up learning the program that way. And he had written a lot of software during kind of junior high and high school and got a little bit burned out.

So when he went to college he didn’t major in any engineering discipline or didn’t major in computer science. He became a consultant, he started working in marketing. He ended up getting into medical school and declined to go. It was sort of like, I think like many people just kind of thinking, “Wow! There is got to be something else out there for me that I’d be really passionate about.” He kind of woke up one day and said, “I want to start writing software again.” And I think that kind of dog-tailed with time when he started thinking about the idea for out of picking around.

So it was really a perfect project for him to think about from a personal standpoint, chances like getting back into writing code and actually building something. I think he obviously also thought about like, “Hey, I think there is an opportunity here. I think there is something really big that can become of this.” But I don’t think that was like the driver. That wasn’t where the passion came from. It was really because he just felt like this was a problem that he wanted to solve.

Steve: And as the co-founder, when did you actually step in with MFP?

Albert: So Mike was working on the product for a couple of years really like– once again it was kind of this like couple of times a quarter, on weekends, here and there. He actually wasn’t really doing a lot of active development, but the product was still growing pretty slowly. There was a very small, but very active and loyal community of users. And right around 2008, the end– sorry, towards the end of 2008, it gotten to the point where Mike really thought like, “Hey, I think there is something here.”

The iPhone had come out not that long before that and the app store had launched, and some of the more popular apps early on things in the health and fitness area. So that was when he came and talked to me. He said, “I think there is a much bigger opportunity here. And unless we really dedicate ourselves to this thing, I don’t know if it’s going to happen.” So he convinced me to quit my job. People are always like, “Well how did your brother ask you to quit your job?” It’s like, “He didn’t really ask me. He just kind of told me to quit.” He said, “Albert you got to quit and work out this thing with me.” So that’s when we started working on it. So that was a little over six years ago.

Steve: So you guys didn’t take a salary, right?

Albert: No.

Steve: I vaguely remember.

Albert: So the business was being monetized through advertising. There wasn’t a ton of revenue there. Yeah, there was some, but we very deliberately decided that we weren’t going to take any money out of the business. In fact we obviously invested more at that point. But anything that we made from a revenue standpoint we plowed it into getting help or development or design or anything else that we thought would help the business move forward. So it was like, well we were two years before we actually took our first sort of pay check out of the company.

Steve: Actually in my mind My Fitness Pal is actually a pretty ambitious project as there is just tons of weight loss and fitness apps out there. So what would say makes the app truly unique, and how has MFP managed to help so many people?

Albert: Well there is a couple of things. So one is we have I think done a really terrific job in accumulating this amazing data set around nutrition, and that’s a big part of what makes My Fitness Pal easy to use– is the fact that when you come into the app, when you try to launch something that you need that we generally have that thing in our database. If we don’t, that means that you got to like go out and look for the information and perhaps try to input it all manually and that’s a little bit of friction.

So a big part of how we think about the product is it’s hard enough to ask people to change their behavior. So if you come in here and you say, “Hey I want to lose weight.” That means you got to start doing things differently in your life. Well the software and the service and the tools that we provide can’t get in the way of that. If we are adding more friction on top of that then your chances of succeeding goes down dramatically.

So getting all that data, really focusing on the user experience, the product and taking away all these really steps to make it something that you can do four, five times a day every single day for an extended period of time, removing all those barriers, I think was a big factor and just making it easy enough that people unmask and start using.

Steve: So you have all sorts of foods. For example if I looked at monkey brain, there would be something in there on the app too, and I would know instantly how many calories were in there.

Albert: Yeah. Monkey brains is probably fairly choleric, but I’m just guessing.

Steve: So one of the things I love about My Fitness Pal is that it’s a feel good company. I’m sure you got many incredible stories from people who you’ve helped in the past. I just thought it would be kind of cool if you could care to share a quick success story.

Albert: Sure. It’s funny because I think people get super excited to hear the story of the person who was like in really dire health, maybe they were incredibly overweight or obese and they lost a dramatic amount of weight. That’s like a super common story that people get excited about. But I think sometimes what we get really excited about; we obviously get excited about those stories also. But sometimes what we get excited about is just hearing about things that kind of fall under the category of non-scale victories, so that’s something that our members talk about a lot.

And so an example of that is like we got a letter from a woman and she just talked about how she’d always kind of struggled with weight and her health and never really found something that had truly worked for her, that really resonated with her in terms of helping her understand how to govern her behavior, and how to eat and be more active. But My Fitness Pal just worked and she knew that it was working because she got up from a chair– from sitting down and she didn’t have to use her hands to push up, and it was the first time that she had done that in like 20 years.

Steve: Wow!

Albert: And so to her that was like this really powerful moment. This non-scale victory, like I got up. I didn’t need even to assist myself. She literally took the time to write us about just that moment. I think that kind of stuff is incredibly powerful, it’s super motivating.

Steve: That’s amazing. If I got stories like that, that would just make me really happy. I bet you got a ton of those too.

Albert: Yeah. That’s really what keeps you going. I think– I’m sure people in your audience can understand there is so many sort of highs and lows in like building your business. Even when things are going great you are just stressed out. There is always something that you are worried about. And to be able to hear these stories from your customers in terms of how you are helping change something for them, how you are improving anything for them is just– it really forces the fact that all the work that you are doing is valuable, and it really helps you to kind of stay focused.

Steve: So let’s go back to kind of the very beginning of MFP. So first of all, how did two brothers manage to fund this company without a team of engineers? Did your brother actually write all the code for the first app?

Albert: He did. So my brother was kind of the primary developer and when I came on, one of the big things that I started working on was getting an iPhone app development. So what we decided to do was we both put in some money, plus we took the revenue that we were making and we hired this guy to work for us and he was like working for us for like two days a week. He actually still works for the company now. And his only job was to work on the iPhone app and I worked with him on that while my brother was working on the website and kind of [inaudible] [0:15:05] for structure.

Steve: And here is the question that’s always kind of been on my mind. You guys kind of bootstrapped the whole operation. If you can go back in time, would you have actually chosen to get funding early on to kind of increase the growth rate?

Albert: No. I don’t think that there are a ton of things in particular that we could have done early on had we had money that would have really changed the trajectory or the outcome of the business.

Steve: Interesting.

Albert: I think one of the things that’s kind of magical about our product is we don’t pay any money to acquire users. So from a marketing standpoint we never pay for installs and that’s a very rare thing to get to. We actually have 80 plus million users now, and we haven’t had to actually pay to get them. So it’s really been dependent on this kind of fly wheel of people coming in, using the product, loving it, going out, and telling others. So it’s been very product driven.

And so once again I don’t know that at those early stages having money, a lot of more money would have changed those kind of things. It also actually– the big thing is you get– the longer you can wait. And I think it’s a delicate game because you do want to be cognizant of course starting out the business when you could be doing better if you had more capital. But certainly if you can wait and you can really grow things, before you decide to take any institutional money it really changes the terms of what you do that, and that’s super valuable.

Steve: True. So you are saying that you never ran any Facebook ads, any paper click ads, or any sort of burner ads on any other site to get the word out?

Albert: Yeah, we didn’t do that. We did– well I shouldn’t say that. So like super early on, before I even got involved with the company, my brother did run like a little bit of PPC advertising on Google. But that was literally like in the $50 a month kind of range. And then sometime last year we did a little bit of experimentation as we were expanding internationally, but I wouldn’t guess that we spent more than five grand or something. So it’s really inconsequential in terms of the size and scale of business.

Steve: So that’s really interesting. So what was the early strategy for getting people to use the app? And so how did you get your first 100 users.

Albert: Well the first 100 users was absolutely kind of friends and family. And I think the good thing is we weren’t necessarily like reinventing the wheel at that point. We were taking a solution that had been around for probably like 50 years, like this kind of notion of keeping a food journal and tracking your activities. Dieticians and nutritionists have been recommending that forever. But we’ve provided a digital version of it, and made it a little bit more convenient and used the benefits of technology to make it easier for people.

So things like, hey you remember stuff that you eat most commonly that makes it easy to input it again in the future. Just like really basic stuff like that and I think that was enough to get just friends and other people out there to start using the product. And once you kind of get hooked into certain communities. So like one community that really engaged with our product early on were body builders. It sounds really funny because was like, “Oh my gosh. My Fitness Pal is like weight loss community.”

And that’s not necessarily how we see ourselves and that actually wasn’t really the demographic that was highly active in the app early on. It was these people who really wanted to track their nutrition down to a very detailed level like how many grams of protein am I consuming everyday because they are literally competing in competitions. And those guys became very vocal proponents of the product, and that helped because you see somebody at the gym and that person is like totally ripped and they are saying, “Hey I’m using My Fitness Pal.” Just the word of mouth power there is actually really, really amazing.

Steve: So were you guys apart of that community? Like how did you get the word out about the app to that community in the first place? I don’t remember you body building Albert.

Albert: Yeah. If the listeners could see me they’d be like, “Wait a second here. What is this guy talking about? ”We weren’t, but there certainly were a lot of places where you could actually go and say, “Hey, we’ve got a solution around some of this.” And the thing is like because there wasn’t anything out there people were really looking for this. We did a little bit of work on SEO early on, and thankfully that kind of paid off. We did some stuff, like we made it easy for people to have these weight loss stickers. And those things obviously were put into all sorts of forms and stamped everywhere and people caught up. And like once again it was like the really active users found it, and those people became really foundation of this community that started to get built around the product.

I think like one piece of advice that I’ve always given to people because they’ve asked a lot about, “Wow you got these really robust and highly engaged community of people. They are talking to each other; they are giving each other advice, and support, and knowledge. How did you guys foster that?” And I think one of the important things to consider is like, everyone wants that to be this very passive thing. But the reality is you have to invest super heavily in that. And it’s like basic things.

So like things that we did that other people weren’t doing at the time was we didn’t have like just a link on our site that said community and if you clicked on that link it went to the forums. We actually intentionally surfaced foreign content right into the application on its homepage, so that even if you were interested necessarily in like going and visiting community, like you would just see people talking to each other in there, and that would lure a lot of people in. And then the other thing that we did really early on is we had people who would post.

Like there is always those people who go in the forums, or kind of in the ghost town because there is not enough people yet to post, we made sure that we answered every post even if we didn’t have an answer. We just wanted people to know that if you post in here, somebody is going to post back. And eventually as more users get involved, they start becoming the ones that really take over and start answering other people’s questions, and it does have sort of take on a life of its own, but you have to be just super deliberate and very meticulous about going through that step early on. I’m glad that we did that.

Steve: Let’s talk about starting a forum because I know you need a lot of traffic to make sure that it doesn’t seem like a ghost town. And it’s like a chicken and egg problem, right?

Albert: Mm-hmm.

Steve: So did you guys have that forum early on in the product, or was it something introduced later on once you already had an established customer base?

Albert: It was something like initially used to actually asking for. I think there may be a dynamic here with regards to the space that we are in. It’s kind of digital health and fitness because you know its sort of– in general health and fitness people have more questions and answers.

Steve: Sure.

Albert: There is just so many things like, “If I exercise and I burn more calories, how am I supposed to like eat back those calories? Just like really basic stuff. So we constantly get like emails from people who are like, “Hey, I’d love to be able to just like talk to other members and ask them questions.” So that’s like– it was one of the first things that we ended up doing. Again, even when you do that you can’t just hope that other members are going answer any of those questions, you just got to go in there and do it yourself.

Steve: So did you guys create multiple personas in the beginning to make it seem like it was more filled out.

Albert: We did, we did. Actually Mike answered a lot on himself. He has thousands of posts in the forums to his credit, and people didn’t mind. I think they were happy that somebody was out there trying to get their answers for them.

Steve: And at time point Mike obviously was a consumer of the product and he probably had great results as well. And so he was showing that off in the forums as well, right?

Albert: I don’t know…

[Crosstalk]

Steve: I’ve actually never met your brother, but I picture this guy who is super fit now.

Albert: I think that’s a very powerful sort of concept. I think when you look at a lot of really successful products and kind of fitness and weight loss phase, certainly providing inspiration to customers can be very motivating. And that’s why like if you go on [inaudible] [0:24:16] you are going to see a lot of lazy success stories. Everyone that you see is going to be just like incredibly thin and they are going to look like what you want to look like.

But I do think that there is some level within our product that is very approachable because that isn’t necessarily what you see when you come and you use our service. One thing I think we recognize is just like everybody has challenges, even people who are really fit. It’s like we just wanted to make this very inviting and very open for people.

Steve: It sounds like to me at least from what you’ve told me so far that word of mouth was just so crucial in the growth of your app. And so what was your social strategy? How did you kind of foster the word of mouth about your app? Now you mentioned that you had– on the front of the app, you’ve exposed a lot of the conversations. What are some of the other things that you did?

Albert: Well we tried to– as I’m sure many people would have, we tried to utilize social media and outlets like Facebook and Twitter to try to increase the virality. But actually it didn’t work very well. And I think one of the reasons is that there is a little of a strange dynamic where– in the world that we are in, where people are very happy to talk to other people about something that they are doing that’s helping their health, but they want to sort of like prevent their audience first. So it isn’t thing where like I broadcast to everybody, “Hey, I am doing this and this is great.”

It’s more of like, hey I talked to that guy who sits next to me at work because like we’ve got a good relationship and I said like I started saying like hey I’m trying this new thing and it’s pretty cool. And so like I think the traditional methods work very effective in creating these viral loops, but, and this is something that unfortunately a lot of– how easy it is for other people to replicate, but the bigger focus for us is like, just to make people successful. If they go out, they use our product for the first week, maybe they shed a few pounds in that week, they are just going very quickly to become evangelists.

And that was the technique that we sort right away. And the funny part is with something like this is even for somebody who for example isn’t really naturally predisposed to want to go out there and talk about the product, they would lose so much weight for example, people will start haunting them about it. It’s like dude, you look awesome, how the hell are you doing this? And they’ll be like well, kind of shyly like well I started using this product and I’m like this [inaudible] [0:26:57] that kind of endorsement is just like super powerful. So, I’d like to say it was like this incredibly deliberate strategy, but I think the real strategy was make sure that people succeed with the product, do everything we can to make sure that they get through that first week, and if they do they are going to start talking about it.

Steve: Wow! Okay, so when people were bragging about it would they be posting this on the forums or would they post it on Facebook? Where was most of the activity?

Albert: Yeah. I think you know people would certainly love posting in forums because there is a community there that they know will be very welcoming to their stories, there’s a lot of people who post on Facebook now, we have a very-very active Facebook page, and now for example that’s the way the community comes and kind of engages with us and it engages with other community members. People are using Instagram a lot now.

Steve: Yeah.

Albert: And so they can view kind of hashtag [inaudible] [0:27:57] you’ll see like people just taking pictures of their– what they are eating, or their success or they’ll take a picture– and they take a picture with like an inspirational statement or something like that. So that’s like we have a lot of other conversations happening, there is also Reddit forum, that’s pretty big.

Steve: Okay.

Albert: That tends to get a lot of conversations going on.

Steve: So what I always kind of curious about was that giving out My Fitness Pal is actually a free App, how did it actually generate revenue earlier on? Was it just primarily advertising?

Albert: Yeah. And it’s still primarily advertising.

Steve: Interesting. Okay.

Albert: And so that’s– that was a tough part in the beginning because obviously it was harder to scale revenue, because you hadn’t just generated a tremendous amount of usage to create any significant amount of revenue, but I think the way that we looked at the business earlier on was, this is a service that gets better when more people are using it. We get more data, our community becomes more richer and more powerful, we have people who create more social connections in our service, and that’s really valuable, and it allows us to do bigger and better partnerships. And so we highly deliberately do not pursue other revenue opportunities like creating a subscription service for example, which was pretty popular amongst other companies that we recognize.

Steve: Right.

Albert: And entirely focused on our growth, and I think that was a horrible thing to do as a bootstrapped business, because you always felt sort of the pain of not being able to do some– you know hire engineers or do things that you wanted. But I think being forward looking I think has greatly contributed to our ability to get the skill that we did end up getting to and really, you know that led to the outcome, selling the company recently.

So, I think that’s like kind of my advice to somebody out there whose bootstrapping is like– it’s hard because I think, you have great discipline, you’re thinking really wisely about like how you are spending your money, how you’re generating more revenue access the fuel for your company. But being able to marry that with the long term view and sort of vision and mission for what you are trying to create, could be in a neighborhood for [inaudible] [0:30:31] even greater heights of success.

Steve: You know what’s interesting is I have a lot of experience in the advertising space, and it’s actually not a set-it-and-forget-it type of thing if you actually want to make significant money, so were you taking private placements or was it just automated services that filled up the ads for you?

Albert: We were– we didn’t have a lot of time to do private placements, and so we didn’t do very much of that, we did a little bit of it. But I think like you said even under– even in terms of like working with partners like adsense and Google obviously we’ve worked with like hundreds of different ad networks over time, like we’ve spent a lot of effort trying to optimize that, and there were huge dividends to be paid out and I’m sure like what’s to get explained, that’s something that is a great revelation to your audience, but like we– whether it was like trying to figure out something like day parting things like we spend probably a significant amount of time doing that and every time we’ve figured something out it ended up being really-really worth it.

Steve: Okay. So, you talked about money and that sort of thing, so when did you guys actually decide to take on your first hire?

Albert: So, we did– the way that it ended up working out is we had like just enough money to pay this guy who used to work for my brother who is a developer two days a week. So he was like the first hire, he worked for us like two days a week, and that’s all we could really afford. But literally like as it revenue grew it’s like hey I think we can pay one more day a week and he had another consulting gig that he was doing that he liked a lot less than working with us. And so every time we had a little bit more money and we were able to do that, he ended up kind of shifting one day until finally he was our first full time guy.

Steve: Okay. And then once you kind of had this space and you had the iPhone app, how did your investments in the business kind of evolve over time?

Albert: Well it was– we kept looking at growth opportunities, so we had the iPhone app, about I want to say seven or eight months offer that, we launched the android. That was another huge propellant for growth, I mean that was actually pretty early on in android, and so when we ended up going on there, we already had a disc [ph] track record on IOS, plus talking to the folks at Google, they were like, yeah we would love to really promote you guys and that gave us a huge amount of promotion earlier on and that helped a lot.

Steve: Did you guys do anything special to make the apps more visible on like iTunes, or in the play store?

Albert: Yes. So, one thing that I think at that time and I still think it’s really important that people potentially take for granted is the app description. And so, we actually tested a lot of apps descriptions and that was something like I don’t think people were doing at that time, and we found out that we were like 10 times better than the ones out there.

Steve: Interesting. Okay, so you guys are split testing description, what else? The titles?

Albert: Yeah. We are doing– we are, I think you get, the audience can see even today the name of our app is not My Fitness Pal, I think these days it’s like a lot more common for people to label their products in that way, but at that point like we were like the only people doing that. And I think it mattered in terms of kind of app stores, SEO but I think that iTunes was kind of search [inaudible] [0:34:07] and what not incredibly refined at that point. And I think we just had– I think even now you can see if you type like M-Y or something in search for iTunes like we are going to pop up the first thing, so we did do a lot of experimentation around that.

Steve: What about soliciting reviews? Did you guys have a strategy for that?

Albert: We didn’t, I think luckily for us when we really launched we– and this is different from a lot of people who ended up going into mobiles, like we had a website, we had a web community who loved us. And so as soon as we ended up getting our app in there, like our existing users went in there and they were like, we love this service, and so we’ve never really had to do anything there.

Steve: Okay. So would you– if you were to do it all over again would you go that same route of developing an audience first, and then launching an app or would you have just launched the app first?

Albert: I think it’s a luxury, not something like I think it’s like a very necessarily like a smart deliberate strategy, I think getting– if you can get yourself up there it really helps. I think people absolutely believe that it’s this incredible self-fulfilling prophecy like if you are the number one health and fitness app, and you are top 100 app in iTunes, that might– you’re just getting– continually getting tons of downloads because you are there on app, I think that is a little bit of a fallacy. I think what we see is yes there are some people who are downloading your app just because you are highly ranked, but a lot of it is really like still dependent on like do you have a good product?

You need to have a great product to really stick there and once again many of the people that are finding our product, even now are still finding us through the word of mouth, not because they went to the app store and just happened to see it there.

Steve: I can actually vouch for that in just running this podcast. Well it helps to actually be in that top of the ranks on iTunes, I’ve been– I feel like I’ve been generating most of the traffic just through building an audience on my website, and then pointing them over to the podcast, so I can totally vouch for what you just said. So let’s just briefly talk about the acquisition. Why did you choose to get acquired as opposed to remaining an independent company?

Albert: The is a lot of different factors, I mean I think for us one thing that is would be a piece of advice that we would give to anyone starting a business is you really focus in the beginning like getting your product, building it, getting it out there, but pretty soon after that you’ve– you really want to start thinking about like what kind of company you are trying to build, like what are you really trying to achieve? Like what is the mission? Like why do we exist?

Why is this product necessary? And so we’ve been very strong in mission driven in our company, and our goal is to really make it easy to be healthy, and so that becomes something that can be a very important lens for you as you’re looking like every other thing you do in the future, writing, responding or whatever. And as part of the acquisition it also became a really important thing which is like, this is going to help us achieve our mission.

And I think on a first level we felt like wow! With the support of Under Armour, their amazing products, their incredible brand, their amazing marketing capabilities, like that we would be able to kind of expand and reach areas that would be very difficult [inaudible] [0:37:31] potentially as an independent company, and then we obviously thought about a lot other things I can talk about like economically it’s just something that’s going to work out well for an investor, it’s something that’s going to work out well for our employees and for us. What does the market look like right now?

What are the dynamics, there’s a ton of competition out there, I don’t think we were afraid of that, our business was incredibly successful and I think we obviously believed even as an independent that we can continue to be really successful, but you just try to weigh all the different factors, you know there are risks out there and what– like you know we looked at working with Under, we just felt like well, these guys are people who can really help us build something amazing, and that made it kind of easy.

Steve: So let me ask you this, let’s say you guys chose not to get acquired, would you have chosen different monetization methods outside of advertising?

Albert: Yes.

Steve: Okay.

Albert: Yeah. I think monetization is something that was actually becoming a much bigger focus for us, it just– it’s the fuel for growth and at some point you do need to have a lot of resources if you want to tackle really-really ambitious things. So we were– we still are looking at like subscription, it’s simply looking at other ways to monetize.

Steve: Interesting. So could you care to come in on some of those ways? You mentioned subscriptions, what about physical products or services?

Albert: Yes. We dabbled a little bit with physical products, not done very much there. I think it’s not because we don’t see great opportunity there, it’s just there are a lot of different opportunities and we just didn’t have, you know that capa– we wanted to be focused, so we didn’t have the capability to exploit them all. We’re going to be, as you can probably imagine exploring all physical products because we’re being acquired by a company that makes physical products.

But stuff like subscription revenue is, I think where we believe there are services and content that we could deliver to our customers, that’s really valuable to them, that they will keep willing to pay for on recurrent basis, that’s the more obvious, it’s like the parallels in– for other businesses in our space especially like once people would really have things like, weight watchers, those are all really– they are very well suited for a subscription model, and that’s where they make all their money.

Steve: Okay. So my next question for you is actually kind of more of a selfish thing. So I kind of started my businesses to free up my time, but you have three kids, so how did you actually balance your lifestyle early on before it was really successful?

Albert: It was pretty hard. I think though one thing that really worked out well for us was when we started working on this– my brother and I first started, I had– my daughter was two, and my other daughter, my second daughter was just a baby, she was just like an infant, and because of that, and I’m sure you know what it’s like or just like you are up at all hours…

Steve: Yeah. It’s crazy.

Albert: I needed a lot of flexibility, but we didn’t have like a ton of employees, our first guy actually I didn’t mention this, the first employee was actually revoked. So he was living in Austin I think at the time. And you just don’t have a lot of overhead in terms of like meeting with people, and all that kind of stuff, like my brother was like writing a lot of code and I was like working with this other guy, and so we dint have to be together very much.

So that meant that we actually had a lot of flexibility in our schedule, we worked super hard, but I could like– if I woke up at two in the night, so like help the baby I would just stay up. I would work till like seven in the morning, and then I sleep till like noon maybe– and it wasn’t like– and so there is actually a ton of flexibility in those early stages that you can leverage to make it easier on your family. And now it’s like we’ve got more employees, it happens to coincide with my kids like they’re all in school and stuff like that. So we had actually worked out nicely because now that they are on a more regular schedule, I’m also on a more regular schedule.

But before, when I needed to like kind of work all over the place, my family– I could kind of work around that and vice versa, which I thought was really helpful. It’s something that was like not obvious, and I don’t know if it’s something you can really plan for, but that was something that helped a lot earlier.

Steve: I was expecting you give [inaudible] [0:42:09] your wife, so I’ll give you a chance to do that right now in case she is going to listen to this interview.

Albert: She is yeah. Sorry honey, but my wife was actually working, that was a huge factor. She was still working, she had a good job and she was still making money for us, and you know obviously it was still on me kind of being all over the place, and so that was obviously really-really important. And I think just having the support of someone, there is just so much anxiety that comes with starting a business, like just going without a pay cheque, it’s not so much even like the everyday, like what are you doing like is my wife supporting me by making money, but if she’s supporting me by just like making me feel free to do this, to go out there and like take a chance.

And she was always very trusting and very confident that we would do right by her, that we were out there, that we were working as hard as we could and that we would eventually make this thing successful. So I can’t tell you how much I appreciated that, that she just– she never like, she never made me feel like that I was taking the success of risk even though she was a part of it too.

Steve: Absolutely. I’m always looking out for you over.

Albert: Thanks man, that was the hook up of the ages.

Steve: So today is MFP is kind of a remote company or is everyone in an office these days?

Albert: So, for the most part people are all in our office– most of the people are. We still have remote workers, and I think that is a way that you can certainly secure really great talent, in places where there are not really necessarily great companies to work at, and that’s how you compete with companies who maybe are willing to make that sacrifice and are willing to say like hey, we want to have– we were okay having people remote. So we had a bunch of people remote earlier on and that worked out fine, and almost all those people are still with us, and still working remote. So we can still make it work, but I think at some point you do or you’re trying to build this like culture in your company and that’s fine to do if there’s nobody in [inaudible] [0:44:24].

Steve: Of course. So I thought I’d close this interview by asking you if there are people out there listening who actually want to create an app or a company, what sort of advice would you give them.

Albert: Well I think, so I think there’s like a couple of things that usually come to mind, it’s like, one is people tend to kind of think about the business opportunity first, and they don’t think about like who the customer is, do they really need or care about whatever they are trying to create. I think it’s like something you gloss over because you are like hey! Won’t you want that, If you could have that? And it’s like yeah, I think a lot of ideas sound great would you say it that way, but then you can focus on like that a business is okay forward and it’ll make money through advertising, we can do all this stuff. And so I think the first thing is like, do you really focus on like trying to figure out in any possible way whether you really think customers are going to care about your product.

So like there are so many ways to do that. You don’t have to build anything. You don’t like say for example, like sometimes people would say I want to create this thing and it’s going to help you in circumstance when you need to like reference somebody’s information for like a sales call. And I’m like, okay, well how do you know that people need that, it’s like why, I feel I need it all the time. And I’m like well, why don’t you take this week, take a notepad and just keep it with you, or like use your phone notepad.

Every time you think you need that product just write it down like check the box, you know, put a tick, if that is like one or two by the end of the week, then you are probably wrong. It’s like you– if you feel like oh! crap I can– six times this week I needed that, this like really basic stuff like that you can do it. So just spend a lot of time validating that, and you can once again you can do that and you can do that while you have your job, you don’t need to go out and build anything.

If you want to try to and build something like draw it out, jot it out on people, like use a paper prototype and show it to people, I just think people get obsessed with like, I got to go out and hire developers and testing stuff, it’s like, no, you don’t have to do any of that.

Steve: So just as an aside, how did MFP do it’s early validation?

Albert: Well, I think Mike you know– luckily for him, and I think this is what everybody has the fortune of having, like he was able to build a bunch of things really early, but I think even in that case what he did was, he didn’t go too far.

He just showed people stuff, even if there was like supper wrath, like you can search and ad of food like how does this feel to you, and it’s like oh! Well that seems pretty simple, it would be cool if you could do x, y, z and I think going through that process and never feeling sort of ashamed of showing people stuff early is like a great thing to be thinking about as an entrepreneur. I think the one other thing that– I was listening to your podcast.

I’ve listened to just a bunch of different episodes and I think that one thing that I feel like is great about bootstrapped entrepreneurs is like it was really as experience for me as a bootstrapped entrepreneur that I felt all the time is like what I would tell people that we were bootstrapping, I felt that people would always make it seem like that we weren’t doing something important, or that we weren’t trying to build something big, and that kind of talk really– I think it can kind of poison your mindset in some ways. And so the one thing I just want to say is like dude, you should always be thinking about your business and like it doesn’t matter where the money is coming from, you can build something big and amazing. And don’t let other people’s opinion or thought process on bootstrapping affect that.

Steve: I here you there. I think it’s just RO [ph] factor of where we live and how the basic community, all my friends they are in funded start ups, so it’s actually kind of rare to see a bootstrapped guy especially one such as yourself where MFP has gone on to be a super successful company, and I think it’s just an RO factor where we live.

Albert: Yeah, it’s like you are working on this cool family business, that’s nice and it’s like, no it’s awesome.

Steve: Yeah, actually really quick last question. When did you guys know that it was going to be more than just a lifestyle business? Was that the intention in the beginning, or was it always to just kind of go big once it started getting traction?

Albert: We’ll I think the– maybe the way I will characterize is like we had big goals, but we knew that we didn’t need to be humongous for us to be happy and successful. So I would say that like we kind of went into the [inaudible] [0:49:06] like we’re not like conquering the world that–this isn’t what we want to become, this is about what we want from this. And so I think in that way maybe you could characterize it as a lifestyle business, we wanted to work on something cool that we were passionate about, and we wanted to make sure that like we can make it successful enough so we could keep doing it. And that’s how we thought about it, and unfortunately I think once we got out a mobile, things really took off and I think that’s when we started realizing well, this is like a millions and millions of people opportunity.

Steve: Okay. Cool, Albert I really appreciate your time, and I’ve learnt a lot from this interview and it’s just really nice to get an insight of someone who’s actually made it in the bootstrapped business world. So thank you for coming on.

Albert: Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Steve: So if anyone has any questions for you, do you have like a twitter handle that you use or-?

Albert: Yeah. It’s @Albertlee all one word.

Steve: Okay. Awesome, once again thanks a lot for coming on, and really happy to finally have talked to you.

Albert: Yeah. This is great, I’ll keep listening.

Steve: I’ll catch you at the next birthday party.

Albert: Take care Steve.

Steve: All right Lee.

Hope You enjoyed that interview, what I like about Albert is that he’s so down to earth and easy to talk to, and it just goes to show that you don’t need to get funding in order to produce a nine figure company, you just need to watch what you spend and focus on what matters most for your business.

For more information about this episode go to MyWifeQuitHerJob.com/episode68, and if you enjoyed this episode please go to iTunes and leave me a review. Because when you write me a review it not only makes me feel proud, but it helps keep this podcast up in the ranks so other people can use this information, find the show very easily, and get awesome business advice from my guests. It’s also the best way to support the show. And please tell your friends because the greatest gift you can give me is to provide a referral to someone else, either in person or to share it on the web.

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