#033: Noah Tucker - Inside Social Snowball’s Insane Growth (2,000+ Brands)

I think truly owning accountability is like the biggest one. Not just like knowing that you're responsible for something, like really owning something and like being proud about the results of whatever that part of the business is that you own. To the point, if something's broken at 3 AM on a Saturday, you want to go fix it because you're proud of those numbers and you're accountable. You're responsible for this one thing. Like you want it to be driving the business forward, not slowing it down.

Noah Tucker is the founder and CEO at Social Snowball, the affiliate and referral marketing platform for e-commerce, driving millions in revenue for over 2,000 leading brands such as SolarWave, Avi, and Javy Coffee. In this episode, we cover Noah's journey with the creation of the all-in-one word-of-mouth marketing platform, the challenges faced by non-technical founders, the value of partnerships, as well as the ethical dilemma of pitching ideas to investors authentically. Welcome back to episode 33 of the Turning Pro Podcast. Today we have Noah Tucker, who's the founder of Social Snowball, joining else. Thanks for joining today, Noah.

Thank you for having me.

So this is the first episode without my co-host Adrian. He is busy traveling, uh, doing the remote life with his girlfriend. But I told him, I was like, I'm— I feel like we've gotten momentum with having interesting conversations with interesting people. So I told him I wasn't planning on stopping even when he's not in New York. Uh, so I'm excited to have this conversation today, just a one-on-one.

I'm honored to be the first solo guest.

Yeah, we'll see how it goes. You want to start by maybe just jumping in and letting everyone know who's listening what you're working on?

For sure. Yeah. So like you said, I'm the founder of a company called Social Snowball. You know, the high-level overview of that is it's the all-in-one word-of-mouth marketing platform for e-commerce. So if you want to build and scale affiliate, influencer, or referral programs for your brand, this is just like the software that allows you to find influencers, give them codes and links, track sales, make sure, you know, fraud isn't happening, send payouts, gifting, reward tiers, just all of like the management that goes into those types of programs.

How did you get started with this?

So before starting building, I worked for a while on the, like, the brand side of the e-commerce world before moving over to the tech side. And to make, like, a long story short, I don't know how deep you want to dive into that, but I basically was using a lot of the existing tech that existed in the Shopify ecosystem to power these types of programs. And they were just, at the time, they just felt very outdated. Things felt very clunky, onboarding affiliates, payouts, everything was very manual. It just felt disconnected. And so at the time I was just like, okay, these tools all suck and I want there to be something better. That's kind of how the idea started. In hindsight, looking back, I don't think those tools actually sucked. I just think what an affiliate was when those tools were started is very different than what an affiliate means, like what the word affiliate means today. So it's not that those tools sucked, they were just built for a different type of affiliate. And like today when, you know, brands are partnering with affiliates, they're thinking of something different. And so the tech didn't really catch up to that. And that's basically what Social Snowball became. Got it.

I think the part that I'm so fascinated by, and I don't know how many people know this, but you are a solo non-technical founder building a tech company, which, as you know, there are far and few in between that A, even try to do that, and B, successfully get off the ground, and C, continue to experience the type of growth you're experiencing. I want to jump into that a little bit in terms of what gave you the conviction to do that. Did you think about maybe finding a co-founder? And maybe problems you faced that you weren't expecting given that you tried to build this by yourself?

Yeah, I mean, candidly, I was extremely naive and I think that was a blessing because I didn't really, you know, coming from the background that I had, which was just like paid media and building ambassador programs and just working on like marketing projects for e-commerce brands is really my background. I didn't, I didn't understand at all to any extent like what went into building like a tech company at all, like, or just a software product in general. So I think my naiveness gave me the, like, the confidence I needed to go into it. It thinking I could do it because if I could run Facebook ads, then I'm sure I could build any business. And so I just went into it. And because of that also, so there's like pros and cons because most people in my position that maybe understood what the challenges were ahead wouldn't have even gone for it. But I also made a ton of rookie mistakes that could have easily been avoided because I had no idea what I was getting myself into. So there's a little bit of pros and cons there.

Let's jump into those. Those are the fun ones.

Yeah. I mean, so like the really the only pro is that I had the confidence to go into it and just like keep going after because I felt like it was very achievable, even though like what felt in arm's reach was like miles away. The negatives were all like the poor engineering decisions I made. So like not having a technical co-founder, the first thing I did was I hired an agency that told me they were going to do like a done-for-you, build the whole app, build the front end, build the, you know, the UI, the UX, even build our website, all of our branding, like fully done. Like basically like here's a business on a silver platter, which is usually, not always, usually a little bit of like a red flag. And also it was their quote to do all of that was like a red, red flag levels of cheap, which I just didn't know what to look out for at the time. And so I agreed to them. I agreed to work with them and they told me they would have like a working MVP that we could submit to the Shopify App Store and would work in 3 months. And it was— it took 15 months before I ended the contract early with them because we still didn't have a working product. So that just already slowed things down a ton. And then, you know, I'm 15 months into this. I spent a bunch of money already.

And how much did you spend on that first agency?

So it was, it was $25K. It was $25K, which in hindsight was like too cheap for what I was looking to build. So then after that, I hired a freelancer. Well, after that, I hired many freelancers, really one at first just to get like to fix all the bugs from this previous agency, get it ready for the Shopify App Store, which we were able to do. That freelancer was actually great, but he had to quit because he was just— he had a full-time job elsewhere. Like he couldn't really Social Snowball was growing at that point and he couldn't maintain it, so he had to quit. And then the next 2 years honestly was just like a huge learning curve for me, hiring and firing a bunch of different freelancers. And basically what ended up happening was, so first the agency built like the majority of the code base and this other freelancer just was able to duct tape bugs together so that we could submit to the App Store and get it working. Then the next like literally 15 to 20+ engineers that I had in there were all just random Upwork developers. That probably were not qualified to be doing what, you know, they said they were doing in the first place. And there were just way too many cooks in the kitchen, way too many hands in the codebase, different coding styles. It was just a complete disaster. And so, like, the, the result of that was just a ton of tech debt that we still deal with today. Um, and, you know, eventually after many, many trials and mostly failures, the engineers— I had like one good one who was like going to become my CTO and then like that went bad very, very quickly. And then eventually I had like one guy who was really, really good. And after 2 years of dealing with developers, I kind of had a decent understanding of what good was. I still couldn't code, but you just kind of start to pick things up. And so I wanted to keep this guy. And so that like that first guy became like my first full-time employee who's still with us today. And then once I had him and I trusted him and I like really believed that I could trust him, he hired all the other engineers moving forward. And then now we have like a tech lead and like he does all the recruiting and stuff. But it took me until like really 2, over 2 years of trial and error to find one engineer that I really trusted, which then allowed us to like properly build an engineering organization.

So a couple of questions there. The first one is, did you ever end up having to strip back the whole product and like build a new version of it from scratch, or has it continued to be piecemeal from day one of like fixing new engineers, new code, etc.?

We've rebuilt most of it. At this point. It's not something that we did in like one swift motion because that would just be like a never-ending project. So what we decided to do instead is like rebuild it in layers, basically. So like there's database things we had to rebuild, there's backend, you know, there's APIs, there's the frontend we had to rebuild. We just did it in chunks and most of it at this point is new code.

And then the other piece to it too is what were your like frameworks or resources that you were using to vet engineers if you're not technical? Is it like Were you getting on Upwork calls and just seeing if someone sounded good, or did you have friends that were supporting you? I think there's a, there's a level of courage there that goes into just blindly trying to figure out who to work with if you're not technical.

I know. And that was the problem. I was just vibe checking Upwork devs and that was my recruiting process. And like, looking back, that's so obviously not the move, but at the time, like that, I just didn't know any better. What a thread that would be.

Like how to, how to go to to where we are now.

But yeah, it worked in the— I mean, it didn't work, but it at least was enough to get us to where once we had an engineer, we could start building from there.

I mean, if you were to start over, would— I'm assuming you would do things a little bit differently in hindsight. Would you have brought on a technical co-founder? I guess, how would you approach it as a non-technical founder trying to build a tech company?

Technical co-founder, 100%. I wouldn't even— I wouldn't even consider building a tech company without a technical co-founder, knowing what I know now.

And where are you guys at today, like in terms of team size, any sort of growth you're willing to share? I know obviously from murmurs in the industry you guys are crushing it.

Yeah, so I mean, I'll just say like we're, uh, multiple 7 figures of ARR, um, and team is 15 right now.

One thing I noticed about you compared to a lot of founders I've spoken to in this space, both like the fact that you're a solo founder, you're a non-technical founder taking on a massive industry You never seem stressed out to me when I'm talking to you.

No, I am. I for sure am.

Like, of all the people I've spoken to, I was like, you feel more present and more like grounded. You could like talk to a founder and be like, oh my God, that guy has so much going on right now.

He can't—

tweaking out. But I didn't get that vibe from you. You reached out to me on Twitter when we first spoke. We got on a call and you were super casual. And I'm like, I know you have a to-do list of 500 things in the back of your head, yet you can carry yourself in a way that it doesn't feel that way. Thank you.

Man, yeah, I appreciate that.

But if you— I mean, you, you claim that's not the case. I'm curious, like, what's top of mind for you right now in terms of what keeps you up at night?

Yeah, I mean, so, I mean, we're recruiting for a ton of roles, so that always is like— well, that's, I guess, more exciting. Um, I would say like still not having a technical co-founder still stresses me sometimes. Like, although we have like a tech lead and a really strong engineering team now that's actually crushing it, like, I still think having that foundation from the beginning would have solved so many problems and even probably more problems that we haven't even encountered yet. So that, that kind of thing still stresses me out a bit. And then, I mean, we're, you know, there's so many new things we're working on. Like we were about to release our full influencer discovery platform. So that's like, I mean, that's a good thing, right? That's like we're building more for the business, but there's a lot of problems with it and there's a lot of stress that comes with that. And there's a lot of like, you know, bugs we have to work through. So just, just the usual stuff, you know.

And in terms of like, what, what is Noah like away from work? What do you, what do you like to do? What are, what are things that you try to use to keep your mind off of it? Or is it just you can't separate the two?

I can't really separate it. And I'm not really mad about that, honestly. Like, I do, I do do fun things. Like, I'm not just like working every second of the day. Like, I went snowboarding last weekend. Like, that was fun. But I'm still like on Slack on the ski lift. And I don't, I don't mind that though. Like that. To me, like, I, when I'm doing something fun, if I'm on vacation or just relaxing, like, I'm enjoying that more knowing that, like, I could check in with the team and, like, make sure the ship is floating. If I have to, like, fully disconnect, it makes it so that I'm not really enjoying my time off because I'm just thinking, what if the team needs me? What if there's something I need that I need to do? Like, so to me, it's like there's no need to disconnect. Like, I'm happier. And, and maybe this, maybe I'll change my mind on this, like, when I get older. But like, for right now, I'm happier when I'm doing my like away time from work and enjoying relaxing. I'm happier just checking in and like still being around. I don't like to fully disconnect. It's just not— it just doesn't feel responsible right now.

Yeah, I mean, I also feel like my perspective on it is that the concept of work-life balance, to me, work is life, and you just kind of figure out how to intertwine it into your everyday, uh, in such a way that doesn't need to be so extreme of like turn everything off and disconnect or like be all in and not like end the day early one day because you want to go do something. Yeah, but I think I'm curious to hear what your perspective is in an environment and culture where it's very much like this go, go, go mentality. You have a ton of founders who are like cold plunge, sauna, journal, like all the things. Yeah. Are there any non-negotiables in your life that you have found to be extremely helpful for you, both from a perspective of your mental health and then also your productivity?

Yeah, I would say like just for me, exercise is like the one non-negotiable. I'm not like super intense with like the cold plunge. I mean, like, if my gym, like, depending on where I am, if the gym has a sauna, I'm definitely stepping in there after my workout. But I'm not like, I have to cold plunge and journal every morning. I probably should be a little stricter with like journaling because I do think that clears my mind well. But the only true non-negotiable that I never, ever slip up on is exercising at least like 5 times a week. It doesn't have to be every single day, but most days exercising. And that, like, without that, my mental health tanks quickly. So like, it's something that I really don't let slip.

What's your choice of activity?

Usually just lifting, like running and lifting. Like, I'll usually— I used to run a lot more than I do now. Um, I've always lifted. Like, just lifting is like a everyday or 5 days a week kind of thing. I like running too because it's more therapeutic. It really like clears your mind, for me at least, and afterwards just leaves you with such like a glow that it's just like a feeling I crave, honestly. So I, I like running and lifting. Those are really the only two things I do.

We've talked so much about running on this podcast, for better or for worse. Well, so I, I ran a marathon a couple years ago, and then I was training again for another one that supposed to be at the end of this month, and I hurt my hip and had to pull out. Uh, to be honest with you, the last 4 weeks, like, my mental clarity without being able to run has actually been, like, terrible. Like, I feel like I'm going stir crazy because you haven't been running. Yeah, because I hurt my hip and, like, I can't run. But something for me with running, I run without headphones.

Yeah, I do the same. Well, I, I sometimes do. I know, I know, I, I get the draw of it though. Like, I don't always run without headphones, but when I do, I'm just so alone with my thoughts that, like, it's it's even more therapeutic.

Well, for me, I find that it's the only time that I can truly disconnect and actually like process my thoughts, because if not— especially when you're a founder, you're inundated with either like physical meetings and conversations or digital meetings and conversations. We're always doing something, and it was like the one time where I could actually try to resolve thoughts that I had in my head. Um, but I was curious from your perspective, like in terms of how you're productive, how do you spend your time? And like, what is your framework or schedule day to day, knowing that like you're, you're the guy that everyone's going to, right? Like, I have a couple— I have three— there's three of us, so I have two co-founders. We each very much focus on like one aspect of the business.

Oh nice.

Which allows like my— of course I have visibility into what's going on, but when you think about like day-to-day and communication, there's three of us. I've never been one to even want to start a company as a solo founder, so I'm curious, like, how do you find yourself getting things done?

Um, so I definitely just try to limit meetings because like you could easily get dragged into— I mean, I used to take sales call— all the sales calls myself, obviously, until I started hiring account executives. So that was like, it was basically impossible to get work done. And then once we started growing, like I had to start hiring account executives. Now with a sales team, I very, very rarely take sales calls. And so that was like by far the biggest like time consumer in my schedule when I had to take them. Now I'll just like block off a day or two a week from taking calls. And usually my days aren't as call heavy as they used to be without me taking sales calls like that. Really opened up my calendar. So now I can spend like I haven't struggled since, since we have two AEs. It's nothing crazy now, but since having those AEs, I'm actually able to get what I need to get done, done basically every day unless I'm traveling. Like that's it's been, it's been more manageable just kind of deciding what is important for me to focus on and delegating the rest because we have like, like I said, a team of 15 now, which is definitely, definitely small, but it feels big now because we've never had a team of 15 before. So it feels like there's a lot of really smart people that can handle different things and I don't need to be like super involved. And I try to remove myself as much as possible from like customer service issues or bugs. Like if it's not the app is on fire, then like I shouldn't get drawn into every little thing. So I've been like, as of recently, I've been pretty like happy with my ability to manage time.

What are different— maybe there's different frameworks you've used or learnings you've had over the course of the last few years hiring your team. When you think about like empowering other people to avoid this micromanagement, both upward and downward, where they're bugging you or you're not feeling like they can actually drive? Like, what are some of your biggest learnings you've had from hiring this team?

I've learned to— for like, and some people disagree with this— I think it's really important at a smaller startup like us with limited resources to hire people who have already done the job that you're hiring for. And like, I used to kind of just like only go like— that used to be too expensive for me, essentially, because we're also bootstrapped. So like, we don't have like the biggest budgets for hiring. But then once I started hiring people that have actually done the job that I'm hiring them for and have been in the e-commerce space for a while and have their own connections and like they're just kind of like self-sustaining, I don't have to like teach them what is Shopify or any of that. That's like— and this, that might be obvious, but for me that was like a learning curve. To me, I thought like, oh, I'll just hire someone that's hungry and I'll teach them everything. And that works for some people, works for some businesses. Maybe at a later stage in this business that'll work for me, but for now, like whenever I've hired someone that has just been a killer in the exact role that I'm hiring for at another company that's also an e-com SaaS, then like it's a very smooth onboarding. They hit the ground running. They teach me things that they've learned in their other jobs that I had no idea about. So that's been like really great.

Is that a non-negotiable for you in terms of the industry expertise? Because it's very top of mind for me right now because we're hiring. And one of the things we're trying to— we go back and forth on this every day is if you find someone who's really good at a specific job based on their skill set, maybe not as much industry expertise, or vice versa, where you find someone who might have the industry expertise but not necessarily as talented as like this other candidate. How do you think about weighing industry experience versus not? And do you think it varies depending on the role that you're hiring for?

Really good question. I mean, so from my limited experience, I don't think I'm the most qualified to answer that question. It's not a non-negotiable, but It's, it's pretty close. And I think that's also related to our stage of the business. Like we are so small that, you know, with 15 people, like if someone has to now dedicate like hours every day to just training someone, that's like taking away a lot of output from the team. So we need, we kind of like can't even afford to fully train and onboard new people. We need them to kind of be able to hit the ground running. So because of that, because of the stage we're at, I feel like it's almost a non-negotiable unless there's someone we really like for like a different reason. Um, and then as far as the different roles, I guess like, you know, software engineer, it doesn't matter if they know the e-com SaaS space or not as much. Like, that they don't even really need to ever fully, fully understand. Um, but like someone in customer success does for sure, because if you're in customer success or sales, really any customer-facing role for us, like the sales process and the customer success process, it's not just about Social Snowball. It's about like all of e-commerce and how Social Snowball falls into your stack and into your marketing strategy. So if the sales team or the customer success team doesn't have a genuine deep understanding of e-commerce, the, the, our customers or leads like sniff through in 10 seconds and they're immediately like pulled out in the call. But when we hire people that have been in the e-commerce space for a while and they genuinely, it's not even just they memorize the script, like they genuinely have an understanding of how an e-commerce brand works and the different problems they face and how social snowball and like affiliate and influencer as an acquisition channel can fall into like a greater acquisition strategy. Like when they genuinely, genuinely understand that it turns these sales calls and customer success meetings into just genuine conversations. And I think like our customers, I think it's like basically necessary for that, like for that type of role. But I guess if it's a non-customer-facing role, a lot of things can be taught.

Another question I have about hiring, which, uh, I don't know, some people I think get uncomfortable talking about this topic maybe a little bit, but I'm curious, what percentage of the people that you've brought onto your team were previously like at a job versus unemployed, like looking for a job?

Okay, so that's another thing that has definitely, uh, like I've had a lot more success hiring people that were at another job at the time.

Um, can you talk, can you talk through that process a little bit? Like, did you, did you have people that you had your eye on, were like, I got to figure out how to sell this person, or it was like they saw roles were open and they came to you because they've just been following your company?

Both have happened, actually. Both have happened. Um, I've had people like, like our, like one of our best hires ever, um, she's on the customer success team, Malz. She just cold reached out to me on Twitter, and then I didn't answer, and she reached out to me on LinkedIn, then somehow found my email and just— and that happens somewhat frequently now, and usually I'm not like very impressed, but for some reason, like, she— her message or whatever caught my eye. And then we gave her like a sample customer— like, basically what we do for the customer service team or customer success team is we'll give them a sample list of really difficult customer questions that you would have to know about Social Snowball to answer. They're not like obvious questions, and we'll just say, use the resources publicly available on the internet to answer them to the best of your ability. And she answered them so well that it was like as if she was like an internal team member already. And I was like, okay, She's really good. She definitely like scrubbed social media. She scrubbed our help center. She like, she did her homework to be able to answer the questions to the level that she answered them. So I don't even remember what your question was.

Well, it was just about— well, first of all, the fact that you forgot the question and you were so excited about this team member shows that like you want to not settle for anything less than A+ when you're hiring. Yeah, clearly speak very highly of her.

Yeah.

Uh, the question was about just the concept of poaching people who are— have existing jobs in other tangential businesses versus, you know, sometimes especially now, like I would say we're still in a bear market and the job market is definitely in favor of the employer, right? So there is talent that's coming through applications that are unemployed, but curious if you try to prioritize poaching people that have jobs versus people who are unemployed.

I wouldn't say I go out of my way to prioritize. I would just say from experience that has usually gone better. But I have made some hires that were like very, very recently unemployed. Like either they were laid off because of like the company had to like pull back budget or whatever, or I don't know, I guess in some situations I guess they quit right before, but they were like just fresh out of a job and I already knew them when they were at that job. So I like use that as an opportunity to like jump and reach out to them and see if they were interested. So I guess that's like a little bit of a different scenario. It's not like they were like looking for a job for 6 months and couldn't find anything and like applied online and then we gave them a shot. It was like more like this person just lost their job, like recently. They're looking for a new job. They're going to get snatched fast. So we need to, like, be top of mind for them.

Yeah, I mean, it makes a ton of sense. We're dealing with the same thing right now. Another topic I wanted to talk about with you is just like the e-commerce landscape. It feels like a very intimate, small community, yet I feel like it's not when you think about like the order of magnitude where I think there's In my mind, it's like there's 100, 150 people on Twitter who know everything that's going on, and then you actually have like thousands of people who don't entertain it. But I'm curious how you think about, uh, as like the CEO and advocate of your business being like top of mind for everyone, how you're managing your relationships. Like, obviously you reached out to me on Twitter. I still don't even know why, but I imagine it's like if you see any figurehead in the space, you're like, I need to know this person. They need to know that like I'm the guy for everything affiliate. Like, what is your approach and strategy in that regard?

Honestly, it's pretty close to what you said. Like, I do think— I mean, just relationships in this space, as you know, are super important. So if there's anyone in the space related to Social Snowball or not, anything in e-commerce that's gaining traction, I absolutely do reach out. And I just— we just get on a call like we did. We just, you know, learn about what we're building, and then who knows what it's going to turn into. I'm doing that all the time. I'm sending DMs every time. I don't even hesitate. Like, it's just muscle memory. If I see someone on Twitter 3 times, the same person that looks like they're doing something interesting, I reach out. If it's a brand, like, I'll hopefully try to get them to, like, get on a demo or something. If it's, like, another tech partner or, like, an agency, I'll just be like, let's— would love to learn about what you're doing. Like, like, we're both in the same space. Like, you're clearly doing well. So now you've caught my attention and let's have a conversation.

I love that rule. If I see them 3 times, just reach out and say something. I think cold, cold DMs and cold messaging is the most underrated thing in the world where you have to do it in a way where you're not asking for something out of the gate. You're just like acknowledging someone does good work and you want to meet them because good relationships turn into potential business down the line anyways.

For sure.

How is partnerships in general been like a driver for your business? Is that like a huge one of your main channels?

It's, it's, it is the main channel by far, honestly. Um, we, we have like a lot of different types of partnerships and all of them have been like our biggest growth channel. So like there's agency partnerships, so there's agencies that are either doing influencer marketing as a service or they just— and those are the best because that's like a, that's like the equivalent of like a retention agency and Klaviyo. Like if we could build a relationship with them, then they'll use Klaviyo. Like the retention agency would use Klaviyo on all their clients. This agency would use Social Snowball for all their clients. It's an incredible deal. But there's also agencies that just do like more standard stuff like email or paid ads or whatever, and they'll just refer brands to us if the brands are asking them like, what do you recommend? Both of those have been incredible channels for us. On top of that, even like influencer partnerships, that's, you know, that's a partnership. We do like a lot of content marketing partnerships. So we'll create like video content, like we do like these video courses for Social Snowball Academy. We do written content like guides, playbooks, all that, all that good stuff. And it works really well. We'll collaborate with a lot of partners on the content. So we'll maybe ask like 10 e-commerce experts their, you know, favorite strategy for influencer marketing and then turn that into a playbook and then we'll be able to you know, have those 10 experts distribute the content to their audiences and that brings leads and we'll distribute it to our newsletter and our social media and, you know, our whole audience. And that could bring them leads as well. We'll like, you know, share the leads. So yeah, partnerships have been incredible.

What, what advice would you give to other founders who are thinking about building partner programs? I think to expedite their learning curve, candidly, it's top of mind for us right now as well. And we can jump into it where there's maybe a little bit of nuance in terms of what we're doing and what you're doing. That maybe presents a different set of challenges, but would love to learn from you in terms of how to expedite my own learning curve and either even other founders listening in terms of like the dos and don'ts when trying to roll out a partner program.

I'd say like the biggest things that have made partnerships successful is you want to send out a lot of leads. Don't just expect people to send leads to you. Actually, you should like, you should have like targets for how many leads you send out. Like this is something that I want to work on more at Social Snowball, but when you send out leads to a partner, the leads come back every time. So if, you know, if you have a partner that's even something unrelated, like let's say like a subscription platform, like Skio or something, like if we, if, if a brand reaches out to us and they're like, hey, you know, we're using Social Snowball. We, we also want to use a subscription platform and we send that lead to Skio. Like we can expect Skio's gonna be very appreciative and they pay that back with sending other leads. And, and that's, and I'm just using them as an example, but that's like any, That could be any agency. That could be, and it could be like not even an influencer agency. It could just be like an email agency. Like someone reached out, they're like, hey, do you have anyone you recommend for email? We send a lead to one of our email agencies. Like they will send leads back. Like they're just very appreciative. People are appreciative of that kind of thing. I think that goes way further than just like a commission kickback for, for someone for sending a lead. Like people, some people appreciate that. Most people care about leads more. So like if you could just, if you could create a system for sending leads to like your partners that you care about the most, or the partners, candidly, that you want leads from the most, they'll— the leads will come back.

How do you think about prioritizing that though? Both prioritizing that list and then also like empowering your team or the process or resources to know, hey, if you hear someone say this, send it to this person, so on and so forth, especially when you want to scale a partner program. The second piece of that is like Do you only partner with one business within each vertical? So it's like, because let's talk about subscription, for example. Yeah, there's a ton of subscription players.

Yeah.

How are you— if you're not only partnering with one of them, how are you thinking about trying to send leads to multiple?

Yeah. So I mean, there's no— well, there probably is a perfect system for this. I'm still learning this, candidly. But, you know, basically like we'll do a lunch and learn with like different companies for my like AEs and customer success team. So they know like basically the trigger words that if they hear this in a call, like you could probably send a good referral to a subscription app or agency, that kind of thing. We don't have like a super strong like round robin proper system that's like, okay, we have these 5 top agency partners for email. So one out of like every time we get 5 leads, like they would be evenly distributed. Like we don't have anything like super smooth like that yet. We probably will at some point. I think that probably is the move. But yeah, for now we kind of just educate the team from our top agency partners. And then also, like, if there's an agency that's sending us a lot of leads, I'll literally make a note to the team and be like, guys, we got to send some leads this way. Like, like, like it works on me too. Like if someone sends us a lot of leads, like I'm like, we need to send them leads fast. So I think it's just like that. You just give a lot and then, you know, it comes, it comes back.

Yeah. I mean, it's interesting for us. Because it's something that we're working on right now. But I also feel like the challenge that I'm thinking about at least is if you have multiple partners in a certain vertical, it becomes challenging to try to keep everyone happy. But I think the other piece too for us is just figuring out where within partnerships to prioritize first, because you have tech partners, you have agency partners, you have referral partners who are just like, you know, the people who know everyone kind of thing. And to be honest with you, referral partners have actually been our strongest lead source.

Oh yeah.

So it's just like the guy who happens to work with so many brands who doesn't have a tech company.

Yeah.

But when you can become like, for us, it's we've become the Shopify person who can help optimize their website. Whenever he meets a brand, like there's a couple on top of mind, it's like, who could you name drop? Or I'll introduce you to him offline. I'm not going to name drop on the podcast, but every time he meets a brand, he's like, meet Ben. He's the person that can help with your website. To be honest with you, not 100% of them answer because oftentimes it's more just like an unsolicited— two people who should know each other. Okay, but I appreciate that because if he sends 20 and 15 of those respond and 8 of those get on a call and 3 of those move forward, like, it's a net win.

Yeah.

Um, but we found that referral partners are easiest because I think that it requires the least amount of thought when you can just become like the website guy for them, right? But for us with different tech partners and even agency partners, there's some challenges in terms of some overlap and complexities to like what Platter offers to where it's not like super simple, right? Like, that's something I'd be curious to get your perspective on, uh, to the extent that you're even familiar with the Platter business. Where like Social Snowball, you've ingrained yourself as affiliate Social Snowball, like they're so tangential to each other. Platter is not like that, right?

Right. Oh, so I mean, I mean, what does— like, what is everything that Platter does then?

Yeah, so I mean, to simplify it, what we do is we natively build a lot of the most popular app functionality around marketing and conversion into one theme and app bundle.

Okay.

To unify your app stack, your support teams, and your costs. Okay. And then layer in best practices around increasing AOV and conversion.

So it's like custom theme building.

It's, it's a theme and an app. Basically what we're saying is that if we debunk the myth that building a high-converting storefront is expensive and takes a long time, then we won.

Right.

Our perspective on it is that you can productize a lot of the process around making new wireframes, building a new store, and then adding in all this functionality. The thing that we're basically combating is brands who start on like a basic theme like Dawn and then spend $100,000 custom building all these features and then downloading 20 applications. Yeah, yeah. And then they get into the situation that you alluded to when you started Social Snowball, which was like so many engineers in my codebase, so much technical debt.

Sure.

I need to like get to a clean infrastructure. Cheaper and faster. So we want to be that solution.

I mean, I think you just answered your question. I mean, that's, that's like when, like when a customer or when a brand is thinking like either we want to start a net new build or like we just invested so much into this and it's not even what we want, like then that's the perfect time for an intro to you. I feel like. So your challenge right now is communicating that to the agencies.

It's communicating for a couple of reasons. The first one is that the Platter bundle, which includes the theme product and the app. So I think to take a step back, to give you context, uh, we built an app solely because there were certain features that were too complicated to build into the theme layer because of Shopify limitations. It's like a public Shopify app, or, uh, it's unlisted at the moment but will be public in the next couple months. That's the, the priority right now.

Nice.

But originally it was just an app to support the theme in terms of features. Once we built it, we're like, all right, now we actually have an app that could stand alone as like a product-led self-serve Sure. Offering. We haven't fully rolled that out yet, but in the current state, it's a big ask to get someone to like switch their whole theme, right? We've been able to reduce the switching costs where we talk to them and they're like, wait, that— I'm almost confused. Like, why could it be so cheap and so fast? But I guess that's all to say with the partner program, the talk track to get someone to refer a brand to Platter Plus, which is the app which will just have a couple of different features around like upsells. So like Uh, checkout extensions, bundle builders, post-purchase. Uh, that's a much easier sell than going to partners and being like, hey, if you talk to someone who's looking for a new website or to make improvements, like, send them here. And so I think because we touch so many aspects of a build, it hasn't been as remunerative for us in terms of partner program, which is why it's something that's so top of mind. But my gut is that once the app is, uh, fully self-serve, that might be the entry point for volume. And then if you just get a brand in your ecosystem, as you know, you can start upselling them other things.

That's exactly what I was going to say. Like, if there's one offering you could pick from that, which probably is the app, maybe there's something else for now until the app is public. But when the app is public, I'm assuming it would probably be that if you could just have that be the only thing agencies even know about, like you don't even need to overwhelm them with, oh, we also do this and we also do this. And well, if a brand's doing this, we could also do this for them. Like if you could just be like, we have this app, it does this, this, and this. If a brand is looking for it, like Hey, you know, this— we're the go-to. And then, like you said, once they're in your ecosystem and they are happy with your product, then your, your team already is building a relationship with them. It's much easier to be like, oh, by the way, if you're looking for this, like, we do all of this. And then it's just— it's gonna be a much easier sell at that point.

Yeah, it's, uh, I listen to people like you who've built businesses where you basically have a word that is just like synonymous with social snowball, which is like affiliate in this regard. I feel like we haven't really figured out what that thing is yet. And it's something we've been talking about for 2 years since we started this company, um, where it's like, can we improve profitability on your storefront? Yeah, but that's still like a little bit ambiguous. Like, what does that mean? How do you do it? Right?

Yeah.

And so that's like an ongoing thing that's top of mind for me. Um, anyways, I feel like I went on a tangent there. It's like a founder therapy session. Like, what are the challenges you're facing?

Yeah.

Um, Podcast is called Turning Pro. Do you know what— why we call it that?

No.

So the concept is basically built around this analogy of getting up from one poker table and going to a more high-stakes table.

Okay.

Like the moments in your life that you realize you were taking things to the next level. Oh, so like double-clicking back into where you started to where you are now. It doesn't even need to be just Social Snowball, even like before you became a founder, personally or professionally. Were there a few moments in your life that you can call back on? You're like, that was a moment where I realized it was like time to move things to the next level?

Yeah, let me think of a good one. I feel like so many little things happen every day, um, that I'm like, whoa, we just like leveled up again. I mean, honestly, every time we hire a new role, that's like a role we hadn't previously had, and it's someone that like I'm really excited about, and they're on my team now, and they're dedicating— like, it's a crazy concept for me to wrap my head around because I'm just like a first-time founder, so this is like all exciting and new. But when we have someone that's like a genuine expert that now works at Social Snowball that I've already been following previously, and now they're dedicating like 100% of their bandwidth and mental power towards, you know, fixing problems in Social Snowball, helping us grow. Like when I step back and I'm like, wow, like all of that is happening now with, you know, 15 people, they're all dedicating all of this time every day to like building up something that was literally just like an idea that I had in a Google Doc once. Like I step back and I'm like, that's crazy. Like It's just like hard to wrap my head around. I know that's not really like one, one specific moment. Um, I mean, yeah, like when we hired a tech lead, I was like, we just leveled up. When we hired a head of growth, I was like, now we're a real business. Like every— I feel like every time we hit a new milestone, even like an ARR milestone, like when we first hit 7 figures, I was like, okay, now this is a real business. Like we've bootstrapped to 7 figures. That rare— that's like pretty rare. Like, I mean, it happens, but it's not super common. So like, the moments like that where I step back and I'm like, damn, I'm just like so grateful. Like, this is crazy.

What about any moments in your life that gave you the conviction to like jump headfirst into being a solo founder building a tech company? Which, by the way, I still don't think I'll ever wrap my head around, even until you're done building this company, whatever that looks like.

I mean, again, like, I think like being on the brand side and just mostly doing like consulting and media buying and building these ambassador programs everything was very doable by myself. Like, I had like a business partner for a lot of stuff, but it was very much just like me or him, me and him just like hacking, just like everything was very manageable. So I just assumed, and also I was like super young when I was like, the idea for Social Nova was starting. I just assumed that that's how business was and that I was just like really talented or something that I could just like start anything and figure it out. And I definitely had a lot of like falling on my ass to happen. To, like, humble myself. But I think that, like, naiveness gave me the conviction that I needed to tackle something that I probably— well, that I was undeniably unqualified to tackle and I'm still unqualified to tackle. But, you know, like, here we are now. So I think, like, sometimes not knowing what's ahead of you because you're just like— like, if I had worked at a startup before and, like, been in the space for a while and, like, knew what it took to build an engineering team and I saw, like, you know, if I worked at a 50-person team and they had, like, designers and this and, like, all these things that, like, were so far out of my realm of reality that I wouldn't even consider. If I had that experience, I probably would have been like, okay, I can't do this. Like, I'm just me and one Upwork developer. Like, that's not realistic. But since I didn't know how unrealistic that was, I was just like, all right, let's go. And I think that honestly was like, I don't even think Social Snowball would exist without that.

I love that answer. I'm curious, just piggybacking off of that, what in your mind are the 3 most common traits of high performers?

Um, I think a big one is accountability. I think if someone's a high performer, they own what they're accountable for to a level that I don't even need to hear about it. It doesn't matter if it's 3 AM on a Saturday. If there's something that they're accountable for that needs to get done or that is broken or whatever, it gets taken care of. I think like truly, truly owning accountability is like the biggest one. Like not just like knowing that you're responsible for something and like like doing it like with a, with a pout on your face, like really owning something and like being proud about the results of whatever that part of the business is that you own to the point where like you want, if something's broken at 3 AM on a Saturday, like you want to go fix it because you're proud of those numbers and like you want, like you're accountable, you're responsible for this one thing. Like you want it to be driving the business forward, not slowing it down. So that would be a really big one is accountability. And I think just like, honestly, like just having a little bit of crackhead energy, just being like a little bit crazy, like a little bit, a little bit of a wild card. Like, I think like all of the best team members at Social Snowball now, and again, we only have 15 people, so I'm probably not the most qualified person to answer the question, but they all are just like a little bit crazy in a good way. Like they're, they'll, if something's broken with the customer and like the engineering team's offline, we can't get it, they can't get a hold of anyone. Instead of like reaching out to me and like trying to get me to reach out to the engineer, like they'll just manually, even if it takes like 3 hours, like they'll just order a pizza down, like manually do whatever it needs to be done to fix the customer's issue, and they won't log off until it's done. And they— I don't even hear about it. Like, they, they're not doing it to prove something to me. They're not do— they're doing it for themselves because they're a little bit crazy, probably, like, like we all are, you know. And they, they fully embrace their accountability. They know, like, I am the only, let's say, customer success person online right now. This customer has an issue and they might, you know, churn if we don't get it solved. There's no— I can't get a hold of an engineer. I don't want to bother Noah right now. Like, I'm going to just get this done. And like sometimes like that, you know, if too much of that can obviously lead to burnout, I'm not saying everyone needs— everyone on my team needs to work to 3 a.m., but like when, when, you know, random things come up, maybe like once every few months and like you just solve it, like that's great. Like that's the best I could ask for.

What do you think contributed to you being able to build a culture like that?

I don't know, honestly, because I Building a team culture was something I was really scared of. And like, I read some books on it and like just did some research on like, oh, how do you build a culture? And everything that I read was basically the same. It's like, well, whatever it starts at when you have like a few employees is going to be what it continues to. And I guess like, I really don't know. I feel like Social Noble has an amazing team culture. Like, that's something that like I can confidently say we have a really, really good culture. Like, I don't even know how it happened. I think like just in the beginning, I just brought the energy and like, I'm always really excited about what we're building and that's genuine. Like, I can't fake that. And I think people catch on to that and, you know, have the right incentives. And yeah, I just— I mean, maybe there's a lot of luck in it too. Honestly, I don't know if I could recreate a culture like we have now, but people on the team genuinely are in love with the business, in love with the product. They, they understand what we're building towards. They understand the problems we're solving. They, are very, very passionate about it. So that's like one thing that I'm like very impressed with. Like, and I don't even have like a good answer for how it happened. It's probably a lot of luck.

What drives you? Like, I know I got on— when we first met, I got on the call and I was like, okay, I— my gut tells me you could probably go sell this business today for a lot of freaking money and take it and do whatever you wanted. And you looked at me immediately like, I— but I don't want to.

Yeah.

What excites you? Like, what, what are you driving towards?

So, I mean, I think like right now the reason that I'm not even— I'm not even really like considering selling it is just because I'm having a lot of fun. Like, this is like 100% of my life. If I were to just like sell this and take a bunch of money, obviously having a bunch of money is great, but like, what am I going to do all day? Like, I literally can't— like, I'm falling asleep thinking about ideas. I wake up early because like I'm too excited about ideas. I spend every second of the day either working or thinking about work. Like, there's never a second where I'm not— this is like too, too— and also like while it's growing and it's like things are working and there's so much that we have planned to build that feels like just the right move. Like, it's not like we're like, okay, we hit a plateau and we don't know where to go next. It's like we have a very clear path forward to where we want to build. And that's like an exciting ride that I want to be— like, I don't want to jump off. So I think honestly, like, the real reason, like, I couldn't even consider selling is because I'm having a lot of fun doing this and just— I just don't want to step away from that yet. And I do think that'll change eventually. Like, I'm sure what I'm doing right now and my lifestyle now is not sustainable forever. But for now, like, I'm, I'm enjoying it. So I, I don't want to give it up.

I mean, the, the way you speak about it with the level of passion, it— I can like feel how genuine it is when you say that. And I know, to be honest with you, I think one of the big reasons for that, uh, which we actually haven't talked about, but the difference between being a founder of like a bootstrap company versus the founder of a company where you're beholden to a bunch of investors who are like forcing you down this timeline and adding a whole level of stress. Like, I feel like there's something to be said about you feeling so free where you wake up, have fun because there's no one you have to call and send like an investor update to unless you want to.

Yeah, no, I agree. I agree. I think like that's like one of the reasons like I really don't want to go the VC route, even though I'm not like stupid. I know we would grow faster if we raised money. It's just reality. Like we've, we've, we have like pretty solid product market fit. We know how to grow. We have proven strategies that result in MRR going up, but like we have like a limited amount of money we could put into that. So if we were to raise, we would grow faster, but we're profitable, multiple 7 figures of ARR. Like our competitors are all like the newer ones are all way behind us and the, the, the legacy ones are all like on a big downfall. So like I'm very happy as far as like our position in the market and where we are and like where the potential is to be. And I think like if we were to raise one, I would have to you know, maybe change the direction and give up board seats and not have full control and not wake up and just do what I want every day. And then I also would lose control of the outcome. And like, realistically, at some point I'm going to want to sell this business. Like, it doesn't feel soon, but at some point one day I'm going to wake up and be like, okay, it feels like that time. And I don't want to have to ask for permission to do anything, sell the business, hire an employee over a certain salary, like whatever kinds of things that giving away a board seat would imply. I don't want to do that. And usually Nobody wants to do that. Most people have to do that because they won't be able to get to the level of ARR and like profitability that we are without doing that. But we are like in a blessed position because we just like accidentally got here. Well, not accidentally, but like we just didn't really know what we were doing and then like things worked out. We're here. I don't want to like sacrifice. I feel like most venture-backed founders would kill to be in the position I'm in because I can literally make you know, multiple 8 figures and walk away from this right now and not need to ask anyone's permission. And like, the— like, nobody else can really say that.

You can walk away with multiple 8 figures, but you could also like start selling lemonade tomorrow if you wanted. Like, no one can tell you what you can and can't do, which I think is amazing. I actually tweeted this the other day, and I'm curious your perspective on it. Probably a little controversial, but like, I'm pretty, pretty honest and authentic when I'm posting things online. Was comparing the analogy of how a lot of founders think about raising money to just the concept of like, uh, dopamine hits. Where when you think about like exercising versus taking a drug, exercising is delayed gratification where you exercise and then you get the results. Whereas with a drug, it's like you feel it immediately and then you have a comedown or withdrawal or whatever, and you have the negative effects on the back end of it. We are a company— we raised less than $1 million, we were profitable in Q1, we bootstrapped before we took in any money, and then it just got to a point where it was like a sustainability thing for us as founders, but very much not your traditional venture path. I kind of see it as in a lot of instances there's founders who don't want to do the hard things and they want to raise money to throw money at problems and not raise money to throw— to double down on solutions.

Right.

And so they're taking like this quick dopamine hit route where it's like you raise a ton of money, you feel awesome because you have a lot of zeros in your bank account, and then you get 2 years down the line and you're so stressed because you either have to do a down round when the market goes go south, or you have to like, uh, maybe even give up control of the business because you can't get it to where you want to go.

Yeah.

And so I feel like I really, really respect the way that you've gone about doing this because you did the hard thing that most people can't stand. And once you make it over that hill, you're now in a position where you don't need to be beholden to anyone versus people who take the safe route, in my opinion, where it's like take a ton of money in a business where it maybe doesn't even require that. You're just not willing to stick it out long enough. And I think the point I'm trying to make in saying this all is that a lot of businesses fail because people just can't stay in the game long enough.

Yeah, I mean, everything you're saying, I agree with. I think, like, I'm not saying raising money is bad. Like, there's a quote from Rob Walling, who's like a startup guy I look up to, and he says, like, raising money is like a tool, is a tool. And you wouldn't say you're pro or anti-hammer, just like you wouldn't say, like, you're pro and anti-raising money. They're both tools. They solve specific problems. But I think you wouldn't use a hammer to, you know, open a water bottle. So like you want to make sure that the tool that you're using for your problem is the right tool. And I think that that is the right way to approach it. And candidly, like we actually tried to raise, like we fully were like, and again, this was like, I probably shouldn't have even tried to raise at the point I was at.

But I didn't know that. Yeah, that's so interesting. Tell me more.

Yeah, like a year and a half. Well, I guess like 2 years ago at this this point. Um, we were in a bit of a plateau, candidly, at the time. Um, and I was like— and also, like, I just saw everyone else raising, so I was like, oh, this is what you do. Like, you know, we already had, like, I don't know, like $20K or $30K of MRR. And I was like, all right, like, you know, we're not really growing very fast right now. Like, but I've already proven that, like, this, you know, business is working. I'm sure raising will be a breeze. And, like, it really was incredibly difficult. It's something that I, I don't even think I could raise today Like, I feel like I'm so bad at talking to investors. I like—

so you say that, but once I'm on the phone with them, it's just like, I don't know, like, well, I'll tell you, I'll preface this in saying you would be able to raise money without doing anything but sending your URL to someone in today's world. The sole reason for that, disregarding whether you're good or bad at talking to investors, you're profitable. Profitability is like the— that is like the buzzword today for investors. So I think, I mean, I laugh sitting here listening to you say out loud, I don't know if I'd be able to raise it.

I don't though. Like, I don't know. Like, I feel like I have a lot of like things. Some things come naturally to me as a founder and the whole like investor raising money thing. And maybe this is just like a limiting belief that I've like put on myself. I feel like it just is so foreign to me that like, I think I'm good at talking in general. I just don't think I tell the narrative that that these investors want to hear. Like, I'm very honest about like how big I think we're going to get at like certain targets and certain timelines. Like, I'm not inflating anything. I'm also not pretending that like this is going to be the next, you know, Uber or anything. Like, I think a lot of e-com SaaS founders raise money pitching a vision that, oh, we're just an e-com for now and then we're going to be the next HubSpot once we— like, I think a lot of that's like, I'm not— I don't want to lie about that either. Like, we, we, we, are going to stay in e-commerce like that. That's the plan. Like, we're not expanding outside of e-commerce. And so I may be too honest with the investors, but then again, my fear is like, if I were to lie and say like, oh yeah, we're going to be like the word of mouth marketing platform for every business ever and like do this like crazy stuff and like, that's not really what the business is going to do. So once we get to like whoever knows how big and I'm like, okay, it's time to sell. And they're like, wait, you barely even fulfilled, you know, a fraction of this vision you were talking about. This is going to be the next Uber. And I was like, yeah, about that. I just said that so you gave me money. Like, I just don't want to play that game either. So I don't really know. Like, this is what I'm saying. Like, this, this stuff doesn't come naturally to me. I don't really understand how to, like, ethically pitch to, uh, to investors without, like, overselling the idea. I don't know, it's just, it's just foreign. I mean, that, that's—

that last comment you made is such an amazing topic though, of the ethics of overselling a dream, where it's like, do you even believe in that dream, or is that just like the today dream to get the money you need to get to the next phase to then recreate the the dream for your next round of funding.

Right, right.

But I think based on your passion, conviction, and honesty, there are enough investors out there that would be attracted to that. But that's not the point because you don't need to be doing that. You just need to be building your business. Yeah, this is awesome. I mean, I could probably just keep going for a long time because I'm so intrigued by what you've been able to do. But I think I'm going to leave you with one more question, which is just if you could go back and tell your 18-year-old self something, what would it be?

And why? Find a technical co-founder.

Love it. Can you just look at the camera, let everyone know where they can find you and what you're working on? I appreciate you coming on today.

Yeah, absolutely. So you can find me on Twitter or LinkedIn. My Twitter is @NoahTuck, N-O-A-T-U-C-K, and LinkedIn, just search Noah Tucker and you'll find me. And what was, what was the other thing you want to say? Or is that it?

That was it.

Awesome. All right. Well, thank you for having me.

Thanks for coming on. That was great.

Awesome.