#068: How Rohit Bhadange Went From Wall Street to Raising $10M to Build Zamp

are you ready to be in this like rat race of, or this constant hamster wheel of consistently raising money? And then because you're raising money, now you're relying on investors to evaluate your idea, your potential, and all these things. Versus like as a brand, you can kind of hit profitability relatively early and then you can access things like Revolvers and facilities to then push your growth. And I think then you kind of have control over what you want to do earlier than as a SaaS founder. But yeah, the grass is always greener, I think.

Rohit Budhange, co-founder and CEO of Xampe, shares his journey from the structured world of Wall Street to the dynamic tech startup scene. In founding Xampe, a tax-compliant solution for e-commerce and SaaS businesses, Rohit combines his investment expertise with a passion for problem-solving in the compliance space. In this episode, Rohit delves into the initial challenges and key learnings from the early stages of Xampe, discussing the importance of founder-led sales, hands-on customer acquisition, and building relationships. He touches on his approach to network management and partnerships, revealing how a personal touch and interactions can yield long-term gains. Welcome back to Season 3, Episode 11 of the Turning Pro Podcast. Today we have Rohit Padungay, the co-founder and CEO of Zam. Thanks for joining us today.

Thanks for having me here.

So you said you want to just jump right into this content conversation. We were riffing for 20 minutes before we hit record.

Let's pick up exactly where we left off. I think early days of like your content journey, because I think like a year a year ago, we were jamming and I was like, you should start posting. And you were— you immediately started crushing it, which most people do not do. I feel like you figured it out right away. So like, what was like the learnings there? How you want to—

so I think talking to people who have had experience doing it, it helps because then I can look at your posts and see what's been working, what's not been working. Especially like for him, he does a lot of stuff on the social content side, so I went through his clients, what he did, and just read through a lot of it. A lot. I think it came down to really 2 things that I had to really work on is, A, what are those first 2 lines that you're pulling the reader in with? Because if you can't capture the attention in the first 2 lines, it's just not going to drive great engagement. And I think the second thing is actually writing about things that people care about, because initially I was writing about things that I cared about, and I think that's very different than writing about things other people care about. And it may be the same exact content, but it's just framed a little bit differently to to just navigate to the right kind of audience. And I think the other thing we talked about this is like I was posting twice, twice a week and I was like, I thought that was a lot. I thought that was an insane amount in the beginning because as somebody that doesn't come from that content background, LinkedIn for me was previously like, I want to connect with people on LinkedIn and just be friends. It's kind of like this professional friends, internet friends, friends. And I come from the Wall Street world and like the where it just isn't for content. It's, it's like strictly professional network. And so posting twice a week was like, okay, wow, what are my friends going to think of me? That's kind of weird. Uh, I, I think you and Tommy were like, like, you need to be posting more. I moved to like 5 times a week. And then I think both of you guys were like, no, you need to be posting every day. So for like 4 months, I just posted every day. Followers went from like 3,000 to 15,000 in about like 5 months. But a lot of it was like top of funnel content and a lot of it was just experimenting with things.

I think both of you are really great examples of like, I talk to Tommy most days because he runs like social agency. I run like a long form agency. We both work with B2B and both of our recommendations are always like, if I'm talking to a founder about working with them, he has the exact same approach. It's like if you can hack it together in-house and learn how to do it and build a system, that should always be like you have a fiduciary responsibility. To use your capital well and effectively, like, go do that if you can. If you cannot do that, then go work with one of us as like a bridge and then build it in-house eventually. And both of you who I've talked to about like both long-form as well as short-form, I know you've worked with Tommy, but took the I'm going to do it in-house, I'm going to learn how to do it and hack it together. And it's become like major growth channels for both of your businesses. And so I'm curious, I guess you can start, but like, how did you think about, okay, not just like waking up in the morning and being like, I got to go post to like building a system around it? Who's going to own it? How are we thinking through metrics, how are we thinking through this as like a better acquisition channel than you spending time on like doing different referral partnerships?

Yeah, so I told myself like when we talked about it, this was like, I started posting May of last year and I think what I told myself is, hey, give me like a month or two to just iterate on what's working, what's not working, and then give me like through the rest of the year to figure out, hey, what is this actually gonna mean in terms of demand for our business? 'Cause I think unlike other people that might be on LinkedIn just to develop a following, I think it has to translate to, like business wins for us. And for me, you know, it's funny you talk about not waking up. I think a lot of what I did was wake up in the morning and decide, hey, I'm gonna post this today. But the other thing that really worked is I just was really rigorous about having a notepad. I just used the Notes app in Apple. Every time I had an idea, it would go into like work in progress. Every time I wrote about it, it moved to done. And I think over time you're just out with friends, you'd be at dinner, you'd be walking down the street and you're just pushing ideas into this WIP. And that became helpful to then write about content. Even if it was that morning, I'm like, okay, I'm reflecting on this experience that I just had. Let's, let's write about it. That was huge. I think the second thing was from a metrics tracking perspective, I looked at metrics pretty much on a weekly basis. I saw what, what hit in the first, first hour. I used to track posts pretty quick, pretty well the first hour, and then I'd check over the week like how it did based on the ones that hit really well. I'd kind of restructure my, the formatting of the posts based on what worked well. And it could be completely different posts. There could be one post about sales tax, maybe one post about a company story, it could be another post about a why is raising money not the best thing. But ultimately the structure was the same, and over time iterating that structure was huge. Um, but those are honestly, those are some of the things that worked for us. I tried to keep it not super structured, but at the same time have some rhythm and rhyme to it. So I write content the night before pretty much every day. Day, um, at like 9:00, 11:00 PM, something like that. And I know people say right into the morning, but that was the only time I had, and then I'm just pushing forward.

You have a very different approach. Walk me through.

Well, I think one thing I want to start with on this topic is that I think too many people get discouraged too quickly when they don't get the vanity metrics that someone told them they were supposed to get, right? So like, everyone has been there where the first post you made got one like and maybe a comment if one of your homies is like, dude, good job.

Still happens.

It still—

yeah, pretty common. My man.

But you, but you Like, I think I commented on that this morning. But the way that you overcome that is just by staying persistent with it. Like, the question I pose all the time, what's your favorite podcast?

Um, Nine Operators is a solid one. All In Podcast, also very solid.

Do you remember the first episode that the All In Podcast released?

No.

That's the fucking point.

Yeah.

No one remembers the first thing you post on LinkedIn. Like, you just got to keep posting. Every time someone's like, I don't know, I ask them that question, they're like, fuck, you're kind of right. Yeah, I just, I just like, you have to make this like, you have to accept it within yourself that not every post is going to be great. You're not going to get a lot of likes on all your posts. People don't really care what you think, and you need to accept that. And once you get over that mental hump, now I just like, I just hit publish. Like, I sure I'll read it over so there's no typos, but I have people who will send me a post, but yo, can you like proofread this for me? I'm like, how about you post it and then I'll read it for you?

I completely agree. I think, I think there's too much of this like of what am I going to put out there and what people are going to think of me. I think once you get over that, you're kind of like, okay, well, half these people either don't care about what I'm posting. There's another half or like 49%, 49% that care but aren't really going to look at the typos. They're not going to judge you based off this. And there's those 1% that are just super annoying that no matter what you do, they're going to comment on it.

So, and you're not doing anything that impactful if you don't have that 1% commenting on it. But the two other things I'll say on it is the first one is I see it the same way as shipping product. Like just fucking ship things and iterate. I think content is the same. I don't understand why people don't see it that way. And the second thing I'll tell you is that the metrics you see in terms of like tracking how many likes and comments you get is not the total number of people who are paying attention to what you do. Oh, 100%. All the people that I get who've like DM'd me, who've become customers or prospects or whatever, they're people that have never liked or commented on one fucking post I've ever made. But that just goes to show you that people are watching and people are paying attention. You need to stop worrying about like getting the feedback loop of the dopamine hit.

Oh, 100%. Actually, I, I— it's interesting because I don't have social media. Like, I don't have Instagram, Snapchat, any of that stuff. And as soon as I got on LinkedIn, it was— to your point, it was a little bit of that dopamine hit coming back. But I've come to realize over the last like 6 to 9 months that every single— whether it's lead from a partner, customer lead, whatever referral it is— I don't think any of them have liked my stuff. And then I'd go into public and at conferences, trade shows, Dinners and random people that I never expect to be like, hey, wow, I read your content. I was like, you read my content? Why aren't you? And I'm thinking in my head, why are you liking my content?

Yeah.

And it's wild because I think those are the best connections. So yeah, to your point, you never know. So I focus more on impressions now than I do on actually how many people really like it or comment or things like that.

I think the underrated aspect of it is staying top of mind, not for like potential customers in the pipeline and not just for direct lead gen, but for staying top of mind with referral partners. And so like investors are a great partner for us. Adjacent agencies are a good partner, other founders and like other ecosystems. And anytime I'll catch up with them, whenever they send us business, they're like, dude, I've been seeing your stuff. Like, you guys seem like you're growing and you're crushing it. It's super active. And I'm like, oh, that's actually probably the most valuable part of the content. It's not direct lead gen. It's like it stays top of mind with everyone that can potentially send you business. It's an example.

It's also being top of mind for if and when some person decides they need to do something else. Like I've said this to you, one of the largest brands we've signed today is Gainful, uh, and their head of product messaged me. I was like, hey, I've been following your content for a long time, we're moving over to Shopify, would love to talk.

Yeah, that's awesome.

Who knows, she might have seen my content for the first time 6 months ago, which is like, this isn't relevant to me right now, but like, it's interesting, it's cool. And then when you go to think, okay, I need to do this thing, who's the first name that pops into my head? I'm always like, how can we become that first name to pop into I think it's recency bias.

It's purely, and I think Tommy—

You gotta stay recent all the time.

That's the point. Every morning.

'Cause I think they, one of the things that you talked about, Tommy talked about is the consistency. There's nothing more important than the consistency part. You could almost put like horseshit out there and it's not gonna matter. You could have posts rip once a month and that's not gonna matter. You just have to post 5 times a week, 7 times a week, and then that way you're really gonna be top of mind, otherwise, you know, like, what are you really doing?

Walk me through, outside of content as like a BD vertical right now, what are the other main like referral partnerships for you and how have they grown with kind of as the business has grown up?

Can we take a step back really quick and tell me what your business does and people listening?

Yeah, so our business is called Xamp. We do sales tax compliance for e-commerce brands and SaaS companies. Um, ultimately we manage everything from A to Z so that They just, the individual customer never has to touch it again. So it could be everything from we onboard the customer, we track their transactions, their order history, all those things, make sure they get registered, file on time, and just handle general compliance. So effectively, like people onboard and they save, I'd say like 20 to 30 hours a month on average, even folks that are using other providers. [Speaker] And I think we end up saving depending on the customer hundreds of thousands, potentially even millions of dollars in out-of-pocket expenses and fees.

What have been the specific phases of growth? Walk us through like Evolution 1, Evolution 2, wherever you guys are right now.

Yeah, so in the beginning, you guys probably can attest this, it's a little bit of like a— I don't say you're selling vaporware, but it's almost like vaporware.

Not as good as vaporware. I've had a lot of customers come on my plane that was only half built and I was just praying we were going to stick the landing.

Yeah, same. And I think, you know, people talk about the zero to one phase, but there's this like negative one to zero phase.

There's your, there's your post tomorrow on LinkedIn.

Yeah.

Talking about the negative one to zero phase.

And I think in that time, it's a lot of it is about who do you have on your team and are, is the team credible enough that someone's gonna take the risk of working with you? And, and I posted about this a couple days ago. Sanzo for us was like one of those customers where they decided it was One of the Pareto Portfolio companies where I used to, where I was a little bit more involved in, now a venture partner there, we'd invested in Sanzo and they were kind of an easier conversation because I already knew them. So we asked them and they joined super early. And during that time, I think a lot of it is, okay, understanding, understanding what the customers need, adapting the product, adapting the roadmap to those customer needs. And then number 2, I think it's a lot of it is just founder and exec team just BD work on the ground because beyond— you kind of— someone told me this when I was— when we were just starting XAMPP, your first like 500 customers in some ways, like the founder just has to be involved. And I don't know if I'd go as far as like 500, but I think definitely the first 50. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

And because you can kind of scale where you're consistently on the ground, you can go to conferences, get like 30 leads, you can go to dinners, you can go to other things. But once you get to a point where you need to get like 100 leads a month, that's just not scalable. So in the beginning, a lot of it was, okay, we tested outbound, we did a lot of BD work on the ground and got as many referrals as we possibly could. We just spread the word and that's when I was starting to push content. And so any one referral really helped and it really moved the needle. I think now we're in this like second phase of growth where we're great, we have product-market fit, things have been working. Now we're focusing on, hey, how do we build this inbound engine? How do we build the partnership engine? How do we make it so that A, we either have people coming to us because of the content that we build. We were in a really complex space. It's compliance. It's not sexy. But how do we make it so that it's more accessible to people and less scary? And on the flip side, it's how do we build trust on trust that's already been built? So a lot of the partnerships that we have— accounting, bookkeepers, all that stuff— they're already in with the companies. They already have the relationship there. Why are we reforging that relationship when we could forge that relationship with these individual accounting bookkeepers and how you take this one-to-many approach. And so those are really the two things. And so for us, like recently what we've been focused on is how do we scale this go-to-market motion even more effectively? And yeah, you could just throw money at it and yeah, you're probably going to get like some level of customers, but at some point it becomes like you kind of start losing the same level of efficiency. And the big conversation for us is, okay, partnerships is working, inbound is working. How do we invest in the right way so we can get from getting maybe like 50 leads a month or 100 leads a month to like 300, 400, 500.

Will you ever stop running around boots on the ground drumming up business?

I think it's hard. I also really believe that founder CEO generally should be on the ground because CEO is the face of the company. And I think it's really important to meet customers, meet partners in real life. I think whenever companies start to lose that touch, it becomes a little bit more challenging. And the reason I say that is because I've seen people try to forge relationships online versus people that go in person, and it just doesn't work the same. And whenever I'm on the ground, I just know that it gives the team a broader leg up, but also just helps relationships in the space because they know me as a person instead of as a username on a screen.

Yeah, or as a line item in a HubSpot pipeline.

Yeah, exactly. And I think it also depends on the person because— there's some people that are just not super comfortable going out there, putting themselves out there, all that stuff. But you kind of have to be comfortable with the uncomfortable if you're going to be CEO. I think if you were anything else, maybe you could get potentially a pass. But it's also nice when you're meeting your clients just live. They really appreciate it, especially because you are the CEO or you are the founder or whoever that is. They're like, oh wow, this guy's spending his time to meet with people. That are actually using his product despite the fact that they have, you know, 500 customers, 1,000 customers, 2,000 customers.

I think there's like two philosophies. Either one, just get comfortable with uncomfortable of like channels that maybe you're not used to. You weren't used to like LinkedIn and other channels before. Maybe you're used to Instagram or YouTube before that. But there's also a philosophy of like, just play to your strengths and maybe try out everything. But then understand like, okay, this BD channel or this way of going about it, I am better at. For some people, we're talking about this before. Like, I love a good, like, one-on-one coffee chat because I can go deep with someone. I fucking hate big conferences. I don't think I've ever been to one. Even when I was investing in CBG, I would never go to, like, the fancy foods or, like, the big— what's that big one?

Uh, Expo.

Expo. I hate it. Like, I couldn't stand it. It'd make me really anxious. But I love a good, like, 4-person dinner or a podcast like this. So how have you— I understand, like, getting comfortable with uncomfortable, but, like, what specific channels are you naturally just really comfortable with and really good at?

I think for me, a lot of it is on the BD side. I'm pretty comfortable just meeting people cold or just LinkedIn DMing folks. And I think what I typically do is I try to add value to their business or whatever they do first before I even make an ask. Because naturally what happens is if you help this individual, they kind of already know what you do. You don't have to spell it out for them. And I think it's— that's kind of the thing that a lot of people forget. Especially when you get these cold DMs from people, they're just like making this like 10-paragraph pitch on what they do. And I'm like, dude, I already know what you do because I just checked your LinkedIn profile. So for me, I'm pretty comfortable with the BD side as well as just being on the ground. I really like that. I think things like inbound, that has to be done a little bit more tactically, whether it's through paid and understanding customer pain points directly or whether it's through like writing and pushing content on the SEO side. I think on the flip side for us, like partnerships and things like that, we have people on our team that are really good at that. I think that's where I get leverage for myself. I make the intros for some of these partners that we've brought on, but then I kind of let them take it from there. Organizing events, what webinars should we do, how should we co-sponsor content together, dinners, all those kind of things. That's not really my sweet spot. I'm good at building those relationships and then kind of handing it off.

I'm just listening to you. Like, I would say the same thing almost verbatim to what you just said in terms of how I operate. We're launching our partner program. I mean, it will hopefully be launched by the time this episode is live. I've been hearing that for a long time, but in real time, in the real time, in the next week or two, uh, and we've onboarded 50 partners, uh, for the initial launch. And I think like 47 of those were me just like putting the founder of insert business name here on the email with my head of growth. And I'm like, yo, can you just like give them the information they need to make sure they're set up to be a good partner? 100%. That's cuz like, that's the best use of my time. Yeah, like I could sit there and like walk them through SOPs and be like, fill out this type form and sign this contract and whatever. But when you think about being like a founder CEO of a business, it's constantly reinventing yourself at every stage of the company of like, where is the best use of my time? And I think in a lot of ways, to your point, it all boils down to like relationships. If you're doing it at a high level, in my opinion, 100%.

And I think the question that a lot of CEOs and CEOs specifically need to ask themselves is Well, for me, I have this philosophical thing of I think all CEOs should be focused on growth or whatever the metric that you guys are targeting. If the metric is ultimately profitability, then the CEO needs to be focused on profitability. If the metric that you guys are aiming towards is, hey, this year we want to get from $5 million to $10 million, $15 million in ARR, OK, how are you as a CEO going to help promote that? What is the North Star for your company? And are you as a CEO spending most of your time driving towards that North Star? And if you're not doing that, and this could be whether it's like BD on the ground in the very beginning, -1 to 0 stage, or whether it's like building the partner referral network, I just don't think you're doing your team justice because now you have this, you kind of have this like, like a cheat code of being the CEO and you're not using it for the right things. And for me, that's kind of how I think about it. And that's why for me it's like, okay, I'm, I can get all these referrals. Let me activate this investor network that we have. Let me talk to different partners. Let me try to get as many customers as I can, and then I'll hand it off to people that are better than me at it. At that piece.

I think when it comes to referrals and like partners specifically, I love your note about adding value, not just like potential customers in your pipeline, but I was talking to an agency owner and he was like, how do you, how do you stay top of mind with like some referral partners who like I know should be sending us business, but they're not. He's like, should I catch up with them? Should I go for a workout? I'm like, why don't you just send them a customer, man? And I think they'll remember that. And every single time, sometimes I get caught up in my head. I'm like, I met these two investors. I know they like, I know we're up our alley. We can help their portfolio. They can definitely send business our way. And I'm like thinking through it. I'm like, maybe we should grab dinner. And then I'm like, maybe I just send them like a really hot deal that they should be doing. And I feel like, again, from like an adding value lens, you can kind of dance around like different ways to do it. But end of the day, it's like if you're running a B2B-focused company and like I just sent you a customer, you'll like— I'll be top of mind.

100%. Yeah, I think that— yeah, it's that same mindset with content. Like, what does the person care about? And I think too many times, like, we have people think about what do I care about? And what is it for me? And I think that's fine. But you also need to think about, okay, if Ben really cares about XYZ, okay, I'm going to try to get him XYZ and then maybe he'll, he'll be thankful and maybe down the line, like, he'll send me whatever or I'll just be top of mind for something. So I think, yeah, same philosophy. And I think for me, I, I'm a venture partner with this group called Pareto and there they do a lot of pre-seed, seed investing, just early stage investing in startups. And I talk to a lot of like CPG SaaS founders And a lot of these people could potentially be our customers. And what I don't even— I mean, I don't even— I tell them on our intro call, like, what do I do and all that stuff? And if they're interested, then we'll talk about it. But at the end of the day, like, whether we invest or not, I will always make intros for them across the board, whether it's with go-to-market motions, whether it's other investor intros or whatever that is. And like 9 out of 10 times they'll come back to me saying like, hey, I know these intros didn't work out, but I really appreciate you at least trying. And that's the same kind of— you— the value doesn't necessarily have to stick. It doesn't have to convert. But I think the fact that you actually tried and put effort in is just huge.

How do you think about managing a network at scale?

The—

I'd say it's pretty hard. Um, I think it depends exactly what you mean though. What do you mean by managing?

Just like, like, you know, a lot of people, you're constantly wanting to add value to people, obviously. Obviously there's certain people you're going to prioritize, but when you're meeting so many people every day, it could be overwhelming. Uh, and it's something— I'm asking you this for selfish reasons because it's something that like I'm thinking through, where there's just so many interactions and so many people, and there's certain people you could be helpful with somewhere at super low touch, where it's like someone's like, oh, I need help with content. Like, I can fire off an intro to Adrian and not really think about it, right? Then there's other people where like you really want to add value, but you have to be way more thoughtful about how you're gonna add value to this person. It could just become like overwhelming and a lot to think about, for sure. So I'm just curious, like, are there tools or habits that you formed around like adding value to people in your network?

So for— I think that's a really good question because, yeah, I mean, we talked about this before. I have, what, 16,000 followers or something on LinkedIn, but you're not going to remember all of them. So what I do is of the people that are top of mind, I actually just make a list on my notepad. So I live off of Apple Notes. I went from Apple Notes to Notion and then back to Apple Notes. It's like that meme where— where—

yeah, exactly.

So What I do is I have like a 3PL notepad, like a notepad. We don't do anything related to 3PLs, but I just have like 4 or 5 contacts in there that I can push people to whenever it's someone asks, hey, I need a 3PL. Oh, you want to, you want to get into Amazon? Okay, here's 3 people. Oh, you want to get into running, I don't know, ads onto Instacart? Okay, here's the people you need to talk to. So for me, a lot of it just helps writing things down. And I say this to my fiancée, if it's not on my calendar, if it's not written down, it's not happening. And it's just because there's only—

wait, so will you put something on your calendar for something you and your fiancée will do? Because my girlfriend thinks I'm crazy because I'll do that. Like, can we go to dinner Thursday? I'm like, yeah, and I'll put it on my calendar. And sometimes I'll send her an invite, she's like, why are you inviting me? I was like, you don't understand, if it's not on the calendar, it's not happening.

She's like, bro, can we go to dinner tonight? You're like, no, babe, I'm sorry.

Hey dude, you know what's—

the calendar's closed.

You know what's hilarious is when I go to dinner, when I go to dinner with friends who aren't like startup founders or in this world, and I send a calendar invite, like, dude, what the fuck is this? Like, I thought we're just going to meet at this restaurant on Thursday night at 7. I'm like, yeah, we are, but like, I block it without adding them now. No, no, I don't, I don't, I block it.

Yeah, I have both.

No, no, no, I don't, I don't do it as much anymore. I'll send it to my girlfriend to fuck with her sometimes. She be like, why are you doing this? I'm like, cuz it's kind of funny.

She has a full calendar of like—

but I, I couldn't like resonate with that more.

Oh, I think I I try to limit whatever's in my head as much as possible. And I do even do this. Like, one of my, my co-founder, he does this thing where you go to a restaurant and again, it's like a relationship thing. If you remember the person's name that served you last time, especially in a city like New York, there's so much value to that because nobody remembers their name. Nobody pays a lot of attention to them and they just kind of get swept under the rug a little bit. But if I'm like, hey, Elena, it's really nice to see you. Thanks for, thanks for helping us out. I think there's a lot— it goes a really long way. So now whether it's restaurants, whether it's events, I put person's name down and I put like attributes related to that person, be like brown hair, 5'7", whatever. And then I will— next time at the restaurant, I look at the restaurant on my notepad, I'm like, okay, great, like is she there? If she's not there, then great.

It's like your notes, like Adrian, 5'10".

I have notes about everything. So for me, I just live off my notepad, and that's why if I ever lost it, I'd be, I'd be pretty, pretty deep shit.

It's just your Apple Notes on your phone.

Yeah, exactly. My Apple Notes.

How do you put that on the cloud?

How many different notes do you have?

I, I, well, there's different categories. There's just one for personal.

Yeah.

Um, which has like workouts and all that stuff. Like even workouts, I don't even think about them anymore because it's just in my notepad. Every time I go to the gym, it's— I have to just check, okay, last time I did legs, okay, this is what I did. Great. This is my weights. I don't have to ever think, okay, 70 pounds, 80 pounds, whatever.

I just go on a new bench every time.

I use the app Fitbod for that. Do you know Fitbod?

I've used all these apps.

Oh, it's the only one that's ever worked for me, dude.

The problem that I have is that there's like 50 apps for all of these different, like, different groups of things, whether it's me working, whether it's me like working out. And so I put everything in the Notepad, personal app. There's work in progress, content, content, and then there's like—

do me a favor, try FitBot for exercise and come back to me in like 3 weeks and tell me your thoughts.

Wait, what do you— are you logging your workouts?

It automatically does. You like, you tell it the beginning of it, you'd like use the weights that are good for you, and then it learns you, and then you can go in, pick the body parts that you want to exercise, the difficulty, how long you want to do it for, and it just spits out a workout for you. And it tracks your historicals, and so it will incrementally increase your weights. And then after a certain exercise, it will ask you like, was this easy, hard, medium, to know next time you do like this workout for this body part, should we increase the weight, keep the weight the same? And I like it because I— my least favorite part about working out alone is having to think about the workout. I want to know what I have to do, just go and do it and leave. And this was the first app that I've ever used that genuinely like replaced a trainer for me.

That's huge.

Yeah, um, I, I— because I get into this rhythm after like 2 months where I'm like tired of the same exercises, so boring. And I'm like, but you can, you can substitute, you can substitute.

It will show you like 10 substitutes for one exercise that hits the same muscles.

Really?

I'm telling you, it is the best fitness app I've seen on the market.

My approach is I go on YouTube and I end up looking at these like gym bros doing new lifts, and my girlfriend's like, Jesus. Christ, I feel like I'm in and I'm watching it. I'm like, I'm so sorry.

Honestly, I do the same thing because I— it's kind of like, how many times can I possibly chest press?

How, how else am I supposed to learn? I, I, I, I— my go-to anytime I'm like a little tired and I forget a workout, just doing farmer's carries, farmer's walks.

They're actually really good for you.

Get big pretty quickly, 100%, by just like carrying them around.

The, the other thing that I started doing is, um, so I go through this phase like when I start working out, like you know, some gap happens, you'll kind of start with your basic exercises. And then over time I started doing like plyo workouts. So instead of just doing like, you know, squats, you'll do like jump squats or stuff like that. Way lower weight. But I think tactically and just from a versatility perspective in real life applications, it just helps more. It's a little bit like CrossFit, but like for beginners because you're doing it yourself.

CrossFit without like injuring yourself from trying to do like 100 reps of one exercise.

You play sports?

Uh, yeah, I play tennis, um, discus skate growing up.

Got it there. How often are you playing tennis in the city?

Like, I probably 3, 4 times a week.

That's great.

Yeah, that's a lot.

Do you have a court near your house or—

No, um, it's— well, it's pretty close, it's like 20 minutes away.

Is it— you just like book it a month in advance and—

Yeah, we, we have it pretty much booked on a regular cadence, um, like Tuesday, Wednesdays, Saturdays type thing. And then we'll play in the morning, 7 a.m. on the weekdays, and then on the weekends, like 9 to 11 or something like that.

I feel like sports is— I feel like when I'm working out, I work out. I know you don't work out with headphones in, but like I have a podcast in or something.

Yeah.

And I'm also checking Slack between sets and like checking texts and like firing off stuff. And my brain is like more filled than before it. And I don't— and then the walk back from it is like a little decompressing. But sports is like one of the only times I can truly Turn off.

Like, because you don't have access to your phone while you're like running around.

You're just like so focused on not getting hit with a ball or something. Yeah, exactly. You have to focus. And anytime I'm doing sports consistently, I'm like a happier, calmer person.

I think the two things that you just talked about, the no headphones and no phones, huge plus on the working outside. I don't think enough people do that. And I, I have a bad habit. I listen to music, but honestly, half the time I don't even know why. I think it's just there. For to fill up space. I don't want to hear other people grunt, so I just use it to fill up, fill up space. But whenever I feel like I want to be as locked in as possible and get the most efficient workout, it's always no phone, no, uh, uh, you got nothing else to do.

You just got to do the next workout or like superset something.

100%.

I want to take a left turn here. You were on the brand side before this, weren't you?

I, I helped start a few companies. I was mostly on the investor side for almost, almost like 10 years, give or take. So did everything from private equity. We're talking like middle, large buyouts, tech, e-commerce brands, whatever, all the way to the very early side of VC of like pre-seed, Series A, did growth. So been all across the board. At the last place I was at called Pareto, we helped launch a bunch of brands and various SaaS companies. So I got a lot of exposure to brand there, which is where actually this problem sits.

I'm curious to get your perspective as someone who's been on both sides of of the coin. I think like every brand founder is like, why didn't I start a SaaS company? And every SaaS founder is like, I should have started a brand. And I think the grass is always greener on the other side. So as someone who's been on both sides, I want your, your take on it.

You know what's funny? I actually wrote a LinkedIn post about that literally last week, and I feel like it essentially— like, the— I, I think they're right in the sense that the grass is always greener, because from a SaaS perspective, yes, you have more access to capital, exit valuations are potentially much higher. But the challenge becomes the path to profitability is a lot more challenging, I think, as a SaaS company than a brand company, because as a brand, you're, you're already, you, you're selling things that people already want most of the time because it's hard to find people that are creating a new, truly new category. So you're kind of selling something that somebody already wants. You're taking market share from something else. Whereas, and, and I think the the amount of people required to build a brand is a lot less because, because of platforms like Shopify, Platter, or BigCommerce or whatever those platforms are, the operational costs have just significantly decreased. I think if you were talking about building a brand 15, 20 years ago, maybe my answer would have been different. And I think with the SaaS world, once you bring on investor capital, you're kind of in this race of you just kind of have to grow. And a lot of this SaaS foundation is built on SaaS is not just like a 1-year time horizon. You got— your customer stays on with you for 3 to 5 years potentially. So you're like, you're looking at that kind of lifetime value. So you're kind of okay being in the red for a longer period of time. And so, I mean, if you look at SaaS companies today, they're not even— most of them aren't even profitable even when they IPO. So what does that really mean for you as a business? Are you ready to be in this like rat race of— or this constant hamster wheel of consistently raising money and then because you're raising money now, you're relying on investors to evaluate your idea, your potential, and all these things versus like as a brand, you can kind of hit profitability relatively early and then you can access things like Revolvers and facilities to then push your growth. And I think then you kind of have control over what you want to do earlier than as a SaaS founder. But yeah, the grass is always greener. I think in today's world, I'd probably think starting a brand would require less resources. Starting a SaaS company may be a little bit more challenging, but upside is always greater. That said, I think the risk in starting a brand is also a lot higher just because there's just so much competition because the barriers to entry are a lot lower.

Yeah, I mean, I'm— but then I like always ask myself, like, based on what you're saying, it's like, why would you start a brand? It's like multiples are higher, there's more access to capital.

But I think you're just betting on yourself though, right?

Because you're basically saying, hey, no, but if you think about just like the, the benefit— yeah, I mean, I guess if you do a cost-benefit analysis of it, everyone cares about different things. So that's probably why someone would do one versus the other. Maybe it's a skill set thing.

I think launching a brand, there, there's a certain amount of— this is coming from like CPG founders that I'm friends with— there's like a certain amount of fulfillment that they have. They're equally stressed as all of us in different ways, but there's— I don't know, all of them, like, whenever they see their product in shelves or like know that it's like a wellness product is actually helping someone, they're like, there's a, there's a fulfillment to that, right? That like— I'm an agency, so I'm neither SaaS nor brand, but like a lot of my SaaS founder friends like don't feel enormous fulfillment from like helping expedite this certain like dev workflow with their tool. I can't speak for Xam specifically, like even when your customers are really happy and thank you a lot.

Dude, he throws parties when he found out he helped someone sales tax.

Best day. I mean, I think, I mean, you're kind of right in the sense because it's the end consumer consuming your product in like daily use capacity.

Yeah.

So it's more instant gratification too. And I think it's kind of this like dopamine hit when— I mean, like, for example, to hit— I don't know, if you want to hit $10 million in revenue, you're doing like 100,000 orders a year, give or take. Whereas like for us to hit $10 million in revenue, we're not doing 100— like, that's like 1,000 customers, if that.

Yeah.

So I think that dopamine hit is also a little bit less. And I think to your point, yeah, like we're helping the corporate side, whereas they're helping direct individual consumers. And there's just more raw emotion with that because now it's consumers spending their own money versus businesses spending business balance sheet money.

To date, what's been the most stressful part of running the business?

I think the part that I'm learning the most is how to manage people. Like our team is over 30 people now and it's, I've, I've, I haven't been in a position where I've had to manage such a large team before and understanding—

you have a co-founder, right? Yeah.

And understanding like when to give and when to pull back is a little bit challenging because every human is wired differently and understanding what motivates somebody versus what motivates another person might be, might be different.

How many direct reports do you have?

For me, actually, I don't have— I have, I have 2 direct reports.

That's my guy right there.

Like, who are you doing? So you just do one-on-ones with those direct? Reports every week or biweekly?

Yeah, we do. I do one-on-ones with those direct reports, um, weekly basis.

That's all.

I have one.

That's— you only have one director? Uh-huh.

And then the next person we brought in our org, I was like, do you want an opportunity to grow and manage? Great, he'll report to you.

I love that. Yeah, there's 3 on the exec team, but I guess it's not them anymore.

I think, well, within each of our teams we have a leader that runs those teams, and typically they have like I'd say like 4 or 5 tops direct reports. Most of them, like, we're at a size where it's still like 2 to 3 on average, I'd say. I'd say the person who has the most is our COO. He like, yeah, I'd say like pretty much the most of the exec team. And then he kind of relays that information back to me on, hey, this is like some of the stuff that's bubbling to the top that you need to be mindful of or you need to take care of. But I know I have visibility into everything because of Slack and communication runs through Slack. We try to keep everything in public channels or leadership stuff through leadership channels, and that really helps so that the need to feel like there's communication gaps becomes a little less. And I think from what we do at our place is we just emphasize communication as much as possible in the form of— in whatever form, but especially written form, so that at least it's documented.

Do you ever get worried about people leaving?

I don't think about that. I think process. I think in some instances we do, but I think we take the steps necessary to mitigate risk pretty quickly. But I think you kind of have to be okay with people moving in and out of the organization because those people, maybe they just aren't bought into the mission fully.

We just had our first person leave. He lasted 31 days.

Did you let him go?

No, he, he put in his 2 weeks and he was good. It just wasn't the— like, I think realized that it was way too fast, uh, and he wanted to be in like a more enterprise, slow-moving environment. And I think it was a little bit overwhelming.

At least startups are the most overwhelming thing. Yeah.

And I like, he, he was, he's an extremely, extremely talented engineer and it was like a bummer, but I realized that if the culture fit isn't right, like it, it's easier for both of us that we figured this out now and not, you know, 6 months from now where we then delegated a bunch of shit onto his plate and then he pulled the rug. It's He kind of didn't really have any response. How much responsibility can you give to someone in 30 days of like trying to understand the product from a technical perspective? Like not that much.

You'd be surprised at XAMPP. High expectations over there.

Well, I mean, it, there's a learning curve to learn the product before you can start to like contribute and manage people.

Yeah.

Um, but it was the first time that we had ever, we'd ever dealt with that. Uh, he's still on his two, like his two week. I mean, this won't air for a long ass time, so it's, it'll be so far in the past by the time this episode is live. But the last 2 weeks of his time, uh, we decide to keep him on for the 2 weeks, and all he's doing is basically just like ripping our product apart and telling us all the things he thinks like could be better about it.

What do you think you could have done better in the interview process to identify the fact that he was not the right culture fit?

It's a really good question, and it's something that I've like been losing sleep over the last couple days because I've brought on 15 people in the last 3 months, and I feel like I've done a pretty good job of identifying the right people for the roles. Um, I think probably a miss on my part was recognizing how like process-oriented and like thoughtful he was, almost to a fault, versus like willing to just get his hands dirty, like figure shit out. Yeah. So it was like too much, here's what's wrong with everything and not like, here's the problem, but like here are 3 options for solutions. Right. So I think it's like screening for that willingness to like roll up your sleeves and understand that you need to get your hands dirty. And the reason we're hiring someone hypothetically is because there's something that needs to be improved for sure. So we need a subject matter expert to take that thing. It's like if it was already figured out, I wouldn't have hired you. So I think ultimately it was a miss on level setting the expectation of like, you're just not going to be an independent contributor who can just kind of like lock into the same thing for extended periods of time and it's going to be like super like lax. It's like very high intense, very fast moving. And that's just like not the type of person that he is.

I think that's, that's actually so key. I've, I've been in one of the things I've learned pretty early on and also even now is you can always convince somebody to join your company. There's like this, like, you know, as a founder you're used to selling, right? So you just convince somebody to join your company. But effectively it's just if there's just not the right fit in terms of what their work style is and what your work style is, that convincing actually is going to end up being more detrimental to your organization. Then, then it's going to help you because now you've convinced this person and you've kind of said the things that you need to say to get them to join. But now when pavement, you know, rubber hits the pavement, it's like, whoa, this is like not what I was expecting.

I think the thing I did wrong, which maybe came from like a place of desperation, like after doing a postmortem of like, we really needed someone in this role. And actually, funny enough, now that we had other people come in, we're not replacing the role, uh, which is ironic. Like, we actually feel like we have what we need and it was like a miscalculation. But all to say that I've been generally really good about overcommunicating the shitty parts of the job for all new hires, because something I read was if you— it was in Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell— if you overcommunicate the worst parts of the job and the person is still excited about it, then it's probably a good culture fit.

Yeah, 100%.

Like, sugarcoating how great something is is only good enough to get them interested to hear you out about the rest of the story. But if you don't tell them the bad parts, and they're still excited, then like it's probably not a great idea.

But, and I think that's exactly what leads to retention because when you, when you just, your expectations are not being met from what, how they were set in the very beginning, you're gonna have this person for, I mean, like we're talking longest, like 12 to 18 months. After that, they're just gonna filter themselves out because they're either get managed out or they'll be like, hey, listen, I don't really like this environment. I can't, I can't really work here.

What are the like chaotic or shitty or like as you said, like not fun parts of your job that you just have to do?

I think where I really need to get leverage is I do all of our finance— finances still. Really? Yeah. I think a part of it is because I come from that background.

You're not doing your books?

No, I don't do my books, but I do everything forward-looking and I still do like AP and stuff like that. Like I— and a part of it is because one part of me is like, hey, listen, I need to have a pulse on all payments and things that go out just so that I have an idea of cash position, because I think this goes back to the whole like SaaS versus brand thing. As a SaaS company, we're not at a point where we're profitable yet. So I have to be extremely mindful of what kind of cash is going out. And that way, like, if I don't necessarily pull together a model every single week, every month, I'm okay because I just know generally what our cash position looks like because I'm the one moving the cash around. But I still hold the, hold the finances right now. It's part that I, I've used to enjoy it, but I think to the prior point of, hey, what is our company goal? If our company goal is to grow, I need to spend time on growth. I don't need to be spending as much time on finances. I can have a voice in it. I can give my input. So one of the roles that I'm actually hiring for right now is someone to help essentially run finances, build data platforms, all that kind of stuff.

What would you say you're most excited about right now?

Honestly, I want to be able to— we've just brought in some great investors. I want to be able to activate them.

Yeah, you can brag a little bit.

So how much did you raise and from who? We just raised our Series A, $10 million, from— it was led by Valor Equity Partners. And then we had a handful of other people that joined as well. The Rippling founder invested, the ex-mayor of D.C., who's advisor to Andreessen, Mike Stoppelman, who's essentially one of the founding engineers at Yelp, and a few other folks, a lot of great people. And I think now it's like, great, we have this awesome network and people have— great, we brought all these seed investors, which is awesome. It's really early, early believers in what we did. But because you kind of have this trajectory and people are excited about the growth, you just naturally get better people. And now how do I leverage a lot of their networks or how do I leverage our investors in the best way to then be able to capitalize on growth? And that's something that nobody else can do because Nobody else has the investor relationships on our team. So I'm almost doing our team a disservice by not focusing on that if that means it's going to potentially help drive revenue. And one of them has relationships with these accounting, bookkeeping, like top 25 firms. We're already starting to work with some of them. So how can I— how can I do that? So for me, that's a big push. And then the second big push is just generally more BD work on larger marquee customers. As well as potentially larger partner accounts too.

When you see like a marquee brand that you really want to work with, say Athletic Greens or something like that, that you've been wanting to work with, you think they'd be a game changer. You think you could really help their business too based on what you've seen and what they're currently doing. What is your approach? There's a lot of channels that you can do this, probably combination of both. Is it intros or referral partners, existing customers, investors, content? Walk me through how you try to get in front of a brand.

So I think we're still zoning in on that a little bit better. But I think for the ones that we've brought on, this is kind of what's generally worked. One, I'll add them on LinkedIn first because again, that drives the whole content engine. And at the very least, whether they like it or not, they're just top of mind. Number two, we do webinars pretty consistently. Like we just did one today with Taylor Holiday. It was focused on first order profitability, not relevant to sales tax, but it is super relevant to our target audience, which is the finance listen, uh, and for him, like, the marketing professionals. So then I'll potentially even send them a message, be like, hey, listen, like, uh, we're having this webinar today, you might find it helpful if you'd like to join, go for it. Again, adding value is super key. Um, and then after that point, maybe they read it, maybe they didn't. Sometimes they read it, don't respond, uh, which is fine. I'll reach out to a few people that I might be connected with and just be like, hey, like, is this person around to grab coffee? And for me, it's a lot of it is being on the ground, interpersonal relationships, because I like the conference thing. Don't, don't get me wrong, but I think more value from what you said is coffee chats or smaller dinners. I try to get them in those situations first and just build a relationship because for me it's like, do I really— is this going to move my needle tomorrow? Like, why am I so desperate to potentially have this customer tomorrow? I'm not. So am I okay with bringing this customer on 6 to 12 months from now? Absolutely. So why don't I just build this relationship and just become friends with this person? So the approach I take is more from a business friend, friend perspective and do whatever I can in that, that lens. And eventually it kind of pans itself out. I don't focus too much on the end transaction because there's so much more value in becoming friends with this individual because whether they use your product or not, then they just like you as a human being. Yeah. And then like you just developed a new distribution point.

That was a post I made on social when like you feel like you're doing business with friends by the end of like a sales cycle of you you actually become genuine friends with someone, it's not— it doesn't feel as transactional versus like, oh, you know what, like, I want to use this. Let's talk about it for sure. So it's part art, part science for sure.

I think if you can, like, if you and I are sitting across the table and we first meet versus like me jumping over the table and like when you're looking at the same problem together from the same side, it's a lot more fun.

Oh, okay.

It's like we're fun ideas.

Yeah.

A lot of time you're not the right solution. Sometimes I'm sure sometimes you hop on a sales call and you're like, I actually am not sure at your current stage page for the most helpful. I don't know if that's true.

I mean, we do— I think one of the best— I think our sales team, what they're really good at is qualifying out customers. And it's super key because I think, A, I really believe that you just have to make sure you bring on the right customers. Otherwise, your churn is going to be too high. And then the value that they get is just not going to be the kind of value you want to deliver. And if there's a mismatch in that, then it's going to cause more problems because maybe they're going to tell their friend like, oh, we used Sam. It didn't really work well for us.

Yeah.

And then it's like, no, well, you needed international tax. We don't do international tax, and we should have communicated that earlier on. So yeah, qualifying out customers, super huge. And also it drives morale higher because at the end of the day, like the renewals are where the renewals are huge. And then also from a sales win perspective, SQL win perspective, it's huge because those numbers get higher and then your sales teams gets more empowered.

Yeah. Bringing on the wrong customers will really fuck over your business. Hurts your team, hurts the process, hurts retention.

Oh, I've learned that the hard way.

Hurts like referrals, as you mentioned after that. Like if you were like, hey, do you guys like working for Verbatim? And they're like, no, then like all of a sudden that like hurts a whole lot more, right?

Dude, 100%. That one bad review hurts more than like the 5 good reviews that you get.

Or the 100 good reviews.

Yeah, because the default expectation is everyone's like, oh, it should be good. Like that's what everyone wants to hear. Then And they don't pay attention to that.

Exactly. They pay attention more to the negativity than the positivity.

Yeah.

So I truly believe making sure that you qualify the right customer and number 2, over-investing in onboarding the customer, huge. Because then you're actually delivering value that you expect to deliver or you want them to feel. 'Cause a lot of times you onboard onto a product and then you're like, okay, this sounded super cool, but I don't know how to use any of this. And it's like nobody, nobody on their team has got the time or effort spent because you're like, okay, you're this like $10 million company. We're not going to care about you. Okay, well, we're just going to churn next month because nobody taught us how to use this.

The worst feeling is when you get onto like— recently onboarded this cool software tool that I was like really jazzed about. We're paying for it. We're not doing a pilot. We're like full customer and we hop on and they scheduled like the next check-in for like a month from now and they sent over like an async onboarding guide and I was like, I have no idea how to use this.

And then that's awful.

While I was looking at it, I saw their CEO, I think using a ghostwriting agency and posting on Twitter about like wins. And I was like, I know I'm part of that win and I have no idea how to fucking use this thing, even though it looks really cool. And I think it's just that it's not like a malintent. It's just like, get your onboarding right and get your time to value right.

If Xamph fails, what's the reason?

I think for us, it's, uh, I think it's purely like a top of funnel thing for us. I know, and I— it's purely like a growth thing for us. How fast can we drive brand awareness? Um, but that said, like, we have runway for several years, so I'm less worried about that because from an engineering perspective, like, 60, 70% of our team is from TaxJar, Avalara, which are the two big competitors in our space that got acquired for $8.4 and almost $1 billion. So a lot of these people already know what they're doing. So from an engineering perspective, compliance, like sales perspective, we're pretty much set. I think the bigger challenge is going to be from a growth perspective, like the SaaS market's evolved over the last 10, 20 years. How do you get in front of customers? How do you build those relationships? Um, I think that's probably what we're thinking about the most. And I'd bet one of the reasons why we potentially might fail is because we aren't investing enough time thinking about how do we grow sustainably. But I think the other thing, which is kind of an X factor, is this whole concept around AI. I think with tax and compliance generally, you're essentially taking all these tax laws, you're then pushing it into some kind of digestible data format that your data models can then read and then pushing it to the customer. I think once we get to a point where there's a lot of subjectivity involved, because you can't just point to an AI tool and be like, oh, they said it, so we're good to go. But if we ever get to the point where you can say, oh, the AI said it and push liability on the AI product, that might change the game. And that's just the stuff you just can't control. The good thing is I think our engineering team is relatively on top of those things and testing new tools and products. So I don't see that being— I don't see us being hit completely blindsided. But I'd say those are probably the two biggest things that we need to work on.

I know you mentioned early days, like the product wasn't like fully formed yet. I think we've all been in that position. What was that point? And this kind of leads into what was your turning pro moment in the journey? What was that point where you were like, oh, like we're not 100% that way there, but like we're 89% of the way there. Like people actually really like this. I think we have product market fit. What was that moment and where was your mind kind of during that time?

I think for, so for us, I truly believe in getting distribution first before building product. I think that's huge because then people actually buy into what you're building and then you already kind of have this. Otherwise, sometimes I see founders build product and then distribute. So for us, like we kind of almost had product market fit coming out of the gates because we knew that this was a massive problem. And but I think the question you're asking is, hey, which, which point did our product feel in a relatively comfortable spot where we could start distributing it pretty much high, high escape velocity. And for us, that probably took about a few months. I'd say like Q3, Q4. I'd say the pilot took about 6 months. We launched our product last May. So it took us, I'd say, towards the end of the year to really be in a place where we felt super comfortable distributing it really widely. And I think there's— we're still continuing to make the product more robust to larger customers just have different needs. So how do we build in the reporting capabilities that those customers need or whatever product functions they need? There's always going to be things that are missing, but yeah, I'd say it took us about 6 months to get to that point.

I feel like I'm good. You crushed it, man. That was awesome.

This was great. This felt like of all the episodes we've done recently, this felt like the most riffing and workshopping, which I appreciate. Talk to the camera on the left. Where can people find out about Xamp and you?

Yeah, people can find out about Xamp on Twitter. It's @XampTax, or you could follow me, Sales Tax CEO.

What's your URL of XAMPP?

It's xampp.com. Damn.

How much did that cost?

We bought it like, we bought it like 5, 6 years ago.

Whoa.

So yeah, we bought the domain before we even had the, had the company and then we, we ascribed the domain to the— so we have a handful of 4-letter domains just sitting in the, sitting in the repo for the, for the company number 2.

Dude, thanks for coming on, man. Yeah, thanks for having me.

This is awesome.