Interview with Christian Owens Co-Founder of Paddle – Small Business Show 230

The Small Business Show Episode 230 for Wednesday, July 3, 2019 Greetings folks and welcome to the Small Business show here at BusinessShow Co, the show that is by, for and about small business. We've got two sponsors today, Go Co and textexpander.com podcast. We will tell you why you want to visit those URLs a little bit later. But for now here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton and out on.

The west coast, I'm Shannon Jean. How are you man?

I'm good. Yeah. Yeah. Crazy holiday week and you know, here in the US and that's a good thing.

Yeah, yeah, that's good. We're wrapping up. That'll be tomorrow when this show airs, right?

That's right.

Yeah, yeah. Fourth of July. That's cool. Hey, so I'm going to jump right in here. We're lucky to have a guest with us today. Talk. We're going to talk about, continue our series of subscription based businesses and have that discussion. And you know, we met some great people. Greg Scound came on from TexExpander that talked a lot about transitioning to subscriptions and more and more software headed that way. And this week we're going to learn from a founder that created a business to help others succeed in the software and subscription market. Paddle was founded in 2012 by Christian Owens and we're really happy to have him with us today. We're going to learn all about PADDLE and Christian's journey as a founder. Thank you so much for joining us today, Christian. We're really glad to have you.

Thanks for having me. Super excited.

Yeah, it's cool. Really glad. So if you could give us a brief rundown on the services that PADDLE offers. I'm sure a lot of our business listeners are familiar with it, but I also would like to hear, you know, how did you get started? What was the impetus to launch paddle?

Yeah, so we've been around now for about seven years and basically what we provide is we provide a platform that handles kind of all the boring stuff that you don't want to do when you create a subscription business. So everything from how you think about payment processing to selling internationally to dealing with taxes, to figuring out how people actually get access to your software and how it gets delivered. And we've been doing sort of, we've been doing in subscriptions now for probably five or six years. The early years were kind of, as you may remember, the kind of perpetual sort of desktop licensed Mac software mostly, which is where we made our start.

Got it got it. So you started in the Mac business like Shannon and I did?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So my, yeah, my kind of story on that side of things is I very much hated school when I was growing up. So I'm 25 now. I hated school when I was growing up and at some point, probably when I was like 12 or 13, discovered this magical thing called the Internet and started teaching myself to build websites. The first one that I built was for my dad who makes sort of like tables and furniture and things and started doing that for him and then started basically going door to door in the town that I grew up and trying to sell people a website which was reasonably unique. So just like all of the local restaurants and things like that. And this was when I was like 14, 15. And so that was kind of my start into I guess entrepreneurship or building a business. And at some point one of those doors that I knocked on and sold a website to, they actually wanted an invoice and I didn't know how to make one of those. So I googled it and I think like QuickBooks or something was like 10 bucks a month. And I was like, I'm not paying 10 bucks a month, I could build this. And so built some invoicing software for the Mac. I was like a die hard, avid Mac user fan from sort of very young. Kind of got my first Mac when I was sort of 13, 14 and that was sort of where I. That was what I learned to code on and build websites and things. So I started building this Mac app, which is an invoicing app for freelancers called Envola and a pre Mac app store, pre any of that stuff. Started building that product, started selling it to people and then realized I had absolutely no idea how to get customers, but knew a bunch of people in sort of the Mac space, people who are building apps, apps that I admired, who I would like. The way I teach myself to code almost was kind of like rip apart their app and see how it works. And I started a company when. So my solution to this was to start a company when I was like 14 called Mac Bundlebox, which was a Mac software bundle company. So through that got to know basically everybody in the Mac space sort of one time or another. And we would run, we would organize these discounted promotions on Mac software where we'd bundle five or ten pieces of kind of complementary software together and we'd sell it as a discount for like a two week period of time. And through that. So I launched that when I was 15, the first one of those did like 3 or $400,000 in its first week in sales, which was quite surprising for both me and my parents who I didn't tell that I was doing this. And like in, I don't know if you have the same thing in the States, but in the UK when you have like a, I guess like a kid's bank account back this is 10 odd years ago, you would go into like into the bank with like a little book and they would like dot matrix, print another line in the book with your balance.

Yes.

And like one day it was like $80, $100 and then the next day we went in, I went in my parents, it was like $400,000 to which they were like, what on earth have you done?

That's awesome.

So I didn't have like a side sort of drug business or anything like that. It was just Mac software and.

Yeah, well there was back then, I mean that seems like a lot of money and it is a lot of money, but the bundle world was, was pretty ripe back then and, and there was a lot of money to be, to, to be made and also just to be passed around. You know, this was gross revenues of course. So. Yeah, yeah, that's good.

Well, so I've got a, I got a couple questions about this, a great story. Let me take you back to school because I'm, I'm curious about this because we hear this story a lot with the founders is that, you know, I didn't, I didn't like it, I wasn't. What was it about it? Because I was the same way. I didn't enjoy it at all. And it I think kind of drove me to go do my own thing. What was it about, you know, when you were in school that you didn't connect with and you know, was just the type, the way that they were teaching you. What, what would you say about that?

I think it was like a mixture of things. So I think one like I discovered like the Internet and started learning on my own and had learn pretty quickly that the way that I best learned was like watching videos and reading books and things like that, not necessarily being kind of told in a group environment how to do this and I learn at my own speed and things like that. So that was 1, 2. Finding the Internet and building stuff became a great, exciting distraction from some of the stuff at school. And I think finally the things that I was learning, I'd often pick them up pretty quickly and I wasn't a particularly good student. I didn't Test well, but I picked these things up pretty quickly and then sort of, I think the repetitive nature of it kind of got a little bit much and then I wouldn't pay attention and I wouldn't focus and I'd just be thinking about sort of what I could learn next or what I could go and build or try.

Yeah, makes sense. You kind of built your own specialized education, if you will. And that's what I think the Internet allows you to do. Go out and learn. Focus on what you'd like. Okay, so then the next step is you go out and you're going to do this Mac bundle. As a kid, how did you convince these software publishers that hey, this was a good idea, Discount your product, we'll put it in a bundle, we'll sell a ton and we'll distribute the funds. I mean, how did you talk about it? Like, oh, it just kind of happened. But I'm sure there was a lot of work behind the scenes to make that work.

So I think the first one was very kind of rudimentary, unromantic as a thing. It was like a. I knew how to build a website, so I built a website. I knew a bunch of software businesses and Mac developers because I was kind of like leaning on a bunch of them because I really like their products. Leaning on a bunch of them to be like, how did you do this thing? How did you make this button work? How did you. And they were like, it's surprising how willing to help people are when a 14 year old kid has a genuine interest in the thing that they love and how willing they are to spend time with you and help and give you tips and advice and things like that. So I already knew a bunch of people and nobody for the first one, nobody really had any expectations around what it would do like in revenue or anything like that. It was more of a. This is a reasonably tried and tested model. Let's give it a try.

That's great. That's very cool. I want to jump back in and talk to Paddle or talk about Paddle. But Dave, do you want to make a couple comments about sponsors?

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Okay, cool. So looking at Paddle and it seems like you've kind of at some point got a tiger by the tail. Your growth curve is really steep, which obviously your services are really needed in your team. You've solved a tough problem for many businesses. Has the fast growth. I mean, has that really been a challenge for you to manage or have you just kind of rolled with it? And I mean, it just seems like a whirlwind to me to be growing so quickly. But I'm sure you've come up with a way to manage it.

Well, no, not really. I think sort of one, it's very easy to look backwards and be like, holy crap, look at this. But I think when it's been a snowballing more than anything, else. So when we first started, it was me and my co founder Harrison, two of us in a little office that we rented, basically just saying there are a bunch of people in the world like us who build software or want to build software and they're really great at building products, they're really great at keeping customers happy. But there's all this other stuff that gets in the way. Let's build a thing for those people. Let's build a thing for the two people in a bedroom or whatever who are trying to start. And that's where we started. We had reasonable success in terms of people liking the product and companies that we worked with on the Mac side of things. But we're still talking like dozens of customers and thousands in revenue, not hundreds of thousands or millions. So that was reasonably easy to kind of manage. And it was like a slow progression through, okay, like, let's win another customer, let's build another thing, let's add more value. And then I think the real moment where we realized like, oh, we may have something here was probably two, two and a half years in when we kind of expanded. We got our first customer who did I think more than a million dollars a year in sales or something like that. And the light bulb went off for us that it was like, oh wait, these small people really kind of resonate with this value that we're trying to add. And obviously a two person team who's trying to sell software and aren't going to have time to do figure out how they go international and deal with taxes and payment processing and all this stuff. The real light bulb moment was that problem doesn't go away as you get bigger, it actually just gets harder. And the company that has two people versus the company that has 200 people doesn't have 198 people sitting there doing nothing all day. These people have stuff to do and it's not like that resource just magically appears and it's never going to be a core part of these businesses. The core part is going to be building their product. So it was that point that we kind of really doubled down and understood that we could be applicable to businesses that weren't just two or three people doing it as initially a hobby and eventually as a business, but actually we could build potentially this infrastructure for every software company. And I think when that light bulb went off we were like, oh, we have to build a very different business to the one that we're building today.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's an interesting thing, right? And, and as business owners you know, I know our listeners either have seen this themselves or will see it. When you have that aha moment that you, the thing you are doing could be retooled for a much different customer. In this case, you know, a much more lucrative customer or type of customer, that's a great thing to realize, and it's also a terrifying thing to realize because you've built whatever it is you've built, you've learned whatever it is you've learned, and now you have to build something new. It's like, oh, crap, I got to start at the beginning again.

And I think that's the thing that we really didn't realize is that going from sort of Mac customers. And we were helped a lot by this shift that was happening naturally of Mac businesses and desktop software businesses, figuring that they also could build for a wider audience and the future of their businesses were going to be subscriptions. We were really aided by a bunch of early customers who were reasonably, like, pioneering in terms of their willingness to make that jump. Then. Then kind of dragged us to say, oh, now, like, we've built for those customers. Now we've kind of built a product that's applicable to all of these, like, subscription software businesses as well.

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, it's, it's. It seems pretty awesome. And the scalability, you know, realizing that, hey, this is very scalable, we just need to get into this other market. I think that was a great insight.

How long did it take you between when you had that moment and realized it to when you had actually finished, you know, retooling or rebuilding things to actually service those customers?

I think that was a pretty gradual process, and I would. I would say that it's probably still happening today.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah. Because I think these businesses sort of the subscription software market, by its very nature of, like, moving from what we used to see kind of five, 10 years ago, like, let's use Mac, for example. The thing that we used to see was you build a product, you probably build a new version, new major version of that product once a year, every 18 months or so. And that would be like the cadence of release or the cadence of real innovation. Sure, you'd be releasing stuff in between, and you'd be adding value and all these things, but that would be the real cadence of release. And now moving to subscription businesses, whether on the Mac or not, that cadence of how they're innovating and how they're thinking about their customers and their business and their product in the market is changing every single Day, they're no longer sort of limited by this arbitrary kind of version cycle that they have to go through in order to be able to ship new features, new value to their customers. So what it's meant for us is that it's gone from us having to anticipate new major versions and what might we need to do to adapt our product, how those products will be sold at the next version. We've had to adapt that to sort of the world that we know today could be slightly different tomorrow, it could be very different next month, and it could be completely different a year from now.

Yeah.

So that change has been big and it's still ongoing.

Got it.

Sure.

That makes sense.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Being able to adapt. So let's talk about money. Everybody likes to talk about this stuff. Dave and I really like bootstrappers. You know, we founded lots of businesses and, you know, grown these companies organically. And, you know, when you started paddle, was it always part of the plan is like, hey, as we grow, we're gonna, we'll go out and get some investors. Or did that. Was that just the solutions, like, hey, we need money, what do we do? And then second part of the question is, you know, it me thinking about this, if somebody dumped a huge chunk of cash in my lap to grow this business, I would be like, okay, now it's a whole nother level of stress and anxiety to perform. Has that impacted how you feel about the business having these outside investors?

So I guess an interesting piece to that is, was raising money the first time. And the first time that we raised money, which was basically as the business was Starting, we raised 150k and it was a process of. It was very much like an ask for advice, get money type situation. Where that previous business, the bundle business, the invoicing thing before that, I'd never hired anyone. Like, I'd never run payroll, I'd never rented an office. I never really had to kind of interact with employees. And I found a guy who I really respected who bootstrapped the business to sort of, I think, like 15 million in revenue, kind of a couple hundred people in a pretty short period of time, like six or seven years. And I met him and I was like, could I like, we want to move to London? Can I move to London? Can I sort of set up shop in your office? Like, we won't take up much space and like when I have a question about this stuff, like when I need to figure out, like how to hire somebody or sort of. And I was 18 at the time. So it was also like a. Maybe we should be somewhere like that has other people in it and, like, have some kind of advocate that when we're trying to hire people we can bring into an interview and they'll be like, look, we are real. Like, there's an adult here.

Makes sense.

And so it started like that, and it was kind of like a, yeah, more than willing to do that, but I also want to invest. So that happened somewhat by accident. It was like, yeah, you're going to be giving us a bunch of value anyway by putting us in your office and helping us, and money doesn't hurt. Like, let's go for that. And then we didn't really raise any money. Sort of like two, three years or so. We focused on kind of growing the business, like, sustainably, and we were focused on our Mac market. And we went from being two people to being four people and four people to six. And the team never really grew beyond, I think, eight or nine people in the first two or three years of the business. And then it was when that light bulb moment happened, it was like, oh, like the opportunity is so much bigger than we once thought. Maybe we should. We've raised money. Once we're set up for it, maybe we should go and do that again. And that was when we raised, I think, three and a half million dollars to say, okay, let's try and scale this.

Sure.

Okay. So your first experience with money was perhaps the best type of investment you can get because you got a mentor as well as a cash infusion. And.

And, oh, absolutely.

And so.

And you were not asking them for the money. Right. They were approaching you, which I think always puts you in a better position.

Yeah. I mean, it's worth saying that I had no idea what raising money even meant.

Of course. Of course.

It was kind of like, oh, this person wants to give me some money and also help me. I was like, sounds like a pretty sweet deal.

Yeah.

Well, you know what, though? It, like, to your credit, it is a sweet deal, but there's so many of us. And when I say that, I mean, you know, entrepreneurs who feel like, no, I need to do it on my own. I don't need help. So it, you know, often takes hitting a wall before you say, wait a minute, I need to ask someone for help, whereas you just, you know, you. You did it right out of the gate. I. I think that's a. That's probably, you know, a big factor in your, you know, both your. Your early success and your ability to scale is, you're okay telling people, I don't know how to do this. Can you help me? And that's a huge thing. It's a huge lesson to learn. Yeah, it's authentic.

I also think that that's, like, it might not be in the same sort of manner, but that's the exact approach that I've taken to hiring people over the last seven years, is kind of, can this person do the thing that I'm hiring them to do better than I ever could? Am I going to learn something from them? Am I going to feel like the stupidest person in the room when I'm around them? And if the answer to that question is yes, and they're also a decent human being, then sort of, they're probably a pretty good person for me to hire.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah. You don't suffer from a lot of the things that a lot of entrepreneurs suffer from. This is good. Yeah. Yeah, this is good. Well, yeah, you want to be. If you're hiring someone, you definitely don't want to feel like you're better than them at the job that they're going to do for you. I mean, like, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Or at least, hopefully, they can get to a point where they're better than you at that job, even if, you know, obviously you might have to train them or something initially. But, yeah, that's the whole point. Yep. Yep.

Yeah.

So, okay, so you're creating this business. You start thinking about, you know, it could be very scalable, you know, and we talk a lot on the show about the ability to kind of create your own reality, to program yourself. And, you know, we use the, you know, phrase, hey, don't be. Don't be realistic. You know, think and use this vision to pull yourself forward. Do you think that that type of thinking is important? You know, as a company founder, have you found that you do the same thing?

Yeah, I think. Absolutely. I think the whole reason we didn't fully get to this, but I guess the short version is the whole reason that paddle started was because I experienced the problem both when I was doing the invoicing thing and when I was doing the bundle thing. And when I spoke to other people, it was like, yeah, this is a real problem. We're spending a bunch of time on it. And then it was really about kind of scratching my own itch. It was like, I want to be the first customer of this thing. And then it was like imagining, I guess, a world to not sound too cheesy, imagining a world where, when I was starting and building that invoicing thing or building the bundle thing, I could have done that without spending 30 or 40 or whatever percentage of my time on this other stuff, this ancillary kind of set of things that I had to do in order to actually start the business or grow the business. But wasn't core to kind of making a customer really happy or building a really great product?

Yeah, that's huge. That phrase you say, I want to be my first customer. That's a powerful part of your success, I think, is trying to solve this problem for yourself. I imagine it goes back to when you were 14 and didn't want to sit in the classroom anymore. You wanted to go out. It's all related. It's all related. We talk about partnerships a lot on the show and how to have successful partners, how to, you know, do that. So back in 2017, I think you merged with Devmate or got together with them. Were they a partner before you decided to merge, or were you looking for new. New tools to add, you know, to your toolkit and you went out and found them. How did that come about?

Yeah, so it was. We weren't a partner when it started, but we probably should have been.

Okay.

It was one of those things where actually the discussion of us acquiring devmate and the business and the product and everything started as a partnership discussion. It started as me And Alexander, the CEO of MacPaw, who's a big Mac software developer, who owned at the time, devmate, and kind of built it again to kind of scratch their own itch. They built it as, like, this thing that they needed. He and I were talking. It was actually wwdc. We were talking about sort of how we can do an integration between these two products to better service Mac developers. At the time, they had a partnership with one of our competitors, which wasn't going particularly well generally. They weren't loving using that product either. And basically, we started. We get reasonably deep in discussions about doing a partnership with each other because we did some analysis and we looked at the, I think at the time, five or 600 businesses that ran on paddle and the five or 600 businesses that ran on devmate. And there was a pretty significant overlap. We were talking like 30 or 40% overlapping kind of customer base. And we were. And the remainder of them on both sides were businesses that we each wanted as customers. So we partnership made total sense. And we were doing this integration. And then kind of Alexander and I started speaking more about, like, what our visions were for these products. And it all came back to the same things of like that product, I guess for listener context, if they don't know what it's about, is whereas Web Paddle is the sort of subscription billing, taxes, e commerce internationalization infrastructure piece devmate was about for Mac software developers specifically. It was like, how do you run beta tests? How do you do crash reporting? How do you understand your users? How do you deliver updates? How do you do licensing and activation management?

Two different headaches solved for the same person.

Yeah, exactly. We did some of this stuff. We had a SDK on the Mac that you could build into your applications that did some payment stuff and some activation stuff. But one of the things that we started talking about was like, oh, why did you build this thing in the first place? And he was like, well, we were building clean my Mac and we realized we were spending a ton of time on solving this problem around activation and licensing and crash reporting and updates. So we built a tool to help us with it. And then that really resonated with why did you stop Paddlers while I was spending a bunch of time on this stuff? And we both clicked at that point. It was like, so we're solving, we're building these products so that people can more easily start, run and grow software companies. We're targeting basically the same customers, and we have 30 or 40% overlap in the customer bases anyway. Like, should we even be talking about plugging these two things together rather than just merging these two things together? So that started off a interesting sort of set of discussions of like, how do you acquire a company? How do you actually make this work? We eventually came to a deal which is sort of acquisitions and M and A and all of this stuff seems like very big company stuff. But when, I guess serendipitous moments arrive where you can do it earlier in a journey. Great. So the whole process took six to eight months. And yeah, we acquired DevMate and integrated the two products really tightly together.

That's killer. The thing is, I can see your. I mean, I'm envisioning, as I'm listening to you talk, this journey that you're on, you know, and you're 25 now. Just think about when you're 40, how, how brilliant you're going to be as you've learned more and more stuff, you know, as we each acquire all this knowledge about things. It's, it's, it's terrific. But now I want to ask you about mistakes because we're big fans of mistakes on the, on the show because we, we learn so much from them. Dave and I have made a ton of them and especially looking back on them. So what would you say and what would you share with our listeners? Is your best mistake the one that has stuck with you and taught you a valuable lesson as you built Paddle?

Yeah, I think the one that really sticks out that I actually kind of remember all the time when we're trying to make decisions is pretty early on at the time we were five people, we were doing like two or $3,000 a month in revenue. So like really small. And we kind of, it was just before we kind of had this light bulb moment and we had never before that signed a customer that did maybe more than four or five grand a month in sales, like total sales that they would put through Paddle. And we found this business, we got on really well with the founding team who were running a Kickstarter for their product. It was a design product called Macaw, which made a lot of buzz. And they'd done like 3 or $400,000 in sales on that pre order. And we kind of spoke to them, we signed them as a customer. It was very obviously our largest ever customer. And their launch day came around, their Kickstarter finished, they finished building the product, launch day came around and we processed more volume, like transaction volume in the first four minutes of them being live than we processed in our entire two year history kind of previously to that, which as you can imagine, sort of is a really wonderful moment for the first three and a half minutes of that until everything breaks right. You're completely unprepared for this sort of like what, this tidal wave of everything that you didn't anticipate coming towards you. And that for me has been this lesson in like, you don't have to do everything all at once. Like, let's incrementally sort of increase size of customer or incrementally think about how we scale or build products or any of these things. I can apply it to so many things, but the amount of people that I tell that story to. And they were like, yeah, we were three people and we tried to do our first enterprise deal and we spent six months on it and we signed it and then everything broke as soon as they went live and they stopped being a customer a week later and we lost a year.

Sure.

Such a learning for me. And thankfully it happened really early on.

Yeah, that's great, That's. I could just see that it's. It's exciting and terrifying at the same time. Yeah, yeah, that's crazy. So certainly a lot of your success paddle Success is surrounding yourself with, with talented people. You know, have you found it, you know, easy to find people that you could share your vision with and that, that you build this culture around. And are you constantly on the lookout for, for talent? How does that work for you?

Yeah, I think that this was one of the things that I met a bunch of people over the years, kind of in the early, early years who kind of everybody would go on about like hiring people is the hardest thing. Culture is the hardest thing, like all these topics. And I was just like, yeah, I don't believe you. Like I'm whatever. Like it's going to be sort of, we're going to. With two people or three people, it works really well. It's going to work like that 100 people, right? And I couldn't have been more wrong about how much energy and effort it requires to sort of. It's kind of like three things. It's find really great people. One, two, convince them of like what it is that we're trying to do, what it is that we want to build. And three, like actually support those people as they learn and as they grow and as they get better and as they make mistakes. So one of the things that we were probably like seven or eight people at the time and Harrison and I, my co founder, we sat down and we were like, so Harrison's my age as well. We both started when we were 18, this business. And we kind of sat down and we were like, what do we really want to build? Like in terms of workplace. And we the only thing, because neither of us had ever had a job before, so that didn't help.

That might have helped though actually.

Yeah, we were kind of like, what do we want to build? And sort of the only thing that we come up with is like we want to build the place that like in 10 years time, and it nearly is 10 years time from when we had that conversation. Like we want to build a place where we still, on a Monday morning kind of want to come into work. And like we want to feel like the team feels that as well. So over the last several years I spent a lot of time on how we think about the people that we hire, the behaviors of those people, like attitudes, competence, sort of the types of people that we want to work with. And it's a constant, constant challenge. We're always talking about it like we're 160 something people now and it's still a constant topic of conversation. It's sort of like how do we make sure we have the right people. How do we make sure we're articulating the thing that we want to build, like in the best possible way, because, like, the thing that shouldn't be underestimated and you'll both be no stranger to this is sort of like even like small businesses and growing businesses, it's tough. Like, it's not easy. And sometimes you're going to have a really crappy month or you're going to have to work late or everything's going to break when you sign the biggest customer you've ever signed or any of these things. And it's sort of more than anything else, I think about setting expectation of not just our expectation of them, but a real expectation of what it's like to work here.

Yeah, that makes sense. That's good advice. And I imagine, you know, it's. You still enjoy going in there, we all going to work on, on Monday and building this thing that, you know, you've got a big chunk of your life, you know, invested in.

Right?

Yeah.

And you. And you don't know any different. And I think, like, you know, to your point, none of, neither of you or, you know, your, your, your co founder had any other. There was no other choice.

Right.

You had to build it. Neither of you had worked anywhere else. And, you know, I think it's a great example of not only creating your own reality, but it's just like, well, how do we want it to be? You had the freedom to, you know, to do it.

So I, yeah, we weren't kind of hamstrung by sort of what good looked like or what bad looked like. It was sort of just, what do we want to build?

What do you want?

How do we want to look?

Yeah.

Yeah. That's really cool. That's great. Well, you know, it's, it's a great story. It's a great product. I think you solve a tremendous problem for a number of people and, you know, I'm really happy for your success. Happy that we got a chance to talk today. So we've got thousands of small business owners that are listening to this episode. If there was one tip you could leave them with today, that, you know, one piece of advice that, that you kind of come back to that's helped in your own journey. What do you think that would be on the spot. But.

I think, I think the biggest thing is patience. Like, everything's always going to take longer than you think it is and probably not going to hit the expectations that you have over really short periods of time. Everybody thinks they're going to start a thing or launch a feature or sign a customer and everything. The whole reality is going to change overnight. But actually building a company and building a business is about sort of the process and the journey of doing this over a long period of time to build something that's ultimately, I guess, greater than the sum of its parts. So I think keeping that in mind, I guess the second piece that I'd add to that, just to break the rules a little bit, would be to talk to people who have done it or who are in similar situations to you. It can be a reasonably lonely thing, building a business, and not everything's going to go right. So just talk to people who have done it or who are doing it. Lean on each other.

Yeah. And what I like is you took what could have been seen as a weakness, your age, your youth, and really turned it into a strength because it allowed you to connect with people that you know in the business, especially, you know, Apple Mac. People are awesome, you know, and so looking back, as you said earlier, you can always look back on it. But that allowed you to make these connections and build your network out there. That helped you succeed.

I think people are so much more willing to help than you think they are as well.

Yeah. Just ask, right?

Just ask. Can you help me? If you start with that, most people will usually say, yeah, what do you need? That's how we're wired as humans. We feel good when we can help.

Yep, that's really great. Well, Christian, thanks so much for coming on the show, sharing your knowledge and your story. It's really compelling. What's the best way for people to learn more about PADDLE and to connect.

With you so you can Learn more about paddle? At Paddle.com, we're very lucky to have that domain name. Yeah, me, I actually got banned from Twitter, but that's a story today. It was because I was too young, not because I did anything bad, but Instagram. Christian Owens, if you want to message me there or. My email address is Christianaddle.com that's great.

Well, you know, thanks again for coming on the show, folks. We hope you enjoyed, you know, hearing from Christian. If you like the show, please come over, give us a Review. Come to BusinessShow Co Review and let us know what you think. Thanks you for listening.

Yeah, thanks so much, Christian. It's really, what a blast, man.

Thank you.

Hope you have a great summer and we'll talk to you again maybe, you know, in the future.

Thanks, folks. See you next week.