david pourquery - founder at groas

Welcome to another Founder Wisdom Podcast. We have David Porkery with us today. He's the founder of GrowAs.com. David founded this agency about a year ago, so it's not been that long, but already scaled to a pretty significant level. He's allowing agency owners and I guess D2C founders to automate their ads. So David, welcome to the podcast. Tell us a bit more about yourself and what you've been building. Thanks, Charles.

Yeah, pleasure to be on. So you said the word agency there, as to what Grass is. I mean, we struggle, we wrestle with that definition a lot. What are we? I don't know, right? There's still a pretty big human component in some cases to what we do. So I think we're a funny mix, right, between SaaS and agency. And I think a lot of things are converging towards there anyway with where things are headed. Yeah, look, so before Grass, I was working in private equity, not enjoying life effectively, wanting to leave. Started scaling dropshipping stores in my free evenings. I did that for a year, got pretty good at Google Ads and Meta Ads that way. And then, look, I had a background in computer science since I was quite young. That's why I studied university. I'd been coding since I was like 13, 14. And so started to think, okay, is there a way I can optimize my Google Ads more algorithmically in a more autonomous fashion than me sort of checking in and sort of seeing what's going on in the account every day? And that's what kickstarted Grass, right? So we start off as a little tool, right? Something that people could come in and sort of use. It was more like a DIY solution. And since then, Grass has evolved a lot, both as a company, as a product. Things have changed quite quickly. And yeah, I've been full-time at this for about a year and a half now at this point.

And how have you scaled to that level that quick? Did you use your own tool to pop off your own ads? Have you been dogfooding a lot nowadays?

Good question. Actually, originally what scaled us was mainly I mean, the main channel was actually LLMs referring GrowAs in the earliest days, right? So people were searching up for the terms Google Ads AI tool, AI agents for Google Ads, and GrowAs was being recommended as the top choice actually for a long time. So LLMs and also just traditional SEO. So we were really active on the content side. So that was really what scaled us in the beginning. I bootstrapped this from zero, right? So to be clear, I didn't have that much funds to invest in marketing in the earliest days. Everything was going back into product and people. So I didn't really have a choice but to do that.

We also paid a little bit with cold outbound.

Um, but yeah, and obviously referrals as well was, was quite a big chunk. But in the earliest days, it was LLMs and SEO, uh, referring us. Um, now we have built a new product around organic search. Like, we did it for ourselves. Like, now we're helping others. Like, how can you actually show up in AI search, uh, yourself? And now we're using that actual product a lot for ourselves. Plus, we're now launching paid ads too on Google Ads. So, uh, there's more dogfooding going on now than in the earlier days because we just didn't have the money.

Right. And you started in dropshipping. How far did you scale that first business?

I probably did about 10, 15 stores in the space of a year, right? And sometimes I would cut a store after 2 weeks. My record day was $3K in a day of revenue, which sounds like a lot to a lot of people, but actually when you look into refunds, ad costs, fulfillment costs, et cetera, et cetera, it's actually not that much profit. So I realized quite quickly, at least for myself, that dropshipping, whilst it's a super good business model, I know a lot of people who are making a lot of money with it still. It has got more competitive. I realized that for me, it wasn't what would enable me at the time to leave a full-time job in private equity. So that's where I started to think about Grass, which has been a lot more, I guess, scalable and certainly much better margins in the agency and SaaS world than there is in dropshipping. That's for sure.

And as a solo founder, what part of the company did you outsource? Was it the product or was that in your own hands? Who did you get involved the team first?

Good question. First hires were engineers, right? Now, I'm relatively fortunate that I've been programming since I was 13 or 14. And in the early days, I did like, you know, code up some prototypes and get sort of an MVP shipped. But ultimately, my time, and I knew this from day one, was better spent on talking to customers, sales, marketing, all the other stuff that we needed to do, right? In the early days, I was also doing a lot of fulfillment, right? So onboarding calls, helping with any customer issues. So that already took a lot of my time. So the first hire was, uh, was an engineer. Then we brought on a CTO like 6, 7 months down the line once we had a bit of traction and could attract better talent. Um, but that was effectively the, the first hires we made. Now the hires we're making are more like client success managers, and that role is turning out to be very important, right? Arguably maybe as important as engineers. Um, but yeah, that's really how the, how the company is has been shaped so far.

Right. And why not focus on one thing, either ads or geo? Why go for both?

Good question. Truthfully, we just sort of, we are done or we're done with Google Ads, right? Like we had been working on it for like a year plus, had reached full autonomy. So like it's less like, there's less stuff for us to just build into the product because we're not selling features, we're selling outcomes, right? E.g., you can connect your campaigns to Growers and then never have to check them again and you will get the desired outcome. Right now, how we do that on the backend, you don't see, right? There's nothing for you to log in and play around with. It's built to be a replacement to a traditional agency. So we got to a point where like, okay, like this is, you know, we have nearly 8 figures of ad spend running through the systems across both agencies and businesses. Like this is pretty solid. We, let's move on to other things. Also, ultimately it comes down to listening to your customer base or client base, whatever you want to call it. This is something that a lot of people have brought up like, okay, like Great. How do I show up? If I pause my ad spend, that stops, right? Those leads just stop overnight. Can we do stuff that's compounding? So obviously AEO right now is a very trending topic. Clearly where search is headed, right? Google themselves are announcing they're going to make a lot of changes to Google search in general. So SEO is changing. So it felt like the next natural progression. We did look at other avenues, right? So Meta ads, we get a lot of people talk to us, hey, you should do Meta ads. Meta is a whole different ballgame, whole different beast. So we just thought, look, We've dominated search on the paid side. Let's now do it on the organic side. That was the thinking. And it's working out quite well so far.

Why were you coding at 14?

Why? I don't know.

And cold emailing Bill Gates.

Cold emailing Bill Gates. Yeah. That's a whole other issue entirely. I'd been— I was always pretty okay at maths in high school. Right? And so, at the time, like, they're like, oh, if you like maths, you might like coding. And so, I actually just started off. summer camp when I was around that age, 13 or 14. I learned Python and, oh, this is cool, like I'm enjoying it. Obviously at the time there was no AI, so like you actually had to think about the problems you were solving and actually like think about the coding. These days I don't think that's the case as much. So yeah, just sort of enjoyed the problem-solving aspect and I ended up just studying it at university as well.

But where did that ambition come from, sort of my question?

It's a good question. I don't know. I don't know. Um, there's no one really in my family who's— who'd been entrepreneurial before, right? Um, so the short answer is I don't know. I think I was always a little bit driven, right? You hear the classic entrepreneur story like selling sweets in school. Uh, I did do a bit of that. Um, but I think I was probably more technical than I was salesy. Um, for sure. So I was always just like trying to code stuff up. And then— but I also saw that at university when I was studying it, that I didn't want to be a software engineer, that also became very clear to me back then, so I ended up going a different route after that.

Right, and nowadays, you told me last time, I think, you had $100 grand MRR or something like that, how does it feel to finally have made it after that kid inside you was dreaming it for what, 10 years?

Yeah, look, I don't know if I've made it, right? And it certainly doesn't feel like it, because every single day there's new problems and new hard things to solve, right? And bad things occur 24/7, especially in paid ads. And often, it's like nothing in your control, right? To be honest. Google has a new algorithm update, right? It screws over like half the people you're working with, et cetera, et cetera. So it certainly doesn't feel like I've made it. I'm certainly not on a beach just, you know, drinking cocktails all day. For me, it's just more a case of head down, trying to focus, trying to focus on understanding what are the big problems in the business because there's always lots of problems, right? That could be on the hiring side. Are we hiring the wrong people? Culture side, that's been a whole new thing I never even thought about, like starting a company, right? Doing that in a remote way. How would you do that when you have different nationalities all over the world working together? Like new things, new problems. And every month I realize how dumb I was the month prior. Um, so it certainly doesn't feel like, uh, I've made it at this stage.

And since there's a lot of these AEO platforms or AI paid ad platforms, how do you distinguish yourself from these other guys?

Yeah, great question. When I first started Grass, there were very few other people at the time. This was like, let's say this time last year, let's just say, uh, the landscape was a lot more open, I think, for like Google Ads AI tools. You had the legacy PPC providers who were there, who'd been there for like 10, 15 years, like WordStream, Optio Optimizer. They've been around for a while, um, but there, there wasn't that many people doing like, hey, like we're gonna try automate things with AI ads. Now people are talking about it, but no one is actually really doing it like we were. So we were really, really early to that. which is great. And I think that's what helped with our LMs and SEO. Now I see a lot more people entering the market. Another thing I see is that people are just like, hey, like I'm going to DIY it myself. Like I've got Claude code. Let's see if I can like build my own agent. And if you're at a big company and you have a lot of resource, you know, you have a team of devs, then sure, why not? I think smaller business owners who try that are in for a reckoning. It's not easy. It's really tough. So yeah, short answer is distinguish in the early days was easier. Now it's harder. On the AEO side, I would argue the proposition we have now, like what we're propositioning, is relatively distinguished to what's out there, right? Because there's a lot of visibility tools. There's hundreds, if not thousands of these visibility tools. But what we do, we're not— we don't really care about that. That's like 1%. The other 99% is like taking the actions that a human would to get you ranking in AI answers. Like any action you or I can do on a computer, that's what we're training Grass to do. So that is more the angle we take there.

Interesting. And you said you have employees. Do you believe in employees? Why not have AI agents for most things and not have to care about culture? Yeah.

Well, I mean, we found quite quickly in the early days, if you think about it, at the start, it's me plus engineers building this thing, great onboarding customers, seeing how they interact with the product. doing some customer support, and it's just me. So I'm the only person actually like getting in front of people and talking to them. Great. But we weren't doing things like a monthly call, a monthly check-in, or we didn't have like a private Slack channel. Like it was just like, get on with it. Bye-bye. Like all the best. We quickly found that we would have churn, but not necessarily due to our fault, but it would be maybe they have a crappy landing page, which they should have never run Google Ads to in the first place. Things outside of our control. Or maybe GrowS was taking the right actions, but they needed like a week or two more to just stay on, see the benefit, understand what was working. So then I was like, okay, we do need people. Humans still value humans at the end of the day. We have this chatbot inside the app, and if things are going bad in the campaign, people can go in and ask like, what's going on? Sure, that might give you an answer, but it's not as convincing as somebody you trust, know, and you build a relationship with. So that's why we have these client success managers, and they are so important, right? And they get people to stay when things are going wrong, not due to our fault or their fault, but sometimes things happen. So But ultimately, the short answer is retention. It's helped a lot.

What do you think is the next big platform in terms of paid ads? Is it ChatGPT? Have they rolled out their paid ads program yet?

It could be. I don't know. So we actually run it ourselves for clients. We built some stuff for ChatGPT. Yes. The same principle we did for Google Ads. We've done some stuff there. I think they recently announced that they crossed a billion revenue run rate recently. Maybe. I think that it may be true. I don't know if they can lie. Um, it could be. The thing is, it took Google like a long time to get as good as it is today, right? Um, we are testing ChatGPT ads. I'll be super upfront, for some things it works quite well, for others I don't think it does. Um, so it's still unbelievably early as a platform to say, is this the next big thing? Like, there's so many factors that go into it. Can they actually pull this off? I don't think they have a choice though, because given the amount of money they raised, the promises, et cetera, et cetera, they need to have a cash cow. They need to have something that actually produces a lot of revenue. They also have a lot of pressure from the Chinese labs, right? The models that these guys are pushing out at like a fraction of the cost are absolutely incredible. So I think they have no choice but to try and make it work. Will it be better than Google Ads? I probably doubt it, to be honest. In 10 years, I don't know. But in the near term, absolutely not. No chance.

What's the next evolution of your company? Are you going to exit that one out in a couple of years? And what would be your finality or your ideal company that you would manage?

Good question. I don't know. I mean, I really don't think about exits or valuations or that sort of thing, because ultimately, I think more just in terms of cash flow, net margins. Like how much more can I scale our ad spend to next month rather than, oh, we need to hit X amount of ARR to raise and like that sort of thing or burn rates. Thankfully, I'm bootstrapped. We're bootstrapped. So 100% the company, which gives us a lot more autonomy and also a longer period of time. Like we've had to do a lot of pivots over and over. Right? And especially in the last 3 or 4 months, we have pivoted our funnels, our price points, everything many, many times over. based on data we see in the market. When you have investors on board, that's a bit harder to do. There's expectations, there's growth things you have to hit. So the short answer is I don't really have some sort of valuation in mind or something like, oh cool, like I'll sell, I'm happy to. I'm just enjoying the ride at the moment, right? It's my first proper company, I would say. I've done a lot of stuff in the past. It's my first proper company. So just enjoying the ride and trying to learn as much as possible. And also stay true to the mission of trying to help as many people as possible for as cheap a price as possible as well, I think. And I think that's where things are headed.

And you know, you talked about the SaaS to agency pivot. Like why did that happen?

Yeah, I think honestly, and we're trying to pivot back just to be super clear, we are like, we're a bit more of a hybrid model. The reason it happened is at least with Google Ads, what you find is ultimately a lot of the things that move the needle such as a landing page or ultimately just crafting a good offer. for cold traffic. Like you may have a lot of like conversions from warm traffic. That's people who know you, who trust you. But crafting that to completely cold traffic who doesn't know you and how to formulate that for Google Ads is a whole other ballgame. And so what we found is people were coming to us with sometimes accounts that were a complete mess. There was no conversion tracking. It's like we were just having to get more involved than we wanted to in order to get people the desired result. Right. And that still requires a human to some extent. However, what we have done actually, so then we were like, okay, cool, like let's just dump some humans on them, like try solving the problem. Great. And that worked, by the way, right? That worked, brought down churn, like had some good results, etc., etc. What we've done though in the last 2 to 3 months and made a massive push towards is automating a lot of those activities that humans used to have to do, right? Could it like set up conversion tracking, give somebody a good landing page, explain to them what's going on in their campaigns? We've automated all of that away. So we're trying to come back to the more, hey, fully productized, do-it-yourself approach. But with something like Google Ads that you're ultimately putting a lot of money into, like people are investing a lot of money, a human element in some respect, whether it's an onboarding call or a check-in like once every few months, we have found still to be important. So yeah, it is what it is.

Right. Do you target like one specific ICP? Why not fully go after agency, go HighLevel style and Grow that way?

Great, great question. Uh, it's not entirely impossible that we do something like that because we have a lot of agencies using us at this point, right? They're probably 40% of the book. When we started off, they were like 5% less. Um, and just with, with all respect to everybody, they are the best clients we have, the best people we work with, right? They have Google Ads running around. It makes incredible sense for their margins. Uh, they know what they're doing. They're professional. They just handle their client comms. Like it's an incredibly good trade for both parties. So it's entirely possible that you know we get to a point where it's like eighty twenty, eighty percent agencies, twenty percent businesses, and we only sort of take on like the bigger businesses. TBD, right? Who knows? But agencies, you're right; they have been an incredible channel for us.

Who do you learn from? You're from the UK. Is that like Iman Gaji type of mental?

I would say no. I mean, no, I'm familiar. I've never been, and this is probably to my detriment, it's something I should have done more, but I've never been somebody who's like bought too much online education.

Right.

Um, and in some, sometimes I wish I had because I've made so many mistakes. So, so much. Ultimately, a lot of online education is like a time-saving mechanism, right? You can learn from somebody else's mistakes before you get to it. Um, it's now something I'm more trying to get into, uh, and do. I'm in a few groups, I'm in a lot of groups, like high-level, whatever, agency guys or like SaaS guys, and I try to learn from those groups, right? Or if there's a meetup, like I went to Miami for like a mastermind recently, and I'm learning from these things. But growing up, I never really had, I think, like a business role model or anything like that. I was more so just trying to make stuff work myself, to my own detriment.

Do you also surround yourself with other founder friends physically, or is it a lone wolf type of approach?

I try, you know, it's hard. And you do find them having these sort of groups. This year in particular, it's been harder. I used to live in London. I left London. So for the last year and a bit, I have been all over the place. I haven't been in one country for more than 2, 3 weeks, to be honest, since I left London. So that's been hard. That's been hard. Now, I think online communities, like, that's typically where you can make some good connections. So a lot of the friends I've made, actually, a lot of these people, I don't even— we'll chat like once a week, but I still haven't met them. But I consider them friends, so online seems to be the new thing.

Yeah, I know the feeling, that's all my co-founders I first met on a podcast, right? Like, that tells a lot, same for my clients. I grew up playing video games and World of Warcraft at like 12 or 14, and I wouldn't— one of my best friends was like online, I've never even seen his face, it's like he was like a torrent shaman or something, right? So that's how I knew this guy. Um, I think it's highly possible for sure. I've done the digital nomad touring stuff for 5 years as well. What, uh, what was your thesis behind that one, and has it fulfilled your expectations yet?

I mean, I didn't, I didn't set on— I wasn't like, oh, I need to go see a gazillion countries. It was more like, okay, I'm done with London. I was working private equity at the time, between there and sometimes the US. I was done with London. So cool. Like let me see what's next. I also was on very limited funds. Right? So it's not like I could be like, hey, like let me go ball out in Miami straight away. No. I actually started off in Asia. Super affordable. So like the first, I guess, 2, 3 months of Grass, I was living in Asia. Right? And like, which is great. Like by the way, Asia's amazing. But I got to see in this last year a lot of different cultures. Ultimately see the places I like, the sorts of things I like, and what I don't like. Right? I spent a lot of time in the US more recently. So since January, I've been a lot more based in the US. And I must say, for me personally, what I found is for me, I prefer the US the most. So it's quite possible I end up just moving directly there in the near future, like making a more direct permanent move rather than flying in and out all the time. Even though we are fully remote and we do have people in a lot of different continents now at this point, I think for myself, US is great. And like I said, there wasn't really a thesis. It was more like, let me see different places, see the things I like and I dislike. Um, and yeah, that's how it started off.

Why do you like US most?

I think the culture of work, the culture of business. I have not been to another place where it's as good. People work as hard, people are as professional, as on it, as sharp, as entrepreneurial, as like wanting to take— like when we sell to a US prospect, It's very different to like even, and with all respect to even like a UK prospect, they have a lot more questions, a lot more hesitations. US pros are like, yeah, cool, sounds good, let's get this going ASAP, sounds great. Um, so I, I personally prefer that sort of action-taking mindset, um, to Europe.

So what do you think, people? China is gonna take over?

It's entirely possible, right? It's entirely possible.

Um, but they just— I mean, they don't have that culture, they don't have that innovation. I can't see it happening in millennia.

I don't know, everyone— I see China is actually one of the places I didn't go in my travels because I was like, oh, I really need like access to Google. But okay, like, I'm not gonna go maybe this time.

Um, which again goes to my point, it's like, yeah, people access to everything and liberty How can you expect them to to overtake an economy as powerful as the U.S. that has produced mega brains for years? Plus, that has a brain drain effect, right? So it's like a win-loss. U.S. win, China loses. That is sort of stopping, but the brain drain is still going for the rest of the world. So don't know when I hear about China overtaking U.S. I can't see it. I love China, by the way. I love Chinese. People, but can't see, uh, the— this quote-unquote miracle happening.

Yeah, maybe. All right, let's see, let's see. I mean, look, well, the one thing that's making me, uh, you know, a little bit, a little bit scared is how good their AI models are and how cheap they are. Uh, but that's very impressive.

That's the only way they're winning, right? Um, and the adoption is still not widespread. Like, it's only true. Yeah. Builders, like the 0.1% that are using these. Um, David, thanks for being on, dude. Where can, uh, people find out more about you?

Sure. Um, best place is, I guess, on LinkedIn. You can connect me there, David Porquery. Or alternatively, you can just go straight to the website growass.com. Um, yeah, both those places are good.

There you go. So it's David and Charles for now.