Monetizing SaaS: Episode 43 with Miguel Oller, Co-Founder, CTO, Makeswift

Miguel, thank you so much for joining our podcast. I've had a great time getting to know you over the last, I don't know, almost 2 years at this point. And I've of course had heard of you earlier than that, but you've had this really awesome story. You graduated from Georgia Tech, you have founded multiple software companies. Eventually you became the CTO and co-founder of MakeSwift, which we are a customer of and love, and which was also recently acquired by BigCommerce. Tell us in your own words, how did you get to now? What's the professional journey?

Yeah, it's an interesting one. You mentioned that in graduate school I almost dropped out. I'm glad that I didn't though. So I wanted to do a PhD in robotics. That was the original plan. And I went to Tech because they had a very good school of mechanical engineering. I was just going through college. I did some internships or co-ops as they would call them. First one was at Toyota. Then my second one was at Ethicon, which is Johnson Johnson's medical device branch. When I was there, I was looking to do a lot of research work, but it ended up being— it was what they call franchise operations development, which is more on the operations side. I remember being very frustrated because I wanted to be doing research and I was like working on this thing that was like not scientific and like not using my degree. Ultimately though, I kind of like decided to embrace what I was given and it was great because I ended up being able to learn a lot about operations in particular, how to like, you know, run a manufacturing line, how to like structure it and set it up., and I did have the opportunity to do some research too. So I did the, you know, talk to our suppliers who send me, um, they call 'em like, like the dog bones. It's like little steel, oh, look like little steel bars that you pull and then you get this like nice graph that you would see in your, you know, science book back from, from high school. And then you polish it, look at it with an electron microscope and look at like the martensite. Anyways, it was super fun. So I had to try something different. And then my third one was at a bank in New York. I worked at Goldman Sachs and that one was in their, um, like market risk department. So it was in finance. So at that point, I was still, you know, planning on doing a PhD, but going through like these different jobs, I kind of had this feeling like, ah, do I want to keep doing this? You know, do I want to do the PhD? And I kind of, the startup bug bit me. Actually what happened was I saw this video. So Bloomberg used to have this series, I forget the name, like I can't remember the name of the series, but this episode was how I became the real Iron Man. And it was a profile, it was a profile on Elon Musk. Didn't even know about the time he was even, I guess he was probably been learning, but like he was like, I mean, this is back in 2014 before, you know, he's like not the richest guy in the world today, but he is. He had a very interesting story because like me, he was an immigrant. So he immigrated into the States. Well, first came out, he went to college, started a PhD and then 2 days later dropped out and then decided to start a software company. You know, sold that, used that capital to start a different software company, sold that. SpaceX, Tesla, etc. And when I was seeing this, I'm like, oh, like maybe the path that I'm thinking about for doing a robotics company and like doing a PhD first and do all that, maybe I can start a company and learn that way. You know, maybe this is kind of like, you know, maybe there's a different approach here. And, you know, I have a similar backstory. Like, I, you know, came to the States, you know, first came, I went to Puerto Rico when I was 5 years old and eventually moved to Atlanta to go to college. Maybe, maybe I can do that instead. And so I started talking to a bunch of friends and people about startups, and that's what got me into startups. And, um, you know, didn't do grad school, didn't get a job. I've been doing startups since my fourth year in college and haven't stopped. With this idea of, you know, I can do the software thing. It's a low capital cost, high margin, you know, you can scale it, make some capital, and maybe eventually one day I'll build my robotics company. So that's how I got into like the whole startup thing. Um, and I haven't, I haven't stopped since.

And, and really the trajectory from there was you started several companies like ShortWeb, Beloved, then I think you joined Landing Lion and eventually became the CTO of Makeswift, right?

Yes. So, so started, uh, ShortWeb during college. The idea there was, you know, I had just gotten back from the internship that I mentioned in New York and, um, I was like, okay, I want to start a startup, you know, so I started talking with friends, meeting people in the startup community at Georgia Tech and we would sit down at the Clough Commons, which is like a, you know, big building, uh, like, in Georgia Tech, and we would springstorm. You know, we'd spend, spend, uh, nights brainstorming, stay up until 1 AM, and I had this idea of, you know, what if you could highlight the internet the same way you highlight your Kindle? And this is something that you might see in Medium, like, where you can highlight some text. And the idea at the time is, if we can have it so that you can install a browser extension that allows you to highlight blog posts that you read, and you can share those highlights so other people can kind of like, you know, see those highlights too. They can upvote them, downvote them. We can aggregate them into a summary and then maybe we can train, you know, at that time it was like a natural language processing model. So I think we could then automate this process and automatically highlight articles. So now when you're, you know, browsing your favorite, you know, blog or you're in the New York Times, you get to see a summary of what's the most important. And I guess we're a bit early. I remember we talked to like a natural language processing professor at Tech and I was like big into neural nets and information. Of course, obviously, as you know today, LLMs are all the rage. So I guess like maybe we were a bit early, but started that and it was going well. You know, got a little bit of money from an angel investor here in Atlanta. Had a co-founder, a couple of co-founders actually in the beginning, like some that like they left like very early on. And ultimately before graduating, shut the company down. Basically, yeah, I can get into more details later. Shut the company down because we kind of like no product market fit, weren't really going anywhere. And so right before I graduated, I was like trying to figure out what's next. You know, once I started doing this sort of thing, I was just not gonna do anything else. Like I was sure that this was the way to do it. Like after I started doing this, I was like, oh my God, like I did not know how to program websites and you know, went to a hackathon and you know, HackGTS, a hackathon I do at Georgia Tech and taught myself HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to like build this product like ShortWeb, and it felt like I was in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber. Have you ever saw Dragon Ball Z when Goku would go into the Hyperbolic Time Chamber and like train? He would train in, you know, 10x the speed. And I was like, academia and grad school would be normal, and then startups are like the Hyperbolic Time Chamber. So if I want to get to my goal as fast as possible, it seems that startups, even if it's harder or more painful, it's definitely the way to do it. So I was trying to figure out what was next, and I had a friend that I met through the community. It was, we used to be Octane. We would go to the Octane that was in, in, uh, New York Georgia Tech at, uh, Mariana Street or yeah.

Yeah.

It's not there anymore. Lots of startup ideas going there. This is before Switch Arts was a thing and, um, ATV was a thing because I did work out of ATV when I was working on ShortWeb. Funnily enough, my current co-founder, co-founder Lindsay, was an early user of ShortWeb, which we found out like 6 years later when she was like cleaning up her account. Anyway, so I had a friend, uh, had a company that he, you know, concept he was, had been working for a while. And so this was the idea of Beloved. And Beloved was a dating app, but not a dating app in the sense that you usually would think about it. So the idea with Beloved was that there's a lot of couples out there that are already paired up, and all these dating apps cater to finding somebody. But once you find somebody, it often happens with that, you know, not that the spark dies up, but like you get busy and it's hard to find things to do. And we wanted to make it easy for somebody to find cool things to do in the city and go on a date. And so the initial iteration when I, when I joined Ugo, Um, it's kind of like, you know, co-founder was, hey, how about we, so, so he was working on that. So he, he was like, I want to build an app. I need somebody to, you know, from a technical background to do this. And joined. So built an app in React Native. And so this is why I went very, very deep into the world of React, Redux, and all this stuff is relevant to, you know, what eventually kind of became Makeshift from Lightning Line. So joined, joined, and we, we built this app, applied to Techstars, got into Techstars Atlanta with Blowbit., during Techstars, we pivoted. So we shifted the idea from this app that has like a feed of recommendations and you can like see restaurants, see the menus, you know, find what's going on in the city, uh, you know, and then go, go there, have a good experience. We changed it to, uh, kind of like a concierge service where you can think of it as, you know, these subscription boxes where like every month they send you like maybe like 5 pieces of clothing and then they, they, you have a style profile, like what you like, what you don't like, and then you pick what you want to stay with and like your, your monthly subscription goes towards that, or you can return what you don't like. It was like that, but for very, very cool dates. So every month, every 2 weeks, whatever cadence you wanted, you know, for example, me and my now wife, then girlfriend, we'd get recommendations and it would be like 3 different ideas for restaurants. We would click on the restaurant, we would pick the food, and then we would show up. There'd be no menu. Uh, the, you know, the, uh, servers would know our names. They would bring out games to play. And then when we were done, they bring an envelope, which would like, you know, take us to like some like rooftop bar we'd never been to or some other place. And so that was, that was the concept behind Bluvit. And, you know, we went through Techstars and it was going pretty well, but right at soon after Techstars, uh, we're doing fundraising, me and my co-founder, uh, started having disagreements on just like how to grow the business and, you know, what, what direction to take the like product in terms of, uh, growth. And so ultimately that culminated in me leaving the company in January 2018. So I left, left the company, um, again, left on good terms, but it just kind of wasn't working out in terms of like working our co-founder relationship. And, you know, I was trying to think, okay, what's next? So already kind of like startup one didn't work out, startup two didn't work out. And again, for different reasons, happy to get into that later if you want. So I was like, okay, what's going to be the next thing? And so I decided I was not going to get committed to anything. I was going to do consulting for a while and think about what was next. And I had this gnawing thing in the back of my head where I had just spent all this time going super deep into React. And I'll give you a quick kind of like overview of the idea. For a very long time, a lot of these like web frameworks like had like, you know, have HTML, you have CSS and you have JavaScript and they would try to, you know, combine these things in what are called partials where you have like a little bit of HTML that can like represents like some part of your application and then there's some CSS that like modifies it. But there was this idea that started with, you might've heard of like Atomic Design around the, around taking visual primitives and then grouping them in what were called components. And React in particular, um, did something different in that they said, hey, instead of having your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript separate, it should all be part of like the same concern. Like you should be keeping them all together. So this idea of components took UI development by storm. And now every UI framework, whether it's Angular, Vue, Svelte, React, is using this idea of components. And what makes them truly special is this idea that they're declarative. So, um, in the world of programming, you have this kind of dichotomy of things that are declarative and things that are imperative. So think of something imperative as like you telling the programming language, do this, like, hey, like draw this rectangle, make it red, et cetera. Declarative programming is much more descriptive where you say, hey, I have a red rectangle. And then the library or the framework takes care of actually doing the API commands to like draw it in the screen. And so this declarative nature, I was like, hey, like, so, so while this was, while I was working on Blobbit, made very good friends with Alan Pledger, who's now my co-founder. He's the CEO of MakeSwap and they were working on a company called Lightning And you know, we're both going through the same Techstars cohort. We're very good friends and always admired the amazing user experience that Landingline had as a landing page builder. So Landingline was a landing page builder. You could use it similar to Wix, Squarespace. What's the other one I'm thinking? Um, I know HubSpot has one, but like there's a couple other, other ones out there, but the point is I was obsessed with like the user experience, but a lot of these tools give you, I like to think of them as like Lego sets, right? You get a Lego set and maybe it's like the Harry Potter Lego set, but you, you know, take all the Lego pieces, you can build a rocket ship if you want, but you ultimately have like the Lego pieces that came with the set. If you want to build a car that has like a little engine, well, you don't have that Lego piece. You have to go get a different set or go buy it. Um, and you usually are kind of like constrained. So a lot of these tools kind of gave you these building blocks, but it didn't have one that you needed. You had no choice but to go build it yourself. And, you know, I thought, man, like no Fortune 500 company uses something like this. And this is the reason why. There's no way to customize it. It's not performant. You're hosting it in somebody else's infrastructure. And so the idea that I had for my next venture was I built this mobile app before Blubbit, then we pivoted. What if we had a visual builder where you could bring your own React components and then you could build native applications doing it? And so one day I'm talking to Alan and I'm telling him, hey, like, this is what I'm going to do next. You know, I'm going to save some money doing some consulting. Um, and then in my free time, I'm going to start building this thing. And Alan was like, hey, like, you should come join Lending Lion. I was like, "Oh, like, that's great, but honestly, like, I don't just want to join a company. I want to, you know, be a founder again. I want to start another company. And then this idea, I have a feeling this is going to be great." And that was in January of 2018. Fast forward 4 months later, it's April, or it's around March. I'm again at Alan's apartment, and, you know, we're drinking some, a handle of vodka, like, just shots as, you know, young guys in their 20s do. And he's like, "Hey, what do I have to do to have you, like, join the team?" And so I told him, I told him like the vision of this idea of having React components and defining your own components. And we, that's kind of like where the vision for what MakeSwift became started. And Helen convinced me to, to join the team and work on rebuilding effectively Langyuan, which was built in Angular at the time in React, effectively to expand Langyuan to become a full website builder. And so I joined the team and we started working on that vision. While that was happening, we were working on this like projects for the engineering team. So it only made sense that the product team also had something fun to do. So they decided to do a rebrand and that rebrand was the, what, what became Makeswift, right? So like that's where the name came from, the logo, like the brand that you see today. And so, you know, we're heads down, kind of like engineering team building, uh, Makeswift, uh, building Makeswift, like the actual technology while the product team is kind of like designing the brands, but then the sales team is selling Laneyline, the support team is supporting Laneyline customers. So we kind of had these two products happening in parallel. And, uh, you know, this is, this has been a very, very long answer, but effectively what happened was like, we, we, we kept rebuilding things about a year and a half in. And Lightning Lion CTO was like, hey, I've already built this. Like, I don't like, I'm like, I'm building your vision, Miguel. I'm building it again. Like this, this is not like, I don't want to do this again. Like if I already built this again, didn't get product market fit. We didn't get to a revenue that like, you know, he believed in also, I believe that we could get. Why am I doing this again? And he decided to leave. So he left the company. And at the time, that was like a real forcing function for us to ask ourselves, okay, if we're trying to build this new product from scratch, should we be spending all this time trying to sell a different product, splitting our focus, increasing burn with like all these people in the team? And so we made the very tough decision to kind of like hit the reset button. And so we kind of like laid off the entire team. And the ones that stayed, myself, Alan, Andrew, and Lindsay, we were the co-founders of MakeSwift. And like started fresh. So we kind of like restarted the company as with us 4 as co-founders. A couple of months later, we had the opportunity to sell Landing Lion. So we sold the IP for Landing Lion. So then we focused on migrating all the customers from Landing Lion to Makeswift, which meant we focused on feature parity. Did that for a while. COVID hit as that was happening. We sunset Landing Lion after we sold, sold the product, had all the customers fully migrated, and then we started working on growing Makeswift. And so there were a bunch of woes there. Again, I could talk for hours and hours about this, but ultimately we were able to accomplish our vision of delivering on custom components that you can bring in and build visually with them. You know, I don't want to say culminated, but I guess like there was like a big inflection point about last year when we like sold. So we sold Makesweb to BigCommerce and it's pretty interesting because like the way we set things up is that we're still an independent unit within the business. So we still kept our brand, team, kept autonomy. And so now we were kind of still like a startup, but we have instead of having to go fundraise, we kind of like fundraise internally. We have resources internally from the company that get allocated. Still looking to grow and accomplish like their vision. So that's like a very, very high level, very quick kind of like story of, I guess, my startup career over the last 10 years. Because I did start actually, yeah, almost exactly 10 years ago when I came back in August, September of 2014. I decided to like start talking to friends to do startups.

A decade in startups. And maybe the title for this episode should be like the Hyperbolic Growth Chamber.

Yeah, Hyperbolic Growth Chamber, that's a good one. Just put Goku in there like going Super Saiyan.

I think what's so interesting about the story is, you know, it starts with bitten by the bug. This is the fastest way to learn. You start, you don't achieve product market fit. You know that you, you call that one. The next one, there's some degree of traction, but there's a co-founder issue. It parts amicably, but like co-founders is like one of the most common reasons startups don't end up working. Third, like it maybe almost doesn't work, but this time there's something about the underlying technology that like has really sort of motivated you beyond just being a part of startups. Like there's something about the inflection from a technological perspective that seems to have aligned you and the other Makeswift founders in like figuring it out regardless. Does that feel like a fair synthesis of what ended up happening that was different about Makeswift than the first two?

Well, yeah, I also think that it felt so different when it clicked that look, like if this technology existed 10 years ago, this would have been built. So the reason it made sense right now is because components that were just adopted, we happened to be the the best team to do this because Alan had just built like a drag-and-drop builder for landing page builder. So it was almost like the perfect storm where we were prepared to take advantage of the timing of the technology existing and the expertise in React, the expertise in the product. You know, Lindsay, Andrew, like, again, he was the one like designed like Landing Lion, like what it was. Lindsay had just joined the team when I joined. She was the first customer of Landing Lion many, many years before. Right. And so we kind of had like this perfect confluence of things that I felt confident, not just in the technology, but in our ability as a team to deliver what we think is, is like core piece of web infrastructure. And it's what we're trying to go to make it so that to build for the web, you don't have to be a developer. And developers are a part of that because they build kind of like these Lego blocks, but then you can go kind of like go to the store and buy the set. And, and now you're not just constrained to like the set that you bought. You can kind of like pick and choose from like different ones. And if you have a developer., in your company, then they can build, build something custom. Yeah. As I'm sure you guys have done for, for the schematic website. You mentioned that you're a customer. So, um, I would, I would say yes. Like initially as a technical founder, I, I had this perspective on technology and like how the technology should be, but that only becomes possible to do in a startup sense because we saw there was a market opportunity as well. And we saw there was an opportunity to actually deliver a lot of value when it comes to like unlocking marketing things. I think that's something that like maybe I haven't mentioned, but A big part of why I gravitated to Alan and like eventually like this team is because even though I focus on the technology, at the end of the day, what we're trying to build here is for marketers. We have APIs for developers, but part of our core product philosophy is when you're in the Makeship builder, you shouldn't be seeing code. You shouldn't be seeing concepts about divs or CSS or HTML. So it's a combination of a little bit of both, I would say. Although I do think you're right. Like I don't, you know, when it comes to product market fit, I would say that I can sense it. We're close. But I think that when we truly get there, it's going to, I think it's going to look different than like what it looks right now. You know, we have some success. We have a lot of customers. You know, we have seen some growth. We had an exit, but there's a lot left and we're excited to tackle the next 5, 10 years and what's left.

Yeah, there's a ton left. I'm curious to know what you learned about the co-founder dynamic from the first two companies and how what you learned in those two companies has sort of translated into things you've tried to incorporate at Makeswift.

Yeah, I think there's, you know, people, there's a cliché that like, you know, co-founders are like, it's like getting married. Um, they say it's like, you know, the usual startup lasts 10 years to be successful. And then like, there's this like very sad statistic that like, you know, marriages in the US average like last 10 years. So it's, you spend, you spend more hours at work than you do at home. So effectively, you know, you're, you're like kind of like getting married. But I think even like when the day, in the day to day of the work, understanding, especially with like co-founders' passion, it's like, you know, We are building trust around co-founders' expertise, especially when there's like overlap in capabilities and leaning on them, I think is like something very important. I think that in the second company, you know, it was one of the problems that we had was we had our lanes, right? I was the CTO. My co-founder was the CEO. He was like taking care of the product. And oftentimes we would butt heads around, you know, I had product opinions and things that like I wanted there. And it's like that, that costs like a lot of friction. In Makeshift now. It's a collaboration, right? So it's, even though there's people where like the buck ultimately stops, there's like an enmeshing of kind of like mind melding that happens when you have that level of respect and trust for each other that is built over years. And it's not something that like from day one it's there. It's, you work together for a couple of years and then things are great, but then you have like conflicts and like things go like very low. But then once you get through that, you build the trust back like even better. So I think that, You know, a lot of people talk about like the grit on building a startup and it kind of, it's kind of like left there. And I think that, you know, there's, there's like the long hours and there's like working very hard, trying many different things and failing and failing and failing. I think a part of that too is like the interpersonal part. It's going to be startups that last long and they're successful. It's because like there's people that care, like care about them at the helm. And they're the ones that, that for them, it's, it's their lives that they, it's their baby. And so when you have multiple people that see it that way, energies are very high. And that can be very, very good and, you know, like when, when channeled well, but it can also like be a source of conflict. And so what I've learned is the co-founder relationship has to be built on this like foundation of understanding that you're like both pulling the same direction and having that as a baseline to even work together in the first place. And then over time dealing like, you know, that grit is part of sticking it through. Of course, sometimes like it gets to a point where like that's, that doesn't work. But, um, I mean, with Makeshift, we've, I mean, almost for 7 years now, we've again, Through highs and lows, we found a way to stick together.

You know, there's some— somebody went through it, I think it was Venkatesh Rao, that trust, you know, you know, kind of like, you know, legacy waterfall software development. He basically has this analogy that like if you treat trust building as like a waterfall exercise, it is doomed to fail. And that the only way to actually develop trust is in this like very agile sort of iterative process where like you, you must go through these troughs and these highs, and you must learn how to have productive conflict. And maybe if we could just kind of go a little bit into like one story of more detail where you all found a way to overlap in terms of lanes, but also collaborate really effectively. If you could tell some story that paints a picture of like literally how you achieved the trust in some moment, I think that'd be useful to people.

Yeah, let me, let me think about what would be a good example here. Okay, so, so I'll tell a couple ones I think that kind of like build up the story, like kind of like build the picture, but there were many, many times, for example, where we'd have, you know, there was like something critical, like fundraising and closing, you know, closing around. And it became clear that like one person would have to like focus on that. And that person ultimately was like CEO of a company. And so when, when that happens, right. And he's like 100% focused on that delegating the trust of like his usual responsibility in the product and saying, hey, Miguel, whatever you end up building, like, I trust that will happen. Me taking that, going and then getting the work done and then seeing that like, you know, it be delivered and they'd be happy. It's situations like that, that like build the trust. And so that's in like in a scenario where like you just kind of delegate, you just like have it separate. On the flip side, you know, when we've collaborated in terms of, hey, we need to, so I'll tell you of a feature in Makeshift that you might not be familiar with because I, you were not a user then. So in Makeshift, we have this thing called the box. And so the box is the main layout kind of concept in Make. So you can nest them with each other. You can like give them space. It's, it's how you structure layout. It used to be that we had rows and columns. This is the vestige of kind of like the landing line, like landing page builder days. And you know, we had the idea when they were like, oh, actually, like we can, you know, what if we combined it and we just had like one concept? And that effort was a very, very collaborative effort where the product constraints around the experience that we wanted would inspire the technical constraints of like, what was like, how do we actually like implement the code and vice versa, like the constraints we found in the code and like what was revealed to us, like when we were trying to kind of like model it, did that. And in that collaboration, simple things is like being okay, like sharing details that you might think that, oh, like, like this person may not understand this level of detail, like giving them the benefit of the doubt goes a long way. And then them understanding and like giving that trust back and vice versa. And so I think that like, that was like a very good example of like collaborating on something that ultimately if it was, if that collaboration wasn't there, I don't think it would have access them.

Yeah, they're great stories. Tell us a little bit about what you've learned about commercializing products. And maybe to kind of— you went from Company 1, which didn't successfully commercialize. Company 2, maybe there was some initial traction. Company 3, successfully commercialized, building into product-market fit and acquired. And now an opportunity to commercialize it, probably, I would imagine, some reasonable scale given the size of BigCommerce. And so I'm curious kind of if you could summarize like some of the single most important things you've learned about commercializing or finding market demand. I'm curious where you'd go with that.

Yeah, I think that, you know, I'll start like with a common thread that, that applies and it's been the one constant thing, which is we've always been changing, uh, and they say like, like in particular, like pricing, not just how much we charge for the product, but like who we approach. So in Makeswift, for example, for a very long time, we were looking at the market as like, okay, we're going to do a bottoms-up approach. We're going to go out there. We're going to get individuals excited about Makeswift. 'll be, you know, low, low cost, kind of like reduce the, the, the barrier to entry, and then we'll get volume and then go upmarket from there. And then, you know, very soon we realized that based on our feature set, like based on like what we, um, were charging and like where we were as, as a company, it made more sense to maybe we should start the other way where we'd start with like a bigger deal and move more and then the mass market vision that we wanted, we could tackle later once the product was more ready for that in terms of onboarding features that were like easier to wrap your head around. And so as those things evolved, we were constantly just changing how we, again, try to take the product to market with different experiments, but also presented pricing, but it had features that did that. And so if there is one thing, if it was starting a fourth company, is that from day one, I would try to make sure that I understand, okay, this is going to change. This is an experiment, like an ongoing thing. How can I make it so that there's a framework upon those experiments that can be built and those changes can be made? Without having to like throw everything away. And I think this is something that kind of like, you know, I guess experience has taught me. I feel like if I had known this, I definitely would have done it that way. Again, even as far back as like, you know, the— BlubIt, right? Like in my first company, whenever even there was no revenue, but like with BlubIt, things changed. It was first an app and then it was more of like, you know, kind of like starting as a free app, but eventually we charged for that. But then eventually moved to this concierge service. It was more of a subscription. You kind of like pay monthly. Um, and the way we package things up, uh, we were coming up with ideas all the time. And honestly, like, the way in particular when you have something like a subscription box, the way you package the product is basically the product, right? But we find ourselves like iterating on the UI parts and like the other things that are, yeah, they're part of the product, but they're, but they're not the whole picture because it just, it was just, it felt like it was just like not viable to like be iterating so much on like the, you know, the how we merchandise and like present this in terms of like price and what you charge for and like the levers that we have there. So, so in summary, it's, it's, it's, uh, change. I think that like the main thing is these things change all the time when you're like a startup. Maybe, maybe they, you know, coalescence is important, like it's more stable later on. But, um, in startup land, I think that if there's one thing I know is that that's going to be changing all the time, right?

Like in the search for product market fit, it is a game of change. And if you're lucky enough to achieve product market fit, maybe then you've got, you know, maybe less rapid change, but you will eventually have more change as the business evolves, as the product matures, as the product goes multi-product. I want you to maybe double-click into that idea of a framework for experimentation. Did you mean, you know, in some ways we need to be more organized around strategic hypotheses that we had from a go-to-market perspective? Or were you saying we need sort of an architecture that enables flexibility for inevitable change? I couldn't quite tell where you were going with that, but I'm curious how you would expand there.

So, so coming at this thing from a technical perspective, it's, it's usually like even if you have the experiments and you have, you think you want, you want to approach making, making it so you can measure, right? And get like actionable insights. So like you can like conclude whether your hypothesis was, you know, was correct or not. While also like in the, in the world of, you know, like SaaS, like, like let's call it like you usually have like all these features and when you're just focused on like getting the MVP out there or like building like the product, you're not really thinking, usually not thinking about how many prices are you going to sell this, right? You're mostly thinking, okay, like we'll set this up and then like we'll figure out how we're going to price it. We'll like slap that on top. Percent that. And when change happens, the amount of work is, it starts feeling a lot larger compared to like the importance that's given to like the rest of the product. And so that's, it's more of what I meant. It's like not having, just not knowing how to model things. Cause I think like, again, what we've learned, and I mean, I think this is like, it's no surprise because like we're schematic users, it's like, wait, there is a way that you can kind of like invert how things are modeled. So that when you do need to kind of like plug and play different ways of packaging like the product, it's easy. Knowing that is kind of like all you need. Cause it's one of those things where if you just know, then it's not harder to do, you just do it a different way. And then that unlocks all these other benefits that if you just don't know, then, then you like really don't benefit from it. Yeah.

Yeah. Makes sense. How does MakeSwift price and package today? And given change is a constant, what do you anticipate to be future change?

So today we're about to like launch an experiment where we're, we're trying pricing on change frequency. We've for a very long time have tried to find the right way to price our product. And you know, we, we've done per page. Per users, per sites, like certain features that we've gated. But it's always felt like they were, each of those like were suboptimal. And we kind of like try to think, okay, like what is like the real value that you get out of something like MakeSwift? If you have a site and you're not touching it, you're not changing it, you're not really getting that much value. If we want to align what we charge to the value we give customers, we shouldn't charge much for that. And we kind of like figured out, oh, like the main thing is this like flux. It's like people going into MakeSwift, making changes visually, and getting them out there. And so We identified like the publish time, like going and publishing those changes was like a very good point. So like right now it's like an experiment we're going to be running. But again, like I said, like in the past we've experimented with number of pages in your site. We don't like that because it limits creativity, right? If you want to like have a lot of pages, also like different users have different use cases. If you have a, you might have a company that does a huge marketing campaign with one landing page that drives a lot of revenue, this one page, which is a different company that has, you know, maybe, um, a lot of blog posts and those blog posts are mostly archived, hundreds of them, and they're not really changing them, but it's not like really driving any revenue for them. So why would you charge them for that? So number of pages, number of sites, same thing. Like we don't want to limit people. We want people to make more sites in Mixlr, right? So they use it more. Number of users makes sense, but as a lever, like if you have like 3 users where you're getting like a ridiculous amount of value because those 3 users create the page. So figuring out how to align it, it's been hard. And then we have competitors that like do think different things, like they might meet on number of visitors. We have a lot of reasons why we don't think that's the best, but, um, yeah, that's kind of like how we, how we price things right now. And some ways we've tried in the past and some ways we could try in the future.

Determining the price metric is so hard. I'm curious if, to what extent have you guys interviewed customers and asked them, hey, what do you think is the most intuitive metric of value?

So, so we have, I haven't been the one involved, but we, so We've talked to, we talked to many customers, but something else that we did was we did a study with Price Intelligently. Um, so Lindsay from my team, uh, they did a pretty deep dive where like they had both qualitative and quantitative studies that they did. Um, you know, like using like their framework for like finding respondents and that gave us a lot of insight on what the market would feel like based on what they know, what like the different limits are. We also sneaked in there like this experiment we're doing now to see like how people would feel. It was done later in the study though. So like we, I feel like we're going to get better data when we actually put it out there and people tell us. So that's like the extent of like what we've done. It's one of those things though, where, where with pricing, like when you ask a customer, you're going to get like a different answer from each one based on, you know, what they personally would rather pay for.

I want to zoom sort of back into kind of founder perspective for a second and make Miguel talking, Miguel now 10 years into his startup journey, talking to Miguel at the beginning of his startup journey. What do you say to that person? And you only have two bullets you can really kind of convey to them because they've got to go learn a lot of things on their own. But what are the two bullets you share with them?

So one of them is, um, don't over-index on the idea, like over-index on the team and the people you're working on. To give you some context, uh, when I was in college, I had a friend— like, when I started talking to friends, uh, with ShortWeb, a friend that we were brainstorming with, and he had this idea for doing particularly Postmates in Europe. And I was reading a lot of like, you know, Y Combinator feedback and like, you know, advice is like, hey, like you're going to be working this in 10 years, work on something that would make you passionate. I wasn't passionate about that and Shortweb was passionate about it, but I was really, I really wanted to work with this guy. He passed the animal test. Like I know you've read like the Paul Graham's like animal test. Like this guy's an animal. And ultimately I decided to like pursue Shortweb instead of like going with him to Spain and kind of like pursuing this company. I'll say that, like, I mean, he sold the company for $3.5 billion, could have owned half of it. And, and it's, it's funny because like every, every year when he was like raising $5 million, $30 million, you know, $150 million, $1 billion, we would chat and I was like, it was like, man, like I, what happened was like I over-indexed on that advice from YC of like, you know, you have to be passionate, which I, I still believe is important. But I think, I think that something that I've learned and it's been, it's been consistent. Second startup and like now at Makeshift is who you work with matters as much, if not a lot more, than the particular like problem space of idea that you're tackling. And then the other, other bullet point would be, it would be affirmative. It would be keep, keep using learning as a metric of success. Um, for me, like this whole start, like a lot of people have asked me, even with that, you know, kind of like that missed opportunity, it's like, oh, like, you know, don't you like I couldn't like live without. And for me, startups, it was, it was always hyperbolic time. There's always a way to learn fast. I'm obsessed with learning, uh, you know, self-taught software engineer. I kind of like taught myself to play guitar, taught myself Japanese. I just like, like learning stuff. To me, the whole startup thing was never like, oh, like, okay, I'm gonna do this for 5 years and then we get rich. It was like, no, like, if I do this for 5 years and it fails, which is the most likely outcome, I guess it worth it. I'm like, yes, like, it literally could fail Like every single one, I've been like, oh, like I would do that again the exact same way because I was waking up every day making sure like that specific day was worth it. And it was all because for me it was like, okay, how do I grow? How do I learn? How do I learn something new about the technology I'm using? How do I learn something new about building a company? How do I learn something new about hiring people? And so the other bullet point would be don't doubt yourself if you think that you're making a mistake by having a different north star. Learning, learning is a perfect north star to do this thing.

Those are two phenomenal bullets. About 4 or 5 years ago, you got really interested in React. And I think that that's obviously carried quite a bit of— it's catalyzed and carried quite a bit of energy, intellectual energy, physical energy, company building energy. What do you think is sort of the theme or thematic or inflection that attracts a lot of your curiosity over the next 5 years?

Yeah, I'll say it was actually 10 years ago at this point. React used to be Yeah, it wasn't even, it was like 0.13 or something. But anyway, it was, it's been a long time. And I think that, as you point out, like that ultimately was a big part of like, kind of like, what government makes sure technology culture. I'm going to state the obvious here, but I think that in the next 5 years, 10 years, I think, so obviously AI is the, like, for me is the answer, but in particular, Like if AI development stopped today, right? So if today there was no more progress made, I still think there's about 5 to 10 years of unearthed discoveries of what the future of products using this technology looks like. It's a usual kind of like classic, like, oh, like iPhone came out, but you didn't get Uber or Airbnb, like all the other kind of these like mobile native things, like much, much later. And so I think in the next 5 to 10 years, call it 5 years, we like founders are going to be discovering How do we use this technology not to make the mistakes I made with Shortweb, which is like, which I, did I get into? I don't think I got into that, but the big lesson learned with Shortweb was it was a solution in search of a problem. It was very cool. Every, every customer I talked to was like, oh my God, this is amazing. I'll use it. And our metrics showed that they were not using it at all. Um, I think that when I think about the next 5 years is going to be using AI, not as a solution in search of a problem, but as, as problems, like as founders look to tackle problems and solve problems, there's this completely new piece of technology that any founders trying to like approach the same problem space 5 years ago would have not had the same technological opportunity in front of them. The same way that something like MakeSoup was not possible before React, there's going to be things that— but like people had ideas. I mean, you can go all the way back to like the '90s and OpenDoc was something that like Microsoft, Apple, like we're all working on, like Notion, like all these things like were tried before. And so I think in the next 5 years, there's going to be things that where people that may might have been too early, like won't be early and the timing will be right. And, um, and there's going to be completely new things that maybe haven't even been tried. And I think if there is the one thing, and you'll probably get the same answer from a bunch of people, so this is not original, is AI. I think AI is going to be what's going to change the way that we build products.

How do you think AI will change the way you build MakeSwift?

That's a good question. We've been having a bunch of people asking, oh, like, are you going to add AI to MakeSwift? Add AI to MakeSwift? And again, I think that that's the wrong question. Like, it's the wrong question to ask, like, how are you going to add AI to MakeSwift? I think it's the right question to ask of the problems we're solving in the roadmap, is there any feature that now that you have like this, like technology with AI can be implemented differently or can be like, you know, presented differently? I'll give an example. We have MakeSwift itself gives us structure, kind of like gives like some components that you can use to like build pages. And we've kind of gone from like, hey, you don't have to write code to like you can build visually. And so you, you still need a person to like do that. So when you think about like migrating a website, you might have a human being go to look at the website and try to recreate it in MakeSwift. And even our own team does that when we're doing sales, right? We kind of like build their homepage in 20 minutes in front of them to like, you know, impress them. That's something that we're already doing, but if AI can kind of like make that more efficient because we can kind of like train it on the schema and have it have the page and like automatically build it. That's the sort of thing where we think like, oh, like that would be great. Um, yeah, we could plug in an LLM into MakeSwift to kind of like, you can talk to it and like it'll like do something. But I think that's like marginally helpful. I think like the proper interface for that is like drag and drop and kind of like what we've already designed. But if you want to get creative and you want to say, hey, like I'm— I need ideas for copy, or I need ideas for, you know, how to build this layout. I think like that's where something like, you know, generative models can, can help a lot.

Yeah, it's really cool. This has been an amazing conversation. I'm grateful to you for doing it. The closing question I always like to ask is, and you've named a lot of really amazing experiences, but what's the single most formative moment in the career for you?

If you had to kind of pin it to a moment, you might have to, uh, like, advance the recording because I'm going to think about this for a couple minutes here. Let's, let's, let's see. Most formative. You know, I don't know if there's, there was any one particular event that was like, oh, like this event was, you know, the most formative. I mean, we had a lot of big milestones, like launches that we did, and, you know, sold Landing Lion, sold MakeSwift, um, had big fights, had big celebrations, like, as co-founders, and had big discoveries, like what actually made possible, you know, the, the kind of like MakeSwift today was actually a big eureka moment, which you usually don't those are usually not very common. But even that wasn't like formative. I think that for me, it's like the journey. It's just like very weird. I still feel like the most formative parts are like ahead of me. Like right now, for example, I'm learning how to scale myself and the problem of, you know, leading a team and growing a team and like the human aspect of that to me has been very fulfilling and like very interesting challenge to solve. But in the last like 10 years, it's been like the little layers that like kind of like build up. Like as they happen, they just feel like kind of like just putting one foot in front of the other. But then you look back and you're like, wow, like it's, you know, so different. And I think like the best way that I would describe it is like this. 5, 6 years ago, you know, every year that would happen, I would look back and say, man, like that year was crazy. Like impossible that next year is going to be like I said before. A year would happen and I was like, oh my God, like that year topped off the previous one. Like that's crazy. Like I can't believe that, you know, that just happened. Year passed and like, it kind of like each year was like crazier than the previous one. And of course last year we sold the company exactly a year ago and I was like, okay, like this, of course this is going to be peak, basically, you know, nothing else is like that. That's it. Funnily enough, it's been a year and I'm like, oh my God, like crazy. There's other stuff too. There's like personal, I mean, I just had a baby, but, um, you know, and the company stuff, but even then, like, for example, like, you know, BigCommerce is having like crazy leadership changes. Like the CEO just transitioned away and they're like from 9 years and there's a new CEO coming in. And the implications of what that means for Makeshift are huge, right? And so, um, I, I'm going to tie it back to the hyperbolic time chamber. It's kind of like, you're, you're, you're like deciding to do startups is this like, you, there's trade-offs, right? Around, around the intensity of it. But the journey is for me, like what's been the most formative because you're kind of like putting yourself in this place of, um, forcing yourself to learn, forcing yourself to grow. And at least for me personally, that's what I live for. The day that I can't learn, I can't, you know, feel like I progress, I'd rather die. It's been a confirmation for me. Like, again, like if something happens to Matrix tomorrow, okay, what's the fourth one? So what's the next one? Because I guess I'm just addicted to this. So I guess like that's what I would say has been the most formative is just discovering that there's nothing else I'd rather do than just, you know, it's like doing this crazy thing that call it starting a startup, you can call it building a company, you can call it You know, forming a team, building products, whatever you want to call it, like this whole thing of solving these problems, learning about technology, about how to sell something, how to pitch it, how to raise money, how to build a team to do it, how to scale it. It's a very formative experience, right? If you kind of like subject yourself to it.

This has been one of my favorite conversations that I've done, and I've done nearly 50 of them.

So that's kind of easy to say.

You're inspiring, and thank you so much for all of the stories, and where can people learn more about Makeswift and reach out if they want to connect?

Yeah, so about Makeswift, you can go to makeswift.com. That's, you know, makeswift.com with the other end. If you want to connect with me, I'm on Twitter. My handle is my last name and then my first two letters of my first name, so it's Ollermi. And, uh, yeah, that would probably be the best place. And then LinkedIn as well, so you can like reach out via LinkedIn if that's your jam. And yeah, uh, makeswift is also on LinkedIn and Twitter. Twitter @makeswifthq is me, reach out and happy to chat. I'm always, always looking. I mean, this conversation like this I haven't had in a very long time. Honestly, like, I, I miss it. I miss it because I used to have, you know, chats like this back in college and oftentimes with co-founders as we were like in super, super early, early mode when it was just, just the four of us. But I really, really appreciate your time and inviting me to be in the podcast today. It was definitely a very enjoyable conversation. I hope we can do it again sometime, whether it's in the podcast or outside.

Me too. Thank you again, Miguel. So much fun.

Yeah, have a good one, Fynn.