Abdo Riani — Unique Strategies To Bootstrap New Business Concepts

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast with your boys, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear.

Hello.

What's up?

We're back with Hustle and Flowchart.

That song, really, it started. It had a good start and then it just kind of.

Yeah, well, this is. I think things are about to get a lot more musical pretty soon here, Matt.

A lot more musical because we're gonna learn songs on the guitar.

We're gonna learn songs on the guitar. I'm looking at two of your guitars that are gathering dust. We gotta change that.

You can't play either of them.

That's true. Cause I'm backwards. You're backwards.

No, you're backwards handed. I'm normal handed.

Backwards handed. I'm about to backhand you with my backwards hand right now.

Backwards hand.

You.

All right, so. Oh, man, today was interesting. So this discussion. This is another, I would say, mind expander on exploder. Exploder.

That's why my floor is a mess.

That was.

You exploded your mind all over the place.

All right, all right. I'm just gonna move on past this. Pretend I didn't say that.

You should be so ashamed of yourself. It's ridiculous. Okay, today we are talking to Abdo Rihanna, and this guy is doing some super interesting stuff. He's kind of set himself in the startup space. The bootstrapping specifically has done some. Not a perfect term for it. Almost like a hybrid summit live.

Kind of like a cross between a podcast and a summit and a membership site. And.

Yeah, it's interesting.

Yeah, he'll explain it better than we can.

Yeah. But it's just cool. It's a cool model that is working very well. We had a previous guest, Liam Austin, about a month ago or so that introduced us to the concept of virtual summits. And this is kind of like an extension of that and a different hybrid. And in any case, it's an amazing way to grow your list, to get attention, to get that authority.

But that's not the part that blew your mind.

That's true, but that's a big part of it. That's very smart, though.

The part that I mean, no, the whole virtual summit concept is awesome. And we're. We're in talks of planning on doing a virtual summit. I'm not going to commit to anything on the podcast, but we're planning on doing a virtual summit.

But it'd be in the podcasting realm and what we do.

Yeah. So we're really fascinated with talking with people who are having really good success with summits right now. But the thing that I think really got our minds kind of going was when he started talking about like his bootstrapping concepts and how to get out minimum viable products for basically no money and, and actually get those funded. And some really, really cool concepts and some really cool apps thrown around that you can do this really cheap and.

Literally like the click funnels or the thrive themes and obviously not exactly of like software.

Yeah, of like software and app development.

Say what, like under $100 worth or even free.

Yeah, no, it's. It's nuts. Like we start, we got off this show, this thing and we started playing with this like, tool to build software and we started going, holy crap. And we started throwing out ideas for all these software products.

Dude, we were already thinking of like, oh, we could do this in the podcast space, the traffic. Like you could build internal tools for your team and for cheap. Maybe you're thinking about some software that you think would be really cool that you wish you had or this perfect, I don't know, to do list or planner thing for your team to make sure you can make it. Just make it. And it's cheap, maybe even free.

For sure.

It's crazy. So there's a lot of little interesting moments here that he comes from a different space, which is really cool. Oh yeah. We talk about PR and kind of how to get into big places like Forbes. Oh yeah.

So yeah, we're already kind of forgetting some of the like braingasms we've had on this episode.

Well, let's just get into it.

Let's talk about our traffic book real quick. We've got. If you haven't yet, go pick up a free copy of our traffic book. It's the traffic strategy that we use to drive traffic to affiliate products. Our own software, our own courses, and also a whole bunch of guest traffic strategies. It's called the Evergreen Traffic Playbook. You can get it at.

He's pointing at me.

Evergreenprofits.com trafficbook Joe was not on his game when I needed him on his game.

No, I'm thinking of Matt's busy over here saying the URL and it's really good. It's evergreenprofits.com trafficbook and you'll hear something Abdo is saying in the actual episode itself is that this concept of virtual summits and the summits in general of what he does, he was like talking to us at one point. He was like, dude, this is like an amazing model. And if you know the traffic. If you know how to harness this stuff. And you and I, Matt, were talking about this, it's like, dude, like we have this interesting ability, as do you as a listener because you're always listening to these interesting traffic things. We're talking about our newest experiments or maybe you're a customer, you could totally apply that here. And all it is is a model that you're bolting on your traffic system. In our case, our traffic system. That is in the Evergreen Traffic book, the Playbook. So that's kind of what I'm like, dude, this is actually a really perfect pair is like if you understand traffic and understand how the flow of targeted people and you can leverage things like affiliates that Abdo and Liam has told you can frickin explode this thing. Yeah. And you gotta understand traffic. That's what the traffic book's all about. So evergreen profits.com trafficbook. Just get it.

It's free.

Yeah. Now let's go talk to the founder of Startup Circle, Abdo Riani.

Hey, Abdo, how you doing?

I'm doing good. How are you, Matt?

This is great.

We're great. Yeah, there's two of us here. This is the voice of Matt and then Joe will speak. And our voices sound so similar though. Everybody always gets them confused.

I'll just say, how are you guys doing?

Yeah, I blame Zoom too. The way we record. It's always Matt's name.

Yeah, he does always say my name in Zoom, but yeah, man.

Yeah, but we're doing. I think I'm impressed with what you got going over at Startup Circle and everything you've been doing because you talked to some interesting folks over there. A lot of the folks that I think some of them have been on our show. So there's some good little overlap there we can chat about.

Yes, sir. Well, I'm actually also very impressed with your show as well. And for that reason, amongst others, obviously you guys have been very successful as affiliate marketers, as marketers in general, as consultants as well, and as podcasters. So I wanted to have you on a Startup Circle and discuss how you guys got to that point. But thank you. Startup Circle is four months old. What we do is we provide aspiring passion entrepreneurs, even rising founders, in fact, who have already built some traction go on their startup ventures. We provide them with personalized guidance through live Q and A sessions with successful founders to help them move the needle, to allow them not only to ask questions, but ask follow up questions so that they can really benefit and use it as a kind of a coaching or mentoring or advisement platform. We keep this small and it is in fact only when we do that we accomplish the goal after we tested it for about a month and tested different variations. So Startup Circle is like a guidance or mentoring platform.

Very cool, very cool.

Well.

Let'S take a step backwards actually, because we want to actually hear about how you got into business and how Startup Circle came about. We're actually looking at the Startup Circle website right now and we're definitely going to dive deep into that whole model and what you're doing there. But we always like to sort of establish kind of where you came from. How did you get into entrepreneurship and how did you get to where you are today?

Sure, of course, absolutely. So I started my first venture back when I was a sophomore in college. I'm actually still in college. I'm a month in, let me count, 15, 16 days away from completing my PhD.

Oh, nice.

Almost.

Congrats.

Looking forward to it. It's been eight or nine years now, and I just never quit, you know, went From Bachelor's to MBA to PhD. I've been PhD candidate for about five years. That's more or less how long it takes. So back when I was a sophomore in college, you know, I'd always been passionate about the environment. I wanted to contribute to the environment and I wanted to find a way to boost awareness for the environment. So I created my. I at least attempted to create a product that rewards users for their eco friendly actions. And the idea is recycle x amount of metals or recyclables in general. You get points. You can use those points to get rewards from local businesses. Back then I was a college student, but also I was an athlete. Actually was as a student. As a student athlete or as a recruit?

How I came to this university. Played tennis.

Okay, I was gonna ask.

Yeah, I was a tennis player, still play tennis. Big tennis fan. Watching Indian Wallace right now.

So I couldn't afford it. You know, I barely had enough funding to fund life honestly. And I wasn't a technical person per se, so I could not, at least at that point, program the product so that I can connect those people together. The three key stakeholders, users, the recycling facilities, and the local and online small businesses that provided the rewards. And I tried to raise fund for about eight months. A lot of people were interested in the initiative, a lot of people were interested in the mission, but they wanted to see results, they wanted to see traction, they wanted to see revenue. And for me at that time, the question has always been, how am I going to show results if I don't have product. And it wasn't until I had a few conversations with entrepreneurs who had gone through similar stages who told me that you're doing well but you're not doing the right thing. This is what you're supposed to do. And it was then when I completely forgot about the product and I became the product. I was the one connecting people to the nearest recycling facility. I was the one keeping track of their points using Excel sheets. I was the one helping them get their rewards and maintaining their points. I was the one doing everything with, with existing tools. Something that literally cost me nothing and allowed me to do a lot. Just two, three months later I had 500 active users and generated $20,000 in pre sales that allowed me to build the scalable version of the product. In fact, it was because of that that five, six years later I create a Startup Circle because.

Some conversations can make a big difference. And I wanted to be the one who can allow passionate entrepreneurs to have those conversations with people who had gone through similar challenges and who can tell them what to do, even if it's a 10, 15 minute conversations. So that was how I started. And after that.

I started Aspire it, which is a startup development studio that helped non technical bootstrap founders take ideas to market by doing things that don't scale. The exact same approach that I followed when I launched my first venture. Same profile or same customer Persona as me. I helped others like me accomplish the same goals and solve similar problems. And then six years later, here I am running Startup Circle and helping entrepreneurs on the side take ideas to market quickly, inexpensively by doing things that don't scale.

Love it. And you're going to school for your PhD.

It's a lot almost done. Especially the first two years in the PhD are very, very time consuming and very challenging.

Yeah, I have a sister in law going through one now.

Comprehensive exam. You're pretty much all set.

Oh man. Well that's awesome, man. And yeah, so there's a lot of, what would you call, you know, so Startup Circle. We're looking at it and it's kind of interesting, the model, it's where it seems like and you know, maybe, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, it seems like to join, that's where you can ask the questions of the expert whenever it's live and you can go there, watch some replays and stuff. So it's not a podcast, it's not a virtual summit. It's kind of like an interesting. I don't know, hybrid interactive thing. It's really cool. It's unique.

Yeah, I think it's hybrid. That's a good way to put.

Allows you to. Yes. Watch some episodes exactly the way podcasts are created, if they are once the live sessions are done and recorded. But the main goal is to get people to join those live sessions so that we can help them accomplish the. You know, the reason why I created Startup Circle, which is help them get personalized guidance. So we're accomplishing two things in one. And in fact, you know, two months later when I realized that I am for some reason, and the reason is because I have not invested anything in marketing, not even sharing the episodes on social media. When I realized that I'm not even filling half of those sessions with the three entrepreneurs, three to five. So we only allow three to five to join live. I actually scaled down and started hosting less and less sessions and focusing more on the goal, which is getting people to join and ask questions so that I can go back to the mission. The reason behind creating Startup Circle. So it is a hybrid, but I'm glad it is helping many entrepreneurs. We are just like any other startup, facing some challenges, making some iterations, but we're making progress.

Yeah. We have a note here that says that you do about 100 interviews every single month. Is that still true?

Not anymore, no.

There's a couple parts of that question now I'm curious about. When you were doing 100 interviews a month, how were you doing that? And also what are you doing now?

So now we're doing about three to five a week. This week we're not doing any. I'm focused on helping entrepreneurs in a different way through a virtual summit. Week long mastermind. But now I'm doing three to five. But let me answer your first question actually.

With that hundred interview. It was.

In, was it in March, March of 2018. Had been thinking about launching a virtual summit for a while and looked at my calendar, found out that I didn't really have lots of things planned for the next two months and decided I wanted to do it. It was literally from one day to the other that I woke up in the morning and start reaching out to guests, to experts for the interviews. And within two months I did over 130, I believe, interviews and launched a virtual summit with 100 plus bootstrapped founders. The Bootstrapping Summit, that was the name of the summit. And thanks to that, about 6,000 people joined my community. And thanks to that also I launched my coaching program which I've been wanting to do for a while. One of the things we talked about before hitting the record button was although I know actually it has been recording ever since we joined the call was.

After Aspire. It wanted to offer different products and services. One of the things I wanted to do was to coach, mentor, guide advice. But I didn't have the audience.

And my hypothesis was instead of fighting for influencers or experts audience, why don't I highlight their expertise, be of value to them and as a result capture the attention of their audience. That's exactly the idea behind launching, you know, the bootstrapping summit or any other types of summits. And that's exactly what happened. So.

6,000 plus subscribers. I sold my coaching program and I applied the same strategy with Startup Circle. Then I realized that with Startup Circle is different. The goal is to provide personalized guidance not to do as many sessions as possible so that I increase traffic. So that's when I, you know, scale down and focus on the reason behind the venture.

Gotcha. No, I'm really curious. So you know, we, we record between eight and ten interviews a month and that seems like a lot for us. So I'm just kind of curious about the mechanics. Like how did you, how did you batch those, how long was each interview? Just. Just out of my own curiosity.

Sure. So I made it as simple as possible. No editing whatsoever. 30 to five minute long, three to five a day. And I have a three step process, record, download, upload. That's pretty much it. I love it more. I don't do any recording. I do the intro in the beginning of session, the conclusion, you know, as part of the session and I click, you know, I end meeting and then my team member uploads it. So I tried to systemize it as much as possible. Although yes, it did take a lot of time. Even if, you know, I tried to pull a lot of the friction out of it. But it was very time consuming. And you know, it's one of those things where you know, as you're, you're doing it, you feel that you won't be interested or able to do it forever. So I had kind of that in the back of my mind and I started thinking, you know, why am I doing it in the first place? I started asking myself questions. Why am I hosting that many sessions a day when 50% of the time I'm the only one asking the questions or we don't have attendees or no one is available at 9 in the morning or 7pm why am I doing it? That's When I started answering my own questions, well, if it's not the right time, if it's not the right person, by the way, that's one of the things, the biggest thing I learned. The right person makes huge difference. And by the right person, I'm not talking about the level of expertise, I'm talking about the level of focus or the industry that made the huge difference, in fact, in people wanting to join startup Circle sessions and ask questions. We realized later that it was actually startup founders who are at the traction stage and who are building SaaS. Companies are the people that we're having join almost every session. So we looked for guest experts who are building or have built SaaS, startups who are more or less known in the space. And then we focus more on the promotion side so that we can get more people to join. And you know, we built partnerships. I can discuss partnerships, but one of the biggest partnerships that helped us scale faster was with Indie Hackers, a community of 50 plus thousand entrepreneurs. So that, you know, allowed us to almost fill every session we host.

Wait, so what was that again?

Say that when we were talking Indie hackers. I've never heard of that.

Yeah, Indie Hackers.

What's that? That's a new one to us.

It's a community of entrepreneurs. It's a Reddit like community about sharing. It also has a little bit of hacker news, business model.

Gotcha.

It was acquired last year by Stripe and it was a strategic acquisition. Stripe wanted to get a first pick. If any of those members ever get to a point where they need to accept payment, they want them to use.

Stripe Smart on their part. Yeah.

Cool.

We haven't heard of that one before.

The founder had been running it for like a year only honestly. So it was.

Not too bad of a time to exit, I guess.

So I want to go back to the site Summits idea just because selfishly late. Matt, have you heard of. We talked to a guy here, Liam Austin, on our show a month ago or so.

Yeah, I do. He has.

Virtual something like that. I don't remember the name.

I believe it. Yeah, I'm blanking on the exact name, but it's all focused around virtual summits and there's a training so we're actually going through that. But we had him on the show and a big part was just the. The benefits of virtual summits is you can the traffic. Like you said right before we hopped on recording, the second recording that you don't see over here is you said it's just an amazing list growth Tool. You said on that one you did, it was 6,000 people joined your list. Now what was the marketing like? I know Liam told us he had his whole approach, but what did you do to attract 6,000 people?

All right, so for me, there was one very big channel, one very big acquisition channel, and that was was Experts Channel. So everyone who joins or every expert I interview is not really required, but inclined, I guess, to promote to their audience. And when you have. My hypothesis was If I have 100 plus speakers and even if 30 or 40 promote, I still have a big number of promoters. And when they.

Accept being on an expert at the bootstrapping summit, I send them everything they need. I send them the copy, email copy, social media copy, banner. In fact, that's what took the most time in preparing the summit, besides the interviews, of course. So for me it was the promotion of the guests. And.

That ties back to the idea of what if, instead of fighting for the audience of my indirect and direct competitors, I can highlight their expertise, I can be of value to them and help them get more awareness. And as a result of that, they do it for me, they promote their audience. So that was number one. Number two, it's sharing very, very actively on social media. I do have a lot of content, obviously, so it's 100 plus, which means, you know, I can pretty much every day share three, four times and tag those speakers, those guests and use some hashtags and some other, you know, ways of getting the word out. And I do it Twitter and LinkedIn mainly also on Facebook. But the first two were the big sales. Number three was the partnerships. So I built pure promotional partnerships with 14 companies, reached out to companies like Bradley, like Right Message, like Clickmeter, like Free up and a few more. And I told them, I proposed if they'd be interested in sending two dedicated emails to their audience. And in exchange, over the course of the five week of the five day or six day summit, every day, when I send that email reminder about today's, that day's sessions, I'm going to write about them and I'm going to link to their websites. And plus I'm going to put it in the homepage of the summer so that people can see it whenever they visit the page and look at the number of speakers.

It was more of a trade than anything there.

Yeah, yeah, pure promotional partnership. There's no monetary amount exchanged. You promote us, we'll promote you. And that helped significantly. I think about 30% of traffic came through partners.

Cool, okay. So we had affiliates basically through the actual experts. You had a lot of social sharing. I like that Twitter and LinkedIn are the top because those are two channels that we have absolutely no focus on.

We spend a lot of time talking about Google Ads and Facebook ads. Very little time talking about Twitter and link. So it's.

Yeah. And then obviously wrapped it up with the actual affiliate or, you know, the partnership as the third thing. I'm curious about Twitter, like your thoughts there, because I know Matt is super bullish on Twitter as a marketing platform that's growing Again, how do you leverage Twitter? Do you use paid ads? Is it all organic with hashtags?

Yeah, it's all organic. But let me say, I'm really not the right guy to ask.

If you look at my profile, I share every now and then, but I'm not active or have invested time or money to understand it well. But I used it, I guess, at its most basic form. And yet that is very effective. Some people just try to overthink it, but I share it actively and use different descriptions for or.

A specific section or session. I made sure that I tagged those experts or people that know them or people are fans of them because I know that there is a chance that they might reshare or at least like. And that's gonna put it in front of others or their audience.

That's pretty much. It didn't cut any interesting part of videos and uploaded. It didn't use any tools. Actually didn't even use tool all. No scheduling or anything. I could have made my job easier, but I felt at that time, especially at that time, that I felt I had so many things to do that I didn't have time to even spend five minutes to understand.

Scheduling tools.

And I don't know if you've ever been there, but, you know, sometimes you feel like there's so much on your plate that you just want to do things the way you know them, even though, you know they're five, ten times more time consuming. But I got the job done and could have done better, of course, but it was, you know, in my opinion, a, you know, good outcome. Within two months, literally, it happened. It all happened within two months.

Gotcha.

When it comes to the virtual summit, what's your virtual summit model? Because I've heard different variations on it. Some people pre record all the interviews, some people do all the interviews live. So it's actually a real summit feel where they interact with the audience. I've heard some models where the whole thing is free. Some models where it's free for one day, but then you pay to get it in perpetuity beyond that. So I'm just curious what the whole what your business model concept around the summits are.

I'm really glad you asked me this question today because it is, you know, by now, by tomorrow I would have tried both and I can tell you what's the difference and what's best. So.

I am liking more the the live format. And let me actually start with the lesson learned from the bootstrapping sum. First, you definitely don't need 100 plus sessions. 20 sessions, 30 sessions, you're fine. You can get as good results, you can get good results. You can even do better than having more. Why? Well, one of the things I realized is who's going to really sit and listen to 100 sessions. That's like 60 hours of content, 70 hours of content. It's too much. Especially that I covered a topic like bootstrapping. It gets very confusing because someone like Susan Patel can tell you how he bootstrapped his businesses and his approach would be different from someone else. And by the end of it there is an information overload and for the subscriber it isn't that valuable in my opinion. So pick a specific topic and have fewer sessions. So for that model what I did was I started with a. I combined both recorded and live. I did recorded, I recorded 100 plus sessions. So those are there for people to see. And I also have live sessions, but I also only had live sessions for those who paid for those who just wanted to see the sessions the day they are released. If they don't watch those sessions like you guys know they, they want be able to. So Monday I had about I think 12 or 15 sessions and if you don't watch the 12, 15 sessions that day, the next day you won't be able to watch them. They'll be automatically removed. And there is and that brings the incentive why they should upgrade, why they should get the all access pass. All Access pass allows them to get access to all the sessions so they can watch them whenever they want, however they want and also gives them access to the live afternoon sessions. I hosted six sessions starting Friday the week before. Two hour long sessions where only the subscribers can go and ask questions live and get personalized answers. This time and I'm doing one with the founder of Lift your lms, Chris Bagehot. We decided that we're just going to do 10, 102 hour long sessions to focus on one topic. How you can, it's an interesting name actually heal your sick course Summit, how can you get unstuck, especially in the early stages of launching a digital product, membership or site or a course? And we're doing it 100% live. You have to be a paid member for you to get access to the live sessions and to get the recording afterwards. This has been 80% less work. And not going to say the performance has been better, but around the same level of performance. But you know, you're also helping students get results because as I mentioned earlier, with the first summit where you're selling goal Access Pass, you know, you're not really assisting them. You're just publishing sessions, recordings, and you know, they do what they need to do to figure it out. But with the live ones, I think the impact is stronger and, and the results for you financially and traffic wise can be the same. It's been the same so far and as I said, we invested 80% less time. So if I do it again, I'm going to do this model. I'm going to follow this model. I think it's a lot more effective.

And what do you charge for the All Access Pass? Out of curiosity?

Sure. So for the all Access pass, with the bootstrapping summit, it started at $97 and then on, uh, Tuesday, I believe, or Wednesday went up to $149, and.

On Friday it went up to $197.

Got it.

Okay.

So it's like a dime sale kind of model where every couple days it goes up or not a dime sale, whatever you call that.

Yeah, it's like a. Escalating. Yeah, I like that. No, I like the combo of it all that you just said there for this one.

You know, Chris insisted because it's mainly his audience and you know, I had to listen to him. He wanted to a cap it at $100.

And honestly, even with that cap, financially, the return has been as much as the booth.

Yeah, I dig that. Because we're Matt and I once we. Because we weren't super familiar with the summit model other than just being guests on a summit, but actually hosting and managing and the marketing, you know, all the benefits. You know, Liam, like I was saying about a month ago, you now kind of saying the similar words. It's an amazing way to publish content, get experts, because we love the podcast. For that sake, we're meeting new people and you can leverage their namesake a little bit for marketing, but also, you know, they're partners in this. They want it to succeed as well.

They also become your biggest traffic drivers.

Totally. So many cool wins. You can do with this. And it's highly leverageable, like you said.

Would you say anything else to that?

Yeah, I would. In fact, you know, one of the benefits of launching virtual events, let's just say events for me at least, was branding. Right. I think you just mentioned that. Branding. You know, I think it helped me. It helped strengthen my own personal brand to people seeing me speak to big names and contribute to the conversation. That's just interview.

Played a role in them reaching out to me in the future, I mean, a couple months later, a week later, and asking me questions and following my content, subscribing to my other newsletters and joining Startup Circle. So that was.

A very big result out of it, I think. Also not direct, but I think it had something to do with me becoming a Forbes contributor just two months later when in my pitch I pitched that I am going to become the bootstrapping guy. Need to be specific in your pitch and what your focus is going to be. For me, it was bootstrapping. Well, the question was, what is the proof? Well, here's the proof. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. One of them was a bootstrapping summit. Then, you know, I think it had. It played a role.

So, you know, that's number two search traffic. Also.

That also is something else that, you know, came out of, you know, launching something like this.

So doing it every now and then and doing it right, you know, can. Can yield to good results. Once again, for those who are considering it, you don't really need to invest.

A lot of time to.

Have hundreds of speakers.

It can be a lot simpler than that. And with just 10, just like I'm doing it right now, you can contribute to your field and at the same time get all the benefits that we discussed right now.

Yeah, I love it. And it's cool because you can learn so much even if you aren't the expert. You can just facilitate the topic.

Of course.

Yeah.

And it's just like you kind of leverage that whole thing with your personal brand and Forbes. I mean, that's amazing. That's super credible. Curious if I know this is kind of a side vein, but how'd you get into that contributor gig on Forbes?

Sure. So here I'll tell you why. Actually, 1 4th or 5th benefit or how. I'll tell you. It's one of the other advantages of posting something like this. So it's the relationships you build. Right. When I invite someone, I'm not just gonna read off of paper and no conversation whatsoever. We're gonna have a conversation and that Allowed me to build relationships. A lot of people, a lot of creators. And before I started a session, I had always been wanting, you know, I'd always been wanting to become a Forbes contributor. Before I start a session, I do some research and see if they are Forbes contributors. And for those who are, after the session is complete and you know, we stop the recording, I ask that question, how did you become a Forbes contributor? I've always wanted to become a Forbes contributor. Would you know anyone that I can talk to? How would you recommend me reaching out? Who do I reach out to? And through that, through one of them, I, you know, I had that first access.

And. Yeah, so that was a story. And it is, you know, let me cut to the chase. If you really want to become a force contributor, the easiest way to become a Forbes contributor is if you know a contributor or you know, a editor. Of course.

You know, not, you know, to bribe them or anything, but just for you to get an opportunity to be listened to.

To.

That's it. All you need is an opportunity to be listened to. You know, they get a lot of pitches, but it's becoming really hard for them to select. So most of the times I can't claim that, but they may just decide not to take any action and not look at anyone and just focus on those who they heard about or have seen somewhere or the top, top leaders in the space. Those, you know, they just reach out.

So if you are a rising founder and have made a contribution to your space.

See if someone is a contributor and can help you.

When you're a Forbes contributor, can you pretty much submit content whenever you want and then they just approve it now, like, do you have a backend access where you can just, you can publish? Obviously they have final right of approval or denial of the content, but. Or are you, do you have to interface with somebody at Forbes every time you have an idea for a piece of content?

Look, that's the beauty of Forbes. You get your own dashboard. You publish whenever you want. No editing, no review.

Nothing. You just publish. I can go up there right now and publish an article and it will go live instantaneously as if you're publishing something through your own blog.

I love it.

That's what I really, you know, admired about Forbes. Now, they do make sure that you're, you know, a good contributor. They do look at your samples, they do interview you. But then once they give you access, actually the first article, you run it by the editor and you may get some comments and after that first one, you can publish Whenever you want.

That's super cool.

But for entrepreneur, it isn't. So for entrepreneur, you know, I submit an article.

And takes about three weeks to be published.

Got it.

And they edit it. So they make changes and then they publish it.

Gotcha. Yeah. Well, Matt and I will have to do some research and see if they need some podcast monetization people at Forbes.

Yeah.

See if it's a good fit there. That's super cool. Thanks for breaking that down, by the way.

Yeah, no, that's really cool. I appreciate that. Let's switch topics a little bit to actually the concept of bootstrapping and some of the tips and advice you tend to give people. Like, if somebody was to come to you and say, hey, I've got this idea for, I don't know, a SaaS company or something, how would they go about financing this company? What sort of advice do you typically give people?

Sure, of course. Well, bootstrapping simply means self funding. Sometimes people.

May believe that it sounds like it's a fancy strategy, but in its simplest form, it just means that you are funding your startup from your own money savings, not investors or loans. So it's just your money. Now, there are some methods that you can apply that will allow you to save and go to market.

Efficiently and inexpensively. And that's what I focus on. So what are some of the things you can do as a bootstrap founder, especially in the earliest stages of your business? You want to go to market under the condition of the unavailability of the product. In other words, if you wanted to create X and and you want to solve problem X, and Y is the product that will help you solve problem X. How can you solve problem X without Y? And you start brainstorming. There are many ways you can do that. We all have heard about MVPs. MVPs are not just product MVPs. They could be Concierge MVPs or Wizard of Odds MVPs. In other words, you VP becoming the product. So first, identify the job that needs to be done. What problem that needs to be solved. Number two, instead of focusing on how you can solve that problem with a product. Solve how? Think about how you can leverage existing tools to solve that problem, including some manual work. I used the example of my first venture earlier. And for me, solving the problem, which is boosting recycling rates, just entailed me getting the job done. Boosting recycling rates. And for that, all I had to do was use an Excel sheet, use a cell phone, use my own vehicle, and connect three key Stakeholders with each other. And with that I got the validation, I got the pre sales and.

Invested in a scalable product. So you want to go to market quickly, you want to start validating quickly. But at the same time you want to go after the strongest validation criterion, which is money, people's customers money. If you can adopt this manual work, concierge and wizard of odds MVP mentality and get the job done, or solve the problem and do it in a way that it allows you to get customers money, then you have accomplished a very, very important stage in the journey of a startup that many entrepreneurs, even with a very advanced product can not accomplish. With that, you take the money and you invest in building a product. And even then you want to go from let's say 90% or 100 or 80% manual work and 20% automation. You want to go to let's say 60% manual work and 40% automation. You want to build only the needed features that will allow you to scale to the next stage. And even for that stage, although you want to think about avoiding potential technical debt where you invest so much in building a product that is non scalable, you still can start by leveraging existing tools. Like.

What is that tool called? I forgot.

I mean we obviously have InVision app, that is one thing, we have Marvel app, that is another thing. But there is this specific one, I was talking about it today.

I definitely need to bring it up because it is.

One of the advanced ones.

Can I pause real quick? Because I want to clarify a couple terms real quick. You've said MVP a couple of times. I just want to make sure everybody knows that minimum viable product. But then you mentioned something.

Wizard of Oz, wizard of Oz mvp.

Wizard of Oz or wizard of Odds. I'm not familiar with that. Can you clarify that for us?

Sure. I was talking to an entrepreneur the other day through Startup Circle, Michael B. Bohorovitz. I think he is the founder.

I think his example is a good example to use in this case. But yeah, so that MVP building software is called Bubble. I just found it. Use Bubble. It allows you to create really advanced apps, web and mobile, without code.

And.

Go to market quickly without investing hundreds of thousands of dollars. I just want you to go Google and search for the cost of building an app. You're going to find amounts that range from one hundred and two hundred thousand dollars. And if you are a non technical entrepreneur looking to build just one version of the app for that much money, you either have a lot of money or you are prepared to waste a lot of it. So you want to leverage existing tools before you invest in scalable ones.

Right now we just pulled up Bubble, actually, I'm like, wait, their headline already caught my attention. You don't need a coder to build software. Like, wait, what?

As compared to others? Actually, as compared to others, this one can really help you build some advanced, really advanced software. Others, you know, it's just about, you know, making it a bit advanced. Okay, Just, just solving the problem in a more scalable way.

But for this one, some companies have built successful, really successful ventures on Bubble and you know, it's fairly inexpensive as compared to others.

So let's say I had an idea for a software we wanted to develop and we went to an actual developer and said, look, we want to develop this. Maybe it's a little more complex than like what we could build with bubble. I'm not sure. But we go to a developer, they quote us, okay, it's going to cost us 70 grand to get this software developed.

What would I go do to get that 70 grand? Are you saying I should go and like pre sell it? Tell people, look, we're coming up with this software. Do you want to invest in it so we can develop it and get the funding up front through like a, you know, a Kickstarter Indiegogo kind of thing? Or like how would I, how would I approach that?

Correct. So you want to focus on raising funds through customers to begin with, that would be number one. But before you just reach out to customers and tell them, hey, I am planning on launching a SaaS product that will solve this problem. This way you want to try to solve that problem in probably a different way, a non scalable way before you build that product or by using existing tools. So you can go to Bubble, for example, and build, I guess, the foundation of this SaaS idea and combine that with your own manual work by getting your hands dirty. And with these two, you get to a point where you actually solve the problem. I wanted to focus on using this specific example, though I do have other ideas in mind to explain the wizard of Oz mvp because it's a complicated one. Tinfoil Security.

What they do is they provide real time security reports.

Directly to developers. So they make sure that your platform, especially if it's highly technical, is protected and even your security team isn't able to detect those issues. Think about that. How can you potentially get your hands dirty or do manual work to get the problem solved? One of the things that Michael did was he created a landing page with exactly the same information he has on his website right now security for developers and developer and DevOps and all he asked was for people to put their website address and then click Scan now. The moment they clicked Scan now they saw a message that told them we are working on the report, we will be be sending them to you shortly. In the back end he had an Excel sheet with the model that he wanted to eventually code and all he did was he used his own hands to create the report. Couple hours later he sends this template to the email address of the user with the reports and all the information needed. So this is like a wizard of odds. It's like a wizard is doing it, but it's not a real person, but it's not the technology. One example, one might think that for an idea like this it's very hard to create an mvp. You definitely need to have an advanced technology but the reality you can. So you just want to do that. In the beginning that allowed them to pre sell the idea. Even though Michael and his co founder were highly technical. Highly technical. I really forgot the background specifically but they worked for government organizations and they had great education and knew exactly what to do. But they decided they wanted to take a step back and validate it before they invested the time.

Software like Bubble can help you do that.

For Michael, for Tinfoil, he didn't even need a company like Bubble. He just needed a WordPress site. I'm not sure if he did it on WordPress, but a WordPress landing page with some copy, some way for people to submit their website was all he needed.

And then you go to your take the money, go to your web development team and invest in that next version. That doesn't necessarily have to be very advanced. It could just be addressing some points, some features. I mean building some features that address some problems that you are certain are validated and you don't need to worry about them anymore.

No, this is super cool. I mean this is getting in the software game. It's something that Matt and I have dabbled with. We've definitely worked with developers and all that stuff and had some smaller pieces of software. But it's that undertaking. The amount of money that can go into software is crazy. And I just went to Bubble on their pricing and it's like under a hundred bucks a month for getting something like this. And I'm sure it scales up but still it's pretty amazing. I've never heard of anything like that.

I can't remember the name of the company, but there was a company that is a big Name company now but they started by creating Excel spreadsheet. You plug in the numbers and it their spreadsheets did all the formulas in the background and spit out numbers and then they made these spreadsheets more and more advanced and then eventually they actually made like a full on SaaS and got out of these Excel spreadsheets. I can't remember what it was like a company like mint.com or something like that and they were like this sort of like financial bookkeeping, like money management software. That sounds like Mint.

Sounds like Mint. It sounds like mint.com I think know they did something similar.

Yeah, I think it was Mint. I feel like that's the story of Mint is like they started by selling spreadsheets and then just kind of made it more and more and more advanced as they managed to get more money into the business.

Yeah, I could.

Yeah. And like you know, have you guys ever heard of Acorns? Acorns?

You know that that's a fintech startup, one of the hardest startups to build or probably fintech and, and health tech startups. And you go to the. I guess I'm promoting Bubble right now. I'm gonna call. I had him on the bootstrapping summit. Actually forgot his name and asked for some commission. But you go to the portfolio section of Bubble showcase, I think that's what they call it. And they have a similar, an Acorn similar platform coins. That's what it's called to show you know how much you can accomplish with platforms like Bubble today you can build a really advanced startups software I guess software with existing, you know, existing, you know, platforms that allow you to build those things.

That's cool man. Yeah, with reflective coins and. Yeah, it's just a straight up app and it looks amazing.

Let me use one last thing, one last data point. It has has actually been shown that it's never been cheaper to build a startup. Today I think it was CB Insights that showed that the cost of building a startup went from $5 million in the year 2000 to less than $5,000 today thanks to open source technology and cloud based tools. It's never been cheaper to build a startup. In other words, what they're saying is then in the year 2000 if you wanted to build a software not only did you need a very expensive. Today it's open source, but at that time there was no such thing as open source. So not only do you need to buy the software which was really expensive but also you needed to hire someone who knew how to use it. Which they were highly demanded and highly priced. But in addition to that, this is the cloud based tools part of the reason behind the decrease in the cost.

In addition to that, if you wanted to, let's say host it, well, there was no such thing as bluehost or hostgator or anything like that. So you had to buy your own server. If you wanted to have your own email marketing platform or system or tool, you needed to build it from scratch. If you needed to have the registration boxes or whatever that is, tabs, you need to build everything from scratch. So thanks to open source technology, thanks to cloud based tools, it's never been easier to build a startup. But I would add to that thanks to those SaaS startups that I think that still falls under the cloud based tools. But thanks to SaaS startups like Bubble and.

Envision Design, Envision App, Marvel App and many others, it's never been simpler and cheaper to start, especially a software tech circle.

So how does it look like? Because these are amazing resources. Thank you. Because this isn't the world that we typically dabble in, but it's obviously totally applied everywhere. How does it look? Has the landscape changed once you bootstrap? If someone chooses to go this way, which I think is very smart, but let's say people get interest or you want to maybe scale up, maybe take some investor capital or maybe sell, what does that environment look like now with these quicker ways to develop?

The idea of the lean startup rose after. You know, it's an old school methodology that the Japanese used with Toyota, I believe, but it started being applied to startup after people, after startup founders in the year the end of 1990, 1990s and especially year 2000, took literally ideas to.

IPO to a public company with no sales whatsoever, just money invested. So those failures in that crash made people think, made startup founders and scholars think about the right way to build a startup. And when people learn that when you approach building a startup from a large company standpoint, it never works out, there should be a better way to build a startup, even if you do have the funding. And that way was the lean startup methodology or approach. And the approach that I shared with you today, which entails getting the job done, building the minimum viable product using ideas like the wizard of Odds mvp, getting some early sales, pre selling the idea, building the first version with some tech in it, making changes, adopting agile methodologies. So to answer your question, it hasn't really changed much or it doesn't change much when you get funding because the same principles apply, although you may have a hard time today getting funded if you have not reached that product market fit stage. If you have not gone through those early stages where you got your hands dirty, validated your idea, have traction, have sales, have traffic and looks like you are on your way to growth. And when they invest in you at that time, yes, they are expecting you to grow. But because you have a repeatable and scalable business model, you can go ahead and invest the money because you know where the money should go, you know the wins, you double down on the wins. And it is safer to invest that much money that time. But no one expects from you to dump $100,000 or a million dollars in an idea and build it for 12, 18 months hoping that what you're building.

Is needed the way you thought or hypothesized for it to be needed.

IDX I just love this and it seems like such a.

Non daunting approach for anyone who has an idea for something that's scalable like we've talked about and just go in a bubble, you see a whole bunch of different ideas already. Like I saw something about dogs and there's all sorts of things you could just go there and yeah, wireframe on some of these things like Marvel app or Envision. It's just like these tools are kind of ridiculous. Now how low barrier to entry it is if you have a little bit of marketing chops can direct traffic and eyeballs, that's like our specialty. Then you pair it up with what you're doing here with some simple MVP style software. I mean dear God, think about the money you can raise off that. Yeah, and it's not even what you're raising, but it's like the system you're generating and the potential for this project, it's way better than I gotta go hire a coder, I gotta do all this stuff. And it's like, no, that's kind of old school as a first step at least.

Very costly. It's very costly, very high risk. You want to, you know, it, it makes sense to a baby. To be honest with you. You don't really have to defend your point. It makes total sense how a simpler approach like this can help you, you know, move forward on stronger foundation. And you know, the way I explain it to the entrepreneurs that I work with and my niche is small business, successful small business owners, not from startup circle. Okay. I'm talking about my own mentoring and advisement service part of the business. I work with small business owners who have always wanted to, who are successful first at what they do, but have always been thinking about launching a technology startup. For them it is an app. So when I say a startup, they say an app. I started using their language when a startup actually is not an app. And I mean, I can talk about that too. So for me, I started working with someone a month ago, just to use an example. He got a quote from a web development design company to build his product for 156,000 pounds. And after the first conversation, I explained to him how this is useless and how else to start. And I realized after that conversation that the way, the best way to convince someone to adopt this methodology is by talking about the money. So I say, do you want to make money next month or do you want to make money in. And when they Hear that question.

99% of the time they answer, I want to make money next month. And this approach allows you to make money quickly, allows you to validate ideas or invalidate ideas. People now willing to pay quickly, allows you to get answers quickly. So, so if you guys are building a startup, I think follow those principles. I didn't really invent anything.

They're well documented and with the traffic that you guys have.

With not just the traffic, but the knowledge that you've accumulated and the relationships that you built in the online marketing space.

You could validate ideas very, very quickly. Because in validating the ideas, you obviously need to have conversations with some potential users, some potential customers and need some traffic. But you guys have that. So.

It'S easier than ever for you guys at this point.

No, I love it. I'm looking at it almost like designing web pages by hand, old school coding it compared to using something like clickfunnels or Thrive themes where they drag and drop. You don't need to be some crazy coder or designer. And it's a great way to iterate, you know, because those platforms sometimes are a little lower on, slow, on load time, a little slower. So you can custom code what works best. Maybe after split testing. It's kind of like an MVP approach that we take for marketing. Yeah, super cool. I love it.

Very cool. No, I love, I love this stuff. And we really, really appreciate you taking the time to share it with us. Now we got to start to wrap up here, but I wanted to ask real quick, can you kind of give us the quick rundown again of Startup Circle and what it is and the sort of benefits so we can kind of remind the listeners about that program?

Of course. So Startup Circle is where you go to get answers, personalized Guidance, a coaching session, sessions. In fact, you can use as many, you can join as many as you like from. From people who have been on your shoes and have struggled and have found a way to overcome those challenges. So you get an opportunity to ask questions, live not just questions, but follow up questions. And the goal is to help you move the needle, move your startup idea forward. So it takes a minute to join. It is free. And all you have to do is either look at the list of upcoming sessions we have and reply to our email and tell us which sessions you want to join or wait for our weekly.

Email or newsletter with all the sessions that we're having come up and reply to which ones to tell us which one you want to join.

How do they get on that list?

It's on the page, I think, right?

Yeah, it's on the page. Join.

And name email. Actually, let me mention one quick thing here. Startup is four months old. One of the things I could have done was I could have invested a lot more time and money to create something more scalable. But I decided to take a simpler approach to get the job done and validate idea quickly. So I just integrated an email marketing.

Tool like ConvertKit and use that as registration. Other people would have probably wanted to have a fancy registration with profiles, with images, with description, with likes, dislikes. One good way to get started quickly is to follow an approach I follow just to tell you that here's how I have personally implemented principles like the ones we discussed today to validate ideas and make progress.

That's awesome, man. Yeah. No, I love the model and I love the guests you have on here. There's a lot of founders from tools that we use. Guy Kawasaki is on the front. He's just amazing. Yeah. So definitely check out StartupCircle co. We're gonna link that all up in the show notes as well and anywhere else you want to send folks.

Yeah, if you want to have a conversation with me, go to abdulrayani.com first part of the page you're going to find a way to find the best time to have a call. 30 minutes. The least worst that can happen is I'll provide you with some actionable advice that you can apply to solve your problems and move forward. And the best that can happen is maybe we can make a big difference in the goals that you want to accomplish.

That's awesome, man. I appreciate it. And one other question we like to ask a lot of our guests is do you have a book or something, maybe in some other resource that you find yourself Recommending just anyone in business or maybe life, something that just is your go to.

Yeah, well, I have read many books, but I think the one that I keep going back to is 0 to 1 by Peter Thiel. I do respect this guy a lot because.

He was successful as an entrepreneur and is very successful as an investor and has seen both sides of the tables and has started from scratch. So it is the person that you really want to learn from. And in his book, he talks about the revolutionary entrepreneur and how to build ideas that make a big transformation in the world.

So I highly recommend it.

No, that's. That's a. That's a good recommendation. It's perfect for what you've been talking about here, too. So. Awesome, man. Well, I appreciate everything you've laid out here because this definitely. It was an aha moment for me on a lot of things, that's for sure. And most likely you'll be seeing a summit of some sort from Matt and I very soon. So a little bit props to you on that one there. So thanks a lot, man. We'll talk soon and appreciate your time.

Thank you. Thanks for having me, guys.

No problem. All right, thank you.

And I hope you just enjoyed this episode you just listened to. Now, right now, before we sign off, I have a few things I would love for you to do. So the very first thing is to go find our guest on Facebook and tell them that you loved their episode with us. That's going to help them just feel good about themselves, but also it's going to spread the word a little bit more for us. Go find them on Facebook. Everybody's on Facebook. And go say that you love their episode and maybe one cool thing that you learn there. The second thing is to go to itunes and subscribe to our podcast. Just look up Hustle and Flowchart and hit the subscribe button. And the very last thing, the third thing, is to leave us a review on itunes or wherever you're listening to this podcast and help us spread the word more. That's how more people are going to get this awesome knowledge, this, this cool podcast training, and a whole bunch of other cool, free training that we give out@evergreen profits.com. so that's about it. Go find them on Facebook, go subscribe on itunes, and leave us a review. You would be amazing if you did that, but you're always amazing. So thanks for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode.

You're awesome.