MBA2143 Extended Interview: Patrick Campbell – Building & Selling a $200 Million Business

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Hey oh. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show.

Helping you build a better business every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is a special extended interview episode. Every once in a while we like to sit down with an incredible mind, with an incredible entrepreneur and learn from their journey starting and growing a business. Today we have a very, very special episode. I sat down with Patrick Campbell. Patrick is the founder of ProfitWell who bootstrapped his business all the way to acquisition, sold it to paddle for $200 million. Patrick Patrick recently sold the business and I wanted to sit down with him to learn about his journey. How he became the person that can build a business like this that's worth $200 million. Some of the challenges he had along the way and what were the deciding factors to sell his business and what does it mean for him now after it's all said and done, there's so much I got from this conversation. I can't wait for us to dive in. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. I've known of Patrick Campbell for about five years now, but I've gotten to know him personally as a friend. For the last three years or so, we actually worked together briefly. He helped us out with our own pricing at Webinar Ninja. Because Patrick is the pricing expert in the SaaS world. But in today's episode, I find out, how did he become that expert? How did he grow profitwell in the first place and was able to leverage his freemium model of offering the software, the main metric software, for free, and building a US with services and other features behind that. But we also get personal. We talk about how selling this company for $200 million has impacted his life, his ambitions, his mental health. Let's jump into that conversation now with Patrick Campbell. I'll be back to wrap up today's episode and share some of my favorite takeaways. But for now, let's get into that conversation with the founder of Profwell, Patrick Campbell.

Patrick, great to have you on the show, man. How you doing?

What's up, man? Good to catch up again. I'm excited to. We don't get to see each other as often as I'd like because you're all the way on the other side of the world, down under, as they say.

You're literally like the. The furthest possible place.

I think I'm now on the opposite. Yeah, I'm in Puerto Rico, so I think I'm like. The opposite. Yeah, exactly. So, yes, we gotta meet. Scheduling was fantastic for this. Yeah, yeah. Or somewhere.

So. Yeah, that sounds great, man. We've known each other for some time. I consider you a good friend. I think you're a very interesting person. And I don't say this just because you're on the show, but the reason why I think you're so interesting is because it's very rare, in my opinion. I meet a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of people in business where somebody is actually quite brilliant, but at the same time a nice person. Very hard combination to hit. Like most people that are very smart, you don't actually feel like they care about you or they have their best interest in mind. They just don't have that. Those soft skills. And I feel like I was your friend before, I kind of respected you as an entrepreneur, and that's very hard to hit. So I just wanted to start with that because I'm not sure if you're aware of it.

Yeah, no, I think it's kind of funny. So, one. Thank you. This is. This is why I hang out with you, basically. So I think, you know, it's Funny, I've been thinking about this lately because, you know, as maybe the lead is buried here, I sold, sold a company for, you know, pretty good sum. And so you have this, like, interesting, like, I'm calling it a refractory period, which is a little blue. But, like, you literally have this. You're like, what is life? What do I do? Like, you're having all these questions, and one of those things that kind of came up is like, I think that without being my own psychologist or psychiatrist, like, I, I, I'm just an incredibly insecure human being. And so, like, that manifests itself in a couple of different ways. And I think my way has evolved into, like, trying to be nice, trying to be helpful.

Right?

Because that, that gives back the security of, like, people, people like you or people like will, you know, respect you in certain ways.

Right?

Like, for example, like, you know, I, I have, like, you said, oh, he's brilliant or he's smart. And I was like, it's, I, I physically, like, jolts me, like, in an uncomfortable way. Like, I can't even admit that I'm smart, even though I have all this evidence.

I was about to say, like, have that I'm smart in your life.

I mean, no, no, I know, but, like, like, so, but even then, like, I graduated. I graduated first in my class in college, and I didn't work that hard, right? Like, and, and so it's like one of those things where, like, I was. I actually did another podcast, and this was a long time ago, and it kind of started me down this path with Sherry Walling, who I think you know as well, Rob's wife, and she asked me, when did you realize you were smart? And I had this whole, like, therapy session on the actual podcast. And I remember being like, oh, I don't even think that she's like, well, you graduated first year class. I was like, oh, I guess that does mean I'm, you know what I mean? It's, I think it's the insecurity that, like, helps me, you know, keep, and it rears its ugly head in many different ways.

But, yeah, so I'm a student. Yeah, I'm a student of comedy. And I love say I'm comedians. You know, I have aspirations one day. But one of the things that is a common thread, what you're mentioning is that a lot of them, like, they are incredibly confident on stage. They are great performers, they're amazing at what they do, but a lot of it comes from a place of insecurity where they feel Like, I want to feel fulfilled through the laugh, through, you know, the reaction of the crowd. So you're in good company, so don't worry about it.

Well, it's funny you mentioned that. I was hanging out with founders last week and then another founder, like, conference the week before, and I start looking, I started looking for it and it's just amazing how much insecurity actually exists. And there's a whole podcast episode we could do to be great, like, are you lucky? Are you insecure?

Right.

But it's probably a bunch of other things. But it'd be a funny podcast to go down the rabbit hole of.

Yeah. One of the things I don't know much about about you, like, we've hung out a bunch of times, we've had chats, but I know a lot about your upbringing or your childhood. Did you grow up in, did you, is it in the Midwest? In the U.S. where'd you grow up?

Yeah, I grew up in Wisconsin. So for any international folks, basically in the Midwest, which is like farm country, I grew up in a town with more cows than people, as the saying goes. And so, yeah, that's where I grew up. Upbringing pretty poor, you know, very. My dad was a union, like Tinner, it's called. It's like a sheet metal worker. He worked on, you know, skyscraper roofs basically to kind of like finish those roofs off. And there were plenty of times I remember, of like, strikes and stuff like that where I obviously didn't understand the nuances. I just knew that, oh, this means we're, we're, you know, eating Campbell soup every night, you know, something like that versus, you know, anything else. Yeah. And so that, that was a good upbringing for, I think, entrepreneurship and stuff like that. I, I, I, I actually never wanted to go into business.

I was gonna ask, are there any influences in your life or.

So I, I had a lot of entrepreneurial things that I did. Like, I was always looking for a hustle, if that makes sense. I was like, like, I remember in, even in elementary school, I, we because a very blue collar household at a really early age, we would make our own lunches because then we're like, parents taught us to make our lunches. And it's like, you're responsible for doing this while being a lazy kid. I would instead take just a big bag of animal crackers and then just trade, you know, to get other things basically in school.

And so you smell your lunch.

Yeah, exactly. And there's like, because like, my parents would never buy that stuff anyways. Right. Like, they Wouldn't buy like the, the stuff I would trade for, for all the kids who had, you know, kind of the expensive made for them lunches. But I think the other thing. And then there was a bunch of other, like, how do I make money? Like, oh, I can do, you know, lawn care business. I can do this, I can do that, right? Like it never was. Let me start an online website, right? Like some of the folks we hear about in our space. But yeah, it was never, it was, it was the blue collar. I, you know, not having any money that I think like led to that. And then the natural progression, which is, you know, almost cliche, was, okay, we worked really hard in like a blue collar manner. You're going to go be a doctor, right? Like, to this day, my dad wants me to be a doctor. Like, even, even he, he'll still be like, well, you would be a good doctor. Like, he would be like, he. Stuff like that, right? And then didn't, didn't love birds sound like immigrants? They're, they're, they're not. But it's like same vibe, right? Like, it's a very similar vibe.

Dude.

You're like to say it's like, I worked, you know, I, I, I worked my butt off for overtime so that you could like go to that summer camp so that, you know, you go be a doctor, right? Didn't love blood or anything like that. I went, I actually went to a summer camp for kids who wanted to go to med school. So that was a very niche camp. And I saw a, it was a recording, I think, but it was basically he got like cast his heart or whatever, like where they like take the needle through the leg and go up to the heart. I like turned white and basically passed out. And then I was like, well, I'm gonna go try to be a lawyer, because that's the other professional craft, right? And yeah, so that's, that's kind of the early days. I don't know how deep you want me to go to.

No, but that's great. I mean, that's, that's, there's so many things that I'm listening to what you're saying, and I'm like, I can definitely resonate with that. Growing up, one of the things that we kind of chatted online about because of the way we grew up. Like, my parents are immigrants. They came to the country with nothing. They didn't. When I say nothing, like, they came from Egypt and they don't know English. They don't know where to get their groceries. They don't know how to get a driver's license.

The.

The. They try to get a job and they don't recognize their degree from Egypt, so they got to do their degree all over. Like, it's just like, literally not.

Tell me about that. That's brutal.

Yeah, it's brutal. So growing up in that environment and same. Same environment, like, where your parents are, like, you know, making ends meet, trying to make the dollar stretch now that you have some money, you know, you made it public, you know, you. You sold your company for $200 million. Is. Is it hard for you to spend money? Like, for me, I'm gonna. Like, I don't act, you know, like, retail therapy doesn't work on me. Like, I don't actually enjoy spending money. And I think it's from my upbringing. Would you say the same for you or what?

It's. I'm glad you asked this question because I'm going to be a little telling with it because what's really funny about it, because, oh, you made millions of dollars and you're complaining about how hard it is to think about money still. It's not a very sympathetic thing, but it is really funny. So 1. The short answer is no, I don't spend anything still. It's been four months, so maybe I should. I don't know. But it's one of those things where, like, Jenny and I literally were talking. We were texting. She texted me. She's like, well, the price of Hulu is going up. I'm not really sure if we should keep. And I'm. And it's just a surreal experience because a $15 a month charge, like, doesn't do anything right? And like, just the money and it's kind of crazy. I also didn't have any investments before this, so we. We had this mindset. And I don't know if you know Dave Ramsey, but, yeah, we didn't. I wasn't like a huge Dave Ramsey fan. I didn't discover him until a couple of years ago. But I started listening just. And I've never listened to his actual show. I just listened to the clip on YouTube and what's kind of funny is what. What resonated with us. We didn't have college debt, but we were like, oh, money can bring couples together just as much as it splits people up, right? So we set off to. To basically pay our house off as quickly as possible. We didn't need to do it. We didn't need to do Gazelle, Intense, as he talks about, but we Basically just went, okay, well, let's try. Because we didn't. We never had that. And so we paid the house off. I had 20 grand and a paid off house. And then the sale goes through. And so we were. Our burn right now is very low compared to some of my peers who I was meeting with who also had exits and stuff like that. And so it's hard because I think the best way I would describe it is prior to this, I didn't spend money because I had it, but I also wanted this future state.

Right.

Yes. I had equity in my company, but I never felt real. Now that it's real. I never feared death before now, and I don't necessarily fear death now. And I don't know if this has resonated with you, but I definitely think about it. Right. This is why a lot of founders, they get an exit and all of a sudden it's, oh, I gotta get my health in order. Like, I'm working out twice a day. I'm like eating. I have a nutrition coach. I have all these other things that I could have afforded before and I could have done before, but I never did. Right, right. And I do think that some of the money things and to hopefully get a little practical is the best advice I got that turned out to be tr. It just amplifies the worst and the best of you. So if you had, you know, some sort of, I want to spend all my money on this. You're going to do now that more. If you were, you know, still insecure before the money, you're going to be just as insecure after the money.

Right.

Maybe even worse sometimes. Right. And so the thing that it also does or did for me, it did move the kind of the goalposts, as they say, a little bit. Because the reason I hired a nutrition coach was because I was like, well, if I don't do it now, I'm basically like this, I'm. This is definitely not me. Like, I'm never gonna be like the healthy guy. And so it does make things easier. And so we've like, loosened up a little bit there, but I haven't bought a car. Like, we bought a used Jeep wrangler that's three years old yesterday. Like, we finally got a car after four months and you know, basically being like, ah, next month we'll get a car, next month we'll get a car. And so, yeah, I, I don't know. I heard there's some adaptation that takes place over time, but I don't know. I'm not there yet. We'll basically see. I'm still looking at receipts, still making sure I get my refunds, all that kind of stuff.

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We're definitely going to get into, like, how did you get into this business of profit? Well, and grow it and bootstrap it and then eventually sell it. But I want to go a little bit deeper on what you just said because, you know, we've been running away at our ninja for eight years or so. We've been given, gotten a lot of offers and things like that, but we haven't really entertained selling the company and all that kind of stuff. One of my fears is because I hear a lot of people when they sell their company, when they sell their business, all of a sudden they're, they have all these mental health challenges, like they have, they have a hard time coping with that, that transformation, that change. But also, you know, even from a financial point of view, yes, maybe they, they get a payout or they get some stock or whatever, a combination of both. But that cash flow and that feeling of like, I can create wealth, you know, that type of feeling goes away.

Can you.

Do you feel like you had more personal mental health challenges since you moved off Paddle and you sold it? Sorry, you. You sold profit well at two paddle? Yeah.

Yes and no. So before I sold the company, I. I texted 30 founders who I knew or knew a bit of who had exits. And I basically asked them. I gave them two scenarios because we weren't originally going to sell. We were looking to raise money for the first time. So we were bootstrapped before, so we'd never raised money technically. And so it was. It was a question of, well, do we. Do we keep going and raise money or do we get. Get the bag?

Right, right.

And I asked the 30, I was like, what. What option would you choose? Right? And about 15 of them. So half of them said, sell, sell, sell, sell. Right? First company, you get your first, you know, major check. All that other stuff, like, your life changes, everything, you know, is different. All that kind of stuff. The other half said, I wouldn't have sold again. Now they all sold and they have the money. So it's a little bit hard to read through. But what was the most. What was the most telling is of that 15, half of them didn't go along with the company. They basically said, here are the keys.

Okay?

And of those seven people, three of them became drug addicts or alcoholics. And I think that the reason I give that is because, one, we very consciously wanted to keep going, not because of this data, but because kind of felt that mission still. But what I will say is I think that I am definitely going through something right now. Some of it's good, some of it's bad, as I mentioned. But what's interesting about it is I had this purpose, and I had this extreme purpose every single day. And that purpose manifested itself in many different ways. It was, I got to push the goalpost of just the company overall forward, which then was, I got to help this new hire figure something out. I have to, you know, settle that argument with Facundo. I have to do this. I have to do that. Right? And that purpose, all of a sudden, like, I'm in a limbo right now because my role, like Facundo, who's our head of product and my business partner, he basically was like, cool, they don't have a product leader. I'm just going to run all of product. And so just like instantly, he runs all. So he kind of just copies and pastes domain. Yeah, there's a bunch of tax on, well, you guys do it this way. Should we do it this way? What way should we do it? Oh, I have to talk to this person, build a relationship with that. Like, there's a lot of that. Peter, my other business partner, kind of has that as well, because he's like, great. You're going to just run sales on this, like, for this part of the organization. Right. I was put into a chief strategy officer role, which is. It's a great role because you kind of get to make it what you want. But that also is a problem because all of a sudden it's. It's kind of undefined. And so all of that purpose that I had is basically like, I still have part of that because there's just stuff to do. I want to make sure that this person, you know, they didn't get necessarily the outcome they wanted. So I want to make sure that they're in a good position to, like, get a good outcome you. For the. For the. The next bite at the apple with the IPO and stuff like that. But it was just one of those interesting things where I. I don't think I really articulated this as well as I just did, where all of a sudden I just don't feel like I have that purpose right now because it's not defined or to maybe state it as charitably as possible. I just don't see where anything I'm doing is connected to the greater purpose. And some. Some people would be okay with that. I think there's some people who just rest. Invest, right. I'm just not wired that way because I get so much purpose from my work. And so, yeah, I'm going through mental health challenges, I guess, and part of it's causing existential crises of, you know, not just who am I, but what do I want out of this. Right? Because if I just want to kind of take a active rest, kind of what's going on is perfect. Right? Because I give some value here and there. I answer some questions. I do a project here and there, but I'm just kind of, you know, go. Right. But I don't. And it's not really me. Right. And so I don't know. I don't know how that manifests. And so, yeah, I'm going through some stuff and it's, again, it's such a privileged thing because obviously, like, you know, great. All my mental health challenges with my big bag of money. Right. You know, and so. But it's, you know, problems and pain.

It's real.

And yeah, you know, people will experience this at some point if they ever saw their company or they go through a challenge like that. So definitely. Thanks for sharing, man. That's. That's huge. And I think it'll be super helpful for everybody listening, but I think it's.

Important for people listening. Just to maybe buttonhook that a little bit. It's important for people listening because I. Money helps you. It does. Like, it certainly helps you, Right? Like, I don't. I do sleep much better than I ever have. I don't worry. Like. And I even talked to Christian, the CEO of Paddle, and I remember mentioning him. I was like, I can totally empathize with some of the, like, pain you just go through as a founder, right. And as a CEO and stuff like that. But I. I can't feel it anymore. Like, I can't feel it because I'm not in that seat and no one else is in that seat. So I've been having a lot of conversations with him where I'm like, okay, like, if you're feeling this, tell me. Like, let me help, because I can at least. I at least have been in that pain. But I know I. I don't. I don't wake up going, oh, shit, I gotta worry about this. I gotta worry about that like, I used to. Because I'm not. I'm not in that seat. And that. It comes with that seat. And I think that for people listening, like, one. If you're in that seat, like, everyone's going through it. Everyone goes through it every day. And you might have great weeks and great months, but you're gonna have terrible weeks and terrible months is just how it works. But just know that and also know, like, whether you're in that seat or not, it's really difficult to empathize with that seat, because if you haven't ever been in that seat, you don't realize, like, how hard it is. You don't realize how much fear that person has. You don't realize how much paranoia they have.

Yes.

And even if they have an amazing team, and even if they're one of the best operators in the world, they still have those fears. And so I think that's a really big thing that I also realized. And I think the other thing for people listening is, like, money helps, as I started saying, but all of a sudden clears everything for you just to be like, oh, who am I? Because I used to be. I used to be. Well, when I get that, I'll. I said this before. I'll take care of this. Or, oh, when I, you know, get some money, I'll do this. It's like, oh, I have the money, and now I'm not doing those things. Ooh, I don't have that excuse anymore. And so it exposes who you are. And I don't know, I think building a company is one of the best self help, like totally activities in the world. And I think that once you get to, you know, the end of a chapter, it's, it's kind of like the last chapter of that book. It's like, okay, where's the next book? You know, where's the next book for that development and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, sorry to interrupt you. I just thought.

No, that's, that's that you added so much value to that comment. I want to learn a little bit more about the genesis of ProfitWell. Correct me if I'm wrong. ProfitWell was a product of Price Intelligently, which was the company before that. And then Price Intelligently was basically a service service business where you would help people with the pricing, their packaging, their value metrics, maybe even dealing with churn, all that kind of stuff. Which in my opinion is one of the smartest things you did because you recognize business is hard. Why am I going to make it harder to myself? One of the best businesses you could do is a service based business where you can charge a premium for a specific type of thing. Going back to the animal crackers. So, so and the lawns and all the hustles you did on the side. So walk me through like the genesis of this idea. Why did you start it? I remember when I discovered ProfitWell and the tool to, you know, be able to follow your metrics and just plug in your, you know, your payment processor and all that kind of stuff. I was just like why is this free?

Again?

Because I was paying a service beforehand like what is happening here? What's going on? And then I got into your ecosystem and went through dunning system and all that kind of stuff. But walk me through the why this business? Why. Why financial metrics?

It's a good question. So the shortest, let me try to give the shortest answer just to get the facts out because unfortunately there's a lot of moving pieces which was not intentional. So I again never wanted to get into business so but I my job out of college, I ended up working for the intel community. So I worked at nsa, which is kind of like a fun sexy title. But like I was an intel analyst and I was a kid out of school so yeah, I saw a bunch of cool shit I wasn't really working on as well I was but I wasn't like working on, you know, the movie stuff. But I then didn't love the bureaucracy. So I went to Google thinking, oh, this 30,000 person company at the Time, it's a tech company. It won't be bureaucratic. But of course it's bureaucratic. Right. And then I ended up working at a startup, and that's where I worked on pricing for the first time. It was the E commerce startup. I was basically trying to figure out how we could do a better pricing strategy. And I discovered that they gave this entry level kid me, like a couple years experience, this really important thing, that when we made changes, we'd see these big swings in revenue. Right. So it was one of those things where, okay, this is a really effective thing. They're not taking it seriously enough. And I don't know why that is, but I was not enamored with the culture. You're kind of getting a theme here. And I was basically thinking, I'm in my mid-20s, let's just jump out.

Right.

And that was a really hard decision given my background. But I realized if I worst case scenario, I'll get a job as a barista digging ditches, working construction. And I think that's, that's the whole concept of stay poor as long as possible if you want to start a business. Because all of a sudden I didn't have a mortgage, I didn't have kids, I didn't have any things. So it was a lot easier to jump out and start. I didn't think of it perfectly like that at the time.

Yep.

But the thing I'm trying to get across too is it wasn't this magical idea that I had been thinking about for a long time. It was all, let's just see what could happen. Right? Like that. Like, let's just see and figure it out. And keep in mind, I knew nothing. I knew next to nothing. I knew how to think because my background's in econometrics and math. I did intel analysts, I was sales op to Google, these types of things. But Google's idea of marketing is paid ads.

Right?

Like, they don't teach you how to market. They don't teach you any of these things. So when I jumped out, I was like, oh, we're going to do marketing. It's paid ads. I didn't know anything about SEO, anything about content, anything about anything. Right. I didn't know anything about product. I knew nothing. Right. And so this pricing thing, it was. It was actually at first a software product. So you basically would send a survey with some questions. We would take the data from those questions and we would calculate elasticity. And when I say we, it was just me in a room for like 18 hours a day I had some part time co founders which was really problematic. Everything's great now. But it was one of those things where you know, yeah, it's a royal we. Right. And to make a really long story short, what we found is that. And this is where the service business came into play. The beauty of a service business, if you, if you. I think the beauty of a service business is that if you have it but you know, you want to evolve from it. Unless you're fine just with like an agency or service business. Because we were like, oh no, we know that services should be the thing we do here, but VCs don't like services so we shouldn't do it. But basically these people came to us and they said, I really like the output of the software, but I don't want to do the work. Right, all right, well let's do the work for you. And they're like, well really like we want you to do the work and we want you to kind of come in and tell us what to do. Literally one of our first customers, we were there to settle an argument. Here's the data, here's what we think. This person's really. No one was right but like this is the more right answer. And you know, therefore we go and we're like, ah, services and we'll pay you a lot of money. We're like, okay. So that's what kind of evolved. And then what the thinking was is okay, well what if we cash flowed the product business and we cash flowed and started building this business and eventually we'll get to. At first it was we're going to host every pricing page in the world. Then there was a bunch of other ideas. At this point we had. I brought Peter on to lead kind of the sales side. And I think that what really worked out is we always knew we wanted to evolve from the service business. And I think the reason that works so well is because we had about 50, 60, I think at the time it was actually like 70% margin on that business because the pricing was good. And the problem was. Or the good thing was we poured all of that back into the business.

This was going to say it was funding the software.

Okay. And if you have this vision of we're going to get beyond where we are, that's what you do. If you don't, you end up taking those distributions, right? And all of a sudden like, yeah, we'll throw 10% into development. We'll throw it like. But no, we were like, we want to build something big this is our funding quote, unquote. So, like, every single dollar was going into investment somewhere. Right, right. And this was a good and bad thing because it was how we were funding ourselves. Right. That first year or the first six months of the business, it was just me. I sold, like, $112,000 worth of services, essentially. And then that next year, I think Peter, and with help from me, sold. I think it was probably like a half a million. Right. So all of a sudden, like, things are stacking up and we're getting this funding. The issue, there's. There's a couple issues with this, but that was. That was basically where we went. And when we were thinking about the product, we were helping a company that was about to IPO with their pricing, and we discovered that they were calculating CHURN and MRR incorrectly. And while that was happening, which are, if you're not in SAS2, like, this is the equivalent of opening your bank account, seeing the number and still getting it wrong. Like, it's just that fundamental of a number.

This is a common issue, by the way.

Yeah, yeah, totally. And what we wanted to do was we wanted to get to something that was more ubiquitous in terms of software. So we kind of started putting two together. And the original thought was, this will give us the data to do the pricing stuff we want. So if I get your financial data, I can then say, okay, here you got a bunch of value, but here's, like, where pricing's wrong. And, you know, if you just click this button, your pricing will be magical.

Right.

And long to make the rest of it as short as possible. We weren't going to give that away for free. We started giving it away for free because there's a bunch of competitors in the market. We started realizing analytics products are terrible to build because you do a lot of work to get accuracy and no customer appreciates it. They're never willing to pay that much. Three figures a month, maybe four figures a month, maybe $1,000 if they're large enough. But you also don't get that scale. So you don't get your smallest customer and your largest customer willing to pay vastly different sums of money. So it's just a terrible recurring revenue business. And we were going to shut it down, but then this thesis came, which is what we've had since, which was, well, what if we got the data? And then that data trained our algorithms to do things like lower your cancellation rate automatically, optimize your pricing automatically, these types of things. And it wasn't even about the network effect of Free of getting customers. It was very much, well, if we get every single customer or every single user basically improves those algorithms, we can't be beat. Because even if someone builds the functionality we have, they're not going to have the data we have unless they copy and paste the exact same strategy. But frankly, no one was insane enough to build basically like a bootstrap business to build a free product on data, which is not cheap. Right. And I think we were just naive to think it would be easier.

Right?

Which is kind of the classic story where, you know, the first time founders, you know, of course, you know, we'll go after it. Three, three quick notes to round this out. One, Free is beautiful when it is better than the paid competition because it gets the reaction that you gave. Why is this free? Like what's going on here? And it's not about, oh well, they monetize through this other thing. But it's more about why I would be crazy to use this paid competitor. And then on top of that, when these guys call me or email me to have a phone call about selling me something, I'll feel obligated to take it. And that thesis turned out to be right. And then the two other things in services, one, I think one of the biggest mistakes we made is we didn't take some money out of the business. My average salary over the nine half years was $71,000. It was basically like zero in the beginning, 30 grand again, no kids, no mortgage. And then at the end my salary was 150,000 a year. But even with COVID I was the first one to be like, oh, go to zero. You know, because that did that when we furloughed some people. And it definitely. And then no distributions in terms of profit, Even though some years we did have profit or we could have structured it to have profit. And I think this definitely it, it absolutely shaped some thinking when it came to the deal.

Right.

It's so shaped the thinking in a way that we probably still would have sold just given the dynamics of selling. But we would have had a different mindset if we had, If I had $1 million in the bank or something like that. And so that's, that's a big thing with like a services business that goes to product. I do think because of the float you get from profit, like I don't know if you should go straight up profit first, but in your, in your plan, just straight up like schedule those raises and then follow that schedule. Like we eventually did this. And it was one of those tough Conversations because we were like, well, we reached this revenue milestone, but all three of us, the three business partners, we were like, yeah, but this money for a raise could go somewhere else, right? But we still gave it to ourselves because we were like, no, we have to do this because we're definitely. It's definitely affecting us. And then the last thing on services business is I think that it's really hard. It's really hard to do a service and a product team because you end up feeding one and not the other. So facundo, in classic fashion, none of you know him, but if you did got everything you wanted. You want that extra hire, you want this? He would not say this. He would say, no, I didn't get everything I wanted. I wanted six engineers, not four engineers. But like, he got everything he wanted. And then Peter and I, who are kind of like trying to run the rest of the business, we. We would always like. And it wasn't. There was no trickery. It was just us, like, thinking clearly. We were just like, yeah, yeah, have the extra head because the product was such the focus. Well, what ended up happening is the product team got so far ahead of the rest of the company. So even marketing, like, our product team was cranking. We had this free product. We were finally hitting a clip. And I was the only person in marketing, in addition to, like, running the company, managing stuff. Right. Same thing with Peter. Like, we didn't, like, structure our sales because all of a sudden it was, well, the end of the quarter. Are we going to spend time figuring out that okr or are we going to, like, hero ball to make sure we get the number we need to continue the business moving forward. Right. And so I think that's another thing you have to keep in mind is like, you have to like, if the service business is going to be something that also grows, you have to fund it. Not necessarily equally, but you still have to fund it every single quarter and increase that funding. We. It causes so much heartburn by, like, just giving everything to product and not really thinking of the holistic business as much as we should have.

This is gold because I can definitely resonate with what you were saying.

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There's a few things I want to kind of highlight as takeaways for me and hopefully others, is one, you were able to build a superior product because of the services. Actually the data that you knew was important to those clients or features that I Now enjoy in profitWell, like I can now, I have that feature that offers an upgrade to people that are most likely to upgrade because you have all the data on who upgrades at what time and the activity, that user and all that kind of stuff. But because you were in the trenches, because you talked to customers, you actually did your job was basically customer interviews for a profit. You're able to know what's important, what to build. You know, for me, with webinar Ninja, I was an educator for 13 years. I, I know what works for coaching and teaching. I'm probably the most critical user out of the whole team. I work with entrepreneurs constantly with this podcast and the 100 RMBA business, which is my service. Businesses like this, it's, it's. I always call it like the golden child and the vampire, right? There's the golden child that does everything right. It's that firstborn child that always gets straight A's and it does everything you wanted to do and is. Is funding everybody. And then you got the vampire that's just like, give me more, give me more, you know, and, and that's great insight where you have to make sure that the golden child needs to be fed to. The golden child needs to be praised as well. It needs to be taken care of. So you kind of have to balance that big time, but huge, huge. You talked about marketing and I want to get into the fact that at some point a few years ago at ProfitWell, you guys became like a media company, right? We're big fans of Wistia and what they do over there and they create great content and shows and podcasts and I was like a religious viewer of pricing page teardowns on YouTube, right? You guys just do these page, page teardowns just to watch this thing every time. It was like so entertaining to me. It was like Brooklyn nine nine for me or something. Right?

So nice.

Tell me a little bit about like the cost involved and the. And how you guys kind of got the ball rolling with saying, hey, let's become this brand affinity machine where people come to us because of our content.

So yeah, I think, I think you're going to start seeing a theme. It's, it's we, if we really boil down to like our success and some of our failure of like why we weren't a billion dollar exit. It's all first principles thinking, like in everything you heard about services, business and all this is first principles thinking, the media thing. So for context, for people don't know us, when I was going to build our marketing team, this was, gosh, five years ago now. I basically sat down and we were doing content marketing, which was basically I would write a post or two a week and then eventually we had some outsourced people who were doing a lot of that work at our direction. But I thought, okay, who's the first hire? What's our strategy? These types of things, the classic go in on one thing rather than doing a bunch of little stuff, a bunch of things. And I started looking to the research and there's a couple things I discovered at the time. One, a B2B blog could expect a max average of 1.6 visits per week from a qualified lead, meaning in the best of worlds, 1.6 touches with their content, right? Which is not a lot, right? No, the. When I looked at media companies, like, you know, the skim, which was very popular, then bloom, like straight up media companies, right? This was even really before the hustle was getting, getting going, right? It was like anywhere from three and a half to like seven or eight, right? And so touches per week. Then I realized, okay, well, what would it look like? There was a bunch of other data that we looked at, but if we produced a series of a show, like a season, let's say of a show, like 13 episodes for a quarter, one per week, it would cost us, and this is all back of the envelope. It'd be like, oh, $10,000, right? Well, the ebooks we were producing that were really successful. Each of those ebooks basically cost $10,000. So we started kind of putting the math together and the TLDR was the best companies in the world at driving traffic. Audience and eyeballs are media companies. They are the worst at monetizing them. Probably the best business at monetizing is SaaS or software, like depending on how you look at it. But they're very good at monetizing traffic. Probably kind of terrible at driving traffic, actually, if you really compare it. This is why I love Going to certain conferences where there's a lot of direct response people or E commerce people, because just the conversations are just insane. Like, you're like, oh, you're on such a different level than any B2B marketer I've ever met when it comes to brand or E commerce or Facebook ads, those types of things. So long story short, that was kind of the beginning. And we basically thought, okay, we're going to do media. And the difference between an inbound marketing and inbound media strategy is that inbound media is basically you're producing episodic content, and most of the time it is podcast or most of the time it is video. It could be written episodic as well. But you're trying to build audience rather than just try to drive people to an ebook or some sort of offer, Right? And at. At Sail, we basically had eight different podcast or video series. One was pricing pitch, teardown, like you mentioned. And we did it in a very bootstrapped way in the sense of like, we got costs like a season of profitable report cost us like two grand. A season of pricing page teardown cost us probably five grand. Like, we got the episode cost down a lot. We worked a lot on that before scaling certain. Certain things or adding different shows because we knew we wanted more shows, because you want to align shows to audiences or align shows to pain points. So we do a show on pricing because unless you're, you know, a Stan like you are, you're only really looking for it when you have that problem, right? And then you binge the entire season, right? And so we did this before all the cool kids did. I just always like to point that out whenever I get a chance. And we did it because we were thinking about, you know, what was going to be the best way up the mountain, you know, built out a team. At Sail, we had about five people on the team, which is pretty cool. Like, you know, because it's a pretty scrappy team for what we're doing. And you just get a lot of benefits. The first conference I went to, after probably about a quarter of doing this, you know, the conference before, I would get on stage and be like, oh, who here has heard of price intelligently? Or profitwell? And you'd get like scattered a couple hands, right? Because people read our content, which is always deep. That conference I went to after that quarter, it's like, you know, 75, 80% of the room because we started doing video. And video just gets a wider audience. People like to consume it. They share it more. You Know, people are just lazy, right? And you know, certain types of content I want to do only written, but it was pretty powerful. And then it also made this look so much bigger than we are. It was also part of the, the value of the sale was, oh, we have this brand and we have so many people not only using this free product now, which has about 30,000 companies using it, but we also had, you know, so many people just eyeballs, you know, coming to us. And I think it definitely played out, you know, the thesis, which I think.

Is great, that's pretty incredible, man. And the content, the quality was incredible. It was like high production quality. And you know, Nicole, my co founder and wife, she's a New York Film Academy graduate. So like, we, we really are snobs when it comes to like watching content. Like, come on, make, make, make a little bit of an effort here. You don't have to have your laundry in the background, whatever. Like, the point is, is that it, it felt a lot more expensive than five grand for a season. It felt really, like really well done. So well done with that, for sure. You're, in my opinion, are probably the pricing expert. I can't think of anybody who's like more a seasoned. When it comes to pricing and, you know, packaging and value and all that kind of stuff over the years. What is some area in pricing or pricing pages or packaging. Did you change your mind on. Did you feel staunch about one at one point and feel like. I don't think I believe that anymore?

Yeah, I used to be very anti freemium.

Okay, wow.

Because you're the pricing person and you're talking about free, right? The price is zero. But the reason I was is because I didn't realize freemium is not a part of your pricing, it's part of your acquisition. And I think people, because it's a $0 plan, they put it in part of pricing. You gotta think about freemium as like a premium ebook, right? Like that's, that's really what you're doing is you're opening the top of your funnel with a very high quality piece of content, which is a free product. So that, that's a big one that I've changed on. I think that like all entrepreneurs and content writers, I think in the early days, you're, you're a little more sure of yourself. You're like, you have to do this. You have to, you know, and then over time you're like, well, it depends on what you're optimizing for. And it depends on, we had one of those.

Well, conversations.

Yeah. Yeah. And then I think. I think there's also one of the most painful things to realize, both from a soul perspective, but also just from a success perspective, was I used to teach how to actually figure stuff out. I used to teach, like, customer development. I used to teach because. Because that's all it is. Like, the big secret with pricing is there's. There's one group of people who understand where you should be priced. It's your customers. You just have to talk to them in the right manner. You just have to, like, break through. And when you get certain data, you have to interpret it certain ways, and it's a skill that you can learn. But that's not a pill. It's not a silver bullet. Right. You know, and people like. Like the quick, just tell me what to do. So I go to these conferences, and I would teach her. I'd run a workshop, and I go through, here's everything you should do, and here's how to, like, get the survey data. And this is when you get the survey data, how. Here's how you cle it. And here's, you know, the objection handling votes, a survey. Right. You know, those types of things. And then, you know, 20% of the audience would do it, and they would see, oh, my God, this is amazing. Right? It's the same reason whenever we talk about customer development, everyone retweets it because they know they should be doing it, but they don't do it because it's. It's not the pathways. Resistance. Right. So I. I stopped doing that because it was like, I would get these amazing reactions, but then no one was doing stuff. So I started breaking things down to a little bit of if this, then that, or like, here's the starter thing to do. Right?

Yeah.

Like, one of the most successful, like, pieces of content or parts of a talk that I have now is here's the email to send when you're raising your prices. And it goes over really, really well. But it's also like. Yeah, but don't send the email unless you've done this and done. Yes. And done this and all these other things. Right. It's a soft skill.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's. Yeah, it's hurt my soul a little bit. And. But I just think that's business. Right. Like, people want. And this is ironic, given our whole mission is very do it for you on basically everything. Right.

Yeah.

And that's also why paddle made so much sense, because they're very do it for you for billing and tax and Everything like that. And we'll do it for you for pricing and retention and those types of things. So I'm trying to think of another really practical example as I go through that. I think I used to, so I used to kind of think about.

Like.

A lot of people talk about good, better, best. I actually think good, better, best is it's the equivalent of Columbus discovered America in 1492. Yeah. Like, it's information and it's like a piece of information for you, but as soon as you go to like even high school, if not college, you learn. It's a little more complicated.

Right.

With like Native American tribes and we don't have to get into U.S. history. But long story short, good, better, best is basically, it's really good advice because before that everyone would just have one price. It's a hundred dollars. And then people are like, oh, different customers, you know, we should have different price levels. But then it's like, yeah, but then you got to take it to the next logical conclusion, which is it's a lot more than three. So like, how do you manage that? And this is where value metrics and pricing metrics come in and a bunch of other things. The other thing I did too, which I think is interesting and might be applicable for other folks, is there's this thing called the Professional Pricing Society. I have never been a member. I have never gone to an event. I think a lot of them hate the content we put out because it's super basic compared to what they're doing because they're all PhDs, like figuring out like, well, I moved these three SKUs and we saw this increase in blah and they're like, it's just, it's, it's great. But the problem is, is like, again, it's kind of like me trying to teach customer development. It's like it's not as relevant and, and I felt a little insecure about that early in the business because I thought, oh, I need to be part of the pricing community. And it's like, there's no pricing community in SaaS. Like, I'm going to become the pricing community, which is great, but I don't need to be a part of this general pricing community. And some people, they have those hang ups about being a part of associations and stuff. And at the end of the day, it's all about what your customer needs, wants, et cetera.

I love it, man, I love it. And one of the things I learned from you in our conversations is that, you know, figuring out your pricing, your value metrics you know, maximizing the value for the customer and for the business. This is one bucket. How you implement that in the UI of your pricing page is another thing altogether. Like, what I was doing was like, I was. How am I going to. We're going strict implementation like that. What I want to do for Value metric is going to be hard to translate into ui. Like, don't worry about that. That's somebody else's job. Just figure out what you need to do first and then roll out the blueprint and head it over to the, the construction crew. So you decide to sell profit. Well, you paddle acquires, you, you join their team. I wanna. If you can remember what was the one kind of fact in your head that you kept coming back to that made you confirm your own decision that, okay, it's time to sell. Like, we all often make decisions in life and then there's always something that goes back. Like, well, I can't deny that fact. So it's hard for me to say no to this.

Yeah. So there's a couple. So one, if you go through a sale, get three Sherpas. Like, people have gone through it before. The reason you get three is because there's going to be things that come up that you're, you're gonna, you're gonna. Especially if you're not gone through it before. There was plenty of situations where I was like, they're asking for this thing. Does that mean they don't wanna buy the company anymore? Like, this was in diligence and it was. It's like I asked those three. They're like, all three of them separately are like, no, don't, don't be stupid. Like, that's, that's easy that they're just asking because they're asking. Right. But the other reason is, is they will give conflicting information when it comes to like direction and these types of things, which I think is great because then you can filter it and kind of make a decision based on what makes sense. But the reason I say that is because some of the best advice I got was just around when I Talked to those 30 founders was you just have to come up with your own framework of what you're trying to optimize for. Right. And what I mean by that is, Faku, Peter and I sat down and we basically decided, okay, we are over the emotional because Christian, I was asking for like advice on fundraising and stuff. And he's like, well, what if we just bought you? And I was like, oh, my baby. Oh no, you can't buy My baby. Right. Like, that's the obvious reaction. But we got over that within a week. Because it was. It's never binary. It's always, if these circumstances are met, of course we would sell. Because you're. Even if you're the 100% shareholder, which I wasn't, you end up sitting there and going, well, I'm going to take away this million dollar payout from this person who's been with me for like six years. Right. You know, that type of a thing. Right.

That's the other thing.

And so. Yeah, but you have a fiduciary responsibility. Right. And so we basically came up with like the things we're caring about, these check boxes, and it's like, well, if they check all these boxes, then we should sell.

Right.

And we tried to do that as early as possible and dispatching as possible because as soon as numbers start get thrown around, you might start, you know, kind of bending on those things. And we talked to a bunch of different people and we ended up getting, you know, a number of. Lois, we were very blessed to do that. But it was, it was very, it was very, you know, in those moments, you had to keep coming back to the framework. And the framework, for us, there's a couple of things. There was a price and the price was different depending on the buyer. There are some buyers where the price was much higher because the environment that we were going to go into, even for two years was not going to be very enjoyable or, oh, they're going to give us glorified roles. But really we're just resting, investing, which is not what we wanted to do. Some people, you may want to do that.

Right.

So the numbers is a little expected value analysis. They're going to be different.

Right.

There was, there were some aspects of roles.

Right.

So Faku needed to be running product. Right. You know, I needed something substantive. Right. And one of the mistakes I think I made is I didn't define my role enough before.

Before.

I think we really should have defined my role beforehand because it just led to the vacuum that I was telling you before we were recording where it's like now it, like it's kind of changing. And when it's not changing, it's like, not necessarily. I don't want to say it's not being taken seriously. It's a little too judgmental and I don't mean it in judgmental way, but it's like there's just, there's all this ambiguity which means, like, I don't feel as fulfilled as I could and they're also, you know, they're not like, that's fine. They're like, oh, that sucks. Like, how do we figure this out? But it's, it's, it's, you know, there's always this day to day business stuff figuring out. So it's tough. Like getting acquired I think is a lot tougher than people think. I didn't think it was going to be as tough as it was. And it's, and it's actually a really easy one compared to what I've heard from a bunch of other people. But yeah, Peter needed substantive roles. Everyone needed to be taken care of. And if they weren't going to bring on part of the team, like there needed to be like significant comp for those folks. We had everyone coming on board with Paddle, so that was great. And then there was some, there were some other pieces around the decision making. Even if they checked all these boxes, why is it a good decision? I think this is kind of what you're getting at. I think for me, we sit on top of all these billing systems and it was almost impossible to see a future where we either didn't build our own billing system, which then puts us in basically part conflict, or we started getting real close to that rail and they would not be able to. Like we already have this issue with certain billing systems, I won't name them where it's like we just, we just can't get the API access that we need to create a great product. And then we have to decide do we build a crappier product than this other billing system or do we just not build it right? Which is a tough situation to be in. So there's this like channel conflict that is, or this partner conflict that's potentially happening. The other thing that was sitting in the back of my mind was very much our TAM is tough. So there's only about 150,000 subscription companies in the world. SaaS, business subscription media, subscription commerce, there's only 150,000 logos. And that number is not growing that fast. It was flat in 2018. Like it actually went down a little bit in 2018. So it's not like now the revenue on those companies is growing exponentially. And that's great. That's why our pricing models are very paid for performance. But climbing up that mountain was just going to get harder and harder even without this potential partner conflict. Right.

And you really already dominated the market.

Yeah, we had 30,000 companies out of the 150 using it. Right. And that was, you know, we didn't always serve more than just SaaS, right? So we had so much. We have so much more of a SaaS market than I think of the other markets. But what's fascinating too, is that when you think about that partner conflict, it also is coming from them. Because Stripe, their analytics, they're not accurate. They're pretty basic. But like, like it's something, right? Someone's going to look at their graphs and be like, well, I don't need these other graphs even if they're free, right? Even if they're deeper. And we could solve that by just constantly going deeper. But how many fronts are we going to fight? That's a really big question, right? And so we kind of looked at this and we went, okay, well, if the multiple is great, all this other stuff's great, we feel like we'll be fulfilled enough. And then we'll also feel like we got the number for the work that we did and we're going to go on an adventure going forward with, like a group that we really like, culturally resonated with, which is paddle, you know, okay. Like, again, we'd be selfish or egotistical not to sell. And I will say the one thing that probably was a thing I kept coming back with, which is your original question. I asked Faku because I think I'm gonna build with Faku and Peter the rest of my life. Like, there might. There'll be other people, right? But I think it's like when you find that group, it's so hard finding the group, and then you spend so much time getting to work together, and then all of a sudden you're just done and you're like, okay, good luck. I was like, no, you probably want to. You should build together. But I asked him, I said, hey, are we doing this in 10 years? Like this profitable, basically? And he's like, no. And I was like, okay, like, crazy market. All these other checkboxes are coming. Like, we gotta do it, right? And so that was the thing I kept coming back to, which I didn't think would be the thing that I would keep coming back to. But if he was like, yeah, like, then I don't know, maybe we wouldn't have sold. And I don't know that maybe that would have been a mistake. So it was. It was a regret minimization, definitely. But also, you know, you gotta keep those folks who are your 10x people, which are typically your business partners. That's why you work with them, like, kind of going. And there were some other things where we Were really bad at hiring middle management. There's a lot of reasons for it. Some self inflicted, some not. We're really good at developing that talent, but all of a sudden that talent, average tenure is like six years of our core management group. They're not getting like some of them are making more money than me, but not that much more money.

Right.

Like we're all kind of making like good money but not great money. And there's like an exit opportunity. You're kind of, it's a lot of risk because one of them ends up leaving within the next 18 months and then you're like, oh crap. Like now it's a huge problem and you're fighting even more fronts. And so yeah, that was kind of the calculus and hopefully that's helpful to someone listening.

Super helpful man, super helpful. And one of the things I think maybe I'm not sure if if you recognize this or not, but I think most founders don't have that honest conversation and self awareness of like these are some major threats of, of of ahead of me. You know, a lot of founders are maybe a little bit over confident, maybe a little delusional about the, the potential of their business and you know, oh, we'll crush everybody, that kind of thing, you know, and you're but honest about the fact that hey, you know, where is this heading? What are some threats ahead of us? You know, is this worth fighting? Like no doubt you probably can put up a good fight, but maybe a ceasefire and going home in peace and, and do something afterwards that's rewarding is the best way to go. So I think that's really, really a huge takeaway for me is just like that, you know, as painful as it could be, you gotta just face the facts and see yourself as an investor in your own company and be a third party. Yeah, we've really gone over on time. But I, I want to ask one more question.

Keep rocking. Yeah.

Oh, I love it. So we're gonna go back to post exit.

I mean we're friends and. But I don't know you.

Yeah, like intimately. But my guess is you're horrible at taking a vacation. Okay.

From what I've seen online, easy guess, I think. Yeah.

Why, why do you have such a.

Hard time or why do founders have such a hard time taking a break and saying, hey, I did a thing, I did something good, I deserve to recharge my batteries.

Why is that such a challenge?

I think there's a mindset and then there's a maturity issue. So the mindset issue Is. It's probably very similar to you. I love what I do. I love what I do, right? Even with, like, trying to figure out, like, I commented on, like, oh, we're trying to. My role's kind of ambiguous. Like, I still love what I do, right? And it's not, it's not the space. Like, it's not. Like, if I was selling coat hangers, I would know more about coat hangers than anyone else. I'd be trying to figure out the code hanger market. Who am I partnering with? Like, I would.

I just. It's.

It's.

And I don't even think it's the game. Like, it's not like, Like, I. Maybe if I was an academic or I'd be doing something else, like, I would just. I know I would just be just as intense about it. And so I think there's this love, right? And every time it, Every time things would get good inside the business and I would have, like, oh, I should take some time off, I would. I'd be like, well, it's fun right now. It's really fun right now. And then anytime it was really bad. And in startups, like, like, it's a founder mindset thing, which is not healthy, where you're always like, it's really good or it's really bad, right? You're kind of see sawing. You're. You learn to be pretty even. Which thankfully I did by the end, which I think was great. But long story short, like, it's just. It's so much fun, right? And I think that being said, like, I hadn't taken a vacation in five years. I took two weeks off in August for the first time in five years. And before that, like, I had a day where I took off because Jenny was like, we're in Orlando. We're going to Harry Potter world and just tough.

You're gonna have to go give me your fault. Yeah.

Yeah. And so, like, and before, like, nothing even. Like, I would go in the office on Christmas, not that long. I'd go in for like an hour or two. But again, I just, I wanted to, right? And sometimes it was a need and sometimes I'm convincing myself. I wanted to, but I, I think it. I think that's a really driving factor right now. The maturity thing is just because it's fun doesn't mean, like, doing that is healthy, right? And doesn't mean that, like, you get your best, right? And I don't know, I. I think that I don't buy into the narrative that you have to take X amount of time off to be better. Like, I just don't buy into the narrative. I think it's the same narrative with work life balance. Like, no, like, you're looking for work life fit, and if you want this side of life, then you need a job that fits that life. Same. Like, and I love what I do, and my life fits around what I do. Right. Which is a little bit of a flip. Again, no kids. Everyone I talk to about this who has kids, like, oh, it'll change after kids. But they also said it would change after, you know, this or that and hasn't. Right. And so I know kids are a pretty big deal, obviously, in terms of change. But to make a long story short, like, I don't buy into those narratives, but I do think that a vacation can provide some clarity and some distance. Right. And I think distance was really important for me right now because my identity in so many different ways has been tied to profit. Well, not just from a marketing perspective, but just in terms of, like, everything. And just having two weeks and the first day, like, you're gonna love this. The first. I had so much anxiety the first day. I just started walking, and I walked on a treadmill for 31 miles, like, just an insane amount because I was just going like crazy. But I think learning to be able to kind of not have to do that and to switch gears is something that, like, I'm trying to figure out. And I know I'm capable of it. And that's why, like, I think that scheduling the vacations. And I would always tell people, like, and I would never expect anyone to work as much as I did, but I would always tell them, like, oh, when you're on the current vacation schedule, the next one. Right. You know, if you're in trouble with vacation. So, like, I never did what I said. But to make a long story short, I think that for me, I do know, and I do know that, like, having some of that distance will improve my thoughts. And so that's the reason to do it, rather than, like, you need to recharge, blah, blah, blah, Which I think some people that might be the case, especially if you have, like, physical labor job or a mentally laborious job as well. But I think that for us who are privileged to work in tech and, you know, there's equivalent of us, or there's another scenario where someone's digging ditches, I just think that there's a mission that when I see people who are, like, taking, you know, 12 weeks off a year and like not getting what they want and instagramming and being $30,000 millionaires. I'm kind of like, not only are you not getting what you want, but also like, to me, and this is a very personal opinion, it's like, it feels disrespectful to like the person who's digging that ditch, right?

Totally.

Now if you take the 12 weeks because it's best for you and you want like a great life and all these other things, I don't judge you. But, like, it's, it's just the people who kind of like say something different and do something different like that, that, that just bothers me a little bit. So there's my rambly, clearly actually mature rant about vacation there. So.

Yeah, well, the reason why I asked the question is because this is something that I had to work through and I'm, I'm going to give you my synapses and maybe it resonates with you, maybe not. But you and I have a Michael Jordan problem with that. What does that mean? Is Michael Jordan, if you ever watch the documentary Last Dance or you're a basketball fan or whatever.

Yeah.

You know that he was a highly competitive person, but really his problem was, is that like, he just had to win at all costs. Right? He's highly. He just wants to win, win.

Right.

And I just feel like I want to win. Right. Even when I go back to my teaching days, I used to put in crazy hours and I used to do all this, all the stuff that no one asked me to do just because I thought this would get me to a win. Right. Whatever that win is in the education world, blah, blah. What I didn't know and what I've learned over years is that when I'm not in my game, when I'm not, in Michael Jordan's case, playing basketball or doing your business or whatever, education or digging ditches, it's healthy to let other people win. Meaning like your family, yourself, your body, your mind. Like, you don't have to win that game too. You know what I'm saying? Like, just pick a game and win. And that really has helped me.

Yeah, I think it's more. I totally agree with everything you said. I think it's. It's also more. Again, I, I don't like, I'm not judging people on vacation. Right. No, I think it's. But I think it's more of a finding that fit. Right?

Yeah.

If you have a great life, you work two days a week and the other three days you're woodworking or teaching your kids or spending time with your wife or husband or whomever, Right? Like, that's fantastic, Right? Yeah, it's so great. Right? And I, I think it's just more of, I've had a long, like, difficult time in my life, like, being myself essentially. Like, I've had a long, like, like it's okay to be me. Like, that comes from that insecurity, right? And I used to think it's, it's almost the opposite of the problem that most people have. Like, I used to think like, oh, like I, I have to like 9 to 5, I have to like, do this. Oh, I'm working too hard, right? Like, I'm in the, like, I would get that from like my peers at Google where it's like, well, you know, you make the same amount of money whether you work because it's salary, right? I was like, yeah, but there's like that higher purpose, right? And so I, I do have the Michael Jordan problem. 100. I absolutely know what you're saying. And I think, But I think for me it's, it's this whole like Teddy Roosevelt thing. Not the man in the arena, which I think is actually not his best speech. I think his best speech was, I think it's called the doctrine of a strenuous life, where he basically talks about like, you know, again, like, you, you've been given, you know, a privilege somewhat in life. Like, don't waste it, right? Like, your, your job isn't to have a life of ignoble ease, like a life of leisure. Your, your job is to, you know, go after the hard thing, right? And so I think for me it's, it's the way I've been tricking my brain, which I think is the healthy. It's not tricking, but it's just making it more healthy is I need to be able to not just go all in on one thing, right? And I want to pick my spots, but it's not like I need to be the best partner or I need to be the best fitness or whatever. It's more of like, what are my spots? And I think if I'm all in on one spot thing, I'm not picking my spots, right? I'm, I'm like, so one dimensional. And for me it can be tangential spots like, hey, I want to get a better personal brand, right? Or, hey, I want to like, right now, fitness is a big thing, right? Like, these are all things that kind of help this central mission. But I think it's the, I think Vacation for me helps me get distance. So I think less one dimensionally about my mission, I guess is the best way to put it. Yeah, but I still want to win at my mission. Right. And so that's, that's just the one thing. Like, I, I'm not willing to give it up. Like, I'm not willing to give that up. But it doesn't mean that I'm the only one who has to win. I mean, in order for me to win, everyone else has to actually win more because they're the ones kind of building the thing. Right. And I'm. I'm a steward leader kind of a thing. So. Yeah, I don't know. This is. There's a good blog post here.

There's something here. There's something here. But yeah, I want to. Yeah, go ahead.

No, no, I was just gonna say I think it's like also one of those things that, similar to like the money conversation. It's like, can we talk about this publicly? Like, can we, can we, can we have this conversation? Right? Because it's, you know, again, it's a very, very blessed conversation to have.

Totally. Patrick, I love sitting with you, man, and chatting. I forgot we're recording a podcast, you know, a few times when we're chatting away, I'm always here to help you and support you in any way professionally, personally. You know, I'm a big fan of what you've done in your life and I've been really grateful of your generosity over the years. So thanks for being on the show and, and supporting other entrepreneurs. Get better at what they do.

Thanks, man. Thanks for having me. And likewise, I, I still tell Jenny about those cookies. I was like, oh, yeah. I was like. She's like, who are you talking? Remember the guy? Remember the, the guy and the galaxy who, like, gave us his cookies? He's like, yeah. I was like, yeah, it's his podcast. You're more than the cookie guy. She just. That's what she remembers. Because if I was like, you know, the webinar guy, she'd be like, what? I know. I don't. Because she doesn't know your business as well or your business.

So they're called Anzac cookies, which is Australia New Zealand Army Corps. And basically it commemorates when they went to World War II together and fought. And those cookies are just basically coconut cookies.

Great, great. We're still talking about them. It's been three years pre Covid. Man.

Free plug for Anzac cookies.

There you go. Now that everything's open, I hope we get to see each Other pretty soon.

Sure.

Wow. What do I say about this conversation? I thoroughly enjoyed sitting down with Patrick and getting the chance to really get into his head and understand what his experience has been. You know, one of the things people don't talk about is that success has challenges. When you look at Patrick's situation from afar, he's like, hey, this is amazing. This guy bootstrapped his business. He sold it for $200 million to paddle. The guy must be living the life. And, yes, that is huge, and that's an amazing accomplishment, but he's got to move on with life. He's got to figure out another path. Yes, he's comfortable financially, but that's just one part of life that's sorted. It's a big part of. But we have to be aware that when we're in that pursuit of growth and financial freedom and abundant wealth, that, yes, it will solve some of our problems, a lot of our financial problems. But like Patrick says, it just heightens who you are. It heightens or highlights all the habits that you had before. The things about yourself that you're not happy with are still there. You need to still work on them. And I really meant what I said about Patrick. He's one of my favorite people because he's incredibly smart. He's brilliant. But he's humble and kind, a tough combo. And he says it's because of some of his insecurities. Well, I guess those insecurities keep him humble. It makes him feel like he needs to kind of compensate and go the extra mile to make sure people are taken care of. Well, I gotta say, Patrick, you're amazing. And you've been a good friend to me and to Nicole and our business. And you've done an incredible job being vulnerable and sharing your story with everybody who listens to this podcast. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe on your favorite podcast app. And if you loved today's episode, go ahead and share it. Just send them to 100mba.net mba2143 Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I want to remind everybody that, you know, Patrick grew his business. He sold over $200 million. And that's amazing and it's inspiring, but that's the path he took. It's not the path everybody should take. Maybe that's not right for you. Maybe you should be running your business for sure a of lot because it gives you joy. Maybe you should grow your business to the point where you sell it for 10 million. Everybody's situation and wants and likes and ambitions and what's best for their circumstances is different. So take inspiration from today, but carve your own path and make your own decisions on what to do with your business. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode.

I'll see you then. Take care.

Of.

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