Bootstrapping to +2M Users With 0 Employees and No Investors with Ania Wysocka, Rootd

I've just released a book, from grassroots to greatness 13 rules to help you build iconic brands with community led growth. We cover stories from big brands and small all the way from Harley Davidson to HubSpot to Nike Disaster to Gainsight. To give you the frameworks to build a community led business that will take you from an obscure idea to a movement to a cult like phenomenon. Check it out at from grassroots to greatness dot com. The digital copy is on for 99 cents.

Recognize and celebrate little wins that you have along the way. I think it's really easy to just get caught up in the next thing. Like me, totally guilty of this. I would hit a goal and then I would like almost feel nothing and I would move on to the next one. It's like, no, no, no, actually take a step back, maybe journal, maybe figure out what you feel in the face of that goal and what that accomplishment means to you before you jump to the next thing. That can be really tricky. But I think overall that's, you know, those things they say, it's not about the destination, it's about the journey. Enjoy the journey if you can and experience the journey regardless of whether it's enjoyable or not.

I need some traction. You need some traction. Let's get some traction. Hey, what's up, innovators, entrepreneurs, visionaries and disruptors. This is your Traction podcast host, Lloyd Lobo. We're a community of over a hundred thousand people just like yourself, on a mission to help you get the methods, the money and the madness to explode your business growth. Featuring stories and tactical advice straight from those who've done it before, like Shopify, Twilio, Asana and many more. Have you ever experienced the suffocating grip of anxiety? That knowing feeling in the pit of your stomach? It's a battle that countless individuals face, often feeling trapped in a whirlwind of fear and uncertainty. Our guest today, Anya, knows that struggle firsthand. When she personally experienced the scarcity of quality resources for anxiety support, she didn't just sit idle. She dove headfirst into expert research, determined to conquer her own pain and help others do the same. And from that determination, Rooted was born. Rooted is more than just an app. It's a lifeline packed with therapist approved features. It's your superpower to combat anxiety and regain the confidence you deserve. And guess what? It's taken the app world by storm, claiming the coveted number one spot on iOS and Google Play with a staggering 2 million users across 150 countries. So buckle up, Traction fam, because Anya is About to take us on a wild ride of how she built the company to eight figures in revenue and over 2 million users with zero employees. Welcome to Traction. Anya, how you doing?

Hey, Voi. Thanks for having me.

We've known each other for a while from your previous company when you were working at Clarity and you're a huge community supporter and doing a lot for the community and you had this as a side hustle and it just took off. Super excited to get into your backstory. How did you get into entrepreneurship? Let's start there.

I was always at least a bit entrepreneurial growing up. I always had ideas for like side hustles. And recently somebody asked me this question. So we were trying to figure out what it was. I figured out that if I drew paintings and drawings and showed it to my family, they would pay me to have the paintings and drawings. But I thought, you know what, I could really scale quicker if I made them pay to just view the drawings. So that was like my first little thing that I did. And then, yeah, all throughout high school, I had multiple jobs constantly and just tried to use the skills I had to earn a little bit on the side. So that's always been, I think, in me. And then with Rooted, however, I didn't know what I would do. I didn't know that it would be rooted, but I knew I was going to do something. And then the way that rooted came about was more so out of personal experience and it wasn't something I was expecting to have ever happened to me, but I guess more on that in a bit.

Yeah. And you were at a Clarity when you were building Rooted, right?

I started Rooted actually before I started working at Alacrity and they kind of let them know as I was joining, I was like, hey, I'm doing this is super important to me and this is why I can't do full time work here. And so I was doing partial hours here and working on Rooted there.

And through Alacrity. You were supporting a lot of entrepreneurs while working on this project on the side. Was there a specific incident or about with anxiety that caused you to embark on this journey? Let's dive there.

Yeah. So that was back in university. So before graduating even I had gotten a panic attack out of nowhere. I really didn't know what they were before. I thought that it meant that someone was too stressed out. I couldn't relate. And then it happened to me and I was like, holy, this is so different than anything I had imagined and it's so much worse. And it became really debilitating for me. So I had struggled to go to classes, struggled to kind of go in the direction that I thought my career was going to go, and it really changed my life for the worse. And so I was, at the time, you know, no family doctor. I was far away from home. I didn't have financial resources to go see more traditional help like therapy. And I was on student loans. So I was really in this tight bind. So I decided to start looking for different solutions that could help. And. And that's how I came across the tools and resources in Rooted.

You know, it's something we all face, right. I think I've dealt with anxiety and panic attacks, like, for a long time, through university, through starting multiple businesses. And it's something. I don't know if it's inherited or what it is, but I see my parents experiencing that too, that they start, like, hyperventilating or they start, like, passing out to that level. And I've seen that their blood pressure drops or their heartbeat, like, expedites. Is it something you inherit or how does this come about from your research?

It can be a number of different reasons. And I'm not a doctor myself, but from what I've learned and all the research I've done, there can really be triggers that bring about the feelings of a panic attack based on something that's happened in the past. I, through work, was able to identify what mine might be from. But for others, really, there's this range of general anxiety. Anxiety is normal. We all get anxiety. It's what prevented us from being eaten by a tiger ages ago. And now we don't live in that type of environment. So sometimes the triggers are sort of things that you wouldn't expect to be triggers, and they're often tied to things of your past. But you can go throughout your day with normal levels of anxiety and not have the debilitating experience of a panic attack. So it's really this range we show in the Rooted app, and we want to be on this range, lower range, anyway, in the daily functioning range. And then with anxiety disorder, it can go up, and then with panic disorder, it's much stronger. So everything in Rooted is to keep you at that really functioning levels of anxiety that are natural and that we should all experience as human.

All my life, I saw my dad. Every time he had to sign a piece of document, his hands would shake and he'd get anxiety. I could never figure out why. And my mom, she's very close to my sister. When my sister was getting married, she got A lot of anxiety and panic attack, and she would just start shaking and breaking hives. And I've seen this in a lot of people. So I'm really thankful to you for developing a service like this. How did you go about your early customer development? How did you get your first customers? Because it's. Sometimes you land on an idea and you know it's a big one. There's a massive market out there, and especially if you've personally experienced this pain and you haven't found a solution or what better way to first scratch your own itch, right? But, like, how did you get your first customers and go on that journey of customer development saying, hey, this is something I want to do. There's a business here.

Yeah. So at first it was really me online, like, all the time. Just like commenting and tagging and letting people know that Rooted exists as a resource on different social media platforms. That was a big part of it. I also went to local media when we first launched, just to kind of share the story for listeners. You'll know that big media companies might not be as interested in sharing your story. You really need to prove yourself to them over a few years, usually, or, you know, have some level of overnight success. If you're just starting out, what a good thing to do is to go to local places where they might be more inclined to share your story because they like to share local news and what people are up to in the community. So I did both of those things, and really what was important was, was hitting that user need. So from personal experience, I knew what it was. I knew what that feeling of a panic attack was. So I needed to make sure that anybody opening my app could get that relief that I was looking for. What that means is those first early users, they translate to positive user reviews. And that in turn creates the beginning of the cycle of App Store optimization, which is similar to search engine optimization.

Fantastic. Now, was the first version of Rooted an app, or did you start somewhere else? Was it an online resource? Like, what was the first thing or MVP you built? And that could be maybe, hey, you had a online resource or a Facebook group, or you were just. It was just you commenting on different people's posts about anxiety as offering yourself as a resource. But what was that first MVP you built and how did that evolve?

It was an app from the start. I was very bullish about that. I remember that doing a web app was an option. And as I was reading the differences between web app and mobile app, I was like, no, it needs to be A mobile app. And I think that comes from having had the experience when I had a panic attack, I turned to my phone quickly. I almost wasn't thinking, I just did it almost like robotically, automatically. Right. And so I think having that experience and knowing that I wanted to target others who are really in the same position as I is what made me really bullish on wanting it to be a mobile app. And the first MVP when it launched was basically the red router button, which is what walks you through a panic attack and lessons on overcoming panic attacks. There wasn't yet the different visualizations and sleep support and journaling and check ins that Rooted offers today and walk us.

Through the user journey or flow through your app. Right, so say I have a panic attack or anxiety. How do I discover your app? And then what is the journey to calming me down or bringing me to normal state?

Well, you discover the app by typing in panic attack or panic attacks in the app stores because we do rank for number one. So thankfully we are your first option there. And then, and that's through years of work and user reviews and being referred and app store optimization, all those good things, we are ranking number one for that keyword. So then once you download Rooted, you have a very quick and brief introduction of what rooted is and then you're immediately asked, how would you like to get started? If you're in the middle of the panic attack, you can say stop a panic attack. And that will take you to the rooter button that I described earlier, that big red button that really walks you through how to stop a panic attack based on how you're feeling. It's an interactive tool. If you want to learn about anxiety, learn where your panic attacks might be coming from. Then you'd be directed to the lessons. If you want to have a moment to breathe, you'll direct it to the breathing tool, the Visualize, the visualizing tool, to Journal, the journal tool, and so forth. These are all tools that in addition to that router button, help you overcome anxiety and learn how to manage it in the long run, not just in the moment.

Love it. And you're number one on the organic search results of Google as well because I just searched Panic Attack app and I think Rooted was number one. The Google, the Apple App Store link and then I think the second link was your website or third link was your website. So that's great work doing that. How did you decide if this is something you want to pursue long term? What milestones did you set in the early days? Was there a Go, no go timeframe to drop this and work on another idea.

I think one of the fun things about Rooted ironically, right, because it wasn't at all a fun journey to have the experience and get started. But I think that the fact that I went into it with just a scratch my own itch mindset as opposed to a very business oriented experience where I had specific goals and milestones actually made it a lot more organic and a lot more fun in some ways. Right. Because I didn't necessarily have those types of goals or milestones or go or no go date. I just said, let's see if this even helps one other person. And then it did. And then it held a hundred and then a thousand. And then I was like, okay, I have something here and it's really resonating with people. So I think that was the moment and that happened really early on. That was like within a few months that I was like, wow, like people are really receiving this the way that I meant it to be received. And that was quite special because that doesn't happen with every project. Right. So I shouldn't say that doesn't happen with my other projects. But I know that there are many instances where you put something out and it's not necessarily received in the way that you mean for it to be received with Rooted. Thankfully people really got it, they understood it and they were leaving reviews sharing that exact sentiment. So that's when I knew I really wanted to keep going no matter what.

But how many years in the making has been this overnight success here?

Yeah, it's definitely not an overnight success. I'd say those positive reviews came within a few months and that was awesome. And that kept me going and has kept me going still. I look at you user reviews when I have a bad day, a long day at Rooted, and I get frustrated and those help so much. But overall it's been five years now, so definitely not an overnight success. Being bootstrapped, staying bootstrapped, these aren't very quick experiences, but it's still something very meaningful and probably I wouldn't really have it any other way. Now.

As someone who's bootstrapped a company and also been a part of venture backed companies, I can completely relate. There's two key learnings here that I took away. Right. One is your need to not only scratch your own itch, but help others. Oftentimes we get lost in this. What's the business model, what's the tam, what's the market size? And we focus so much on the business side, but there's some truth to this saying, right? If you chase money, you make short term decisions, if you chase power, you destroy relationships. The only way to build something big and lasting is to focus on impact. And you started with impact act as your primary goal and so the money didn't matter. And, and you genuinely derive joy from doing this and that's why you're still doing it, right? That is a testament. The second thing is consistency. Success is not doing a hundred things, it's doing one or two things consistently well over time. It's showing up for your customers, for your users, for your community. And you did that. And the only way to show up consistently is if you derive joy from what you're doing. So kudos to you for sticking it out because it probably the journey has been very fulfilling. But I want to dive a little more into your early days. At what point did you think we found product market fit? Was it a retention lever? Customers weren't leaving? Were you getting more positive reviews? At what point? Was it months? Was it X number of users, weekly actives? What was it? What was that aha moment?

I think there's a few of those moments and personally those happened for me when thankfully from the beginning we were getting great reviews. Even if somebody had an issue with some of the tech, there was a bug in the app, they'd be like this content is so good, we need rooted to overcome this bug. Cause I need to see the rest of this lesson or whatnot. And I think that was really insightful for me because I was like wow, this person is so excited about the confident that they're not even mad about a bug. And I was upset about the bug and they were less upset. So I think that was a really telling sign that had nothing to do with revenue. However, that was genuine user experience and what they wanted and were looking for in the product. So that was one. The other one was actually on my birthday one year I hit a hundred thousand users and I remember being in the office, I was sitting with my colleague and we had just finished work and I was like, oh, I should tune into this, see what number I'm at. Because it was really close to a hundred thousand. And my colleague and I were sitting there and I refreshed and it was like 10 more downloads. I refreshed, it was like 25 more downloads, I refreshed and it was just picking up on that day and we hit a hundred thousand and I was like wow, that's so awesome. And I remember that experience and refreshing and wow, so many people are downloading this right now. And that was a great moment and I think that was very solidifying for me. Fast forward one year later, I hit 1 million on my birthday. That was another cool one. And it was just weirdly in line with my birthday. Same with 2 million. It was just like, yeah, very strange. And then from a more traditional business point of view, I think the product market definition is do your customers advocate for you? Are they willing to pay? If they pay, do they recommend others to pay to? And that is the more traditional way. And I think that getting user reviews from people saying, I buy a subscription for rooted and it's completely worth it, I recommend it. You should too. Seeing those reviews, I think was that next phase of product market fit. And then of course hitting revenue to the point where it wasn't just paying for itself, but it could pay a salary too. That was another one of those milestones.

I love that definition, right? Do customers stay, do they pay and do they bring their friends? That's I guess the pinnacle of product market fit. And you hit that was that year one, I think immediately you said you, you felt that feeling or was it much later?

So the advocating customers came really early, but the paying customers came later. Because I didn't actually have a paywall in a very obvious way. I always had some sort of paywall. So it was like paying itself back. But it was. There was no like excess profit or anything. At first it was like, great, this is covering costs, which is awesome too. We're just starting out with a bootstrap product that's also a great goal to have. But it wasn't until March 2021 where I actually moved a paywall closer to the beginning of the app. And then revenue went up by six times.

Your app right now has a seven day free trial and put your credit card first, which is an evolution from where you started, which was a free app, right?

Oh, it's optional though. It's optional. So still. Yeah, that's just. If you want to try the trial, you can. If you don't want to, you can just X out of that page and continue to the free content. But the fact that the option is even there, that was the difference.

That was the difference. What was the feature lever or how did you tier the pricing? Because you started like you said, free and then you added the pricing or made it more obvious. How did that pricing evolve and what was your thinking in terms of how to bucket a free versus paid? Because a lot of people make mistakes here or they're worried that, hey, I'm going to add a free tier, I'm going to lose all my users or I'm going to add a paid tier and lose all my users kind of thing.

Yeah. So the way the payment was structured, which features are free versus paid is the same since when I first launched Rooted. The idea is the essential features that if you're in the middle of the panic attack, there's no financial barrier, you can just access them. And then the less essential features, more for that long term anxiety management, those are paid features. So you really have the opportunity, whether you try the free trial or not, to try all the features right away. You have the opportunity to use the free content, see if it works for you, see if that's the language that works for you. Pan execs are such a personal thing that you really want to make sure it's the right fit and then you have the option to pay more. And so that has been the same since I first started Rooted. What's changed again is that paywall placement and I think that, yeah, just having people even know that it's an option because I also like those users or people that you described. I was a bit worried that maybe people would be put off by a paywall. But then if you download any health and fitness app, there's obviously paywalls. Apps cost a lot of money, a lot of work to work on apps. So it's not unreasonable to have a paywall. And the amount of people who actually were upset by the pay was so much less than I thought I could count on my hands. The amount of people that month that were like upset and then the thousands of extra people that ended up being happy paying people because they didn't even realize before that there was other content or they didn't go as deep into the app to even see the paywall. They were now experiencing all these tools and reminded of them daily. So yeah, overall it was positive and I think that I was maybe too worried about people getting upset. So that's a good takeaway.

We all do, right? We undervalue the service we offer and then we realize we shouldn't have done that. But you can't put a price on your health, number one. And what is the cost of seeing a therapist or a doctor? It adds up significantly. Or sometimes you don't even have access. Sometimes you can't even get an appointment. Right. I like the model here. It's free when you have an emergency, but if you want white love experience with a physician, then you Got to upgrade. But it's free. Every time you have an emergency and that's the impact you're creating. You're providing a great service for free. I have an emergency, it's going to be free. What was the placement of paywall before and after the change because you said your revenue jumped 6x, that is significant. So what was that learning or how did you even think about moving in?

The paywall before was just in those long term features. So you'd have to go pretty deep into the app to see the paywall. Basically now the paywall exists in the onboarding. That was the biggest difference. It's again optional. You can try the free trial then or keep going without a free trial. And. And then it also exists in the side menu. It exists also on the homepage. It'll pop up sometimes. See, hey, do you want to try out the premium features of Rooted? So those are all these things and that's what really helped increase that revenue. Which again, it was not even a change in content. It was literally moving the paywall and that increased that revenue. So that was like a huge aha moment. Wow. I really didn't have to hide this fact that there's paid content. I could just be more open about it. And then people are so happy to, to pay and participate sometime. Not everyone obviously. I think like most health and fitness apps, the majority of users are free with Rooted. However, they really appreciate that there aren't any advertisements. They appreciate that there's as much free content as there is in general. So I have the free users leaving great reviews and then I have the paying users who are able to pay also leaving good reviews. So that is like a good mix. Every now and then you'll get somebody who is just frustrated at the world because mental health support should be free. And like, yes, I agree, but there's so much that goes into private business and it's just, it's a shame that I'm the one being blamed for the fact like of course I wish I had a great government contract and we could make this for free. There's just so much that I wish we could still do. But so every now and then people will take out that frustration on Rooted or me. But otherwise it's just been a really happy learning that just moving the paywall that many more people know that the premium features exist.

You're providing great value and creating impact for a reasonable price. And it's a business ultimately, right? If you go and try to pay for a therapist or whatever else service is Going to cost you a lot. And running a business costs money. People have gotten so used to freebies that they forget that it costs money, access costs money. And again, you're creating this great impact. And the other learning here is sometimes we overcomplicate things, right? We like, okay, you know what, how do I increase revenue or how do I optimize my pricing? And you get into this whiteboard discussions and long pontifications with your teams. I think this is a benefit of having no team. You can just make a change, right? Hey, have you just tried to make that more visible? Let's just test that and then, boom, it's 6x. That's wonderful.

When you don't have so many people, you just, like you said, just, you kind of get to it. You get to experiment quicker, you get to track experiments quicker and just do more things quicker. My unbiased.

I tend to agree with you more. I do believe people build companies, but at the same time, what's happened in the last little while, especially in the pandemic, is we've created this notion that one needs to have hundreds, if not thousands of employees to be successful. One needs to have millions, if not tens or hundreds of millions to be successful. And that's not true. Right? You create this notion and you perpetuate this idea that you got to go on the journey to pitch to investors to raise money and go boom or bust. There's more than one way to build a successful company, and there are businesses that are doing this with one employee. No employees, contractors, or if you look at basecamp, less than 80 employees. And it rivals the user bases of Asana and Monday, which has thousands of employees working round the clock and hundreds of millions of funding. So I think this is a great way and more people need to hear stories like yourself to say, hey, I don't have to climb a mountain to get there. Right. I mean, I can do this with limited resources. I don't need to go and parade up and down Silicon Valley and beg for money. There are different ways to do this. So let's dive into your journey of building the company with no funding, no employees. Firstly, what steps did you take to get to this level?

Right.

Walk us through how you built the business step by step. Maybe. What did day one, week, one month, one look like from figuring out what you're going to build to how you're going to market it to what resources you're going to leverage to help you out kind of thing?

Yeah, I mean, again, I didn't really come at it with that business perspective. So my go to market plan was non existent. It was just like this needs to exist, like this app needs to exist. And I knew that the distribution would be primarily through the app stores. And in terms of those first steps, I mean I had a very limited budget. I went to an agency, they quoted me, I was like, yeah, there's no way I can afford that. So I kind of went back to the drawing board and I was like, okay, what else can I do to really decrease that cost? Because that's not going to happen. So what else can I do? And I started just learning from different blogs and blogs and finding different articles online that really would help me as a non technical founder figure out how do I bridge the gap between what I'm trying to communicate and to a developer in as efficient way as possible. You know, it was quite an interesting start. I mean there's a lot of Google Docs and Google Sheets and Photoshop and JPEGs involved. Right. Whereas now you can do everything like Figma and there's a lot of emailing and now you slack. Right. So it was a bit of a clunky start, but I think that the way that I did it, like it had to be done that way because I couldn't afford the alternative. And some of the tools that we use now just didn't even exist then. So those were the first weeks and months. It was clunky, but it was all about figuring out how to communicate better to developer. I ended up working with a student developer and working through a lot of bugs and delays and all of that and just really figuring out how to keep going. And then within probably the first years when I hired a more senior developer and then another, all contractors, yep. Typically they're working on other things, which does relieve a lot of the pressure too. Right. Cause I didn't know I wasn't going at this from a revenue first perspective. So I didn't know how long I could, you know, even work with them. So it's great to not have that pressure on me. They all have their own things going on. They enjoy working on, rooted. Some of them said that they enjoyed doing something for people with panic attacks, anxiety because they knew about it personally, but they'd never actually worked for a company that did something on the social impact side of work. So yeah, it was all positive relationships, but definitely a lot of difficulties too. You know, a lot of delays or ghosting and all the stuff that you sometimes can get. But you know what you can get them with employees as well too. Just contractors really. But yeah, lots of hurdles that way. I'd say the technical side of the business has been by far the most difficult part because the marketing, the business development, the product, the design, that's all stuff I love and I'm in charge of. And it just like it feels better when I. If something messes up, I know how to fix it right away and I know if it's my fault, I can work on it. But the stuff I'm not in control of is definitely the hardest.

I've just released a book from grassroots to greatness. 13 rules to help you build iconic brands with community led growth. We cover stories from big brands and small all the way from Harley Davidson to HubSpot to Nike Disaster to gain sight. To give you the frameworks to build a community led business that will take you from an obscure idea to a movement to a cult like phenomena. Check it out at from grassroots to greatness.com the digital copy is on for 99 cents. Anything worth doing is not easy and pain is the precondition for growth. It's like working out. You lift heavy weights and then you get stronger and the next time you can do more and more right and you develop this muscle. So you came up with the idea, you had a personal pain. You wanted to scratch your own itch while creating impact. You learned to wireframe and design. You did your own research because you couldn't afford an agency that probably does like user studies and user research and wireframes and user diagrams and all of this. So you, you learn to do that all yourself, jangling together PowerPoints and Google Docs and JPEGs and found student developers and other contractors to help you build it. So you did it in the most lean, bootstrap way and that's the best way to do it. Lack of resources makes us creative, right?

Yeah.

There was this, I think it was hp Bill Hewlett that said it. More companies die of indigestion than starvation. Sometimes you have all the money in the world. But I was part of a company called Speakeasy. We were building an app calling app for SalesPeople. We raised 6 million on an idea and then spent all this time on mobile team, web team, all this money and energy and then finally ran out of money and realized like, hey, the product doesn't even work. We get users but they churn. And so there's great learning in doing things and bootstrapping and putting yourself through constraints. It's even with writing, right? If Twitter didn't exist you wouldn't probably be able to clearly put your thoughts in 140 characters or whatever that is. Right. We tend to want to naturally incline towards doing just more. Our spending more or thinking that everything takes longer than it should or more versus this forces you to be constrained, forces you to be creative. Now, in terms of your marketing channels and customer acquisition, what channels worked and what failed.

First and foremost, App stores, that works. Putting a lot of effort into App Store optimization is really helpful and important. Storytelling is huge. Sending stories updates to the app Store doesn't mean they're gonna actually read it. Or maybe they do read it all, but that doesn't mean they're gonna feature you or whatnot. But just putting the story out there. It took me tens of times before I ever got a callback. And these days people ask me like, oh, how can I do it? I. I sent submit a story, but I didn't get a call back. And I said, well, how many times have you done it there? Three times already. And I'm like, yeah, we like maybe 20 times. So like, keep going, keep sharing your story. Keep learning how to make it interesting. And then the other thing with press releases as well, I think telling a story and then tying it back to a global event, that was really helpful for getting more of those press releases out there. And in terms of what didn't work, what didn't work early on was advertising. It's not that people wouldn't come in and use it, but it didn't translate it to paying customers. So I think that I had done it too early because I didn't yet have that paywall built out. I didn't have these other things now that I had like push notifications and other things to bring people back into the app that I didn't have back then. So that was a loss for me. Then out of the 2.5 million users, maybe like tens of thousand, like under a hundred thousand, I think it was like at 3 or 4% came from those advertising. So it's primarily organic and I'm still going to give it a shot in the near future. But I just think focusing on the In App funnel is so much more important than the user acquisition.

What is your In App funnel to drive more users?

Yeah, so the In App funnel, there's the paywall. Of course, when you have, you know, bringing that to the front, that certainly helps. But in terms of just the app itself, we set up reminders. So if you want a reminder to breathe journal or visualize daily, we also have a Share button. So at the end of a experience where you get a positive message from the app mascot, you can choose to share rooted with a friend. And that has done really well. And then pretty soon, and I think I can share this now, we're going to be adding in this daily mission. So basically that means that the app mascot, Ron, who people have come to love and really personified, he's on the homepage and he will have a different mood based on what activities you've done that day. And this comes from a lot of users asking to interact more with the mascot. And then it also comes from this really basic idea that you're taking care of the monster. Of course, that means you're actually taking care of yourself. But sometimes people, we need to be tricked that we're playing a game or that we're doing something else, and then we get the benefits from taking care of ourselves. So I don't have the numbers on that yet in terms of seeing how people interact with that, but it's something that I'm very excited by and that'll be out later this month.

Some great learnings here, though, like helping creating rituals for your users or helping them create rituals gets them to engage more and make it more of a habit. Right. Even I found myself with working out. Like, I have this daily ritual. I wake up, I thank something good that happened the day before and then listen to Eye of the Tiger and bang out 50 pushups and it becomes like a ritual. And then once a week I have a challenge day where I try to exceed some goal and I have systems around it, and then it becomes a habit. And as you think how some of the best products have done it, that's exactly it, right? They productize the creation of rituals and through challenges and help you create habits. And then users stick around for the long haul. Other learnings here. You said you invested a lot of time in app store optimization, press releases, and reaching out to the app stores to feature you. How did you go about learning how to do that on the fly?

Oh, I mean, that was mainly the press releases. I mean, there's so much content online for the feature stuff I actually didn't really know, but there is this public page where you can go and share what's new about your app that month. And here I was getting these really powerful reviews from people. So I knew there had to be some way that I translate that to get someone's attention. And again, it didn't work out. So many times I almost did feel like giving up. I was like, oh, this channel doesn't work. But then I just kind of kept going and eventually got a response from them. So that type of stuff, I mean, I've always been into writing, but I think marketing is a bit different than general writing. But it's all stuff you can kind of learn online. And it is tough as a founder to get people to be as passionate or excited about something as you are, because unless they have that personal problem, it's really hard to get them excited. So finding the right words to do that is a skill, but I think it's a learnable skill and there's a lot of helpful content.

Online writing is such an underrated yet important skill. As I look at more and more pitch decks and as I talk to more and more founders, it's like driving on the highway at a hundred miles an hour. If your billboard doesn't hit me in the face, I'm driving past it. So, like, how can you make your messaging so crystal clear that it resonates with me? And that's an art, but it's something that you can learn with practice and over time and just learning to write. And I tell people, just try to write your thoughts down each day. What metrics are top of mind for you, especially as a bootstrap founder in this market?

So I think metrics around acquisition, retention, engagement, and in this, from a revenue perspective, it'll be trials started to trials completed. So that's people, they get to use the full premium features of rooted and then they decide if they want to stay on as a paying customer or not. So that's quite a good indicator. Those are the top ones.

And then in terms of your funding to date, before you started generating revenue, how did you fund this? Was it all out of pocket? Did you leverage any government grants? Did you have any family, friends, angel invest? How did you go about that?

No, it was just a couple months savings was the first go. It wasn't until later, once I already started having revenue. The ironic thing is you don't get that support and funding until you already have traction. So how do you start getting traction without that funding? It was really strappy, like, yeah, it was just a couple months savings and I was very stressed about paying rent and it was very, it was a hard time at the beginning for sure. It wasn't until later on that I leveraged some like Creative BC was one grant that we got that was super helpful and a few other grants like.

That in many ways. Also finding inexpensive contractors and just investing your time in learning how to build an app or product, manage the app through user experience and design yourself and then outsourcing, just what you need also is a skill, right? How did you manage to find these people to build for you at low cost? What are some learnings that we can employ in our journeys?

I wasn't actually asking them to work at low cost. I actually just would either share the situation and they would give me their hourly rate or they just give me their hourly rate and I find a way to work with it. So I'm not like, I'm not against asking for discounts when you work with a company, but when you work as an individual, I try not to. I try to just work with what they're asking for. But at first it's just that I was getting talent that had no experience. So that's a way of keeping costs low. But that doesn't mean even that they're giving you a discount. It means that they are genuinely like, hey, I've never built an app before, but here we go. Sure, I'll do this for X amount an hour, because I have no idea. And so like tho, those are the people that I worked with at the beginning and then over time just got to work with people that had more and more experience in some ways working with the people who had less experience. There's aspects of it that were better and more positive, I have to say, and then on the flip side with the more experienced people. But it's not that I was like desperately trying to get discounts for people. Right. It was just more, hey, like this is a situation. And then we like find a way to work with whatever they're comfortable with because ultimately you want the people working with you to feel happy, respected and like they have their own agency. And that I think that's really important. And I wanted a drama free experience. Right. And of course stuff still happens. Like I mentioned the ghosting and I had a couple experiences with developers that were not as great, but again, I hear from my friends who have a bunch of employees and it's quite similar. And working with companies through earlier in my career, I've heard all sorts of stories.

How did you find these contractors? And what are some tips to working with contractors and keeping them motivated so the ghosting doesn't happen?

Yeah, So I found them in a number of different ways. There's many through Slack Communities. Probably my closest contractors are through Slack Communities. So I would just look up, for example, iOS engineers have joined that Slack group and then chat with people in there. Another way was through LinkedIn. I found a couple people, but those didn't last as long. Now looking back another way was through conferences. That's a really close engineer that I'm working with. That's somebody I met at a conference. So I actually went and I did it on my own time too, on my vacation day. Right. Because I at the time at a job. So I was like, oh, I really want to check out this conference. But it's not really in line with what I'm working on. So I took vacation to go and do that conference. And yeah, that was another way. And Fiverr hit or miss, but I found some cool people on there too.

I use Fiverr a lot Traction for essence. Effectively. We bootstrapped to over a hundred thousand subscribers and mostly it's me and contract or like volunteers and people just volunteering their time, like Ray from Launch Academy and stuff like that. Right. And so you learn a thing or two and one of those things is Fiverr, just to get things done very quickly and inexpensively. Sometimes it's not 100%, but as founders, we. Perfection is the enemy of done. Sometimes 90% is okay as long as you get it out the door.

Right?

So, yeah, Fiverr, great tips.

Yeah, there's been a case in Fiverr where like somebody would send something and it's something that I can't check myself. For example, svg, it's the type of image and so they'd be converting my PNGs to SVGs. And then I send it to the developer and the developer's, oh, no, this doesn't work at all. Fiverr is really good about letting go back even if the contract's done because stuff happens. Right? And then you get to go back and say, hey, this actually wasn't. I kind of know what you did here. You kind of put, as they say, lipstick on a pig. You save this as this SVG based on actual svg. And then I like back and forth and then they'll actually redo it for me. So I have had that happen and different examples of that happen. One more note on the talent though, because you had asked if there's any like discounted talent. And I said, well, rather than ask for a discount, I just kind of go with less experienced people or people who just have a lower hourly rate at the beginning. And another thing was when it came to languages, that's where I accepted volunteers, because it would be people who would write from their countries and they're in their native tongue saying, hey, I really need this in Spanish. For example, or I need this in Portuguese. And so then I accepted the volunteers at that time because the app wasn't monetized. And I thought that was awesome of those people that they were willing to like. Chinese was another one actually. They're like, I really just think that more attorneys should have access to this. And I don't like, I could just help you translate this. And so that was really helpful at the beginning. Now that content has been replaced by more professional recording just because now there's enough to afford that. At the beginning I couldn't even afford voiceovers, but so I would just invite somebody and use a microphone I had and they would do their thing and then I would like buy them dinner because I just couldn't afford anything else. Now that's been replaced. But I think that was also a great thing to leverage of people just caring about their communities.

What a great learning here. And E that perfection is the enemy of done. And I think it's a superpower. A lot of people glorify the ability to fundraise and storytell and like do the smoke and mirror and grand vision. But what's underrated but has probably more value is to do more with less. Right. The ability to evangelize people, to volunteer their time to believe in your story to when some agency gives you a massive quote to go and figure out, hey, what are the things that I can do myself and what are the things? The learning curve is just huge. Those skills are so undervalued but helps you build a multimillion dollar business with little to no funding and no employees. So kudos to you. Now you said community. You've got two and a half million users. What have you done to turn this user base into a community? I mean, some early signs, like you said, people love the product so much and even if you didn't have resources, they've volunteered their time to help you translate for their regions, for their languages because they felt it needed to exist. They wanted to be part of an impact and that is the foundation of a community. But what are some things you've done to turn this user base into a community?

Yeah, I'd say probably the most public channel where users, especially during the pandemic and just a few years ago in general when Instagram was so popular, was our Instagram channel. And outside of that, there are some Facebook groups that we participate in. We don't have a chat in itself within rooted and that's for reasons of moderation and needing to. We probably want to work with a Clinical psychologist. If we were to have a channel where that psychologist is there helping to monitor the channel. We don't necessarily want to put a number of people who aren't yet sure what the solution to their problem is and have them suggesting advice for each other like it's all rooted as scientifically validated. We use therapist approved exercises. It's really hard to moderate discussions that you're not a part of. But I definitely encourage people in that community within our Instagram channels and got a bit on TikTok as well, a little bit on Twitter, but I'd say Instagram and Facebook are the most popular.

And as you grow, right, like with the popularity of rooted and number one on Google organic search, number one on Apple iOS definitely there are going to be others copying or competitors coming in to the play. What sets rooted apart from other anxiety management apps on the market? Are there any unique features or approaches that you continue to build out that blows the competition out of the water? Or maybe that's something you don't think about given you have two and a half million users.

It is. I mean there have been some cases of people just randomly having the exact same same aspect in their app that they didn't previously and that's always a bummer. Or a company using like our exact logo. This is weird. So those things do happen and they happen a lot. But I think that ultimately there's two things. One, the language that Rooted is written in and the way it works, it all does come from personal experience. And that's not something that you can really sit in a boardroom and be like, hey, I see anxiety as a big market, let's go after it. You're going to miss that piece of personal experience if that's how you're approaching a problem. And I think that is obvious to users when they use different tools. A lot of users will download Rooted and say, I finally feel seen, I finally feel accepted. That's not an easy thing that happened overnight. Right. That's like years of work and understanding anxiety, panic attacks and understanding users. And that's really hard to replicate. And the second thing, what I was going to say was there's a lot of listening to users. But that was the second thing. Maybe it'll come back to me. But basically, yeah, I'd say those are really important aspects of it.

They can steal your idea, but they can't steal your passion. They can't steal your execution, they can't steal your vision. Everyone like Blockchain came and then Web3 came and now AI and people just jump on the bandwagon and they want to do it because it's cool or it's the flavor of the month or think they can make a quick buck. But it's where we started, right? If you don't draw joy from it, if you, your life's mission is not that impact, then you'll just do short term things. Chasing money. When the going gets tough, it's going to be difficult for you to be consistent and show up. Right. And showing up day in, day out over five years has helped to get to hear. And it's going to be hard for people to just replicate that passion, that vision, that consistency.

Totally. And that actually reminds me of my second point. That was my second point where having all that traction, it takes a long time to get all those user reviews, to get that rating and to get that app store optimization. So that doesn't mean we're totally not affected by competition, but it means that the competition does have to be really good to get past that or spending millions a month or something. You know, like it's not every app can go in and really take over right away. It takes a lot of work and a lot of time and resonating with users, definitely. So it's not something that I can't sleep over. You know, it's not something that bugs me so much, but I do notice it and sometimes it's frustrating when people copy. But it's also something that I know often users can see through. And it takes a lot of work to get to the place where rooted is. So I'm not so worried of that disappearing overnight, necessarily.

The compound interest on consistency leads to overnight success. And like I said, like, it's hard to replicate somebody's passion and vision and execution. They can steal the idea. But the user reviews you've garnered over the years, 2.5 million users, is a testament in itself the community you've built. Right. That there's something good here and people are on the journey alongside you to create this big impact. But still, people will encroach. People probably will raise lots of money. How do you ensure your users continue to stay engaged and don't churn? Are there any specific frameworks you follow for user engagement or maybe some future plans or features in the pipeline that you can share with us?

Not necessarily a specific framework, but I do an update to Rooted once a week and a big update once a month. So I have plans till the end of 2023 and beyond. And there's just so much more I want to do. And they are in line with the vision of rooted and rooted's value. So I think that just continuing in that direction is the thing that I'm going to keep working on and trust and we'll see what happens.

Love it. Constantly communicating with your audience, with your community. So one big update and one small update, but like on a weekly basis, you're communicating with them yourself. So that's phenomenal. Now, any major feature that's coming that you're super excited about that you can share?

Yeah, I think that Mood Dial Daily challenge, that's something that I'm really excited about. So it will be on the homepage and it's basically like you're taking care of the app mask. And I'm really excited to see how users are going to interact with that because as I mentioned, I just heard about users personifying him and giving him names and thoughts and feelings. And so I think that it'll just be so exciting to see how people react when they can actually have an influence over his mood.

I'd love to see this turn into like an in person get together where people are congregating and sharing these challenges together, like a CrossFit or like a Harley Davidson. There's some big opportunity here in the future. Awesome. Now, as we close out, what were some of the biggest challenges you faced and how did you overcome them? Perhaps, maybe as you look back, what was the toughest or lowest point of your journey and how did you overcome it?

Say the technical side again. Right. Those times with the developers, I think that a part of what helped me overcome it was I was chatting with an investor one day and they were telling me about how they buy distressed businesses and they were saying that, you know, a founder will come to me and they're just done with the business. They have a big thing happening, like their CTO left, for example. But for me, that's not a problem at all because I have this network of amazing ctos and I just hire anyone and it's fine and we keep going and we grow the business. And I remember in that moment that I was like, wow, I don't want to be the CEO that sells for a reason. That to me seems insurmountable, but for someone else, it's no big deal. So that really helped me through those challenging times with the developers, with switching developers, with working through issues with developers.

Definitely surrounding yourself by people and talking. Sometimes we just like drown in our sorrows and don't seek advice from others. But a lot of things you can just solve from talking to people. And people are so gracious in their help. If you just ask what's one piece of unconventional advice that founders typically ignore.

But shouldn't probably that bootstrapping can be a viable option. I think it's still quite scary to many and it presents its own challenges for sure. But I think that is something that.

I would say one key learning and a great inspiration for everyone listening out there is there's more than one definition of success. Do not build somebody else's definition of success. You know, oftentimes what happens is as you pitch investors because the media has perpetuated this addiction to unicorn porn. And everyone thinks before they even get started they need to talk to investors and then they listen to your idea and they look at you and they're like, oh, that's a lifestyle business. Like it's a bad word. The word lifestyle business gets thrown around. Having a great lifestyle is not a sin. The VCs are telling you this because it doesn't fit in their framework of what makes them and their investors wealthy, which is you either become a five, $10 billion company or more, multi billion dollar company or more, or it's meaningless for them. They say this because they raise money from LPs, from investors who they have to show massive returns to, and they raise hundreds of millions of dollars. But for you to become successful, you don't need to be on a particular side of somebody else's pattern matching. Define your own journey, what impact you want to create in the world and build the business that suits you, that brings you joy. Because if you build somebody else's definition of success, eventually you will not be happy. And you've Anya here has shown us great inspiration and great methods to do that. Right. You shouldn't be embarrassed of not taking venture money or bootstrapping. And especially after the pandemic with everything that happened overvalued companies during the COVID boom and as soon as the interest rates went up, companies lost growth, valuations fell, banks shut down. So this should be a great learning for all entrepreneurs. What message or advice as we close out you'd like to share with individuals, particularly entrepreneurs who don't talk about this, who are currently battling anxiety and panic attacks?

Well, I guess there's two groups there. Like with entrepreneurs in general, it can get really hard. So I guess my advice would be to really recognize and celebrate little wins that you have along the way. I think it's really easy to just get caught up in the next thing. Like me totally guilty of this, like, I would hit a goal and then I would, like, almost feel nothing and I move on to the next one. It's like, no, no, no. Actually take a step back, maybe journal, maybe figure out what you feel in the face of that goal and what that accomplishment means to you before you jump to the next thing. That can be really tricky. But I think overall that's, you know, those things they say, it's not about the destination, it's about the journey. Enjoy the journey if you can, and experience the journey regardless of whether it's enjoyable or not, in a way. And then the second group, I mean, if they are struggling with panic attacks and anxiety, then obviously I recommend checking out rooted and taking some time to really figure out what might be the cause of that and see how you can manage it so that it's at least not in a debilitating place in your life. Just a way that you feel more confident and capable of managing it again, because you can.

You know, a lot of us, especially entrepreneurs, we always want to say that we're crushing it. We're embarrassed to accept failures or mental health issues or anxiety in public. We're all crushing it until we're crushed. And the number of people that hit me up now because I've been very public about my mental health and anxiety issues on social media and I get hit up. One of them was the founder of this mental health startup that raised 70 million. He's, I don't know, I just feel like crying. I want to leave everything and run away. We don't talk about it a lot. And the first step to improving a situation is actually acknowledging that you're going through it. Right. But if you're always crushing it in public, you're living up to this hype, then you can't even acknowledge it. And I know so many people, me included, who have face planted in the last year and said, forget it. Like, I'm just leaving it all and going to change my environment. Awesome. Anya, this has been an incredibly insightful conversation. I learned a ton. I learned a lot more about bootstrapping than I thought I knew. Having built a bootstrap company, where can we follow your wisdom? Where are you active on social so.

You can follow rooted, rooted app on pretty much every platform? And then myself, I am Anya Margaret on Twitter and you can find me on LinkedIn as well.

Yeah, I didn't know how to pronounce your name and that's why I didn't say your last name. But it's Wisotska. Yes, Anya Wysotska, what a great pleasure. Thank you so much. Wishing you great success. Another 10 million users in short order. Love and peace, Anya. Enjoy France.

Awesome. Thank you. Cheers Blake. Thanks for having me.

I've just released a book, from grassroots to greatness 13 rules to help you build iconic brands with community led growth. We cover stories from big brands and small all the way from Harley Davidson to HubSpot to Nike Disaster to Gainsight to give you the frameworks to build a community led business that will take you from an obscure idea to a movement to a cult like phenomenon. Check it out at from grassroots to greatness.com the digital copy is on for 99 cents. I need some traction thank you for listening and we hope you enjoyed this week's episode of the Traction podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a five star review and you can find more information and all the resources mentioned in today's episode at. Boast AI that's Beast o a s t AI blog focused on the tech stack, thinking it was brilliant. Now I know that it's no way for you to build a unicorn.