Episode 739 | Selling SaaS to Customers Who Don't Know They Have a Problem
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Welcome back to another episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. I'm your host, Rob Walling. In this episode, I talk with Andy Kim. He's the co-founder, co-owner of a SaaS app called Trotto. That's at Trot.2. Andy acquired the majority of the business from the original developer that built it. And Trotto is in an interesting position in the sense of once they acquire customers, their retention is extremely high. But most people who need the tool are either unaware they have a problem

or problem aware, but they're not even solution or product or most aware. And we talk about that dynamic in the show of how difficult that can be and how it can be a bit of a headwind to get over. But to Andy's credit, he's making progress and growing the business month to month and has figured out some interesting approaches for getting around that.

Before we dive into the episode, I have a Kickstarter that's launching a week from today. It's for my new book that I co-wrote with my wife, Dr. Sherry Walling. The book is called Exit Strategy, The Entrepreneur's Guide to Selling Your Business Without Regret. Sherry and I have taken our combined many, many years of experience

going through exits, counseling founders through exits. And it's not just focused on SaaS. It's all types of businesses. But obviously there's a light emphasis on SaaS because of course we do have more of a network in the space.

But if you'd consider backing the Kickstarter, you can head to exitstrategybook.com and click the Back the Kickstarter button and we will be in touch the moment it goes live. Could really use your support. First 24 hours is a great signal to everyone that if there's a lot of backers...

then we tend to get more. So exitstrategybook.com if you're interested in that. Before we dive into our conversation, MicroConf mastermind matching happens three times a year, and it's happening right now. Applications close on December 4th, so just a week or two after this episode goes live. Masterminds have been critical to my development and frankly my longevity as an entrepreneur, and I've been a proponent of them ever

for probably 12 or 13 years, you can go to startupstherestofus.com and search for startup mastermind and find the first time that I ever mentioned it on the show. And it's a long time ago because I became a believer in meeting with like-minded founders over time, a small group of founders who really followed my journey almost like honorary co-founders. So if you've been feeling alone or isolated or lost or like you're

you're just not sure what to do next and you need some accountability and someone else to be in the trenches alongside you, head to microconf.com slash masterminds. You pay a one-time fee and we will match you up with other like-minded founders. And with that, let's dive into my conversation with Andy. ♪

Andy Kim, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks for joining me today, man. So you run Trotto, that's trot.to, and the H1 is easy and secure go links. Quickly share and remember links by shortening lengthy URLs. Try for free.

What the hell is a Go link? That's a good question. So most people probably have not heard of a Go link, but the way to think of it is a URL shortener. The consumer version of this is bit.ly or tinyurl.

But GoLinks specifically only work for people within the same organization. So whereas you would use Bitly to shorten our URL for like marketing purposes to the general public where anyone can click on that link, GoLinks only work if you and I work at the same company. And the purpose is really to share resources between each other.

Got it. So folks understand, you're a SaaS, you charge per seat, per user. And when I think of Bitly and what was the other one, TinyURL, I think of these big kind of freemium consumer cheap plays, right? But you're much more on the enterprise side. Yep. Isn't that right? Okay, so talk us through how that, it's like two sides of a different coin. Yeah.

Yeah. And if you remember, Rob, when we were actually interviewing for TinySeed, you were questioning why do companies even pay for this, right? It's an interesting phenomenon. But

The reality is this is a, what I call like enterprise software tool that works the larger the company is, the larger the problem becomes. So there's really three use cases. I'd say company-wide, team-wide, and then individual use. But the way that we break it down between those three, sometimes there's good overlap, but really the fundamental problem is

Hey, Rob sent me a resource three months ago, and I don't remember where he sent it. Email, Slack, he might have told me over a video conference. But GoLinks basically helps you remember where to go because it's a human readable link most of the time that's a lot easier to recall.

Got it. So as an example, then, if I wanted to implement GoLynx for TinySeed, I would install a browser plugin, right? And then I sign into my GoLynx account as a TinySeed employee. And there's, what is TinySeed team? Six or seven of us, right? So six or seven of us would all sign in. And then I can type in to my browser, let's say I'm in Chrome, tinyseed.com slash some internal short code, right? Like A&R's deck. And

And we know Anar's deck is the deck. That is not a great example, but some type of short code. And now that has to then point somewhere, right? Like it points to a Dropbox location or some URL, right? Because Trotto doesn't store the files themselves. It literally is just a hop. We don't store or host anything. Yeah. Got it. Yeah. And actually you would just type in go slash Anar.

And that would be it. You don't even have to do the tiny seed portion. Yeah. Oh, because the Go... So it doesn't need to be a TLD. It's literally... Because the Chrome browser is... Correct. The Chrome plugin, I'm sorry, is going, ah, Go slash Anar's important resource. Yeah. So is this a real problem? Like, to be... Who's paying for this, I guess? It's like, who uses this? Like...

Someone invented this and it's somehow popular. Like, what's the story? Yeah, this was started back in the early to mid 2000s at Google. We actually have a very cool kind of interview with a couple of the people that started this at Google on our website. You can check that out. But basically, folks at Google were asking to set up these redirects. So they would say, hey, like I have a holiday party I'm planning for all of Google and

It's really hard to communicate this to 10, 20, you know, 50,000 people. And it's going to be go slash holiday party 2007, for example. Right. And they just communicate that to Google. And these engineers were setting up these redirects internally for Google. And they thought, let's set up a service for this so that anyone can just self-serve themselves. Right.

And what ended up happening was as this just exploded in popularity at Google, folks left Google. They would go to LinkedIn or Netflix or any other large tech company and they would set the service up for themselves. And that's really what happened with John, my co-founder as well. He worked at Google, went to a startup, wanted GoLinks, set it up for them. Other folks kept on coming back to him and asking him to set it up for their startup. And he's like,

bang, idea, let's make this a service. Got it. So then this is independent, like the concept of GoLynx has been built by hand inside Google and other Silicon Valley startups. And then Trotto is like a self-serve version of, not self-serve, that's not right there, but it's a SaaS version of the same thing that John kind of obfuscated out. That's such a trip. So it sounds like, because I still to this day, I'm like, I don't know, I don't feel like I need this, right? Myself, like, I don't feel like I need this.

But it's obvious, like you have clients like what, Figma? I mean, you have big enterprise. Any other notables? A couple of Fortune 500 companies for sure. So it's for them to pay for it. And your pricing's on your website. It's at $3 per user. Got it.

I can just extrapolate to these are not small contracts. These are enterprise-sized contracts. So it's obviously for there to be enterprise contracts around this, is it something that if you haven't used it, it doesn't feel like a pain point, but when you use it and you get kind of addicted to it or get used to it perhaps, the next company you go to, you're like, I've got to have this.

Definitely. That's definitely it. I mean, we can see it in our user base, right? So depending on the company, there are 20 to 30% of users that use this more than five times a day. Anything that they're going to, they're using a Go link to get there. There are others that may be more like you who only use it once a month, if that, and

And it's because I, as a power user, sent you a link. But what we find is that the adoption rate of this within a company doesn't stop at 20 or 30%. It's like 70% average usage per month for all of the employees at a particular company once they've fully adopted this. It's a daily, weekly tool that folks use regularly. It just becomes part of

your normal workflow. You don't look to bookmark things. You just know that a go link exists. So think of it as a bookmark placer. Think of it as like a, you know, memory helper, all of that. Interesting. Before we get further, I want, you know, I want to dig into the story of, of Trotto and how you've been growing it, but can you give us an idea of where the business stands today?

Yeah, we're profitable, which is great. We're six figures in revenue. The story generally is John built an awesome product. It stands up on its own. We have SOC 2 Type 2. We have a bunch of different services, including SSO. We have a Slack app. So all of the pieces are there that John built.

But he was a classic founder who focused more on the product itself rather than a little bit more on the sales and marketing piece of it. And that's kind of where I come into the picture and that's kind of where we are today, which is, you know, you'll talk about probably some of the issues that we may have, but that's the problem we're trying to solve for is how do we get awareness out there about what GoLinks are and also why Trotto is the best option for someone who is looking for GoLinks.

And that's really the crux of where we are today. That is, that's the next thing I want to talk about is you have, I talk about on this podcast, five stages of awareness from Eugene Schwartz and it's unaware, problem aware,

solution aware, product aware, and most aware, right? In that order. For most people, they're just unaware. Like I was unaware of this before you interviewed at TinySeed. But then there is a different subset that is more

And the problem that they have is I used GoLynx at, insert name of startups, I'm at the new place of employment and my problem is I really want those, right? But they probably aren't aware that there is a solution to this. And I imagine they think I need to get engineering to build it because we had a custom one at the other thing and the IT department or whatever maintained it, right? So how do you as a founder who's trying to grow this business think

deal with that of, hey, you're because in a perfect world, you're at stage one and two, you want to be at four and five, right? You want to be like product, everyone's product aware, because I'm HubSpot or Salesforce, you know, or Shopify, or everybody's most aware, whatever, it never happens, but you're all the way at the other end. So it feels like a headwind. How do you think about that as a founder?

Yeah, I think if we were trying to get every company in the world to adopt GoLynx, that would feel like an impossible task, just like boiling the ocean. Like you're never going to be able to get the attention span of everyone out there to be able to do that. So that's not something that we really think about. We're trying to solve for, hey, folks that have already used GoLynx, say, and you can, you know, pull folks that used to work at the

the Googles and Netflixes, the big tech companies of the world. And oh, they work at a new company now. And that becomes our ideal customer profile. These people probably have used GoLynx before. And in the best case scenario, they've loved GoLynx. I'll give you one example. We reached out to the CTO of a very large tech company

Yeah.

Now, we have to go and close that deal, right? And there's other considerations like budget and timing and all of this. But that's kind of the power of, hey, if you've used GoLynx before and it was part of your workflow, this is an easier sell than most. But the problem is if you haven't used GoLynx, then you fall into Rob Walling's world where you're like, why the heck would anyone buy this thing?

Right, a real customer education challenge, right? Because you're not inventing a new category because the category exists, but it's not a big category yet. It's not DocuSign like electronic signature or scheduling links or marketing automation or something where it's this massive thing with dozens of competitors, if not hundreds. And this is a conversation you and I've had when you interviewed for TinySeed was like,

How big can this get? You know, how many positive, I mean, I guess over the course of 20 years as people move to a new job and move to a new job, it'll eventually propagate. But like today, how do you think about that as a mostly bootstrap startup? I'm presuming since you're in Dynasty that you want to get to seven or eight figures in ARR. Yeah. And how do you think about that? Yeah, I think what's exciting for us is that what we're seeing is true. Our

Our target market continues to be technology companies, right? But there are non-technology companies, say in automotive, industrial, healthcare, government. And that is wide open greenfield opportunity for us. And they are, I would say, in a sense, starved of productivity tools like GoLynx that technology companies use every day.

Thank you.

You're right. It'd be one thing if it was kind of slowly moving across tech companies. That'd be a slow kind of growing market. But because we have non-tech companies adopting this as well, that's kind of what I'm most excited about. For example, we have a nonprofit customer who said, truly, when new employees join and they use GoLynx, and they were working at another nonprofit before, this is just magic. It just works.

And that's kind of the magic that we're trying to achieve, not just that tech companies, but non-tech companies. There are actually quite a few products in TinySeed that are like hard to get the deal signed, but the retention is through the roof. It's like there's zero, there's net negative churn, frankly. And it feels like Trotto is that kind of product.

Would you agree? Yeah, I would agree. We have customers who have been with us for four or five years now and the companies are growing, which is great for us because again, we charge per seat. But we see the, hey, new people join the company, they start using GoLynx and it just expands the overall pie for us and that's exciting for us and that's what we're really trying to achieve. And so I'd imagine that your...

the marketing or slash go-to-market motion has to all be outbound. Because I can't imagine there's much search volume or even much conversation in Facebook groups or Quora or Reddit. All the marketing, I have 20 B2B marketing approaches in SaaS Playbook and I'm guessing 19 of them don't work. I mean, I'm sure in person event, there's some things that could work. But it seems like you would have to be going out there finding people. Yeah.

Yeah, that's what we're really trying to solve for is what is the repeatable marketing funnel that works for us, right? We've tried outbound email. We've tried, you know, Google AdWords, of course. We've tried all the different kind of playbook items. And we're still really searching for what is the best solution that says I can put in X amount of effort and time and money resulting in Y leads.

That part of the funnel we have not yet solved for yet. And that's part of the journey that we're on. Yeah, that's the stage of a lot of...

Most listeners to this show are in that stage of trying to figure out what's the repeatable thing that I can scale up. I remember it was interesting in some of my earlier software slash SaaS companies, I found one or two channels that I could really crank up and really get a lot of volume out of. When I launched Drip, I remember being like, yeah, I got to find that one or two thing, one or two, and it never happened. I,

It was just a bunch of things. I don't think there was a single kind of traffic source, so to speak, that was more than 15% of our monthly trials. And so we had like... Yeah, and it was all time. And I was running, I was like dealing with Facebook ads. I was paying somebody to run those. We were doing SEO. We were doing, I was doing podcast tours. We were doing, we had an affiliate program. There was all kinds of stuff. And it was just all, you know, that's...

for kind of diversification so that no single source can crush you. It also kind of sucks because I had to manage all of that. And we were like, at the time, we were like a four-person team, five-person team, you know? And by the end, by the time we sold, we were 10 people.

But, oh, and we were doing cold outbound as well. I mean, we were doing all of it and it was all kind of working. It was all working well enough and as a big, like it got the snowball going and the growth was really good. I mean, that's what one of the reasons we got acquired was we were just growing, we were picking up market share so fast. But I found it frustrating to be on this small team and be like, I don't want to manage all this crap. Like I needed, I needed a marketing team of like six or eight people probably. And it was, it was massive.

me halftime and a full-time junior marketer, you know, and then like our customer success person halftime. And it just, it was always frustrating. It is, it's not a myth to be like, Ooh, you're going to find one or two things that work, but it's really hard. Like it takes a lot. It doesn't just take a lot of trial and error. It just doesn't work in all spaces or with all categories where you're just going to find that single silver bullet, so to speak. Yeah.

Yeah, I agree. We, this is actually a common topic for our tiny seed masterminds group actually of, okay, we have a product that we think is working now. How do we reach the right people at the right time? And I think that's actually some of the value in the community as well, right? Because I

I mean, I just use the Slack channel all the time to ping people and be like, hey, we're thinking about trying this. We are doing this. And just people that have been on that journey before, it's just super helpful to get all of their thoughts. Yeah, it's definitely helpful to learn from those who came before you. That's whether if you're in TinySeed, you know how to do that. If you're in the MicroConf orbit, that's MicroConf Connect or even listening to this podcast and hearing the experience of folks and reading the books and all that.

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So I want to switch it up a little bit and ask you about the, I'd say the unorthodox way that you came about being a co-founder of this company. So your co-founder, John, built it.

and got a first big customer in 2020. And then you came in, it was either 2023 or 2024 last year, and you bought into the business, right? And he's now a minority owner. Tiny Seat obviously owns our percentage. But tell us a little bit about how that went down and who came up with the idea? Because again, it's unorthodox. And I like to tell stories on this show about

to give people an idea of, oh, that's possible. I didn't know you could do that, right? And when I heard your story, I was like, huh, yeah, it's an interesting way. So walk us through what happened.

Yeah. So I have been interested in my own startup for the longest time. I can't even begin to tell you how long it's been. And part of the problem was, how do I stand something up, right? How do I get the first customer? How do I get the first product out the door? How do I get first, you know, interest? And that to me was a big enough barrier that it felt like diving off the deep end, right? What ended up happening was I

I've been looking for businesses to buy on various marketplaces. And one that came across for me on Quiet Light was John's business, this Trotto business. And John's part of the story is really he built this thing to be sustainable and

But he has a full-time job as a software engineer. And this business just wasn't getting enough care and attention that it needed. And admittedly, he probably stubbed his toe with other partners in the past. But with...

me buying in, it's a real, you know, capital commitment to growing this thing. And I think at the end of the day, what mattered the most and continues to matter the most to us is the level of trust that, that John and I have built over the last year plus of, Hey, John, like I'm taking care of his baby basically, right. His, his company and taking it forward. And

And he's, you know, there as support on, you know, critical issues that he has the experience and knowledge about. Right. And it's actually worked out better than I could have really imagined for, I think, both of our cases. And it's something that I'm super happy about and excited that it's kind of turned out the way that it has.

So did you and John know each other before this? No, we did not. Okay. How did you find each other? Through Quietlight, the broker. Very nice. I didn't know that Quietlight would do majority but not full acquisitions. Yeah. I think at the time I also wanted to acquire the full business.

But in conversations, as John and I built trust, I think John wanted to retain a certain percentage. And in retrospect, it was probably the right outcome for both of us to kind of make sure that our incentives were aligned. So he's still involved with the business? Yeah. I mean, we used to catch up every week.

It then turned into every two weeks. Now it's on a monthly basis. But yeah, I ping him all the time on Slack and bother him with questions. And yeah, it's been great.

As we move towards wrapping up, I have a question for you that I like to ask of, you know, a lot of guests that come on the show. And it's in your experience running, growing, building this business, what has been the hardest thing about it? And you can either say overall, like, ooh, it's been X, Y, Z challenge. Or if there's a moment where you were like, this is so f***ed.

I'm not having fun at all. You can also just go to a moment. I don't have a moment, but it is the general feeling of not knowing what the right answers are. You go to school and you're like, okay, I got an A or B on that test. You go to work and you're like, okay, I know I'm doing well or I'm not doing well. You know what the company's doing, but you're a smaller part of it. When you're at the size of company that we are and

It seems like at times we're flailing in a large ocean of everything else that's going on. The real question is, how do you know what your North Star is? How do you know that you're making progress against that? And how do you...

How do you try to figure out the basic problems of going from basically nothing to a company with processes and with people and with all of that? So I think the general frustration of the question is, is all of the effort that we're putting together on this thing worth what we think it's going to be worth?

That's the real kind of crux of the problem. And again, on the marketing side, you can truly spend unlimited amounts of money into all of the various methodologies and end up with nothing, right? This is not a game where you're guaranteed results. And I think that general kind of frustration is the toughest part of this entire journey.

The uncertainty. Yeah. And it's not just the money. It's your opportunity cost, man. Like you could get a job working for a company in the Bay Area and make lots of money. And yet you are basically, you know, I'm guessing taking a below market salary as most of us do and just trying to figure it out. And that is a real it's a gamble.

You know, kind of the traditional, like maybe Silicon Valley or YC founder is like a 23-year-old founder doing it out of a garage, you know, or having this and that. And there's a reason for that stereotype. Most of the microconf, tiny seed startups for the rest of this ecosystem tends to skew a little older, let's say 30s and 40s, some folks in their 50s.

But the further you get on and the more, you know, you're making 350 grand a year as an engineer, senior engineer for Facebook or something, it becomes really hard to leave that for the uncertainty of a startup. And I think it is, I mean, it's just one of the big concerns that folks have. Definitely. The uncertainty, though, also makes it a little bit more fun when things do go your way and you do figure it out.

And truly, I think that we would have some difficulty if it wasn't for the Tiny Seed community, just like being able to call you or call Aynar or the mastermind group that we have. It's just super helpful to be like, okay, I'm not in this alone. And here's how we're all going to kind of get through it together.

Yeah, being alone in the uncertainty is even harder. And being alone and having a spouse and or a family in the uncertainty. And it's like, well, I'm going to spend all these nights and weekends for, you know, at least you're able to do a full time, hopefully mostly during the day. But the bootstrap, you know, I bootstrapped five companies and then raised money for 20 seed. But four of them I did effectively nights and weekends.

And it was not fun because I had young kids and I was like telling Sherry, my wife, like, so you know all this time I'm putting into this thing? You know, by the time I was on the second one, the first one had made enough money that it was like, okay, I'm going to do this again. And I kind of know what I'm doing now and now, Fred. But the first one was a real tough sell when our friends were like, let's go to happy hour. And I'm like, I would love to, but, or I'd go and I'd leave early because I was like, dude, I got to get home and write some code on this thing. These are the trade-offs, the unseen trade-offs of life.

entrepreneurship, but specifically bootstrapping of any kind is just a lot of grinding hours. Andy Kim, thanks so much for joining me on the show. If folks want to keep up with you on ex-Twitter, you are at TrottoHQ. And of course, if folks want to check out Trotto, it's Trot.to. Thanks again. Thanks. Thanks again to Andy for coming on the show and thank you for listening this week and every week. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 739.