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In this episode of Confessions of a B2B Marketer, I'm joined by Andrew Gazdecki of MicroAcquire Former CEO of Bizness Apps & Altcoin (both acquired). We get Andrew to share the importance of bootstrapping a business, building a strong culture within the company, and competing for customer attention when starting a new business.

Andrew Gazdecki is a successful entrepreneur and founder of the business app company, Appster. He has been credited with disrupting the market with his unique insights and bootstrapping approach to growing his business. In this article, we'll explore how Andrew used these strategies to build a successful business. When Andrew started Appster in 2011, he had no outside funding or investors. He was determined to make it on his own and bootstrap the entire process.

This meant that he had to be creative in finding ways to fund the company's growth without taking on debt or outside investments. To do this, Andrew focused on creating value for customers by providing them with innovative products that solved their problems.

He also leveraged existing resources such as customer feedback and data analysis to identify opportunities for improvement and growth. Andrew also relied heavily on his unique insights into the market when making decisions about product development and marketing strategies. He was able to identify trends before they became mainstream, allowing him to capitalize on them early and gain an advantage over competitors who were slower to recognize them.

This allowed him to stay ahead of the curve when it came to developing new products that customers wanted before anyone else could offer them. In addition, Andrew used a combination of organic marketing tactics such as content creation, social media engagement, influencer outreach, and search engine optimization (SEO) techniques in order to reach potential customers more effectively than traditional advertising methods could provide at the time.

By leveraging these tactics combined with his unique insights into customer needs, he was able to create an effective strategy for reaching new audiences without having access to large budgets or resources typically associated with larger companies in the industry at that time period..

By using bootstrapping techniques combined with his unique insights into customer needs and trends in the market, Andrew was able grow Appster from a small startup into one of Australia's leading mobile app development companies within just five years of launching it - an impressive feat considering its humble beginnings!

Today Appster is still going strong thanks largely due its founder's ability recognize opportunities early on while staying ahead of competitors by leveraging creative solutions like bootstrapping and organic marketing tactics instead of relying solely on traditional methods like advertising or venture capital investments which can often be costly or difficult for smaller businesses like Appster at its inception stage..

Andrew Gazdecki's success story serves as an inspiration for entrepreneurs everywhere who are looking for ways innovate their businesses without relying solely on external sources of funding or resources - proving that anything is possible if you have enough determination!

Thanks for listening and hit me up on
if you have any questions!

Episode transcript

And the reason I think culture is so important is just simply with a startup, you get to build anything you want. You get to choose the people you work with. You get to choose the values of your company.

How fast do you move?

How slow do you move?

And you got to work there too. So you might as well make it fun. Mr.

Gazdecki, how are you?

What's up, Tom?

Doing good. Thanks for having me. I was literally just watching the most recent RussKhaneman video about trying to get the Twitter handle.

Can we jump into that?

Because this is absolutely brilliant. Was it just like an idea you had, like obviously with Microquire, that you can kind of use his character to do the announcements, etc.? Yeah. So the original video, the first video I did was when I first launched Microquire. And it was just me, I've always been a big fan of the show. And I heard about Cameo.

For anyone listening, you can go on cameo.com and book him. And I saw him and he's like the funniest character on the show or one of them. And so I thought this would be really cool to announce Microquire, if you will. So it was just an idea. I just thought it was funny and I'm glad other people think it was funny.

And yeah, he's kind of like our unofficial spokesperson at this point.

Can you share like roughly how much do you pay per minute on Cameo?

It depends. So the first time we booked him, or I should say for some I booked him, he was I think like 500 bucks and now he's up to like $5,000. So they ain't cheap. But it's worth it. Yeah. So he's got some fans that are definitely using him for, I've seen him do funding announcements. I've seen him even on like a conference thing. He's a super great guy to work with.

Yeah, I think just as more and more people have seen his Cameos, obviously, you know, supply and demand, this price has just kind of gone up. And he kills every time because he has the props, he has the cap, and then he has a picture in the background and he has the bottle of tequila.

So anybody here listening, and I want to talk more about LinkedIn personal branding later in this chat, but right now anybody that hasn't seen these go to Andrew's LinkedIn and then just scroll through recent posts and you'll be able to find it. They're just absolutely incredible. Cool. But anyway, thanks for coming on the show. What I wanted to cover was some general marketing stuff, but also some entrepreneurship stuff.

And my first question is, obviously you like killed it with maybe you had like a great run with business apps. It seemed like that was an awesome company. You started basically from nothing. And then you kind of went from that relatively fast into now acquire. And it seems like both of these have like turned out like pretty well.

What do you think it is about you that's enabled you to do this twice?

Yeah.

Well, if you ask my friends, they'd say luck and I'd probably agree with them. My friends call me Gazluck. It was a nickname I got in high school, followed on into college. So with business apps, just to be more on a serious note, I would say just when you build a business, you want to have unique insights that other people don't have.

And so an example of that with business apps, before that I had a job board that connected mobile developers with businesses. And this is right when the iPhone first came out. So the timing of the business, business apps, so BIZ, and I spoke to them incorrectly. I couldn't afford the nice domain at the time, but I was seeing these proposals for these apps for high end hotels, luxury restaurants for 50 to sometimes $100,000.

And I saw the specs, I saw the features they wanted. So I had unique insights into, hey, there's a market for this and they're paying this much money. And then I just got the idea, well, there's these do-it-yourself website builders.

Why isn't there like a do-it-yourself mobile app builder for small businesses?

And I was also in a college town with early adopters, usually younger people, everyone had the iPhone. And so I'd say having a unique insight into the market. So I was able to see very early that every business is going to want to be where their customers are and that's on their mobile device. And so I built a business around that.

And then if you think about Microquire, after selling business apps, just going through that whole process, just even finding the buyer and then just looking at the market in terms of options to sell a business, especially for businesses, let's call it sub 20 million in enterprise value. The options are very limited. It's a very fragmented market, it's a very confusing market. There's all these terms that bankers use that you don't understand.

Business brokers will charge you an arm and a leg. Other platforms, I felt lacked trust and security. And I would just look at reviews and just see, I got scammed on this thing. So nothing was specific to startups and SaaS, which is what we focus on at Microquire. And so as I had exited my second company, Allcoin, which is crypto protocol exchange company, I was looking to buy a business.

I wanted to buy a SaaS business because I saw people start to talk about this. Not just big private equity firms, it was just regular people just buying kind of a lifestyle business, if you will, or building a portfolio of companies. I thought that was very interesting. And so I just built it thinking entrepreneurship through acquisition was going to be a growing trend.

There's a lot of entrepreneurs who maybe have great skillsets in sales and marketing, but don't want to chew glass and find high market fit like me. That was me.

And I, for some reason, decided to chew glass for two years and launched Microquire. But the key is having some unique insight into the market. And if I get one quote, I want it to be this. You want to make it a non-obvious bet on a problem in the market that will become obvious over time. And if you do that correctly, you're there before anybody else.

And then when you're there, everyone's like, oh, like, where has this been?

This is so obvious. And then with business apps, huge market, huge need. When it came out, everyone's like, oh, yeah, like mobile apps for businesses makes complete sense. And I think Microquire had a similar response like, oh, startup acquisition marketplace.

Yeah, acquisition suck. Makes complete sense. And so just like being able to have the unique insights can come from prior businesses that you built. Maybe you have an agency and you see just like a common problem or just personal experience. But that unique insight gives you such a competitive advantage over others. Makes total sense. I have to go back to business apps.

This is from your book, by the way, anybody who hasn't read it, Getting Acquired is the name of the book. Search that on Amazon. Because I believe for business apps, there was, it was, I think a number of partnership deals you had, I think potentially like web development agencies that were using your software for their clients. And that was one of the key growth engines.

Could you share more about that?

You don't know how much I've made off books so far though?

Yeah, yeah, please. Zero.

Really?

I had the publisher specifically price it at cost. So it's completely free. I wrote it as just such a crazy story or experience for me. So I just wanted to document it and share it with other entrepreneurs. But in terms of our go to market strategy, so we started out selling to businesses one to one. So we would be cold calling restaurants in 2010.

And the pitch would be like, Hey, what's your mobile app strategy?

And they're like, what do you do?

Appetize?

You want our appetizer menu?

What are you talking about?

So we were just so early that that strategy didn't work. We had a lot of initial traction by going into businesses. Like I remember walking into every business in my I went to CSU Chico State, they call it the Harvard of the West. Not really. It's a total party school. But all the bars and all the restaurants saw the value because you can send a push note and get notifications, etc.

But that didn't scale past the college town. So there was a moment in time when I saw this individual in actually Switzerland building these apps for these really high end Ramada hotels. And I remember it like it was yesterday I was sitting in my tiny little 500 square foot office by myself.

And I reached out to him because I'm I was 23 at the time and I'm thinking, okay, this person owns hotels, he's rich, like maybe he's super smart. And he can give you some advice on how to how do I get more customers. And it turns out he didn't own the hotels, he owned a web agency.

And he was building these mobile apps on behalf of his customers because he managed their website, their social media presence, basically everything.

And so my next obvious question was, how do I get you to sell more apps to your clients?

And so he proposed this idea of a white label reseller program. And the benefit to him is he was able to set his own pricing, and then offer the solution as like a semi custom mobile app, like a app you can deploy within month rather than six months for one tenth of the cost, but it had his branding, there's no association of business apps.

And what that did is it allowed him to set a certain price and a service price. So we would sell apps at say $30 a month, and he would charge his clients $100 a month and then let's call it like $1,000 setup fee to build the app to manage the app to set a social or push notification strategy.

And then once we did that, the business just went from kind of growing to just like a rocket ship. Because also what we didn't know was, he wasn't the only person with that problem.

All of like every web design company, almost across the world was looking for a way to build mobile apps or have a mobile app solution for their customers as an option, but they didn't want to hire a mobile developer in-house. They didn't know anything about mobile. The list kind of goes on and we just came with a perfect solution.

Like, hey, we have the technology, it's been proven. We handle the app store submission process, which is a complete headache. And we ended up partnering with over 5,000 agencies at our peak. Some even as large as like public companies.

So it was, I mean, shout out to Raul from Vendomat. That's his agency's name. He's still around and I still keep in contact with him in the downtime.

But yeah, it's just a good lesson of listening to your customers, I suppose. From the book, I also got a sense that you had a strong culture of business apps. And I assume you're putting out the same at MicroAcquire now.

What's the neat thing to share?

I know it's quite like hard to describe, but that you can do as a founder or even if you're a marketer running a marketing team to build this strong culture with the people that you're working with.

Yeah, definitely. I think culture is the most important piece of building a company. And I think it really starts, it absolutely starts with the founder. And the reason I think culture is so important is just simply like with a startup, you get to build anything you want. You get to choose the people you work with. You get to choose the values of your company.

How fast do you move?

How slow do you move?

And you got to work there too. So you might as well make it fun. And so my view on culture has always been to really go the distance. If you just hate working, if you build a job you hate, that's so sad. And usually that is revolved around. Maybe you just have a lot of drama in your business or maybe your team is just constantly foot clopping on strategy.

Like for me, alignment and no drama and just being able to laugh with my team, both on a personal level and a professional level and then seeing them grow is super rewarding.

And so I just look for a few things when I hire people, which just can I see myself enjoying working with you?

And then number two, can I see you enjoying working at this company?

And three, I think you'd do a good job. So I look for motivation and attitude and skillset in that order.

But yeah, I mean, I always kind of joke around and say we didn't build the biggest company at Business Apps, but I would put, I'd enter a submission if there was a condos for Funnest Company because everyone was super aligned. We had so many good memories from building that company. And that's how you really get the most out of people too.

If you just treat them with respect, you give them autonomy, you trust them in terms of what their job is. Because as your organization grows, you cannot be involved in every single decision. So you have to kind of let go. And it took me a while to learn that.

But once you do, it's not only rewarding for you personally to see people you hire kicking ass and doing a way better job than you are, but then also you don't have to stress out over everything. And then people enjoy working there. You create this environment that people want to be a part of. So employee retention goes up, people do their best work when they're happy.

So my thing with culture has always been revolved around, I always tell my team my job as CEO is pretty simple. It's number one, to make sure you're happy. And then number two, just make sure you have everything you need to succeed. There's obviously a lot of layers to that onion.

But at its core, it's like, are you happy in your current role?

And then two, do you feel supported and you have everything you need to succeed?

Kind of it. Nice. So let's skip forward now to I don't know if the name has officially been changed to acquire.

No, it has not. Not yet. But it's coming.

Yeah, we're thinking of first week of next year, we'll do like an official switch. Cool.

Okay, nice.

Are you allowed to share how much you paid for that domain?

Yeah, so that caused some controversy. So I was on Twitter, and someone randomly and I joke around on Twitter from time to time. Sometimes the jokes are funny, sometimes they're not this one I have apologized for.

But someone said, like, Hey, Andrew, what do you think?

What did you pay for the domain?

And someone responded with definitely over a million and someone else responded. And this was like an anonymous account. And they said, I think between five to 10 million. And then I said, we paid 2 million for acquire.com. And then it just went like viral amongst the domain community, if you will. I had no idea there was articles were written about it. Like acquire.com fourth biggest purchase of the year.

And I'm just like, what is going on?

Like I didn't issue a press release. I didn't know an email me to confirm the price.

Like you serious?

And so I later corrected that we paid just a little over 200 K for the domain, but it was down from 500,000 last year. And I had actually been in contact with the buyer or excuse me, the previous owner for about a year and a half. So it took a long time to really get them to believe that domain. I'm not a fan of domain squatters.

And so that was a purposeful over suggestion of the amount you pay for the domain to get the free PR, I assume.

No, not at all.

No, I don't know. I just thought it was funny.

I was like, wow, you guys really think this is a multi-million dollar domain?

So I just kind of was just, and I guess the domain community was watching or something. I don't know. Cause it's not like I said this to, I don't know, go daddy or something like that. I just thought it was just an off the cuff joke. It was corrected within hours, but within that two hour time period.

And then the whole domain industry is kind of like, that's like, you shouldn't do that and all stuff. And I'm just like, I'm sorry. Like I had no idea you guys would like rush to publication and stuff like that. And there is a little bit of little drama on that one. Let's talk about bootstrappers.

I want to understand, so for the people listening, it's essentially a separate media property from acquire that is like sponsored by in the header, et cetera. And you have teams that are creating content around people that bootstrap. It presumably is a media play that's going to grow attention that will ultimately drive both startups and investors to acquire.

Am I correct in that?

Is that the overall strategy?

Yeah, a little bit. I started bootstrappers out of frustration with just kind of the mainstream media and just frankly the bullshit they feed young founders. When you look at TechCrunch and Forbes and all these other magazines, the only version of success you read about with startups is raising a bunch of money, trying to build a unicorn and it's insane.

And so it started with me kind of throwing some jabs at TechCrunch specifically because they cover business apps, which was a bootstrap company. And they covered us a bunch of times and they wrote real business building stories, stories that inspired me to be an entrepreneur. And then it just turned into a venture capital PR firm and every other article is like, this company raised 500 million at a crazy valuation.

I'm just like, dude, we're in a bubble. Stop writing all this stuff and no one cares about the fundraisers. I would like to hear about the founder story, the struggles they went through, like the TechCrunch of 2012, 2004, the one I grew up reading that kind of inspired me to be an entrepreneur.

And so I just felt there was just such a void in the market and almost to the point where it was, I'll use the word toxic because that's not the only version of success for entrepreneurs. And I just felt like someone needs to say something in terms of you don't need to build a billion dollar business to be successful as an entrepreneur running micro-quart. I just see that every day.

I get to see all these businesses. So long as we're short on a case that only writes about bootstrap businesses. And we really tell the founder story.

We tell how did you get the business idea?

What was the struggles?

What is your background?

Who are you?

What are the lessons you can share with other founders?

Real stories. Not just raise five per million quote from the founder, quote from the VC, like this boilerplate. It's just basically something I felt the startup ecosystem needed given all of the just one way sort of press that we see today, which frankly hasn't really changed too much. And I think it's kind of a bummer. For sure.

So you like the playbook here is create a new brand, hire people that can write real stories, then find the stories published and then just wash with compound over time. Yeah.

And then I think more than anything, like we don't ask businesses on there to like, Hey, do you want to like sell your company or anything like that?

Like it literally just was kind of a gift, if you will, to just the startup community.

Like, Hey, for full disclosure, micro requires venture bag. We're on that 1% sort of ride. We're going to get to that. Don't worry. Yeah. And then just letting people know like, Hey, just so you know, there's a different path you can take. Maybe a similar path I took with business apps where you don't raise a bunch of venture capital and you can sell your business for one, two, three, four, five, $10 million.

That's pretty awesome. And that's probably what you really want. You don't really need a billion dollars.

Like what are you going to do with all that money?

Like you don't need a private jet. That was just the thought behind it was just the narrative and Silicon Valley is just, it's been glamorized. It's been overhyped and it's burned a lot of founders. And I thought just put shining light on businesses that are taking a more practical and realistic approach entrepreneurship made a ton of sense.

But like you're obviously an entrepreneur, and so you're taking capital and investing it in order to grow. So I assume it isn't just a gift. Like you're going to judge its performance and see the impact it has on the business or not. We don't run ads on it. We don't. We write the stories for free. We design animations.

There obviously is business benefits because we mostly focus on helping bootstrap founders sell their businesses. So there is some benefit in that respect, but it's not our main customer acquisition channel or anything like that. I'd love it to be. If we can inspire enough bootstrappers and when they're ready to sell their business, Micro requires the place to be. That's awesome. But that's not like our goal.

We don't write about companies being like, oh, we wrote about you. You better sell at Microquire when you're ready. I can. So I have been featured and it was an awesome experience. It wasn't like the interview I had for the article to be created was like a really good conversation and the article wasn't some light, shallow level piece. It was like a deep article.

So it was an awesome experience for me and I got good feedback from people that read it. So that's just some feedback. Yeah. I remember reading your article and see, that's how disconnected I am from bootstrappers. I don't do the interviews. We have a completely separate team. So the only real connection is just kind of powered by Microquire.

And then we'll just reach out with, do you know any other founders that want to be written about?

But again, I think there's just such a huge void in just the startup ecosystem in terms of media and everyone saying one thing in terms of basically only featuring.

There was a tweet recently by a friend that's like, what's a great PR firm?

We're looking for someone to tell our story. I just said, just raise a bunch of funding. And then that tweet got more likes than the original tweet, I believe.

But yeah, I think it's important for entrepreneurs to understand, again, you don't need to raise a bunch of capital. You don't need to build a billion dollar business. You can have a really, really successful life. Because when you raise a bunch of capital, especially as first time founders, it's like, hey, go climb Mount Everest first try. Good luck. It's only going to take 10 years, maybe 20.

And I think entrepreneurs fall into this trap again, where they build a job they hate. And I think a big part of that is being stuck in some big business where they've raised capital and they get to focus on more capital to keep it alive. And they have all this investor pressure. And that's awesome. Because obviously, we're recording on Zoom, that's venture backed, they're public.

There's a lot of amazing companies that come through that route of building. But for I think 99% of entrepreneurs, it doesn't make sense. And I think at least for your first business, bootstrap it. I always say my recommended path for entrepreneurship is number one, start an agency first. You'll learn a ton, you'll really get your hands in sales, marketing, maybe it's sales development, maybe it's video editing, whatever.

You'll learn a ton just by starting a very simple business. And then build a bootstrap, a SaaS business, sell it so you become financially secure, and then swing for the fences. Raise capital, go land a beach, go do whatever you want.

But that's how I think you can also maximize just your chances of having a successful entrepreneurial career rather than first try trying to build a billion dollar company, and then potentially failing. And then usually when you see that happen, they bootstrap the second business, which I've seen over and over and over. And there's also a reason.

If you notice, a lot of people in private equity, when they build businesses, they bootstrap them. Because when you bootstrap a business, you can sell the business for whatever you want. An outcome of two or three or four or five million dollars is truly life changing, unless you're a billionaire or something like that. But when you raise venture capital, you're signing up to build something much, much larger.

It's either the ultimate prize or kind of nothing. There's really no in between. Kind of going on a ramp, but... Yeah.

So, I mean, Aquia has now valued 110 million after the last fundraiser, right?

Probably 85 million. So that article, I know what you're referencing. It's an Australian based publication. And I reached out for them to correct it. But I guess Australian dollars, 85 million converted to Australian dollars is 110 million. Got it. So our last valuation was 85 million. So you are on the billion average, is what you're saying. I guess so.

I think with the current correction in the venture markets, our valuation is probably half that like with everybody else.

But yeah, I mean, I'm swinging for the fences. I bootstrapped my first business, sold that, and then my second business sold that. And for this one, I just felt, let's really try and impact as many entrepreneurs as possible. And I knew if I didn't raise capital, someone else was going to come on to this opportunity, because it became so obvious that this was such a huge void in the startup ecosystem.

And so yeah, I was like, all right, I'll kind of take one for the team just to help out a lot of entrepreneurs.

But I'll also say, at the same time, after going through two different, or I've built like five different businesses, if you include like the ones prior to business apps and stuff like that, when you accumulate enough experience, like dealing with investors or dealing with the pressure, and then also having kind of a small win in my back pocket, it makes the process of building the company so much easier, especially hiring and recruiting.

I have hired back probably half of my old team. So there's a lot of benefits to again, bootstrap your first business, get to some form of financial security. So if your venture backed business fails, you aren't just left with nothing. Because when you bootstrap a business, you get it to even a million dollars, that's still worth something.

But if you raise money and you get to a million, and you go to sell that business, you might get a job at the company that acquired you. There's a big gap.

Moving on, it seems like I might have the answer to this question already. But you were talking about the key motivation between or for acquired was to impact as many entrepreneurs as possible. My next question is about personal brand, LinkedIn posting, the book, for example. I assume that is all aligned with the mission, which is trying to impact entrepreneurs because your content is all around a similar thing.

You can bootstrap if you want. Here are tips for starting a startup.

Would you agree that that's the motivation?

And then second part of that question is, what has the impact of that been on the success of different projects?

Yeah, I've thought about this a lot over the past two years. What really drives me at this point is really just helping entrepreneurs. I know that sounds cheesy and everyone probably says that, like I want to help my cousins with it. But it really does.

When I have a tweet or LinkedIn post and someone says, like, hey, I really needed to hear this today or when someone sells their business and they're like, thank you. You influenced my life in some positive manner. Or when we write about other entrepreneurs with bootstrappers and they're like, this is the first time we've ever been written about. Thank you. That's what really motivates me at this point.

This sweater is from Target. I've been trying to fix my hair this whole interview. I just got out of the shower. I don't have any material once.

Well, you bought a house, right?

I think after the business apps acquisition.

What's that?

You bought a house, right?

Yeah, I bought a house, bought a car, and that's about it. And I still have clothes that my friends also call me simple gas because I love building companies and that took a while to unpack and learn about myself. But ever since I was a teenager, I've just loved that's the happiest.

But getting to your question around creating content, I also love creating content because it has an impact on so many different people. The single tweet you can take someone from because building startups is so hard. It's stressful. A lot of people are trying to learn and just being able to give back and just share tips, even if they're bad tips.

Sometimes I say things that people vehemently disagree with like, is product more important or distribution?

I have certain opinions on these topics and I share them. But in terms of business impacts, it obviously has really helped put Microquire in a lot of people's minds. I'm sure that's how you heard about us. But I would go as far as saying if you don't have a social strategy today, your business just doesn't exist. Every single day, new startups are being created.

And when you look at the landscape, I think one mistake that people make is they kind of map out like five competitors that do the exact same thing as them. But your real competition is customer attention. Because there's all this stuff going on. And so sure, maybe these other companies have the same features and solve the same problem. But really, what you want to compete for is customer attention.

And so that's kind of how I think about marketing is you want to tell a compelling story. You want to be helpful as possible.

And then maybe once in a while, you get to ask for some help like, hey, Elon Musk, can I have this Twitter handle, please?

But yeah, it's had a pretty good impact, not just on the business, but I think also, more importantly, just on people building startups.

If you had like a baseball card of you as an entrepreneur, and you had all the different attributes like marketing, product, culture, hiring, where would you say that you're the strongest?

That's a really good question. Probably better answered by someone who works with me. But I would say brand. I'm just saying things that I like. I'm a big believer you do your best work when you enjoy it. I love brand work. I love storytelling, which kind of is in the marketing bucket.

So let's just go with marketing, culture, recruiting, actually sales, basically everything but product is kind of, let's just put it that way. But then and so this is why I think I find your story so interesting is because you've been a solo founder three times, I believe.

Actually, what was the second one as a solo founder?

Yeah. So clearly, all three products have been, we can say at a minimum, good.

And so my question is, how have you managed for that when it hasn't been your strong point?

So I'm not technical at all. I don't know how to write a single line of code I never have. With business apps, I made our landing page or homepage. It was just like a template. But I only knew how to like edit the images. I've always been a decent designer. So when I say decent, like decent enough to make a design, but not decent enough to get a design job.

So basically a bad designer. But anyways, yeah, I've always been non-technical. So the start of business apps, that was started by someone who's building apps for other people on the job board that I created. And I reached out to him and I said, hey, could you make a template for this app that you're selling and I'll pay you for it.

So I sold the job board to pay for that and then found a bunch of great developers on Upwork, surprisingly. I got just lucky and found there was this individual named Raymond Chester and he was kind of like our CTO for the first three, four years. And then we eventually hired in-house VP of engineering, VP of product, all the people just way, way smarter than myself.

So I've always known how to manage engineers and the whole product development process, if you will. And then with all going again, hired a team. And then with my group, I actually started with an agency. I just had an agency build everything from start to finish. Very MVP-ish, if you will, probably over designed. I put a heavy emphasis on design and user experiences.

I also had a thesis around, I think you can disrupt a lot of businesses today that are kind of old, clunky incumbents that just look like they were built in the year 2000. And I think for... Let's not say the F word.

What's the F word?

It's the common competitor of yours.

Oh, Floba?

Yeah.

Was that who you were referring to when you were saying old incumbents or not?

I think they're a great business. I would say, I just wish they would stop copying us is the only thing. They've copied everything from features that we build, from tweets that I write.

Really?

They're also... But actually, I should thank them because they are paying customers of Microquire.

Really?

Yeah. They're CEO, they're co-founder, they're head of product, but we don't look at them. So they like to say that they're leading all the time and they're pioneering the industry. But if you're following, you're not leading. So I'll just leave it at that.

But yeah, I looked at them and I just said, hey, this thing looks like Craigslist 8, I think a Starburst. I think we could probably do a better design job. So focus heavily on design, user experience. Yeah. So basically every project I've ever started or every company I've ever started, I was not the person to write the first sign of code or anything like that. Wow.

Andrew, I want to thank you for being so generous with your time here. I just want to thank you for all the information you've been putting out and building Microquire soon to be acquired. Yeah. So for anybody watching or listening, go to, I guess to search for Andrew Gastecki on Twitter, LinkedIn, also go and buy Getting Acquired on Amazon.

And obviously, if you ever need to buy a business or sell a business, go to soon to be acquired or acquire nod.com.

Anything else we should direct people to?

No, just maybe if you have a question about Microquire or just need help as a startup founder, you can reach me at andrew at microquire.com. One of those inbox zero weirdos. So if you email me, I'll probably respond. Take that up if you're listening.

Andrew, thank you so much for your time. My pleasure.

All right, guys. Hope you enjoyed that. It was a maybe less marketing focused chat, but we definitely got some marketing wisdom in there. And I would highly recommend checking out Bootstrappers, checking out Gastecki on his social channels, especially the Rust Heneman videos. Absolutely genius. So go and check that out. Quick shout out to H. West Webmaster Tools.

Go there, Google that, go there, sign up, and you're basically going to get some sweet SEO tools for completely free. If you have any feedback for the show, Apple podcast rating and review, please, if you do that same screenshot, I'll get your shout out in an outro of the future episode. And of course, thank you so much for listening.