Lessons Learned From Bootstrapping a Software and Event for Podcasters (with Pat Cheung)

Welcome to the Frugalpreneur podcast. I am your host, Sarah St. John and my guest today is the founder and CEO of Fanlist, which is the all in one fan platform for creators to create a fan page for podcasters, YouTubers and creators where you can engage fans and earn money. Welcome to the show. Pat Cheung.

Hey, Sarah, thanks. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

It's good to have you. I was a guest on your show a long time ago, so it's good to finally have you on mine.So now you have Fanless, which used to be called Pod Inbox for people who maybe aren't familiar with the name change yet because it's been fairly recent ish that you change the name. So just to make that connection. But yeah, I'd love to hear how you even got the idea to start that.

I mean, I guess I could start with the journey of what you alluded to, Pod Inbox, which is now called Fan List and which we just like you said, we just pivoted to that name or did a name and brand change. So Pod Inbox was originally a very simple idea and it, and it really came from a place where I guess I'm what's called a serial entrepreneur.I've been in entrepreneurship for a while, for many more years than I care to admit. But my previous company was a venture backed company.It was called silversheet, it was in the area of healthcare and we could talk about that if you want. We, we were venture VAT and we got acquired. So it was a successful acquisition.And after we got acquired I just really was looking for the next thing and honestly looking for the next thing. I kind of had a mental checklist of the type of companies that I wanted to start or pursue.And a bootstrap company was high on the list of something I wanted to try because I think of my experience with venture VC was good, but still I just was very curious about bootstrap companies. So the idea for Pod Inbox started is I just wanted something simple.I kind of learned a lot about bootstrapping in the tech world and I think a lot of the advice was like maybe, maybe start with something simple. So I thought, you know what, let's pick something simple.And the other piece of advice I got was pick some niche or industry that you're really passionate about. And at that time I just love podcasts. I still do. Been an avid listener podcast since I don't know, probably 15 years. So just always loved it.So on the short list of ideas was like, I should probably do something in podcasting, and let's just try to find a small pain point that looks like it's kind of largely being ignored that I could probably tackle.So the idea came when I was, like, just trying to understand the different type of podcasts that I like and kind of the things that they did and maybe some of the pain points they had is I noticed this little thing that a lot of the prolific podcasters I listened to did a lot of audience engagements. They had a lot of question and answer or AMA episodes.And one of the ways that they were facilitating that was dial into this phone number, leave a question, and then we'll answer it on one of the future episodes. I thought, that's great. You know, I actually love those episodes. It's like a way for podcasters to engage with their fans.And I thought, wow, instead of a phone number, why don't. Usually the audio's pretty bad with the phone.You know, if someone's calling in with the phone, you get that kind of like, really cheap little mic from the phone, and it's really staticky. So I thought, why don't we alleviate that problem of instead of go to a phone, go to this webpage that they could just leave an audio message on.Right?So that was the basic premise of POD Inbox, why it's called Inbox too, because that's kind of your inbox for your podcast, and it kind of grew from there.The other main benefit from that, V1, when we launched V1, it was about three years ago, so we've been around for three years, was with a phone number, you. You don't really get to collect that person's contact info. Right. You don't know who that fan is. You just kind of know that phone number.So if anything, you're kind of collecting a database phone numbers, which is good. But we thought, you know, a lot of creators, they're kind of taught to create an email list, right? So that's kind of what we did too.So it's like, if you engage our fans, not only are you getting that fan interaction, but you're actually collecting their email through our system, too. So, yeah, that's how we started.And we launched at a trade show, my first podcast trade show, and I can't remember, that's Maybe that's where I met you, or we met at subsequent trade shows.

We met. I think it was podcast movement in Dallas.

Okay. Yeah, I think that was the second year.

Well, that's where we actually met. But I think I probably knew about you or the company before that or something. I feel like we maybe had connected.I feel like when we met, we somehow already knew each other.

Yeah, I know. Yeah, it's a. It's a small world in the world of entrepreneurs and podcasting.

So you bootstrapped? Well, we'll start calling it Fanless now. Cause that's what it's called. So you've bootstrapped that business, Is that correct?

Correct. Yeah, it's something. Yeah. Pot in Box, I thought was like a simple enough idea.And I'm still a huge fan of bootstrapping, but I'm also a fan of venture cap or investments, so I still think about that from time to time, especially as we're kind of pursuing a bigger idea now. I mean, the other idea, the technology is pretty simple. This. The concept is pretty simple. And getting customers is pretty simple.This other concept is totally different. And I even alluded it to a pot, a pivot, which is not really a pivot because we just added onto the product. It still does that core function.People could just use that function if they needed, but now it has all sorts of monetization functions, which creates a lot more complexity, a lot more cost, and all that stuff. So, yeah, still, I still have, like, the bootstrappers mindset, but maybe open to other financing options too.

Okay, interesting.

Long answer to your question, though. Yeah, still bootstrapped. Yeah. But I'm putting more and more investment in it all the time.

And one thing, when you changed it from POD Inbox to Fanless, one thing you did was you took away paid plans. And so now it's just the way you get paid as a percentage of if people do a donation or a membership.And I think it might be a higher percentage than it used to be, but you're not charging a monthly fee. How did you decide to do that?

Yeah, that's a great question. Hopefully it's the right decision. So all these little minor pivots are still new. That happened at the same time as the branding.So when I did the branding change from POD Inbox to Fan List, we released a bunch of new features, and we did this pricing change. So we just thought, let's just treat it as almost like a relaunch a little bit.And with that kind of relaunch, we actually had to get rid of a lot of our subscription revenue, because, as you said, we went from a SaaS only product. I'm sorry, to.To be very clear, we went from a product that had SaaS in there, that recurring subscription revenue to Just a commission based revenue. So I had to give up a lot of our existing revenue. But we did it because we thought, well, two things. I'm a huge believer in community.And the more I learned about podcasters, there were a lot of initial assumptions that I think were totally wrong in my mind. You know, I thought they, you know, I kind of treated them as sort of small businesses with some kind of a spending budget.But I think I realized it's even hard for a lot of podcasters to afford small subscription fees. And I think I just got tired of selling them this product that they had to buy. I think I just wanted to give it to them.So I don't know if that's the right decision, but I thought as someone in the community that really wants to encourage podcasters on their journey, let's just offer it for free, let's just give all our best features away for free, and let's just try to succeed. When they succeed, and our job is to get them to succeed, that's our North Star.It's like if they don't succeed, then they're going to churn and that subscription revenue wouldn't be worth much anyway. Right. They're going to not only turn off our product, they're going to probably do what's called pod fade podcasting terms. Right.Meaning they're going to stop their podcast too. So our job is just to help them keep podcasting because I have a theory that if they keep podcasting, they do it for.If they just keep going, they'll eventually find their audience and they'll eventually find some kind of monetization. And I believe when they succeed, then we'll succeed was sort of probably one of the.It's like something I'd like to think we did altruistically, but I think it was a good strategy too. Mainly the other reason too is when we pivoted, we went from sort of a tool to this kind of greater industry, a different industry.We went into this creator economy platform industry. And so I kind of looked around the space there and thought, what's the normal business model around that? I think there are two main ones.It could have been SaaS, it could have been subscription revenue, or it could be this commission based structure. So, yeah, we just went with commission based structure.

Yeah, I mean, I personally, I like that structure and I think probably most people who are bootstrapping or who have an independent podcast, especially if, say, there's no money coming into it directly, I assume that most people would appreciate that model. I Mean, I know I do. But like for you, have you found income wide that the.Because I, I believe it's a higher commission percentage than it used to be. But you're not getting the monthly recurring income. Has it been more beneficial on your end as well? Or is that still to be seen or what?

That's a good question. And I mean, maybe I should take a step back. When I first decided to do this podcast, I'm like, oh, the whole topic is about being a frugalpreneur.I'm like, you know, I have to ask myself, am I really a frugalpreneur? Like, do I really think about ROI and profits and ebitda, like that much? And I would say, quite honestly, I don't think I'm a great frugal planer.I'm really into bootstrapping. I sort of manage in my town that I live in, I manage pretty big bootstrap community here.Pretty big advocate of bootstrapping and also pretty big supporter. Any bootstrapper wants to grab coffee with me, I always open up my day to have coffee with them because I want to encourage that journey.Am I a good bootstrapper or like a frugal entrepreneur myself? I'd say no. And maybe one of the reasons, and there's a long answer to your question.So sorry, lay out this context that I feel like I think my lessons in running a VC backed company is, and I don't know if this is right or wrong, this is what I do. So definitely don't take my advice.But I don't know for me if it's important to be frugal and always looking at the bottom line or is it to be capital efficient?I think the subtle difference to me is when I fell in love with the world of bootstrapping, I fell in love with their determination to be capital efficient. And I even think of, and I even, I've tracked it even more is being efficient.So I just think, how can I be the most efficient entrepreneur in my bootstrapping journey? And sometimes that efficiency doesn't necessarily translate to how good the profits are, whether they're better or worse.So once again, long answer to your question. So when I make this justification, I try to justify my actions and a lot of times I'm just tricking myself early.But one of my justifications of doing this because we definitely lost revenue, I mean there's no doubt about it and therefore lost profits too. But when I thought about it, I'm like, am I being efficient? Is this an efficient decision?And then I thought, well, how big can a SaaS company around one feature be? Maybe it could be big. Maybe we spent X amount of dollars and get another X amount of dollars out. That could happen. So charted out that scenario.But then I thought, we're not just changing the business model, we're going into a different industry, right? So when I think about it efficiency, I'm thinking we're going into creator economy industry. That industry's total market size is way bigger, right?So when I think of like a podcasting tool, I mean, let's, let's just not to be way too long winded. Cut me off if I'm being too long winded.But even when I analyze like podcast hosting companies, right, we go to these trade shows, what are 10 booths, we see podcast, everyone's in a podcast. But then when I think of how big are these companies? How, how big can they be? When you do the math, they can't really. I mean, they could be huge.Like there's massive podcast hosts that has dominant share of the market, but their total market size can only reach. It's well under a billion dollars, right? Well under maybe a fraction of a billion. When I think of what the opportunity is, it's well less than that.It's well less than a podcast hosting company. Those podcast hosts you actually need as a podcaster, you need that tool to be a podcaster. My mind is just kind of like icing on the cake, right?If you think about the pot in box tool, you might not have AMA on your show, you might not care about interacting with your audience at all. So then when I think about our pivot to this bigger idea, this creator economy platform, there are companies that are valued in the billions.That industry can actually get to the billions, right? So when I think about efficiency, I think about, oh, what's long term gain versus short term gain?You know, I kind of make that calculation in my head and it's like, well, you know, if I really believe in this idea, then it's worth investing this X amount of money for these years being less profitable. But now I'm going after a billion dollar market versus let's say $100 million market, you add a zero there, then I would say, not great.I'd give myself like maybe a D on being a frugal entrepreneur.But I think being an efficient entrepreneur, when I think, oh, how much time and resources did we spend building this pretty advanced tool that could stack up against the tools of billion dollar companies? We built that with a small team and Was very capital efficient with that. I was like, yeah, yeah. I think that's kind of where I, I lean into.I, I, I think, you know, we did a pretty good job and yeah, that's how I kind of justify. Yeah. Once again, long answer to your question. I'm still trying to answer your question. Lot less profit.

Well, maybe. Yeah, at least initially and then hopefully eventually, because I guess now it's not just for podcasters, it's for YouTubers and as well.

Yeah. And that's kind of an experiment too, as any sort of guy run a lot of experiments.So, yeah, recently we put in the headline of YouTuber and other creators, because I think it will become a tool that other creators can use. It could, other creators could use it right now, but our primary focus is still podcasters, I think. Yeah.Even doing the calculus on that, that's like the most efficient way, I think, to get the right eyeballs on this type of company, get the right users and build out that niche first. Yeah. What do you think? Is it smart to write all the above, or is it better to. Okay.

I think, I think so. Yeah. I think to, to say that it's for. Well, let me, I need to look at the website again to see what.

I keep on going back and forth on. So I keep on.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, because I assumed that that was part of the reason you changed the name was to kind of open it up to more than just podcasters, so.

Correct. Yeah, yeah, that too. I think it gives us the potential to.But even when I look at some of the competitors that we have, it's like it's arguable that podcasters are making up a majority of the revenue. There's just so much power in podcasting that has yet to be harnessed. We see it harnessed, I think, because we're inside the industry.But, yeah, there's still a lot of potential there. So, yeah, I think, you know, I'd be happy if we stayed there for years and just focused on that industry.And when I say focus, like, you know, once again, it's like capital efficiency. It's like we could build out a whole suite of tools for creators in general. But my belief is still I'm prioritizing the needs of podcasters.One of the features we just built was a subscription management product for premium content, and we could have picked any premium content to start with.What I mean by premium content types is like, we could have built a subscription paywall for newsletters so we could kind of compete with substack Right. Do we start out with that or do we build that in later? Well, we decided, well, let's build that in later because we want to focus on podcasts.So the first feature premium content feature that we built was premium podcast, which is probably the hardest of them all. Having a podcast like a premium podcast feed wasn't easy to build.We have these features that gives each subscriber their own unique feed and all that stuff. We host the files and everything.So when I think of all the features that we could have built just for creators on the leaning into how to be efficient, we started with the podcast one and yeah, we do really believe in the industry of podcasting.

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So in your bootstrapping journey or bootstrapping this business, what things have you learned? Mistakes, failures, but then also successes or any kind of like tips that you have? Bootstrapping.

It's funny. I am guilty of probably one of the cardinal sins of a tech entrepreneur is I'm a builder. I love to build and I don't love to sell.Often when we sit in a conversation, we can be around A table of 10 people and people will not know I'm the founder and CEO of Fan list until day two. But I love to build. I love to build great products. I love to build beautiful products. That's one of my cardinal sins.And in that sin, it's like when I first bootstrapped pot, inbox or fan List. One of the things I told myself is, well, we really have to test the product MVP stage before I spend years building this thing.So we built an mvp, took us about two or three months, and we launched at Podcast Movement, and we launched there. And I chalked that up as, like, I guess it was a success and a mistake. It was a success in that I kind of got over.I did what I set out to do, which is don't build a bunch of stuff before you get validation. I'm a huge believer in customer development and product validation.And just for some context, I was a product manager by trade for, know, 10 years or whatever. We're kind of taught that. But sometimes when you run the ship, you tend to throw out a lot of the rules. This was one of the rules.I'm like, yeah, let's follow that one. That's an important one. Let's validate the product.So I thought my only goal in launching pod inbox podcasting was like, let's just see if people care about this thing that we built. So I'm like, what's the best way to reach people? I could either run around the conference and get feedback, or I could just pay for a booth.So I did the calculus. I'm like, well, this is where the frugal. By the way, I am a frugal guy by nature, so maybe I don't get a D in frugality.You know, I'd probably get, like a B.But I looked at the cost, okay, If I go to a trade show, this one being Podcast Movement all in, it'll cost me maybe 1,500 for ticket, hotel, flight, and all that stuff. Maybe a thousand to two thousand somewhere around that Buck park, right? Or let's just see what the cost is for getting a trade show booth.And to my surprise, it was not that much. More like, when you get a trade show booth, you get. They give you a couple free tickets.So already you're saving, like, I don't know, $800 there, right? If each ticket's $400, you're saving 800 bucks. So the delta of being attendee and having a booth was only maybe $2,000, I'd say.So I was like, you know what? It's probably. It just feels more like a launch if I just had a booth, did all that stuff and really got feedback. So that's the. What we decided on.It's like, okay, let's do a booth. So we're like, okay, we have the booth. What's our goal for Validating the product. And we only had one Northstar goal.We're like, well, let's give an offer. And if enough people buy this offer, then we're like, okay, it seems like people do care.Like people think, oh, this is good enough, that they're going to part with their money. That's the validating criteria that I had. So we created like a lifetime offer.It was, I think, actually quite honestly, I'm forgetting now, but it was like maybe $70. It felt like an appsumo type offer, right.I think I just created like a baseline of if 50 people sign up, we'll just call this validated, kind of an arbitrary number. But it kind of was basing on how many attendees were there were and all that. And these goals we kind of set out before the actual show.And then at the show, 70 people signed up. So we thought, okay, that felt good, that felt okay.You know, I don't know if we smashed it outta the park, but at least we met the goal of the validation case, right? So, yeah, that's what happened.I'd say that was kind of like a pseudo success where, yeah, we had a goal and we hit the goal and we executed on the goal. But where I'd say maybe learning once again, to answer your question in a long winded way, the learning was. I was not a podcaster at that time.I think the only credibility and authority I could lend myself is I've been a fan for a long, long time, right? So I think I know podcasts very well as a fan, but I did not know podcasts as a creator, as a podcaster at that time.So quite honestly, it felt a little disingenuous to, to launch a little bit there. I mean, if I could do it over again.And this is a lot, like I mentioned, I run like a bootstrap community here and I'm always encouraging people before they get into anything. If you really want to be efficient and frugal, be curious. You got to be curious about that industry first.Like, learn about it, be a student, take notes. So I wish I went to another conference first, just as an attendee, just to learn.Even before writing any code, even before developing anything, I wish I would just learn about their pain points in sort of a very honest way. And, you know, I mentioned this because I think a lot of. I think other people are in today's society.It's like there's so much rah rah about, you know, build authority, write a book, become a known expert before you even do the Homework. And I feel like I was kind of guilty of that a little bit from.Even though we had a successful conference, I thought, in retrospect, I think it would have served me well to learn a little bit more. We might have done a different idea. I don't even know. I don't know what that route that would have taken us, but what went a ride.Tell people about the start. We say, learn, be curious. That's something I didn't do enough of, probably kind of.

Speaking of conferences, you hosted your own conference called PodConf, and unfortunately, I didn't get to go, but I'd love to hear about that process and how you decide whether to have one or not and kind of the expenses involved in the logistics and whatnot.

Sure. Ooh. It might be hard to pull back out all the details, but I'll try it. So, like you said, we had an event called PodConf here in Portland, Oregon.That's where I live. And I'll tell you where it originated. It just came out of what I just mentioned earlier. I just wanted to be curious. I'm.I think maybe it's a project, a product manager in me that. And I'm a product designer, too. And I think we're just ingrained to be curious, right? Be curious about the industry.So I got really involved with the local podcast community because just as the continual exercise of being curious, like when I took part in leading the local meetup here, the local meetup chapter here, I thought, you know, I'm not going to tell any of these people about Fanless. It's not my turn to sell. And maybe that's my weakness of, like, I. I don't. I'm not a great seller, but I want to learn.I want to continually learn what podcasters are struggling with, what they need. And then my job as a founder of a podcast technology is to try to see if we could serve and meet those needs, right? So that was sort of my goal.As I led the local chapter more and more, I thought, you know what? These local chapters are great, right? It serves this purpose that these conferences. And by then, I've gone to all the big podcast conferences, right?And not to knock them. I love them, right. I'm still going to keep going to those conferences, but they're more like trade shows, right? They're great.If you're in the trade or if podcasting is a big part of your life and your business, those are great. But there's this whole other world of podcasters that will never go to These trade shows, because they're a podcaster, right?I use the analogy of like there's a lot of people playing basketball at the local park and they're never going to go to some conference for basketball.I don't know if that's a great analogy, but they're just going to play at the park and they just want to know the local people that are playing and kind of share notes and get better together. And that's kind of where the idea came from.I'm like, oh, that would be cool if these other podcasters that are kind of isolated behind their mics have community locally, right? So that was where the idea originally. I'm like, oh, if I start this meetup, maybe I should just formalize it into like this bigger event.Just have a one day thing, just simplify the whole experience. Like a lot of the conferences we go to, they're multi track and it's just crazy, right? It's just like everyone feels drained afterwards.Everyone loses their voice afterwards. There's so much talking and so much action. And this one, we've set it around three values. Community, creativity.And I forget the last one, but it's something like contribution. We wanted people to really feel like they're part of this local community, that they could contribute.So those values really help build the framework around our conference, which I think was successful. Like, I got raving feedback that like, whoa, this is like one of the neatest events I've gone to and stuff like that.So all that stuff was really good to hear. And I think it's because we've focus on these values of things that we didn't experience at the trade shows, right?Trade shows, we tend to see same speakers all the time and all that stuff. So this, we're like, let's give people who are just avid podcasters a chance to do a workshop. You know, they're not speaking on a stage.So we did have a stage. We had a main stage. Once again, it was one track, but we packed it all in a day. We had three core speakers. I wanted the speakers to be inspiring.They were to provide that part. You know that one of the three tenants, right, they, they were going to inspire. How, how did they grow their podcast into the po Big podcast?They were. And the workshops were how do you take part in? How do you contribute?So we just called out to our local community and say we have 10 open slots for someone to teach a workshop on something about podcasting. And 10 people raised their hands and they did it. And so, yeah, that part of it was really cool.It was really cool to sort of brainstorm what the event was going to be. And logistically, this, this is where my memory might fail me a little bit. And maybe there's a lot of good frugal tips here.In fact, I'm going to be talking about this, some of these things in our local meetup. So this will be a good refresher for me. Another context is this is my first time hosting an event like this, like an industry type event.I've hosted kind of biggish events before, but like an industry type event. It was my first time. So I didn't know about venues, I didn't know about any of that stuff. So just did the research.And one of the cool, maybe frugal hacks that your audience might appreciate is when looking at venues, there are venues that I think we got stuck for a month looking for venues. And there were venues that you had to pay a lot of money for per hour. And then in that venue you have to cater through their system too.So that's another cost. And it's just cost stacked on cost. And these costs aren't just cheap costs, they're actually kind of industry costs.Because if you choose a venue, chances are you have to choose their caterer, which is pretty high dollar amount. So one of the smart things we did was I looked at a local hotel that I really liked. It's a boutique hotel. They have this beautiful space.And this was new to me. Maybe it's kind of, kind of common knowledge to other people, but if you cater food, a lot of times they give you that space for free.And they gave us this huge beautiful space that had a main auditorium that could fit about a hundred people. So this, the, the goal of this thing was to fit about a hundred seats, sell about a hundred tickets.So this venue they gave us had this space that could fit right around a hundred people. They had four breakout rooms that was perfect for our workshops. And they're all kind of located in one central vicinity, which was kind of nice.These big trade shows we go to, we're running from one end of the trade show floor to like this other end. And it could be like a coup football fields away. But this was very intimate. You know, that's one of, one of the best compliments we kept on getting.It's like, wow, that was such an intimate conference. And it's because everything was right there in the breakout rooms.And the amazing part was all that was free, all the venue things that they provided Were free.All we needed to do was spend some minimum limit amount of money for food, which was crazy because the minimum limit they wanted us to spend was pretty much maybe two or three hundred dollars more than what we were going to originally pay for a venue.So that was a big unlock for us because we're like, oh, not only can we have this event, because at first when we were planning the event, we're like, oh, no, food. That's just going to be too much of a headache and too much of a cost.So after this opportunity came up was really kind of a game changer because when people got there and, you know, another core tenant that we had is we didn't want to make money. Like, I would. I just, like, I'm just doing this for the community. I don't need to make any money off this thing as long as it covers our cost.So we just didn't want it to be a loss. So we. We could just. So we were just maximizing for break even. So in that we were able to sell tickets for $50, which I think is very low.And other people thought it was low too. We started at a 30, so, like half the people got their ticket for $30.And when people came, they were like, this is unbelievable that you guys did all this work. And it only cost $30. Very good value because they get food. Like, we had food from. There was enough food. Oddly, a lot of people didn't eat.It was really good food. It was done by the private chef at that hotel. Really great food. And there was enough food for the whole day, Enough coffee for the whole day.You know, you go to these conferences, they usually run out of coffee by midday. There was coffee enough for the whole day. And yeah, so that was a really good frugal unlock. Every. Everyone else was. Were volunteers.So we got volunteers to help out, which is hard because when you don't pay someone when things need to be executed, that obviously becomes tricky because everyone's just volunteering their time. But our volunteers were great. They were really, you know, wanting to pitch in and help on the day of. And that. That was definitely necessary too.We had like, I think we had about five volunteers to help out during that day, which they were all necessary. Yeah, yeah, that's. I'm sure there's a lot of frugal hacks in there.

It's like getting dark, I guess. Oh, it's stormy outside. I was like, why is my face getting so dark all of a sudden? Did you notice in the room?

I did notice it too. I'm like, I thought maybe it was your WI fi or something.

Okay.

Oh, yeah.

A little better. Yeah, yeah. It's like I get progressively dark the rest of the best parts of a podcast, and I usually have a. Like a ring light on. But whatever.

That would be funny if you did an episode where you just increasingly fade out, where it just ends.

That actually reminds me. So my parents, their neighbor was throwing some stuff out and that one of them was a chair. And they asked if I wanted it.And I was like, well, I already have a chair. I don't really need it. And they're like, okay. Well, yeah, because just to let you know, the one thing with it is it'll randomly, like, go down.And I'm like, well, that wouldn't be good. Why would I want that?Because if I'm in the middle of a podcast, this whole joke about how, like, as the podcast goes on, I'm like disappearing out of the frame. So I.

It's like a meter. It's a meter that the guest is being too long winded. Thank you.

But yeah, so that it reminded me of like, I'm progressively darker and then they remind me of that. Anyway, actually, I think I will keep this in the podcast. Thanks for sharing that stuff about the. The conference. Yeah, I think that's.I feel like in a lot of ways there's always some way that we can or different ways to launch a business, manage a business, have an event, whatever, with little to no upfront money or ways to hack. You had mentioned appsumo kind of in passing because of the pricing thing.That's one way that I do a lot of appsumo deals, which saved me on a lot of monthly expenses.

We ended up, yeah, breaking even. It was very close. I don't even know.I might have me and the other organizer, there's another co organizer named Claire, she put in a little bit of money. I put in some money too.And I don't know if we were ever totally made whole, but it was enough that we kind of asked ourselves, would we do this for an altruistic purpose anyway? And we're like, yeah, that was sort of money we were able to part with, but the money we got.So we ended up selling about 100 tickets, which was our goal again. And I think the blended rate think it the last rated was at was 50.I don't think many people bought it at 50 because we already pretty much sold out by then. So most people got it. I think we actually started at 25. Was my memory is clear. So the blended rate, let's say, is like 35.So we probably got about $3,500 from that. Definitely can't remember the food cost, but it was probably right around there. The tickets probably paid for the food in the venue.There was some cost associated with some of the speakers. Some of the speakers were volunteer. I think one of them, we had to subsidize some money or maybe a couple of them, I think felt fair, too.They were helping us out, and we definitely wanted to make it easier for them to come. And the other revenue we got were from sponsorships. You know, that was the benefit of, like, going to a lot of these trade shows.You just get to know all the founders of all these other companies. And I was just like, you know what?One of the other core tenets we wanted to do with this conference is, like, you go to a lot of these other conferences, it feels.Feels like a lot of the people who are speaking on stage, we're kind of pitching a product, which is something it just personally doesn't resound with me. I like the separation of, like, journalism and, like, ads a little bit, and that's kind of how I feel about the stage.So we're like, okay, let's see if there's sponsors willing just to do this to support community. And there were enough sponsors. I think we got about, I want to say about four or five sponsors. And this was new to me, too.I didn't know how to ask sponsors for money. I started with pay what you want.I just said, look, to be honest, I have no idea how to value this, but I admire you in the industry and just pay what you want. And it was hard for them, quite honestly. If I were to do that over again, I'd just say, no one wants to feel bad, right?They don't want to feel bad for being cheap. They don't want to feel bad for getting ripped off either. So it's like, just give them a number.So I think it started because the first person I asked was like, I don't know, what do you think is a good price? And then I just thought, you know what. What would I pay as the founder of Fanless to sponsor an event of a hundred people like that?And I put out a number. I think I want to say it's like 500 bucks, but I literally can't remember what it was. So I want to say it was like three to five hundred bucks.So, yeah, each of those sponsors found this included. We pitched in three to 500 bucks. So do the math. Like three, three to 500 times four or five. So that was revenue too.That just went into some of the operations. We had to like do stuff like rent some chairs and all that kind of stuff. So overall it was kind of break even.

Well, that's good. Well, I'm glad it was break even. And man, I feel like we could keep talking and I have to get on another call. I'm bummed.But I do appreciate you coming on. And of course people can check out fanless analyst.com. was there anything else? Did you have any last words or anything?

Not really. Just, I mean, want to be helpful to your audience.Once again, I am just a huge proponent of bootstrappers, but it just came from a place where being a VC backed company before, you know, we went through techstars before too, which is kind of a pretty well known accelerator.There were just so many resources we had as a financed company that I thought when I took the journey into bootstrapping, it's like there's so little resources. So anything I do to help. So if anyone needs advice or wants to reach out, feel free to.

Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it.

You're welcome. Thanks for having me. It was fun.