Brian Casel: [00:00:00] Hey, it's Open Threads. I'm Brian Casel. This is my podcast. Welcome to it. So today I'm continuing my conversation with my friend, Corey Haines. And here we got into Corey's current search for a technical co founder. So Corey, as you know, is a marketing focused person, and he's been very successful at really growing awareness and community for his products and his ideas.

And when we had this conversation, he was actively. And openly searching for somebody technical to join forces with and build a SaaS. Now, to be clear, we recorded this back in February of 2022. So I don't know whether or not he's actively still looking for a technical co founder, but he might be. So if you are technical and it sounds like you might be interested in partnering up with someone who is really strong on the marketing side, Corey's a [00:01:00] great person to get to know.

But in this conversation, we got more into exactly what he's looking for and how he's going about it. I think it's a unique approach. So yeah, a lot of questions to sort of like think through and wade through. I've always thought about partnerships in general as it's so much harder than people realize.

You have to get so lucky, right? It's not just a match of skill sets and personal chemistry. Of course, that's important, but it's also alignment in your careers and where you're at, both of you. So we got into that and a whole lot of other stuff in this conversation. It's a good one. here is my chat with Corey. Enjoy.

I'm here with Corey Haines and we just did the other segment where we talked all about your marketing as a media brand course and community at Swipe Files. But I wanted to talk to you about what are you up to right now in your career? I mean, you mentioned at the front of the last segment that you're doing a lot of things and [00:02:00] man, I relate to that.

This was literally. Me for the last 12 years on my personal side, I have like a list of all the products that I started and launched. And just recently I sold off basically all of them, except for ZipMessage. So I first became aware of you as the head of marketing at barometrics, right? When you're working with Josh Pickford and the team there a few years back, and then you went out on your own and.

And started like Swipe Files and podcast, and you've been consulting with different SaaS companies and stuff like that. So how has like the journey been so far? How would you characterize the path you've taken so far?

Corey Haines: Man, it's a windy road. I'll tell you that much to give some context. I started like, no, since I was about 19, I wanted to be an entrepreneur.

Just didn't really know what that meant or what that would look like. And I was very aware of that. I think it's silly to try to predict the future on what exactly they'll be interested in and what opportunities come my way. And so I just knew. I'm just going to try to put myself in the best position possible to eventually have all the skills and practice and network and financial ability to do this one day up until now, or the last like [00:03:00] year has been putting in the reps, trying to get myself ready for this next step of my career as an entrepreneur.

Also, it's just been finding this world of SaaSs and bootstrappers and indie hackers and starters for the rest of us. And this whole like. Micro SaaS community. And as soon as I started working for a SaaS company, I knew that I wanted to start a SaaS company. Eventually it was just like the perfect business to me.

And I fell in love with software and the business model and the community and just the whole, I think, opportunity and idea of it. I had a lot of false starts and ideas around e commerce products and businesses and. Marketplaces and websites like

Brian Casel: selling actual products or like, yeah, it was for e commerce.

Corey Haines: I have a new book I could pull up right now literally has 200 plus Physical product ideas like little inventions which is I wanted to see in the world things to solve my own problems That is really, really hard. Inventing a new physical product is I can't imagine really, really hard. After a bunch of false starts and try and do all the research and figure out all the operational side and manufacturing [00:04:00] side, I realized that if I really wanted to go down that route, I'd probably have to do more licensing than anything.

Cause it was exciting to want to see that thing exists, but I was not excited at all about building that thing in the first place.

Brian Casel: That seems like a super frustrating. I know a lot of really well in that world. Like a good friend of mine runs board game tables. com. Chad Deshawn does really well with that.

And he's personally into like gaming and everything like actual board games. Well, they manufacture tables. And when they make a change or like if something comes back from the factory and something's off, like if like send it back and like wait a month for them to correct the problem before they can even ship it to the customers.

And I'm thinking like when there's a bug and ZipMessage, like I fix it by tomorrow morning. It's just the speed of it just seems so frustrating.

Corey Haines: Right. That's what drew me to SaaS was looking at all these, listening to all these podcasts of e commerce entrepreneurs and. Doing all this research and just the idea of one having to make sales every month with new customers To maintain your revenue [00:05:00] stressed me out.

It's like, geez, that does not sound fun at all. You have all sorts of seasonality, flexes and cash flow issues and things like that. Number 2, the production side of things. If you don't own the means of production and you have to outsource and basically get everything manufactured in a rural country or ship it over or have someone else to fill it.

Also a huge headache and don't want to deal with that. SaaS was like, this is better and easier. There's recurring revenue and it's software. You just deploy code. Like what's that's the dream. So anyways, SaaS has been my end game forever. Now, I spent a good four years in college commuting about two hours a day back and forth through all the different places I need to be and going through home, listening to podcasts and audio books.

By the time I finished college, I felt like I had a really good understanding of what's all out there. Like, it was totally just like a red pill, blue pill moment where I was just like, I can see now how the world works, what's out there, what's interesting to me, what's not. And I just knew that SaaS was the thing that I eventually wanted to get into.

So I also got [00:06:00] introduced to Rob and started for the rest of us and his stair stepper approach to bootstrapping where he talks about, okay, step one, you need a. Single channel, single sale product. So that for me was, Hey, marketers, the job board step two is can go either way, but like multi channel single sale or single channel multi sale recurring revenue.

And so that was something like a course or like a membership set. Three is like a product type service. And then step four is SaaS. So it's like you want to step your way up to the level of difficulty, which is SaaS or e commerce or like those types of businesses. That are very, very complex. There's a lot going up in the air.

They require a lot more experience. And so everything up to that has been trying to, okay, step one, check the box. Step two, check the box. Step three, check the box. I've been doing prioritize consulting, mentoring, coaching. Just to put myself in a position in order to finally get to SaaS, which I don't know this close to

Brian Casel: like, I definitely [00:07:00] seen and felt firsthand the whole idea of like the stair step approach, but it felt a little bit more random.

And then also when I think back on all those different business models, like, I don't know that I'm fully on board, at least not anymore with the idea that like SaaS. Has to be the final step, like all of them have their challenges, all of them have their benefits and drawbacks. And I mean, what seems to be usually like an early step, it was for me, it is for you.

And with other people is like the course, like book or info product or course or membership community. It's technically easy to create, like you don't have to build software. You don't have to have those special skills, but it's still extremely hard to market and grow an audience. And you sort of have to have those kinds of skills, right?

But then that's also like the big benefit. Like in your case, you've grown this audience of marketers, right? In a community.

Corey Haines: From my perspective as a marketer, I think the marketing across each one of the products is relatively the same. It's not really like harder or easier for any one of them. [00:08:00] I think the product is the crux there.

Even in, so I love the example of, uh, Daniel Vasallo on Twitter. He's a really good thinker and creator and maker. He shares openly his, like all his revenue from the products that he creates. The vast majority of his income comes from info products, eBooks and courses and things like that. And then he does some consulting for gum road.

And I think actually one of his first projects, but the tiniest amount of revenue, I think only does like a thousand dollars a month is a SaaS called user base. I want to say I might be butchering that, but I think one, because it's just inherently harder to find product market fit with software. You get lucky and strike gold and like build something that's like very new and needed and just people are clamoring for most of the time you have to feel your way around and make a couple of changes and pivots and.

Get up to feature parody in order to start competing with an incumbent or start being attractive for people to sign up for.

Brian Casel: It's so hard because it literally has to be solving a problem that people are ready to buy and get their problem [00:09:00] solved. Whereas with a course I found that like, yes, it really, really benefits a lot of people who buy it and, and watch every lesson and implement it and use it to grow their business.

And that's great. But then there's a lot of other buyers who. They don't necessarily go through it all. They don't necessarily implement it all, but it's sort of exploratory. They'll make the purchase just to go down that rabbit hole for a little bit to see what it's like. And maybe they'll learn like, that's not for me.

And in that case, they still got value out of learning that path is not for me. So like there are people who are willing to buy just to explore. Whereas with a SaaS, they would need to buy to actually solve a real problem.

Corey Haines: Yeah. I think what it comes down to is there are a lot of products, even I would put e commerce in this bucket as well, but e commerce.

Info products, even some services. When you make the purchase, it's more to fill like an emotional need of this thing makes me feel good. I'm making myself better. I'm going to save this for later. I want to see this thing in my house. This thing's going to solve something for me in some way, or it's gonna make my [00:10:00] life easier in some way with SaaS.

It doesn't solve like an emotional need as much as it, a very functional utility. Like if that thing doesn't solve the problem or if it doesn't like an ROI attached to that thing in some way. Then you just don't pay for it. Right. And I think it's inherently harder to build something that serves. A function that is, it's a utility than it is sell someone on like an emotional benefit.

This thing will make you look better, feel better. It's fun. It's educational. It's entertaining. Definitely easier on that side of the spectrum.

Brian Casel: So it's like way harder to build, way harder to get product market fit, way harder to market. But for some reason we're all chasing it for some reason. Right.

Exactly. I want to talk about being a solo founder versus finding a partner and the great partnerships out there. And I'm solo today. I've been solo basically my whole career with the exception of some like side hustles, like my bootstrap web podcast I do with Jordan, or I organize a small conference with my friend Brad and dude, like the twist [00:11:00] and turns of this career and everything, like I've just ended up solo and basically accepted that at this point, but there've been times where I came really close to forming a true like business partnership on a major business, several times.

I'm curious to know, like, where are you at in that journey? You're solo now, you've got not only a number of products like we talked about, but you have an audience now, you've got a community, people who know you, Twitter, podcasts, all that kind of stuff. So how do you think about that? Are you comfortable in the solo founder role?

Or how do you see yourself building into SaaS future as a solo person? Or would you be looking for like a partner?

Corey Haines: For different types of businesses, I think you have to think about what is the core competency. Of the thing that we sell. So for an e commerce business, a lot of it is around product design.

And so designers fit really well. If you look at people like Catherine Lavery, for example, with best self, she was an architect and she's a designer started making t shirts and then notebooks and then journals and then card decks, and she can do that. She can design the products [00:12:00] because. That is a core competency of herself.

Same thing with content. If you're going to produce courses, you're going to write a book. You need to be able to write and enjoy writing and enjoy creating content, videoing yourself, producing a podcast, and that can be your product. If you're going to build software, you need to know how to write software.

If that's going to be the thing that you're doing by yourself alone. So I am very self aware that I am not a programmer. I'm not a designer. I am a marketer. Now I can do Swipe Files alone because fits very neatly in my circle of competence with. Content creation and around my subject matter expertise, which is marketing with SaaSs.

I'm definitely not going to do it alone, even if I had the money or ability to hire a developer. I would choose not to go down that road because I just know that at the end of the day, someone needs to be responsible from a very high level for the product. And I just can't fill that role. Someone else would have to have to be some sort of CTO, [00:13:00] some sort of.

Director of engineering, VP of product, something like that. And I don't want to go into that business, not knowing the product that I sell, not having that core competency. So for me, SaaS is it's either nothing or it's going with a technical partner. Now for Swipe Files, I want to keep that from myself alone.

And I can do that forever because there is nothing that I can't do in order to sell the thing for the product for that business. If it was e commerce again, that was one of the reasons I also decided that that wasn't for me is because I'm not a designer, even like marketing isn't like a really core thing that you need in e commerce, you can very easily outsource that and you can hire for it.

And also sometimes it just happens. Your thing starts spreading virally and you don't really. Need that. So for software, I see it as there are only two jobs. You build the software or you sell the software. If you can do both great power to you. I think you will still probably have a hard time straddling doing both of those jobs at the same time, sort of splitting [00:14:00] your focus between them.

But for me, it's unquestionably, I need to have a technical partner.

Brian Casel: Yeah, that makes sense. I definitely feel the challenge of being solo almost every day. And it's usually a tension between, I mean, I am a product person. I design and develop and build the software and I hack my way through the marketing side of things.

But the tension there is the, what am I working on today? Am I working on product or am I working on marketing? And I have to do both. And it usually involves, I'm either answering emails that are marketing related or I'm in between GitHub issues on the product.

Corey Haines: One of the best pieces of advice I've seen a lot of indie hackers give to each other.

Is do a week on week off for product to marketing. So spend one week on the product, one week on marketing, whatever the, now you're moving on half as fast.

Brian Casel: That's true. You are moving definitely half as fast. I do a lot of that too, but it's never that clean. It's never like literally Monday to Friday is product time.

And then next Monday to Friday, it's marketing time. I mean, it's never that clean because the opportunities are going to come into your inbox at any time. And that's when I have to just like flip into marketing mode and go do [00:15:00] this podcast. So I'm curious to know, like, if the ideal for you would be to eventually get to a SaaS business, which would in your case, require a technical partner.

Would you go into that thinking like, here's a product opportunity that I identified in the market. Let me find a technical partner to help me build this or maybe find a partner first. And together as a partnership, go explore product ideas or markets.

Corey Haines: I thought about this one a lot. I don't know if there's a really clear answer because the problem is if you find a partner first and then you both go and explore an idea, what happens if one of the partners isn't as interested in the idea as the other, this whole like Venn diagram of interests, right?

It's like, okay, you found the person, but now can you find something to work on together that. It's both of your core competencies and allows you to work in your zone of genius. That's also really difficult. So on the flip side, if you were to find the idea and then find the partner for the [00:16:00] idea, that can also work.

The problem is that you might not know if that idea is actually a good idea or not. Right. I was going to say, well, yeah, exactly. And also a lot of people want to see. An idea is a dime a dozen. I think that ideas aren't worthless. There are some people that will say that. It's definitely not worthless, but you want to go and validate that idea.

And this whole validation question gets really, really murky. But I've seen a lot of advice thrown around there around, well, if you're not, if you're a non technical partner, go and like build a no code prototype, start getting revenue, and then you can recruit a technical partner. It doesn't really work like that.

It's really hard to actually go and do that.

Brian Casel: I think there's a ton of opportunity in no code to build things like Swipe Files and memberships and add like automations around that stuff. But to build and sell an actual product that could take the place of a SaaS, I don't quite buy it yet.

Corey Haines: No, and here's the thing, too, is personally my own view of what validation looks like.

Is you need to have usage [00:17:00] before revenue because no one's going to pay for something that isn't actually being used, that they are not finding utility out of and making use of the app that you have. And so you see this all the time. I think more recently we've started to see this where someone starts charging for a product.

That doesn't really exist yet. And then once you give people the product, they're like, yeah, this isn't really what I want. I'm going to cancel. And so it's this whole false start and false validation where just because you have revenue doesn't mean you have validation. And so for me personally, I would approach it more from let's build something that people use first and then we can charge for it.

And so this whole like, we'll go and build a no code prototype and then like start getting revenue and recruit someone just doesn't work for my approach either, because I would want people to use it for free first and then be able to charge for it later.

Brian Casel: You know, on the validation question, I've gone through a long list of products in my career so far. And I think if there's a spectrum, I moved from. The lengthy validation, customer research, even have done pre [00:18:00] sales and all that stuff. And as the products have gone on in my career, I've moved closer and closer to what I did today with ZipMessage, which is like shift the product as fast as possible and get a usable product in their hands.

As fast as possible. I think that like, yes, obviously you need to validate a market. I think a lot of that happens through observation, whether it's scratching your own itch, you're in the market, you feel the pain. So you see it, or you're just observing a very active market and you're seeing the movement and the gaps happening in a market, right?

So it's sort of being tuned in, but then it's having the skillsets, even whether it's yourself or through a partnership to be able to ship really, really quickly. Was it message? Like I had the idea in late 2020. Started literally building the prototype in like January 1st of 2021, shifted into the hands of customers by the middle of March, first paying customers in April.

It wasn't a full product, but it was like the core is like the basic idea. And the way that I got there was a building up my skills as a developer, be leveraging. development frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Tailwind [00:19:00] CSS and anything that would help me ship faster. Hiring a developer to it and working out a really strong, not a business partnership, but a daily day to day work partnership where he and I are just shipping features like as quickly as possible.

And I think that's a skill set that product teams I think really need to hone. Again, I think it's one of those. Core competency skills in early SaaS startups that doesn't talked about or promoted as much. We all know tons of extremely talented and experienced developers who know how a computer works inside and out.

But the ability to make tactical decisions in architecting a product that's a high level of quality and B will ship by this Friday. That's a really unique skill set for product developers to have. And I think that's really hard to find.

Corey Haines: Yeah. You don't want to spend a year in a cave building something that no one wants without talking to anyone, but you also don't want to.

Start charging for something that doesn't [00:20:00] exist yet. And then spend a couple of months building something that ends up you falsely validated, right? Are you over promised? That wasn't actually the thing that the people want. You have to find something in between. And I think that in between that perfect balance is building something as quickly as you can, that you can get into someone's hands and then go from there.

Right. It's like step zero is ship something people can use. And then step one is validate that thing. Will people pay for it? What are the features that are missing? Is there really something here? Do they use it? How much do they use it? Who uses it? But really like step one, the whole crux, the non starter is you have to get something in people's hands.

Brian Casel: I guess the last point that I've run into several times in my career with finding a partner. Curious to hear how you think about this now. And I think that folks who are in that front half of the career, like earlier on, have a, A little bit of an advantage in terms of the timing and alignment with a potential partner.

When I was younger, in my twenties, like before I had a family and kids, I came close to partnering with one or two guys. They were a little bit older and they had a family and kids. So I was [00:21:00] the one like hustling and working nights and weekends. I don't care. Like I just want to get a business off the ground.

I like it. But basically limited to like nine to five because of family obligations. Totally understandable. And then now fast forward to more recent years. Like I'm the one with the family and everything. But the challenge that I found there is alignment in career and like career level, career experience, and frankly, the ability to self fund.

So what I mean there is like, there were times when I was looking for a partner and, and I was sort of at the start of a brand new business idea. Because I had the ability to self fund. I had audience ops. Basically paying my bills while I had free hours a week to work on a new product. So the other person usually did not have that unless they're just recently sold a business and exited, or they have some other passive income source going on, or together we decided to take funding, which at the time I didn't.

So I'm curious to hear, how are you thinking about that now? Like, would you be looking for someone who has that ability to self fund today? And also somebody who is like sort of in between businesses right now? Like [00:22:00] that's the hardest thing about finding a partnership,

Corey Haines: I think. Yeah, the timing is really, really tough.

Even the timing for myself, if someone came to me two or three years ago, I'd be like, yeah, I would love to do something, but I can't work on it full time until X date or until X revenue milestone, or I have to keep this thing on the side on the down low until we can afford to leave or something like that.

So I'm trying to make my life easier, right? I've built up Swipe Files where it supports me financially. I'm SavvyCal, which helps and gives me a little bit of a cushion and. Some recurring revenue from when the cashflow goes up and down for Swipe Files, months and months. So I never know. So now I'm completely flexible.

I'm like, look, whoever wants to work with me, I am wide open. Please let's do something. But now they obviously have to be in that position as well. Of course, it's way easier when you don't have kids and you don't have a mortgage. Those are the two big factors. And also if you don't have like a very demanding nine to five job, especially if it like prevents you from working.

Brian Casel: That to me is a non starter. [00:23:00] If they're employed, that's not going to work in my opinion.

Corey Haines: It's really difficult. So for me, it's hard because of course I want to find someone who is super talented and like checks all the boxes of this is someone who has all the like competence to build out a SaaS product from start from scratch, which not everyone does.

Some people are more like the optimizers and scalers and where they're really specialized in one area. And so if you tell them to build something from scratch, they're like, well, I've only really done this part before and it's not going to look great or function great, or it's not going to be faster. Et cetera.

And then two, do I like this person? What I want to get a beer with this person and be friends and basically sign myself up to be married from a business perspective for the foreseeable future and even put my own finances at risk with this person ethically and practically if it goes to zero over there's some catastrophic event.

And then three, is this the right time for them? Is this the right circumstance for them? Can they actually pull this off? So Yeah, the pool of people who I can work with, I think is inherently very, very, [00:24:00] very, very small. The Venn diagram makes this tiny, tiny little point of intersection where like, these are all the people that I could see myself working with.

Of course, I've also tried to put myself in a position of networking with entrepreneurial developers who can be technical co founders. I started the IndieHackers of San Diego meetup, trying to meet more of those types of people. I constantly am trying to help people, IndieHackers on Twitter and IndieHackers.

com with marketing related things. To build friendship and trust also just because that's what I like to do and can't help myself from doing those things. And then like you said earlier, building friendships with people who can also introduce me to those types of people. So I'm kind of just like, I'm putting out the bat signal a little bit and allowing the internet serendipity to do its thing and like try to find me.

The right person or even people, multiple people for different projects or for different times, or just test the waters and do something together where you can figure out, do we continue with this or do we want to part ways? And either way, that is a okay outcome for both parties, [00:25:00] but we're keeping our options open.

Brian Casel: I think that's a tremendous opportunity for a technical person who does want to get into basically the startup game. Obviously there's plenty of people who are just, they're out there to be employed, but. I know that there's a lot of technical founders who are not marketers. They're not natural marketers.

And to be able to partner up with someone like you, it would be a tremendous opportunity.

Corey Haines: Yeah, I mean, I'm all about like, let's just find the work that we want to do and that we really enjoy. And if you don't like marketing, like you shouldn't have to do marketing. I don't know how to design develop, but I also have a pretty good idea.

Like, I don't think that's what I'd want to be doing day in and day out. Like, I've never really felt that much of the urge to go and Be in the code or to design things. I am happy handing that off to some other person. So let's just find what we like to do that. We can both bring to the table and especially in this world of SaaS, like those two functions work really well together because then neither person has to worry about filling that function in the business.

Brian Casel: I think it's interesting. And I think this comes into play with newer partnerships where [00:26:00] there's some initial tension around like speed and misunderstanding of the other person's domain of expertise. Right? So like marketers who really know nothing about how a product is built, like why is something taking a long time?

What is the technical hurdle? Cause they just don't understand how it's built. I used to be there, but on the flip side, I mean, again, I think developers. Engineers, you have to start to hone the skill of rapid prioritization of what's important to build and what should you not even touch or think about so that this thing gets built fast so that you can learn fast.

That is the hardest thing for a technical person to get to know. And I think when both people are on the same wavelength on that front, we're building, but we're shipping, that's the recipe for making a new partnership work.

Corey Haines: For marketers too, like, look, I'm not trying to toot my own horn here, but like, there are only a couple of SaaS marketers out there who can do a really good job early stage and look at a business and a product and say, what are the best [00:27:00] strategies and tactics in order to grow this thing?

And then they have the confidence to go and execute on those. Again, it's kind of a problem of specialization. If you're a backend engineer, you're going to have a hard time with a lot of the front end development and design of building a SaaS app from scratch. And if you're a demand gen marketer used to metrics and budgets and ads all day long, and then you have to go and plan a product launch and write content and DM people and see the product influencers, you're also going to have a hard time, right?

And you have to be broadly experienced and broadly skilled enough for the early days. To make it work and developers also don't want to partner with anyone, right? Even the markers that you partner with, they need to have the right skill set to get something off the ground. And I can tell you from experience, there aren't that many people out there and it's very easy to fail as a marketer.

If you don't have that breadth of experience.

Brian Casel: Yeah. Well, Hey, Corey, I mean, I think it'll be really interesting to see how things evolve for you this year. Obviously you've got a number of existing products that are, that are doing well already, but you're always making moves and be really [00:28:00] interesting to see how you venture into SaaS over the next couple of years.

Corey Haines: Thank you. Yeah, I hope this year is finally the year I can break in. I've also got, just to mention it really quick, I have a Notion doc that I wrote up about what I'm looking for in a technical partner. And so I've been sending that around to a couple of friends and partners and people that I trust who hopefully can make a match.

I've already got some potential things in the works. So if this is an open thread, maybe I can follow up later about what's come of that and what SaaS products I can actually ship out the door and grow.

Brian Casel: Yeah, definitely. Well, I don't know when people are going to actually hear this one, but probably the best thing to do would be to connect with you on Twitter, right?

Like, yeah, that's what I was searching for you earlier. Uh, Corey Haines, that's some other guy. You had it like a coat.

Corey Haines: Yeah. He's actually a well known developer. It's a bummer because I'm like, dang it. I'm never going to get his handle. I'm never going to get the domain. He's always going to be like the first one to the next social media platform.

Brian Casel: Well, to state the obvious, maybe Corey Haines should partner with Corey Haines. Right.

Corey Haines: I thought about that. Actually, he's a little bit later in his career and doesn't seem to have any side projects or anything like that [00:29:00] to be entrepreneurial, but that would be funny.

Brian Casel: Well, yeah, this is cool. Thanks, Corey.

Corey Haines: Thanks for having me. Well,