Prioritizing Your Personal & Professional Goals with Levi Nunnink, CTO of Morning Metrics

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today, Joel is talking to Levi, CTO of Morning Metrics. And they discuss how to approach selling your company as an entrepreneur, how to keep your head on straight when raising venture capital, and how to think about prioritizing your personal and professional goals. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Levi at 00:00:27) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:28) This is the Modern CTO podcast. Hey, so last time we talked, you were opening an office, I think, in Poland for Droplr. Is that right?

(Levi at 00:00:45) Yes. So at that—I think we talked, man, that would be 2018. So it's been a little while, four years maybe. And so, you know, Droplr was in the process of opening up a Poland office, a branch in Poland, which ended up being really successful as far as, you know, we were able to recruit, build an awesome team. Still friends with a lot of the people out there. And then in 2019, we were acquired.

(Levi at 00:01:08) So we sold to a private equity group. It's interesting. There's a whole world of people who, if you can't arrange a strategic exit, they will oblige you for a very financial kind of, "Okay, let's add this up and this works." And there's a lot of people who want to buy a SaaS app that is generating revenue.

(Levi at 00:01:26) So that is kind of the arrangement we came up with. It was, you know, in many ways, it was kind of heartbreaking to walk away from it. At that point, it was pretty much, I'd say, the best option on the table. As a lot of companies, we kind of found ourselves in a position of, "Okay, we need to either raise another round, you know, keep growing this thing, or we need to find someone to kind of cash everyone out and take it over at that point."

(Levi at 00:01:53) And the, you know, really the option that seemed the most realistic was to find a buyer for it, and so that's where we ended up. But, man, you know, at that point, when we sold, I'd been working on it for ten years at that point. That started as a side project. It was officially founded in 2013, but I'd been, you know, hacking on it nights and weekends for a couple years before that. Yeah.

(Levi at 00:02:14) So it was hard. It could've gone a lot worse, but it also was hard to walk away from it at the end. And it is very weird not to be in control of it or not to be, you know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:24) Did you retain any sort of equity, or did you just completely get bought out?

(Levi at 00:02:28) Yeah, it was a complete buyout of the company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:31) Nice. Yeah. Yeah. That's what they like. It's weird when your company gets to a certain stage of growth, people just reach out, and they're like, "Hey, we think your revenue might be this. And if it is, we are interested in talking." Or they might send you just a letter of intent. "Hey, we plan on buying you for this amount of money based on these things." And to me, that was like, it showed me this whole new world of how companies flow from being created. And then I talked to a lot of people that they got their company to around $5 million in revenue, and half of the people I had talked to had sold around there, and the other half had raised money to take it to $20 or $50 million, whatever it was.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:10) And what I learned from talking to these people is almost all the people that raised another round of capital and got their company to a much larger number in revenue kind of regretted it because it takes all that extra time, all that extra stress, all that extra everything, but you get diluted. And so when you finally exit, it's not that big of a difference than if you would have just exited at $5 million when it was smaller.

(Levi at 00:03:37) No, you're absolutely right. I think that, man, there's so many strings attached to raising money, especially when you get to the exit point. I remember getting on the phone with essentially, he was a board member, but our CFO at the time, but he was from our main investor. Right? Wonderful guy. Love this guy. Super generous, insane amount of experience, worked for a number of amazingly cool VCs and everything. But just starting to add up the numbers of basically how this deal was gonna go down, and he was like, "Sorry. This sucks. You know, this is kind of a bummer."

(Levi at 00:04:11) You know, but when you're in the state of mind when you're raising money, you're in such an optimistic frame. You know? Like, "Oh my gosh. Yeah. Of course. We're all gonna be so crazy rich when this thing goes." That, what does it matter what these terms are? Who gets cashed out first or liquidation preferences or anything like that? You know, I think as entrepreneurs, a lot of us, we aren't finance people. You know, we like products. We like ideas. We like trying to build things, and we're naturally optimistic.

(Levi at 00:04:42) And I think that's where you really want to think through. It can be very expensive money, right, when you're taking it. It might not do what you hope.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:50) Yeah. When I—so I raised venture capital. And when I did it, I thought it was so interesting. I'm like, "They care? They're negotiating these items. Why do they care about this? It makes no sense. There's nothing there yet." And now later, several years later, I think it's been four years since I did that, I totally get it now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:08) What you said with, liquidation preferences and all of that and different rights and controls and things like that. So I completely understand it now. But there is that phase when you're first doing it—some of the thoughts that were running through my head when they were, you know, my lawyer or something, "You need to think about these, you need to decide on these." I was thinking, "Look, that person's gonna, if they make this investment, that's gonna give us a shot of a lifetime. And that experience is so important."

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:37) "And it's so important that we get it right. And it's so important that we end up making money. Even if I build this company, sell it, barely make anything, I have that entire experience of raising venture capital, building something with partners." Previous to that, I had only had CTO product experience. So this time I was the CEO, so I got to learn how to build sales teams and all of this stuff. So I saw it partly as they paid for my education, but we did return them. We're profitable, and they're gonna be very happy when we do sell. You know?

(Levi at 00:06:08) I think there's a world where, you know, you really want to think about the kind of—it's not even so much like, "Oh, venture capital is bad or investors are evil people" or anything like that because my experience with investors is they want you to succeed. I've never met an investor that I thought, "Oh gosh, you know, this guy was truly evil" or something like that. But you really want to think about the kind of business they're trying to make you and the kind of business that you want to build. I think those are the things that I didn't necessarily consider.

(Levi at 00:06:38) And that's more of a soul searching kind of thing, I think, that needs to—it's a philosophical exercise that you should do and the kind of conviction I think you should have before you go on to raise money. Because you're telling them, "In five years, this is what success, the kind of success I'm going for." Right? You're selling them a portion of that success. That's kind of the way I would say. And if your ambition is to build a large growing scaling company that's on the train of, "Hey, we're raising subsequent rounds. We're gonna have liquidity events along the way. You know, this valuation is gonna look like this. We're either gonna get bought up or IPO eventually."

(Levi at 00:07:09) Right? For example, my co-founder at Riskalyze, a guy named Aaron Klein, is someone who—I met Aaron when he was in between jobs. We were running, somewhat a friend's office kind of, you know, subletting office space together. And he acted like he was the CEO of a multimillion dollar company. He just carried himself that way. He was so professional. He was this dauntless ball of energy. Right? So Aaron, who now, lo and behold, became the CEO of a million dollar company that is hugely successful and impacting. That was what he was going for. Right?

(Levi at 00:07:58) He was gonna get there. For someone like that, it makes a ton of sense to take investment because you're going to be doing that. You're gonna be creating a scaling operation that builds and builds and grows and grows. You know, it makes sense then to take investment along the way if you can use that capital well. Not necessarily, but, you know, if you can use that capital well, it makes sense.

(Levi at 00:08:19) I think for me, kind of the lesson I took away from Droplr is where we ended up was like, "Man, I love this company. This is a product that has customers that use it a ton. I enjoy working on it. You know, we're making enough to pay the team. We're profitable if we're careful." Right? And I was really happy there. Like, "Would adding a hundred people to the mix here, if we 10x our revenue, would that be a better company to work at? Would our customers be happier at that point?" And for me, I couldn't see it.

(Levi at 00:08:52) Right? I couldn't see—for me, it was like, "Hey, we need to do less. We need to focus on who we have. We need to really just lean into these customers and serve them as best we can." But it wasn't an option. You can't say, when the rocket is halfway into the atmosphere, "Well, maybe I wanted to drive a car to where I'm going." You know? That's kind of the thing that you realize. So I think that is where, for me, walking away from Droplr going, "Okay, you know, I've seen the playbook."

(Levi at 00:09:22) "I've seen what you can do for getting a business to a certain size and how that feels, and I'd like to do that again. But I need to make sure that I'm careful as I build that, you know, that I'm building a business that's not meant to scale, as ironic as that sounds."

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:38) Did you have a co-founder or was it you at Droplr?

(Levi at 00:09:41) I had a co-founder. Again, one of those things that about halfway through, you know, we parted ways somewhat amicably. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:49) Between you and your co-founder, did you guys ever lose board control?

(Levi at 00:09:54) When he left, we did. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:57) Yeah. That's the worst. That's the thing I won't do. When I went to raise my second round, it got to the—everyone in the second round wanted to push for a board because now we've got, we would have two VCs involved or three or four, and they all wanted to push and they all want to control, and no one liked the fact that I had full control. I had three or five board seats. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:17) Or four or five, I think. But no one liked it. And they even told me that. "We don't like the fact—" they called me, what did they say? "Chief cook and bottle washer" or something.

(Levi at 00:10:28) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:29) I was like, "Okay." But I told them too that, you know, "That's why you invested in me. You invested in me because I'm able to make these decisions. And if I have to spend mental effort and energy and all this time convincing other people who aren't in the day to day of what should be happening for the business—" And maybe I would have a concession. "Okay, if you're involved and you're working as a full-time employee day to day in the business, then, yeah, maybe."

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:49) Yeah. But it's too much work to try to sell ideas to people that are managing a hundred different companies. You know?

(Levi at 00:11:01) And I think that's the—before we sold, I went to the board. I was like, "Guys, here's what we really need to do. There's something here. This could be a successful business." But they were looking at it as like, "I hear what you're saying. I get that. But we're four years into our investment. We need you to be raising your next round right now so we can get our money back." Because they have a whole model.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:25) Yeah. They want you to go grow it, raise money, and buy them out in your next round.

(Levi at 00:11:30) Yeah. Exactly. You know, they have investors too. Right? They're not just people who are sitting around with no one that they're accountable to. So, anyway, you're absolutely right. If you retain the board control, that is a huge thing, and it also shows you the kind of faith that your investors have in you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:47) Yeah. And those relationships are crazy too as they grow. And then you start to build trust, and it becomes this whole relationship thing. And we're in a really good spot. I only have the one fund, and we have a really great relationship. They saw us navigate the pandemic really well, and, you know, they have a lot of portfolio companies. So I think they have 70 or 80 now, but I think we were investment number six or seven. So we were pretty early on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:18) Wow. Yes. We've been with them for a while. They saw there was multiple opportunities for me to do negative things that would positively benefit me but negatively benefit them, and I did not do those things. And that creates a lot of respect, you know, when I'm willing to say, "I'm not going to do this specific thing." I guess I will be less ambiguous because there's no reason why not to say it. Some people were suggesting when we had such a massive shift in business model from leadership development training to podcast advertising that we should just let the leadership company fail and then just start the podcast advertising business and just start fresh with a new LLC.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:57) I've got all these investors. I have one VC, and then I have three or four personal, just individuals. And I was like, "There is no way I'm going to do that. This thing has to succeed. It's my word. It's my reputation. I looked these people in the eyes and took their money and told them I was gonna get them a return. I don't care if I end up selling baby formula. We're gonna get these investors, not only their money back, but a positive return." And so I shared that story with them, and they shared some other stories of founders who—not the same thing, but who didn't do what I would call the right thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:33) And so just those stories and those relationships over four-plus years just created a lot of respect between us. So just sharing.

(Levi at 00:13:42) It is a very interesting relationship, the relationship between investor and, you know, founder. One of the things that we did have at Droplr was some family and friends invested as well, and I think that that was something I was a little bit embarrassed of at first. Like, "Oh, yeah. These aren't institutional VCs. This is my uncle. This is, you know, stuff like that." But I actually think that's actually a very healthy thing to do. I think you should do that if you're taking—because that really keeps you honest. Right? Make sure it's on good terms with everyone else.

(Levi at 00:14:12) But, you know, that is something that if you do believe in something like that, make sure it's something that you would want people that you see once a month at family get-togethers to invest in. If you're gonna ask someone, you know, institutional to put money into it as well, that's one of the things that'll help you have the most integrity as you navigate those relationships.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:32) Yeah. Because you're closer to them. I mean, institutional money is often individuals' money that they've gone and convinced their limited partners to put all this money into a pile. And then when you're not connected with them, it's less emotional. But when you do have employees that have invested in your company or family members, then it just is a whole different ballgame.

(Levi at 00:14:51) And there are—I mean, the interesting thing that we did discover as we were looking, going through the process of selling Droplr, you can sell under whatever terms you want, really. You know, they could say, "Hey, I want to sell this company for—I want to pay $10 million for Droplr, but I want the investors to get none of it." Doesn't matter. You write the terms of the deal this way, otherwise, I'm out.

(Levi at 00:15:14) Not that that was an offer that came in, but there were weird offers along those lines where they were very investor hostile, you know, trying to kind of read the relationship and get, "Well, these guys probably aren't real thrilled with their investors at this point, so let's make sure that we kind of cut them out." Just interesting stuff like that. And you will get those opportunities often. There will always be opportunities to do the wrong thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:38) That is true. That is very true. And honestly, I don't want to say it's really great, but I do kind of think it's really great because it gives you the opportunity to stand out by choosing to do the right thing. And yeah, I mean, it's sad that it's rare that there are people that do the right thing, but when you do it, I don't know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:55) It's just it's not that hard to stand out, Levi. You just have to do what you say you're going to do, and people think it's awesome.

(Levi at 00:16:02) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:03) But I'm curious to know, so you built Riskalyze. I loved Riskalyze. I watched them grow, and I was so excited when I got to meet you on our first interview. And then you did Droppler. And what's going on today?

(Levi at 00:16:17) Yeah. So after Droppler, I would say, you know, I'd started a really good relationship with the people at Riskalyze. Just, you know, built a really good relationship with them at the time when I was working there. They obviously went on to great glory in the years that I was working on Droppler. So when Droppler was done, I was kind of in a position where it's like, I don't really know what I want to do.

(Levi at 00:16:39) I think once you've kind of been working so hard on something and you close the book on that, it's an interesting feeling. I was in a place of like, I really don't—I don't want to do another company. What exactly does the future look like for me? So I went back to working at Riskalyze for about two years. The main thing I—why I reengaged with them was to help them open a European office in Poland, which is something I had just done with Droppler.

(Levi at 00:17:06) I was a big fan of it. They were in a position of like, yeah, we're exploring—you know, we want to diversify the pool of talent that we can pull from as we're a growing company. And so I ended up going with them and kind of consulting with them for a period of time. After that, I ended up doing product management for them for about a year on their platform, kind of overseeing the platform. And it was interesting returning to a code base at a later date that still had a lot of code that I'd written.

(Levi at 00:17:36) And, you know, over that process, for me, it was an interesting experience. First off, going back as, you know, as an employee, as a consultant, and then employee to a company that, you know, you were co-founder of when they're at a much larger stage was very interesting to me. And realizing that, yeah, this—you know, I am not a—the way I described it and I told, you know, I told the people there I was working with, I was like, you know, as an employee, I'm like a bench player.

(Levi at 00:18:04) Like, if you put me in as a founder, like, I'll be your all-star. Right? But as an employee, like, I just—it's a complex situation. It's something that I still think about. Like, why is the relationship between employee and employer the way it is? Why do I find it so difficult to navigate? So long story short, at the end of that process, a lot of the things I learned through working there kind of led to the product I'm working on now, which is called Morning Metrics. And it's something I'm really excited about. It's basically—the best way I can describe it is a metrics platform for people who aren't data scientists. Right?

(Levi at 00:18:42) It's something that we struggled with all the time at Riskalyze, at a company that was at that stage of just like, hey, knowing what's going on with my key numbers. There are so many enterprise business intelligence platforms out there that all start at about $40,000 and require a data scientist to run. And really, what most people I've discovered need and what I certainly needed at that time is just—I just need a spreadsheet of some numbers delivered on a regular basis. I don't need really insane visualization. I don't need 90% of the features that we would buy by trying to adopt this platform.

(Levi at 00:19:24) I just need something really simple that gives me the data I need that's reliable. And so that was kind of the seed of the idea with Morning. So I've been working on that, gosh, for about six months now—even longer, about eight months now. I'm kind of working on the first version and the MVP of that product.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:42) Nice. Nice. Do you have a team, or are you just doing it solo?

(Levi at 00:19:45) I'm doing it solo right now. Yeah. And I think, you know, for me, the thing that I'm trying to build with Morning, other than just a, you know, a service that provides valuable service to customers—I don't know if you know Derek Reimer or Tuple. There's some indie smaller companies, but they've identified like, I want to build a business that I want to work in, you know, the kind of business that I want to be a part of.

(Levi at 00:20:12) And, you know, for me, I think that's something that, you know, has clear objectives, that serves a clear purpose, that also is something that I enjoy supporting, as weird as that maybe sounds. But, you know, there's a weird thing where so much software in the metrics world makes it really hard to buy. Right? Because they want you to—you can't just go on their website and purchase it and try it out and play with it. They want you to get on the phone with their sales team.

(Levi at 00:20:42) They want to put you through this whole kind of customer enablement process because they know that they're going to hand you a pretty big bill, and so they want to kind of make sure they've got you sucked in at that point. For me, that's not something I'm really interested in being a part of. I don't want to go through a long sales cycle with people. I need to build something that is simple enough that people can adopt in a simple point-and-click SaaS model. And so that leads me to a certain customer as well.

(Levi at 00:21:08) And so that's kind of where I'm exploring right now. I'm talking to a lot of people. I'm building out those options and adapting it. I have two or three customers, one paying customer running on it right now that's using it very regularly, and a couple more in pilot. And I'm really just trying to, you know, listen, figure out what they need, and say like, hey, I want to get a hundred of you.

(Levi at 00:21:29) I don't need a hundred thousand. I just want, you know, a hundred paying customers, and we'll see if we can get to that. This is the goal I'm setting for this at this point.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:37) Nice. What's the website?

(Levi at 00:21:38) The website is morning.so. You have to sign up and get in line for now, but yeah. If anyone's listening to this who is looking for a very simple way to get your key metrics delivered, Slack is kind of our primary delivery mechanism right now. We also send things through email and email digest and things like that. But I've really seen the most success using Slack as kind of the delivery mechanism.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:05) Ah, I'm on the list.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:07) This is cool. You know? Yeah. There are data stores and things that I have that I need reports. Like, just build—write the query and then have it update, and then I want to show it on a dashboard.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:19) And there were like two apps that could do it, and you're right. They were like $40,000. And I was like, really? And it was great because you could connect to any data store, and you could just, you know, plain English do the algorithm, or it had some helpers. So what is it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:32) Like, the thing that Rails does where you can—

(Levi at 00:22:35) Object model.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:36) Method chaining. I haven't written in a while. I'm losing my touch here. But yeah, the way you could articulate the query in a really simple DSL type deal, and then they could connect to all the data stores, and then you could just say, "Alright, pull this in and make this a chart on the page."

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:53) And I'm like, that'd be great. Right now, what we have works super well too. Every position at the company has, you know, three or four KPIs that go into a spreadsheet. And every week, we review that, and we know whether or not they're having roadblocks or they're having personal issues or some sort of performance drop, or we can just know what it is, which is one of the things that only comes with, you know, having the position around long enough to know what you should expect for it. And that's working pretty well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:24) But as you grow, it would be great to pull from all these spreadsheets into one dashboard for me so I can pull from the sales sheet and the marketing sheet and the production sheet. That'd be kind of cool.

(Levi at 00:23:37) Well, and I think what you're describing is something that's not uncommon at all—that, you know, there's a lot of people, a lot of companies in your position who are just like, "I don't have the budget for what's on the market right now." Right? And the ironic thing is I've talked to people at these bigger, you know, analytics companies. And what they end up doing is they build this massive system that is insanely powerful. And at the end of the day, most of their clients just need them to export a spreadsheet with the data specified to how it exists in the system.

(Levi at 00:24:11) And I'm like, well, maybe I could build something that skips all that stuff in the middle and just gives them the spreadsheet data at the end of the day. Because that's honestly—that's what I've done too. As, you know, CTO at Droppler, you know, I had a bunch of scripts that were kind of run on cron jobs, pull data from various databases, summarize it, and then send me kind of the latest stuff, and we'd all kind of review that. You know? And that's where I was like, well, this is a process that everyone's going to be doing, so let's automate it.

(Levi at 00:24:40) Let's productize this. Let's make it so we don't have to—you know, you don't have to have one of your developers going around hacking SQL scripts or every time you need something new, you don't have to go to him or her and say, "Hey, can you send me—can you run this query again? Because I don't know what's going on right now, and I need this data."

(Levi at 00:24:57) And that was kind of my experience at Riskalyze, which is a, you know, fairly large company. But as a product manager, my data lived in some dashboard in Google Analytics and then in some table in a SQL database somewhere. And then, you know, who knows where? It was scattered all over the place. I just wanted something that could pull the data in from these places and then present it to me in something as simple as a spreadsheet that would get sent to my Slack once a day or once a week.

(Levi at 00:25:25) And something we could talk about as a team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:28) Yeah. All the technology is there. Yeah. I mean, you could use a browser plug-in and pull things from anywhere. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:36) And that would be super easy to do. I mean, I did a lot of work back in the day with just data scraping.

(Intro Narrator at 00:25:41) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:41) You know, directories, things like that. And those tools are really advanced now, and they're super easy.

(Levi at 00:25:47) Yeah. And again, this is getting back into—if you're building scraping—Browserless is a company, I don't know if you've heard of them. They're an indie company, but they specialize—they're basically the experts on headless Chrome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:00) Right?

(Levi at 00:26:00) Okay. Yeah. They have a whole service that just gets by all the services that'll stop that sort of thing and allow you to scrape data off of websites. I think they just broke a million in revenue. And, you know, there are two guys working on it, and it's a great service.

(Levi at 00:26:18) And to me, I look at that and I go, "Okay. Is there a billion-dollar company in scraping? No. Probably not." But for these two guys, this is huge. They're doing great. You know, this is awesome. And their service is awesome because they can actually just focus on scraping, and they're not trying to scale it to something beyond that use case. So, you know, even beyond the task of metrics is to build something that's useful enough for enough people that it doesn't have to grow beyond that to the point where we don't go, "Okay, well, this is doing fairly well, but we need to build the enterprise version of Morning Metrics."

(Levi at 00:26:51) Right? Now we need to hire the enterprise sales team, and we need to turn off the self-registration on the site. And, you know, we're going to blow this thing up into the next level. I want to make sure that option—that's never an option that we're forced to take. Maybe it's the right option, but it's something that I don't ever want to be backed into.

(Levi at 00:27:10) I don't know. Do you use Slack? Are you a Slack—

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:13) Oh, yeah. Our whole team runs on it. Yep.

(Levi at 00:27:16) Yeah. Their story is very interesting because I think, you know, Slack, I was thinking about it as the, you know, probably one of the most transformational pieces of software—the piece of software over the last six years that really just completely overtook a major part of my workflow. Right? And I think a lot of people had that experience. You were stuck on email before. Maybe you're using something kind of like Slack. I think before Slack, we used Skype to chat with people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:41) Or you had, like, Pivotal Tracker type deals. Yeah.

(Levi at 00:27:44) Yeah. All kinds of weird stuff. And then once we used Slack, it just kind of took everything over. So we were very early adopters of Slack. But for me, that product has not improved since its initial idea. And in a lot of ways, it's kind of gone backwards, I'd say. They've improved some things, but it's clear that Slack is a product that is moving up-market as hard as they possibly can. You know, I knew people at Slack. I have friends at Slack, and that was the mantra there: "Enterprise, enterprise, enterprise."

(Levi at 00:28:21) Like, all we care is like, how can we get Slack to work at IBM? Right? Like, how can we sell into IBM? And what you start to do is now every time I've tried to use a shared channel now in Slack recently or try to adopt some of these new features, I am so confused. I hit so many bizarre dead ends. Everyone's like, "Oh, what plan am I on? How does this work?" It just is—it is a product that while it's still great, while the core use case is still extremely valuable to me, it's clear that I'm no longer—we are no longer their target customers. Like, they are figuring out how to sell to IBM. And to me, that's something that I think is a shame, and I never want to have to do. I never want to have to say like, "Well, I'm going to make my product worse to attract these customers."

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:05) Oh, they don't see it like that.

(Levi at 00:29:06) I'm sure they don't.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:07) Yeah. They're a bunch of financial analysts that say, "We need to go get that piece of the pie," and the technology is just the vehicle to go get that piece of the pie. Yeah. Which is fine. I have respect for all sides of that. I think the most important thing is self-awareness of what you want and spending the time the way that you want to spend your time. Like, for me, when exploring the idea of trying to raise a second round and, like, you know, do something bigger, I thought, first of all, I could spend time with customers, and if I spend the same amount of time raising money as I do with customers, I just make more money, and I don't give up part of my company. So I was like, that's one reason to do it. And the second reason is because you get to choose what you want to do. And for us, when the leadership team—then the sponsorship stuff started to happen for the podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:51) And then that grew really well, and then it sort of caps out because there's only so many sponsored episodes you can do. And then we were like, "Alright. So we've got this cash flow positive thing together, and we've got these really great humans together." And so the sponsorship stuff pays our bills, and it's most of our work. And we took maybe two years and took maybe five shots and failed at different ideas to create recurring revenue.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:21) Because sponsorship, you know, you build it up, and then next month you start at zero, and it's really stressful. So it took two years, five shots, all of our extra cash, and we're running real lean with really great people. And then finally, in the back half of last year, one of our sponsors was like, hey, can you make us a podcast? And I was like, yeah, we can if we do it exactly like Modern CTO as far as the processes go. So we figured out because we already know how to train producers. We've been doing this for the podcast for 500 episodes, five years. Right? So we know it's really, really stable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:54) So we're like, yeah. And since then, we've picked up like nine shows, dude.

(Levi at 00:30:58) Wow. So the model is basically you're a podcast studio now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:04) Yes, sir.

(Levi at 00:31:05) Wow. It's funny, the things that turn up if you're listening to customers and if you have an open mind. I think that's where, I don't know, I think that's a very fun place to be in when you're trying to find something that works, trying to find that market. And honestly, that's where investment can really help because it gives you the time to do that. And that's why I'd say there's a caveat with certain kinds of investment. And I've seen some really interesting funds spring up that are investing in companies that are much more kind of like, we're going to allow you to maybe build a smaller company, something that we can invest in that's still a good return for us. But we're going to say that we're looking for lower-risk bets that will still give you the option at the end of this cycle of, you know, raising a Series A and getting on that VC train. But if you decide at the end of that, like, no, that's not for me, this is the company we have, and this is a good company, then it's still a good return for us. And really, what I mean, I think the point that they're making and the thing that they recognize is like, there's a lot of good founders out there that just need to pay the bills. You know, that they have kids. They have a family, and it's, they want to build a business. They will be successful if given the opportunity, but they also can't, like, sleep on a futon somewhere for a couple years. That's just not an option. It certainly wasn't for me. And that's where investment is really critical for, is creating that runway.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:28) Yeah. I did think it was, when I got into the whole VC space, I thought it was kind of backwards. I was like, okay, so you've got these people who are working at these companies who make decent salaries, and they have a lot of experience, and they're experiencing the problems at the large companies, and they're there. They know how to work with other people. They may be leading a team, and they have this idea. They see this market opportunity, and they've got this product, but we're not going to invest in them because you don't want them pulling a $150K a year salary. You want them eating ramen noodles and having a lot of pain. And instead, you're going to go give a million dollars to some 18-year-old who's willing to go through that pain because they don't have a wife and a kid and things like that, and that person knows nothing. And so I was like, hey, you know, that's obviously an extreme example, but I saw variations of that. So my whole deal was that I would take the least amount of money that I needed to pay my bills and ran super slim, didn't even have enough money to add into savings. And I ran super slim like that for years until we got to the point where we were cash-flow positive and doing well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:35) And then at that point, I started paying myself a little bit more so I could have savings, personally. Right?

(Levi at 00:33:41) Yeah. That is an interesting thing. I remember, if you know Steve Blank, he's kind of an entrepreneurship guru. All I know is he came to speak, came to our office when we were at Transloadit and, you know, kind of got to meet him and stuff. But I remember, basically, the person he described that investors are looking for is someone who, you know, the only way I can describe it is has almost a deranged dependence on the success of their business, where they are unhealthily invested in the outcome of that business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:15) That was me for sure.

(Levi at 00:34:17) Yeah. It is so hard when you're doing something like that, right, where you're killing yourself. And I remember, you know, when we were at Transloadit, there was like, you know, a couple winters where, like, we literally couldn't turn on the heater in the winter and it was cold. So, like, you come out in the house and it'd be like 50 degrees because, like, energy is so expensive in California, and, like, it was just, like, we only would turn it on real quick before you go to bed, you know, that sort of stuff. And I was like, what am I doing? Like, this is silly. But, you know, I mean, that's one sacrifice to make. I think even the further step that I would love to see change in the tech industry in general is the fact that, you know, who are you working for? I think is a really important question to ask. Right? You hear these big mission-driven companies. Right? You know, this is a very popular thing. What's your mission? Oh, we're revolutionizing this. We're making, I mean, Silicon Valley parodied it. Right? We're, like, we're making the world a better place through fault-tolerant asset transactions for databases. You know, that sort of, that's always like, how are we, like, we're on this mission to do this. You know, and I step back and I go like, you know what? Like, I'm on the mission to make my world a better place. And that doesn't mean, like, Levi needs a boat. You know? He wants to spend time on the lake, you know, and he wants to drive a Tesla, that sort of thing. It's like, I have kids. You know? I have a wife who depends on me that, you know, I promised my life to. You know? Like, I have kids who, like, if I literally don't provide for them, they, you know, who knows what'll happen? They are so dependent on me. Right? And that kind of, like, I think that whole process, like, centers you as a person. So it helps you to kind of navigate these situations where you're trying to operate with an ethical framework, you're trying to find success. But it also means, like, at the end of the day, like, these are the people who have a claim on my soul, more or less. Right? They have a claim on my art and my passions. Like, I loved Transloadit. It was a great business. I thought we made cool software, but it wasn't, I would never say I'm passionate about file uploading. You know? I'm extremely passionate about this. Like, and I hear people say that kind of stuff and they go like, really? That's what you're passionate about?

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:23) Lying.

(Levi at 00:36:25) They are. It's marketing speak, but I go like, you know, I'm passionate about these people here. Like, I'm working to make their world better. You know? That's what I'm doing at the end of the day. And there's certain sacrifices we make as a family. We're going to maybe not go out to eat. We're going to not do certain things. But at the end of the day, like, I'm doing this for them, and this is a choice we make together. As opposed to someone who, like, has no one depending on them and ends up kind of where their business truly does have their heart and kind of their all of their attention.

(Levi at 00:36:57) Yeah. Their passion. Right? This is something, and you see this, I remember when I visited Facebook recently, the campus, I don't know if you've ever been out there, but it's kind of the same story of every, you know, FAANG company. You go like, you walk in here and you go, this is amazing for one thing. Like, holy cow. Like, they have, like, these super nice restaurants that you can eat for free. Like, there's, like, these insanely cool offices, and it's really stunning. But I think the thing that you realize is, like, they're making a place that it's very hard to leave. Like, they are one step away from putting bedrooms here. You know? And I know in—

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:30) They're not a step away.

(Levi at 00:37:32) Oh, are they?

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:32) They have done it. They're doing it right now.

(Levi at 00:37:34) Yes. Right? And so, and I know in, like, you know, this was something that was going on in China at Foxconn, right, where you literally lived in the factory.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:42) Or in India? Like, you'll live at Samsung. You'll work, it's like it's the old company store from, like, the 1930s. Right?

(Levi at 00:37:49) Yeah. Yeah. And to me, it's like, that is something that is very hard to make good. And if you look at the negative impact that a lot of these huge companies have had on just the health and well-being of, you know, our society in general, we need more people, I think, that are working not to make the world a better place, but to make their world a better place. It's kind of the way I'd say it. Right? Because it's very easy to say, you know, I'm working for this really vague goal where I'm about bringing people together. Right? But if you look at my life, I have no connections. You know? I don't have anyone I'm brought together with outside of the context of this mission. And so that's, I think, a thing that makes me really want to, you know, whatever I'm building, Morning Metrics, working on this problem, I want to exist as, and I want to see more people doing this, of building businesses that are just businesses at the end of the day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:43) It's okay to be a business.

(Levi at 00:38:45) Right? Yeah. You're not on a mission. You're not converting the unconverted. You're, you know, you're trying to make a living with your family. You're trying to make your customers happy. And I kind of like that idea. It's like, this is small business. You know? This is, like, this is what used to be the lifeblood of, like, the economic engine of our society. And it's okay. It can be very rewarding, and it's fun to participate in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:10) Yeah. Move towards sustainable businesses. And to your point, if you think, like, a lot of people trying to make the whole world a better place, but you said something about, like, making your world a better place, like, you having better mental health, you having a more stable environment for family and your relationships and the role you play in your local community, which a lot of these people aren't playing any role in our local community, which is something I didn't do for a long time. And then my life got a lot better when I started it. But when you have your world better, if everybody were to do that, the result would be a better world. If everybody made their own world better and had, you know, these things in place and a quality of life for themselves, and you know what the lack is? The fuel for that is discipline. That's what lacks. That's, if you can get discipline, you can get whatever you want.

(Levi at 00:39:58) Yeah. No. You're absolutely right. I think there's, and there's a very corny saying. I think I saw on a magnet or something like that in a refrigerator once. I'm going to butcher it. But it was like, to the world, you may not be much, but to some people, you're their whole world. Right? To a very few people, like, you are their world. They depend on you for everything. And that's actually a really healthy centering thing for all of us. And that's something I think that, you know, if you have to choose between working on Facebook's mission or whatever, if you have to choose on working for some massive company's mission versus working on making your world better, choose that one. Choose the thing that, you know, you can actually change, like, whatever that is. You know? Participate in your community. Get married. You know? There's a lot of options out there and—

(Levi at 00:40:41) Make some more humans. Yeah.

(Levi at 00:40:48) Exactly. Right? We need it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:49) You really want to change the world, dude? Make a person. That changes the world in such a significant way.

(Levi at 00:40:56) It truly does. Yeah. And I think for me, like, you know, as I look back on, you know, kind of my experience going through this stuff is, and this is where I get aspirational, but, like, for me, if Morning Metrics is successful, it'll mean that it was a positive impact on my community at the end of the day. You know, that maybe, hey, like, we could hire people, local people, and they could get a better job than they could normally get. And who knows? If we had some kind of exit, maybe they could be doing great. And I saw that with Riskalyze. Right, that the impact that Riskalyze had on small-town Auburn, California was really positive. You know? Employed people, gave them their first kind of job. Man, that was awesome. You know? And if that's something that I could do, you know, maybe that feels very rewarding to me. It doesn't have to change the world, but if it could change Maryville, Tennessee, that'd be great. That's achievable, actually. That's not as hard as changing the world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:49) Oh, yeah. No. I mean, we moved to this part of Tennessee, and I saw, like, from where I was in Florida to this part of Tennessee, the average income is vastly different. And I was like, this is actually kind of cool because now when I'm spending money in this town, it means so much more than when I was spending money back at home when I was fairly insignificant because it was where all the old wealthy retired people lived. Right? And now, like, you know, the lawn service guys, like, all the little things that I do and the services that I consume pour money into this local economy, and it's kind of cool.

(Levi at 00:42:23) Yeah. Moving out here, there was a really interesting experience, I think, that, or at least I had, not it's not a unique experience, certainly, but we drove out from California when we were moving out here and drove across the country. We took a long time to do it because we wanted to see a lot of places we haven't been as a family. You know? But one of the things that was so interesting is, like, how every place you'd go there was, like, a Starbucks. Right? So it was, like, you can never leave in a certain sense where everywhere you went, you could still get your latte. You could still sit in, like, a mid-century modern, vaguely hip room where the menu was always the same. And I was like, that's not what I want things to look like. I don't know if you've seen the word or heard the phrase "Starbucking." Right? But it's like everything is getting this homogenized. Everyone's buying from Amazon now. Where's, you know, all the money's flowing out of the communities into these, you know, bigger corporations. And to me, I'd much rather see more entrepreneurs building smaller businesses that flowed into their communities that were, yeah, maybe the, you know, not every coffee shop can be as good as Starbucks, I guess. I don't know. But it certainly can be unique. Right? And it certainly can benefit the local community much more than Starbucks ever can.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:35) Well, there's, like, and they're killing it too. It's a huge opportunity for small business right now because I am, like, 20 minutes outside of Clarksville, like, the center of Clarksville. If you're looking on a map, it's right next to Nashville. And so in Clarksville, there's everything. Like, everything you could possibly imagine, all the chains you would expect, essentially, all of the chains that were in Tampa, Florida, plus more. So it's like major city stuff. There's nothing that's not there. And then 20 minutes outside, I'm, like, in the sticks. Right? And so on that in-between gradient as you start to drive into town, I noticed on the edge of town, there's these businesses that have popped up that are just, like, insanely busy local businesses. And, like, there's a coffee shop that literally, they're having issues right now because the cars, like, start to stack up on the road, and then they move into, like, an abandoned parking lot, and then they're, like, driving on the sidewalk. It's like this whole deal. You can see that clearly the city needs some planning around that because the, it's just this tiny little box of a coffee shop.

(Levi at 00:44:35) Yeah. Absolutely. And it's, I think we get it with restaurants. I think it's really easy to see with restaurants for some reason. I think there's an opportunity, though, for more with software. I mean, I still look at companies like, you might not have heard of Basecamp is a really obvious one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:50) I love Basecamp. Yeah. Jason Fried.

(Levi at 00:44:52) Yeah. Yeah. They're great. And they've been doing that for, gosh, fifteen years now, you know, longer. And they're still doing the same thing.

(Levi at 00:44:59) They're still making the same software, and they're a small business, you know, insanely successful, you know, bootstrapped, but small. To me, I look at companies like that, and they go, that's the dream, right, to build something that has a market, that supports a team, but doesn't have the ambitions to become, you know, the next Starbucks. Like, you can be a wonderful coffee shop that's hugely successful, but you don't have to have a shop on every single corner in America. That's what I'm trying to do, and I hope we get there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:29) Well, if you want to check this out, go to morning.so. What do you say? What's your pitch?

(Levi at 00:45:35) Here. I'll make the simplest pitch. If you're a team on Twitter and you want your data to be sent to you every day in Twitter, your metrics, go to Morning, and I'll get in touch with you, and we can talk about making that happen. I think we have something that you would like.

(Levi at 00:45:50) I'm on Twitter at Levi Nunnink too, and I talk a lot about data and tech and things along those lines there as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:57) Well, we'll have you on again soon to talk about, like, WALL-E and AI and get updates on how Morning is becoming the biggest small business ever.

(Levi at 00:46:07) I have thoughts on DALL-E too. That's a whole other can of worms, but we have to get there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:13) Well, dude, this is great, man. I'm super excited. We got to connect. We will make sure that it doesn't take us, like, two or three years again. We'll put you on the annual list or special guest type list thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:25) Because, yeah, it's always a pleasure when I get to talk to you.

(Levi at 00:46:27) Yeah. Thanks, man. Likewise. I really appreciate it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:30) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague that you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn, or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.