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Jimbo Paris Show #99 – Taking Ideas to Prod. (Bill Boulden)
9 Plays2 years ago
“Don't be worried of people stealing your idea. Because ideas are cheap. And execution is hard. Because someone will steal your idea. If your idea is good, someone is going to launch a competitor.”
“Don't worry about it. What they can't take is your execution, the special sauce that makes you, your plan for how you're going to get your first 100 users, your long nights and weekends burning the midnight oil. Execution is everything.”
– Bill Boulden
Welcome to The Jimbo Paris Show #99 – Taking Ideas to Prod. (Bill Boulden)
Bill Boulden is a Fractional CTO of nine (at last count) tech startups who has launched over a dozen products. Bill specializes in "Zero to One" phase at startups, that is, taking products that are in the idea phase with no tech or working product to show yet and getting them to the point where they launch to customers.
Bill has a lot of "tales from the trenches" learned in the course of launching over a dozen startups. They can talk about hands-on technical tools or entrepreneurial topics, as they have been involved in all aspects of startups, including sales and marketing, support, investment, and growth.
Connect with Bill Boulden:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/billboulden/
►Watch the whole LIVE Episode #99 with Bill Boulden now! ◄
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►Watch Our Previous Episodes◄
Jimbo Paris Show #66- Expanding Human Potential (Judy Ryan)
Jimbo Paris Show #97 – Succeed with an SEO Expert (Brandon Leibowitz)
Jimbo Paris Show #98 – Awareness. Key to Self-love. (Kim McIntyre)
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Transcript
Introduction and Bill's Role
00:00:06
Speaker
I am Jimbo Paris and you're listening to the Jimbo Paris show. Hello everyone, I am Jimbo Paris. Welcome again to the Jimbo Paris show. And today we have a very special guest, Bill Bolden. And they are the chief software engineer on Hello Audio. See what they have to say.
00:00:33
Speaker
Hello, it's a pleasure to be here, Jimbo. Again, beautiful, beautiful, pleasure is all mine. So can you kind of give me a bit of a gist on kind of who you are, what you're about and what your message is?
Tech Product Launches and Typical Day
00:00:51
Speaker
Certainly, I'm a, what I call a fractional CTO of between six and nine tech startups.
00:01:00
Speaker
So I offer services as the chief technology officer for a number of different tech startups. Hello Audio being actually in the rear view mirror a little bit, but still active, still
00:01:16
Speaker
great people there. But I have launched over a dozen products and I help take founders who have ideas for tech startups and make them a reality. So people come to me with their ideas for a new tech product. Like, I really wish there was an app for this. And I say, okay, I know how to get that done. I can build that for you.
00:01:38
Speaker
and I've done it over a dozen times. Hello Audio is one of many. I'm no longer with Hello Audio, but recently worked with Book with Tote, Dovey Dates, Quan Wellbeing, whose shirt I'm wearing today, any number of products. And if you were to boil your bath skillset into maybe a few simple things so the audience here could understand,
00:02:01
Speaker
What would it be? What would it be that your skill set pertains to for what you do specifically? Just a bit more summarized. I'm interested to know.
00:02:11
Speaker
Sure, I can write code, I can manage, I can lead, I can advise startups. My average day consists of helping between two to four different founders vet their ideas and work on launching their new products.
Defining Software and Project Examples
00:02:29
Speaker
For some of them, I'm actually writing the code myself. For some of them, I'm directing and leading other people to write the code.
00:02:35
Speaker
And for some, I'm managing the team of developers. But in all cases, my raison de etre and what I aim to bring to companies I work with is to help new products launch. That's my goal.
00:02:51
Speaker
I'm interested to know as well, how long have you been in this industry now? 20 years. I'm a little older than I look. I've been doing this fractionally for multiple clients at once for about three years. But I've been engineer and a software developer for 20. Wow, OK. So you being a chief software engineer for Hello Audio, can you give us a bit more of a
00:03:20
Speaker
a gist on what software actually is. Software is the code that manages websites and apps. So if you have an idea and you, you know, the example I always use is someone comes to me and they say, I wish there was an app where people who sell rabbits
00:03:42
Speaker
can find people who want to buy rabbits, and they can sell their rabbits through the app. They're going to need software to get that job done. And they need someone like me or one of my peers who knows how to write code who can say, OK, we got you an app. Your app is in the app store. People are posting their rabbits every day and then see their idea succeed and make money. OK, so your current project, it's referred to as QWAN.
00:04:12
Speaker
Yes, Quan is a Dutch wellness company that does corporate wellness. So I've made a lot of different kinds of software. Quan is a particularly cool one. What we do at Quan is that a company signs up to use Quan and Quan will send wellness surveys throughout their organization, take the results.
00:04:36
Speaker
and then aggregate the results in a scientifically anonymizing but valid way that then can
00:04:45
Speaker
come back to the company and say, we found out what's wrong with your wellness of your employees. We found out that people are having problems in these areas. They're not sleeping enough. They need company yoga, et cetera. And we come back with hard recommendations on how the company can be a better place to work. I'm really proud of working for this company because what they do is so wholesome.
00:05:13
Speaker
How many tech startups do you actually handle right now? And possibly can you maybe elaborate on each of them? So I'm very proud of bookwithtote.com. This is a really cool app. It's a, it's a plugin for clothing retailers.
00:05:30
Speaker
that puts a new button on their site, add to fitting room. And so if you're a clothing retailer and you're running a site, you probably have an add to cart button where people can add stuff to their shopping cart and check it out. But if you install book with tote, you'll then have a add to fitting room button where shoppers can browse your site, add all the clothes they want to try on to a fitting room, then drive to your store.
00:05:58
Speaker
and have a custom made fitting room all laid out for them with all the clothes they asked for waiting and ready to try on. That's what that startup does. It's a pretty cool idea and the customers who've used it love it. They get fitting room requests all the time and people are coming in all the time with pre-made fitting rooms that they built on the site. Wow, I might try that out myself. That sounds pretty cool.
00:06:23
Speaker
Yeah, there's a number of small retailers using it, and it's kind of on a retailer by retailer basis. If you're ever browsing a website and you see that book a fitting room button, that's me. Okay, all right. Now, here's one that you'll probably find pretty interesting. Govi is a new app.
00:06:46
Speaker
that just got released two weeks ago for iOS and this week for Android. That's an app for couples where it's a chat app between you and your partner. But there's a third participant in the app, which is the app itself.
00:07:01
Speaker
which is helping keep the conversation moving with prompts that help you get to know each other better. So imagine that you and your partner are in this chat app, but you wake up in the morning and there's a new message from the app itself that says, name three qualities you love about your partner.
00:07:25
Speaker
And then you have a chance to answer that question. And then the next morning it says, where do you want to take your next vacation with your partner? And so in that way, you and your partner can come closer together through this app. That's very, very interesting.
Advice on Startup Launches and Common Mistakes
00:07:44
Speaker
Okay. It's doing great so far. I mean, I'm not at Liberty, of course, to say like,
00:07:49
Speaker
exactly how well it's doing, but the people who've downloaded it love it. Me and my girlfriend use it every day. Although, let me see what today's prompt was. Just open it up real quick here. The question for today was, name something you want out of a vacation with your partner. That's a really wholesome conversation starter. Actually, that's a very valid point because I think that's the biggest problem with a lot of these types of sites. It's very hard to build that
00:08:18
Speaker
initial connection, but it seems that this website that you have worked on building, it can solve that issue.
00:08:27
Speaker
Yes. One of the things that the research shows is that people want to really ask, get to know you questions when they're first starting to date somebody. It can feel so fake to have just met someone through a dating app and be like, so what are your three favorite movies? But if you're part of a conversation that's prompting you, Hey guys, both of you name your three favorite movies. Now it's actually kind of fun. Now it's like an activity.
00:08:53
Speaker
It's like an online wingman. Yeah, it really is. So Dovey's pretty cool. And we just wrapped that project up the other week.
00:09:01
Speaker
Excellent. Excellent. Since you've made so many startups, I think the best question to ask now is sort of how are startups launched? And you seem a bit like, you know, this magician in a way, because you could make nothing into something. That's the most fun part of it is creating something where there was nothing before. So, uh, there's a wrong way and a right way to launch a startup.
00:09:24
Speaker
i mean a tech startup and i would love to help teach your listeners on this show what the difference is the wrong way is to assume that if you build it people will come i've made this mistake early in my career a number of times
00:09:42
Speaker
where people go ahead and they make that rabbit app and then they discover that no one is using but they're out a hundred thousand dollars that they had to pay coders and engineers to make the app so the proper way to do a startup is to pilot the idea first by proving you can build the thing
00:10:04
Speaker
before you build it. First, you make a website for it. Then you start collecting signups. Then you evaluate if what you're doing is resonating with people or not. Then you decide to go find someone like me to build it for you.
00:10:20
Speaker
That's very fascinating because most people I think would get the idea that you need the website first, but there's a whole other story involved too. And I think that's so true because I think I made that mistake as well too. Yeah. I know that I have worked on apps.
00:10:37
Speaker
So I won't say which one because it's a shame that it didn't work out. But I worked on an app where I built a glorious marketplace, one of these rabbit type sites, but not for rabbits. It was for something else where people who wanted to sell a certain thing could meet people who wanted to buy that thing.
00:10:55
Speaker
And then no one signed up. And I was like, what happened to the thousands of people you said you had on the wait list? And it was like, oh, they must not have liked it. And that's just heartbreaking because that's money you're never getting back. So I always say, find a way to pilot the idea first and then come talk to me, which actually is sort of a problem for me business wise.
00:11:19
Speaker
because founders come to me to build their app, and I explain to them they don't need an app yet, that it's premature. So I talk myself out of business. But that's okay. The point is, I'm helping.
Technology Acquisition and App Development Costs
00:11:29
Speaker
So speaking of mistakes as a whole, what do you think are kind of the biggest mistakes you see a lot of these startup founders making?
00:11:36
Speaker
Okay, so one mistake is to accept favors. They shouldn't accept. I believe there are two different kinds of favors. One is a favor with a defined start and end date. That's okay to accept. Two is a perpetual favor. You should never accept that kind of favor even if somebody offers.
00:11:58
Speaker
But the real question is, you know, why do these developers feel like they need to offer favors? I think all relationships in business should always have some type of mutual, you know, transaction. I believe so too, but a lot of the time I'm in these meetings and I'm hearing like, oh, my friend's wife is a coder and she offered to build it for me in a weekend. She said it wouldn't be hard. And they don't understand why I'm saying no.
00:12:25
Speaker
You need to find someone you can pay to do this. And it's really hard for them to turn down free. But one thing about developers is we love to build. It's who we are. And so a lot of times people say, yeah, I can make that for you because it's a challenge or it's fun, but it doesn't stay fun.
00:12:42
Speaker
It's not fun in six months when you're being asked to change the font size on a text box for the 10th time. That's where money does need to enter the picture. So you agree with me then that these should probably never have been favors in the first place. Of course, completely. Now, I think the next question is kind of buying technology versus kind of building technology. What is kind of the specific difference that you sort of have in mind for that? So a good example
00:13:11
Speaker
is when you are building out your new app, there are going to be certain things it has to do and you can buy a piece of software that does that thing or you can build it yourself. And I think that when you're trying to get a new piece of software off the ground, you've got to be focusing on your app.
00:13:29
Speaker
which is your secret sauce. You've got your hands full with enough to build this rabbit trading app. You don't need to do something like develop software that sends text messages. When it comes to sending text messages, there is a service called Twilio that is the best service there is for sending text messages. They offer an API that your code can call their code and it results in a text message being sent.
00:13:58
Speaker
And so when I'm making the rabbit app and it's time to text somebody, oh, we found your rabbit, then I'm going to sign up for Twilio and incorporate Twilio's API into my software rather than build out my own text message sending software. The same thing goes for sending emails. The same thing goes for doing code reviews. The same thing goes for doing authentication and password storage because, um,
00:14:27
Speaker
There are companies such as Auth0 or Firebase that will handle usernames and passwords for you so that you don't need to track the usernames and passwords yourself. Which means that if somebody ever hacks your app, they won't have access to the usernames and passwords. They would have to hack Auth0 or Firebase in order to get those usernames and passwords. And those are a lot harder to hack than your little app that only one engineer ever worked on.
00:14:56
Speaker
Now I understand what you're saying about the term social engineering. That was a very good term to use, but there's some people here that may not know what that is. So there's two ways to hack a company. The first is you can penetrate their software. And this is what you see in the movies when people are typing in those white on black or green on black text windows, and they're using command line commands to fight with a server to authenticate to it.
00:15:23
Speaker
That's one way. The more popular way, which is more effective anyway, is to trick somebody at the company into giving up their password, plugging in a flash drive that's not authorized, or sharing some key piece of company data. And people do this all the time by spoofing an email or a text message
00:15:44
Speaker
and being like hey this is your boss there's no time to explain i need the password for the such and such i'm in an important meeting and people are like oh sure yeah it's this and poof now the attacker has your password that's called social engineering excellent excellent explanation what do you think the cost is to build a web app these days
00:16:03
Speaker
If I came from a rough environment maybe, out of college, any type of position, I'm thinking more the average person, what's the cost? You're looking at between minimum. Remember, you can pilot your idea very cheap, but when it comes time to pay engineers to build it, it's going to cost you between $50,000 and $300,000 depending on how complicated the app is.
00:16:29
Speaker
So it's really hard to come in under 50 grand to get the developers. You've got to get good developers, and you need a designer who can do the graphic design for your app. That's multiple people right there. So you're already looking at tens of thousands of dollars. But if you're getting quotes for over $300,000,
00:16:51
Speaker
Then your software is too complicated and you need to scale it back because you should never pay a million dollars before you have something ready for launch. You should pay 50, 100, $150,000. Then you should launch it and begin receiving feedback. And then eventually over time, it comes to cost a million dollars, but it'll never cost a million dollars out of the gates.
00:17:16
Speaker
So there are ways to help with this. You don't need to have personal savings. And this is my message for the aspiring founders
No Code Tools and Career Influences
00:17:24
Speaker
out. Look up pitch competitions in your area.
00:17:28
Speaker
A pitch competition is a place you go with a slide deck where you tell everybody your idea and why it's great and why you're going to make money. And they give you constructive criticism and feedback. And sometimes there's like a $10,000 prize where it's like, here's $10,000 to help you take baby steps to make your idea a reality. Then there's what's called accelerators.
00:17:51
Speaker
which is programs you can enroll your startup in that are immersive programs you go to in person and you sit down with the best and the brightest like the co-founders of Airbnb or something and they explain to you how you're going to be a success and that can involve a check for $100,000 and some examples of accelerators
00:18:12
Speaker
are Y Combinator and Techstars. So if you're despairing because you are fresh out of college and you've got an idea for an app that's going to change the world, but you are living paycheck to paycheck and do not have 50 grand saved up, which a lot of people don't, even I don't. And I work in a highly lucrative career. But you can start by finding pitch competitions and then by applying to accelerators.
00:18:41
Speaker
That's the path to money. So for these pitch competitions, what do you think is the ideal strategy in order to kind of draw people in? Well, you're going to want to have a really solid pitch deck. In general, you're going to want just between 12 to 15 slides and you're going to want to cover the following topics. Your TAM, which is your total addressable market, your revenue strategy, like why it's going to make money.
00:19:06
Speaker
the problem you're solving, your ideal customer profile, which is the kind of person who will buy your product, a quick overview of what the product is, although really you only need a slide or two on that. You don't need to go too deep. A description of where the invested money is going to be spent. For instance, I will be spending 30 percent of the money you give me on marketing and 70 percent on building it. Then a slide saying who your board is.
00:19:36
Speaker
like the advisors you've taken on. Because every good startup needs a couple high profile advisors from people who have done it before. And advisors typically don't need to be paid. They typically get between a quarter of a point to a point of equity in the startup in exchange for giving their advice on what you should do next. So you knock all that out in about 15 slides. You practice until you're hoarse and you can't talk anymore.
00:20:06
Speaker
And then you get up there on stage and you wow those judges and hopefully take home the prize from the pitch competition. Do you personally know any success stories?
00:20:15
Speaker
I have had two of my startups exit. So when you live in startup land, the thing you're always waiting for is what's called an exit. An exit is some kind of event, a merger, an acquisition, a buyout, or an IPO that causes everyone's stock to become worth money. All the stock is worth nothing for the longest time.
00:20:41
Speaker
because the company isn't publicly traded. So I have 10% of this company's stock, but I can't do anything with it. Nobody wants 10% of that company's stock. But when there's a buyout or a larger company acquires you, then all of a sudden the company's like, all right, we're buying your company for a hundred million dollars. Now having 10% of that company means you get $10 million. That's the big dream day. And I've had that happen at two of my companies.
00:21:11
Speaker
both success stories. I'm at liberty to talk about one. There was a platform called Clearview Social, which I helped run for four years, which was a startup that helps manage your LinkedIn profiles. And that company exited. It was acquired by another company. And I'm very proud of that. So that's what a startup success story looks like.
00:21:36
Speaker
Sounds good, sounds good. What was the term you used again? For the different pieces of software getting blended together. No code. No code. They call that doing things the no code way.
00:21:49
Speaker
You think this is the future now? No code? Yes. I think that more and more of my startups, when founders come to me and say, build me this app, I say, you don't need that. I'm going to make you a Webflow, staple a type form to the Webflow. The results from the type form will go into a Google Sheet and you're going to manually review that Google Sheet every day.
00:22:12
Speaker
and invoice people through Stripe. Stripe being a company that processes credit cards. Another great piece of no code software. And you staple those things together and you don't wind up having to develop an app at all. What situations do you think no code
00:22:27
Speaker
may not be ideal. Well, at the end of the day, if you do want an app in the app store and you want something people can install on their phones, you're going to have to write some code. There's no two ways about it. Or if you want there to be a website, if you're building SoundCloud, you're going to need the code that runs SoundCloud. So it all depends on what your business model is.
00:22:52
Speaker
But there's always a cheaper way first, and then the more official way later. It breaks my heart every time I see a founder invest their life savings into a product nobody uses.
Final Advice on Startups and Networking
00:23:03
Speaker
Who are sort of your career influences? Probably two. I love very much my dad, who is also an entrepreneur. He left corporate in 1993 to start
00:23:17
Speaker
a consulting firm that helps companies manage their CRM databases, customer relationship management databases. He's basically a tech entrepreneur himself. I always felt like at the end of the day, I was going to be a tech entrepreneur too because I wanted to be like him.
00:23:37
Speaker
It's very fulfilling, very satisfying line of work, and we're both very jolly people. My other biggest career influence, this may sound like it's coming completely out of left field, but a professional Magic the Gathering player named Patrick Chapin.
00:23:55
Speaker
has been an inspiration to me throughout most of my adult life ever since I met him. And he sculpted the life he wanted for himself. There was no such thing as being a person who plays a fantasy card game for a living until he decided to make that his lifestyle. And just the same way, three years ago, there was no way you could say like, oh, I do engineer stuff, but for like,
00:24:25
Speaker
eight different companies. I had to invent this career for myself to be a person who does this for so many different companies at once. And I took a lot of inspiration from him. Excellent, excellent. What are some of your other
00:24:41
Speaker
hobbies and endeavors. Well, I do like to play Magic the Gathering right here in this office. This is my work machine. That's my Magic the Gathering machine. But I'm also a DJ and producer who goes by the name of Down Upright. And I make EDM and Ambitious Kickstarters. I've been a DJ for 10 years and a music producer for 20 years.
00:25:08
Speaker
I've been at this a long time. I'm very proud of all the music I've made. I'm very proud of most of the DJ sets I've played.
00:25:17
Speaker
Most is a DJ out at clubs and stuff, so I have some horror stories. Kind of horror stories. There's always the times where you just play to an empty house. Sometimes you get booked at a bar that doesn't have a fan base, and there's nobody there. You still gotta play so you can get paid. That happens. The reason I'm interested in the DJ part, because my experience is a bit different, but I used to be a radio DJ, and that's a bit different, but your experience seems challenging in another way, because
00:25:45
Speaker
With me, the challenge was more so about getting the encoders right, making sure the audio was coming out. But with you, you're dealing with people face to face. People want what they want. I have received some outrageous requests. This happened only a few weeks ago. I had somebody come up to me and request, can you play Yeah by Lil Jon and Usher? And I said, certainly. That is a party staple. That song is a classic. So I play it.
00:26:13
Speaker
And then after it's over, she comes up to me and she says, can you play Yeah by Lil Jon and Usher again? And I was like, no, no, it doesn't work that way when you're a DJ. You can't play the same song twice. And she was like, but it's so good. I just want to hear it again. And I'm like, it's fine. I have a good laugh about it all. It's a wonderful career.
00:26:36
Speaker
That's an awesome story. This has been an amazing interview. We were jumping in all kinds of different directions here. Kind of to wrap this up, is there any advice you would give to anyone trying to do a tech startup? My first advice is to find me because I will help.
00:26:52
Speaker
You don't have to pay me 50 grand. You can find me at BillBolden.com or on LinkedIn as Bill Bolden. I love to help and I love to help aspiring founders. I will meet with you and help validate your idea. It would be my pleasure. That's why I was put on this earth is to help people's dreams come true when it comes to tech startups. That's what I believe.
00:27:19
Speaker
That would be my first piece of advice. My second piece of advice would be to start with pitch competitions. Nail your ideas down into 15 slides. Take your big, heady, ambitious goal that only you can see all the parts of and get it into words, into slides.
00:27:40
Speaker
and look up pitch competitions near you and start getting constructive criticism and feedback and take it. And if you walk away with a $5,000 or $15,000 prize, so much the better. Be really awesome. Maybe then you'll have the money to actually start seeing your idea get made.
00:28:02
Speaker
And that's when you can talk to someone like me again. I would say, do not just find somebody to make your app for you. You'll wish you had that money back. Find a way to test that people want your idea before you sink the money in. That is my number one piece of advice.
00:28:19
Speaker
Okay, great. This has been an excellent interview. Are there any other, you know, final words, suggestions you'd like to give to the audience here? Oh, yes, there's one. This is what I always close with. Don't be worried of people stealing your idea because ideas are cheap and execution is hard because someone will steal your idea.
00:28:43
Speaker
If your idea is good, someone is going to launch a competitor. And guess what? That competitor might be better capitalized than you. And so you're going to have this heart-seeking moment where you're like, oh, no, my business is over. Someone else is doing the same thing. And they fundraised for $2 million, whereas I only have $50,000. Don't worry about it. What they can't take is your execution, the special sauce that makes you you.
00:29:08
Speaker
Your plan for how you're going to get your first hundred users. Your long nights and weekends burning the midnight oil. Execution is everything. People who want to tell me their idea come to me and they want me to sign an NDA, a non-disclosure agreement.
00:29:25
Speaker
And I usually refuse because I just tell them, look, I don't need a 10th startup. I'm not going to take your idea. But if your idea is so fragile that just someone else having it takes the whole thing away, then it wasn't a very good idea. I want your execution to be the part no one can take away. Excellent words. All right. Thanks again, Bill. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure being here today, Jimbo. Pleasure's all mine.
00:29:54
Speaker
All right, so just to end this off quickly.
00:30:00
Speaker
Let's just give a few shout outs here. Our first shout out is going to be to Lifework Systems. This is our affiliate and collaborative partner. Basically, she's an HR superstar looking to go inside of big businesses, improve the infrastructure, and create a better collegial environment. Next thing we'd like to say is we also have a YouTube channel. Subscribe to us now, and you can get exclusive updates on every show, every episode coming out. Final thing.
00:30:29
Speaker
We have a Roku TV channel. Jimbo Paris show is on Roku. So get a Roku box. Check us out there. Uh, this episode will be on there as well as all of our other episodes as well. All right. And actually we're going to do one last shout out here. We also have a new business out now called Jimbo Paris services. And Jimbo Paris services is essentially a consulting business. We've already started working with big corporate businesses like general electric.
00:30:59
Speaker
And we are building certain systems. So right now I am bringing on experts from their business. I'm interviewing them and I'm building all kinds of engaging content that they could use to draw on a specific audience. So if you have a business out there, you don't have a spokesperson. You need a guy like me who can create those ideas and market for you and build that content. Check me out. Thanks again, Bill. Thanks for having me, Jimbo.
00:31:27
Speaker
I'm Jimbo Paris, this is the Jimbo Paris Show.