Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Founders' Series - Todd Watson - Showit
147 Plays6 years ago
Today's episode is part of the Founders Series, where we chat with founders and CEOs of companies that have created products and services that help creatives run their businesses. Today's guest is Todd Watson, the Founder and CEO of Showit, a website platform created specifically for photographers and creative professionals.
This episode is a little different than previous episodes. Instead of focusing on tips, strategies or tools that you can use in your business, we focus mostly on Todd and the Showit story. I don't know about you all, but I'm fascinated by stories of how businesses got started, especially businesses I admire, because I found regardless of the type or size of business, that there's so many shared challenges that entrepreneurs face when getting started.
I've had the pleasure of getting to know Todd and the Showit story over the last few years, and I can tell you, it's a good one. We discuss how Showit got started, how at one point there was uncertainty over its future and why Todd and his team rebuilt the platform from scratch into what it is today. We chat about why Todd opted not to take VC funding and the business that he wants to run.
For the show notes, go to https://daveyandkrista.com/btb-todd-watson-showit-fs/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction: Platform for Photographers
00:00:05
Speaker
If you're not a photographer, like we may not be building the features for you. We're really focused on what is it that a photographer needs to run their business. And so that helps us shape. It helps us be able to say no a little bit easier. It helps us to be able to say yes in the right places and all those kinds of things.
Podcast Overview with Davy Jones
00:00:25
Speaker
Welcome to the Brands at Book Show where we help creative service-based businesses build their brands and find more clients. I'm your host, Davy Jones.
Meet Todd Watson: Showit Founder
00:00:36
Speaker
Today's episode is part of the Founders Series, where we chat with founders and CEOs of companies that have created products and services that help creatives run their businesses. Today's guest is Todd Watson, the founder and CEO of Showit, a website platform created specifically for photographers and creative professionals.
Focus on Showit's Story
00:00:54
Speaker
And today's episode is a little different than previous episodes. Instead of focusing on tips, strategies, or tools that you can use in your business, we focus mostly on Todd and the show-it story. I don't know about you all, but I'm fascinated by stories of how businesses got started, especially businesses I admire, because I found, regardless of the type or size of business, that there's so many shared challenges that entrepreneurs face when getting started.
Origins and Challenges of Showit
00:01:18
Speaker
I've had the pleasure of getting to know Todd and the show-it story over the last few years, and I can tell you it's a good one.
00:01:24
Speaker
We discussed how Showit got started, how at one point there was uncertainty over its future, and why Todd and his team rebuilt the platform from scratch into what it is today. We chat about why Todd opted not to take VC funding and the kind of business that he wants to run.
00:01:40
Speaker
Be sure to check out the show notes at davianchrista.com for the resources we mentioned during this episode, and I'd like to hear from you about what kind of content you'd like to see on the Brands at Book podcast as we move forward. I'd also like to know what episodes you've enjoyed so far and why. To leave your feedback, head on over to the Davian Christa Facebook page and send us a message.
Listener Engagement and Offers
00:01:58
Speaker
Oh, and as a listener of the show, you can even get 10% off an annual Show It subscription by using the code BTBSHOW when signing up for Show It. That's not an affiliate code. We're just big fans of the Show It platform and want to share that with you. Now onto the episode.
00:02:22
Speaker
All right, guys, we are here with Todd Watson, the co founder and CEO of the show it website
Showit: Creative Freedom for Photographers
00:02:28
Speaker
platform. And I'm really excited about this. Because if you listen to this podcast, or if you're familiar with Chris and I, you know that we love show it that now most of the websites that we designed for our clients are on the show at platform.
00:02:39
Speaker
So I'm really excited to dig in with Todd about how the Show-It company got started, some of the challenges that they faced, and I'm fairly familiar with this story. So I'm really excited for you listeners to hear about it. But first, welcome, Todd. Hey, Davey. Thanks for having me on here. It's good to be here. Yeah, I'm excited to dig in. So first, for those people who don't know what Show-It is, can you just tell us what it is? Yeah. So we felt like when we looked around the market, we see a lot of photographers that they just felt stuck in their website. And so
00:03:09
Speaker
whether it be stuck in a template or just within WordPress or something like that, they just felt stuck. And so we felt like as a creative, we wanted to provide creative freedom for them to build the website that would be uniquely theirs and provide them the opportunity to connect with their ideal client. So we looked around and we realized that
00:03:26
Speaker
when you're thinking about creating website you really want to be able to do exactly what you want to have that creative freedom and so we made a very drag and drop very visual a lot more like a photoshop as opposed to a lot of you know just menus that decide things so everything is like right there on the way that you would design an illustrator photoshop or something like that so that you can actually create what you want to create when you do your website.
Evolution: From Flash to Mobile
00:03:49
Speaker
Yeah, and I think what separates show it from a lot of the other drag and drop or, and I shouldn't even call them drag and drop builders. A lot of the other builders out there, you have to design within, you know, like modules within, you know, squares. And with show it though, you have a lot more flexibility over the design. And if you are a photographer, the back end to show it, I think kind of feels like home to a certain extent, because it has the same feel as the Adobe suite. I can use it, which means it's not as complicated as the Adobe suite.
00:04:18
Speaker
But it does have it does have a similar feel to the Adobe suite. And what's interesting is that, you know, we've designed custom WordPress websites for a long time. And on WordPress, you can pretty much truly do anything you want. But
Strategic Focus on Photographers
00:04:33
Speaker
having that sort of flexibility is often it's a problem for people. It's actually a challenge. One because there's generally more maintenance work that goes into your website. So you know, things things break maybe a little bit more. So having something like show it we found that our clients love show it because they can go in and they can make updates on their own, you know, so once we get them set up with a with a beautiful looking website, but after that they can make updates on their own.
00:05:00
Speaker
Yeah, and really that was one of the big things that when we looked around and decided on WordPress was we realized that there's the WordPress way. And this is kind of when you dive into this idea, WordPress has a way to do things. And so you have plugins and themes and everything that work inside of WordPress. The unfortunate thing is that that really constrains you on the way that you can build a builder for WordPress or how you can customize it. And you end up getting like stuck into menus and then CSS and custom code and like all that kind of stuff where it
00:05:30
Speaker
it gets really difficult to actually customize. And so people who have purchased themes or done other things like that for WordPress, they say, yeah, it looks great when I started, but I don't know how to do more with it. I don't know how to make this thing grow to what I want it to be. And so what's unique about Showit is that we're not actually inside of WordPress. We're actually a standalone platform. So you don't actually have to have WordPress to use Showit. You could just build a site entirely independent of WordPress. But then you can also design a WordPress theme
00:05:58
Speaker
In show it and then publish that into word press which isn't really the word press way but it works and it allows you to have this really great you know design experience without having.
00:06:11
Speaker
frustrations of being inside of the WordPress builder, that kind of thing. Yeah, no, I think it perfectly combines the freedom of WordPress, but eliminates a lot of the complexity. Because as you said, you're working in a standalone builder. And we take full advantage of that. And that's something that we love about show it is that it has that sort of integration, so to speak with WordPress. So you can easily add so not only can you create a beautiful website, which is, you know, the number one concern for a lot of people out there. But if you want to easily add different functionality to it, the fact that it does
00:06:40
Speaker
have a connection to WordPress, you can add that functionality usually, relatively easily with a plugin, which is really nice, which is really convenient. But first, Showit is a very different platform than it was, how many years has Showit 5, which is a platform that people are now familiar with, how many years has that been in existence? Two? Yeah, we only launched in 2016. So we've been around since, as a company since 2006, we launched our Showit website builder,
00:07:09
Speaker
back in 2008. Really, it's been 10 years since our original website builder that we designed. Back when we built that, it was on the Flash platform. We were building Flash websites, which at the time were spectacular. They were really engaging multimedia experiences. They were just something that we just couldn't really do in HTML at the time.
00:07:32
Speaker
It was a great platform and we had this full drag and drop thing that lets you build a site and you need to get stuck in templates and it was like that was what we were about and that's what we were going to do. But then along came mobile phones and as that started to take off, you're like, okay, so how does this work with it? So we made some changes and adjustments to that.
Shift from Slideshows to Websites
00:07:51
Speaker
But then really, when Steve Jobs came along and said, Flash will never be on the iPhone, that was really when things started souring a bit. And as the iPhone really took off, it really started to shape. Adobe, who had acquired Flash and owned it, was like, oh, man, if we can never be on the iPhone and they're never going to push back on this, we're probably going to need to move away from this. And so, unfortunately, that platform was moved on, essentially.
00:08:21
Speaker
said, you know, we're gonna stop supporting it, all those kinds of things. So yeah, here we are. Yeah, here we are. But ultimately, I think I mean, the platform now is out like we love it, it's outstanding, you know, and so I guess the silver lining, I mean, from your and I want to get into this in a second with you. So I'm sure going through that change, probably not, it wasn't easy, right? But
00:08:44
Speaker
the what you what we have now as far as a platform. It's amazing. Can you walk us through sort of the the beginning of show it you know kind of what what motivated you guys to actually where were you like were you always computer developer type? Yeah. So I had a computer background but I was working at camp doing their video production stuff and my friend David Jay was
00:09:08
Speaker
since elementary school when he was a photographer and was visiting one time and said, hey, could you build my website? And so I was like, yeah, I could do that. And so we built his first website. And part of that was some slideshows for his photos for different weddings that he'd shot. And he was like, man, other photographers really love this. The clients love these slideshows. Could we build something that would let photographers be able to build slideshows? And I thought, oh.
00:09:37
Speaker
Yeah, but we could put something together that would do that. And there wasn't a lot on the market that was doing slideshows. There wasn't Animoto. There wasn't other things like that at the time. We built our first version of what we call a show web because DJ was doing on-site slideshows and he wanted a way to put it on the web.
00:09:52
Speaker
We bought the slideshow product and I was working at a camp making pretty minimal amount of money. I was like, man, if we sell 50 of these, it's going to be just crazy great. That was my expectation at the time that we built it. It was like 50. That'll be good. 50 is a good goal.
00:10:09
Speaker
50 is a good girl you know and that we kind of beat that goal and over the next i think four five years i think we sold like fifteen thousand or something like that it was just insane and so that was really the start of it but i was working a full time job and then just doing on the side where build that out and try to figure out what we what we do with that.
00:10:29
Speaker
while only being kind of a part-time gig and just on the side here and there. And it was like, is this just going to dry up overnight? It's hard to know, especially in a business where you're selling a slideshow product, it might sell one month and the next
Commitment to Showit's Growth
00:10:42
Speaker
month nothing. Who knows? And there wasn't any kind of recurring revenue, any of those kind of things. So it was pretty risky at the time. But we finally said, you know what? Let's go ahead and go all in on this and make a company out of it and actually build something. So
00:10:55
Speaker
We started that in 2005, but really didn't until late 2006 really decided, okay, let's make this a company and go after this. And then in 2007 is when I quit my full-time job and actually dove in making a real company. And that's when we started. We decided let's build a product that
00:11:12
Speaker
photographers needed, which was websites, just the slideshows, you know, and say, let's do that. So because I guess, you know, slideshows at the time, like you said, I mean, they're in demand and the whole same day slideshow thing, right is, you know, was a thing. I mean, it still is a thing today, but you have no way of knowing is this going to be a trend for the long term. So is that really what motivated you all to transition from it being primarily slideshow app to a website platform for photographers? Yeah, for sure. There was a lot of factors as we looked at it, because
00:11:43
Speaker
it would be crazy how great someone's slideshow would be and then they'd put it on a website that was not great. So when you're looking around and going, oh my goodness, the websites that are out there were just cookie cutter templates that you could drop in a few photos and that was it. And we actually heard stories of people saying like, oh hey, are you in collaboration with that photographer? Because you guys have the same website. Are you guys like a team of photographers? And they'd be like, no. And so you hear those stories and you're like, oh man, it just
00:12:13
Speaker
The state of websites was not great at that time. And so we said, I think this is a way that we could really provide a valuable service to the industry, especially when it comes to being unique, providing a website like that. So we took our experience in building some software and said, OK, let's build a team around this.
00:12:31
Speaker
actually formed a company and started hiring a few people. Can you talk a little bit about why you decided just to focus on photographers? I mean, working in the wind industry, I feel like the wind industry is one of those industries where the photographers are very aware of, you know, the planners that are out there and the florists and so on and so forth. At any point did you decide
00:12:49
Speaker
Well, if we're going to build a website that photographers can use, why don't we market to planners and florists and bakers and all the other pieces of that specific industry? Yeah, it's a tough one. It's one that we wrestle with even now. Those questions still come at us all the time.
00:13:09
Speaker
I think ultimately what we've found is that once we
Unique Design Approach and Challenges
00:13:12
Speaker
started, we've tried occasionally to do a few things like that, and you learn very quickly that if you say, oh hey, we also do church websites, and then they're like, well, can I have something to do, like podcasting, and can I do something to syndicate sermons and do other stuff? And then it's like, oh, we do realtors too.
00:13:29
Speaker
integration with listing sites and integration with us. And all of a sudden, your scope of the service that you can provide has become so wide. And you realize, I don't know if we can actually provide really great service to all these people at the size of team, at what we want it to be. And we realized we have domain expertise. We were around photographers. My former partner was a photographer. We were in it for photographers, and we had a good sense for
00:13:56
Speaker
this is what the features are that are needed this is how we can do it and we just you can you have options stand out as a focus niche and so we realized you know what we wanna be the best we can be serving photographers and.
00:14:10
Speaker
You know, other people can come along and we have lots of other types of businesses using show it. But ultimately, when they come to our site, they're going to know like we're about photographers. And if if you're not a photographer, like we may not be building the features for you. Sure. You know, hopefully there's a lot of a lot of good things for you. But we're really focused on what is it that a photographer needs to run their business? And so
Building a Sustainable Business
00:14:32
Speaker
that helps us shape. It helps us be able to say no a little bit easier and helps us to be able to say
00:14:37
Speaker
yes, in the right places, and all those kinds of things. So we've just decided that's the direction that we're going. The thing that I've told people in the past is until we have no opportunity to grow, then we can talk about other markets. But as it stands, there's so many photographers that we have the opportunity to serve that there's no reason for us to take our eye off that ball.
00:15:00
Speaker
Yeah, and one, it's not like the photography market is small, right? So it's still a big enough market where you can run a profitable company. But I really wanted to ask you that question because I think it's an issue that so many people struggle with, especially when they're first getting started. In whatever industry it is, they have an opportunity to serve most likely all sorts of different clients. And it's so hard to niche down, it's so hard to say, especially if somebody's ready to book your services and maybe they're not quite the kind of client you serve, it's so easy to say,
00:15:28
Speaker
yeah you know i'm gonna take that client but by taking that client can you serve them really really well and i think one of the reasons that so many other kinds of creatives have found the show it platform that you know to be such a such a good platform for whatever the doing is because you guys have been really really focused on building something for photographers and serving them
00:15:50
Speaker
as well as you possibly can. And, you know, maybe you would agree that if you tried to build something for everybody, you probably end up building something for nobody and nobody would quite find enough value in it. Yeah, for sure. And I think that's the that is definitely the piece that's it's hard because there's so many times where it just feels like, oh, if we just did a little bit more, we just did this, you know, like, it won't be a big deal. But like, every time you give that inch, there's just this sense that like,
00:16:18
Speaker
You lose credibility. You lose the sense that who you're about and those kind of things. When we can be very firm about that, you're going to find that people are going to connect. They'll understand our vision, our mission when it's not like, oh, well, we're also for dog groomers and they're great too. When we start weakening our message, then
00:16:40
Speaker
And I think it's the difference that you're going to see when you go to a Wix or Squarespace. All of a sudden, you're going to go and choose between which template to start with. And it's like, well, I'm not a restaurant, but maybe I'll customize this menu to be my photography menu. And it doesn't always relate very well. And then you're like, oh, man.
00:16:55
Speaker
It would be really nice if I was just working from something that was really designed for me. And I think that's where our value is. We're going to say, hey, we're going to be starting from what's valuable to you. And as a photographer, booking clients and taking care of them and providing different services.
00:17:12
Speaker
That's what we're gonna be about, you know, that's we're gonna help you absolutely and so there's there's stuff that happened in the meantime though from old show it so you decide to pivot and you're building website a website platform the old flash base platform for photographers and
00:17:29
Speaker
somewhere in the middle there, you were actually part of or that same company had launched another product, right? You guys launched pass. Yeah. So what happened was that we were building our website product and we realized, man, it would be really great to be able to provide a way for our show customers to have better galleries for their clients. We're like, well, let's build a gallery tool inside of show it. But then as we looked at the market, we realized that there was a lot of shoot and burn photographers delivering on CDs, just real frustrated. So
00:17:55
Speaker
We said, you know what? Actually, this is beyond just websites. This is photo delivery. And so we
Community Engagement and Trust
00:18:00
Speaker
said, you know what? There's a bigger opportunity here for us to do photo delivery. And that's where we started pass. And sure enough, that was one that took off even faster than Showa did because it was such a need in the market to be able to deliver photos. And it was so much more efficient, so much better than handing over a CD. And then people never put it in a computer. A lot of them didn't even have a computer that had a CD in it. And you're like, oh, what do we do with this?
00:18:25
Speaker
It was a great product and that thing started taking off. And then we found ourselves in this weird spot where you have two products, one that's doing really well, the other that you're kind of seeing the end. The end is near, but you have all these little customers who've been around, enjoy the platform, still like it. It's just the technology underneath it. That was kind of the frustration of it, the changes with mobile, the changes with the way websites would work.
00:18:52
Speaker
So we got to this point and I realized, you know, I'd love to see us continue to show it, you know, and reboot it. DG at the time just felt like it was, it was okay to just let it go and vote and put all our energy into the, into the, into pass. And so, so we talked through it and, and
00:19:10
Speaker
I said, you know, I think I'd enjoy taking on that project. And so at that time, we split the company into two and he took over pass and I took over show it. And then even after that, it was another two and a half years before we actually had a product that we could launch.
00:19:25
Speaker
It's easy to write a story and be like, oh yeah, and then this happened and that happened. Now it all works, you know? But if you look at the actual, you know, in the moments, you know, when I took over, I was taking over a sinking ship. I mean, every month was lower than the previous month. Everything was going away. You know, unsubscribes were up. It was hard to get people to stay on a platform that I wasn't even very, you know, I wasn't proud of that at that point. It's like, well, yeah, I mean, it works and we made it the best we can with what we can. You know, we made things still work.
00:19:55
Speaker
Even if you didn't have flash, we were still generating stuff that people could see and use and all those kind of things. It still worked. It just wasn't great. And so I think that was the frustration for us of like, okay, how do we do this in the two years that we're transitioning the company and getting
Design Philosophy and User Needs
00:20:10
Speaker
a new product? And then even starting over from scratch and rebuilding and launching a product, you have all these features that you've built over the course of
00:20:17
Speaker
six to eight years. And you're like, okay, all those things need to be in the new product. And it's like, you know, we actually have to start with like kind of a almost product, you know, things that we've learned. I think there's even still things right now inside of show it that I'm like, Oh, man, we had that built out in the previous version. We're still working on building, you know, things out that make it better and better and better to design and use. So
00:20:39
Speaker
That whole process of starting over is tough. I want to pause there for a second because I think, to me, it would be both tough and terrifying. You're taking over a product that, as you just mentioned, the revenue from it is lower and lower each month. It's something that you're not particularly proud of as it stood then. Certainly over the building process, you were proud of it.
00:21:01
Speaker
and just in general, you should be proud of it because you built something that thousands of people use, which is awesome. But Steve Jobs comes out, now it's basically the death of Flash, right? You know that the platform is going to have to change. And it's not the same as if I wanted to rebrand my photography business, let's say. And I can
00:21:22
Speaker
I can change my name and I can pick up with the same services, maybe communicate it a little bit differently and that's that. That's just not how developing tech works, right? So you couldn't just take what you had and build off of that. You were building a completely different platform. This is your full-time job.
00:21:41
Speaker
you have a family, you know, and just a plug for Elisa here, Elisa was on the podcast as well. Her episode was around Episode 10. She talks about personality, super interesting. So you should go listen to that episode. But you know, back to this, I mean, what made you want to take on this project and just to paint the picture a little bit more. And I'm not sure exactly what the competitive landscape looked at that time. But I imagine that from 2006, when this company started to 2000, and we're talking 14 now,
00:22:10
Speaker
around 2014. You probably didn't have or it looked probably very different, the Wix, the Squarespace, the thousand other builders that are out there. At 2014, it's going to be a much more crowded marketplace. Did you ever look around and just say, I don't even know if the market needs this anymore? Oh yeah, for sure. I mean, that was the conversation that we had when we decided to split the company.
00:22:37
Speaker
Look, there's plenty of other options. The market doesn't need you anymore. And that's definitely something that you're fighting against and looking
Sustainable Growth vs. Investment
00:22:46
Speaker
at it. I think what we came back to over and over again was that there was new platforms that were out there and there was new options and new availability. And this was the big bet. Can we compete with Squarespace and WordPress and Wix and other big players in the market?
00:23:05
Speaker
What can we do that's going to make us unique? And I really felt like just, and this kind of gets into the tech side that people don't always understand, but like every builder that I looked at wasn't really what you see is what you get. You know, it wasn't really that where you place something it stayed. It always, you know, like it was responsive. So things text wrapped, things changed. This moved here that did this, you know, it's so you would design something.
00:23:30
Speaker
hit publish and then you'd open it up on someone else's computer and be like, oh, what is that? You know, there's always something different about what it looked like. And that was great for the sense of responsive. But I was looking at going, man, I think some of the things that we learned about building the first version of show it never happened. And the next, you know, wave of builders are out there. And that was some of the ideas that we took with scaling. So that instead of wrapping and rescaling like that, we actually took things and made it
00:24:00
Speaker
size up more similar to like, if you took a JPEG and scaled it, you know, like it stays the same, you know, no matter what size you're looking at, it just might be scaled a little bit differently and understand that there is a mobile design view and a desktop design view. But really being able to say like, people who care about the design are going to want the design to look like the design and those kinds of things. And so that was really the approach that we took that I feel like
00:24:26
Speaker
has separate us from the people around in the landscape. If you want to site up really quick, yeah, Squarespace is great and it's going to prevent you from messing up.
Balancing Simplicity and Features
00:24:36
Speaker
But then at the moment that you want to change what they've decided is how you should have a website, you're going to feel stuck. That's ultimately what it comes down to, unless you want to learn different coding things or different whatever. It's just a lot more work to figure out how to change what they have.
00:24:52
Speaker
We took the opposite approach. We said, we're going to provide hundreds of design templates now that are in our store that you guys build design templates. So we have great starting places because design is huge. It's important to start from some good structures and good looks and that. But then you're never going to feel like it's stuck. You have to get stuck in this box or here or there. So that was really what we
00:25:15
Speaker
wanted to go after and that's where we've been going since then. So but along the way, was there ever a feeling like this, this isn't gonna work? You know, like, did you ever have doubts? Like, I don't know if like, the ship is sinking. And in addition to that, you know, everything a lot of what you just mentioned, right? And I love that. I mean, you know, I love that you love the tech behind it, right? But you know, when you're trying when you're explaining that to somebody, I don't think that's what is going to be like, oh, yeah, that's why I need to be on show it, you know,
00:25:44
Speaker
Because instead of the rap or doing the scale, you know, like, there are so many reasons to be on show it. So how did you communicate that to your user base or people that would become your user base? You know, like, what was your strategy there? Like, numbers are declining, how did you get people excited about this platform or willing to give it a shot?
Business Decisions and Community Support
00:26:03
Speaker
You know, especially after the old platform, it would just, you know, I mean, it still exists, obviously, and it will for the next couple years, but eventually it won't. And it's not as easy as like,
00:26:14
Speaker
you know, publishing your old website to this new platform, because they're two completely different platforms. So what was your strategy in like, saying, Hey, this is this is going to be way better than what it what it was. You know, stick with us. I know you can go to Squarespace. I know you can go to Wix. I know you can go back to WordPress and builders there. Stay here.
00:26:33
Speaker
Yeah, well, I think it's a great question to explore. And I think one of the things that I would encourage people to come back to is that business
Resilience in Business and Life
00:26:40
Speaker
is about relationships. And so I think that is definitely where we had to come back to and say, you know what, we need to like in the season of rebuild, we actually need to rebuild relationships because there's a lot of people that we had that
00:26:53
Speaker
you know felt burned by the fact that we hadn't changed you know or things like that you know that we were we're stuck in this this way so you know a lot of our focus during that time of building was actually building relationships as well so going to leaders in the industry and just saying hey you know we're sorry we're working on it here's where it's going you know we be around can we you know can you give us feedback how can we make this work and so
00:27:19
Speaker
There was a lot of that that was us just investing and being a part of the community again, really developing, you know, our show to your community and saying like, Hey, we understand that you felt neglected. We're turning the tide on this. Like we really want to change what it looks like for us to have a relationship. And so a lot of that had to change on, on the relational side, because until those things change, you know, like I think.
00:27:44
Speaker
there's a sense that some people have like, if you build it, they will come. And I think those, those are few and far between, you know, that it really works out that way. I think a lot of times really the relationships that are happening behind the scenes, the things that will be the things that matter. So, you know, we doubled down. We, as part of that split, we took over United conference and we, and we really doubled down on, on doing a conference for photographers and really investing in the community. Even though we knew that most of the people that were coming to United at that time weren't even using show it. We just said, we just said, you know what, we're going to,
00:28:14
Speaker
do a conference for photographers that's going to be awesome, regardless of whether they're involved and show it at all, and build a community. And hopefully, when we have a product that we can really be behind, hopefully, they'll come around as well. But regardless, we're going to be invested in helping photographers succeed. And so that's really where we came back and started on that. But I mean, for sure, as we're
00:28:40
Speaker
That was an investment period. It was like, okay, we're spending money on salaries, we're spending money on a conference, we're spending money on all the things to make a company work, but I have no idea whether this is going to work out. We still haven't launched the bridge that happens when you're actually asking people for money and they have to decide between X and Y and all those kinds of things. That's when you find out if your business is going to succeed. That's when you find out, will they trust us with what we're doing?
00:29:10
Speaker
That took a long time to find out that. And, you know, our whole team will tell you about, uh, our first goal at the beginning of the year, 2014 was a company goal of 51st sites. I mean, that's a crazy thing to think about now, but like, yeah, like our only goal was that we have to get 50 sites online that are using the new platform, you know? And so we're asking, we're just begging everyone that we knew, you know, like, will you be one of the ones that's our first part of our 51st sites? You know, and say like, will you be a part of this?
00:29:39
Speaker
We're trying to get this launched by the end of February. We want to have 50 sites that are currently using the platform before we go to WPPI. So we have something to show and talk about and say, here's success on the platform.
00:29:51
Speaker
you're trying to get those first sites online, you find out all the things that go wrong, all the things that don't work, all the things that you're missing. And that's when you're iterating as fast as you can, because you're like, we have to solve the things that prevent us from going to launch. And so yeah, that was our big goal. And man, I think we barely did it. I think we've had 51 sites or something like that. And it was like everyone on the team, you got to be like two or three people that you're talking to.
00:30:15
Speaker
and we're gonna do this and we're hand holding across the board you know everything was about that it was like can we get these first fifty launch because that's the make it or break it if you can't get past that just initial hurdle you'll never get to hundreds and thousands and whatever else that's gonna happen after that so that was definitely part of that journey of like okay this is where it feels like the ship either floats or it sinks you know here we go so
00:30:41
Speaker
That's fascinating. And there's a couple of things that I want to dive into there. And I'm going to mention them just so I don't forget. The first one is features, you know, and in figuring out what features to build, because I think the comparable thing for people who are running a service-based business is, you know, people coming home and say, Hey, can you do this for me? Can you do this for me? And you're thinking, well, I don't really do that, but I could do it. And again, like if you decide to go that route, you know, the nice thing about
00:31:06
Speaker
Standardizing things and serving a niche is that things are repeatable and that way you can serve those people really really really well You know as as show it's done with the the photography niche, right? But people struggle with that because again It's like people willing to give you money to do this service and you're kind of like well I need to pay my bills and this and that but I want to get to that in a second the first thing I want to ask about is investors, I mean Squarespace for instance, right has
00:31:30
Speaker
probably raised, I don't know the exact amount, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was over $100 million.
00:31:37
Speaker
Do you feel like not having outside venture capital like that has allowed you to be more relational? Has given you the opportunity to really focus on those first 50 people? Do you think something like a Squarespace, I would imagine they have to, if they're taking money from outside investors, they have to go out and grow and scale as quickly as possible?
00:32:02
Speaker
Whereas for you, I mean, your very clear goal, we're going to go out and get 50 people on the platform, and we're going to serve them as best as possible. We're going to ask them for feedback, and we're going to iterate from there. Do you think there's any connection there? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot I could talk about when it comes to investment and taking money and all those kinds of things. And it does change the conversation when you take on investment, when you have investors that you're dealing with, and you have to decide what you're going to do with that. I actually have a book
00:32:31
Speaker
Small, I think you've told me that. Small giants, yeah. Yeah, sorry. I was just looking for it. Small giants, and the premise of the book is when companies choose to be great instead of big. That's the whole premise of it. And I think ultimately, as we were growing, show it from the first days, I think the story I relate to people is that when your business is about survival, everyone's on the same page. We're just trying not to close the doors. When you get to a certain point though,
00:33:00
Speaker
and you have any amount of success in your business, that's when you can start to see when priorities of owners are different. What do you want to do with success? What's the end goal? And I would say that too about investors. If an investor comes in and invests in your business, their goal is that you survive so that you start to make a return for them. But ultimately, their goal with what they want the business to be about is going to be sometimes different than what an owner would want that
00:33:29
Speaker
Company to be about and so reading that book small Giants was just such a great one for me to realize that there are companies out there that have said No to investing, you know that have said, you know, like no we actually don't want to take that because we understand what that does to a business and so now that's given given me freedom as a business owner to make The choices that I want to do where I can say like yeah, we're gonna stay focused on photographers we're gonna stay in this niche we're gonna run a conference that I
00:33:57
Speaker
maybe doesn't look exactly right on the books, but has the kind of impact that I want to have. I'm feeling exactly right on the books means that it might not be profitable. Is that even for it might not be profitable? Well, you know, any business that's not profitable will ultimately die. So at the end of the day, the conference itself is what you're is what I'm saying. You said, Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. It's not like you generate a ton of revenue from this conference.
00:34:23
Speaker
No, no, no. That's not the point of it. And that's okay with us. So because we have priorities of what we want to do with certain things. And so, but yeah, so I think when I was able to say, you know what, I understand what I want my business to be about, and I want it to be about the way that I can impact my team, the way I can impact my family, the way that I can impact the community and the industry, then I can have those priorities about what I want that to look like without having to worry about is every one of these
00:34:52
Speaker
decision's going to be the most profitable. For sure, the baseline is we have to be a profitable company or we don't survive. So we're always working towards that. But to a certain degree, we have a lot more flexibility with what we want our impact to be, what we want the direction of our business to be, what we want it to feel like to work at our company, what we want it to feel like to be a customer of our company. If, for instance, we take an investment, there's no way we would have in-house support.
00:35:21
Speaker
It's just so much more expensive than outsourcing that to another country. But you'll have an experience that's very different than the experience you're going to have with our team that is a part of a culture that actually cares about the clients, that actually cares that your website looks good and is going to go above and beyond to try to take care of that. So I would much rather be a part of a company that's doing that
00:35:46
Speaker
as opposed to squeezing out every dollar and leaving customers feeling like, oh, well, I guess they took care of my problem, I guess. Yeah. No, but I think and to speak to the support team, because we certainly reach out to them quite a bit as we're launching client websites. It's not just a matter of making sure something works. They'll go out of their way to make sure it works the way you want it to work, the way you envision it. Not just like you're saying, just making sure
00:36:11
Speaker
you know, things are good enough, right? So that's something I really appreciate about them. And I do want to, I do want to say just a sort of a disclaimer here, the VC question, I'm not saying that all VC money is bad or that it's all investor money is bad or anything like that. But I did, you know, based on the previous conversations we had, I did, you know, have a feeling that you're going to answer that way. And I love that. I do love that distinction between, you know, what's the goal? Is it to have, you know, what kind of impact do you want to have? Do you want to just get big?
00:36:38
Speaker
or do you want to, you know, have impact? And so I love that distinction. And I love that about show it for sure. I am around a lot of friends that take VC money around around that environment, I understand it. And I just know that there's just different decisions that you're making, you know, and, and I love that book Smile Giants just for that purpose is it helps you clarify like these are those decisions that you're making. And it's fine, you can go either way. You know, certain
00:37:05
Speaker
I have friends that love the VC game and love being a part of just going as fast as possible. I just think for the style of business owner that I'd like to be and the type of business I'd like to grow, I always want to grow our business.
00:37:19
Speaker
but not at the expense of losing those pieces. Sure. So going back to the feature question, I asked that. It's kind of a, you know, there's a few pieces of that. You know, I had, I've interviewed Jake and Becca Berg of Dipsado. I asked them the same question because again, it's another company that I feel like, you know, they definitely listen to the community and they definitely have a community around their product just as show it does.
00:37:41
Speaker
I'm just so interested in how you guys navigate adding features and figuring out what to build next because I got to imagine that if you ask 100 people for what feature they want next, 90 of them are going to say something different. As the business owner, you have the burden of figuring out, okay,
00:37:58
Speaker
People think they need X but really they need you know, whatever that is and I was wondering if you could just speak to Kind of that process of figuring out. Okay. How do you balance listening to the community? But at the same time not just chasing around Features all day. Yeah, it's a tough question because I
00:38:17
Speaker
We've been through a lot of different seasons where we had feature boards that you could vote on and things like that. And there's all kinds of ways to generate input on what features matter to customers and things like that. Ultimately, I think what it comes back to is that you have to listen. You have to listen a lot and hear a lot of things. And then I think more than anything, you have to be a user. I built a new site.
00:38:44
Speaker
once a month just for the sake of feeling the pain points. I love helping a friend launch their site because then I get to feel all the pain points of getting a site launched and things like that. For sure, I think one of the big things for our whole team is making sure that we still stay in it, that we still are a part of it, and then we feel their pain. But our customer support team
00:39:05
Speaker
hears over and over on a daily basis, like the things that are pain points. And so then we have meetings with our team and say, hey, where do you guys hear? What are the things that really surface when you're talking to customers and when you're dealing with them? And so I think a lot of it is our whole team has a voice on what is important.
00:39:23
Speaker
Then we're also looking at, where do we want to go? There's features that seems like, that'd be cool, but is that what we want to be? Is that the direction that we want to go? There's this other piece of being easy as an easier platform, trying to make things simplified, that the more options that you give someone, the more complicated you become immediately. Every time you feel like, oh, we'll just add one more button here, we'll just add one more thing here, you're actually making it more and more complicated for everyone else.
00:39:53
Speaker
So we're always trying to measure against those things, like, OK, this might be a little bit nice, but it's actually just going to make it harder for everybody else. And so there's a lot of that that we're weighing when we say, OK, yeah, it's at that feature. What we found is that we tried to provide some power features into the platform, along with trying to stay fairly simple on other things. And so even by just allowing a basic embed code kind of thing, there's so many things that you can grab
00:40:22
Speaker
from other places and drop in and extend. So, if there's something that you really need, you can find it that way. Also, our choice to really try to stay integrated with WordPress means that most plugins that you could get for WordPress will still work or show it. So, that provides all kinds of things. So now, instead of saying, hey, we need to be owning that feature, we say, hey, we'll just work with someone who owns that feature. And so, when it comes to shopping carts or
00:40:47
Speaker
download store, something like that. There's all kinds of options that you can use inside of WordPress that provide those features so that we don't have to be the expert on those particular things. We're going to stay in our lane of like, we want to really provide this great design experience. Yeah, and I think if people actually... I mean, those like a shopping cart, for instance, that is a product in and of itself and the layers deep that you can go with that. And so, I think it makes sense, but at the same time has
00:41:13
Speaker
I feel like I would really struggle being in that role, deciding what to do next and staying disciplined and saying, hey, this is our lane. We're really going to make this stay in it and then make it as easy to use and flexible as possible.
00:41:30
Speaker
Yeah. Because that's the appeal of show it, right? Is that we can tell our clients, hey, when we build you a website using show it, you can update things on your own, right? Yeah. And so if you go in and start adding all these different features, then all of a sudden it becomes harder for people to realize, okay, this is what does that. And this is actually how I, you know, yeah. So eventually, you got to a point where the amount of the amount of users on the new platform,
00:41:57
Speaker
surpassed the amount of users on the old platform. Yeah. Is that where you felt that, you know, you guys like at what point I guess, did you feel like, Hey, we're on the right track. You know, like this is, we've got something here where you're both proud of what you have now, you know, and feel like, Hey, we're, we're heading the right direction. You don't feel like the ship is sinking. Yeah. Was there a turning point or did it just kind of happen?
00:42:24
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good question. I think there's a lot of moments along the way in that journey, because the beginning of 2017, we actually were at this moment where we were starting to get to that point where we were losing money. Every month, we were losing money. It was like, that's coming out of my pocket. I got to pull from savings. I got to stop paying myself. Whatever it is, just to
00:42:47
Speaker
keep things going because we were growing. We had launched in the VM 2016. So we were growing the new platform and it felt like things were moving in the right direction. But at the same time,
00:42:57
Speaker
we're losing to a certain degree, you know, and so how do you how did you decide? I mean, so I guess the question before that that question is, you know, like in that moment, again, I just think like, okay, if I were going through this, like you have a family, like it's not, you know, this isn't just like, you have to put food on the table. How did you decide like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna keep going with this? Like, how did you know things were heading in the right direction? Even though you're losing money? Did you know that was just a season and things like where other metrics telling you like, hey, we're heading in the right direction?
00:43:26
Speaker
Well, I mean, we were seeing good growth, good new subscriptions, new sites being launched, all those kinds of things felt good. So it was a hard time because you're celebrating the fact that things look good now, things are picking up. But the reason that we were able to stay in business is because an old product, but that old product is starting to sharply decline. So you have a product declining and a product raising at the same time. And so it's a transitional period.
00:43:55
Speaker
And so even if you may be growing, you're actually staying the same revenue wise and sometimes even shrinking. And you're finding out that you have to have people in place to handle the support, to handle all the stuff that we did with WordPress, that it became a little bit more difficult from a support end. And then we brought on someone for marketing that we thought, okay, we need to invest in this because we're in a place where we have an opportunity to grow. We really need to invest in the marketing side of this.
00:44:23
Speaker
And so it was at that moment that we, you know, we hired someone and we felt like, okay, we're going to do this. And then three months into that, you know, that we realized, you know what, I'm paying out of pocket right now. I'm just losing money. And, and we have the opportunity to be a profitable, like stay profitable, stay fiscally responsible. And at that time I'd consider taking on investment. That was when I was really weighing, you know, is this the season to take on investment?
00:44:49
Speaker
And we said, you know what, let's just be diligent about just being physically responsible. So we ended up letting that person go and then just really tighten the belt and said, hey, we're going to just be what we can be while we can be this, you know, and figure out how to make that work. And so, you know, we just, that 2017 was a rough year, you know, it was, it was a rough year because it was a good year, but it was a transition for sure. And that, and that made it tough to figure out how to
00:45:15
Speaker
how to balance all the celebration of a new product getting going, but also understanding that we're not out of the red completely. I think once we got towards the end of that, then we realized, okay, now we can start to make some more decisions that are forward thinking. That's when we decided to move into an office space out here. Because at the time that you're losing money, you're like, I'm not signing a lease. Things like that, you're like, I don't know if this is going to work out.
00:45:44
Speaker
Yeah, so there's a little bit of that where we were patient about a few of our decisions and said, hey, we just got to let this go. But even now, I think we're finally hitting the point now where the old product revenue doesn't account for the cost to run the current. So we're hitting that now. So if you said,
00:46:03
Speaker
When did you get out of the woods? It's like yesterday. It's a journey. I have two questions because we're getting close to time here. One is during that hard season, and I just want to preface this and I occasionally say this, this wasn't in the outline that I sent Todd. I've just been putting him on the spot here for the last 10 minutes.
00:46:27
Speaker
you know during that hard season where you had make some of these hard decisions whether be letting somebody go or deciding what direction the company was going to take outside investment was there anything that you that you found yourself like i gotta imagine other people giving you advice i would assume a lot of advice you know and then how did you navigate that season like you have like a trusted people that you go to what
00:46:51
Speaker
What tips can you give people maybe going through a similar season maybe not obviously not the exact same thing but how did you navigate that I think it's really important to have people around you that are smarter than you I mean I'll you know like over I know that's kind of a trite thing to say but it's it's really important and honestly like part of this was you know I will always
00:47:11
Speaker
I mean, since the beginning of our business, we've paid for consultants. We've always invested in people on the outside being a part of our business and just not being in it, but on it and saying like, hey, are you running this appropriately? Are you doing this? And so I had advisors that were strongly encouraging me to take investment. They're like, hey, you have this opportunity to do this. It's going to work. Get investment and go. And so I was listening to them and weighing it between different things.
00:47:39
Speaker
And so, you know, I don't regret that. I think it was really good for me to be paying advisors, you know, even, even in the end that not taking their advice, I felt like I learned what, what the ramifications were from both sides of like, what a decision like that would look like. And so I think the other piece of that too is that, you know, leaders are readers and I think reading books over and over again, it's, that's another one that's like hard to come back to, but it's like, man, my,
00:48:07
Speaker
my book list is very long on which ones I've gone through and said, okay, man, you know, this has really shaped the way that I am able to do business and lead a company and do those kinds of things because I invest time in reading. I listen to a lot of books because I love Audible, a lot more of an auditory learner, but I mean, I think, yeah, I just go through books after books because that and then the wisdom of others around you, like, yeah, I have a team.
00:48:35
Speaker
advisors leadership team here in our company and then my wife Lisa is
00:48:40
Speaker
one of the wisest people I know. And so being able to bounce things off of her, and she really helped me through that season too. Awesome. Well, the final question here, and you were training for an Ironman, so completely not related to show it here, but kind of. Why? Why are you training for an Ironman? 140 miles, right? Just the total distance of the race. We were talking about this a little bit before. I was, for whatever reason, under the impression that it was a little shorter than it ended up being.
00:49:10
Speaker
Yeah. We talked about this at United last year. We had a card that we said, do hard things. That might be a simple saying, do hard things. But I think there's something really valuable in that. And I think even when we talk about this story of what our transition looked like and standing on the edge of a precipice and saying, you know what, I'm just going to go for it. It's hard. It's easy to laugh about it later and say, oh, yeah, we just did it. But it was hard. And I think
00:49:35
Speaker
There is a certain amount of that that I enjoy in life of saying, okay, I'm going to put some challenges in my life that really press me. When I was building a business, I stopped doing a lot of working out and things like that. I know that probably was a better time to be getting some exercise and things like that, but I really wanted to reset a bit there.
00:49:55
Speaker
I think in training for a marathon and other events in the past, I've found that the moments when you feel like, I have to give up, my body has to give up, and then your mind just makes the choice and says, nope, I'm going to keep going. Nope, I'm going to keep going. Every time you make that decision over and over, it's like when you're lifting weights and you're curling some weights and it's like, okay, that's as much as my arm can do, and then you do it one more time.
00:50:22
Speaker
that's gonna strengthen your arm to push it past its its capacity it also strengthens your brain i think that's the thing about i love the iron man is like when i go out on training and you know doing ninety mile bike ride it's like you hit my lady like well that's enough you know i'm done you know and you like.
00:50:37
Speaker
No, I'm going to keep going. No, I'm going to keep going. And I think that piece of training your brain to be able to say, no, I'm going to keep going, it creates this resilience. It creates the ability to face obstacles in life in other areas. I just feel this capacity to handle things more just because of that kind of training. And so that's what I love about the endurance world is just how it changes the chemical makeup of your brain to be able to say, nope, I can handle
00:51:08
Speaker
enduring this. I think there's so much of life that
00:51:12
Speaker
comes at you from different directions and being able to just say, I'm going to endure and I'm going to push through. That's a big part of what life is about. And so giving some free time to train to do something like that, I think is huge. Awesome. Well, your first Ironman is coming up this November or October. Yeah, so November. So we will absolutely be cheering you along when you get to that.
00:51:38
Speaker
And I just want to thank you for your time and sharing your story and even the challenging and the tough parts which I know for me have been inspiring to watch. And again, I think at the end of the day, you know, we're big fans of show it largely because of you and the team behind show it.
00:51:54
Speaker
Don't get me wrong. I mean, we wouldn't recommend a platform to our clients that we didn't think was outstanding. So I also think the platform's outstanding. But again, I think this is just such a valuable piece of things for people to hear because of, you know, just those things you mentioned throughout the interview, like having an impact instead of just getting big, you know? So thank you for sharing all that. And where can people find more about Showit? Our website's showit.co. You can find us at Instagram at showit.co.
00:52:23
Speaker
So yeah, you can sign up there. We have a 14-day free trial. You can check out the platform and see if it's a good fit for you. And I'm looking forward to seeing you hopefully in a few weeks. We're going to be taking an RV around the country. And that'll be part of this fun. And so we'll be showing up at your door one of these days. I think what show it needs is like an RV tracker. Like the Santa Claus thing around Christmas. You need a page on the website where we can go and kind of find where you are on the map.
00:52:52
Speaker
So, but anyways, thank you so much for joining us. And until next time, I appreciate that. Hey, thank you. Thanks for tuning into the brand set book show. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing and leaving a review in iTunes for show notes and other resources. Head on over to Davey and Krista.com.
00:53:24
Speaker
you