Trust the process, embrace resilience, and understand that challenges often lead to greater success.
Dive into the latest episode of the B2B Go to Market Leaders podcast, where Eli Rubel shares his entrepreneurial journey from tech startups to service businesses.
Eli details his transition from chasing venture-backed dreams to creating lifestyle businesses that align with his personal values. The conversation spans his decision-making process, the creation of Matter Made and NoBoringDesign, and his newest venture, Profit Labs.
Eli emphasizes his “tricycle life” philosophy—prioritizing work-life balance while building profitable businesses.
Connect with Eli Rubel on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/elirubel/
Connect with Vijay Damojipurapu on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vijdam/
Listen to the podcast here:
From Art School Dropout to GTM Powerhouse: Eli Rubel’s Founder Journey
Signature Question: How do you view and define go to market?
Yeah, sure. So to me, go to market. Very simply put, would be, you know, what is, what is the motion with which you get your product or offering in front of your ideal customer? Flat out? Like, what are the channels? What are the means, methods, strategies, tactics, yep, all of that kind of in one very.
Cool, yeah, that’s a pretty crisp definition and view for sure. Now let’s double-click and triple-click on some of those things. Yet it all starts with who is your ICP. What are the channels that you’re getting and how you’re reaching them? There’s an entire spectrum of the buyer journey, beyond just adoption and even up to advocacy.
There is also the internal aspect within either an agency or a SaaS company. It doesn’t really matter. There are a lot of moving pieces. So if you have to double click, and based on your vast experience and perspectives, like, where would you go in deeper in any of those or any other areas?
So when I think about go to market, I think about influence, because at the end of the day, especially with where the market is today, you know, it used to be the case that you could take people through this long buyer journey and kind of build trust over time and like there was enough capital around to fund that type of buyer journey?
Yeah!
I think now, you know, we’re not It’s not growth at all costs anymore. It’s much more about, how to do we as efficiently as possible. Get someone to make a buying decision. And to me, that comes down ultimately to trust and influence. And so when I think about a go-to-market motion, whether it’s for one of my agencies or for one of our SaaS clients, the fastest path to that, in my opinion, is finding people who are influential, who have an audience that trusts them, and figuring out how to create some sort of win-win situation between us and them, such that they put us in front of their audience. Because either the conversion rates that I’ve seen when that play is successful are so much higher, and then the sales cycles are so much faster than if you’re talking about a traditional kind of full buyer journey, and it’s because you get to piggyback the trust of that individual.
Absolutely, in fact, it’s great and so relevant that you mentioned this exact piece, Eli, because I was actually working with, very closely with an Enterprise, a large enterprise client last week, and one of the key things that I emphasized is, how do you pull in quote-unquote influencers to accelerate your sales cycle? Right? That’s huge. I mean, you guys telling about yourself is one thing, but imagine your customer advocating on your behalf. So it’s a very similar parallel where you bring in an influencer and they show that point of view, or they take that buyer to the next relevant point.
Exactly, exactly, and every category has them right? Like, if you’re selling to Mark, if you’re selling to corporate marketers. Dave Gerhart, exit five, no-brainer, right? If you are selling to SMB tech founders or like Bootstrap founders, Adam Robinson or Santos, right? Like they’re just names that come to mind for pretty much any vert that you might be selling into, or buyer persona.
Yep, absolutely you touched upon all the people that I look up to on my LinkedIn feed every single day, multiple times a day.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, even for me as a go-to-market, practitioner advisor and consultant, right? So for me, it is about how I keep myself up to date and even question my own thinking. So that I can guide my clients and advise them in the right direction.
Totally!
Yeah, the role of influencers is critical, for sure.
And you can kind of follow it makes it easier to follow the general Zeitgeist in that category, right? Like, whatever those folks are talking about, tends to become the language that, like your average middle, middle manager buyers starts to use, because it’s like, okay, or even, or even executive buyers, like, they just, they hear it over and over again, and they’re like, Okay, that’s the cool new language that we should be using. That’s how we talk. That’s how we articulate this challenge or the solution to our you know, ELT and so I think it just makes a ton of sense to align with that fantastic.
Now, this is a great, great opening, for sure. So let’s take a step back, big picture rewind. Walk us through your journey. I mean, your career journey, and what led you to what you’re doing today and who you serve.
Oh, man, it’s a meandering story, so I’ll have to be careful not to let it be too long. But yeah, I mean, I started off as an art school kid, and actually dropped out of art school. I thought I wanted to be a photographer. Spent two years working in the nonprofit space after leaving school, and then I had what I call my quarter-life crisis. I was about 20 years old and realized that you know, I was like waiting tables in Los Angeles, doing the starving artists thing, and realized that that was not going to provide the lifestyle and future that I wanted.
And so I read The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss, Yep, got super motivated starting read this was back when what was, this is like 2009, So back when TechCrunch was like everything it put folks in tech like that was, that was the source of truth for what was going on in the startup world. And so started reading Tech Crunch, and I was like, You know what? I’m young enough, I can figure out this software thing. I can figure out the internet.
So I moved home, moved into my mom’s basement, and set, basically a rule for myself where I wasn’t allowed to leave the basement or move out of the basement until I’d started a tech company. So, yeah, just sat down there. Would go to coffee shops and just bang my head against the wall trying to figure out, how to break into this tech thing, and knowing that I didn’t have any qualifications to be an employee of someone’s company, I had to start something, and ended up starting a Contract Lifecycle Management tool called Glider.
Raised VC money for that, yeah, and then sold that business in 2014 during my earn-out, I took basically a year off where I was, like, available to them. But it was the case that, like, culturally, my startup and the people who acquired us were like, oil and oil and water. And so thankfully, they didn’t call me very often. I took a motorcycle trip all through Central America, and there were many, many conference calls from inside of my helmet where they had no idea where I was. Is pretty great. And yeah, so that was, that was my foot in the door in tech.
From there, I acquired an E-commerce business, ran that turned it around over the course of four years, and sold that to a private equity firm in 2019, and then that’s when I got into the crazy world of service businesses and agencies. I started my first agency that serves the tech market in 2019 called Matter Made, a performance marketing and demand efficiency firm lucky enough to partner with clients like Dropbox and Oracle, we created Looms, demand, Gen, org, and programs from scratch. Joe, the CEO, came to us through a trusted advisor of his and was like, we don’t have the demand gen function here yet. We don’t have a demand gen program here yet. Can you create that for us?
And so we did, Loom.com, hop and product board, bunch, bunch of names that are pretty well-known. We helped them grow that demand through those types of programs. So that was Matter Made. Still is Matter Made, yeah. And then in 2023, I started, I saw this trend, like this was kind of deep in the VC winter, right? No, people were not investing, and budgets were frozen. Hiring, hiring was frozen. And had this thesis that a lot of these companies had just fired their designers, because designers are always seen as, like this, nice to have expense, right? And so I was like, You know what? I’m going to create an agency that lets people work with world-class design talent, but without having to hire them, yeah, and sell into the same audience that Matter Made is, you know, sold into right being like B2B SAAS and yeah, so that, but that that became NoBoringDesign is the name of the agency. We’ve done a bunch of really cool work over the last couple of years. That agency is now as big as my first agency. So yeah, it’s been a fun journey, and actually, I hired a GM to run both of those businesses, so I’m not even in those businesses anymore. I’m starting a third one, which we’re announcing in a week.
Very cool. Oh oh, my God. There are so many segues we can take in your entire journey, very few minutes over here, in the entire journey. So let’s start at the very beginning, right? I mean, college dropout, okay, but that’s fine. I mean, I kind of, and even the audience can relate to it, sure. But then you waited in LA restaurants, I get that too, right? And then you decided, okay, this is not going to get you to where you want to be, big, big, big ambition, big vision, and so on. And then you loved yourself in your parent’s basement, perfect. But then what happened between that point in time and starting Glider?
Yeah, a lot of like, sitting in front of a Moleskine notebook, yeah, at rainy coffee shops in Portland, Oregon, wondering, like, What the hell did I do this? How am I going to do this? What am I going to do? Yeah, first I’m going to put the company in strong air quotes here if you’re not watching the video. So the first company that I tried to start was the easiest way to describe what Squarespace is today. But I had this idea because I had come from art school, and I really knew how hard it was for student artists to get their work online like they had to hire an HTML and CSS like a front-end developer to build them a website from scratch.
Yeah.
So I was like, that seems ridiculous. Like, what if? What if we created some sort of templated website builder for student artists? And so I think the idea was great, the vertical was wrong, and I had a really hard time building it, because I didn’t know anything about how to get software built and who to work with, and so I was working with the wrong type of engineers, and I spent maybe six months working on that Before I abandoned it.
And then after that, I worked on a consumer app that we actually did build, and it was a fully functioning app before I abandoned that, which was, again, kind of come from, coming from the student, artist lens, I was frustrated with this was back when everybody would just like, they’d go on a vacation, and then they’d put their SD card in their computer, and they’d upload every single one of the 500 photos that they took in Mexico to Facebook.
I was like, Guys, this is, like, there’s this thing called curating your photographs, and it would be really nice if you could do that so we could see the ones that we actually want to see. And so this was, like, an easy way for someone to curate a collection of photographs and tell a story with them. And we had, like, tapped into Facebook’s graph, graph search. And you could search using, you know, plain language, like, Hey, show me all the photos of me drinking beers in Mexico with my friends. And it was like, this was before you could, like, now that’s very normal, but back then, there was no search on top of images. And then from that, you could curate your story. So I think it was ahead of its time in certain ways. And then it was also just like, not really that useful in other ways. But what was interesting about that that really paved the way to Glider, because I networked the shit out of Portland, I was taking as many execs and CEOs and founders out to coffee as I could, yeah, while I was working on that, and ended up throwing like this launch party that a bunch of people came to from the community.
And so what the feedback that I ended up getting was like, Yeah, we knew this idea was never going to work for you, but it was cool to see how tenacious you were.
Yeah!
About starting a thing!
Yeah. And they got when you say launch parties. Was it the launch parties for both of those ventures?
Just for the second one, the consumer, yeah. And so shortly after that, I got an email from the only VC in town, and they were like, Hey, you don’t know us yet, but we know you. You know we’ve seen you and we’ve seen you execute. We’ve seen you do this, this project. We think it’s a bad idea, but we would like to have a conversation with you and potentially back you. Some way. And so I went and met with them, and they basically gave me that same speech, like, Listen, if you’re willing to change what you’re working on, we’ll cut you a check right now.
Amazing, that worked on it.
Yeah. I just want to interrupt that, right? I just want to tie this back to the conversation we started, which is the go to market definition, sure. So many nuggets and insights over here, which is you had the ICP. Initially, it was the students, yeah. After that, it was a consumer, yeah. And then the problem, so the match between the ICP, the problem, the offer, and the business model and the channel didn’t even get into the channel part yet.
Yeah, right.
All those things have to align. And doing these things for you, was a huge, a hand learning experience. You had to get through these iterations before you hit your yep,
yep. Totally amazing.
Yeah, sorry, I interrupted. Yeah. You were talking about Glider and how it got funded.
Yeah. So, so basically, it was a blank LA was it was a check with a blank idea, right? So they’re like, here’s this check. Let’s collaborate on what the idea is. While I was going through the process of closing that round of funding, I became really fascinated with the friction that was involved in the communication between myself, my counsel, their counsel, and them. It seemed like it should have been a pretty straightforward process, but then we were collaborating on these documents, and it was a little bit convoluted, and it was unclear if we were, you know, who’s looking at the right version of the document, or where do we stand in the process? And so I started to develop this, this question around, you know, is this how all legal document processes go like, is it always this kind of unclear? Yeah. And so I went out and interviewed something like 40 different law firms about, hey, how does this go with your clients? Yep. And the initial thesis was, we would help. We’d be like, a workflow and process engine around legal documents, and we’d sell it to law firms.
Got it.
And so we started, that’s what we started to build. And we actually that’s what we raised money on. We went when it went out and raised money from True Ventures and a bunch of other folks in Silicon Valley. And pretty quickly we learned that selling to law firms was a really bad idea. But the problem we found was, was actually a problem for sales teams, right? Because they’re, you know, the easiest way to summarize this would be, think PanDa doc today, right? Or Aptus, or any of this kind of last mile of the sales cycle. You’ve got the verbal from the client. You know it’s time to send them the paper. And there’s a bunch of internal and external approvals that need to happen in order to do so. Then there’s negotiations that need to happen, red lines, yeah. And then ultimately, a signature, and then that needs to be routed to the right people afterward, yeah. And so at the time when we were starting Glider, DocuSign and Echo sign only did signature. They didn’t do any workflows. They didn’t do any approvals. It was just like documents finalized already sent for signature.
And you found all these two-year interviews with the lawyers, the legal law firms, or even with sales teams?
With sales teams as well. Yeah, yeah. And so that’s where we pivoted from trying to sell to law firms. And it was like, Hey, we’re gonna sell to SaaS companies with large sales teams who have struggled with that last mile being a black box for their sellers, and ultimately for their finance teams.
Nice, and you got them to be like, design customers, and then paid pilots and so on, the initial whatever, the reference customers.
Exactly, yeah, and then pretty quickly, so we were still in the like, we moving through exactly what you just described, you know, design partners, then paid, first paid customers, And right around that time, we had this company reach out to us out of the blue, and they’re like, a 30-year-old company that was one of the larger players in the CPQ space, configure price quote. They had customers like AmEx and Bell helicopters and just Hitachi Data Systems like just big, big old companies as clients, and they didn’t have anything on the contract management side of the house, and so they were, this is when Aptus was really big, and they were just getting beat, eaten alive by Aptus because they didn’t have contract management, yeah. And so they reached out and that the acquisition conversation was actually, it’s its own kind of wild story. I’m happy to go there if you want to. But they basically came in and were like, Hey, we’re gonna give you this cash offer. We need this for our business to thrive. And I had felt like I was pretty tired at that point and had been through quite the journey. And I wanted to get, you know, a base hit this, this was the base hit.
So, very cool again, just tying back to the entire go-to-market story, which is, in this case, FPX, your acquiring company, I’m thinking, I’m assuming it’s FPX. That’s right, right?
Right!
And they found a gap in their go to market to the customers, and there they were being eaten alive, better competition, actors and others, yeah, and so you provided that plug for them in their go to market.
Yep!
Amazing. And yeah, you should actually spend like, a minute or two Eli on that whole acquisition offer, how you went back and forth, and then, yes, you just made the decision after that.
Yeah, so it took me. It took me a number of years before I was comfortable sharing this story. But now I think it’s hilarious, now that I’ve had some successes afterward, I think it’s hilarious. So we had a technical founder that ended up basically lying about the process, the progress that was being made on the product, and we ended up having to replace him, and we were set back, like 12 months. We had to reboot the whole product with a new team, and so our traction wasn’t aligned to where it should have been based on, you know, the amount of money that was raised and the time we’ve been working on it.
So when we went out to raise our Series A we just didn’t have the sales. We just started selling. We just started converting accounts to pay, yeah, and so, you know, compared to other series A companies, we just didn’t do, we didn’t look very attractive. And so our VCs were like, listen, it’s been a good it’s been a good try. Like, we’ll, we’ll cut you a check for the next thing you want to work on in a heartbeat. Why don’t we wind this thing down. Call it, call it a day.
Right.
And, and, yeah, and you can tell us what you want to start next. And so before we had, before I had that conversation with them, they sent me the note like, hey, come to our offices. We want to talk about, you know, the future. And so I knew it was, I knew what the conversation was going to be like, yeah. And this was at the same time that Dreamforce was happening that year. And so I was like, obviously, in quite a depressed state knowing what was coming. I was like, fuck, I need, I just need to keep myself busy up until this meeting, so that I’m not like, sitting there wallowing in my own self-pity.
Right!
And so I just had a bunch of meetings. And one of those meetings that I took was this random corporate development guy from FPX who had sent me a note, and he was like, Hey, I see you’re going to be at Dreamforce. I’d, you know, we’d really like to connect with you. Can you meet for coffee? Like, great, happy to let’s do it. And so I show up to this meeting thinking it’s just going to be this one guy over coffee at the same Regis. And he, he’s like, Yeah, meet me on the whatever, the very top floor, yeah. And so I walk into this room, and the entire executive team for FPX is lining the route, like lining this penthouse suite, in suits.
And here I am in my like, startup hoodie. Oh, this isn’t what I was expecting. They had, like, catering and so, like, yeah, “tell us about your business”. So I don’t know what got into me. Actually, it’s pretty typical of my personality, but what I did was I was like, You know what? This business is going to get shut down anyway. I might as well just send it with all the confidence in the world.
Yeah, exactly.
Why not? Yeah. And so I pitched it. I was like, Yeah, we’re out raising our Series A right now, which was true. Technically, yeah, we’re out-raising our Series A right now. You know, we’ve got all these great design partners that we’re converting into paid all of that was true. You know, here’s the future roadmap for the product, here’s how it’s solving problems. I was just like, really confident and optimistic in this meeting. Gave them a demo of the product. Like, great. Well, we really appreciate you taking the time to share this with us. Nice to meet you. I leave. Go straight to True Ventures offices right from that meeting, have the conversation where, like, hey, let’s spin this thing down. We’ll invest in your next thing.
Right!
And now I’m walking down the stairs of True Ventures South Park office, almost late for my flight, so I’m kind of like, running down the stairs. My phone rings and I answer it thinking it’s my Uber driver, because of a number I don’t recognize. I’m like, I’ll be right there. I’m literally running down the stairs. I’ll be out in front in a second.
And the other guy’s like, Eli, yes. He’s like, Oh, this is Ron. You were just meeting with us over at the St Regis, yeah. Can you come back? Oh, wow, yeah. I was like. Like, no, I’m late for my flight to Portland. I can’t come back. And he’s like, I really think you should come back. And I’m like, I will miss my flight if I come back. And he’s like, our executive director wants to meet or executive chairman, I can’t remember what her title was, really wants to meet with you. And she’s here right now. It’ll be worth your time to come back. Yeah. And so I’m like, again, I don’t know what got into me, but I was like, fuck it. Yeah, sure. I’ll be there in 10 minutes or five minutes. It’s just so close. So I show up, and this woman is, like, draped in diamonds. I’ve never seen someone wearing so many diamonds. She puts out her hand. She’s like, my name is Audrey, and I buy your company.
That’s it.
That’s how she led with that. And I was like, well, it’s not for sale, yeah. And so kind of the same thing. I was like, I don’t know where that came from, but I told her it wasn’t for sale. And she was like, well, it will be by the time you land in Portland. Wow. And that was, that was it. They got, I got, they sent me an LOI, yeah, the next morning. And, you know, typical negotiation process, back and forth, but I got, so I went from the company was for sure gonna get shut down yes, to a cash offer.
They ended up, I mean, I talk about this publicly, so I’m not sure they ended up buying us for $3 million cash, of which I kept, like 1.2 or something like that, 1.3 which for me, if you think about my story, as I had gone from waiting tables, yeah, it’s huge. Yeah, I was in credit card debt because I used credit cards to start the business before I got VC funding, and then I wasn’t confident enough to pay myself at a market rate, whatever. Anyway, long story short, it was a life-changing event for me, and it ended up opening a lot of doors after the fact, too.
So an amazing story, and I’m actually so glad that we took the time and you actually shared the story. Eli, I mean, so many reasons, right? One is your mind is always telling you a big lie. The reason why I’m saying this is you think when I say you that your mind is shaping a story in our narrative for yourself, but the world outside will see a different value. In this case, FPX saw a different value for your company versus for you and your investors at the end of the road. Yeah, that’s one.
And second, is your ability to just it doesn’t matter in what mental state you are. You still need to tell that visionary, the CEO, the founder, story that is key. That definitely played a huge role. And I think one other key takeaway for me and the listeners from the conversation is never to give up. It doesn’t matter how bad or gloomy the situation is, you never know how it transpires. Right? Going back to your previous two companies that you started, you threw a launch party.
You didn’t have any expectations that you’d get funded by True Ventures for a different venture. Yeah, you didn’t know that totally right? And the same thing with this, it’s an amazing story. I am so glad and thankful that you actually shared this. El.
Yeah, of course!
Yeah, fantastic. All right, and we’re just getting this conversation started. We are just about halfway through that, and so many rich stories out of this. Now go to the next phase of your journey, which is NoBoringDesign, but in between you do your motorbike riding. Maybe that’s a conversation for a different podcast and insights. But going back to, I think you turned into an LP, became an advisor for different companies, and then you also started NoBoringDesign. What is that journey and decision-making like?
Yeah, so I started, it was Matter Made. Was the first company that I started after. Essentially the decision-making was like, you know, I’ve been, I’ve been chasing this dream of starting a massively venture-backed company, taking it public, you know, the typical Silicon Valley trade. And I’d been chasing that now for I think I was 28 so I’d been chasing it for eight years, and I just felt like I knew that I was ready to start a family and have kids, and I felt like I didn’t have the energy anymore, or the drive anymore to chase that dream to the extent that I would need to actually see it through, yeah, and that, to me, I was more interested in creating a lifestyle for that next stage of life, of having kids. And, you know, I called it the tri, the tricycle life, which was this vision that I had of, you know, chasing my kid. They’re they’re on a tricycle, riding down a tree-lined street, then I’m chasing them.
And it’s the middle of the work week, the middle of the day. I’m not worried about anything, yep. And so I was like, How do I get there?
Right? Like it does. I don’t need to take a company public to get there. Obviously, that would be one way to do it, but probably wouldn’t have a bunch. Of time and wouldn’t be so carefree, and I know it’d be a long journey. So surely there’s another way. And so that’s where I started thinking about starting a services business, which is what made me a no, boring designer.
And it came from this kind of lazy place. I like to call it a lazy place, people laugh when I say lazy, that I’m lazy, because whatever I think I’ve always optimized for the most lazy decisions, and they work for me. Other people, they’re like, Dude, you’re not lazy. But anyway, I digress. So I was like, how do I make the most amount of money with the least effort? Yeah, and to me, service business seemed like a great idea, because it’s like, great I get to hire people who are smarter than me, charge more than they’re worth for their time, or not more than they’re worth, but, like, charge more than I’m paying them for their time. Yeah, that’s right, yeah, collect a margin, and I don’t like it, all I have to do is get land for the business, right? Obviously, it’s not as simple as that when you start to scale.
But long story short, I started this. I started Matter Made with him with the ambition to bring home $40,000 a month. It’s like if I bring home $40,000 a month, that’s like an ungodly sum to me, like, there’s just I couldn’t possibly have any needs beyond that. And so that’s why I created a business model for that. And we got there in six months.
Wow.
And then I was like, Oh, shit, this is fun. I guess I’ll keep going. So I ended up scaling that business.
Well, I guess I’ll keep going. So I ended up scaling that business, actually.
Before we went there. So how did you land on the ICP and the problem and develop an offer for that?
Yeah, so the thinking was I have this network in B2B, SaaS, right? Venture-backed. SaaS, yep, from my first thing, and I remember how much I was kind of flying blind and stabbing around in the dark in the earliest phases of my startup journey around go-to-market marketing.
And so I was like, I definitely could help founders shortcut some of those stumbling blocks that I experienced based on, you know, just based on my own journey. So it’s like, I look, I could look for people who were where I was however many years ago, right? And just help accelerate them, yeah. And so I was like, that’s great. So, like, that’s my ICP is early-stage tech. I’ll leverage my existing network, right? And I’ll help them with marketing and growth, yep. So, yeah. So that was, that was the initial thing. We would create demand gen programs, and then help execute those demand gen programs. And then over, over the years, we refined that into, we’re just really, really good with paid media and helping create the most efficient media programs possible, and that became our niche, and we ended up scaling Matter Made, which still is an agency today, to 4.2 million in profit at its peak in 2021 in three years.
So that’s kind of like a huge departure from my initial goal of 40k a month in profit. And that’s when I was like, Oh, the agency thing is like, a secret, yeah, it’s kind of like a secret, like, and it’s funny because there’s as a like, I cut my teeth as a founder, like a tech founder, and I remember thinking, agency people are like scumbags. They’re just like, you know, it’s like, it’s like, this dirty word or dirty job, like, ooh, lifestyle business. What’s that? That’s icky. And then what I was on the other side of it, and I was like, holy shit. I like it, I made four times my acquisition price in a single year, you know? And I didn’t. I didn’t do any of the work. It was all just like orchestrating the work.
And were you calling yourself and pitching yourself as an agency in the initial months?
No, in the initial months, I was like a consultant. It started as a consultant, and then pretty quickly I was like, Well, shit, I don’t want to do the work myself. That’s exhausting. So then as then, it became an agency. Once I hired some folks, we got up to about 40 people, yeah. So, yeah, that’s, that’s the that’s the Genesis story of how I, how and why I shifted from tech to services.
Amazing. And then you saw that, you know, it’s quote, unquote, easy money, and you were clearly hitting your goals so easy that something I mean, what transpired you to actually start NoBoringDesign? Yeah, so meta-made.
Yeah. So you use the word easy, and I’m kind of smiling and laughing, not again, easy with quotes I should, yeah, yeah. Well, it’s a good it’s a good segue, because, you know, I think it’s easy to just talk about your wins and your successes, but it’s important to talk about the failures too. So Matter Made peaked in 2021 at 4.2 million in profit. And then all, but all of our clients were tech, every single one of them, yeah.
And so when the Tech Winter came in 2022, and all the VCs pulled the plea, you know, Sequoia issued what was like their first memo since the first memo they issued back in 2008 right? And so everybody froze their spending and fired all their agencies. So we went from absolutely crushing it, we were my target for that year was 7 million in profit, and we were like, so certain that we were gonna hit that number. And then we went from that to losing $200,000 a month because we had this huge team, and suddenly had very few clients that stuck around through that tech winner.
Right!
And so we went from 40 people down to 5. It was the hardest part, the hardest phase of my career by a landslide, yep. And so I had these two designers on the team that I was basically going to have to fire, and I was like, I really don’t want to, I really don’t want to cut. I mean, I didn’t want to cut anybody, but I just finished cutting 35 other people. So I was like, I wonder if there’s a creative way for me to save these folks, and that’s where I mentioned it at the start of the episode, where I was like, I have this theory that everybody just fired their designers, and so what if we kept them around and created a separate brand and made them available to solve for the folks three months down After firing their designers realize, Well, shit, we actually still need design.
Great.
So yeah. So I went to my head designer and was like, Hey, here’s the reality of the situation. I’m willing to get creative and give it a couple of months.
Yeah!
Can you create a brand and a website for me in seven days? And so this was on a Thursday or Friday, and by Monday, I had mock-ups, and by the end of that week, it was live. Called it NoBoringDesign, because I could, it’s like, I need a simple name. Something’s very literal. Ended up being a, I think, great name, because…
An amazing name.
Yeah, you get to use it for Nbd, for short, it’s kind of fun, and people remember it. So anyway, long story short, that’s how it started, and then within the first couple of months, we had landed our first 10 clients, and the business was already profitable. Started hiring other designers, and started building it out that team is now around 30 people, and we’ve just carved out a really great niche, helping both B2B and B2C companies. But really a concentration in B2B Tech stands out. You know, it’s like, how do you, especially in this environment, design ends up design, and ultimately what, what I mean by design is brand and you’re good at the market. It becomes a very cheap lever relative to the other levers, right?
It’s like, okay, I could spend $200,000 a month on Google ads or on LinkedIn ads, whatever it is. And if I look like every other provider that’s advertising, that $200,000 is not an efficient spend.
Correct.
But if I spend half that, and I have a real member, think, think, like a gong, for example, right? Really memorable brand, yeah, if I spend half of that dollar, but I have a really memorable brand that converts better, like I may get the same result, and the investment in the brand is so much cheaper than that, $100,000 every single month.
A huge market product, especially after you have product market fit, it’s huge.
Exactly. So that’s where we found it. Our niche is helping, helping companies differentiate, and create that moat around their brand, both from, you know, the brand itself, the website itself, but also even like the ads. The creative so, yeah, that’s that there was NoBoringDesign. And now I’m about to launch my third agency. It’s called Profit Labs.
Do you want to give a sneak peek into it?
Yeah, I’m sure by the time this episode goes live, well, when does this episode go live?
In about a month.
Oh, yeah, we’re good. So it’ll be live by then. So profit labs I created because I realized, as an agency owner, and I’ve got a bunch of peers, right, who other folks who have started agencies and services businesses, you know, the financial support that we get is usually from like a generic SMB accounting firm that just they, you know, they do the minimum, they do your books, they give you a P&L and then financial reporting package at the end of the month, and that’s it. But there’s so much more that goes into running an agency and making it profitable. And so I thought to myself, I really want to create an accounting firm, a finance firm that is built exclusively for service businesses, exclusively for agency owners, and helps them run more profitable agencies by surfacing insights that matter to them. Because that’s all we focus on. And so that’s what we’re doing. We help seven and eight-figure agency owners run more profitable agencies.
Yeah, very cool. It’s almost, I mean, the brand that comes to my mind is like, what Gusto does for small to medium management roles. It’s very similar. You are, like, a fractional accounting and finance for agencies?
100%.
Yeah, very cool. All right, wow. I mean, we covered so much, just an initial part of the conversation. And here I am thinking about how we are yet to get into the meat of the episode, but I think we covered a lot of ground, I still want to dig into this, which is, if you were to go back in time either from your different companies, I think you covered enough from your different companies. But if you were to go back in time and look at your B2B SaaS clients, if you can share a go-to-market success story and a go-to-market failure slash learning story, that’d be amazing for the listeners.
I mean, go-to-market success story, Loom is obviously an easy one to point at, given their ultimate outcome and being there on the ground floor, I think Calm is another like the meditation app, we launched Calm for Work, yeah, Calm for the workplace. It was like B to B to C, and that was a really big success story. Oh, man, what’s a failure story?
I’m sure when you start talking about these two, something will come to your mind, yeah, start with these.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, do you want to dive into the specifics of those, or what?
Yeah, so either Calm or the first one that you mentioned, which is Loom, yeah, just start, and then I can steer the conversation, sure.
And I’m gonna preface this with like, a, this was almost five years ago now, four years ago now. B, I didn’t do any of the work, so these are my teams that were, that were working on these accounts, yeah, so it’s gonna be hard for me to go into like, specifics.
Got it? Okay?
I think I could, yeah, go ahead.
Let’s actually start with, I mean, when you had the initial discovery, call the conversation with either Loom or Calm, what is it like? And then how did you and your team come up with what the engagement would look like and outcomes for the next three, six months?
Yeah. So for both of them, we were basically walked into those deals by an advisor to the CEO, who had already worked with us and seen the results that we produced. For other folks, they were advising, yeah, and had whispered in the CEO’s ear essentially, like, hey, you need this, you know, you need this help, right? These are the experts. You know that you can trust them because I’ve seen their work in the past. Like, let’s get this done. Let’s get this solved.
And so unlike other sales cycles, where we were starting from, you know, scratch and building trust and authority, that was kind of, I think my first meeting with Joe was like, here. He was like, here’s the lay of the land. We don’t really have anything. We just hired our first demand-gen person. But we don’t really, like, we don’t have any direction for them. We need someone who can come in and set the strategy, oversee the hires, oversee the work, and get us on the right track. Like, we’re not just, like, very, very early, early, early. And that’s that was, you know, at the time, that was the type of challenge we liked. We don’t do that anymore. We don’t work with the early stage anymore, but at the time, that was like so much fun, right? Blank slate.
And, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, got it okay, and they were at about a few 100k or even a million in revenue back then.
I don’t remember, but yeah, they hadn’t whatever revenue they were producing was not because they were marketing and doing demand.
Yeah, and the fact that they had the first demand gen, which most likely would be like a senior individual contributor, but they didn’t have the budget, not the need yet for like, a full-time director or VP of demand.
Yeah. And, I mean, I think, I don’t think Joe would correct me on this, but, like, I don’t think Joe would have known, like, he didn’t know what he needed or, like, what the roles would be, or how to get that set up like he was a green founder. You know, that’s not a dig. That’s just like how it is. I was a green founder at one time, too. So, yeah.
Fair enough. And then what was like, the first big, aha, big success that you delivered for Joe in demand, Gen.
This is where my memory is, like…
That’s okay. If it’s easier to talk about Calm, we can do that,
yeah. I mean, they’re all from the same era.
Or we can move to NoBoringDesign on you, yeah?
Like a short version for Loom. I remember we did Loom. It was, it’s funny, Loom and Calm were both Loom, Loomfor the workplace, Calm for the workplace. And it was like a video series that we CO produced. We brought in this video team that we really like. We created these, like, really fun, kind of funny videos of someone using Loom to communicate in the workplace, kind of share the value proposition and illustrate. Because, you know, now, Loom is practically a verb, but back then, nobody knew what it was, so we had to introduce the concept of, like, why would you send a video message that also allows for screen sharing? Like, how is that valuable?
Right!
And I remember that campaign just did super, super well, and that was kind of like the spark, the initial start off, like, okay, we’re onto something. Let’s chase this. Let’s chase this thread.
Absolutely. I mean, I love loom. I mean, I use Loom even to this day, and I’ve been using it for a few years now, and I still recall that maybe it was from the campaign, or from a different one, where the employees at Loom were actually talking about how they use loom, both internally for their status or weekly updates to the team, or even for sales calls. Yeah, yeah. Amazing. This is great stuff, and I’ll just make it easy on you. Eli, I know we covered a lot of go-to-market failure stories, so let’s not go there throughout a lot for sure. But yeah, as we come towards the end of this conversation and podcast, a couple of questions I have for you. One is if you were to go back in time and then look at, or think about, like, two, three, or four people that really played a big role in shaping and really pulling you up from your deepest points or most down points. Like, who were those people?
I think the VC who first came to me with that, you know, vision of what I could be and could do when I was still working on the stupid thing. Her name’s Angela Jackson. She’s, I’ve shouted her out many times before because she was really that first spark for me, the first kind of win-win in my sails, if you will. And then now, now that I have, you know, a little bit more years under my belt, I’ve started to even go back further than that and realize I have this friend. His name’s Rob Mizell and he and I met in photography school, and he was the one who told me that I had to read The Four Hour Work Week and a couple of other books too, that just like, absolutely changed the course of my life. So I think he, gets an absolute mention there as well. Yeah, and then yeah, there were, I mean, there are a lot of folks along the way. Timothy Young, who was the he found very successful founder, then the president of Dropbox, and now the CEO of Jasper. He was an advisor to my first company, to Glider, and just along my career has been a pretty pivotal person and a great support system, and just a great guy and friend and oh man, the list. The list goes on but we’ll leave it at that. I think that those folks at least encompass the vast majority of the beginning of my journey.
Fantastic, great. So two questions, the last two questions. So. Wow. The one question that I wanted to get your thoughts on was, how do you think about launching Profit Labs, and what did you have to create, like, a point of view or a manifesto, and why did you come into existence? And what is your vision like? If you can walk us through that thought process?
Yeah, I love it. So Profit Labs, the accounting firm and financial services firm for agency owners, the way that I do at this point, I kind of have a playbook for launching a services business. And the playbook is pretty straightforward. I need to absolutely identify who the influential cogs are, right, not cogs, but like, I think of it as, like, an influence map.
So who are, who are the players who, if they buy in, or if they talk about me, especially if multiple folks within that world talk about me, that it’s just going to absolutely 10x our growth from what it would be if, if, if I wasn’t interacting with them.
Yeah.
So that’s the first thing, and start networking with them, figuring out, like, what is the angle, what’s the win, win. Then cold email still works. It doesn’t work as well as it used to, but it still works and so, and I think there are interesting ways that I use that in the funnel. So, for example, I have a newsletter called profit labs weekly, where I share tips and strategies for agencies and service businesses to see how they can be more profitable.
How can they produce more profit? And I give away a bunch of free resources and models and spreadsheets for all these things. And so I’ll use cold email to promote that. So instead of being in someone’s inbox, asking them for a meeting and pitching my shit. I’m just reaching out to these folks, but hey, most agency owners struggle with profitability. They struggle to be as profitable as they believe they should be. Here’s a free resource. Let me know if you have questions and just kind of bleed with giving. And it’s a pretty common phrase at this point, but it works. So, you know, eventually, then drip them closer to the offering itself. So cold email is another big one. And candidly, between those two things, like, if you’re starting a business like that from scratch and you just did those two things, yeah, that’ll get you to the first 20 customers. No problem.
Absolutely, no, for sure. I mean, even though you call it cold email, that’s not really cold email, it’s actually a newsletter where someone has to opt into it, yeah, and yeah, nurture drip, offer value. And me, personally, I’ve subscribed to so many newsletters I’ve become attached to that founder’s thought process and bought products and services and coaching.
Totally, absolutely.
And that thing works.
Yep, absolutely!
Yeah, great.
So final question, if you were to go back in time and go back to day one of your go-to-market journey, what advice would you give to your younger self?
Hmm, trust the process.
Simple, that’s it. Yeah, amazing, yeah, trust the process, yeah, and especially given what you just shared with me, Eli, and if I were to put myself in your shoes, only at a surface level, that’s all I can do, right? Like when your friend told you, hey, go read The Four Hour Work Week book.
Yeah.
Versus you waiting at LA Tables restaurants and then deciding, hey, you know what? This is not it. I’m going, I need to start from the ground up and figure out what that is, all the different failures, and then somehow a higher power, or whatever, is actually helping you connect the dots, which you will not see it. Yeah, right. That’s how I see, I mean, and you aptly put it right across the process, you never know, but as long as you’re just putting in the reps. Yeah, I really feel that. Okay, this is the right thing to do. Yep, you don’t know. You don’t know the outcome, but it’s what it is.
Totally!
