Elevating the Entrepreneurial Spirit With WooCommerce

Jonathan: Welcome to Do The Woo. I’m your host today, Jonathan Wold. And with me is Colin Daniels, the co founder of Foo Sales. Colin, welcome.

Colin: Good morning, Jonathan. Good to be here.

Jonathan: So you are a recurring guest of the show. You joined us just about three years ago, and it was your first time back. If I’m recalling correctly, this was episode like 87.

We’re now in the way into the three hundreds. It’s really good to have you back.

Colin: Yeah, time has really flown and it’s amazing what’s happened in the world in the last three years.

Jonathan: For those who aren’t taking careful notes that episode was in December of 2020. 2020 was a big year for all of us.

And at the time you described, just to catch people up a bit, you described it as, you had both your best sales month and your worst sales month. And would you mind just just stretching back into 2020 for a moment and give a snapshot of what you guys were going through as a company, you had foo events and foo sales.

Kind of what was that like back in 2020?

Colin: I think it was crazy. Like it was for many businesses, I think for us Firstly, we were a small company and both of our products were aimed around in person sales and in person events. So they were particularly hard hit by the COVID outbreak and restrictions around events and shops closing, for example.

So it was a very anxious time for us. And we had to be very agile and make some very rapid decisions around supporting things like virtual events, for example, and with food sales we also had to think about what that meant and adding kind of functionality around allowing people to order online and pick up in person. And those were the types of discussions that we had internally. And in terms of the sales, initially I think the whole world panicked, many consumers panicked. We saw that with lots of businesses. So we w we, we had some anxious months where we had some of the worst sales that we had ever experienced.

And then all of a sudden with people realized things, it wasn’t Armageddon and business had to continue and our customers that we serve had to adapt and make money. We started to see some opportunities around that, which helped us to rebound.

Jonathan: Now, if I’m recalling correctly, the most of your customer base is small business, right?

So those, these are those who are like, they’re right at the heart of it. And one of the things that stood out to me, like you guys are also a small business if you. It’s interesting, right? If you hadn’t adapted, you did choose to adapt. If you hadn’t adapted, like that could have quite well been the end, right?

Like you, you had foo sales that was focused on retail, which is it really hard, they had the events, like two of the things that kind of most hard hit. And you guys were really quick to bring a zoom integration on the event side of things. I think it was really hard, but what was it? Like, why did you make, why did you adapt? There’s a lot of things that you could have done. Like what drove that? We’re going to be flexible. We don’t know what we’re doing exactly, but we’re going to make those decisions. You alluded to a lot of decisions. What was at the heart of. You making your way through that?

Colin: Yeah, I think it was adapt or die literally. I think a few things that, that I can tell you, firstly, we had set some cash aside. So that would be one of the lessons that, that I continued. So even though we were bootstrapped and stuff, we’d been very conservative and we’d made sure that we did.

Do you know, we had a lot of retained profit that we had kept aside. And fortunately that’s what, what partly helped us get through a few of these rough months. So I’d say always good to have savings in the bank. That would be the first thing. And then I think secondly, just having a great team. We’ve still got our original team. We, there’s a lot of faith and trust and everybody within our team. And we were all on the same page with, okay, what are we going to do now? And, these decisions were made in a number of hours very quickly. And so the second takeaway there was just really the benefits of having an amazing team that is used to adapting and being very agile. And making decisions quickly and moving on them in the face of uncertainty. And then yeah, thirdly, I think listening to your customers. We always do anyway, we are very customer driven product development company, but I would say that just listening to our customers and we could see, something like the zoom integration.

It wasn’t even on our roadmap. It wasn’t even there. It’s not like we moved it up and expedited it. It wasn’t even there, but we just saw that our customers who, as you pointed out, we’re also small businesses that we’re putting on events and things like that. They needed to still make money. They couldn’t just, some of, unfortunately did cancel events or postpone them or shut or they closed down, but many of them were also hustling. And and we just saw this massive demand coming in for, how can we adapt and turn the products make it possible for people to sell tickets to virtual events with seamless integration with zoom, that was where the biggest demand came in. And so in a sense they made the decision for us what we needed to do.

Jonathan: It’s really interesting because you still had to decide, but you were already open and you guys were flexible. And as a small team where the trust was there, you were in a position where you could adapt and take advantage of the opportunities coming in. Because this happens a lot. Customers often are in a position to tell the companies they’re working with, like what they need.

And the company has to decide. Because sometimes it’s not like sometimes what they’re asking for isn’t the right thing to do, right? But oftentimes what happens with the companies, they just get stuck. They don’t really go through that process for whatever reasons. So for you personally, if I’m recalling correctly, 2012, give or take, was when you started. And so you started out, was, were you still doing the agency work then? Cause I know that, that was where you guys started. When did product come into the space?

Colin: Yeah. So we started as an agency around 2012 and we up until a few years ago, we continued to do agency work. But during that period, we were always, experimenting with products. We were always fascinated. We always wanted to become a product company, but it was obviously difficult without funding and without having a really solid idea. So there were a few things that we tried, sideline projects over that time whilst the clients paid the bills for our agency work.

But I guess, that’s where we really got serious about it was around 2015, which was when we started working on for events and that came out of a client need. We had tried other things, which were more our ideas products before. Before that, but this was the first time that we’d actually seen a real need from working on clients sites and a request to be able to seamlessly sell tickets for an event they wanted to, to host.

And as an agency, we looked for solutions and we just really couldn’t find anything that met the. The client’s full requirements and that’s where, we decided to to work on a minimum viable product. And that, that’s where Foo Events first started. The origins go back to 2015.

Jonathan: I love in the podcast , about three years or so back that you described Foo Events as your first successful product which tells hints at the hints at the journey that you guys went on, that you tried different things and you went to that. That’s excellent. So for you personally, as a co founder, as an entrepreneur, you’re now sitting on like over a decade since you guys started the company, like how has that journey been for you?

Did you have an entrepreneurial background before this? Yeah. How’s that been?

Colin: Yeah. So I guess the last 10 years, it’s gone very quickly, if I’m honest, it feels like a whirlwind and a lot has happened in this period of time, besides COVID, just we’ve pivoted the company, a few times we’ve had various hurdles and obstacles. Strife that we’ve had to contend with. And I would once again, just say that flexibility and adaptability and resilience has played in for the last 10 years, because every year has been different. Even when we were an agency, we were losing clients, gaining clients, having to make decisions about what technologies to support and whatnot to support.

So it’s just been every year has been almost. New challenges and new opportunities. It’s been a very interesting past 10 years. And I think, we’ve grown tremendously as a company, but, and without that experience, I don’t think we would have been doing what we’re doing.

Now that’s all, the skills, the expertise, the knowledge, all of that stuff has played into creating these products and Where are we taking them? Where are we planning on taking them? So I think it was fundamental in allowing us to get where we are today. We couldn’t have just jumped into to say, building plugins and understanding the markets and the audience and having the skills to do it. Because both through events and through sales, they quite. Complex products. There’s a lot going on. They have apps native apps that we also build. So there’s a lot of technologies and things and integrations that we do behind the scenes in terms of my background. I’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur and from an early age.

But I worked in corporate for a good number of years whilst I cut my teeth. And yeah, the first opportunity I had. To be able to start a business with my co founder Robin, who we had worked together for a number of years before that in these corporates settings we took it and we just evolved from there.

Jonathan: I love it. Let’s talk about FooSales. Three years back, FooSales was still fairly new. It was an active product. So what I’m interested in first, so you had a first success. With FooEvents. And you’re building on that. That’s growing. Where did the idea for FooSales come from? What was the origin of that?

Colin: Yeah. So we were, we never really set out to create a second product because it’s hard enough doing one, in terms of focus in terms of your customer target audience. So I guess, being entrepreneurs, we constantly looking out, we constantly have ideas and the hardest part is also saying no, sometimes, might just add, but in terms of food sales we were working actively on four events and we were still doing the agency thing at the time. And this was now around late 2016.

And we just noticed that there was just a big gap in terms of WooCommerce and its functionality and what it could offer because there was no point of sale system. And we also, obviously we were like very much monitoring the environment and what was going on in terms of Woo’s roadmap. And we noticed that one of the most commonly requested features from the public. Was a point of sale system that was the most commonly requested feature at the time. And we, we had often spoken about it because some one of our team members is involved in an online business that sells records. And we had noticed that. They used woo for their, for selling these records online. And they were in the process of opening a store, a physical store.

Jonathan: Ah, so they went from the virtual to the physical.

Colin:es. And, that is a trend that we saw starting to emerge as opposed to the other way around, which was the early ecomm days and and one of their kind of struggles and challenges was that they really deep into the woo ecosystem. They had 10,000 products listed in the online store, but now they had this challenge of what kind of points of sales system do they use when they open their store? And, they were, All sorts of, there was nothing native to WooCommerce at the time but there were all sorts of crazy bridges and middleware and things like that available and they were all clunky, prone to errors.

So there was nothing seamless and specifically designed to take a Woo store and allow people to sell in person. So it was a combination of a real world problem that needed to be solved as and verifying that with data being what the public were voting for. And that’s where the origins of that came from that product. And of course, having the team to be able to, to bold, it was a different story.

Jonathan: So speaking of the team, like at that point, how much experience had you had building native applications?

Colin: Like a lot. Because of the agency business, that was one of the services we offered. So we had built a number of native iOS and Android apps at the time. So once again, we wouldn’t have been able to really execute that.

Jonathan: To me, that’s a pretty big risk if you don’t have that experience. Cause yes, I was actually going to guess that you didn’t and you were, you figured it out as you went, but the fact that you did. Added just another piece to the stack.

And I think it’s one of the things that’s easy to underrate about service backgrounds is that you can actually have quite the range of experience when you’ve been successful at it and you’ve built up and especially if you have a diverse clientele, there’s lots of things that you so you had experience building apps, so you’re sitting at this intersection of.

FooEvents have been grown, seeing the sort of demand in the space, seeing this okay, there’s a lot of there’s demand for, there aren’t a lot of great solutions, we actually could do this what was that, was the decision was there a particular point that stands out to you where it’s like you made that decision or what was like, how, was it hard to make that decision once you got there? What was that like? To begin investing.

Colin: Yeah. I think it was quite a bit harder with FooSales because of the complexity of the product. I think with FooEvents, we had learned how our lessons of the past of investing too much in the sideline products that we worked on without then being validated, so to speak, and coming up with a brand, building a website, spending money on Google AdWords before we even had customers. And that was the kind of lesson that we had learned in the past. So with through events, once we had built the minimum viable product, we just slapped that onto code Canyon. And we didn’t spend any money on marketing. We didn’t. Build a brand or a website or anything like that. And we let it evolve from there before we decided to start selling it directly and taking it more seriously. So we just, we made sure we had sales first. We made sure we got a lot of customer feedback.

FooSales was a little bit. Different in the sense that it’s it, we designed it as a SaaS product from the get go. And as anyone knows it, that’s worked in SaaS, it takes a long time to, to build up a customer base and a lot of long time to make money actually. With that, we used the record store. They were like our first customer and they still use it. So they were like a great. Test case for us and use case for us. And we got a lot of initial feedback from them right from the beginning. So that was helpful. I think if we had just built it and launched it and, hoped and prayed that people would come, that would have been a different story.

So we launched as a free product. So it was actually free for about two years whilst we worked on building it. And the reason we could do that was because we had the luxury of having another product and through events and also, having revenue coming in through the, through our agency business. It was a long time in incubation. And over that time, we learned so much about the markets about the needs and one of, the biggest complaints we started to get off in that incubation period from people was that it was free and they didn’t trust it, we. We businesses and stuff and investing in a points of sales system, even if it’s free, there’s a lot of time and energy that goes into it. Training, getting the right equipment, for example, and we don’t want to worry that you’re a fly by night and that, you could be closed tomorrow. So why is it free? How do we know you sustainable? So that, at that point, that was the kind of real point where we knew, okay. We’ve validated this.

We know that there’s a lot of work, a lot of functionality that people want. It’s not a small undertaking, but we know that if we are getting repeated requests asking why it’s free, because people are like, we want to give you money for it. That’s a good time to start to commercialize it. And we knew that we were onto something at that point, and this was towards the end of 2019. And of course, once we started commercializing it early 2020 we started to build up clients. That’s when COVID struck and we lost most of them at that point. But anyway, we’ve rebounded. And I think the point I just want to make is that we knew that the timing was right when people were asking, why it’s free and we would rather pay you for this and have peace of mind.

Jonathan: One more thing I’m curious about in your entrepreneurial journey you’re sharing. It sounds like you exercise quite a bit of care and deliberation and patience even in making these decisions. Was that always the case or was that a learned was, is that how I, because you’re, it’s in contrast to what another approach, which is just like trying things, going out there and let’s just go for it and see what happens. But yeah, there’s different approaches and I’m hearing a pretty like measured careful let’s make sure. And I’m curious how much of that is just like how you guys have done it or how much of that was.

Colin: Yeah, that’s a great, it’s actually a great question because I think there are many different approaches in entrepreneurship. There isn’t one size fits all approach, but I think in our case we do prefer to be more measured and calculated. Some of it comes from past experience, just in the sense that we’ve realized how we’ve maybe wasted time and resources and energy by jumping on something before validating at first, testing the market first.

But building it based on customer feedback, that type of thing. So a lot of it just comes from trial and error, and then the second part to that is just that being a bootstrapped company it’s our money. We don’t have a safety net. Time and money has a real, can really affect us in a sense. Possibly if we had a big war chest, we would be a little bit more aggressive and go out there and try and make things see what sticks. But in our case, we, we prefer to, to do it organically just because it’s a bit safer too. Yeah. That makes sense.

Jonathan: Okay. End of 2019 you’re investing into FooSales. It’s starting to pick up 2020 hits. You hit then you have the drop, but then you make the switch and catch us up. It’s been about three years since. What have been some of the highlights of FooSales in the interim period?

Colin: Yeah. I think the first highlight was just seeing. Seeing it rebound, at one point in 2020, we had we’d put it on ice in the sense that we weren’t doing any new active developments on it. We were still fully supporting all the customers we had, but we just weren’t doing, we weren’t releasing on any new features. And we were doubling down on few events at the time because, that’s where the virtual side and, things like Block booking seats for social distancing. There was all these crazy features outside of even just virtual events that we got requested things like keeping a log of who’s checked in and checked out through our check ins app for events.

So once again, things that weren’t on the roadmap and they were very specific to COVID, but they still being used now for various things. So it’s actually ended up. Helping the product. We see it made a big difference to the product anyway, those features. So yeah we were doubling down on FooEvents at the time. And FooSales, the biggest thing was that we’ve, we managed to get those customers back. And I think that also says a lot about the resilience of small businesses. Many of them sadly did shut down, but many of them have come back maybe in different. And we’ve seen our customer base grow and strengthen. And now, we surpassed where we were pre COVID terms of our customer base and from a kind of functionality perspective, it’s just been incredible to see what people are using FooSales for, and I. Think this says a lot about the woo ecosystem. If I can bring it back to that, just how flexible a Woo is, as a e commerce platform and how we are really starting to see the omni channel kind of dream being fulfilled, because we are seeing a lot of our customers that are.

They either brick and mortar stores that want to go online and use, use Woo as their platform, but through sales as the kind of conduit, because it allows them to sell, in person as well, and then we seeing the vice versa too, a lot of online stores that are opening a pop up shops or, they have markets or, that type of thing. And through sales allows them to be able to use one database, one, one e commerce store. So that’s been very exciting to see that and just how, yeah the different use cases, we seeing people using food sales to place orders over the telephone, for example, and process payments there. We seeing restaurants using it for ordering for takeaway joints, for example, and we’re getting a lot of requests around fulfillment. So so customers wanting to use it as an inventory management system and with FooSales, they can do that. With having Wu as the kind of platform supporting it. So it’s very exciting to see how Woo has become entrenched in various industries and what it’s being used for. We can see that being at the coalface.

Jonathan: So you’ve rebounded then stabilized again, I can hear you guys are excited about it. There’s a lot like, and I think, and what I’m hearing you say is a lot of what’s driving that is seeing that real world, you see what people are doing with it. You see the creativity you’re in, especially cause you’re seeing that the small business like the entrepreneurship, like the, if a small business is going to succeed.

They typically have to have a very clear, like value alignment. And so you’re getting to see things generally that are like much closer to value where it’s like, you can see the merit in the things that they’re doing. And I imagine that’s energizing in and of itself, as you look at the next couple of years, what are you looking forward to with FooSales? So for you as an entrepreneur, what are some of the challenges, the opportunities as you look at like the next three years for FooSales as a product?

Colin: I think one of the biggest challenges is just we’ve got so many things on our roadmap and it’s how we prioritize. We’re not worried about features, that’s for sure. We worried about how to prioritize them. So because, I mentioned that there’s a, we have a very diverse customer base Which is amazing. But one of the challenges around that is that they’re very different use cases.

So there’s a lot of kind of feature requests that are specific to those different use cases that we need to prioritize. So it’s deciding on who do we. Who do we prioritize first as customers? Do we focus more on retailers? Do we focus more on customers that want to use it for inventory management or fulfillment, for example? So there’s a number of different kind of use cases that we need to decide where do we go next and what do we double down on?

Jonathan: How do you decide that? Like just let’s take that because that’s a pretty pivotal let’s it could let I’m just going to take a guess like it could take a year of development, a small team to take one of those bets, right? Okay, we’re going to become more inventory focused versus or more like broad use case focus. How do you decide that?

Colin: Yeah, It’s difficult. I think some of it comes from our internal discussions and we just look at like where there’s low hanging fruit, for example, and where we can just make some interface changes or spend a day or two working on a new feature that will make, unlock whole new opportunities. So we, we tend to look at things where. For a small amount of work, we can unlock a lot of potential and get a lot of get a high return on investment. So that’s quite a big part of that. The other part is just looking at. We keep a lot of data around what customers have requested.

We informed a lot by what our customer supports, what kind of issues and the feature requests that come through there. And then we have a feature notification sign up on, on all our roadmaps that we look at quite regularly and just see where the demand is. So I would say it’s a combination of data, hard data that we look at, as well as what strategic decisions that we make internally, where we feel like, with a little bit of work, we can really unlock a lot of value.

Jonathan: That’s excellent. So far. You’ve had three years of growth. You’ve recovered. What’s been the key to growth so far, like growing, as you alluded to earlier experience can vary, but generally when you’re building a SAS, there’s this like slow and steady vibe, right? Like each customer, the fact that you have a customer that you started out with. Is a good example of okay, we’re building this. We’re not just like doing it fast. We’re being careful about this. What’s been the key to your growth so far? Yeah,

Colin: I think the key to our growth has been listening to our customers. I really do feel that can’t be overstated if we hadn’t listened to our customers, that we probably would have gone in a very different direction. And I’ll give you a very good example of that would be when we first bought through sales, we didn’t actually have a web version for it. So it was strictly app because that’s how we envisioned it would be used and how we thought we would be most differentiated. But what we actually realized is that, customers want a web version because they want to be able to just run like a cheap windows computer in their store, or they wanted.

To be have the option to be multi platform, which is exactly what we are. So they could, for example, have a windows computer in their store at checkout, but they could also have an iPad closer to the entrance where they could use both terminals running through cells with all their inventory and everything in sync. So that was, that’s a great example where we would never have thought that would be, A direction we would take. So I think listening to our customers keeping track of what’s going on in the e commerce with trends with what small businesses are doing, the kind of trends.

And we’ve seen, a lot of uncertainty this year, actually over the last 12 months or so around, is there a recession, is there going to be a soft landing, what’s happening, and it’s looking more likely that. That there isn’t going to be a hard recession, which is great. And we starting to see a lot more traction in terms of small businesses now that we’re maybe taking a wait and see approach in terms of. Do they spend more money or do they hold onto it? And now we starting to see people are feeling a little bit more confident around that, and they are starting to maybe open up a new business or a new store and that type of thing, or put on a new event. And that’s obviously really good for our.

Jonathan: So one of the challenges that you alluded to is the, is for a small team bootstrapped, there’s this challenge of how do you decide between all the opportunities? So you talk through the approach. Are there any other challenges that stand out to you as you look at the next couple of

Colin: Years? Lots of challenges. I’d say the other kind of important one is around partnerships and integrations and distribution. So those are our, I’d say off the top of my head, besides. features. Those would be the other three things. So basically partnerships, we’ve realized that, in WordPress and in WooCommerce we all interlinked.

So trying to do it alone can only get you so far. So we definitely, very open to partnerships and working with other companies for. To mutually benefit all of us and including the whole Woo community and customers that use Woo. In terms of integrations, we’ve realized a lot of requests. We get a lot of requests around integrations with Foo sales which then allows it to be even more extensible and do weird and wonderful things that currently might be limited because we don’t. Specifically integrate with a certain plugin or service. So that’s a big one. We could have a whole department just working on integrations. So yeah those are the top ones. And then distribution of course, which is just getting more eyeballs to, to try our products, increasing awareness,

Jonathan: increasing awareness. Like the part of the challenge is you’ve done all this work slow and steady over the years. You’ve got point of sale that works both in the browser, native, et cetera. And the challenge is that there’s people who just don’t know that’s an option, right? Like they’re looking at Woo, but that’s not obvious to them. And once they discover it so one of the things that you originally ran into, if it was free, it’d probably be too good to be true, right?

They’re like, what you’re telling me this, and this. And so it ends up becoming. How do you just connect with the people who would be a good fit for this? There are last time we’re calling like 6 million plus WooCommerce installs, according to the built with data. And it’s there’s a good chance that a of those that I’m guessing are now currently using foo sales would be a good fit. You just have to figure out how to make that connection.

Colin:es. And to extend on that, there’s a lot of, Customers that don’t know anything about wordpress or woo that are looking for solutions like they might be starting a new business and they’re looking for a solution to be able to sell products online or over the telephone or in person and so the addressable market gets extended beyond even just existing with commerce customers and we’re looking at, anyone that really wants to start an e commerce business. So there are lots of eyeballs out there. Yeah.

Jonathan: So I want to take a little bit of a step back in time. So for, we have a lot of builders that listened to this your, there’s a lot of agency folks as well. Many of us have had experience doing service work, et cetera, and. I think the, what I like about, there’s a lot of things I like about your journey and the experience that you guys have had.

It’s a bit, there’s a bit of this cliche that like the grass is greener on the other side, right? So I, it’s un, it’s not uncommon to talk to service people who like, Wish they could do product. And I’ve talked to product companies who like wish they could have more of this it’s if it’s product and scale, then you wish you could go more up market and before too long, you’re back in that service mindset again. So like that’s interesting. I think that’s more about human nature and just but if I, if you take back your experience for those who are in the service space and thinking about product. Taking what you’ve done so far in the three years since, are there any particular like lessons or pieces of guidance that you’d offer for those thinking about making that jump?

Colin: Yeah. I would say firstly, you need to make sure that You really do want to get involved in products because like you said, there might be a certain sexiness around it to some people, but it’s it’s a lot of work and it’s very different. It’s very different, so now. As a service business, revenue was a lot more guaranteed. Obviously, there were times where it went up and down, but especially if you have a lot of existing clients that are happy with what you do and you’ve got retainers in place, that’s guaranteed revenue. Whereas when you starting off with products, there’s no guaranteed revenue and you don’t even know what the ceiling is. The glass ceiling is might be for your particular idea your plugin or your product or service. The first thing is just. Making sure that you committed and that you have the necessary skills to, to work on a product. For us, it was something we were actively trying the whole time.

And we happy we made that jump because we just love working on our own brands. Whereas some people get satisfaction working on other. people’s brands and helping them to succeed. So I think it’s just firstly making that distinction between what type of entrepreneur you are, builder you are. I think also it’s, was quite tricky for us to pivot being a bootstrap company and with all our revenue initially coming from our agency, it took a good few years whilst we had to. Balance the scales and slowly, turn down agency work and, inform clients that we weren’t going to be offering certain services whilst we built up the product revenue. So it took quite a long time for us to become fully product focused. And I think it’s even harder if you’re a SaaS product. One of the options is to take investment. So that’s certainly something that. Depending on how big your idea is. If you don’t need to take investment, that’s great, but you might want to look at that. If you are, if you do have a big idea around a product it will be a lot easier to take investment than to try and build up revenue whilst you’re running your agency.

Jonathan: How do you guys feel about that now? Like you bootstrap this yourselves. So it’s easy to like, yeah. Knowing what you know now. If you could go back and have had access under your terms to like the capital, to additional capital, to grow faster, would you have done that?

Colin: Yeah, I think, looking at the two different products, like FooEvents I feel like we, we didn’t need investment for it. So that’s like going back to what I said earlier, I think just really evaluating what your idea is as a builder.

So FooEvents is more a traditional kind of plugin that is, grown and is now basically a platform with nine extensions and a check ins app and stuff. So it’s its own ecosystem. And sure, with a bit of capital, we could have maybe expedited it a little bit. But I still feel like that was the right decision not to take capital for few events.

It wasn’t capital intensive, wasn’t capital intensive. Exactly. And we were getting, nice annual licensing fees up front. So that, that allowed us to, find the business with something like food sales, I would say, yeah, that is. probably, we would have been better served by raising some capital there because firstly it’s a SaaS product. And as I said, you don’t really make any money out of SaaS for a very long time. And secondly, it would have allowed us just to really Get to the point we are at now and like faster, there’s three platforms that we have to support. Plus these other things I’ve mentioned, like integrations, looking at partnerships and it’s really its own company. It should be its own company. I would say there would have been a lot of value if we had raised some capital there and devs on.

Jonathan: And part of this goes back to your intentions as an entrepreneur and your vision for it. Like just from an outsider’s perspective, looking at it, when you look at the size of the addressable market, this is part of what also warrants the capital decision or not, right? Like how big is the opportunity and what’s your appetite as entrepreneurs? And part of what I’m hearing you say is like, when you look at the opportunity size for food sales, there’s a lot, there’s a lot more potential there. And so that makes it more warranted to say, is it worth for us? Is it worth us taking on a partner?

Who’s bringing capital and additional resources to help us reach more of that addressable market faster. And ultimately that comes down to there’s a number of different factors, I think part of what you were describing similar, it’s what’s the opportunity, what are the risks associated with it? How does this play to our strengths or not? What’s that partner bringing to the table? What are the trade offs and cause ultimately. opportunity in the space. At the time there weren’t players. I’m guessing there are more coming in now and there’s not a right or wrong. There’s like benefits and trade offs.

And what I’m hearing you say is as an entrepreneur, looking back, seeing that it’s different, that the nature and the scope and the potential it’s okay, the playbook is similar. But since this is a different type of product, it warrants you taking another look and say, okay, we haven’t done capital before, so it’s not an obvious thing for us, but maybe that’s so what I’m, that’s what I’m hearing is like for someone who’s considering the different moves, don’t assume that capital is what you need to do. If you’ve had success without it, don’t assume that. That just, that’s just a repeat of the same thing because the next product that you’re trying may not, it may not be the same base factors. And I think the good news is that when you’re focused on value for your customers, there’s not really a right or wrong. It then goes back to your appetite as entrepreneurs, like how much more impact do you want the product to have?

Colin: I think that’s a really great summary, Jonathan. And also a product can start off, not really requiring it, but I think you can reach a certain point where you realize actually, in order to take this to the next level, the resources required, maybe the marketing budgets, whatever it might be even over the course of a product’s life cycle, you might reach a point where you just you do need to raise some capital in order to achieve those objectives.

Jonathan: Yeah I’m excited to see what the next three years brings. It’s been great watching you guys grow over the years and see that continued focus on value for the end user. It’s a, it’s really interesting. Like I. I think one of the things I loved how you described like the weird and wonderful sort of side of WooCommerce, right? There’s a resilience and there’s this sort of adaptability that’s inherent in the space. It’s been really fun to be a part of it and watch it grow. I think it’s certainly one of the highlights of what we have going on with Do The Woo is getting to hear these stories from folks all over.

So Colin, thank you for taking the time to share your story and we’re looking forward to doing this again. If. If folks are interested in connecting with you, what’s the best way to get in touch?

Colin: You can find me on Twitter X. I think everyone just calls it Twitter X these days. And my handle is at Youngblood. So yeah, that’s probably the best way or on LinkedIn.

Jonathan: Cool. And it’s, and the product is foosales.com, right?

Colin: FooSales.com and FooEvent.com.

Jonathan: Awesome. Thanks so much for joining us, Colin.

Colin: Thanks, Jonathan.