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- [00:00]
Tim Schumacher
Foreign.
- [00:10]
Podcast Host
Welcome to the product led podcast. In today's episode, we're sitting down with Tim Schumacher, co founder of SaaS Group, to unpack what it really takes to scale SaaS companies the smart way. We'll dig into the challenges founders face when aligning product sales and marketing, the pitfalls that stall growth and the mindset shifts needed to build companies that last. You'll hear Tim's perspective on building a portfolio of thriving SaaS businesses, what he learned from scaling across different markets, and the frameworks he uses to spot opportunities and avoid common traps. So if you've ever wondered how to create sustainable growth at scale and learn from someone who's helped dozens of SaaS companies do exactly that, this episode is for you.
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Interviewer
For SaaS Group, since you co founded it, what were like everyone's different skillsets, abilities and stuff. You mentioned like you love the operations so I'm going to assume that that's your, your jam as far as that.
- [01:08]
Tim Schumacher
Part in this team and the SaaS group team, I'm more kind of the probably I love operations but kind of from a business marketing, business opportunity standpoint. And so kind of the first person I asked to co found the company was my CDO co founder who is a real product guy. So he's like a really deep product mind who could think about products and everything and, and the people who then subsequently followed. One is, is, is very technical, is the CTO and the other one is an operations finance guy. So we really kind of have all our, yeah our respective complimentary skills and I think that's really important at a team. I, I couldn't, I couldn't. Just running along, couldn't imagine that.
- [01:52]
Interviewer
Oh totally. Yeah. It's good to divide and conquer on that end. And what kind of got you. What was like the founding vision for this company? What was like hey this is the, the big need we see in the world or was it like hey no, I just think it's a good idea. Could have a lot of synergy for SaaS companies. Like I always love studying different builders. Like I know like Mark Leonard, probably familiar with him like Constellation Software. It's like he did vc. We're investing all these companies that like.
- [02:17]
Tim Schumacher
You know what for me it, I mean of course Mark Leonard, he's, he's an ID for us and he's, he's a company we really follow. And I would say, you know there's a role model, it's definitely Constellation. But fun fact is I didn't know Mark Leonard when I went into this Industry as very often as a founder, you know, first you think your idea is unique. I was like, oh yeah, it's so unique buying SaaS companies. And the reason was exactly the same. The reason for me was I was not vc, but I've been doing a lot of angel investments since I exited my first company, Sito. And it was always so, I mean there were like a lot of really nice cases, but it was so frustrating very often that you know, you could tell founders things and they would just ignore your advice and you knew they gonna hit a wall and they were just destined to do it. And at the same time we've been paying those crazy valuations. Like they come with a deck and it's like, hey, this is a nice deck. I want like a 10 million free money. And it's like then you get those companies offered by brokers who's like, well for 10 million that buys you a $2 million profit company. And I haven't seen that many of my venture or business angel companies to hit 2 million in profit. So it's like, okay, I'm an operator and I can, yeah, I think I could do that.
- [03:35]
Interviewer
So I guess what was your unique way to differentiate just for like anyone that doesn't know SAS for. Because there is a lot of like big PE companies. You'll hear like Vista Equity, Constellation Software. Like Constellations, like, hey, you're like a mission critical piece of software. We're not really going to touch much of your operations, probably going to firebase your team, run it just for profit. And majority of their growth just comes from acquiring new companies. It's very little organic growth. I think it's 5 or 10%. There's like Vista Equity which is like, hey, we have the Playbooks. Our Playbooks are locked and loaded behind the vaults and that's like our crazy IP and we add a ton of value. And then where would you say like SaaS Group is like, hey, this is our unique playbook and this is how we differentiate against some of those other players.
- [04:22]
Tim Schumacher
I, I think one of the things that is differentiating us is really kind of the size of acquisitions. Although I think Constellation is in a very similar playing field. We do small acquisitions, usually from 1 to 5 million in revenue. We've done a little bigger than that, we've done a little smaller in the beginning, but really it's, it's kind of our sweet spot is probably between 3 and 5 million these days. And a lot of players don't touch deals of that size. Then contrary to Constellation, actually A lot of other players like Banyan Software and others, we don't go into those super deep vertical enterprises. We kind of touch those things that are mission critical but kind of the next generation mission critical. So online marketing tools, development tools, productivity tools, those small little tools we all use like the software we're on at the moment, Riverside to, to record that podcast that could be this kind of software. You don't, you probably pay a couple bucks a month but it's not huge. But it's still mission critical for you. But would you change it if they raise the price a little or something? As long as they're stable, doing a good job, you probably going to keep using that fervor and we, we do a lot of those things but kind of the more modern stack, more PLG stack but with similar economics and just smaller, smaller arpus.
- [05:43]
Interviewer
Okay. And I guess from the beginning was it always like we're going to invest in product LED companies or is it just like hey we just tend to work best with them for the most part. Like where did that kind of come into play?
- [05:56]
Tim Schumacher
I think it's kind of happened kind of organically in a way. I've never been like a heavy enterprise sales guy doing kind of mission critical software and selling them in, in sales cycles that take 1, 2, 3 years if you sell it to big corporates. I've always been someone who liked building products that sometimes have high tickets but still product led. Like my first business was a company called Ceto.com, at the main marketplace and I'm sure like many entrepreneurs are still familiar. It's, it's the biggest domain marketplace in the world and you can basically you can go on there, you can buy domains. We've sold to a lot of enterprises, I mean and we've sold like big ticket domain names for millions but still fairly similar process to buying a $99 domain name on the secondary market. Also that the next business I started was the company behind adblock and adblock plus the world's leading ad blocker. And again it's kind of a bit more consumer ish business. So I'm, it's just probably what I gravitate to totally.
- [06:56]
Interviewer
Were you always investing like majority in SAS Group, like to get the majority stake in the company or is it like we have to get a hundred percent of the stake or is it minor? What side typically look like?
- [07:08]
Tim Schumacher
So it's always majority and actually it's always been 100%. I'm not saying that that's the only model we would ever do. We've had deals where we contemplated doing a majority and then some put call option to acquire the rest. But fact is it's, it's much easier to have a streamlined company if you own 100%. The secondly, the type of deals we do mostly deals where the founders ultimately want to transition out some very quickly. We have people who are like, okay, I burned out, I can't do that any longer. We've had people who are like, I want to become a woodworker, I don't want to have anything to do with this Internet stuff anymore. People who are like saying, okay, here are the keys, you have four weeks and then I'm gone and then never ask me again. And we have people who've stayed with us for years and still are with us and both is fine. There's nothing is right or wrong. I think I'm a strong believer that you should do what matches your personality, your lifestyle. We have people who really were really great at 0 to 1. They build something and then that's what they're really good at. But they're not good at scaling. It stresses them, it burns them out. Once they have to hire people, once they have to answer a lot of support emails, once they have to start really building in structures and they hate it. But they're kind of a victim of their own success. They have golden handcuffs. Very much like the corporate world does that with salaries. A company can do that to a founder. We've seen that multiple times. And so they transition out quickly. And of course we have to do different deal structures. We can't do like long earnouts or also sometimes it's of course not advantageous for the price if something is really kind of a fire sale. But generally we can do everything and we believe we want to work with a founder who is really motivated if he or she's motivated. We like to work with founders for a long time, but then we usually find kind of some long term incentive programs and earnouts but still do kind of 100% deals.
- [09:10]
Interviewer
Got it. And so where do you hope SaaS Group is in like three years? Like what does that like ultimate success look like? Obviously three years is not ultimate success, but like that big shiny like goal for you and the rest of the team. That's like super inspiring to you. Yeah.
- [09:27]
Tim Schumacher
You know, I read an interesting quote from a, from a business coach the other day who said like and that really kind of resonated with me and I said like, founders are often much happier if they don't focus on this ultimate success outcome, but because they're living in the gap, instead focus on the path. And that's very fitting to your question because I hear that a lot also from startup founders. They're like, oh, you know, I want to have this founding round and then everything's better. And once, you know, of my Series A or whatever, or I want to have this exit. And I get it because, like, the first exit was like one of those goals for us back, back in the days. But actually, I think it is actually a lot more. The path what you're on is like, are you enjoying what you're doing? You have like a great team, you like to work every day. And I think we have that. And so I can't answer your question, to be honest. I think for the next three years we're just going to continue to do what we do well is, is acquire companies, treat the founders well, treat the company well, grow it, make money that way, but also have fun building this. And so, yeah, three years down the road, the company will be bigger than today, but probably also in five years or 10 years. And maybe at some point we're going to do an IPO or just keep tugging along. And I think that's. There is no ultimate success. And that's, for example, what I really like in our constellation. They're like, really just focused on. Every year they do a bit more and they, they're really disciplined. And I think in that way they're a bit of a role model.
- [10:57]
Interviewer
Yeah, definitely. And you remind me of. There's this book called the Eos Life. I don't know if you've heard about it, but it's like five principles of, like, success, essentially what you're referring to, like that journey, it's like, do work you love with people you love, make a big, big impact, get paid fairly, pass some time for hobbies. And it's like I, I kind of adapted that, added like maybe one or two other things. Like, for me, travel is very important stuff. Like, I get to do that wherever I want, not just work I like. And so, yeah, it's kind of fun when you live life based on those principles because then you can look at every day and be like, am I successful today? And it's like, well, did I check the boxes on those things? And it's like, yeah, it's actually quite easy to do that. So, yeah, I love that it's focused on the path as well, for sure. But how do you like to push back on that devil's advocate? How do you inspire the team around that? Because there's like sometimes getting them bought in, they're like, hey, here's the vision of where we want to go. And if you're just like, hey, it's, we're going to enjoy this journey. We're going to obviously grow a little bit. I imagine that like, could be potentially a little hard for them to be like, okay, is that, you know, I need to acquire 100 companies this year is at 5. Is that like, sure, we could grow a little.
- [12:10]
Tim Schumacher
Oh yeah. I mean, we have, we have goals, dog. Great question. We have goals. I mean we, we, we have a goal for every one of our brands for this year and next year and, and we have acquisition goals. We've met them in some years. But this year, for example, we've just acquired three companies so far, probably going to be four. But it's falling a little short of our role and we know what we need to do to ramp this up next year. So, so I think that we know you, you have a fair point. The downside of a continuous business like that is that you don't have this one goal everybody's working towards too. So you need to kind of create a bit of micro goals. So for example, one of our goals is, is reaching a hundred million in revenue now we're at about 80 million now, so there is still some room. But it's like, it's one of those milestones and technically, I mean, it's, it doesn't mean anything. Life will be exactly the same whether we have 80 million or a hundred. But it, it's, it's kind of something we'd all be proud of. But you do raise a good point, is motivation. And that is, to be honest, is something I sometimes struggle with because I see on the venture side, I see a lot of climate businesses and they have a very clear goal of doing their part in solving climate change. And that's usually very, very motivating for the teams. And I'm sometimes like, hey, I wish we had something similar in terms of ambition. And that's much harder. I would say it's softw and especially it's harder in this, in this distributed software. If you have one software, it's usually you have a really clear product vision and something where you want to go like which target group you want to enable. And from a group level, it's definitely harder to phrase that. And that's, it's, to be honest, something I sometimes struggle with when I speak in front of the team. And I want to bring the same enthusiasm I have on, on top. But it's harder with a topic like that that with us.
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Interviewer
Totally.
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Tim Schumacher
Yeah.
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Interviewer
Because like with world funds and we were talking about that at the beginning, it's like very clear like the environments green like that impact. It's clear, everyone can know that. But then for SaaS Group as a whole, I think you almost have to like zone out to core values or something like that. Like no, we're just obsessive about growth or something like that. Like it could be that, it could be something else. But that is the thing that applies across everything.
- [14:29]
Tim Schumacher
Yeah, absolutely. And we have that. I mean if, if you go on our website, we have four core values and a lot of them are actually also built towards the way we work. We're a remote, fully remote company which brings, which has a lot of benefits and it's beautiful but it also has some drawbacks. And, and so it, but it just lends itself to very peculiar type of managing an organization with a lot of transparency, very radical transparency, radical honesty and a lot of independence. And those are all our values. Because you can't otherwise operate a remote company without those values. And that is fulfilling for many of us. Gives us a lot of freedom. You mentioned that you travel. A lot of our people are the same. We have digital nomads. We have a lot of people who live in another country than they were born. Probably I would say the majority of SaaS group because that's just the type of, of work is much better. It's, it's sometimes hard like you live, you move to a new country, it's, it's harder to find a job but it's easier to find a remote job very often.
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Interviewer
Oh yeah, definitely.
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Tim Schumacher
And like a lot of especially yeah in low, low, lower cost countries. So we have a lot of people in, in Portugal, in Spain, Vietnam for example and all beautiful countries. But it's, they're not the highest paid countries.
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Interviewer
Geo arbitrage is beautiful.
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Tim Schumacher
Exactly, exactly. And those are super smart people. If you like to travel, if you like to live in different countries, it's my argument you have a wider horizon than most people. And to me this is a real benefit in your mindset, your openness, your ability to adapt to certain cultures. And I think that's part of the foundational we're built. And so back to your point, you made a very good point is really we're focusing a lot more on how we're doing it than the what we're doing it because at the end of the Day software is, is, is useful, but it's, it's also a bit boring. But the why is quite interesting.
- [16:34]
Interviewer
Yeah, the founder of Vista Equity was like, oh, software kind of tastes like chicken, like different flavors of chicken, but it's. It's chicken.
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Tim Schumacher
It's chicken.
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Interviewer
Yeah, yeah, that's.
- [16:44]
Tim Schumacher
That's very true.
- [16:46]
Interviewer
Yeah, that's fun. And so what I would love to do is just kind of draw out over the last. How many years has it been for Saskrip? It's been seven years, nine months, according to your LinkedIn, as far as that, that whole journey. So draw out from like year zero, essentially, like getting into it to. We'll go to year one. Like, what were some of the first things you did? Because, like, looking back right now, it's like, wow, that's amazing. You got like 80 mil. ARR. That's fantastic. Many founders are just like, oh, that's incredible. But I think what a lot of people miss is like sometimes the early journey of what it took and then just what were some of the first steps to get started? Like you mentioned already, you're like, yeah, we started with smaller companies, under a million. Now we've kind of upped that once we, you know, de. Risked it, figured it out. So, yeah, why not walk us through just like the first year. What, what went on? Did you have like, all your co founders start at once? Did you add some others? What did that look like?
- [17:48]
Tim Schumacher
Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a great question because, yeah, in retrospect, things always fall into place or sometimes fall into place. But, but the, the first year or two are always the hardest and they have been for every, every single startup I've done for SaaS Group. And that was part of the original idea. I wanted to kind of leapfrog that first year by just acquiring something to not having to go through that sometimes very rough patch of, of getting, getting the product off the ground and really kind of spending the first 12 years of just acquiring people, acquiring users. I kind of wanted to leapfrog that. And so the first thing really I did is I incorporated the company and I bought a business. I was actually, I reached out to a lot of brokers and who were selling SaaS products. And then actually a lot of good stuff came through FE International and they sent me all those products or those, those projects and companies for sale. And there was one which I kind of liked, although I really didn't know the space enough, which was Deploy Bot. And I like, because it was really Stable. The sellers, they're a great company. They also have a couple of other products. I really kind of, I like them from a value standpoint. They very much run the company like we run SAS Group. They're a small, small company, but yeah, very, very good people. And I always look at this, I is like, do we get along with the sellers and do they have a similar culture? Because at the end of the day you will have a couple people moving over and culture is really important. And so it ticked a couple of boxes. I really didn't understand the business that much, but I was like, okay, I'm going to figure that out. And I bought this business that I did with my prior exit proceeds from cedo. And so it was all my equity. And then I, I hired someone to take care of the business who's a developer, knowing this, and, and, and started approving a couple things on the marketing side, on the business side. So, so pricing the, the business itself moved it over to Stripe. So lots, lot like lots of little things which, but they all kind of brought some incremental value. And then the, the product was stable and it was fine and it was just churning out money every, every month. And I was like, okay, now it's time for the second one a couple months later. And that's then when I asked later, sorry, a couple minutes, a couple months later, I was like, that's quick. That was quick. Yeah. AI in times of AI is like, oh, it was all an agent. No, a couple, couple of months later. And then I asked Uri to join with my friend, CEO, co founder, because I felt I need someone kind of, judging from this first experience, I felt I need someone who I really have as a sparing partner for product, who can really deeply think through a product. And, and he joined and I then we together acquired a second product, which is Juicer. And we still own both products today. They're both, they've both grown a little since then. They haven't, they haven't really taken off like big time. But there was also never the intention. The intention was always just keeping, keeping the product stable, grow like 10% a year on average and maintain profitability and then use those profits to finance new acquisitions. And then with the third acquisition, we actually started and we still do this, resorting to debt as a, as an additional financing vehicle. Because of course with buying companies that come with a 4 to 5 EBITDA multiple, it takes usually 4 to 5 years until they amortize unless you really improve something radically. And so that actually helps Then acquiring businesses faster and we started taking on some debt on this acquisition and that's been kind of our model ever since is okay, it's a mix of reinvesting our own profits, some debt and also some equity injection over time to, to acquire new businesses.
- [22:01]
Interviewer
So for that breakdown like in each acquisition obviously it's different. Like the, the mix of like okay, how much of what we're paying for this company is profit versus debt. But if we were to take like let's say one of your stock examples where it's like okay, it's a $1 million interrecurring revenue business, EBIT just to keep numbers simple is a hundred K. How do you value that? And I know I asked the same question to Jerk. He's like oh man. The formula EBITDA times surgeon multiple could be the very simple answer or it could be something a little more oh, it depends on the team too. There's obviously a host of different factors you, you obviously look for on the sens. But let's talk maybe a bit about that. Like what is your deal box of like this is a green light. This is something that is investable because there's a lot of 1 million interrecurring revenue businesses out there where I'd argue they don't even have product market fit, although it sounds like they do. It's like well you know, you got two big enterprise customers, there's 500k and then you got like maybe 10 other smaller ones or mid sized companies. You're like it's not quite even 30 customers. That's, that's concerning potentially it's like our from a risk profile of if some of those big companies leave, it's.
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Tim Schumacher
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And we've seen a few that had that customer concentration. That's, that's usually also a sign that the company isn't really product led, but it's sales led or is almost more kind of a combination of enterprise and service work. There are some exceptions but very often that's the case. So I mean yes, we have that checkbook checkbox where we have obviously a whole bunch of criteria but really kind of six, seven main criteria which is kind of what we look for. Yeah, number one is just overall size like 1 to 10 million. And in AR that's, that's simple. Then generally we want that ARR to be rather stable or growing. Then of course declining, there could be reasons for a short decline or something but generally kind of in a declining market is definitely a lot harder to turn around. It's also, I mean it is a reflection of a price. Of course a highly grown business will command a higher price and then low growth or declining business will be lower one. So we don't completely rule it out, but it's of course favorable to grow then profitability. And that of course is usually a direct factor of how efficient are you as a team. And that's the funny thing is we see 3 million ARR businesses. By the way, 3 million seems to be kind of almost a ceiling a lot of founders hit and then they're like at 3 million and then they're kind of stable. And we see 3 million businesses with 30 or 40 people. And we see 3 million businesses with a single founder who is just a lone guy or maybe he has hired one customer service person to help him. But we've seen also people who haven't. So it's, it's really everything.
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Interviewer
Is sales led and the other one, no, no.
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Tim Schumacher
No, no, no, no. Wow. They are product led. But then they start kind of going down the enterprise sales and the enterprise route and they have suddenly 10 salespeople also selling there. But the product itself is product led. But they think, okay, by talking to people they can really accelerate things. And then they usually just bloat the entire organization. And yeah, then the only chance if we acquire them would be really tough to, to scale the operations down and make it 10 people. And usually that's that, that works because 30 is very often a bloated organization and if we only have two, it's the other way around. We need to build up the team because then usually the, the like, like with a brilliant founder, you, you can work with two people. But usually if you build a team not relying on the founder, you need a couple of different, different skills in the team. So you end up with more like five, six people. So they kind of converge from both sides in a way. So really kind of the size of the team tells us a lot. It's also a lot more manageable to have a smaller acquisition position, to have kind of those lean efficient teams. And of course also with high profitability it's usually better. Then, then we look at of course the quality of the product. Is it something, is it, is it a bad product they've just been selling and marketing well, or if this is actually a great product where people have been able to, to have genuine fans, build community, have some word of mouth and is really a great product which, which we can, can that then help push into the market? So yeah, lots of different factors, but in the end, of course, they're always also reflective of price. And so you asked for the price earlier. If, if you look at EBITDA ranges, we've bought businesses from two times EBITDA really kind of a difficult business, which was almost about to collapse technically by the way. It's one of our best businesses now. But it was back then, it was really kind of at the brink of collapse. And we bought it during COVID so it was kind of everything aligned. But we also had businesses that had an EBITDA multiple of more like 15 or 20 even because it wasn't very profitable, we thought, okay, by slashing some costs, we actually can get it into a, into the zone of profitability very quickly and everything in between. And same for ARR multiples we've bought. We've paid everything from a 1x on arrow all the way up to 10x on AR majority really kind of being at the 2 to 3x range. So. So paying 2 to 3 times AR.
- [27:46]
Interviewer
Okay, so to recap your like 1 to 7 kind of criteria you look for, there's the size of the company. So between 1 to 10 the ARR, like how stable is it? Is it growing? Is it declining profitability of the company? So how efficient is your team? There's the quality of the product. And what were the, the other three? Maybe I, I glazed over them.
- [28:08]
Tim Schumacher
Team size. Team size was one. Oh, and churn. I haven't mentioned churn of course is a big factor. Is even consider two companies that are both growing at 10%. One might have no churn and just add 10% every year. The other one might be just churning through half of their base. Just happen to add then 60% new clients net is also 10%. Of course the first company is much better because it's a stickier product. And we know that even if marketing would dry up tomorrow, customers would still use it.
- [28:46]
Interviewer
Totally. Okay, so I love that. And so out of the 80 mil error I think I saw on your, your website, you have 35 companies.
- [28:55]
Tim Schumacher
25.
- [28:55]
Interviewer
25. Okay, got the first digit wrong. Okay, so out of those 25, what is like your average like goal for some of these companies when it comes to how they run, how they operate? I know you said you love the, the operations side, but is it like you kind of mandate like hey, all, you know, cash flow businesses, like gotta run a 50% EBITDA or something like that or like the growth stage businesses like do you have it kind of broken down internally out of those 25 businesses, like there was a McKinsey like Blue Grid. I don't know if there's like cash cows Growth business.
- [29:28]
Tim Schumacher
Yeah, the cash cow BCG matrix. Yeah, it', it's, it's, it's cash cow dogs. What else? Growth growth stars and question marks. Yeah, well, a little bit, I mean a little bit that plays a role. I mean we look at every company individually kind of what can they do in their given market with their given resources. And, and we have some businesses which we really optimize for profitability and we, we have others where growth is really important and we feel that we shouldn't, we should, we should be investing generally. We're big fan of the rule of 40 because it, it kind of shows that there is this balance between the two. The rule of 40 says margin percentage. So EBITDA margin plus growth. Which is kind of funny because it's kind of two, it's two numbers that actually have nothing to do with each other. One is really a profitability of something and the other one is a growth from a year to year basis. But still it really shows this kind of trade off between growth and profitability. And we steer the majority of our businesses with a rule of 40 and above. It doesn't always work. Sometimes we have businesses that fall shy of that number. But we have everything from rule of 40 up to rule of 100, which means a company grows 40% and makes a 60% profit margin. For example. That's not unheard of, but of course it's the exception, not the rule.
- [30:47]
Interviewer
Okay, so if I understand the rule correctly, you have like, if it's the rule of 40, you have the kind of mandate is like run at 40% EBITDA while growing 40% year over year.
- [30:57]
Tim Schumacher
No rule of 40 would be mean 20 grow tw, grow the company 20% while maintaining a 20% EBITDA merchant. And that's, that's, we would kind of consider baseline that 2020 is actually, is a good, is a good baseline because and then you can shift like you only grow 10%. Well then you should make 30% profit. You don't want to grow at all. Well then at least 40% profit. And so kind of companies can choose to a certain extent. Sure. We also, we have an opinion. So it's, that's actually something where we engage in a dialogue that with, with a brand manager to find what, what is the right strategy. And, and there really isn't, isn't the right or wrong. They are like we need profits as much as we need growth and it's really just always figuring out is like what is actually profitable, efficient growth. That's really kind of what we're looking for. Because what we see in the VC world is a lot of non profitable, non efficient growth. Sure. You know, you throw enough things at something, you're going to grow. Will you grow enough to justify the next valuation? That's the big question mark. Will you just grow enough to leave something for the founders once all the liquidation preferences are satisfied? You also don't know, but you grow.
- [32:10]
Interviewer
Yeah, I was looking at Twitter or X about like the AI bubble. There's like ChatGPT is paying this much for each and then Replit is going off of that one and they're paying this much and then like the next AI tool that's like subset of by replit.
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Tim Schumacher
And then you're like, oh, if one.
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Interviewer
Of them, you know, increases price towards where it should be.
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Tim Schumacher
Oh wow.
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Interviewer
Like it turns out AI is not that cheap. But, but I mean if you're betting on like Moore's Law and everything else that's development, like it should come down. But right now it's definitely infused with VC dollars. That's for sure.
- [32:46]
Tim Schumacher
That's right.
- [32:47]
Interviewer
Totally. Well, I love that rule with the 20 over 20 or like, if you're thinking about like, okay, we want to have 30% EBITDA, okay, expect like 10% growth. Of course, you know the math and how that actually works. You might have 20% growth still, but it gives the person leading the company a bit of a rule set of like, hey, just kind of expect these things. I never heard that before. So I love that. Now tell me more about your post acquisition playbook. Because the very first company, you had bought it with your euro money from the previous exit and then you kind of went in, hired somebody else to kind of help the developer to kind of get things executed, got it to a stable point, then you left for the next acquisition. But what does a typical acquisition look like? And on the post acquisition side? So like when you fix it up, maybe it's like you mentioned the first time, like, okay, we changing things. You're going to use Stripe now and like I imagine there's some standardization of like some tools, but that's the next question. I want to go through this centralized versus decentralized approach, but let's focus on the post acquisition playbook.
- [33:54]
Tim Schumacher
Yeah, yeah, no, that's a, that's a very good question. And the post acquisition, I mean that's something that has been refined over time. Yeah, the first one, it was more like I looked at the website and the, the product is like, okay, maybe I think we should change this, that and this. And there was also no formality and no central services. And then over time of course we discovered more and more things that were similar between different SaaS products. So even if the service was something completely different, a lot of things are the same. Kind of how you payment, for example, with stripe and other things is a best practice. How you do pricing, how you market for products. There are, I would say there are 80% similarities and then maybe 20% things that are unique per every single business. But usually best practices a best practice. And also with new things like for example, at the moment a lot is about how do you position companies in generative AI services. So how do you rank well in ChatGPT? Here is a best practice for that. And it's something we rolling out everywhere because we know it's like mission critical, just like SEO was over the last 30 years. That's, and there are a lot of similarities and, and you have that everywhere also development in the adoption of AI at the same time we don't want to stifle creativity and the freedom to choose and market based, market based behaviors of the brand. So the brands tend to be free to choose with most things but that's kind of at their own risk and there is a set of standards. So we're basically saying okay here we're pretty sure that this is the right thing, but you know, you're happy to prove us wrong, but we're pretty sure. And then there are other things where we're like, oh, nobody's tested that just do whatever you want to do and especially kind of when it comes to your own product. And most people, and that's the interesting thing at SaaS is most people pride themselves mostly on the actual product development. So whatever service you develop. So you know, take a product of ours, anyone like let's take Scraper API for example, scraping service. Then of course those people are among the best in the world, knowing everything about scraping services, scrapings and proxies and all the different ways to extract data and put it into the right boxes and everything. So that's what they're really world class at everything else, how they market their product, how they do billing, how they do a well converting website. They do it as much as anyone else. And that's kind of where we come in. So over time what we have done is we've built central services that are really good at those horizontal things. Those are things like hr, finance, bi but also marketing services, some product services and the newest one is AI. Because while AI is of course course a job for everyone, IT people really benefit when they have a super specialist who can kind of teach them everything about AI best practices, be a sparing partner. And so that's a position. For example, we just, we just hired at the beginning of this year and it's been working out really well.
- [37:03]
Interviewer
Awesome. Yeah, I love that focus of like centralized services. When did that come about? Because I know even at product led we're, hey, we are a whole model. It's like we have product LED implanters that will implement anything from like a new offer. So homepage for the clients, onboarding, flow pricing, install your product analytics, run your growth process. If you don't have that, help you identify like who should you have on your product LED team and your product strategy, user research. There's a ton. And what we realize is like no doubt, not every implementer is fantastic at all of those. So there is some ones where it's like, hey, you know what, having somebody who's just really solid at pricing has done this again and again. You know, it's a little more rare. So it's like, okay, that should be a specialist. And we're not quite at the point where it's like, okay, we have like somebody full time for that. It's just contracts where it's like, okay, well we'll pull them in when the project makes sense for that specific client. But curious how that came about for you as you were a crafting SaaS group. Was it like when you had like five companies, like they all need help with X marketing site or something like that? How did that kind of come about?
- [38:09]
Tim Schumacher
Yeah, it grew organically. Like most things grow at startups. I mean there were a few things where very early on we started, for example with finances because you got to consolidate finances at the end of the day, have proper accounting. And the good thing is also most founders and teams, they hate it. So it's nothing you take away from them and they're like, yeah, sure you can do it. And we've got a few, a fantastic accounting head and she's been doing that for literally last seven, seven years. And so that was one of the early functions and at the beginning was just kind of the one, one person, not one person that exceeded halftime and, and, and then it over time developed into a full fledged finance function with now everything from tax to audit to payments whatnot, budgeting, FPA and love all the things we have there and Other things were essentially stuff I've been doing, like marketing for example, the beginning I've been doing, I've been trying to kind of guide them with my, I mean I have some marketing knowledge amassed over the years, but also I'm not a super specialist in any of the topics. So a lot of them was also guessworking, pointing them to the right directions, hiring the right freelancers. And at some point we're like, okay, well you know, actually it would be cool to have a CMO to take care of this. And so kind of that person then took a lot of the stuff that's already there, but kind of made this into a professional organization which we have now. And that is very much also demand based. I mean we have marketing is a great example. We have teams we acquire who are really good at marketing. They might just need one specialty. They're like, okay, we need help in technical SEO or hey, we would like an SEA account or SEO or Google account to be managed because that's really kind of a special thing. And then they hand that off. But the rest they run in the brand. And then we have others, they have no marketing at all. They don't like marketing. They're like, okay, marketing central. You run this and we're just going to give our input from the product side and both works. It also depends a lot on the size. Some of the teams we have are two people and others are 20. And that of course is a different story.
- [40:12]
Interviewer
How do you manage the dynamics of that? So you have centralized services, I imagine that's paid directly from SaaS Group. But then let's say, hey, you have this new company that you acquire and they're like, actually we need a ton of help on all of these specific things. And then long behold, your centralized services is like inundated with just this one company. I guess maybe that's a little normal of like at the very beginning it probably should be like that. But I'm curious about like the financial intercompany dynamics or you just treat us all like, hey, we just help whoever has a request kind of thing.
- [40:49]
Tim Schumacher
That was like, it was like that at the beginning. It was like, you know, we help whenever we have a request and we pay everything. But of course it's always a thing. If something doesn't have a cost, demand is infinite. Yeah, marketing, whatever. Demand, sure. As a, as a brand leader, you'd be stupid to not take the maximum. And also you never know if your central team is actually doing a good job because if something is free, well, people Will take it. Can't blame them. And so I think about three years ago we did what all companies or bigger companies do at some point. Yeah, do intercompany pricing and be okay. You know, you want marketing services, it's that much. You want recruiting services, Every hire costs you, I think $3,000 is what we charge internally, which is actually super cheap. Like it's, it's amazing. Like recruiting for example is one of the muscles where we have like an amazing recruiting team. They're amazingly fast, they know the company really well. I also like we never work with outside recruiters. I'm a really big fan of in house recruiting teams and they work fast and quick and at a super affordable rate. But they would have to prove themselves in the market if suddenly they would charge 30,000 people. Like why we gotta get some headhunter? Because they do it for half. And that has happened. Some services have disappeared because there was not enough demand or they were too costly and the people just didn't order them. And it's like, okay, seems like there's no demand. And I'm really a big fan of the market principles also within a company because otherwise I think an organization becomes very bloated. There's one cool book, book by the way that has inspired me Humanocracy, which I read, I read it about two years ago but it really was like it was kind of a scientific blueprint for a lot of the stuff we've been doing. But I also learned a lot about how other companies have been doing that and it was a lot about those independent units that really work in a free market and you don't have those bloated organizations where you have very little accountability and responsibility within the respective markets because especially in central teams it can lead to them being just monopolists. And that's, that's usually never good for Coley.
- [43:02]
Interviewer
Yeah, I'm going to read that book. That sounds fun. I know I was talking with the visionary at EOS and they, they recommended like reading the Starfish and the Spider as far as like centralized versus decentralized organizations. And so learned a ton from that one too. But I excited to that one. So first centralized services, you have recruitment, finances and then like stuff on the marketing side. Is there any other like core services where you found like over the years like hey this one hasn't changed. People just always need to have this centralized and it could just be really core to your culture. Like the people piece. Like hey, if we centralize that we can kind of instill, hey we're screening people for the core values that we have at SaaS Group. And so there's a little bit more of like an incentive to be like that's, that's going to be centralized. You're going to get somebody great. But they also mesh with who we are as a company.
- [43:51]
Tim Schumacher
Yeah. Now and exactly what you just said is people is crucial. Having core values, having core principles, also having transparency. I mentioned radical transparency earlier and part of that is really also having proper feedback processes. I'm a big fan of that. We do biannual surveys and also biannual reviews. One is lighter and better once a year is a really full 360 degree review. And that's really interesting in a distributed organization to discover truths and hidden people in both good and bad way which otherwise just wouldn't surface because you wouldn't see them. But also have metrics across the organization where you know, okay, we have a problem here in this team. There's some team leader and something is wrong there. We gotta really look into this or otherwise hey, you know, we have this hidden talent over there and he or she's doing an amazing job. We should really do something and give that person a great path. That person can do more. And so really. But, but standardized metrics across the board and it's also one of the things where there's no, there's no freedom to purchase it. It's. I mean those things are very, very, they have very small costs or they're even some, some of the things are completely taken over by central cost wise. But we really need that input to run a proper organization. Also People analytics is super important. There's a tool we're using called called People ix which is super cool people analytics tool where you basically have all the information at your fingertips and that's super important at a distributed organization with also different culture, different history through the nature of roll ups and like we couldn't work without that. So people to your point really is the People HR team is a team which works more standardized across the board than other teams. Also payroll, those sorts of things. You don't want to leave that to individual companies. And frankly they also don't want to. They're very happy to have a competent team taking that over.
- [46:01]
Interviewer
Definitely. And is People IX what you use for getting those performance reviews that you do twice a year? Is that like a different tool or is that that.
- [46:10]
Tim Schumacher
That is a different. It's just a survey tool. That's very simple. But now, but, but the more interesting thing is the analytics Piece of really kind of finding out everything about people and from. From performance metrics to. To attrition metrics, fair pay, lots of topics and kind of how you can actually dig in people data. And that's one of the things which I find super fascinating is like how much analytics there's out for anything. Website analytics and marketing analytics and finance and whatnot. But people, which is really kind of. It's everything we have in a software company. It's all the value, but it's also almost all the cost. How little attention and proper analytics it always gets in most companies.
- [46:51]
Interviewer
So yeah, yeah, it's like your most important asset yet. You have the least analytics on. Like, how are you doing? Okay, so with the performance reviews, super interested in that. What is there any like resources or anything you recommend to kind of check out if you to get really good at that part? Because I think a lot of people listening, it's like, yes, they hear performance reviews, but then it's like, well, doing them, executing them. They just want the easy button. So I'm curious.
- [47:19]
Tim Schumacher
I don't know. There's an easy button. Like the tool we use is really just a proper. It's just a proper survey tool. We could use any tool. We've actually thought about transitioning to one of our own. We have two customer feedback tools, User Snap and Zen Loop, but they are made more for product feedback, but we could easily use them. We've actually thought of transitioning to our own tools because it's really just a survey tool. And in terms of what is best practice, it's also not rocket science what we do there. It's just a bunch of questions. And I think it's not a lot. It's like four or five questions. What's the best thing that person has done in the last year? What are the things where that person needs improvement? What's the path for the person to move forward? And so on. So really very limited question. I think the core is really just doing it is is the discipline of meticulously scheduling time every year or ideally every half year in an organization. Make sure really everybody does it. And it's not about getting too hung up on formality on how you do the exact questions, but it's about putting down a few bullet points and then taking the time to talk, like in a dedicated way about feedback. Because of course, you know, we give feedback all the time. I say, great idea. I said like, well, yeah, okay, we say that all the time. But actually giving proper, structured feedback, I think is such an important thing in management and also receiving feedback. Also for me it's of course super interesting to always get feedback from people on my skills. By the way, giving not enough feedback is always in there. It's like always. It's like every time I'm like, shit, I've tried to give feedback but I'm still, that's kind of where I'm scoring low. And, and so I think, and, and most people actually do. So it's, I think it's, it's really important to take the time and, and the discipline is more important than anything else. So the combination of putting it down in some structured form but, but then also just talking.
- [49:12]
Interviewer
Yeah, I love all these people operation tips as well. And speaking of people, I, I'm sure like one of the most important hires you have to make is like okay, if the founders of one of the companies you're acquiring leave, who is going to run that ship and be the CEO? I don't know even know if you call them the CEO or the GM or whatever, the person who's going to lead that charge. Tell me more about like how you hire this person or is it usually a promotion for someone who's already at that team? How do you typically find that person and then incentivize them to really grow that company?
- [49:42]
Tim Schumacher
It's, it's an interesting question because we've tried multiple ways of finding people. We have had internal promotions. I like that, I like internal promotions as much as possible because people tried and trusted and we want to have internal paths. We have had founders continue. We've had for example the founder of MyWorks, MyWorks Software. Now over three years into the acquisition, he's still with us and he's awesome. He's like great. He has done an add on acquisition and coached new founders and has really kind of also moved the product further in a great way. And we have very often we have the second in command taking, taking charge which is an interesting dynamic because if you are in a small company, our company has five people, 10 people and there's a founder, then you have the interesting dynamic that the founder is like a glass ceiling is like really hard. You never get over that until that one day when the company gets acquired, the founder leaves because then suddenly it's like, okay, oops, now I could be that person. And we've had cases where it should be that person. That's what people sometimes think. But sometimes they also know that there is a limiting factor as founders, especially the ones who are charismatic and going forward they usually need someone who take care, takes care of a lot of the operation. The classic CEO role. But those people also often have limitations that they might not be that product focused, that people focused, or whatever other qualities the founder had. Not always the case, but it's a bit of a generalization, but very often it's the case. And so I've seen cases where this went really well, where the CEO was actually the better CEO, where the founder was just all over the place, disorganized. Just sometimes those super creative founders, they tend to not be good company runners and the COO takes over and he's better at everything. And you have other. We have other cases where we're like after years, like, okay, there was a reason why the CEO was only CEO and that's okay. But then, you know, we'll try it out and sometimes that person goes back into command. And often we also hire from the outside. What we've had very good experience with is hiring very technical people because you can learn the business part, it's not that rocket science. But being a builder, being a doer, being someone who doesn't just talk, but actually builds product codes, things, especially these days where, you know, you code agents to sell things to answer customer service queries, like you actually need builders. And we love hiring very technical people and who are good journalists and then putting them in charge. And very often that's what works incredibly well.
- [52:32]
Interviewer
And do you have like, I know like McDonald's has Burger University, but is there any sort of like, yeah, SAS Academy, SAS Academy? Yeah, your own SaaS Academy or Dan Martell SAS Academy, SAS Academy.
- [52:46]
Tim Schumacher
Well, it's virtual only, but we are doing things like for example, next week, we the entire leadership team. So brand leaders, Central leaders, about 35, almost 40 people gonna be meeting in Gdansk in Poland for a whole week. And some parts will be management and other things, but a lot of things, it's just about exchanging ideas. And then there's going to be a whole day of formal leadership training and training. Yeah. So we do a lot of those things to move our people forward. And that's super important.
- [53:20]
Interviewer
Totally. And how do you incentivize them? So is it like usually just like, hey, here's some compatible base and hey, if you get these profit targets, here's like a percentage or something like, what does that typically look like for incentives? Because I know incentives are like, usually with a lot of people, it's like half of the battle. Like, how do we motivate them?
- [53:40]
Tim Schumacher
Yeah, yeah, no, incentives are super important. Was it Was it Buffett or Munger or I think one of them said like show me any incentives, I'm going to show you the outcome. So making sure there's alignment is super important and it is a combination of a, of a very attractive base plus a yearly bonus based on the yearly targets plus then some long term component. And we're experimenting there a bit. We have SaaS Group stock appreciation Rights program which is very similar to stock option program and we also have some brand long term targets and yeah, we're still kind of as always with incentives, experimenting a bit, kind of what's best. Also people's life situation is different. Some people are like, you know, really, you know, I need cash now, I don't know, building a house and have an expensive family and it's like they're siding to that. And others I like, you know, I really want to have a lot more stock based compensation. I can be more frugal and we're a big fan of letting people to a certain extent choose between these. But it's always a mix of the three base, short term and long term etc.
- [54:46]
Interviewer
So with SaaS Group stock appreciation program, tell me more about like how you're thinking about that because we actually one of our influencers today like raised a really good point. It's like you get paid based on like the, the clients you manage and everything else like that. But he's like, we love collaborating with each other but there's no incentives here. And so I'm like okay, noted, we need to address this. And so I'm thinking just in the back of my head I'm like, I think you're onto something with the like overall company appreciation part there too. But curious how that that works.
- [55:16]
Tim Schumacher
At SaaS Group the stock appreciation rights program is a simple stock option program. You know, you get a certain grant at a, at the current stock price and then you get a percentage of whatever is the appreciation. Now that should in theory that, that indeed should build community and make sure we're all working on something together at the same time. There's no direct impact for collaboration. It's not like hey, you know, I'm going to help a colleague with this problem and I'm going to get something for that. But in the end I would like, we think that that's also not how the world should work. Collaboration is really more of a give and take people give. Those people will be given back also by giving you learn other things, you sharpen your own skills and it's quite rewarding. And I think good leaders know that things, you know, you always meet twice, I mean especially in your own organization. So it's in their own interest to be collaborative and, and a lot is also trying to be a role model by themselves. If we're cutthroat, business is like, you know, eat what you kill principles. Or if we're like, okay, we also collaborated, we're helping, that tends to build that culture. Sure, there are always going to be people who's like, hey, this is my focus for this year and I'm heads down and not helping anyone. Fair enough. But I think in the long run, most people realize that humans tend to be collaborative animals and their people are better off in collaborating.
- [56:47]
Interviewer
But totally I like that mindset. And what would you say like as you build SAS Group in like next three years as well, not back to that goal, but like thinking about like, okay, you're at like 100 mil. ARR. What is the moat that you're building? There's the people side. I could definitely probably say, hey there, there's something there you're working on like from the recruiting side to making sure you always have the best people. But what would you say are like the top three moats you're going to build that will make SaaS Group unstoppable?
- [57:18]
Tim Schumacher
Every business should have its own moat. So every brand should have something where they're really kind of the best in the world. And sure some businesses don't have that, but we have a lot of those businesses like Take Take Scrape API, which I mentioned earlier is really world class in, in scraping or pre render pre rendering service, which is, is important for bigger, bigger sites to be then found in SEO. They, they, they have moats within their own business on how they do it, how they build things. And then of course SAS Group is always the sum of, of the parts. Then of course there is the, the overall SaaS group component and they're probably M and A. And our ability to source businesses transact in this small segment because I think it's one thing to buy $100 million businesses where you can throw a lot of attorneys on and that's one thing. But what we've become really good at is buying small businesses in a very efficient way and then also improving them with a kind of a proven playbook which we have quote unquote industrialized over the years and which we can execute with smaller targets. That is somewhat of a moat is really kind of across the board. Plus of course the sourcing of people and building a system where we can operate with at some point hundreds of small businesses, but we can still operate them in a meaningful way. And I think that system to build that's been taken some time and I think that's something which is not that easy to copy because yeah, it's easy to do that with one or two or three businesses but it, it, I think it is kind of hard to do this with, with 25 businesses or hopefully a lot more in the future.
- [59:11]
Interviewer
So if you were to 10x this business, so let's imagine you're at 100mil already, you're trying to get to a billion dollar portfolio in three years. What would you have to change?
- [59:20]
Tim Schumacher
That's hard. That's a great question. The bottleneck is sourcing the right businesses. And I think we could do it, but I think we would risk of over expanding and being not very capital efficient. Like we could buy enough businesses to get this with it, three years to a billion. But then we need so much capital then our leverage would go up. We probably would make more mistakes because we couldn't hire the right businesses. They wouldn't fit culturally, nor could we properly integrate them. Then I think the same would happen as like with any of the venture backed startups. Some of them we are buying because they had too much money and they were trying to do things too fast and then ultimately killed them.
- [60:08]
Interviewer
Yeah. So sourcing the different, scaling the people, the playback sounds like that obviously refine that, improve it. What would you do differently? Like it's been almost eight years going through this journey. Is there anything like looking back you're like actually I wish I did this a bit differently or would change anything. Obviously I, when I asked that same question, I'm usually like well I became who I am because of these things. So there's like that. But if you were to get to, I don't know where you are today in like a fraction of time, is there anything you do differently?
- [60:39]
Tim Schumacher
It's so hard because of course it's, there's a ton of mistakes I would have liked to avoid. But you never know those things in the first place. I mean sure, out of our 25 acquisitions, I'm not going to name any names because of course the respective people running it would be disappointed. But there are at least five which I wouldn't have done. But it's so hard to say because I remember for example pre Render, that business, I mentioned the rendering business, pre Render, like we debated it so hard. Like when we acquired it, it was early 2020 and then Covid hit and we really weren't sure about the business because Google at this point was also already saying like, you know, maybe we have, we're going to do this server side. We're going to do that from the crawler side. You don't need to do that server side. And, and we're really like, is, do they have a moat or anything? And these days it's our best business. It's been growing 5.5x since we bought it, both in profitability and profits. It's doing really well. Product has really evolved. Super good. We've won, amazing clients, great team. There's nothing to love about this business today, but still it was one of the ones which we debated the hardest. Some other businesses were like, yeah, this is a sure bet. They're like, we wouldn't do them again. And so sure, in hindsight, it's so hard. But to generalize, okay, what should we have structurally changed? Maybe a bit more focus. I think there's. My biggest problem is like, I have a certain amount of discipline, but I'm also a victim of this shiny object syndrome, which I think we all often have. There's this target and there's, there's something really cool about this business. And so it's like, hey, let's try it. Especially if it's something different because it's a new challenge. And there have been one or two cases where I've really been pushing acquisitions through just for also having a new experience there. And if we would have focused more on, okay, what is really our ICP said no to more things, probably we would have been a little better off.
- [62:40]
Interviewer
Okay. And do you feel like those five were just, they were outside of your icp. They were like, ah, we want to try these things.
- [62:47]
Tim Schumacher
They were not outside of our ocp. That's the thing. It's not like, I mean there are one or two where I know, okay, I can't. We consciously went into something. So for example, we bought a business. We bought two businesses out of insolvency. And my co founder and I, we just thought, hey, it'd be cool to really buy a bargain business out of insolvency or like chapter 11. It's, it's, that's, it's fine. It's a new experience. You get to make a real bargain. And let's see if we can do this if we can tweak it. And it worked, but it was like, it costs so much attention and work. If we would have invested that very same work into the businesses that went well, to make it even better, return would have been much better for that. But in hindsight, it's always easy to have those generalization, those, those rules. But when you're in the moment, it's.
- [63:32]
Interviewer
Hard hearing about like Elon Musk's favorite game and it's Polytopia. And so the whole kind of like game, it's a little like you like conquer different villages and stuff like that. But the interesting thing about Polytopia is you have 30 moves. So it's thinking in bets essentially of like, hey, if I do these things things, or if I expand in this area or if I expend this amount of energy for this like bargain bin thing, it's like that's one move. And so it's like, is that the right move for you? And is it gonna really get you closer to whatever that big goal is? Or something like that too. So that's great.
- [64:10]
Tim Schumacher
I haven't heard of that. I gotta look that because yeah, indeed it is because I mean we think of the business. World War is chess. It's a continuous game. We have as many moves as we need. The others have their move too. But yeah, you're right, it is more like, what was it? Polytopia.
- [64:25]
Interviewer
Polytopia, yeah.
- [64:26]
Tim Schumacher
Because yeah, you have a limited attention span, limited time. That's the problem.
- [64:30]
Interviewer
Definitely. So your past before you got into SaaS group, like you were entrepreneur, you had your other companies as well. But this was definitely like a new area for you to like go in and build more of a portfolio of SaaS companies. So what were some of like the most helpful resources, mentors, things you did to really level up in this area? You mentioned like the book Human A crassy and just going through that. But what were some of those other things that you found was like, hey, that, you know, there's a lot of crap out there. This is the good stuff.
- [65:00]
Tim Schumacher
I mean there are tons of books I think I've read over time. Humanocracy was more for an organization structure when it comes to actual marketing work. For example, the book Traction. I still like that one from, from the decago founder. Also we like, we happen to know each other well because I also run a search engine, ecosia.org a green, green search engine. It's a nonprofit now that uses all the profits to plant trees. And so I've been quite involved in that field. But so there are a lot of like those books with very practical down to earth advice that I think is one of the books that actually stands out. I mean I don't know. I've read a gazillion books on years, so it's super hard to single one out.
- [65:39]
Interviewer
Was there any like great people you followed where you're like, yeah, kind of want to do like something like Mark Leonard or something like similar where you found like they're really good to study? Like I know Mark Leonard is probably one of the worst to study.
- [65:53]
Tim Schumacher
Worst to study because he doesn't read, doesn't publish anything or write anything.
- [65:56]
Interviewer
Yeah, yeah. Most interesting to study though.
- [65:58]
Tim Schumacher
Yeah, yeah, that's true. No, I. And I, I envy that if people can be really so focused, like they don't waste their time on podcasts like me. Just kidding. Now I find that super envious to be like that focus. And that's also about saying no, which I think is a really, really important skill in business. And so yeah, I mean he's a person, but also other people I touch base with, we have a couple of smaller investors, more like kind of large angel tickets. One for example is the founder of Bunyard Software. Great guy. And so exchanging ideas with great people who are a little further advanced is always one of the best things.
- [66:41]
Interviewer
Okay, awesome. And like as we wrap up here too, is there anything else you would like to impart on any SaaS? Bounder, obviously. Hey, if you're looking, you're tired of your business, definitely reach out to SaaS Group if you meet that criteria of being a great company with a great product, you know, between 1 to 10 mil. ARR. All that fun stuff. But besides that, is there any other like pieces of advice you'd recommends kind of founders walk away with just to think about.
- [67:07]
Tim Schumacher
I mean what kind of echoing what I said a little earlier is really, is that people should enjoy the path and really be focused a lot more on the path of the journey itself. Less than an actual exit. Always kind of remembering that starting and running a company is really a marathon and not a sprint and you can't be miserable during that. If you're miserable, then I think people should ask themselves why. And we have many people who really love building but they hate running companies. And then yeah, it is time to go into building mode. And I've seen a lot of founders who go back into that and then be happy again and really have fun along the way and enjoy things. And yeah, life is definitely too short to have a miserable business. And maybe one last thing is, is thinking about capital and how capital efficient you can run a business? I. I'm a big fan of bootstrapped companies. Most of my businesses Cito and and also the ad blocking company were bootstrapped. Most of the businesses we buy at SaaS we buy bootstrapped. I also it's kind of a little bit of the irony I have on the side started that climate fund world Fund which I also still still spend quite a bit of time with where we, where we back kind of supervisionary founders in the climate space and that's the opposite. We can't bootstrap those companies because a lot of them involve like huge like a lot of research, huge factories or other physical products. But it but especially in the SaaS world I think founders should always question themselves. Do I need this big funding round or is this just because I'm reading about funding rounds on TechCrunch that I want to have that control Gradual headline of hey XYZ raised 10 million and this will make me happy for this one second but I've seen so many businesses fail and ultimately the founders working walking away with nothing and bootstrappers don't have that problem. Things are slower but they tend to end up very often happier and wealthier than their receive backed founders and money also has a very diminishing return like your 5 million exit. That's life changing. Whether you have a 5 million exit or 20 million exit doesn't really change your life that much. House is going to be a little bigger, doesn't really matter. And so yeah think about capital efficiency and staying bootstrapped as long as you can and yeah that ultimately sure maybe making an exit or just keeping that company and tugging along. I think that's the much more resilient model. As a closing thought from my end.
- [69:46]
Interviewer
Yes. And now if anybody could help you who's listening? What is your biggest challenge right now? That's like keeping you up at night that you're like ah just need to solve this core issue.
- [69:57]
Tim Schumacher
I mean our biggest issue is finding great companies with great people that willing to join the SaaS group family by selling the business to us. I mean we also look for we have a lot of open positions as well but probably finding businesses is the hardest. So yeah I'm open to any tip, any introduction. Also happy to give advice. If any founder is like hey you know thinking about this or that without any business just email me timasgroup super easy or LinkedIn of course. And yeah I respond to every email personally.
- [70:30]
Interviewer
Awesome. Well this has been a fantastic kind of interview going through things Tim. I really enjoyed this. Anything else you wish I kind of asked or went through?
- [70:36]
Tim Schumacher
No, I mean we cover law around. I enjoyed that as well. That's great. Thank you very much.
- [70:42]
Interviewer
Awesome. Well thanks so much for coming on. This was great. And to wrap things up, thank you everybody for listening to this version of the product podcast. Make sure to rate review this on wherever you listen to podcasts whether it's Apple, Google, you name it, Spotify. I'm gonna read every single one of those views and that's how I know how to improve best. Also if you want to stay in contact with me and learn what is going on in the world of PLG and every single week get the best actionable deep dives on product led growth. Make sure to head on over to product led.com forward slash newsletter. I am personally writing each of these deep dives every single week and you're going to get a ton of it so make sure to head on over there to product led.com forward slash newsletter.