← The SaaS Podcast - Growing Profitable AI SaaS & AI Agents
The SaaS Podcast - Growing Profitable AI SaaS & AI Agents
414: PushPress: From CrossFit Passion to 8-Figure SaaS - with Dan Uyemura
00:45:22
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- [00:10]
Omar Khan
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS podcast. I'm your host Omar Khan and this is a show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business. In this episode, I took to Dan Waymura, the co founder and CEO of Push Press, a gym management software platform for boutique gym owners. In 2009, Dan was working as a front end developer at MySpace while also falling in love with CrossFit as a personal hobby. His passion for fitness led him to open his own gym. Despite having no prior experience in the industry as a gym owner, Dan quickly realized the existing software options weren't meeting his needs. So believing he could create a better solution, he recruited two friends, a developer and a designer to help build his own gym management software. But building the software proved much tougher than any of them had expected. As they were working on it, they also talked to other gym owners and realized many shared Dan's frustrations. So, seeing the bigger opportunity, they decided to turn the tool into a product that they could sell. But for years, the founders struggled to gain traction. They faced several technical challenges along the way, often having to scrap entire versions of their software and start over. The slow progress was demoralizing. It took them nearly five years to reach the first million in ARR. And behind the scenes, Dan was battling personal demons. He struggled with drug addiction, which added another layer of complexity to his entrepreneurial journey. And these personal challenges threatened to derail both his life and his business. By 2017, Dan was on the verge of quitting Push Press and going back to running his gym. In a last ditch effort, he decided to invest in an accelerator program. And that decision proved to be a turning point. The changes the founders went on to make started to pay off. Push Press doubled revenue to 2 million ARR. The following year, they also teamed up with another company to add features that they needed in their product. And then a competitor came along and bought that company. Suddenly, the founders were back in crisis mode. They had to race against time to build those crucial features themselves or risk losing everything that they'd work for. Today, Push Press generates eight figures in ARR, serves over three and a half thousand gym clients, and has grown to a team of about 100 people. They've also raised about $11 million in funding. In this episode, you're going to learn how Dan and his co founders persevered through those five years of slow growth before reaching the first million in arriving. Why Push Press decided to pivot from relying on third party integrations to building their own full stack solution, how a competitor's acquisition of their partner company forced them to rapidly having to develop crucial features why Push Press chose to focus on customer retention and organic growth rather than pursuing aggressive paid acquisition and how Dan balances running the business based on instinct with the need for more data driven decision making as the company scales. So I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Attio, the next generation of CRM. Now imagine a world where your CRM is powerful, easily configured and deeply intuitive. Well, Atio makes that a reality. You can set it up in less than a minute and in seconds of syncing your email and calendar, you'll see all your relationships in one place, all enriched with valuable data. You can also build zapier style automations, get powerful reports and seamlessly handle any go to market motion. From PLG to sales led, Atio is designed for the next era of companies like yours. So it's time to say goodbye to inflexible one size fits all CRMs and join industry leaders like ElevenLabs, replicate Modal and more. To scale your startup to the next level, you can try Atio for free@atio.com that's attio.com are you building a software product?
- [03:59]
Phil
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- [04:36]
Omar Khan
L h u b.com all right Dan, welcome to the show.
- [04:40]
Dan Waymura
Thank you so much. Excited to be here.
- [04:42]
Omar Khan
My pleasure. Do you have a favorite quote? Something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?
- [04:48]
Dan Waymura
It's not a quote so much as it's just a mindset and it's basically focused on inputs, not outputs. It's something I really try to drive every aspect of my life around.
- [04:57]
Omar Khan
Cool. So people who aren't familiar with Push Press, what does the product do? Who's it for and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?
- [05:06]
Dan Waymura
Yeah, so Push Press is basically a gym management software platform for boutique gym owners. So think single owner operator, yoga studios, Martial Arts Studios, CrossFit Studios, stuff like that. What we're basically our big value prop is trying to give these gym owners who are fanatical about delivering whatever fitness modality that they love and believe in, more time and energy to focus on their clients while giving them software and processes to streamline their business.
- [05:34]
Omar Khan
So can you give us a sense of the size of the business? Where are you in terms of revenue, customers, size of team?
- [05:41]
Dan Waymura
Yep, we're low eight figures, so below 20 million, but above 10 in ARR 3500 clients and about 100 people on our team right now.
- [05:51]
Omar Khan
Great. So the business was founded in 2013. So let's kind of travel back in time. What were you doing back then? Like, what was your background? And then how did you come up with the idea for Push Press?
- [06:06]
Dan Waymura
Yeah, so right around the time I we started Push Press, I was working for MySpace as a front end developer. And I also, at that time, maybe about a year before that, had discovered CrossFit for myself personally. And what I started to notice was on the work side of things, I was kind of just showing up to get a paycheck, but on my personal side of things, I was looking more and more towards being able to leave at the end of the day so I can make my CrossFit class. This is right around the time CrossFit was starting, like 2007, 2008 or it was early days for CrossFit. And what was happening was a lot of gyms were spinning out of my gym. So the gym that I belonged to, I think maybe like five or six gyms spun out of it because people fell in love too and opened gyms. And because I kind of had a technology background, I was helping people who were opening gyms like set up their website and get lead funnels built and some of these stuff in place for them. I was myself just falling in love with the science of CrossFit and I ended up getting a coaching licensure and then I ended up opening my own gym too. And that's kind of as I opened my own gym, I realized the software that was out there I wasn't super thrilled with and I wanted to just build my own for something that I knew could be built that would be better.
- [07:17]
Omar Khan
What was the process you went through? Did you, did you go out there and try to look for software that could help you run the business. And what did you find at the time?
- [07:28]
Dan Waymura
Yeah, so. And again, this was fairly early. We're talking 2009ish, 2000, maybe early 2010. First thing I did do was look for software because I'm a software guy, so of course I'm looking for software. And everything I found I just felt was very disconnected from what I knew could be built just because they were built in probably the early 2000s. And between the early 2000s and late 2000s, the iPhone came out and APIs were created. None of these things were available in the early 2000s. So I just saw that visual disconnect between what was available and what I knew could be built. And I just decided like, I don't want to use that. And so I foolishly thought it would be easy to build my own. It was actually super hard, but I thought I could build my own first version. At my first gym, we just kind of rolled together something on top of recurly and WordPress and just kind of made it work. But what I didn't realize was I ended up kind of joining a whole bunch of gym ownership support groups. And those people in those groups ended up seeing my website and realizing I wasn't using what everyone else is using. And people started asking me, and that's when I realized that the demand was there.
- [08:36]
Omar Khan
Around what time was that?
- [08:38]
Dan Waymura
20. 2010.
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Omar Khan
2010. So that was about three years before you actually launched Push Press, correct?
- [08:44]
Dan Waymura
Yeah.
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Omar Khan
So you've identified the demand, but like, how did you get to the point where you went from, okay, kind of, you know, kind of duct taping something together with WordPress to saying, I'm going to go and actually build a product for other gym owners as well.
- [09:06]
Dan Waymura
I mean, to be honest, I'm. I think I'm very entrepreneurial, entrepreneurial minded. So I'm sure it's all hazy now, but I'm sure when we opened the gym we were also thinking the software would be cool to build. Then we realized the software wasn't good because we were software people, right. So we're like, probably should build the software. Realized software wasn't good, realized people wanted something different. So it was like helping us build conviction all the way around. And then probably around 2011, we actually sat down with the partners that were forming kind of the nucleus of the company that is today. And we just started coding. And so it was myself, another coder, and then somebody who was like a UI UX director at a pretty big company kind of formed the founding three and so we would just go to Starbucks and coffee beans and anywhere we could just sit together and code and we just coded. And it took us probably a solid year and a half. I think things are way faster to build nowadays. So this might sound crazy to people listening, but, you know, a solid year and a half. And I think we threw away two versions of code because, like, first version we built on top of WordPress. Again, we did something else that wasn't wrong. Then Stripe came up and we're like, oh, we should use Stripe. So it was kind of a process that took quite a long time.
- [10:19]
Omar Khan
So while you were developing that idea and getting ready to ship this product, there were some struggles going on in your personal life, which I think didn't, you know, didn't help. Can you, can you talk a little bit about that?
- [10:38]
Dan Waymura
Yeah, so I'll back it up a little bit. So the catalyst for me actually starting CrossFit was I got a divorce. So I got out of a kind of a bad relationship, got a divorce, lost my house. I don't know if you remember during those like Obama years where they were doing the whole housing, I forgot what they called it, but they had a program where you can try and restructure your loan because there was predatory lending. I was in that boat, lost my house, had a lot of negative things happening in my life. Also got laid off from my space, opened the gym, which was positive, but just all in all, a lot of bad things happening during that time. I got introduced to drugs and literally in a six or a nine month time frame, I went from being a fully functional normal person to a fully functional drug addict to a non functional drug addict who kind of lost his head and it kind of, I guess capitulated in me thinking that the mafia was trying to come kill me. During that time I had bought some guns, which probably a stupid thing to do in hindsight, but ran out in the middle of the street, shot my guns in the air, called the cops to tell them to come save me. Cops arrested me because obviously I'm the crazy one. And then it happened to be by a park. So I got like these enhanced charges because drugs were involved near a park and a gun shooting. So it turned into this whole felony offense and it was just like some crazy thing that just like snowballed out of nowhere. So, yeah, it was nuts. And I basically was kind of like confronted with this life choice once I sobered up because they left me in like a holding cell for like four days straight. And I sobered up and I'm like, well, I'm a college educated professional who has a good job. I've never done anything wrong. What am I doing? And it was kind of this moment where I had to basically pick a path because normal people probably don't think this way, and I've never thought this way. But when I was confronted with this whole felony, I realized, like, you can't get a job, you can't get an apartment. You're basically relegated to, I don't know, a life of crime or really low pay for the rest of your life. And on top of that, I was sitting on 13 years in a state pen. So I'm talking like places they send killers. And so I'm, you know, having to make this choice of like, do I, do I, if I go to jail, how do I survive? Because I consider myself adapt. I think most entrepreneurs are adaptable. Like, we'll serve, we will try to excel wherever we are. So honest, literally in my mind I'm like, do I have to shank somebody? How many fights might have to get in? Like, I'm mentally preparing for this because this is the way I'm going. But then as the judge started to show me leniency, I'm like, okay, I'm 110% going to fix my life, never going to be here again. And that was kind of the turning point when I think the judge thankfully gave me leniency and said like, community service, no felony, blah, blah, blah. So, yeah, it's pretty nuts that that's.
- [13:16]
Omar Khan
Like one is like, it's just crazy that something like that happens considering kind of what, you know, your background and what you were doing maybe, you know, 612 months before. But also it's like this, this point where you get to where, you know, someone's decision or something externally could have, you know, sent your, direct your life in a completely different direction.
- [13:43]
Dan Waymura
Yeah, yeah. So I'm very thankful for that. And I think, you know, I think I had the ability to recognize that exact fact that like I could be in a federal penitentiary or I am able to fix my life. And I, once I was given the choice to fix my life, like I went 100% that way. I will say, and, you know, maybe someone out there is struggling with some type of a problem. I think a lot of entrepreneurs are obsessive compulsives. And obsessive compulsiveness shows up in different ways. Drugs, sex, gambling, starting businesses, buying domains, you know, just like we do obsessive compulsive things. And in some Ways push press saved my life because I was able to go 110% into helping gym owners and building software as opposed to, you know, something a little bit more negative or a lot more negative. Yeah.
- [14:30]
Omar Khan
Okay, great. So let's, let's talk about the, you know, getting the product out there. So eventually you guys, after several iterations, you, you got a product that you were ready to ship. So 2013 comes around, you get it out there. One, what was the reaction like, were people running to, you know, sign up and start using the software? Did you do any marketing, like as you were working up to the launch? Or was it what some founders experienced, which is like, okay, we finally built the product but now it's like crickets and it's like, ah, like what do we do now?
- [15:06]
Dan Waymura
Yeah, more the latter than the former. I think as all entrepreneurs are building their product, they're so attached to it, they think like, oh, we're going to launch this, we're going to have a flood of people wanting to use it. It's so obvious that was not the case for us. Like my gym was the first client. We happened to land a second client like the day after I launched my gym just randomly and that gave me the signal of like, oh, we're good, like this is going to be great. But then it was like very slow from that point forward. And the way I describe it, it's basically like you're in a jungle looking for people to have hand to hand combat with. It's not even just hand to hand combat. It's like you're looking for the fight and they're few and far between and you lose more than you win. Um, the other way I kind of describe it is like you're basically in the early days of running a business. You're basically like, you know, fighting Mike Tyson or pick a pro boxer, but you don't even know how to box yet. And so after a few rounds, maybe you learn how to block a punch and then you're, you're getting better at blocking and then you're able to throw a punch but you miss. You know, it's just like this slow progression of actually being able to hang in the ring for a while, but you've got to take all the punches for all those rounds.
- [16:10]
Omar Khan
So I think it took you about, I think you said, you told me like four or five years to get to the first million in ARR. So this wasn't like, you know, kind of like the first, the second customer came and then there was like 10 and 20. And before you knew it, you were a seven figure business. And I want to spend a little bit of time talking about how you actually grew that business and got to that first million. But just to set some context here, it was about a four or five year journey and you got to a point where I think after about three or four years where you were ready to quit, push press and go back to running your gym, right?
- [16:49]
Dan Waymura
Yeah, yeah. It's, you know, every, every business, it's in gyms and it's in software. You get just enough clients where it's hard to shut down because enough people rely on you, but you're not growing fast enough where you can see a clear line of sight to like, I can pay myself anytime soon. We were at that point probably in 2017. I remember turning to my co founders and I said, hey, I think I'm just going to focus on the gym because I know I can make this gym get to a point that pays me some money. And I was not sure about that, about push press. Yeah, I mean, starting any one of these businesses, like to get to a point where you have enough velocity that you can pay yourself and you start to see a bigger picture than just getting through the month. It's, it's really, really hard work and it requires a lot of conviction. So I'm kind of a proponent of, like, you should start a business either around something that's super trendy, that you can like, definitely launch and get going fast, or around something you're really passionate about, because there's gonna be a lot of low moments and you're gonna need that passion and that connection to the customers you serve or whatever to like, get you through some many days. In the beginning.
- [17:52]
Omar Khan
Yeah, yeah, I, I, I think it's like the number of times I talk to founders who are working on an idea that they don't really seem that passionate about and they're sort of, they may not say it, but I think the bet they're making is, well, it'll be okay because I'll get this out there and make money and something good will happen. And it's like, yeah, hopefully that might happen. But are you willing to go through the years that you're going to have to struggle and wake up and question yourself and, and people are going to be telling you to quit or why the hell you still doing this thing and you feel like a failure and all of that stuff. So I want to, let's kind of unpack that. Those, those first four or five years from that second customer, like, how long did it take to get those first 10 customers? And how did you go about getting them?
- [18:46]
Dan Waymura
We probably got to 10 customers in the first few months. You know, maybe let's call it quarter or two quarters. The beginning was really just founder led everything. Sales, marketing, word of mouth, everything. So personally, myself and another co founder, we landed ourselves in these, like, Facebook groups where gym owners were. And we've, you know, since day one, we've adopted this help first mindset. So somebody would ask a question, hey, I'm thinking about, like building a landing page. What technology should I use? And I would just tell them I didn't. We've had landing pages built into push press. But I would tell them, like, hey, if you want to build landing pages, you use like, I don't know, one of these landing page systems. And you'd set it up doing this way and you'd want to get a stripe account so you can get payments and blah, blah, blah. Or you can use push press. Like, I'd always throw in the like, easy button at the end, but I wouldn't sell from the front, I'd sell from the back. So it felt more help first. And that was kind of my. Our initial motion of getting the word out because I think we genuinely were seen as help first. Like, and it wasn't just anything technology that push press could solve. It was anything, anything. Like, I wanted build a founder's plan at my gym. How should I do it? Here's how we did it, you know, and I would say how I did it at my gym. So just establishing that credibility in the community as a fellow gym owner, but somebody who can also help in technological ways.
- [20:00]
Omar Khan
And then that led to people, some of those people checking out push press, signing up. What was the product actually like? Like, were you finding that once, you know, the time that you guys had spent those two or three years building the product, how much of it did you feel you got?
- [20:20]
Dan Waymura
Right?
- [20:21]
Omar Khan
That customers were actually able to run their business with it and weren't coming back and saying, you know, I can't do this or that, or they were churning. Like, how well did that first version do?
- [20:35]
Dan Waymura
I think for. Let me, let me start by saying this gym management software, probably like a lot of other vertical management vertical softwares, it's a vertical software, but it's very horizontal. Meaning, like part of our original release, we had to build waivers, which was basically DocuSign, but we had to build a really light version as a feature. We had to build calendaring and scheduling which was basically acuity. But we had to. You know, it's like we had to build a lot of stuff, very lightweight across the whole domain of running a gym. So I think honestly, it landed pretty well and we did pretty well with our first launch. But as it's race, because as gym owners become better business owners, they are demanding more functionality as business trends change. When we first launched, there wasn't a concept of workout tracking. Like, people actually like tracking their workouts and seeing their progress and looking at charts, like the customers of gyms that hit the scene a couple hours, a couple of years after we launched. So we had to build that. Like, they're just constant, never end. Like, to this day, I still feel like we have 20 years of product to build. This is never ending.
- [21:39]
Omar Khan
Were most of the customers coming through this Facebook group?
- [21:42]
Dan Waymura
We'll call it word of mouth. Yeah. So originally it was basically me and my other co founder helping first. And then one of the. One of the tenants that we had early on was. And it was kind of spelled out as clearly as customer support requests are answered within five minutes. So a frustration of mine as a gym owner was anytime I use any software system, I'm like, hey, how do you do this thing? And I had a customer standing next to me who wanted to join the gym, and they didn't get back to me for three days because that was like the common response time. I'm like, well, thanks. Not only did it not help me in the moment, but when they did get back to me, I'm like, well, thanks a lot. Because three days ago, this would have helped me, but I don't know why you're even answering me now. So we kind of had this motto of customer support in five minutes. And what we found was there's actually two interesting findings. The customer support one's one. So in the customer support one, we found that people were so unaccustomed to anyone getting back to them in any kind of real time without it being a robot or a telephone tree, that they were like, oh, whoa, what? You're actually helping me or talking to me? And they actually began to lean on us and like, hey, I can't figure out how to make my TV work. Like, stuff that wasn't even push press. And we would help them to. This date, one of our most highly seoed and trafficked help docs is how to restart your fire stick. Your Amazon fire stick, which has nothing to do with push press, but it gets like 100,000 hits a month or something. So that turned into word of mouth. The other crazy thing is what we found was when we release bugs, if they wrote in and we're like, and this was very nimble, like I would get a, I would talk to somebody and I would just fix it, right? Because I could do that. And it was just this crazy. Things would be like, yo, your system's broke. And I'm like, tell me about it. And they're like, okay, I just pushed the fix. Does it work? And they're like, oh my God, it works. Like, that's amazing. Like, we actually got more props for fixing bugs than just releasing good code. So like later on it became a joke of like, oh, I did that on purpose so I could fix it for people. But that those two things turned into a lot of word of mouth out in the, in the population because they're like, dude, they listen to you, they're there to help you. They fix their bugs, you know, and it turned into this word of mouth cycle that I think really helped us early on.
- [23:39]
Omar Khan
Is that something that like, do you think that was because of your experiences as a gym owner? Like if you hadn't had that experience would, do you think maybe you guys would have just said, well, let's just do what everybody else does?
- [23:51]
Dan Waymura
Yes, yes, exactly. I think most of our competition at the time were not built by gym owners, so it was easy for us to say like, well, I don't know why they do that. That doesn't make any sense. Because as a gym owner I would expect this. And that gave us that early wedge. And I think that wedge was playable from like 2010 to 2015. Now it's like you see coffee shop software being written by coffee shop people, like this is this, this kind of a thing happened across every vertical in the last like 10 years. But yeah, early on it was like people who were so disconnected from the space that they had no idea how to even interact with their own customers. Right.
- [24:26]
Omar Khan
What's the downside of doing what you did? Like, you know, if you over optimize for, for support or being super responsive, maybe you need to hire more people. But I just wonder why more startups don't focus on.
- [24:46]
Dan Waymura
So I'll answer the first question. I have add so I might forget the second question. But the two questions were what are the downsides and why don't more people do that. So the downside, I'll tell you explicitly, is our company is founded on empathy, customer empathy. And everything has a double edged sword. So like in the later years it turned into like, oh my God, this one. Clients writing in, they have this problem with this one abstract, unique thing that only they do. And it'll be like, oh, everyone stop what you're doing and let's fix that one thing. And we had to change our culture to be like, well, does it really impact like 100 people or just one? We still have remnants of that today where it's like the smallest problem that's that every pain that's felt by a customer, once it comes into our. My team is like magnified because they're like, oh, a customer's feeling pain, we all have to just stop and talk about it, you know, which I'd rather, I'd rather err on that side of things than not. But it's not really scalable and it also doesn't help you grow in the right directions when you're trying to do focus later on, which is where we are now. Why don't other people do it? Oh, I remembered that's gives me props. Other people don't do it, I think because they're not connected to the industry so they don't really understand. You know, it's like if I was a, you know, a Stanford Business school graduate and I come out and I'm like, oh, the biggest opportunities in logistics, shipping software, I'm just going to build logistics shipping software. But I don't really know except for the interviews I do and stuff. Like, I don't really feel the pain that the customer feels inherently, like in my gut, you know, and to this day it's like, I think we can make decisions on a gut call that are more than 50% right. I would even say like 70% right. Just because we've sat in the seat of the gym owner. Whereas if I didn't, it would be like, you're very blind to a lot of things and you just don't know all of the nuance and details of what a gym owner is thinking, feeling, seeing, etc.
- [26:33]
Omar Khan
Yeah, I think in many ways if you're a, you're an early stage founder. Yeah, it's hard. Yeah, it's going to take up more of your time, but just going. In fact, I would say when I think about a lot of the founders who've been on this show and have done, have done well in terms of building multiple seven figure, eight figure business, a lot of times you go back to those early days and a lot of them were going the extra mile to help customers and it wasn't, I don't know, some kind of Strategy at the time, it was just like, they just wanted to help. And the more they did that, the more people talk about you, the more people are like. Because like we were talking earlier, the bar is so, so low.
- [27:23]
Dan Waymura
Yeah, it's like you shock people when you actually are there to help them. I would get on sales calls and say, like, oh, we're not the right software for you because we don't do X, Y and Z yet. And people would be like, what? What? Like you're telling me the truth. This is insane. Like, I actually want to use you. And I'm like, not yet. You're gonna have to wait. And then I would get like five referrals from them. You know, it's just like, it's crazy to me because the equation for business is so simple. It's like I'll defer to like a couple things. Like, what is the. What is the definition of money? Money is the transfer of value in a deferred state. Like, I give you some value, you give me value back, but it's like something I can, I can hold onto and use later. Right. That's what money is. How do you, how do you earn money? You give value to customers, like just. It's just that simple. And if the closer you get to the customer, the more you understand the customer, the more value you can focus on providing them. This is the input versus output thing. The money comes, the money is the output. Right. But most people are just focused on the money, so they're, they're like not worrying about. How do you actually deploy business strategy to earn the right to have money?
- [28:26]
Omar Khan
That's a good way to think about it. Okay, so those first few years, you're getting customers, most of them coming through word of mouth, but you're still seemingly far away from that first million we talked about. You get to this point where you're saying to your co founders, look, I might just go and run the gym business. What happened after that one? Why did you continue with push press? And then did something happen that accelerated your. You hitting the seven figure mark or.
- [29:04]
Dan Waymura
Super good question. So I don't know where or why this happened because I've never been a fan of school. But sometime around that time, I realized that there was so much stuff we didn't know that we had to get help from people who have been there. Now I'm on a never ending quest. Like, I'm always trying to position myself around people who have been way farther than me. So I can get just nuggets of like What I know is around that next corner today. So it's not, you know, so you're not like scratching for it in the dark, you know.
- [29:30]
Omar Khan
Yeah, it's like that expression like, you know, if you want to be good at tennis, like, I guess play someone who's going to kick your all the time. Right. It's like that's how you're going to get good.
- [29:39]
Dan Waymura
Yeah. Yeah.
- [29:40]
Omar Khan
Okay, great. So you get to the seven figure mark. The business, you're starting to get traction. You've got a little bit more focus on this business. Let's talk about the, the partnerships. At what point did they come into play where you started looking at the competition and saying, look, there's competitors now, where we have a bunch of gaps in terms of what we need to deliver. And then you started looking at potential partnerships.
- [30:11]
Dan Waymura
Yeah. So what happened was, and I mentioned this earlier, is as we were going through our journey, the business acumen of the gyms was widening. So they went from just wanting software to bill people to also wanting software to do workout publishing and tracking. And you know, like, that's kind of like value delivery to the clients. And also there's another segment of basically like website lead nurturing customer life cycle management. So in a gym specifically, it's like, oh, you've been at the gym for nine, nine months. I want to send an automation to you that's like recognizing the fact you've been here for nine months or maybe the first 30 days. It's like, here's the rules, here's the etiquette, here's some recipes. Right. Like there's a, a cadence, right. To joining a gym and going through your life cycle with the gym. Those two big trends popped up after we had launched, but there was no way we were gonna be able to build either of those because they were so hefty. The workout publishing and tracks. An interesting story because we acquired a company. I have a little backstory to tell about. This is a fun one. There was another company that was competing with us and I used to. And he used to ask questions all the time on Facebook in a SaaS operators group. And I used to answer all his questions like, how do you do this? How do this? And he was literally trying to compete with us.
- [31:21]
Omar Khan
Did you know that when you were answering all his questions?
- [31:23]
Dan Waymura
Yep, yep. And he's like, he, and he messaged me, he's like, you know, I'm trying to compete with you. Why are you answering all my questions? And I'm like, because what you're Trying to do is so hard. You don't realize how hard what you're trying to do is. I could tell you everything you need to know, and you're probably going to fail. You know, like, it's all about execution, and it's really hard. Right. And so anyways, because of that, I built a little bit of relationship with him. And then the time he ended up partnering with someone who was close with us for business advice. And I told that person, like, hey, we're looking to buy a workout tracking thing. And he's like, what if we gut. He's like, this company, his name is Mike. Mike doesn't really want to compete with you anymore. He realizes it is hard. He just wants to focus on workout tracking. What if you guys buy him? Like, what if. And because I had created that relationship by helping him and working with him early, like, the trust was already there and the deal was much easier to put together. So it's just. That was a really interesting story, right, of how that came together.
- [32:14]
Omar Khan
Are you. Are you one of those people who believes in karma? Like, just going out and doing, like, good things and coming back?
- [32:20]
Dan Waymura
Yeah, like, I firmly believe, like, and it goes to the input, output and, like, how you earn money. It's like, if you just do the right things. And a lot of this comes from my relationship with drugs and my recovery process. It's like when I was going through recovery, I was very cynical. I'm like, I don't know how anyone can get to this point just by doing the right thing every day. This is stupid. Because we would go to speaker meetings and they'd be like, oh, just do the right thing every day. And, like, in 10 years, see where your life goes. And da, da, da. I'll tell you this story real quick. And like, there was a guy on the stage, he was worth 10 million or something. He was talking about it, and his basic message was, just wake up every day, do the right thing, and one day you'll be worth $10 million. And I saw, like, I went to the bathroom after he went in the urinal next to me, and I'm like, it's not true. Tell me it's not true. Like, it can't be true. And he's like, it absolutely is. And he was so positive about it. It just stuck with me that I do believe that, like, as long as you know where you want to go and you're doing the right things and treating people right and being a. A good human being about it, the universe comes back to you. And I think I experienced the opposite boomerang. I was doing the wrong things, I was hanging out with the wrong people, blah, blah, and the universe got me. I do believe that 100%.
- [33:22]
Omar Khan
And then you ended up raising a series A, which is about $11 million.
- [33:28]
Dan Waymura
We raise a seed first, which I have another interesting story to tell about that one for founders. So the guy who. Who or the company that, that funded our seed, I had pitched him five times. First time, you know, was like, not interested. Second time was kind of a not interested. Third time was like, hey, when you get to 10,000 mrr, come back, you've probably reached escape Velocity. We'll talk. Then right when we hit 10,000, I called him, he's like, when you hit 100,000, MRI come back, you've probably hit a. He gave me the same line, like, I think he forgot, right? Like when you hit a hundred grand come back, you probably hit escape Velocity. Came back when he hit a hundred grand and he's like, no, not interested. And then when he found out from other people that we were raising kind of a friends and family around and some people he knew were invested in and bought into it, then he called and he's like, okay, let's have some serious talks now. But it was that perseverance of like, I don't know how many times I pitched him and got told no and only for that relationship to have been built so that when the time was right, he came back and funded the seed.
- [34:29]
Omar Khan
So what was it overall? It was like eight years of trying to raise funding.
- [34:35]
Dan Waymura
Yeah. Yeah. So the first. I mean, all three of our co founders have been CEO at some point. All three of us have pitched, all three of us have failed. Now that I've gone through the whole process, I realized, like, there is a very clear way of pitching that works which we did not possess early on. So in the beginning, I had a big chip on my shoulder thinking that VCs were stupid and this, this and this. But I realize more it's now it was more us. Like we didn't know how to approach the pitch. We didn't come off with the right. We didn't have the right information. We didn't have the right deck. We didn't. We weren't excited enough. You know, like some. Some VCs were like, we don't sense the excitement in you. And I'm like, we are so excited. What do you mean? But it's just like how you deliver the actual pitch matters. So, yeah, eight years, probably a good six of them literally laughed out of rooms like, yeah, not interested, don't waste our time again. You know, that kind of stuff. It was pretty brutal in the beginning.
- [35:23]
Omar Khan
And then when you raised your Series A, what was the valuation?
- [35:27]
Dan Waymura
I think it was 62 post. So it would have been like 52, 51 pre.
- [35:33]
Omar Khan
So you beat the 10 million valuation that the guy told you you'd get to, right?
- [35:40]
Dan Waymura
Yeah. Yes, we did. And that's the other thing I would say to founders is like, as I went through this journey and as I've talked to other founders, VCs can never understand the TAM. In fact, they thought Airbnb's TAM was like one tenth of what it is today. You know, like nobody understands the TAM until you've built the business and you start to understand what the customers want. Like, I already know and I don't have a way to convince any VC at this point, but I already know our TAM is going to be 10 times bigger than anyone's even thinking right now. Because I know how to approach these customers in a way that provides so much value to them. It's going to unlock. Again, think of values. The money is a reciprocation of value. Like when I provide this much value, the money will come.
- [36:18]
Omar Khan
Yeah. I want to talk a little bit about kind of growth and data and obviously with running a SaaS business, there's a whole bunch of metrics and data that's super important. And when you and I were chatting, you told me, you know, we're still figuring a lot of that stuff out. We still don't really feel on top of the data piece. And in many ways, a lot of the reasons we've been able to grow and get to where we are in terms of an eight figure business, it's been driven by gut more than by data. So just, can you, can you just tell me about that? Like how, how did that happen? And, and, and like what are some of the things that you've been, you've been dealing with?
- [36:59]
Dan Waymura
Yeah, I mean a lot of this is symptomatic of as you're, if you're a first time founder and you're growing, it's really hard to attract people who have really been there, done that, like really seasoned people who know exactly where you need to get to to hit certain levels of the business. So you're always kind of like adding people to the company as you can who are the right fit at that time. But very rarely are they like, oh yeah, I've been a series C CFO at Seed, right? Just, it just is really hard to do. So if you're in that boat, it's totally normal, but you're just blind. Like you don't know. By the time we become a series B, Series C company, we're going to need to know not only like our customer acquisition costs, but by channel and by ICP type. Like we're gonna have to be able to slice this data four different ways and be able to look at charts, understand how a plan, you know, attaches to the actuals and week over week, not month over month, day over day. Like there's just so many ways that the data pivots as you grow in order to make good decisions and have, I guess, a proactive approach to looking at data that until you get there, you don't know. And we didn't know until we got there. So it is something. We're kind of backfilling now and now we are at the revenue levels and we have the cash in the bank to hire the people who have had the previous experience. But it's, it is, it's a constant battle you're going to have growing a business where like you don't. And this is why I say I try to talk to people who have seen around the corner for me, because you will hit many times where you're just like, I didn't even see, I didn't even realize I needed to know this thing at this point until I was right here at this moment. And you need as much forewarning as you can get as you're like going down the path. Data was one of those, I think.
- [38:42]
Omar Khan
When it comes to data. Yeah, I see founders who maybe rely on gut maybe more than they say. But I also see a lot of founders who kind of over optimize. Like they try to almost want to track everything, which probably isn't a good use of their time either. So if you were going back in time and giving yourself advice in those early days in terms of like, okay, you don't know what you don't know, but you've got to do something. But you don't want to spend all your time just trying to track a whole bunch of metrics that are kind of ultimately meaningless. How do you find the balance?
- [39:28]
Dan Waymura
Yeah, that's super good observation and a good question. I think like the difference is when you're kind of going from zero through series A and into series A, this has to transition probably around there. You can do a lot of things just with output metrics because like you're Pivoting so fast. Like, you're able to run through walls. You don't have, like, you know, teams of 30 engineers working on something for next year right now. Like, you know, like, you're working in the now, but as you get bigger, you start working in quarters and years a little bit more. Like, I'm already, you know, like, I'm thinking about 2026 while I'm trying to get my team right now to plan the roadmap for 2025. And I have to have 2026 laid out so they can have 2025 directionally going in the direction of 2026. So you see how, like, you start to expand your time once you do that. Like, you've got to be able to think a little bit more in terms of data, in terms, you know, like where we need to go, what type of growth trajectors we need, stuff like that. So in the beginning, though, I think it would be overkill to track too much. And I think in the beginning, you can probably get away with your standard output metrics, which would be, you know, your cac, your ARR, your nrr, ARR, Growth, you know, just some of the basic stuff that track how you run your business. But as you become more and more sophisticated, I think you need. You have to start thinking about inputs. Because it's really the inputs give you the levers to drive the goals and the plan that you're trying to achieve. And if you're only thinking about the outputs, you're not really giving your team the ability to change the output. Change the direction of the output.
- [41:02]
Omar Khan
Yeah, no, that's good advice. All right, I think we should wrap up. Let's get on to the lightning round. I'm going to ask you seven quick fire questions. Just try to answer them as quickly as you can. You ready?
- [41:16]
Dan Waymura
Okay.
- [41:17]
Omar Khan
All right. What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?
- [41:21]
Dan Waymura
I go back to the inputs and outputs things and how that ties back to customer value. It is a cornerstone of everything. Yeah.
- [41:28]
Omar Khan
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
- [41:30]
Dan Waymura
For me, it was the Naval on the Mac, Naval in the Mac, or the how to Get Rich Without Being Lucky podcast series. Just like every single chapter or tweet.
- [41:40]
Omar Khan
Is a gem, what's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
- [41:46]
Dan Waymura
It's the combination of curiosity and relentlessness.
- [41:50]
Omar Khan
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
- [41:55]
Dan Waymura
Having an ea?
- [41:57]
Omar Khan
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time.
- [42:01]
Dan Waymura
I want to reinvent wineries.
- [42:03]
Omar Khan
Interesting. What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
- [42:10]
Dan Waymura
I was in Glee club and I was a cheerleader in high school.
- [42:13]
Omar Khan
I would never have guessed that. And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
- [42:19]
Dan Waymura
Besides my family and my dog, I would say it is actually getting into the gym and lifting some weights.
- [42:24]
Omar Khan
Cool. That's quite a relevant and kind of a positive thing to do.
- [42:32]
Dan Waymura
Shocker, huh?
- [42:33]
Omar Khan
Yeah, exactly. And you get to meet all your customers as well, probably.
- [42:37]
Dan Waymura
Yes, that's the cool thing.
- [42:38]
Omar Khan
All right, great. Dan, thank you so much for joining me. It's been a pleasure. Just love to have a chance to share your story and the ups and downs of building this business. Congratulations on what you've achieved so far. It feels like you guys have still got some big, ambitious plans ahead of you and hopefully lots of opportunities that you're going to tap into. If folks want to check out Push Press, they can go to pushpress.com and if people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
- [43:14]
Dan Waymura
I think the easiest way. PushPress.com Dan has kind of a launch off to all my. All of my contact ability, I guess, if you will.
- [43:23]
Omar Khan
Okay, perfect. We'll include a link to that in the show notes as well. Great. Thanks, man. It's been a pleasure and I wish you and the team the best of success.
- [43:31]
Dan Waymura
Thank you so much. It was super fun. Thanks.
- [43:34]
Omar Khan
My pleasure. Cheers.
- [43:35]
Phil
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- [44:08]
Omar Khan
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