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The SaaS Podcast - Growing Profitable AI SaaS & AI Agents
427: TeamGantt: Bootstrapping a 7-Figure SaaS with Focus and SEO - with Nathan Gilmore
00:59:06
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- [00:00]
Nathan Gilmour
Foreign.
- [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.
- [00:25]
John
In this episode I talk to Nathan Gilmour, the co founder of TeamGantt, a software platform that helps teams visualize and manage projects using Gantt charts. In 2009, while working as software developers at a commercial roofing company, Nathan and John needed a better way to share project timelines with their team. They were frustrated by having to export PDFs every time they made changes and finding no good web based solutions, they decided to build their own. With full time jobs and families to support, they could only dedicate about four hours every Saturday morning to their side project, but they made each hour and week count. Within six months they had built a basic version ready for testing. They created a simple landing page and used a hundred dollar Google Ads coupon to test interest and it didn't take long for people around the world to start signing up for their wait list. A year later they launched their paid plans and their first customer was a video company in California that signed up for their $29 a month plan. Growth was slow but steady as their SEO efforts started to kick in. A new customer every few days became one every day. When they were making almost 3k in monthly recurring revenue, the co founders made the leap to working full time on their business and kept grinding away and eventually their patience paid off. By 2012 they hit 10k in MRR and two years later reached their first million in annual recurring revenue. Today TeamGantt serves 6,000 customers across 180 countries, including Fortune 500. They've grown to 21 people and generate seven figures in ARR, all while remaining completely bootstrapped. In this episode you learn how working just four hours a week forced Nathan and John to discover an unconventional approach to building a SaaS product. Why focusing on one core feature instead of building a full project management suite help them compete with larger competitors? How they grew to seven figures through SEO alone and what made them finally narrow their focus after 14 years. We talk about what happened when both founders were managing 12 direct reports each and why they had to abandon their flat organizational structure and why choosing to focus on the construction industry after 14 years became a game changing decision for their growth.
- [02:37]
Omar Khan
So I hope you enjoy it. I talk to a lot of founders who have the same challenge. They've got an amazing product idea but need a technical team to build or Scale it. If you're looking to develop a B2B SaaS product, but don't want to hire and manage an in house team, listen up. Gearhart is a product development studio that handles the entire technical side of building your software. They've built over 70 successful products, including SmartSuite. Who's founder trusted Gearhart after his $200 million exit to help build his next big venture. Some of Gearhart's customers have gone through YC and their portfolio companies have won over 10 startup competitions. Until the end of March, they're offering our listeners free strategy sessions with their leadership team. Just visit Gearheart IO to book your session. That's Gearheart IO. Nathan, welcome to the show.
- [03:27]
Nathan Gilmour
Thank you. I'm excited to be here.
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Omar Khan
My pleasure. Do you have a favorite quote? Something that inspires or motivates you?
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Nathan Gilmour
Yeah, there's one I came across recently actually. It's the less you know, the more you think you know, the more you know, the more you realize how little you know.
- [03:43]
Omar Khan
Uh, I can relate to that.
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Nathan Gilmour
Yeah.
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Omar Khan
Isn't that what they call the, the, the Dunning Kruger effect or something?
- [03:50]
Nathan Gilmour
Yes, yes. I, I just feel like it, it encourages learning and it, it always happens, you know, you start to feel comfortable and then as you dig in you start learning something, a whole new world is opened up about some new skill you need to learn or. And then you go, oh my gosh, I actually don't know much about this and it can be humbling. So.
- [04:07]
Omar Khan
Yeah. So tell us about TeamGantt. What does the product do, who's it for, and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?
- [04:16]
Nathan Gilmour
Yeah, sure. So TeamGantt is easy scheduling for teams. So it's all about Gantt charts. And if you're not familiar with Gantt charts, it's basically a timeline view of a project and it just helps people visualize it gets it out of your head when you have a whole bunch of steps, a bunch of tasks when they need to be done, and then you can easily communicate that to everybody else involved in the project. And ultimately it just helps bring calm and clarity to teams and it helps them get their projects finished on time.
- [04:44]
Omar Khan
I remember using Microsoft Project back in the day with the Gantt charts. But unfortunately I ended up spending more time in the app than actually managing projects. So I think things have changed quite a bit since then.
- [04:58]
Nathan Gilmour
Yeah, that is funny. So that's really the problem we wanted to solve is a lot of tools were complicated and hard to use, so we focused on simplicity and we Also focused on taking it online to the cloud and it's been a game changer. And it's funny, there's even still today people that still use Microsoft Project and when we expose them to TeamGantt, they go, oh my goodness, didn't know how much things have changed and they're very excited about it.
- [05:22]
Omar Khan
Give us a sense of the size of the business. Where are you in terms of revenue, customers, size of team?
- [05:28]
Nathan Gilmour
Yeah, so we're, we've got about 6,000 customers, about 21 employees. As far as revenue, we're well into the seven figures. We're across 180 different countries and then we actually have a lot of teams even from Fortune 500 companies using US as well.
- [05:47]
Omar Khan
And you are bootstrapped.
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Nathan Gilmour
We are 100% bootstrapped. Yeah.
- [05:54]
Omar Khan
Right. So let's start the story back, I guess around 2009, which is when you and your co founder John came up with the idea of building a product. What were you guys doing at the time and how did this idea come about?
- [06:13]
Nathan Gilmour
Yeah, good question. So at the time we were both working for large commercial roofing company. It was actually John's family's roofing company and his brother was, was very tech savvy. He wanted more technology in the company. So I had left, I was at the time I was working at TD Ameritrade. I had gone to the roofing company, I was building software there. But then I went over the roofing company, I was building software for them along with John. And while we were creating the software we realized we needed a better way to be able to show everybody how long it was going to take to do they show ownership and everyone in the company this how long it's going to take us to build each module. And so we were looking around and we couldn't find anything web based, we couldn't find anything on the web because we were always exporting a PDF and then things would change. You'd have to export another PDF and it just felt ridiculous really. There's got to be a web based version of this. There wasn't. So that's how the idea got started.
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Omar Khan
Cool. Okay. So initially it was just for John's brother's business.
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Nathan Gilmour
It was, it was something that we found a need for in the business. But we decided, hey, we need this. There might be other people that need this too. So it was a business idea from the beginning. We started working Saturday mornings. So John would come over my house, we had a, you know, down the townhouse basement. We would just spend Saturday mornings. And we started working on it slowly but surely. And we're taking, we took it from there.
- [07:45]
Omar Khan
One of the interesting things about your story was that you guys were only working about four hours a week on this. And my, my immediate reaction was, oh my God, it's like, how can you get anything done in just four hours a week? Why, why did you have that constraint? And you know, what sort of progress were you guys, were you able to make in the first year?
- [08:14]
Nathan Gilmour
So the reason we had the constraint was just because we did have other obligations in life. So we had our full time jobs Monday through Friday. Then in the evenings it's, you know, it's family time. Saturdays at the time we had, so my wife was doing hair, so she would work on Saturdays. And I used to golf on Saturdays. So I had to stop golfing. I had to give up golf to do this. So I stopped golfing. So that gave me some time that, you know, there was four hours right there I could apply to it. And then John was, at the time, the church we were going to, his father was actually pastor there and they're building a new building. So John was involved in that. So in the afternoons he would have to go do that. I also had a baby that year, so I was taking care of the baby. So, you know, so we had a lot going on in life. And it was like four hours was kind of all we could kind of sustain and do.
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Omar Khan
Well, actually, when you think, when you describe all of that stuff, it's like four hours actually sounds like a lot now, right, to take out of that time.
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Nathan Gilmour
Yeah, that's right.
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Omar Khan
Okay, so four hours a week, not a huge amount of time. How long? Well, first of all, how did, how did you spend that time? Was it just all about building the product? Did you, did you sort of focus initially on just that one business? Or were you already thinking about, you know, other potential customers to go and talk to and validate the idea? Or was it just we sort of know enough about this one business, we know what the problems are and we're just going to focus on just building a product for that.
- [09:47]
Nathan Gilmour
Yeah, so we, what we did is we always tried to look at each, each Saturday morning we go, what's the most important thing we got to do today? And we try and get that done. And it was important to us in the early days to kind of do both. Start validating the idea, start getting the word out, but also start building it. So some, some Saturdays, you know, might be a little bit more on one or the other, you know, one of the first things we probably did was probably before we really even did too much working on the actual products was we. And this, we didn't spend much time on it. We built a landing page, like ugly, quick, dirty, hey, this is what we're doing. If you're interested, give us your email address, right? So that was like probably one Saturday morning. We were just like, let's get that up. So we did that and then we started working on it, you know, and then we'd focused on the product and we're like, all right, well how do we get the word out about this landing page? So I think like one Saturday morning because, because Google knew we had like incorporated new business, they sent us a hundred dollar Google AdWord coupon that we could use. So we're like, all right, let's try this out one day. So we, we used that, signed up for Google AdWords and spent a hundred bucks on ads to this landing page. And we actually had multiple people put their email address in. And that was like the first, that happened quick, maybe within the first month. And that was exciting. We're like, okay. People we don't know from different parts of the world all said, hey, they're interested in this. So that gave us enough energy to go, all right, let's keep putting some more Saturdays into this.
- [11:19]
Omar Khan
And how long did it take you to, to build the first version of the product that you could get out there in the hands of customers?
- [11:29]
Nathan Gilmour
Probably about six months. Six months was to the point where we had a beta product. Not something we were happy with, you know, not something we were like. Like, I don't even, might not even had drag and drop at the time, you know, which is important, but you know, it was something that, hey, someone could go in and create a Gantt chart. Not the prettiest thing, not the easiest thing to use, but, you know, probably about six months is I think when we started getting some, some beta users using it.
- [11:55]
Omar Khan
Okay, so here's what I see with a lot of founders at that point, you have the ones who take path A, which is what you guys did, which is not happy with this, hasn't got a bunch of features, but we need to get it out there, get some beta users, get some feedback, figure out how to make it better. Then you have the founders who take sort of path B, which is, there's no way I'm going to put this in front of people. It could destroy my credibility if it doesn't work perfectly and have all the features they Expect they're never going to give me another shot. And so they continue down the development path, building more and more. In some cases, that may be justified because the type of the industry or the nature of whatever the product does and so on. But you, on the one hand, admitting I wasn't happy with it. It didn't have a whole bunch of stuff that we needed to have in there. It was pretty basic. But what drove you to still get that out there in front of potential customers?
- [13:02]
Nathan Gilmour
We wanted validation. Yeah. We wanted to hear from people, and we wanted to hear a couple of things. Wanted to hear one like, hey, yeah, you guys are on something. Maybe it's not quite there yet, but we're willing. We wanted to see if people were even willing to try it. Is anyone even willing to spend the time to log in and add a task, you know, like, can we even get that far? Right? And if we can, and they hate it, all right, good. We made progress. At least somebody showed they wanted to try it, right? And then when we. When, however far they get, if they get stuck, they go, well, it doesn't do this. Okay, well, great. Boom. That's what we need to work on next. Right? Because when you're building a product, you can go 10,000 different ways, right? So many different features and different things to work on. The sooner you can talk with customers, the sooner you can get feedback from them, the sooner you can learn, the more you know, and the more you can prioritize smartly, especially when you only have a few hours a week. Prioritization and working on the right thing is incredibly important.
- [14:05]
Omar Khan
So who were the customers, the beta users? Were they all from a, you know, a specific industry or were they from just, like, all over the place? And secondly, what were the main takeaways or learnings you got by letting them use the product after six months?
- [14:24]
Nathan Gilmour
They were from. They were from all different industries. Because it's interesting, like, Gantt charts are a lot like Excel sheets in terms of, like, kind of everybody can use them. Anybody that has a project, anybody has a deadline, anybody has a timeline, can use. Can use the Gantt chart and benefit from it. So we, and we still, to this day, we get people from every industry wanting to use it. So that was always interesting, too. It was fun to talk to different people and hear how they're using it. And then we would learn specific things. Like, one of the reasons we created TeamGantt was because we hated PDFs and we hated the idea of having to print them out. Well, people would tell Us, they're like, this is great, but how do I get a PDF? We're like, are you kidding me? You seriously want a PDF? And that was actually really important to them. To some people, not to everybody, but some people, that was important. So we said, all right, well, we're going to have to build that. So we did. That was a feature. We ended up building that. We didn't want it, we didn't think it was important, but enough people told us it was. So we said, okay, we'll build that.
- [15:20]
Omar Khan
That's interesting. It's like, wait a minute, we're trying to build something that doesn't do that, Right? We've got something better for you.
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Nathan Gilmour
Exactly, exactly.
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Omar Khan
In hindsight, was that the right thing to do?
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Nathan Gilmour
It was because, you know, there were use cases where it makes sense. So for instance, people are saying, well, hey, we need to do a client proposal and we need to be able to put the PDF in with the proposal. It's like, okay, I get it. That makes sense. We weren't doing that, we weren't doing proposals, you know, but they also still wanted the web based collaboration. There's a lot of benefits to being on the cloud. So they kind of wanted the best of both worlds. And it was, it was. I'm glad we learned about that and glad we did that.
- [15:55]
Omar Khan
Were all these beta users using the product for free or were you charging them?
- [16:00]
Nathan Gilmour
Yeah, we didn't charge them. No, we set free. Like we wanted feedback, we wanted to see people actually use it, know they were getting value out of it. So we did make that free. And that can be controversial. Some people wouldn't do that, some people would. But for us it was, we were fine. We didn't really think it was ready to be a paid product and we were okay with that.
- [16:20]
Omar Khan
And then how long did it take to get the product to a point where you started charging for it?
- [16:27]
Nathan Gilmour
So then it was probably about another six months, six to eight months or so after that when it was in beta that we've, you know, got enough things worked out, you know, got enough people saying, yeah, this is good, we're liking it, using it on a regular basis, that we said, okay, we think it's time to put it behind a paywall and only let people use it if it's, if they pay for it. And then that was the next big moment. Well, now we know people use it, but will they pay? And that was the big next question.
- [16:58]
Omar Khan
Were you guys still working the four hours?
- [17:01]
Nathan Gilmour
We were, yeah, we were still working the four Hours. Yep. We still had our day jobs.
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Omar Khan
So the first. This is the first 12 to 14 months you've been doing four hours a week on the Saturday mornings, building the product, getting the beta users, improving it, and eventually getting out to launch and you start charging for it. How did you get those initial customers? Had you built up a bigger email list? What had you been doing in the last year that sort of prepared you for this launch?
- [17:35]
Nathan Gilmour
So that's a really good question. That's important. A lot of people will sometimes think you don't need to market something until you maybe you're figured out what you're going to sell for sure. But I like the approach of start marketing day one, which is why we did that, so that when we had something, we were ready to sell. Now we had an. We had a group of people. So we had started doing SEO. Along the way, as we were building the product, we were also doing some SEO and we had the landing page up and we had actually gotten to the point where we had 1300 people on an email list that we could then email and say, hey, here it is, it's launched, it's ready, check it out.
- [18:12]
Omar Khan
Did the vast majority of those people come from just organic search? They just would. Would find something and then end up joining the email list?
- [18:22]
Nathan Gilmour
Yeah, they did. I was. It was pretty straightforward. I mean, we did. We took some basic SEO strategies at the time and just built up some traffic. And so then by that time when we launched, we had the email list of everybody from the last year that it signed up. But then we also had people signing up every day saying they were interested. So we also had kind of a continual funnel built up there, which was great.
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Omar Khan
And so how long did it take to get those first 10 customers?
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Nathan Gilmour
So I remember when we launched, we set it out and it was like, all right, starting today, people can only use it if they pay. And we just, we were watching, we had something, I guess it was on our phones at the time where we could check and just see. And so we just like refresh it during the day to anybody buy. To anybody buy. And finally later that day, one person we saw bought and they bought our mid plan. We had like a $10 plan, a $29 plan and a $99 plan, something like that. And they bought the $29 plan. It was a video company out in California. They wanted to manage their video projects. And, you know, so I think we probably high fived and we're like, all right, awesome. We're in business. We have a First customer, somebody we don't know found this, liked it, Bo bought it. So. So then it was like, you know, the next day we're checking anybody else buy. And I can't remember the exact pacing, but it was something along the lines of like it was every couple days we would get a new person buy. And then it turned into like, you know, and it was maybe that way for maybe a month. Then it turned into we were getting about one person a day buying, you know, and then it turned into about two people a day buying. And it just slowly kept building up.
- [20:02]
Omar Khan
Do you think that was largely because of the SEO work that you had done over the last year?
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Nathan Gilmour
Yeah, the SEO work played a big role.
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Omar Khan
Yeah. So maybe just break that down for us. I mean, obviously SEO keeps evolving and changing and what you did back then probably wouldn't work today, but help us understand what you were doing to try and build that organic traffic.
- [20:26]
Nathan Gilmour
So we had an advantage for sure back then in that we were pretty much the only online Gantt chart. So we took the strategy of thinking about, okay, what are we, what are people going to be searching for? So what are those keywords? We looked at, like, we would analyze what are people actually searching for? We'd look at what's their competition for. So we'd think about things like, okay, so we're. You could look at us as project management. You could look at as project management software. You could look at us as Gantt Chart software, online Gantt Chart software. So we went through these different keywords and ultimately we landed on, well, some things like project management software was too broad. Like we couldn't. There's too much competition, so we couldn't do that one, you know, but maybe Gantt Chart software or maybe online Gantt Chart software. So we kind of honed in on those. That's like, all right, you know, we don't have much competition for that, that. But there are people searching for it. So we then started building content around those keywords. And yeah, back then especially, we just didn't have a whole lot of competition, so it was pretty easy to move up in the ranks.
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Omar Khan
I mean, what you just said there, that kind of struck me that for a lot of full blown project management tools, having a Gantt Chart is like a feature. And what you guys did was you took that one thing and said, we're just going to go all in on this thing because if we can do this really well and make it easy and simple, there are a lot of people who could get value from this and maybe they don't necessarily need all the bells and whistles that come with a full blown project management system. Was it sort of that intentional and thought out? And is that what helped you sort of find your place in the market? Because, yeah, I mean, maybe, you know, online things, options were a bit more limited back then, but there's never been a shortage of project management software out there.
- [22:27]
Nathan Gilmour
Yeah, there's always. There's a million of them. Right. Which is why we didn't want to go with that keyword. Because, you know, I mean, you back then, you know, Basecamp was a big player, which of course they still are today, but a bunch of them and then Asana and Monday and all these others came along. Of course you got Microsoft Project in that category. You just have so many. So yeah, we really did. Our name was even strategic.
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Omar Khan
Right.
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Nathan Gilmour
Like TeamGantt. That's also kind of defined the product from the beginning. We're Gantt Charts for Teams. So that way a lot of these other tools, Basecamp, Monday, Asana, all these others that have come out, like a lot of them were project management, but they didn't have a Gantt Chart or they're not. They don't. They didn't have one. Or if they later added one, it's more of like, okay, we added one as a feature, as a thing, but it's not their specialty. So we just always made Gantt Charts our specialty. And that's a big differentiator. And it's what we obsess over. It's what we put our time into. We focus so much on the user experience of the Gantt Chart because it's actually not an easy thing to make a Gantt Chart easy to use on the, on a browser. It's actually a pretty hard thing. So we've really focused a lot on that and that really separated us from everyone else.
- [23:41]
Omar Khan
It would be easy for a lot of people to go into this space like you guys did and say, we'll start with the Gantt Chart, but over time we'll add more stuff and we'll become this full blown project management software. And it sort of strikes me if when you even the name of the product and the website is Gantt, it kind of feels like you're locking yourself in a bit. Right. Did you have any idea of how big the opportunity was at the time? Like, what were you hoping this business might become back then?
- [24:21]
Nathan Gilmour
Yeah, that's a good question. Back then it was like, hey, can we turn this into something that pays the salaries of two people. And then it was kind of like, we feel like we can do that and probably go beyond that. And then as the business went, we kind of kept going, okay, they can be bigger and bigger and bigger. And I think it's a good point, too. What you were talking about, like, the temptation of. And we've had discussions about this. Do we switch and become like the project management software versus the Gantt Chart software? And we have added features over the years to TeamGantt that takes it beyond just the Gantt Chart to make it more collaborative and to add a lot of other things around comments and discussions and checklists and a lot of other things. It actually does make it pretty comparable to some other tools and some of our competition. But we still keep the Gantt Chart front and center, and it's still all centered around that. And that's still the thing we put the most work into and the most love into. And it's still the thing that separates us from everybody else.
- [25:25]
Omar Khan
Okay, so you launch the product, you're getting people signing up every other day, and then sort of every day, it's sort of building up. What was the. What was the reaction? Like, what, you know, how good or bad was the retention with those early customers?
- [25:45]
Nathan Gilmour
You know, it was actually pretty good, I think, when we used to model out spreadsheets at the beginning, because we got to a point too, where like, all right, when do we leave day job and go full time on this? And so modeling out these spreadsheets of, all right, if we keep adding a customer a day, what's that do? And I think there's spreadsheets. I don't think we even put churn in there. I don't even think we. We were just like, people probably won't leave, you know, and so we didn't really put that in there. And it was okay for that first year or two. Like, the spreadsheets actually held unbelievably accurate to what we had predicted for the first couple years or so. And we did get some cancellations and whatnot. But it was like, when the early days, the user base is small, the churn is like, not a big deal. It wasn't until, like, years later where that was like, okay, we got to really start caring about that.
- [26:36]
Omar Khan
Hey, have you heard of SmartSuite? They were just named 2024 SaaS Startup of the Year by Startup Grind. Well, I recently discovered that Gearhart was the development team behind their success. Gearhart is a product development studio that specializes in scaling B2B SaaS companies built by serial entrepreneurs, they understand the unique challenges of startups and can plug into your team to accelerate growth. With offices in San Francisco and London, plus a distributed team of 43 experts, they've helped build over 70 successful products. To learn more about how Gearhart can help scale your development, check them out at Gearhart IO. That's Gearhart IO. So, okay, so you've got, it looks like, you know, the SEO work is, is paying off. The work that you did with the beta users. You've, you've got to a point where you know you've got a decent enough product that when people are signing up and they're paying for it, you know, they're not, you know, leaving the next week or month or something, they're sticking around for a while. What else were you doing to, to try and grow the business? Because I mean, number one, you know, yeah, SEO is great as long as it keeps working and generating traffic, but then you're also bootstrapped. So it's not like you've got a ton of money to throw at this. And then I guess the third challenge with that is like with a horizontal product, it's like, how do you focus on like, even if you were doing anything like, I mean, I think, you know, you told me you did, you did the hundred dollars credit with AdWords, but did you do like tried paid ads and see if you could sort of accelerate growth a little bit?
- [28:25]
Nathan Gilmour
We did. We've tried paid ads on and off throughout the years. We've probably had the most success with it in the recent years, but we're still working to try and get it to the point where it's really scalable. Just because we're still not with most of the subscriptions we sell right now. We're still not a real expensive, it's not a real super high ltv. So that makes paid ads a little harder. But we are starting to niche down and create some higher end versions for a specific industry and that might be a game changer for us as we go down that road.
- [29:03]
Omar Khan
At what point did this become more than a four hour week business for you guys?
- [29:09]
Nathan Gilmour
So there was a point, it was probably, I think it was somewhere in 2011, I guess 2011 or 2012, I'm trying to remember. But we, we did decide, okay, hey, we got to the point where we saw like, hey, this is starting to turn into real money. Not like a whole, not like a salary, you know, like maybe more like a summer job kind of money. Like, you know, it wasn't a Lot, but it was actually like thousands of dollars, not hundreds of dollars. So we thought, all right, this is starting to go somewhere. We modeled out the spreadsheet. We could see, okay, you know, it could go this. This direction. So. And we thought, you know, it could. Could turn out to be a good thing. So we did some, Just did that math, took a look at our save. You know, like, my wife and I, we looked at our savings account. You know, what we had. You know, of course she was working too. She was doing. She was a hair. Hair stylist, which helped. So, you know, we kind of looked at our Runway. Even though we didn't have investment money, we looked at, all right, we could make it probably a year if I were to scale back or stop my job. And then John, for him, he went through the same things of looking at. Looking at that. So then we just decided, okay, we're ready to take that leap. And the nice thing was that working at the roofing company, they were family, and they were actually super supportive of us doing this, and they let us scale back to, like, part time, which was nice. And then eventually we said, okay, now we're. Now we're ready to take the leap and go full time. And that was another kind of make or break moment where it was like we. We still didn't have enough money to, like, pay all the bills when we took the leap to full time. But we saw the trajectory, and we knew if we could put more time into it, we believed in what could happen. And it was actually like we felt, even though the. The money was low, it still felt like we were pretty excited about what was going on. We felt. Felt good with it, had some savings, as you know, and we were. We were able to do it.
- [31:13]
Omar Khan
2009 is when you came up with the idea and started working on this product. Sounds like around 2010 is when you started selling it. How long did it take to get to, let's say, the first 10k in MRR?
- [31:31]
Nathan Gilmour
First 10k in MRR. Probably 2012. 2000, probably 2012, if I had to guess. Yeah, something like that.
- [31:40]
Omar Khan
Had you guys gone part time by that. In the. In the roofing business, we went part.
- [31:46]
Nathan Gilmour
Time pretty early, and I think even we went full time. I think it was. We weren't making much MRR might have been. I don't even know if we, like, maybe a thousand bucks, maybe 2,000, two, $3,000 in MRR, maybe something like that.
- [32:04]
Omar Khan
Okay, so 2012, the 10K MRRs as a milestone. By that time, you guys Are working full time on the business? Are people still coming in through organic search? Is that the thing that you're still looking at? And was generally traffic increasing? Was it about the same? What was going on there?
- [32:29]
Nathan Gilmour
Traffic kept increasing, which was great. Yeah, we kept working on new keywords and putting more content out and that kept growing and then we kept making the product better. And so then our conversion rates are going up and the business was. Business grew pretty fast for a while. Yeah. Yeah, it was pretty quick growth.
- [32:49]
Omar Khan
Okay, so at what point did you hit the first million in ARR?
- [32:54]
Nathan Gilmour
I would say that would have been, I don't know, 2013, 2014, somewhere in there.
- [33:01]
Omar Khan
So walk me through that. Like what? Like we're talking about like two years, two, maybe three years to get to 10K MRR, and then another year or two to get to 83K MRR or, you know, whatever that number is, aside from SEO, and you sort of doubling down on that and saying, okay, more keywords, getting more traffic. What else contributed to that? Did you, did you play around with pricing? Did you start charging more for the product? Did you, you know, did you get better at keeping people around for longer and improve your ltv? Like just trying to figure out like what were you doing that helped you get to that fairly quickly after you got to 10k?
- [33:52]
Nathan Gilmour
It was all the above. Yeah, Everything you said. Really? Yeah, we would, we did do, we did SEO. We did do a little bit with trying to get some pr, which was probably more, I mean, we would get a little boost from it, but it was probably more so a good SEO play. Like, you know, we would go. I remember like There was a TechCrunch reporter that was like down in D.C. one day and so he was doing like a little get together where you just go pitch and tell them what you're working on. So I was like, all right, I'll go down D.C. and meet him and tell him what we're doing and hope we can get an article. And so he ends up writing an article about us, which was, which was really good. We'd meet with like, there's some local publications that were doing some, you know, covering text scenes. You know, we'd meet with them and tell them our story. Just any, anywhere. There was a few other, I think Forbes wrote an article. So we definitely worked that scene as much as we could, especially in the earlier years when it's like, hey, we're new, you know, we're doing some cool stuff and people would write about it. So that helped. Working on SEO Creating more content and then working just like, super focused on the product and just talking to customers nonstop, learning from customers, how's it going? What are your needs? You know, what can we do better? And just working on designs, we do a lot of user testing. That was big. So back in the day, we used usertesting.com and we would have just watch users try and use TeamGant and see them get stuck on something. And we go, oh, my gosh. It's almost painful to watch when you're doing those user tests. But it's so valuable. You're just like, oh, it's right there. Click that button. But then you just have to just go, all right, I get it. They didn't see it. So other people probably aren't seeing it. Let's tweak it. And so we would just iterate, iterate, iterate, iterate, and just obsess over that stuff. And we just kept working on it. And that would just improve the funnel, improve optimizations, and it made a big difference.
- [35:58]
Omar Khan
You know, it's funny. You and I were talking before we started recording, and you told me about the lesson you learned about narrowing down on your icp. And, you know, I asked you like, you know, when did you do that? I was expecting you to say, oh, you know, about a year or two into building this business. We did that. And you said something very different.
- [36:24]
Nathan Gilmour
Yeah, we just. Just in the last, you know, just this year, we've decided to actually narrow down our ICP very recently. So our strategy has been for a long time. Hey, we basically put our hand up on the Internet and saying, hey, we're the Gantt chart people. You know, so if you need Gantt charts and you're looking for Gantt Charts, we show up places, right? In directories. You know, that's another thing we do. We do integrations. I should mention that, too. We build integrations with different tools so we show up in their places. And we're just showing up as the Gantt chart tool for a lot of different industries. And that has worked really well over the years. But now we do believe that to really get to the next level, to go up market, to help work on churning, it does get to the point where, you know, hey, if we really under. And being a small bootstrap company, right, like, you know, we can't study the whole world. We gotta. We gotta study a very specific ICP and make sure we do something really special for them.
- [37:22]
Omar Khan
Yeah. So you guys have decided to focus double down on the construction industry. Yeah. Can you give me an example or two of, like, some of the challenges you faced by not having identified that ICP sooner? I mean, you know, one of the things I talked about was, like, you know, go to market and outbound. It's near impossible when you've got such a big horizontal product. Like, where do you focus? Who do you talk to? How do you reach people? Because it could be anybody who wants a Gantt Chart, but I assume building the product, it also becomes equally difficult because you have so many diverse types of customers. The only thing holding them together is they want to do a Gantt Chart. But the industries could be night and day, and the requirements could be all over the place.
- [38:10]
Nathan Gilmour
Yeah, that. I mean, you're right. All those things are the issues. I mean, there were advantages to it because we could just open up and just handle so many people and all the floods coming in. It's great. But when you, you know, there is a point of. Yeah, like, when you want to really scale beyond SEO and different things, it's like, all right, we really do need to know who we're actually really targeting. So we can use the right messaging, so we can build the right features, so we can solve the biggest problems for those people. And every industry, obviously has very different problems. You know, everybody has kind of certain common Gantt Chart problems. But when you really step in, you really study a particular industry, you start going, oh, my gosh, you have that problem, this problem, this problem. And if we did this, this, and this, that's going to make a huge game changer for you guys in that industry, then. Then it's like, okay, yeah, and we can just keep talking to those people and hear the common thread, and it's like, all right, yeah, that makes so much sense. We can figure out where to reach them, what events to go to, where to advertise. So it's going to be a good thing for us going forward. Yeah.
- [39:09]
Omar Khan
How did you decide that that was the ICP you were going to pick?
- [39:13]
Nathan Gilmour
Yeah, good question. So we really looked at our customer base, and we have. I mean, we have everything from software companies, creative agencies, universities, engineering, manufacturing, construction. We have all kinds of people using us. But construction is actually our biggest market segment. They're the ones that convert the best. So the people that try our free plan, they convert to a paid. They're the best, they stay the longest. And it's also where we came from. It's part of our story. Like, we. We were in construction, so it's where we came from. We already know that industry, we're connected to it. So that's a piece of it as well. And there's a big need. There's a huge need in the construction industry like Microsoft Project, still their big tool that and another one called Primavera P6. And there's a lot of maybe dislike or just those tools can be powerful but kind of hard and complicated. The trade off for that. So people are looking forward to like a simpler solution and a more collaborative one.
- [40:23]
Omar Khan
Great. So, yeah, I mean, it's great to get that clarity and have confidence that these are probably, you know, the customers that, you know, are the right ones for us to serve with this product. But then you also have a bunch of other customers from other places. So how did you decide to walk the line between focusing on one icp, but not necessarily, I guess, alienating people who want to give you money? Right.
- [40:53]
Nathan Gilmour
That's a huge part of it. Right. So we're still going to welcome everybody because that's still a big part of our business and we're happy to help those people. And our core product right now is fantastic for so many industries that we still absolutely want to help them. And so like, if you go to our homepage, it's not going to say TeamGantt, the construction software tool. You know, it's gonna be TeamGantt, the online Gantt chart, easy to use tool. But we will have a construction specific edition of TeamGantt. And that's where we're, we're gonna be putting a lot of our newer features into and doing some special innovation there. And that'll be a different, you know, it's gonna be a different price point, it's gonna be a different level of features in there, but our main business model will still continue.
- [41:42]
Omar Khan
Let's talk about events because this is another sort of, I guess, a growth channel you've started to look at. And the example you gave me about that recent event you attended earlier, I think it's worth sharing because it's a good example of just, you know, things that start to happen when you focus on an icp.
- [42:09]
Nathan Gilmour
We left this event on Cloud nine. We were so excited. So three of us went, we flew into Denver, Colorado. This was a big tech construction conference, 4,500 people there. And we went, we're like, all right, let's test the waters, right? Let's see how well we're received here. We'd build an integration to the company putting it on is called procore. They're a big company in the construction space, big software company. And we built an integration with them. So that's part of the ICP is like, all right, let's focus. Let's go find the biggest software company in that space now we'll integrate with them. So we built the integration, we went to the show, showed everybody the integration, and people are. I mean, it was nonstop. People coming by our booth and going, yeah. Oh, Gantt charts. We love Gantt charts. And so right away, we're like, all right, this is good. We're in the. We're in the. This is. This is our people. Like, it's. We love ganttra. Show us. Show it to us. What's it doing? We show them. We. And they're like, wow, that's so much easier than what we use now. And we're like, awesome. And. And then we're like, well, here. Do you hate PDFs? Because you could just share this link and everyone has instant access to it and they go, what? It can do that? That's awesome. Like, yeah. And then. And then, by the way, since you're using, like, desktop software now and one project doesn't know about the other project, you probably have some resourcing issues. They're like, yeah, we do. And so we say, well, in the bottom of TeamGantt, there's a resource view. And every project knows about the other projects. And you can see if you've double booked somebody or, you know, a crew or something like that, and they go, oh, my gosh, that's a game changer. That's awesome. So. So they were just. Just loving it. And these are a lot of, like, bigger, larger GCS subcontractors, you know, doing some. Some big projects, some big business, and they have a lot of schedulers. So these are larger contracts for us. And just seeing the excitement and I mean, we were just. It was nonstop. It was two days of nonstop people coming up to us. We walked away with 200 leads. We scheduled 40 demos on the spot. I just did some today. I'm still doing demos from that show back in November. And it was a really good example of narrowing down the icp, finding the right people, and just. It's like a great match. For sure.
- [44:21]
Omar Khan
Yeah. I think it becomes easier to reach them. Your product development becomes more focused, your messaging is more focused. And as you. I mean, you already had a background in that industry, but when you pick a market and can talk credibly about that and show them that you understand their specific issues. Right. You know, just some, you know, some nerds who built some software and sort of came in and don't know anything about construction and you're trying to sell this to them. I think that's really important as well. So I think there's all these good things that start to happen from. From being clear about that icp. Let's talk about hiring. So you and John were the two people working on this for a while. When did you start hiring people?
- [45:17]
Nathan Gilmour
Yeah, we started hiring. I think 20 would have been 2014. 2013. 2014, maybe 2014. I think it was when we hired our first employee and that was someone to handle customer success. And basically, you know, we were. By that point, we're getting a lot of emails like, hey, we got a question about our account. Or you know, hey, how do you add a dependency? Or you know, these things. And it was like, that was kind of the first thing. We were like, all right, you know, we've been doing a lot of that ourselves, but that would be helpful if someone could answer those questions for us. And, you know, I would get back to product design and marketing and John could have more time for doing all the engineering, building out the software. So that was our first hire.
- [46:00]
Omar Khan
And just kind of walk me through how what that trajectory was like in terms of hiring, because by that time you've hit the first million in ARR, you've got some sense of good traction, you hire your CS person and then presumably as you're continuing to grow, are you getting more comfortable about building a team around you?
- [46:25]
Nathan Gilmour
Yeah, it took a little bit, you know. Cause we were kind of like, what do we want this to be? You know, is this just the two of us? Do we want somebody else? Or is it going to be the three of us now? Is it going to be, you know, how big do we want to go with this? And we did as we hired good people and we saw what they could do and we saw them doing things really well. It was like, all right, yeah, let's start hiring more people. And probably really around 20, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, like, we really started ramping up hiring, you know, I mean, at least a few people a year, three people a year, sometimes a little more than that. And yeah, start building the team out more.
- [47:05]
Omar Khan
And you kept the org structure flat. So you just like hire people, come in, got a flat organization. How long did you do that for? Until you realized this is becoming a problem. And how big was the team at the time?
- [47:21]
Nathan Gilmour
Yep.
- [47:22]
Omar Khan
So once.
- [47:23]
Nathan Gilmour
So we actually stayed flat till maybe a little less than two years ago. And it was flat in the sense that you Know, probably about half the company reported to John, half the company reported to me, and it was too much. Like, we definitely broke. You know, I think the limits should be like six to eight people direct reports. And we might each had like 10 to 12 direct reports. I think we were probably, you know, we're 20 some people, you know, 22 people or something like that. And we're like, all right, that's. That's a little, A little too much. And we weren't, you know, we didn't really know a whole lot about good management techniques. We were still like, yeah, let's be a startup where we all just work hard and do stuff and, you know, should work out. And then we kind of learned from a few years that I were like, all right, you know, these people that talk about the importance of, you know, okrs and, you know, different things, it's. It actually, it really does matter. And we ended up getting some advice from a group we attend that they were like, yeah, you know, you should look into this tool called eos. So we did that. EOS is entrepreneurial operating system, and that has basically a lot of like, basic business principles kind of packaged into tools. And there's a good book, it's called Traction, that talks about it. And then we even hired an implementer to kind of help us kind of consult and help us walk through it. Like, how do you really kind of structure a business properly? How do you get the vision clear? How do you do quarterly rocks? How do you do a good accountability chart? How do you set scorecards up? Like all these basic business things that we were either not doing or half doing kind of thing. And so now being almost two years into that, that's starting to really feel pretty good and making some good progress on that front.
- [49:13]
Omar Khan
So I can think of founders now who are maybe a little bit at an earlier stage to what you just described there. And they're getting traction. They feel like they've got something and strong product market fit, at least potential. They're moving fast, they're hiring people. And a lot of the things that you just described, they kind of sound like big company stuff. They sound like admin. They sound like overhead. Just explain, like, why that stuff turned out to be more important than maybe even you thought at the time.
- [49:44]
Nathan Gilmour
I think you kind of think everybody can read your mind and you realize they can't, you know, like, for obvious reasons.
- [49:50]
Omar Khan
Right.
- [49:51]
Nathan Gilmour
They're not going to read your mind. Everybody thinks differently. But, you know, and, and you'll. You'll roll out, you Know, you kind of hit a point where you start, you stop getting the traction that you need. And maybe you thought like, you just add more people to the company and the company will just grow more because you add more people doing more stuff and you realize, you know what, like, if everything's not organized and done the right way, you actually don't get that traction because people are kind of starting to go a little different directions or maybe they don't know their expectations are different than your expectations. And you know, it's just, it's just one of those things that I think a lot of companies in the early stages think that I thought that, like, oh, that's. As for corporate, why we don't want to become corporate, we're not going to do that. But then you realize like, oh yeah, all right. There's a reason for that and it's important. It doesn't feel like corporate. It doesn't feel corporate. What we do now, we're still nimble, we still move fast, we can still, we're still a smallish team, which is great. But now it's not like I don't have 12 people all, you know, saying, what are we doing? And me not managing them well and you know, all that kind of stuff, it's like, it's way more organized and it elevates other people. Other people are able to take more ownership of things and do a better job, you know, of than what I would have done or, you know, and it's just, it really does, It's a big transformation. It's a big way to kind of start shifting in your head how to think. But it's, it's important if you want, if you want to scale, if you want, if you want to grow, it's important.
- [51:23]
Omar Khan
Yeah. And I think that, you know, for anybody like in your position where, you know, you got a seven figure business and you're thinking about, okay, well how do I get to 8? You got to have this kind of infrastructure, people, infrastructure in place. Right. Otherwise it just, it's just going to be a bigger problem with a lot more people there. Right.
- [51:46]
Nathan Gilmour
And I think it's been said too, like, you know, it's one type of company to get from zero to a million. It's another to get from 1 million to 3 million. It's another from 3 to 10, it's another from 10 to 30, it's another from 30 to 100, you know, kind of all these multiples of three. It's like you really kind of have to reinvent and Change the company as you go. And it's true.
- [52:06]
Omar Khan
Love it. All right, we should wrap up, so let's get onto the lightning round. I've got seven quick fire questions for you. You ready?
- [52:15]
Nathan Gilmour
Yeah.
- [52:16]
Omar Khan
Hey, what's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?
- [52:20]
Nathan Gilmour
All right, so I'm a big fan of mailchimp and Ben Chestnut. They had exited for their bootstrap company. Exited for like, billions of dollars. I mean, he's one of the best. It's one of the best bootstrap stories ever. And I had messaged him on Instagram. Just say, hey, congrats on that. That's awesome. And he was like, oh, you're doing Gantt charts, That's cool. And we went back and forth a little bit. And he was like, hey, here's my advice. He said, just be more obsessed and hang on tighter and longer than your competitors. You'll win big in the end. 99% of the world just gives up and it's there. It's times in business when you're going through these different changes, you kind of want to give up. Sometimes it's hard. And that would ring in my head, like, don't give up. Keep going, Keep going. It's hard. Keep going.
- [53:03]
Omar Khan
That's great. Love that. What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
- [53:08]
Nathan Gilmour
There's a good book called the One Thing. I think, especially with the Bootstrap mentality, it's all about focusing on one thing, the most important thing, and just dead set focus. What's the most important thing I need to do today or this month or this quarter, and really being focused on that.
- [53:25]
Omar Khan
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
- [53:30]
Nathan Gilmour
Determination. Just not giving up. My dad would always say, where there's a will, there's a way. And it's like, if you just keep trying, just stay determined.
- [53:41]
Omar Khan
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
- [53:44]
Nathan Gilmour
I think all the way back to, like, getting things done. The element I liked of it was most important task mit. So just at the beginning of the day, in the morning, no, what is the most important thing needs to be done today? And obsess on that thing. Don't let the, you know, urgent things creep in and take over. Like, most important thing, get it done the morning.
- [54:04]
Omar Khan
I've got. I've got the answer to the question I asked you before we started recording. I was like, dude, like, when you're working four hours in a week, how do you decide what to do? How do you make use of that time. And. And the reason why every time I would sit down for a session would be like, oh, I've got. I've got three hours, and I'm going to do these 18 things. Right. And then you're like, oh, I wonder why that didn't work out. And this thing about just, what's the most important thing? What's the one thing? Getting that done will probably be a lot more important than the other 17 things on the list that I think.
- [54:40]
Nathan Gilmour
Are important to do 100% right. It's huge.
- [54:44]
Omar Khan
Yeah. What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?
- [54:51]
Nathan Gilmour
We did, about a year or two ago, we actually built an. A frame cabin as an Airbnb, and that was a lot of fun. Love the design process and work on that. Something my wife and I did together. It was a lot of fun. So if I had more time and another life, that's probably what I'd do to do more of those.
- [55:11]
Omar Khan
You are all in on construction, aren't you? Yeah, Yeah.
- [55:15]
Nathan Gilmour
I mean, I didn't build it myself. You know, we. We did a lot of design work, but of course we hired somebody to do it.
- [55:20]
Omar Khan
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
- [55:24]
Nathan Gilmour
You know, I would say I love playing guitar, but what's kind of funny is I don't sing, I can't whistle, and I cannot remember words to songs to save my life.
- [55:35]
Omar Khan
That's awesome. And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
- [55:40]
Nathan Gilmour
Definitely family. We do a lot of fun stuff. Um, and then it. It kind of depends on what time of year, but if it's. If it's summertime, it'd be doing some boating, being on the water. Spring, fall, it'd be mountain biking, and then during wintertime, it's woodworking. So bounce around.
- [55:59]
Omar Khan
It's been a great conversation. Thank you for joining me and sharing the. The journey that you and John and the team have been on. It's always impressive when I. When I talk to founders like you, who have got to where you are and bootstrapped all the way, it's not easy. You know, things don't happen overnight, and it does take a lot of determination and, you know, persistence. And I think that that quote that you shared from. From Ben is. Is gold. It's spot on. It's the kind of thing that I think, you know, everybody should be reading every day because there's always things that we want to give up. On. So I love that. If people want to check out TeamGantt they can go to TeamGantt.com and if you don't know how to spell gantt, it probably isn't the right place for you, but it's with a double T. And if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
- [56:55]
Nathan Gilmour
You can send me an email nathangant.com or message me on LinkedIn or something. Be happy to hear from you.
- [57:03]
Omar Khan
Awesome. Thanks man. It's been a pleasure and I wish you and the team the best of success.
- [57:07]
Nathan Gilmour
Thank you Amir. It was a lot of fun talking with you today. I appreciate it. I always enjoy your podcast and been a listener for a long time, so pleasure being on it with you.
- [57:14]
Omar Khan
Thank you. Cheers. If this episode got you thinking about building or scaling your own SaaS product, let me tell you about a resource that can help.
- [57:22]
John
Whether you need a complete technical team.
- [57:23]
Omar Khan
Or want to scale your existing one, Gearhart might be exactly what you're looking for. They're a product development studio that specializes in building B2B SaaS platforms. We what's interesting is that they can act as your fractional CTO and technical team, but with a unique twist. They've built strong connections in Silicon Valley and can even help connect you with VCs when you're ready. Plus, as a proud Ukrainian born company, they deliver Silicon Valley expertise with an offshore pricing model. They're offering our listeners free strategy sessions with their leadership team until the end of March. Visit Gearhart IO to book your session. That's Gearheart IO.