The Contrarian Founder: Why Profitability Beats Growth Hacking with Aleksandr Volodarsky

[00:00:00]

Alek: as a founder, you're always looking for like a silver bullet that, oh, if we do this, it's going to change the history.

But usually it's not true. It's just like, you know, a hundred moves that are, some of them are at the right direction. Some of them are not the right direction and yeah lead bullets can solve much more problems. rather than you're not actually looking for a silver bullet, if you just make brute force to, launching hundreds of lead bullets, it could be much more.

​

Allan Dib: Welcome to the Lean Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Allan Dib, and on the Lean Marketing Podcast, we help you do more with less. And today I've got a very special guest. I've got Alex, Alexander Volodarsky, and his story is really fascinating because he's built a business in what I would consider probably to be the most difficult kind of market.

business or online business that you can build, which is an online marketplace. And so I'll let him kind of introduce himself and tell his story. So [00:01:00] welcome, Alexander. How are you?

Alek: Hey, I'm very excited to be here.

Allan Dib: What on earth possessed you to start a marketplace? Because a marketplace is kind of one of those businesses that's extremely difficult.

I mean, if I was thinking about, on the scale of difficulty, I think it would be at the extreme end because you've kind of got this cold start problem where you don't have any supply because you don't have any demand and you don't have any demand because you don't have any supply. And it's kind of that vicious circle.

So What made you start it? How did you start it? How did you solve this cold start problem? I've got a many questions there.

Alek: Right? Yeah, I agree. It's a pretty hard market. In general, like the business model of marketplace is pretty hard. But I think like other business are hard to like I would never want to start a payment company, right?

I wouldn't want to deal with banks.

Allan Dib: Yeah.

Alek: I mean, I'm not an engineer, so I probably would be not a great to start a hardware company, right? Like building robotics. This is like manufacturing problems is like different. [00:02:00] Different world, right? But in online business, marketplace is a hard business because you basically have a except the, you know, chicken and egg problem.

You basically have two sets of clients because in regular business, you have your supply, whatever you provide is something you create. Right. If it's a software, if it's a product something you create and you have a, A lot of control of what you do because you can make product decisions when you, when you have a marketplace, your supply is also your client.

And you have some control over it. That's what I'm trying to do. But let's say like in our case, developer decides to leave the project or there's a miscommunication, and it appears that your product is not good because your supply is not good.

Yeah. So, yeah. It's pretty hard. I started it as a side hustle, not as a marketplace. I lived in Israel back then, I didn't have a job. And someone asked me to find them a developer. And uh, as a, yeah, I have a developer that I work before in one of the projects and I gave them the developer.

They got so excited because before their experience on Upwork was [00:03:00] horrible. And she basically brought me, I think, five other clients within a month. Yeah it was great. it grew a little bit for a long time, but at some point I saw that it takes significant of my time and it became a significant revenue stream.

And that's why I decided this could be a business.

Allan Dib: so a couple of those early wins. So you helped a friend kind of hire a developer, then got a few more referrals and things like that. Okay. understand that. So that's kind of almost like a recruitment business to some extent. How do you take that to kind of become a marketplace where Hey, I want to be a developer on your platform because on a marketplace, it's kind of a natural monopoly where, everyone's on Amazon because there's lots of buyers, lots of sellers, everyone's on eBay or whatever else, or Upwork and all of that.

Whereas if I'm a developer. And there's a brand new platform. It's kind of like, why would I bother if I want to be where everyone is, right? Or how did you solve that problem?

Alek: So the secret of most marketplaces that became [00:04:00] successful is that they had one of the sides of the marketplace figured out, meaning if you look at Airbnb they went to find those apartments, they went into Craigslist, right?

A lot of marketplace actually unfolded Craigslist and used or for the supply side or for the demand side.

So in our case too, like I knew a few developers. And a few of those projects, it was not recruiting. It was like, basically it was a marketplace model. When they came and did a project, we matched them with someone we had.

Just someone we had was someone I knew already and I could trust them. I knew that they're a good developer. So I knew a few and I asked to refer a few more. So I think we had enough supply from my network. By the time we were maybe 20, 000 in revenue monthly revenue. So like, I didn't have to worry about that because I was sure in the supply that I'm providing, because like I worked with them before.

But we had to scale and we did some marketing and we had some like cold imbalance coming to us, we already had to figure this out. So we hired a team that was actually, first it was a regular [00:05:00] recruiter who just went on the intranet. Most of the developers back then were from Ukraine, because I'm originally from Ukraine.

But it worked up until, I don't remember how much, but like, I think maybe 60, GNV, back then. And then we hired a person who used to scale those supply sites for other businesses, not Marketplace, but other businesses. And she actually created what is right now our network.

Allan Dib: Oh, wow. And so her strategy was to, what, just reach out to individual developers, and so your marketplace, so everyone's, where's lemon.

io so,

Alek: Back then the name was Coding Ninjas and what helped us that we were focused on the one word press back then. because in the marketplace, the chicken and egg problem is much more complex than just what do you bring in supply or demand more? Yeah, most of marketplace are have multiple products.

Like if you think about us, yeah We only provide engineers but engineers can be like, you know, you know hundreds of different technologies So if you have python developers and the client comes and looking for react developers [00:06:00] You basically cannot do a sell, even though you have a client and a developer, you cannot make a sell, so you have to have the same demand as if you have supply.

So at the beginning, our focus was only in WordPress developers, and that's why we only had to find WordPress developers. And that's why it was, pretty easy to just cold start. Basically, you cannot cold start a marketplace. If you have a lot of products and you need also to worry about demand and supply.

You have to have one side figured out already and you have to be pretty niche to be able to start at the beginning.

Allan Dib: I think that's a really, really good lesson. So you, you want to go very niched, have one, one side of the marketplace really sorted out and then start recruiting. the other side of the marketplace as well.

So okay, great. So you've got the supply side, you've got developers now coming onto the platform. You've got someone recruiting them. How did you work on the demand side of the platform? How did you get people to come to lemon.io or CodeNinjas at the time, rather than Upwork or one of the other big marketplaces?

Alek: Right. So another [00:07:00] complication of our business is that it's a commodity market. we had a few big wins. we haven't found a consistent scalable way to grow, but we had a few wins that took us like pretty like a big step, for example, at some point I figured out Quora.

And uh, we did a a lot of work on Quora, and this helped us to get I think it helped us to get, like, another million dollars of revenue. And then at some point I figured out Twitter and Twitter, I was building public on Twitter, I was sharing a lot of information on Twitter. People started trusting us and we got like at some point we got like 40 percent of new clients coming from Twitter and this got us a huge step at some point we started advertising on this podcast called My First Million when we started working with them, it was just new.

Even though they had like really following in Sam and Sean and this got us another, you know, a couple of million dollars of revenue. So like there were a few sporadic wins that we figured out. And demand side is pretty hard because it's a commodity market.

Allan Dib: so I understand Twitter, you, post content and I've been following your Twitter, you've [00:08:00] got some banger tweets and I'll read some of that in a moment.

But what did you do on Quora? Cause Quora is just a question and answer sort of platform, isn't it? how did you generate a million dollars

Alek: So at some point Quora was pretty popular. People would actually go to Quora to figure out questions. And if someone is asking where do I find developers, I made sure that we are on top of the answers.

by the way a lot of that came from, so when someone asks like, Hey, I don't like TopTel who is a TopTel competitor. And I was there like, you know, and swiping and saying like, you know, I am a lot of that, like you had to update content all the time because like Quora cared about like updated new answers and like you had to go to, you know, ask all your friends to upload this question and you had to do a lot of work over there in terms of like to keeping up on the front.

Also back then Quora was very prioritized in Google search. So if someone's looking like top 10 competitors, you could Google and or would be one of the first top three or top five answers. So people would go there because it's a [00:09:00] form like a user generated content and they would trust it.

And you know, it generated us a lot of revenue. That's really

Allan Dib: cool.

So bring us up to date. What's the state of the business? So now, obviously I think you're much wider than just WordPress developers. I think it's public information. I saw it on your Twitter. So you're doing over 15 million in annualized revenue.

Yeah. What's the state of the business right now?

Alek: Actually we went away from WordPress. I don't think we have WordPress developers anymore. So yeah, Last year we did somewhere close to 16 million in GMV a little bit over 5 million in revenue. GMV is just a marketplace metric that includes not just our revenue, but also revenue of the sellers in our case developers, and um, We didn't grow as much because first of all, the market is stagnating. but also we were focused on, on profit rather than just revenue. And yeah, we're a profitable business. And this year we have a lot, a lot of plans in marketing. Amazing. Amazing.

Allan Dib: So um,I'd love to hear what someone in your [00:10:00] space, who's like selling developer time, essentially how are you thinking about AI and some of these coding assistants and things like that that are helping, you know, developers be much more productive and helping junior developers become almost like senior developers, like what are your thoughts?

What are people kind of getting wrong and what are people not understanding about it?

Alek: So this has like two sides of the debate. Someone says, you know, Oh, engineers are going to be extinct in just a couple of years because of the AI. And some people say it's bullshit, you know, AI can't work with engineers.

I think that the truth is somewhere in the middle. So we already see that. the simple tasks can be resolved by AI. If you have like a pet project or a marketing project that you need to launch in the company, you can use all those AI tools. Even before AI became popular, you know, a few years ago, you could use companies like Bubble to create all those small projects that could, you know, serve the marketing needs for a company.

Landing pages were open. Now with AI, it's even more [00:11:00] true. I think the second part of it is actually co pilots that help architecture engineers to be more proactive, to do less coding and more more thinking. I think there's. There's a long way to become, for this to be like, you know, very effective.

But even already I see a lot of improvement that not engineering myself, I can only like see from what is happening in the market, in our community but more and more clients. requesting for developers to be versed in AI co pilots and more and more developers pay attention to it.

If you can replace I don't know. It's a good question. I don't think so. But a very good meme came out from a friend of mine on Twitter saying that OpenAI is hiring hundreds of engineers to replace, you know, engineers, right? So you still, you need engineers. And I think that the engineering team component is not going to go away.

Probably going to evolve in more productive work rather than just, you know, creating lines of code. Well, probably going to be a little more evolution in testing. And uh, yeah, generally going to improve as it happened with, they replace [00:12:00] some of the human work, but like it'll replace humans.

They just make humans more productive and the word became less less dangerous. And, you know, all this. thing that we see right now. Um, I

Allan Dib: 100 percent agree with you. I mean, I, I see that all the time, particularly in the marketing space. So where people say, Oh, it's going to replace marketers, going to replace copywriters, all of that sort of thing.

I think the people who really understand it can see it like, you know, like. a combine harvester with farming, right? So you used to need hundreds of people to run a farm. Now with machinery, with all this farm equipment, we can produce large amounts of food at a low cost and with fewer people and less labor, similar to tools that we've seen, like literally from the printing press to, you know, computers and typewriters and spell check and all of that, and now large language models.

So kind of been the evolution of writing and I know someone, someone like me who writes every day. It's made me faster, more efficient, write better research, [00:13:00] but there's no way that it can, at least currently, I don't know what it will be in the future, but certainly currently replace someone who has stories, original ideas Clear thinking around something, and what I've found with most AI tools is at least some domain knowledge is required to really get a lot of leverage out of it, because if you don't really know what it is that you want it to produce, I mean, or you have some very vague result, it's not going to produce a really good result.

Good output. It's kind of like, a guy go garbage in garbage out. Right.

Alek: also, yeah, it's very good for discovery. I found and you know, if you were going to spend, I don't know, five hours on Google trying to go deep into the topic and it would use a YouTube and Google all those searches.

And all this type of content. You probably can do this within like half an hour on OpenAI. You can compile that. you know, I have a live example of what he said. Like I had a case when I was driving and the commercial truck hit my car and I was right.

I was in the right lane. they were making a huge [00:14:00] turn, but The insurance company told me that I'm not right and then I'm not going to pay for my car repair. did ask it, oh, charge of duty, what should I do? And they told me, you can write those letters. And I told them, write those letters for me.

And I sent those letters to the company of the commercial truck and actually paid me. So, This is a simple test that probably would take a thousand dollars of of a lawyer. This kind of replaced, but to have actual lawyer to think through the case that is more complex and go fight for me in court or go through a specific you know, if you need to create an agreement in specific where you need to have domain knowledge and not, you know, a little thing that you put a wording you put in, in the agreement can, you know, screw you in the future.

That probably not going to be replaced by AI

Allan Dib: yeah,

Alek: I 100

Allan Dib: percent agree. So I've similarly used it to draft letters of complaint or feedback or Sometimes just to change a clause in a contract. You know, I remember emailing my lawyer. She said, Oh, I'm on holidays. I'll be back in two weeks.

And you know, all of them like that. God, I need this right now. So I just did it in, [00:15:00] in a large language model. Boom, 20 minutes later, it's all done and drafted and, and it's all good. So yeah, I think for those smaller kind of tasks, but now like I'm in the process of kind of reviewing my will and estates and everything like that.

So yeah, I think for those smaller I don't think I'm going to trust the large language model to that. I want to sit with a human being, a lawyer, to talk things out, to really understand my situation how I'm going to allocate assets and all of those.

Alek: And it's all natural. This is how we progress.

as a founder, this is very natural, natural to us too, because like, as we grow as a founder, you leave behind the tasks that are like more manual work. You delegate this or you automate this and then you progress to better work. I think that's all natural.

Allan Dib: Totally. So one of the things that I think is kind of a contrarian mindset that you have.

So a lot of startup founders have this idea that, you know, you've got to be struggling, you've got to be unprofitable for a very long time, all of this sort of thing. And you're quite different. You run at very, very high profit margins and [00:16:00] you continue to get more profitable. And so. I believe it was a big catalyst for that was implementing Profit First in your business.

Uh, Mike Michalowicz who wrote Profit First is a good friend and I'm sure I'd love to hear this as a case study. I might, tag him in it, but maybe tell your, Profit First Story, and just some of your thoughts around being profitable in the business versus kind of this badge of honor that a lot of startup founders have, which is about struggling for many, many years until you get your billion dollar exit, hopefully,

Alek: Right. So yeah, it's a big topic and probably we could speak about this forever, and there's no right answer. Like, you know, there, there are sites that say, you know, to take venture money or we have to be bootstrapped and like, don't think this is true for, the whole market.

Everyone has their own story. There are some businesses that have to be venture backed, like a friend of mine is building this company, robotics company. There's no way, and he put his million dollars of his money and like there's no way he can go from the small thing to actual production with his own money.

He has to take [00:17:00] venture money and he raised hundreds of millions of dollars already. Like being said, like in my business, I don't see how money can actually fix the growth for our type of company, it's a commodity market. You have to, you have to grow in a different way. And I saw companies that took venture money.

Most of them are not alive, sold as echo hires and didn't make any money. So we were kind of always profitable. We took only very early on. We took some angel money And at some point when the market was very, very much growing, I got a, like, you know, some as a founder, like, you're always look outside and like, oh, this company got, you know, venture funds and they're growing quickly.

And I was like, I got into that hype. And I felt like we don't need your venture money. We have our money. So instead of just, you know, being profitable Let's just dump as much money as we could and growth and this when it went sideways because we started making bad decisions We started overspending a lot And I think, mid 2023, we found ourselves losing hundreds of thousands of dollars every month in [00:18:00] profit.

And we didn't think the company was going to end, but it was, like, very close to it. We felt like, you know, it's too much. that time, I heard Andrew Wilkinson talking about this book on MFM. I took it seriously. and he said like there are a lot of founders who are miserable.

They feel that they, their business is not growing they're losing money and they you know, thinking to maybe exiting, side hustle. And it was clearly talking to me, you know, it was my story. He's talking actually like reading from my book and I took it seriously. We went with profit first. We start cutting expenses.

We found a lot of unnecessary expense that we did. And we, in the course of, I think, three, four months, we became profitable and again, and since then, it's been an amazing journey, we've been a stable company, we've made much better decisions, we had to recess a little, how we spend, how we look at marketing, how we look at growth, what is priority.

And now we have even more money to spend on growth. And now we make much better decisions because we spent a year in a calm state where we said, [00:19:00] okay, this is not a place to just go and try a bunch of things. There is a space we have to test thing one by one and see what is working.

And now when we see what is working right now, for example, we invested a little bit in SEO. We see that SEO is working for us and what is working for us and we're gonna um, you know, double down on that with the money that we already have cash, not borrowing money, not trying to, you know, sometimes you're like, if we're not going to get to this revenue, we're going to die.

And this is how we'll live for like a, you know, six to eight months. Yeah. And we're in a pretty happy place, stable company and not going to go back.

Allan Dib: I love that. I love that. And so I mean, you are running I think before our call, you, you mentioned that you're running somewhere about 65% gross margins.

Is that right?

Alek: No. No. We, it was 65% EBITDA growth year over year. So last year we did a little bit because we just started to go into profit first. This year we already, that we grew I think 68% year over year on ebitda. Yeah. Our, our [00:20:00] margins. I'm not sure. I think it's like around like 25 percent or something like that.

Allan Dib: Okay. So it's still healthy, but interestingly, like, your, your margins have grown 65 percent on only revenue growth. That's maybe 6 percent or whatever. So the top line is not, you know, super impressive number, but What you take home and, you know, the bottom line, that's the impressive number. And I think that's a great lesson for a lot of a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of business owners is yes, growing the top line is kind of sexy and fun.

And, and that, you know, shows a big number, but at the end of the day, it's what you take away, It's not your turnover, it's what's left over that really matters.

Alek: Basically, then the name of the book, Profit First. You first take your profit and then you distribute.

And if you don't have enough money in the bank, this tells you that you shouldn't spend it. It tells you that you should make better decisions and prioritize things. Because before then, we saw growth in the market and we said, let's do hundreds of things and none of them were tracked well. None of them were executed well, because we were doing so many things and outbound and dis marketing, dis marketing, [00:21:00] offline events.

everything went to garbage. Everything went to garbage. All the budget that we spent that year in like late 2022 or early 2023 was, went to garbage.

Allan Dib: with growth, I mean, it's a double edged sword sometimes because sometimes more money, pouring more money on the fire is not the thing that's going to actually do it for you.

If you're, some things just have to grow slower or some things just won't work with the current business model. So

Alek: any speak about this in the book about how, like, are they, I think the roofer is taking more jobs that are not roofing. And like, it looks like you're growing, like you're taking more revenue, but actually you're losing a lot because You have to buy more equipment and you have to do the jobs that you're not sure about and like you're not specialized in and then you have to, you know, all those expenses that in the end you become a loser rather than like you made more money.

Brilliant book. By the way, if someone, you know, is not sure he wants to buy or not, he can [00:22:00] text me on Twitter and I'm happy. I already gave away like 50 copies of the book for free. I bought people and I'm happy to buy it to more founders. Wow, very generous of you. That's great.

It changed my life.

I want

to, you know,

help her

out.

Allan Dib: That's fantastic. uh, I saw a tweet related to this that you wrote. He said two things that had the most impact cut expenses, make better decisions on how we invest in growth. So about cutting expenses, you're right. you break every expense, including payroll down by essential replaceable and cut unnecessary negotiate or change replaceable.

So we found 20k there even though at our scale and growth instead of running many growth initiatives simultaneously and helping revenue and hoping revenue would catch up, we did only a few things that we thought would make the most impact. So I love that. So it's really, really good.

Kind of doubling down and focusing on the things that kind of make the biggest difference.

Alek: 100 percent. 100 percent. And when we're cutting expense, you know, sometimes you look at UPNL and [00:23:00] you just take it as granted, but there's so much money over there that you don't even know about. For example, the number of licenses of LinkedIn, every LinkedIn license is a 900 a month.

So as we have a lot of recruiters and we have a lot of people on the team, some people left and we still pay for that. Or we found that we paying for retainer for a designer that work with the agency, we pay for two retainers and we haven't used even a half a retainer. So like, there's a lot of revenue over there.

And like, in the book, there is a that. But it opens, like, I didn't think I was going to find any money over there, but we found a lot of money over there.

Allan Dib: I agree. One of the things that is interesting that you said is how you, you said you started with a side hustle.

So that's another thing that kind of, we get often told is like, you've got to burn the ships. You've got to go all in, you've got to put everything on the line to start a new business. Whereas you've started an extraordinarily successful business in a very, very difficult market. And it started as a side hustle.

So uh, Tell us [00:24:00] more about that. So how did you launch it as a side hustle? How did you manage whatever your main thing was at the time? And how did you transition?

Alek: I started lemon.io not Lemon.

io, coding agents back then, when I didn't have a job, like, I had a part time job that I was doing and yeah, like I was doing something and I was doing this as a hot side hustle because it just fell in my lap and actually made a thread about it a couple of years ago, but the company is a side hustle.

And it would actually amaze you that like whatever, like MailChimp started a side hustle, sold for 4 billion. There's a lot of businesses. I don't remember all the businesses. And there's a lot of businesses like that. You know, side hustle is a great way to start if you're not sure that you want to go all in.

And you always have a weekend, you have, you always have you know, late nights at it's much safer thing that just going all in and again, I'm, you know, if you want to go all in, it's totally fine. A lot of companies did it, they quit their jobs and they started started their companies you know, full, went all in in the companies.

But yeah, you can play with the things. You can play with several things and see what, sticks. If you [00:25:00] follow all the, trend of IndieHackers, they start several businesses while they're doing engineering jobs. And they see, you know, what's working, what's not working. And then, you know, this is the end.

This business to grow to like 10, 000 of monthly recruiting revenue. Yeah.

Allan Dib: did you have a target point to say, Hey, when we reach this much in revenue, that's when I'm going to kind of switch my focus to all of this. Or did it kind of happen gradually?

Alek: It happened gradually. I just lived in Israel.

That is very expensive to live in. And uh, was taking any money I could make. At some point when I saw that it was making, I think, like maybe 10, 000 in revenue. But then I hired an assistant. I was still doing my job. I had an assistant and I brought a friend as a co founder and I then I paid myself.

I think quit my job, a part time job only when. I want to say when we hit like maybe 25,000, I don't remember exactly, but like it took some time until I did it. So I wasn't a safe side because like we had a first child and it was pretty hard. But yeah, I mean it's not [00:26:00] something like you have to make a decision right away and like, you know, it's a, you just jump into it.

You can play with things because sometimes you work on something and then you see, Oh, maybe it's not something I want to do, or maybe it's not something the market wants. So if you still have your job, it's easy to let it go. Or easy to pivot to something else. If you are all in, it's sometimes hard to see that maybe I need to push a little bit more, a little bit more, push a little bit more, and it's hard to see that it's not working out.

there's both ways. You can do both ways. It's really up to your securities. I was not, secure enough to go and just, you know, jump into this business fully.

Allan Dib: It's cool to hear a story like that because usually the story we all hear is, you know, I took this big risk. I put everything in, I burned the boats, you know, I had no other choice but to succeed.

And it's kind of a very romanticized story, particularly in the startup world. And

Alek: it's usually survivor bias and I'm sure there's a lot of stories like this and they're successful, you know, like they are successful. But you don't know about, another 90 percent of the stories that are not successful and because [00:27:00] we are hearing all this survivor bias, you know, that's why it's so romantic, you know, like suffering, it's uh, and hard times and I, you know, all the investors one investor fall asleep and during the meeting, one investor, you know, stand up during the minute left.

And now I'm running this 1 billion company. Those stories do exist, yeah, and to be honest, there are a lot of stories that started as side hustle and didn't grow just because it was side hustle and people were not decisive enough also exist, so we don't know about this. So I think, like, the main thing is, like, This is your life and this is your choice.

You have to be comfortable with your choice. And if you are in your twenties and you want to be, you know, a survivor and you want to have this cool story to tell to your grandkids and to the media that you survived and you struggled and you, you know, you beat the market that's cool. Or if you want to say the story that I started as a side hustle.

Now this is a, you know, 20 million business. This is also a cool story. So it's up to the person, how they feel comfortable.

Allan Dib: And I ran it as a profitable business the whole time and I [00:28:00] didn't have to suffer and all of that sort of thing. I mean, I'm sure I did have to suffer.

Alek: I also didn't have to suffer, you know, profitable business also suffer.

There was a time I didn't have a salesperson and I lived in Ukraine back then. And I had to do my work, then I answer all the clients, then I went to sleep. I woke up at 2 a. m. because there are some clients who would answer me like in California. I would have to open, like, open my computer at 2 a. m.,

work for half an hour, go to sleep, work in wake up in the morning, take care of my kids, you know.

Allan Dib: Yeah,

Alek: you still suffer, like, you see, you still can go. Yeah, business owners, they, they suffer, they, you know.

Allan Dib: I often say building a business is probably one of the best personal development journeys or quests that you can take because you're going to come into, you're going to learn psychology, you're going to learn sales, you're going to learn money management, you're going to learn working with people.

There's just, Almost no lesson you don't learn in running and building a business that's not going to equip you for life.

Alek: Interesting. From your experience, [00:29:00] what do you think what is the number one skill for a founder? Because you're a marketer, I want to hear from your side.

Allan Dib: From my side, I think the, the number one skill is to build the demand side. So get a client, get an ideal client. Healthy, like you, trust you because when you have demand. Supply is usually not a problem, right? So if you've got the ability to get attention, to get someone to know you, to like you, to trust you and convey that in a simple and understandable way.

So to me, the master skill of business is marketing and the master skill of marketing is words, copywriting, being able to communicate what you do in a clear and effective way. So to mewhen I look at every success I've had, either personally or professionally, whether it's, you know, one of, one of my books, whether it's, you know, closing a deal, whether it's making a friend, whether it's making a connection or whatever, it's been a result of words, you know, because I think words as, the code of human, [00:30:00] like we program computers with computer code.

We program both our lives and the lives of others human beings with words, right? So that's the operating system of human beings. So that to me is the master skill of business and life.

Alek: Back to AI, by the way, now you can program actual software with words.

Allan Dib: I did come from a little bit of a technical background.

I used to be a telecom engineer. I know like a tiny bit of coding, like maybe 1%, like, maybe basic stuff. But now with the LLMs, I'm solving Problems with code that I wouldn't have a hope to do just by myself. Right.

Alek: That's amazing. Beautiful.

Allan Dib: Yeah. Yeah. it's kind of cool to get back to some of that technical work, which, like I said, it would probably take me years to, to be able to do it just manually, but being able to feed it into an LLM and tell it, here's the input I've got, here's the output I want, here's the format I want it in, here's how I want [00:31:00] it, you know, all of that sort of thing. And it's not always a hundred percent, but it's certainly getting better all the time.

Because I've got a little bit of technical knowledge, I can kind of guide it in the right direction. I can say, no, I want the output like this or whatever, that sort of thing, because I know how it works internally, even if I don't know how to write all of the code perfectly.

Alek: Prompt engineering became a big thing.

Allan Dib: Prompt engineering, yeah. Well, you know, I was talking to someone else the other day and, you know, there's this quote where the quality of your life will result from the quality of your questions, right? And so some people ask just really dumb questions like, you know, how do I grow my business?

Whatever. I don't know what resources you have, what context and the same way that you ask a person or a mentor questions, you will ask an LLM. Like, so if you ask an LLM a dumb question, you'll probably get a generic or dumb answer. Whereas if you talk about your goal, the context, what resources, what you've tried, what format you want it in, all of that.

You're going to get a much better response [00:32:00] as well.

Alek: Yeah. The same thing with the humans.

Allan Dib: Yeah, exactly. The same thing with the humans. Yeah. Yeah. One of your tweets caught my eye. you said I follow up with leads that didn't close to ask what went wrong.

And then you've got this very simple email that you've screenshotted where you're saying, You're saying, Hey, I'm the CEO of lemon.io kind of what went wrong. Why didn't you sign up? Very, very cool tactic and one that I very rarely see done.

Alek: So as a B2B business in a commodity market, we get so many leads and uh, we like really value every lead.

And I just asked myself like a few months ago, like, you know, we, we will lose them, but like sometimes, A lot of people feel uncomfortable telling the truth. If like, let's say that it was too expensive or someone was rude. So we wouldn't know why they didn't, if we don't know why they didn't close, we wouldn't know how to make it better.

We only know what we know. Right. And I was trying to understand what we don't know. That's why it was like, we just follow up with all leads asking like what went wrong coming from the [00:33:00] founder. And that from the person who was dealing with them probably would be, you feel a little comfortable, a little more secure to answer the question and people to answer the question.

And actually, we we're getting new opportunities from those leads because they were like, first of all, let's say they didn't come to the call and we just closed them because they didn't respond and then it appears that they were, you know, away and they couldn't come and we scheduled new calls for them or there were opportunities that we didn't know about just because of that conversation.

Yeah. Works great.

Allan Dib: And I'm sure you would probably also, even the ones who, who you didn't generate opportunities from, you got insights. You're like, ah, right. We really should change our messaging this way. Or we should think about offering this, that, or, or the other. So just. real life insights instead of kind of just inventing it.

Alek: Someone says he was pushy. Someone says like we didn't understand. And we have a feed of those. You know, our, SDR is actually doing that. And we have a Slack channel where we feed everything, it goes to product people, or it goes to the sales lead, and we discuss a lot [00:34:00] of these things yeah. And people do respond, you know, respond rate, I'm not sure, but I think it's over 50%, and it's great.

And we offer them like 25 for just a couple of words as a gift card. And people just respond to us. It's great insight and it's pretty cheap to get those insights because like, if you actually know what's going on behind the people who didn't buy, you actually can know what, how to make it better.

Allan Dib: I love that.

Another tweet of yours and this may be slightly controversial or whatever, but it's unbelievable how extremely easy it is to make ex employees of the competitor share information about their company. I thought that was, that was a

cool tweet.

Alek: Yeah. Just my philosophy, not about ex-employees, but like, you have to ask.

I had so many wins in my life just because, like, I just ask an example. I was uh, renting this apartment that we just got married with my wife. and um, the landlord came and said, I'm, I'm selling this apartment. And I was like this a little bit discouraged because in the neighborhood wanted to leave.

There was not a lot of. [00:35:00] But the next door apartment, I've met the owner and she told me it was a twice as big as an apartment and she told me I'm looking to, rent this apartment twice as much that we're renting if I knew anyone. So, you know, being mean that I always ask, I came to her and said, Look, we just need one bedroom.

We don't need the second bedroom. I only have this money. Can you rent this to us for this money and you can close the second apart the second bedroom? And she said yes. So we moved into twice as large as an apartment. She actually didn't close the other room. She decided to leave it as is. And we were paying the same money we paid for the just because I asked.

There was no logical reason for her to rent me this apartment for, you know, twice as cheap as she was, wanted to rent it. And we had like a, you know, three year relationship with her. She's still texting us because like we, we had like one kid over there and she, whatever, became a friend. But like, yeah, always ask and I apply this to anything.

So like when I see, I connect direct with someone on LinkedIn who is a past employee. ask them, you know what did he do? What worked? What didn't work? [00:36:00] And I don't ask any questions that people gonna, you know, regret or can be sued for, but a lot of this information, even like a general information that could be public, but it's not public or it's hard to search.

Yeah, always ask this information and people share again, I don't put them into a situations where they can, yeah, regret this, but like, yeah, people open to talk, especially if you're nice to them. And if you, if you're also sharing. Always when I, when I come to these meetings, I will share what's happening in our company.

I share the numbers, I share what worked in marketing, what worked product, what didn't work, and they're as open as I am, and it works, yeah.

Allan Dib: Asking is the beginning of the receiving process and so few people just

Alek: The worst thing we're gonna come out if you ask, people not gonna respond but if you don't ask, people 100% gonna respond.

Allan Dib: 100%. I love that. I think asking is so underrated, It's easy, you know, and speaking of which I'll quote one more tweet that you had lead bullets, not silver bullets. So that you, [00:37:00] you mentioned Peter Levels there. and just for context, Peter levels is a very kind of successful individual developer.

And he's built. You know, an amazing business. And it is essentially almost like a one person business, I think, if I'm not mistaken. But

Alek: I think over 3 million of revenue.

Allan Dib: Yeah. Yeah. millions of dollars of revenue. But one of the things that you highlighted is that he only has a 5 percent success rate. So his luck comes from shipping constantly, you know, trying new things constantly. So I think that's a valuable lesson.

Alek: Yeah, 100%. I don't remember this tweet but I think I heard it from Sean Puri from my first million. And yeah sometimes, again, as a founder, you're always looking for like a silver bullet that, oh, if we do this, it's going to change the history.

But usually it's not true. It's just like, you know, a hundred moves that are, some of them are at the right direction. Some of them are not the right direction and yeah lead bullets can solve much more problems. rather than you're not actually looking for a silver [00:38:00] bullet, if you just make brute force to, launching hundreds of lead bullets, it could be much more.

And we hear the stories like Airbnb, sort of Airbnb, they were not successful. And then they figure out if they make nice pictures of those apartments and they went and they made a nice picture of that and they work, Nice story, beautiful. But in reality, they tried hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of things.

Some of them worked, some of them didn't work. Actually, Airbnb is a product of many, many, many, many, many, many thousands and thousands of small improvements in the market. It's basically a short term rentals where you fund in automated every possible problem that you have when you do short term rentals. Yeah, so basically it's a company of, millions of lead bullets.

Allan Dib: And people only see your successes. They don't see the 95 times that you failed. They're like, Oh, wow. He failed.

Alek: He also a product of Hollywood movies, you know, like she did a lot of you and you did something and now she loves you. And and it's beautiful, but in reality, it's not like that.

Allan Dib: Yeah. [00:39:00] Love it. Well, Aleksandr, thank you so much. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing some of your wisdom, sharing your story, because it is a really inspiring story. You've done amazing things. You're an incredibly insightful person.

I had the chance to spend some time with you last year, which was really, really cool. So thank you so much. Where can people find you and where should people go?

Alek: Yeah, first of all, likewise, I enjoyed our time in Victoria and I enjoyed our time right now. Thank you very much for inviting.

Yeah, you can find me on Twitter at Volodarik, V O L O D A R I K. And any questions, my DMs are open, I think. Yeah, they are. And yeah, if someone is looking for a book to read my profit first, I'm happy to give this copy to a founder.

Allan Dib: Amazing. And of course, if you need a developer, lemon.io, and we'll make sure to link to all.

Alek: Thank you so much. Thank you. It was a pleasure.

Allan Dib: Thanks, Aleksandr

​

[00:40:00]

‍