Josh Pigford (@shpigford), who created Maybe and Baremetrics, talks about bringing his financial tool back to life with the help of open-source collaboration, sparking interest and investment. In our chat, we delve into the challenge of building a platform that simplifies financial data, similar to how Zapier simplifies automation.
The goal? A community-supported plugin system and a customizable personal finance operating system for every life stage. Josh also discusses considering changing the technology behind his project to Rails, weighing the pros and cons of different tech choices, and the reasons people contribute to open-source projects.
For successful founders, the joy of creating often outweighs the desire for money. This story highlights the blend of technology, personal finance, and community effort in reshaping financial management tools. You can learn a lot from Josh about showing up relentlessly.
Arvid Kahl 0:00
Today, I’m talking to Josh Pigford. He is the founder of Maybe and he recently open sourced the whole codebase for this financial software tool. He also sold Baremetrics a couple years ago for $4 million. So this project now is a continuation of his interest in the financial industry and dealing with money. I talked to Josh about all kinds of things about involving people from the community and building your product about raising money for something that could also be bootstrapped and how to manage such a thing in a community and an industry that is usually pretty slow to take up new technology. Enjoy this conversation between me and Josh. The whole conversation is sponsored by acquire.com. Now here is Josh.
Josh, thanks so much for coming on the show. You’ve been giving a building in public master class over the last few weeks and I really enjoyed it. Let’s talk about maybe, what is it? Why are you building it in public? And why are so many people so excited about it right now?
Josh Pigford 0:57
Yeah, well, thanks for having me on. So maybe it’s something that started back in 2021, post exit of a previous company and we spent the better part of 18 ish months building that not in public really, launched it and found ourselves in a pickle, where we had gone the sort of typical VC route, hired a lot. And then we launched the thing and essentially ran out of money to be able to see it through to grow it. So we found ourselves on the spot where we’d be like, downsize the whole team to like two or three of us and ultimately shut it down. And then a few weeks ago, I got really nostalgic and decided to open source the whole thing. And that hit a nerve and now it’s alive again and we’ve raised some more money, but rebuilding the company differently this time. But yeah, people are pretty pumped about Sienna, the FinTech software, the insides of it. So
Arvid Kahl 2:00
That’s the surprising part to me, too, like FinTech tends to be a very closed source ecosystem. And you just throwing it out there and open source like, how did you come to that kind of conclusion to just throw it out there? Because you could have done many different things, right, you get to just restarted hired outsourced all that, but open source, that’s a pretty solid choice.
Josh Pigford 2:18
I well. So I had, I really wasn’t thinking that anything. In my head, the the choice is sort of binary, and that either this, this stays in a private Git repo, and no one ever sees it. The end member had no plans of reviving it anyway. And so it was that or make it open source. And then like, maybe somebody can do something with it. And it was so complex, that it wasn’t the kind of it was, it was never the kind of thing that I was gonna build, just grab the repo and like, deploy it and have their own version of maybe like we had sort of over engineered it for a multitude of reasons. But it was, you know, even now, we’re a few weeks and have 10s of 1000s of people like seeing it and like it still is kind of a hassle to get it up and running. So like, it was more of just a Yeah, I’m curious what other people will do with it. Curiosity more than anything. Cool.
Arvid Kahl 3:14
Yeah, I see you rehired one of your software engineers to me, that’s so I love this. I love the cyclical nature of this. There’s,
Josh Pigford 3:21
there’s more of that. There’s more of that coming. Oh, wow.
Arvid Kahl 3:24
That’s cool. I was reading Sachs tweets about it. And it was pretty interesting, because he gave some very transparent insight into the back then. And then now of where the vision goes. And apparently, he was talking about a lot of compliance stuff like, version one had a lot of requirements, because you had a lot of advice, financial advice they were giving. And version two, the open source version doesn’t have that. Can you just kind of elaborate on that choice? And why? Yeah.
Josh Pigford 3:48
So when we first started, it was the impetus for maybe was, was sort of exited barometric so that company took home close to 4 million like me personally. And so what is the situation we found ourselves in was, us, me and my wife was we’ve got all this money from this exit, I want to not blow it. So I started working with financial advisor. And that was the first time first time we’ve ever worked with a new advisor or planner or whatever. So it’s like, I’ve got this mix of we’re doing this and I have all the free time in the world. And I can dig into like, what is what does a financial adviser do? How do they grow our money? Um, and why are we paying them a percentage of the assets that they’re managing? And so that’s when I like went deep dive into this, this that whole world realizing like oh, they’re not doing anything all that great to warrant taking a percentage of assets. However, it is nice to have a third party kind of like gut check you on some stuff. So the idea was we’ll build this like modern platform for managing You’re on finances. But with that will tack on and a financial advisor as part of your account. And that choice, though, meant that we’ve got an infinite number of regulatory things to comply with. And so that added a ton of overhead, it meant that we could only be in the US. I mean, we could expand other places, but like, we would have to meet all the regulatory requirements and all of those countries too. And so that very quickly sort of limited us on sort of addressable market, how fast we can move on things, tech choices, because there’s things like we have to keep, and, you know, an unchangeable copy of every single interaction for like, seven years or something like, there’s just a lot of a lot of tech choices that that forced. And so that made overhead very high and text that complicated, like all sorts of stuff, but now we’re saying we’re not doing that anymore. There’s no advice component, we can rip out half the code. Like, that’s sort of where we’re at. But
Arvid Kahl 6:00
that’s cool. Yeah, that’s awesome. And I think just kind of shaving off complexity is generally a good idea, right? If you want to revive something that was too expensive to run. So I kind of I kind of really appreciate that that logic makes sense to, do you think that people are going to build their own advice systems on top of on top of this, because right now, you’re kind of just supplying the way to gather data
Josh Pigford 6:19
correctly? I guess you could, I mean, you know, there’s, it’s not in the current sort of most recent commits. But like, if you go to the very first commit of the thing, that open source a few weeks ago, the whole like, advice dashboard is there. So like, you could build and we had built a very full featured, a certified financial adviser could go in, and it’s like a whole thing for them to manage their clients and interact with him, like a chat system, uploading videos and audio, like tons of stuff. That’s there, if somebody wants to grab it and do something with it, but it does, it comes with regulatory overhead. And at this point, we’re not interested. Yeah,
Arvid Kahl 7:00
that’s, that sounds very complicated. And it sounds like very hard to monetize as well. Because you know, that, that just the increase in costs and all that, that probably makes it hard to get a cut how you’re going to monetize this open source kind of system. Yeah,
Josh Pigford 7:13
so pretty typical. I mean, you know, the, I think the example most people would understand are sort of like, see, the correlation is like WordPress, where, you know, it was wide open source for ages. And then they did like wordpress.com. And so you can have your own hosted WordPress, essentially the same thing, I don’t think it’s a little less, it’s a little more consumer, I guess. And on our side, where we’re not gonna, like, talk about maybe is like, get your own hosted version of like, we’re not gonna use that language, I guess it’s just, you’ll go to the maybe a website and sign up for an account. And that’s that. But there is, it’s sort of the hosted version that you’ll pay for, will just be the version that you know, most of civilization uses. And the open source stuff is like, it’s available for those that want to self deploy and all that stuff. That
Arvid Kahl 8:01
seems to be one of the few but very promising ways of monetizing any kind of open source project, right should keep you keep the core free, you keep itself deployable, but you kind of have these added services or just the
Josh Pigford 8:14
well, there’s things especially in the financial world, where, you know, like connecting all your bank accounts. There’s all these different data aggregators, plaids, sort of the most well known one. And very few, I mean, quite literally, probably 99% of these aggregators across the world don’t have an option for an individual to use them. They just require enterprise contracts and stuff. So you know, on the on the hosted version of maybe that will, will offer for pay, that will include those data aggregators, where you’re not having to sort of manually import CSVs and things. Whereas a self hosted most of that will be either manually inputting data, or uploading a CSV or something like that. So so
Arvid Kahl 8:55
there’s the upsell, now I get it, I was wondering just a little bit where that value would be of a hosted version. But of course, like you having the capacity to get these aggregators, and I was, I was thinking a lot about this, because ever since I moved from Europe to Canada, like the automate, automate ability of my financials has just gone down the drain. It’s like super crazy, the kinds of standards that Europe has or Germany with, you know, the in FinTech, there are API’s that every single bank has to offer, and you can kind of fetch data from there does not exist here. When I go to my bank here in Canada, it’s like, yeah, you can kind of copy and paste it from the website, if you like. It’s like, it’s, it’s really hard to pull that into anything else. So how is that like, you come from a place where within a day, you can build something really cool. You can refactor if you want it to your whole code base and 24 hours right? Let’s go a tweet at you throw out a couple a couple days ago. You could and nobody can stop you. But working with these banks working with these particular interstates, and I guess if you expand to other places like Canada, with these very self contained places How are you approaching that kind of integrability.
Josh Pigford 10:02
So what we’re working on right now is essentially standardizing the data model on our side. And then, and then everything will have to sort of meet that. So like, Will will make it so that, you know, we build a plan integration, even just for us to use, but it’ll then have, its, it’ll be sort of self contained, and then just pull in and process the data so that it matches our data model. So, you know, it ends up being anybody can build a data source sort of plug in or something that depending on where they’re located, or whatever, you know, eventually this stuff all becomes like integrated with maybe
Arvid Kahl 10:42
that’s interesting. It’s kind of like a Zapier for financial data that
Josh Pigford 10:46
yeah, essentially, it is, it’s like, a lot of the banking data includes more sort of detail than is actually necessary for the average sort of financial application. So it’s like, we can we can standardize or sort of reduce the complexity into, you know, money and money out kind of thing, in most cases. And it gets a little bit more complicated when you’re talking about investments and buying and selling things and whatever. But the idea is, we can sort of standardize all that stuff and, and simplify the incoming data. Todd
Arvid Kahl 11:20
reminds me so much of that one XKCD, always about like, there’s 15 standards for this kind of thing, let’s just implement the standards for all standards. And now there’s 16 standards for that kind of thing. Right? It’s fun, though, I think it’s just necessary, right? If you want to be able to integrate with all these platforms, and there is no Core standard or Central Standard, you just have to establish an interface for it. I love the idea. Because once that is established, and is also fully documented and communicated to your community of contributors, and people who are interested in using it, they can start building these extensions, and you can kind of add them to the system as they come. And they can also be externally maintained, which is really cool. Is that like an ongoing plan to just like, give the community the opportunity to keep building and maintaining these things? Are you going to pull them all in? I
Josh Pigford 12:02
think so there’s a little bit, the only sort of, I guess, hesitation or risk of having too much external stuff is security. When you’re talking about financial stuff. I think the state like linking out to stuff that’s like, hey, download this thing that pulls in your banking data, like, that feels a little bit feels a little risky. So yeah, I feel like we would need to have some sort of, you know, we have an internally hosted is set of Doc directory of plugins or something I don’t know, that’s been vetted and made sure that it’s not, you know, scraping your data or something. But um, yeah, I don’t know. I think it may be one of those things that the self hosting crowd ends up having their own sort of lots of plugins to choose from. And this is kind of the case, again, to the WordPress example, like, you can install plugins on wordpress.com. But like, there’s some limitations to that, right? Like, you’re not going to have the full breadth of plugins to choose from. So yeah, I don’t know, we’re still that’s still super early. So yeah,
Arvid Kahl 13:12
and I would love to just kind of your brainstorm these kind of things, I find them very interesting. Because when you’re, when you’re at this point, now starting just to build the potential for a plugin marketplace, if that would even be the name for it, or just a repository that is kind of validated and tested and secured. Like, there are so many different ways. If you look at WordPress, the example is great, I think you can, you can install manually, like any plugin anywhere, it can be locally installed, but it kind of has to go to adhere to the restrictions. Or you can just choose one of the ones that they have pre approved, right, that are securely located in there, the big list of things that are wonderful, and you just click on it, and it’s right there, right? That that kind of duality, gives you some choice as a platform maintainer, to just want to offer and how to secure it that that’s a really cool thing, too.
Josh Pigford 13:57
Yep. Well, and that sort of jumps into another way that we’re thinking about this. And I’ve tweeted about this a little bit like the concept of maybe being your like, the sort of OS for personal finance, where, you know, internally, we talked about having apps or modules such that, you know, you could potentially build your own sort of module that’s got its own set of like tools for whatever specific stage of life you’re in or something like that. I think we’ll have our own stuff that we’re building, but the idea of being able to create your own Yeah, watch this thing.
Arvid Kahl 14:32
Yeah. And any kind of standardized interface makes perfect sense for that. Right. That’s, that’s fun. Yeah, standalone. Absolutely. That kind of reminds me of a tweet that you just sent prior to this conversation about once like the stuff that Basecamp people have been doing. Is that kind of the taste that you have for these apps just to be just standalone, instead of being hosted on something else?
Josh Pigford 14:53
Not necessarily. I am most curious about the ones stuff from a deployment perspective, like how easy they’ve made it to sort of self host, in this case camp fire their first app. I like that idea, at least as far as some sort of inspiration around making the maybe app itself sort of self postable. Making it where it’s, you know, you copy and paste this one, literally single command into the command line, and then it walks you through everything else. Like, that’s, that’s sort of, to me is like, sort of the gold standard for self postable. But also like modifiable codebase. Yeah,
Arvid Kahl 15:33
I have some very recent experience with that kind of stuff in the PHP ecosystem. Like my most recent Sass projects are both built on Laravel. And Laravel, has this incredible ecosystem, like there are like billing portals and back end admin portals and all that, that you just pull into the package management system, you still have to kind of log in with your, you know, account or API key, if it’s a paid system, or some of them are free. It’s a very interesting monetization model that too, but it all gets pulled into composer, which is kind of the the NPM of PHP, for anybody working with JavaScript, right? The idea is to just have it be hosted somewhere, you pull it in, and then it’s right there. And maybe it’s kind of just a vendor thing, it works in the background, but you can expose the actual contract files and the view files. And you know, what the way it looks like the what text is in there, just how the database is connected all of that yourself and just keep building on top of it. And I think once in the Ruby world, that is the idea of having the standard on Ruby apps, or it’s doing the exact same thing. It’s, it’s a very interesting approach, and kind of a novel and not so novel approach, it reminds me very much of the beginnings of open source software, right, it’s kind of a cycling back, let’s, let’s talk a little bit about tech choices. Because like, I think 40 to 50% of your tweets over the last couple days have been about tech, like just straight up JavaScript or rails, like which to do to do which to take which to choose which not to do is can it just kind of give me a glimpse into your mind regarding to picking a tech stack for a project like this? And why? And what what kind of concerns you have in picking this?
Josh Pigford 17:05
Yeah, so we’re in a super weird spot with maybe where are you know, if I’m building something, myself, but no one else is involved, I’m choosing rails 100% of the time, um, and previous company Baremetrics were Rails app. When I started, maybe, in 2021, I had no plans of building any part of it. I mean, like, from a coding perspective, at least. And, and I think that choice at the time was coming off of like, I hadn’t really been building much of anything, the prior few years, because I was in full on CEO mode. And so I think, in part, I didn’t feel equipped to be able to build this financial app at the time. And so it was like, well, I’ll hire some, I’ll hire engineers, and they can talk amongst themselves and choose and whatever, like, it doesn’t really matter to me, because I’m not coding any of this. Um, so that resulted in React being the sort of base for it, react and next Jas, and a few other bits and pieces. I mean, that’s, you know, was and still is, on a lot of levels, like the the most popular sort of tech stack. And, and so it was like, Okay, let’s do that, because there’s a huge pool of developers, you know, available for that, etc. So that was the, that was like a choice that was made in early 2021. And, you know, we just went with it. Now, where we’re at at this point is, we’ve revived this thing, it’s still that same tech stack. But you know, as we were talking, before we started recording, that whole world has changed drastically since 2021. And it’s changed drastically in the past six months. And so now we’re at this place of like, okay, we’re already having to rip out a ton of code. Because of that, there’s so much in there for the compliance stuff. And the features that aren’t part of the app anymore, we’re already having to rip out stuff, a lot of the stuff, a lot of stuff just doesn’t work, because like, the JavaScript world changes so fast, and whatever packages have updated, and they’re no longer compatible with each other and whatever else. And so it’s kind of a dumpster fire from like a compatibility perspective of all the different bits and pieces. So now, the thing we’re playing around with, in our heads and talking amongst ourselves about is, what if we, we rebuilt it in Rails? Obviously, that reduces, and this is the discussion that’s been happening on Twitter for the past 72 hours is you’ve reduced the number of available developers, then Bush, my argument there is but you increase the quality of developer Oh, that’s what I want to be clear. I’m not trying to burn Anyone here because I think it’s the, the reality is so many people brand new devs, of course, that the tech stack that they’re learning is the thing that’s most being hired for. So like, I don’t fault people for that, it’s just there happens to be a lot of very, very green developers in that world. Fine, totally cool. Nothing wrong with that. Um, but I think that also means you end up with a lot more. And we’ve found this to be the case already in our OSS repo for maybe is like, a lot of the discussions are like people sort of, you know, arguing semantics of code versus just writing some code. And it’s very easy to argue about the way you should or shouldn’t do things, instead of just making decision and building the thing. And so, I tend to find that most people in the Rails world, air towards, let me let me ship something over, let me like, try to get this code in some sort of standardized way, or, I don’t know, like this argue about that stuff a lot, a lot less that still exists. But either way, that’s sort of where we’re at is, like, we already know, the data model behind maybe is set, like how we organize all the data, and then how all these things sort of relate to one another, I think is very solid. And a lot of these big decisions have already been made. So then it becomes, okay, let’s just get the infrastructure around it rebuilt. And I joked about building in 24 hours. But like, last summer, when we started, like trying to simplify some stuff as a proof of concept, I rebuilt the maybe like net worth dashboard stuff in like five days, like, by myself. And so I think it’s very doable to you know, I think one of the other tweets I said was like, in 30 days, I think I could rebuild the entire thing. And I do think that that’s true. Now, you know, certainly people disagree with that being a possibility, but like, Well, I think it’s possible. And so we’re just sort of looking into that. I mean, you know, later today, we’ve got a call with a number of people who have very deep ties in like the JavaScript world that can potentially, like change our minds on some of that stuff. But, um, we’re just sort of not I don’t want to, like make a keep doing something just because like, that’s the code that’s there. And then we end up sticking with something we’re constantly trying to backtrack or undo stuff or like, I don’t know, just just there’s a lot of overhead that I think comes with the JavaScript ecosystem. Yeah,
Arvid Kahl 22:35
for sure this is done. And there’s the risk of just sunk cost fallacy kind of behavior, right? You don’t want that either. Just because you’ve invested time into this doesn’t mean it’s a good choice. And honestly, I’ve been doing a lot of JavaScript like I was, I wasn’t around to the CoffeeScript days of 2000, like nine and 10, and stuff. And it was a good time, and it’s stuff was developing, and it still is, I’ve never stopped developing, right? It’s not like there, there ever is like an end point to where this goes, it’s just developed so fast. That’s just what you said, the libraries you’re using today might have a major version update tomorrow that requires you to integrate TypeScript or whatever, and then all of a sudden, you have a completely new thing to put into your stack. And it just makes it brittle, which is, I think, why there is this massive discussion around best practices, because people want to avoid this brittleness of their code, knowing that over time, it’s just gonna decay so fast, you don’t really have this as much in the rails or PHP or an in the Python community, right? There is there’s a lot of standardized stuff that is just from smartly designed language things, that JavaScript as a very, you know, evolving language just doesn’t have. But I want to talk about something that is just here to say like, the outside feedback from the the open source contribution community, and I want to I recently read a book called working in public by by Nadia Akbar, it’s on stripe press. It’s really nice. It’s I think I have it right here. It’s pretty cool. I guess it’s a book about open source projects. And I found a quote in there, which I really liked was about people who build these projects, if the project management is kind of a one way mirror, and she she quoted somebody else saying, like, you wouldn’t criticize a painter while they’re still painting that piece. But a lot of the people in open source do exactly that, as you’re building the code. They’re going in there looking at every leg a little bit and saying this is not right, this is wrong. How do you deal with this? How do you deal with the inevitable community originating feature requests and criticism kind of stuff right now?
Josh Pigford 24:27
Yeah, I so this the stance that I’ve been taking the replies that I sort of give to people who are making either filing issues on the repo or even making pull requests. My response is, generally look, what’s the impact of this decision? Like what are how does how does the entire repo and the community of developers at large benefit from this change? And that right there, you know, a lot of the sort of semantic arguments well, you there’s no it’s there’s not a response. So that says, This is good for everyone, it ends up being more of like, well, this is my preference, okay, well, then I don’t care what your preference here is, like I need, we need to have tangible benefit to making people change the way that they’re doing things or to make this big overhaul that means people have to go and like, you know, redownload the whole repo and run a bunch of scripts again, to get it to update or whatever. Like, it’s, it’s just, I need an explanation, like you need to be to make the case for it. And it can’t be well, I like doing it this way. Or it can’t be, well, it compiles faster. Okay, what is faster? About three milliseconds? Like, I don’t care? Like, it doesn’t matter, you know, and that’s to me as, like, you need to explain to me why it matters. And so I tend to be a little dogmatic about that on my responses, which sort of ends a lot of that stuff, I think,
Arvid Kahl 25:51
Do you think you have enough or like sufficiently calibrated tools to deal with these kinds of things? They’ve already been in like, what’s in it the whole open source maintenance management tools that kind of Oh,
Josh Pigford 26:03
like, does does GitHub provide enough? No, they don’t. I think it’s, you know, there’s a lot of stuff that I would love to see sort of built around the management of an open source project. But it’s, it’s not that bad. It’s just like, Okay, well, there’s a lot of people involved. And it’s just people management and ends up being more like the kind of tools that you need to manage like a Discord server. I feel like I need that on GitHub. But yeah,
Arvid Kahl 26:33
yeah. How’s that? What’s that looking like for maybe like, how are you involving the community? Like on GitHub, Discord, any other places? Or how are these things interacting?
Josh Pigford 26:40
Mostly, it’s, it’s yes, Discord, GitHub, and Twitter is kind of where everything happens. And, you know, it’s try trying to, you know, writing up documents about how to contribute, being really responsive in discord when people ask questions, or say they have trouble getting some getting something up and running, like, okay, let’s talk through that, that gives us feedback over how we can make it easier to get up and running with the platform. So I don’t know. It’s mainly just being present and responsive.
Arvid Kahl 27:13
Yep, that makes sense. You’ve, you’ve talked about just earlier, like funding with us. I think that’s an important part, because obviously, this is the bootstrap founder podcast. And bootstrapping is technically non funding activity. But I believe that you your funding approach is kind of bootstrapper ish. I think we had this whole conversation, or I guess the community had this conversation when you sold parametrics. And everybody was calling you like a bootstrapper? And he said, Actually no, brain guys, I will look like why do we act like one? But you know, this funding? Is there. How’s that happening now with maybe what’s what’s the plan for this?
Josh Pigford 27:48
Sure. So we back in 2021, if you’ll recall, the the landscape was very different. And people were just throwing money at everything under the sun. So it was easy to raise money. And we end up talking about the bootstrapper sort of mentality. So we, we did not raise a traditional type of VC round we did, we went the crowdfunding route using reg CF, which sort of allows anyone to invest and not have to be accredited. So we have, we have around 1300 investors, because of the craft table, you know, as little as like $20 of people are involved in. So that was the sort of impetus or the origination of funding for us. So raised 1.4 ish million back in 2021 2022. So that was that was the original end, like we spent, the vast majority of that trying to get the maybe product out the door and hired a team of at most are eight people, eight full time people plus contractors. So there’s a decent number of people involved. And that was the most expensive sort of route to go. But anyway, so essentially, we’re running out of money, shut all this stuff down, did a quick pivot, then built a tool called detangle. That thing makes money or at least isn’t losing money. But then when we open sourced all this stuff, again, there’s a whole other world of people who are interested in investing in open source projects, at least commercial like commercially viable open source projects. And so yeah, so in the past 10 days, we’ve raised another 1.1 and some change million dollars. But we’re like refocusing like, okay, not going to VC typical grow at all cost route of rehired to people from the previous maybe team and and like that’s essentially our overhead is that and so much larger focus on like, building the very sustainable, profitable business. And leaving it at that
Arvid Kahl 30:12
sounds like a con business to me like,
Josh Pigford 30:15
Well, that’s the goal like it’s the kind of thing I talk about my sort of view of Maybe as the kind of thing that you start using when you’re like 18 and or 16, or whatever, like you get your first job and you’ve got some money. You need to figure out a budget it and all that stuff until you die and you’ve gotten a state that you’re like leaving to your kids or something like that, right? And like all of the stuff that happens in between and all the different ways that you manage your finances. And so, with that in mind, we’re like building a company that needs to be around for the lifetime of its users. So yeah, so that needs to be calm. It can’t be, go, go, go go go. We’re like spending, you know, 1000s of dollars to acquire a single customer and like we need VC money to prop up our terrible customer acquisition costs. And now it’s like, okay, we’re like building a very long play here.
Arvid Kahl 31:08
Is that also a choice that you made for yourself? Because like post exit, a lot of founders kind of switch, right? They switch from I need to, I need to oh, I might or now I don’t have to anymore, but I’m choosing to do things intentionally. Was that baked into the fabric of Maybe?
Josh Pigford 31:21
So the thing that the Baremetrics acquisition sort of allowed me to do is not need to do anything, which pros and cons to that, for sure. However, there’s, now not the need for some or there’s not the pull towards some sort of like, exit. Like, it’s okay if this thing takes a long time. It’s fine, you know. I haven’t taken a dime from like a salary perspective for maybe ever leaving from when we had all this funding a couple years ago. So like, I can be all in on the Maybe stuff. And we just see what happens. Like, it’s like, we can take some like a typical risks because I’m not having to like, this isn’t my job in the sense of like, this is how I’m supporting my family, like, we’re fine. So there’s sort of different outcome needs, I guess, pros and cons, though.
Arvid Kahl 32:20
Yeah, and let’s maybe dive into the cons here as well because everybody’s going for the exit, going for the big cash influx. But the time that comes after that has a couple of challenges too. What you just said to me, I reminded me very much of my own choices right now. The businesses I’m building, they don’t have to be profitable immediately, I would like to, but they don’t have to. I can definitely invest a lot of you know, like, capital in it myself, having access to it and just see it, you know, survive long enough to make money. It’s something that I heard somebody called this post economic state of mind, right? A state of mind where you do not need to think of your mortgage, payments, or whatever. You think about years or decades, you don’t think about next week or next month. And that makes a lot of difference. But you were talking about challenges of this state of mind of this time. What challenges did you encounter after selling?
Josh Pigford 33:13
Well, I think the sort of challenges of not needing to make money means that you also aren’t necessarily optimizing for it, or at least the speed of it. So I think it can also be, you know, constraints sort of breed creativity, right? And like, if you’re trying to build something that makes money, well, then like, you need it to need to make money. And so there’s less urgency with that. And again, like, there’s trade offs on all that stuff and but I think for me, it’s the con can be like, sort of, oh, we’ll get around to the money making part. Instead of like, we have to get around to the money making part. So, I don’t know, sometimes lighting a fire under you is a good thing and other times, I don’t know, just depends. But I think for me, that’s been the harder part I think is I don’t feel the urgency most of the time. And sometimes that’s good. Sometimes it’s not. The inverse of that is also true. So
Arvid Kahl 34:23
I relate to this super strongly, like, my life often feels like, oh, I could be doing more. Or I could turn this into and then some kind of monetization idea comes along, but then I’m then like, no, I don’t have to and I would rather just be nice and kind to people and help them with stuff. And then you know, money will come as a consequence of helping people anyway. It’s one of the core tenants of what I believe, which is why I’m building in public and sharing everything that I do anyway because I see that you know, helping other people help themselves best way to do it. And you do the same thing with what you’re currently doing in a very cool way. Yeah, I think it’s definitely a challenge to still keep doing stuff when you don’t have to. Have you ever considered and this is kind of a metaphysical question, but have you ever considered what your enough is in terms of not necessarily money because money, you know, scales infinitely, but in terms of the contribution, like how much time you want to spend doing things for other people compared to doing things for yourself? You know, like, all this kind of oh, after I sell, I’m gonna sit at a beach and drink like margaritas all day kind of thinking. That’s like, obviously, the one extreme. The other extreme is, I’m working full time, like, all the time doing new things. And I think most people like you and me, we’re somewhere in between, like, where is that line? Like, have you ever consciously reflected on that?
Josh Pigford 35:44
So for me, it ends up being my core is this sort of need to create something now, whether that’s software, whether that’s like music or like woodworking or anything. That’s the pole. So at the end of the day, I’m sort of optimizing for that. That’s sort of where I get a lot of fulfillment from. But that has a lot of different flavors. And, you know, it’s like, currently, I’m doing a lot with software. I mean, I’ve been doing that for the better part of 20 plus years. And so it’s an easy way for me to get, like some sort of fulfillment, from a creativity perspective. But I think that changes over time. And that’s like, a lot of that’s based on life stuff, right? So it’s like my kids are older. I have one adult kid, couple of kids in high school, like the sort of time and sort of investment in that side of life is like, different now than it was 10 years ago when they were little. And like, I think life sort of, like always evolving regardless. And so for me, the constant is just like, every day, I want to create something and then that enables certain things, right? Something like a big exit, gives me more freedom to do things with kids and for us to have different experiences and that kind of thing. So I don’t know, it’s a weird melting pot of things. But the way my brain works is like, I have to make stuff in some form or fashion.
Arvid Kahl 37:39
Yeah, that’s so incredibly noticeable, like with you in particular, like, I don’t remember a time where you didn’t do something really interesting. And we think about detangle as a thing of just recently, but also Laser Tweets and all these other things like over the past, like Laser Tweets, you sold that too, right? Like these things go come into your life and they leave your life again, like you have a very high churn and the best kind of sense, in terms of projects that you’re working on. Do you want to keep doing this forever? Like, that’s also part of this enough question for me. Is this just the state of being that you always want to do?
Josh Pigford 38:12
Maybe, I mean, so I have this list of like, every project that I’ve ever done on my website and it’s I think I was the other day was updating, it’s like 70 projects or something like that. And that’s everything from just dumb. So I start tracking that stuff in 2003. So that’s 20 years of making stuff. So like, I don’t know that it’s just a sort of, it’s not necessarily a fad for me, like I don’t know that I’ll stop. Because that’s been at least half of my life, at least from a business perspective, I guess. Certainly, as a kid, I was making all sorts stuff too. So I don’t I see it changing. But I feel like the hobby side of it may change a bit to the I said something other day where it was like, I want to use projects or I want to build stuff that like hundreds of millions of people use but also want to go like live in a cabin by myself and never talk to another human again. And I genuinely feel that where, you know, is there a scenario one day where, you know, my wife and I are often in the mountain somewhere and like, away from civilization, maybe. I personally would love that. My wife’s not quite as like, anti human as I can be. But I, you know, I think it morphs over time, but as my interests change and I think to me, that sort of the constant is that it has to be something sort of new for me. I’ll just get bored. And so there has to be some sort of fresh way to approach it. Otherwise, I’ll lose interest.
Arvid Kahl 39:55
Which makes this whole open source thing such a smart idea, I feel. Right? Right?
Josh Pigford 40:02
And I think that’s one of the motivations behind it was like, well, why not? No one else has really done this. So let’s give it a try. That was the case with Baremetrics, where like, we made our dashboard public for everybody to see. It was early on before it was really making much money was and I talked to other founders, the advice was like, no, don’t like put that out in public. Like, you’re shooting yourself in the foot with like competition and stuff. And I was like, well, I don’t know why not. Like, I like the experiment of it. And I sort of feel that way with this open source stuff is I like the experiment of what happens when you make a million dollars worth of FinTech software, open source for anybody to use and then try to build a business around it, you know.
Arvid Kahl 40:48
Yeah, that’s very cool. I love that both of these kinds of experiments are kind of transparency forward experiments. Instead of just making things like even more secretive and more secluded, you just opening up, right? And I love that with Baremetrics. You kickstart I think in many ways, the whole open dashboard thing that so many people still do to this day, right? There is a time in every business is life where it’s beneficial to have it open. And then there is a time when it becomes problematic when there’s too much attention. But still for that time, like building in public as well as a seasonal activity, that is a wonderful thing that gets a lot of goodwill, a lot of trust established in the community of people. And that is always good. And I really like that that’s the outcome of this. So with Maybe being an open source project that you will monetize through, like additional services, what’s the vision for this going forward? Like what will make you stick with something like this for decades to come when you’re a person that always needs novelty?
Josh Pigford 40:48
Yeah, I think that it’s understanding that software hasn’t ever finished. I mean, depends on what problem you’re solving. But I think having a very lofty sort of goal, that where we want customers that will use the software for 60 years, like, if that’s the goal, there’s a lot of work to do to sort of meet the needs of in the same way that you know, your own personal finances are always changing, growing whatever or not growing, which is its own problem to solve. And like, if we can build products that help people for a lifetime, there’s a lot of interesting things to try to make that happen versus, you know, some other more hyper specific tool set or something like that. So I don’t know, given the breadth of work to do that sort of a never ending sort of thing to solve.
Arvid Kahl 42:49
Yeah, it’s a field that will present you with not only throughout the seasons of anybody’s life that are also changing, but even the economies of the future are going to introduce new things, right? Like the whole bitcoins and whatnot, like all the crypto stuff, that will be an interesting challenge to integrate. And that will change that will be flexible. Man, I’m so close to making a joke about lifetime payments and lifetime prices here. And I don’t really know what the joke would be. But have you thought about monetizing with that kind of stuff? Because obviously, when you think about 60 years, like would you ever think about selling access to a product for that?
Josh Pigford 43:25
I could see if Maybe was able to be a sort of downloadable product that didn’t need external data, yes. So the problem here with finances depends on, a lot of times it just needs external stuff. Even if you’re manually inputting data, there’s still a lot of stuff around the value of certain things. So like stock market data, for instance, like if you’ve got investments will like we need the investment data to tell you what the current value is of your investments. And that is the reason, a lot of the reason at least to have a subscription fee is like each account has costs for us, right? And so, you know, as nice as it would be to sort of almost go this somewhat altruistic route of like, let you have a one time fee for it. The reality is that that’s not super possible at the moment. Maybe it will be in the future. I don’t know.
Arvid Kahl 44:28
That’s aptly named product, I guess, for that kind of, you know, unspecific future. But I think that’s kind of where I’m getting with the whole one stuff where the base camp people like the idea of like selling a product once having people self hosted and running forever makes perfect sense if it’s its own internal, kind of isolated database and you just have, you know, people chatting with each other and you keep it all on your server. But the moment there are API integrations that you only can provide, like if people can run it on their own service, that’s also fine. But if there’s stuff that you need, obviously subscription model makes sense. Yeah. And in many ways, your definition of lifetime is a very refreshing one. Because like most people would define lifetime as lifetime of the product, right? Lifetime of however long they want to run their servers. But for you, it really is the lifetime of the customer. So I’m very much looking forward to seeing you just go on this journey and build something really, really cool in front of everybody with the help of people who are interested in it. If people want to follow you on this journey, both you personally, the product, the company, where do you want them to go? Where do you want them to see the journey, whether you want them to contribute? Put it all out here.
Josh Pigford 45:34
Yeah, the easiest place is Twitter. So just @Shpigford, that’s where I talk too much. So you can go to maybe.co, there’s some links to that stuff that’ll change a lot over the coming weeks. But that sort of ends up being the launching pad to not be behind on stuff. Anywhere else, I’ll send you and it’ll change in the next week.
Yeah, that’s right. Maybe tomorrow, who knows? Change is the only constant, right?
That’s for sure.
Arvid Kahl 46:05
Thank you so much for sharing all of this. I’m super excited for you in this project that gets really really cool not just to see that you’re building something amazing that I might find very useful for myself, just to see the just the excitement and enthusiasm of people in the community that over the last like, what 20 days or something has just exploded. That is so so cool. So I’m really, really happy that you’re sharing this, that you’re doing it. And thank you so much for chatting about it on the show today. Thank you so much, Josh.
Josh Pigford 46:31
For sure. It’s been a ton of fun chatting. Thanks for having me.
Arvid Kahl 46:34
And that’s it for today. I will now briefly thank my sponsor acquire.com. Imagine this, you’re a founder who’s built a really solid SaaS product, you acquired all those customers, and everything is generating really consistent monthly recurring revenue. That’s the dream of every SaaS founder, right? The problem is, you’re not growing for whatever reason, maybe it’s lack of skill or lack of focus or play in lack of interest, you don’t know. You just feel stuck in your business with your business. What should you do? Well, the story that I would like to hear is that you buckled down, you reignited the fire and you started working on the business, not just in the business and all those things you did, like audience building and marketing and sales and outreach. They really helped you to go down this road, six months down the road, making all that money. You tripled your revenue and you have this hyper successful business. That is the dream. The reality, unfortunately, is not as simple as this. And the situation that you might find yourself in is looking different for every single founder who’s facing this crossroad. This problem is common, but it looks different every time. But what doesn’t look different every time is a story that here just ends up being one of inaction and stagnation. Because the business becomes less and less valuable over time and then eventually completely worthless if you don’t do anything. So if you find yourself here, already at this point or you think your story is likely headed down a similar road, I would consider a third option. And that is selling your business on acquire.com. Because you capitalizing on the value of your time today is a pretty smart move. It’s certainly better than not doing anything. And acquire.com is free to list. They’ve helped hundreds of founders already, just go check it out at try.acquire.com/arvid, it’s me and see for yourself if this is the right option for you, your business at this time. You might just want to wait a bit and see if it works out half a year from now or a year from now. Just check it out. It’s always good to be in the know.
Thank you for listening to the Bootstrapped Founder today. I really appreciate that. You can find me on Twitter @arvidkahl. And you’ll find my books and my Twitter course there too. If you want to support me and the show, please subscribe to my YouTube channel and get the podcast in your podcast player of choice, whatever that might be. Do let me know. It’d be interesting to see and leave a rating and a review by going to (http://ratethispodcast.com/founder). It really makes a big difference if you show up there because then this podcast shows up in other people’s feeds. And that’s, I think where we all would like it to be just helping other people learn and see and understand new things. Any of this will help the show. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful day and bye bye.
