25: OK, 2020

The SaaS Venture

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0:00:11.4 Aaron Weiche: Episode 25. Okay 2020.

0:00:16.2 Intro: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. Sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrapped SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins, and losses shared in each episode, from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.

0:00:44.1 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.

0:00:47.4 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.

0:00:49.7 AW: And we are here to look back at quite the year that we've had. Wouldn't you say?

0:00:57.6 DS: Let's say, yeah, it was a year for the history books, this one. It was... It was a bad year. 2020 really sucks for most of the world's population. It was a crummy year. But I guess... I don't know, I took some notes before the podcast and I have some positive things to look back on, but yeah, definitely it was a tough year.

0:01:18.8 AW: Yeah. As we break it down, I think for me, at the end of it is like, "Okay, we survived this year," right?

0:01:30.3 DS: Yeah.

0:01:31.3 AW: Being able to just make it through and not be as dinged up in some way or another as others, when you look around and there are certain industries that are completely shut down, have your doors closed. It's amazing when you think what it must be like to be in those types of industries.

0:01:54.3 DS: That weighs heavy on me, I really feel privileged to be in the digital marketing industry, building SaaS software that people still need and are actively looking to sign up for. We're just in such a fortunate position, whereas so many other industries have been devastated. And so I think about that all the time, about like, "Wow, we gotta recognize our privilege here."

0:02:24.7 AW: Absolutely. For better, for worse, however it happened, accidentally, on purpose, it isn't hard to look and be like, "Man, thank goodness, my industry has survived this well." Obviously, some aspects of our industry have absolutely taken off because of what COVID has forced.

0:02:45.9 DS: Yeah, totally.

0:02:47.9 AW: If you are at Zoom, a Zoom shareholder, any of those things, like you know how true that is. Or just probably any product in the video conferencing or live communications world has just sky-rocketed based on immediate demand across the board.

0:03:06.6 DS: Totally. I really wish I had thrown some money into Zoom when, back in like March, early March, be like, "Oh quick, put all of our investments into Zoom, it's gonna be huge."

0:03:21.0 AW: Back the dump trucks up to every tech stock in the last 10 months and you're not doing too bad anyway, right?

0:03:26.8 DS: Yeah, it's true.

0:03:28.5 AW: Oh man. What is your overall... It's like you have the feeling of survival and whatever else, but maybe let's start to dig a little deeper into that. Like when you look back, is there ways... Do you feel like there's any ways you could break down, you know, the year into thirds or quarters, or things like that? And how you feel about, like are there transitions where you guys felt differently about it or adjusted, like what are your thoughts on that?

0:03:57.2 DS: Yeah, that's a good way to look at it actually, because I come to the end of the year and I can think, "Alright, great, we have some... We survived. We even thrived in some places." And I can look back at that and feel overall the sense of, "We did it." But then... Gosh, if I think back to March, April, May, it was a dark period. We had to... We saw massive decline in revenue, we had to do some layoffs, we had to put... We had to get all the government programs in place. And it was stressful and it was like, it was this period of uncertainty for myself and for all of our team members.

0:04:40.4 DS: And so people were stressed and worried about the pandemic, and we came out of that after about three months, things just started to recover. It was almost like people instantly had this fear of the world falling apart, and so everyone really tightened up expenses and weren't spending any money. But then it was like, "Oh, well, I guess this is our new reality and life will go on and we still need to buy things," and so business picked up again. How did those first three months feel for you?

0:05:14.0 AW: Definitely when you're dealing with the unknown, that's one of the hardest things where there's no game plan for it. You can't research your way out of it, you're just taking sometimes hour by hour as it comes. And that same thing, I was just kind of wondering to myself while you were talking, I just wonder how much have people changed or where are they at in that progression.

0:05:44.9 AW: Those first few months were so uncertain and just as you outlined, like you can imagine this Doomsday scenario where what you've built, what you're working on, whatever else, where it almost collapses on itself. You kind of envisioned, "Oh, everybody holds up." Business is just kind of killed off in every way. It felt like, "What's gonna go on and continue on?" You entertain those kind of thoughts, and then as time goes on, some of that regresses in certain areas. In the world of software at least.

0:06:24.9 AW: And then you find, "Alright, well, here's the next thing we can do." And I think we started doing a lot of short-term focus things like, "Here's the 30-day plan, here's the next 30-day plan." And it was kind of focused on just taking small chunks, 'cause you can't predict or look at anything further than that.

0:06:40.1 AW: I think we saw... That was one thing that I took from some of the larger companies at some point when they were like, "Hey... " And I can't remember if it was Apple or Twitter or Google, or whoever did it first, but a couple of them definitely said like, "Hey, we're remote until June 2021." They just said, "Let's stop trying to look at this as like in two weeks, in two months, in two quarters."

0:07:05.9 AW: And they just said, "Yeah, well over a year from now, we're gonna revisit this. But that's not something we need to deal with right now, because it's just gonna be vacillating all over the board." And I almost kinda took that as like, and applied that to other areas and said, "Stop. Stop just vacillating on all the what ifs, you'll drive yourself crazy, and focus on the things that you can control and that you probably should control," and things like that.

0:07:35.2 DS: Yeah. It was funny to look back at some of the emails we got from that time, like in early March, it'd like, "We're closing our shop, but we expect to be reopened in three weeks." [chuckle] People were like, they really thought this was gonna be a short-term thing, in so many ways.

0:07:55.2 AW: Well, we've never experienced anything like it. So you just... No one knew, right? Everything was like... It depends on how much optimism you carried at the time. Or in some circumstances, and you can get this, a business would also look and be like, "Hey, anything longer than this and we are in trouble." That's where I feel with so many of these restaurants is like, they're not built to just shut down for a month, much less... Here in Minnesota, where I live, they're on their second six week to eight-week shutdown of no indoor dining at all, in any capacity, in any way.

0:08:34.8 AW: And then to top it off, there's this time around, there's absolutely nothing that's lined up for support of what they need or helping them out. It's just this really wonky scenario of the government saying, "You can't operate and we also can't help you." And my hope is they should have already had help lined up before they ask them to do this again, or mandated they did it again.

0:09:00.1 AW: But we're really starting to see some rumblings here between restaurants just all saying, "We're not gonna do what you're asking us to do because you give us no ...