Pivoting 2x to find product market fit with Spencer Coon - Baremetrics

In this episode, we talk with Beamer co-founder Spencer Coon about his start in investment banking, his decision to leave banking and start a SaaS, and how he pivoted multiple times to find product market fit.

 

ABOUT SPENCER COON:

Spencer is the co-founder and COO of Beamer – a no-code platform for product teams that includes changelog, notification center, NPS and roadmap – used by thousands of SaaS companies including Intercom, Hotjar, Drift, Freshworks and many more to improve engagement and get user feedback.

He is a 3x co-founder with one previous exit for the collaboration platform Hibox. He currently resides in Boulder, CO and his interests include bootstrapping SaaS businesses, user engagement, foreign languages and rock climbing.

 

ABOUT BEAMER:

Beamer is an easy to use newsfeed and changelog that helps improve user engagement. Use Beamer to announce relevant news, your latest features and updates.

 

TRANSCRIPT:

Brian Sierakowski: Welcome to Founder Chats by Baremetrics, where we chat with founders and hear about how they started and grew their business. My name is Brian Sierakowski, Director of Ops at Baremetrics. 

This week I talked with Spencer Coon, Founder of Beamer. In this episode, we talk about Spencer’s background, starting in investment banking, early entrepreneurial efforts, and how he pivoted multiple times to find product market fit.

Hey Spencer, thanks for joining the podcast. 

Spencer Coon: Yeah, of course. Happy to be here. 

Brian Sierakowski: And how are you doing today? 

Spencer Coon: Not too bad. Sitting here in Boulder, Colorado. Pretty nice today. Enjoying the last bit of summer. 

Brian Sierakowski: What’s the weather like right now? Is it cool out there? What’s the weather like? 

Spencer Coon: It’s decently hot in Boulder and kind of all of Colorado during the summer, unless you’re high in the mountains, which we are not here in Boulder. It’s in the high eighties, just sunny and nice and long days and a good time to get out before and after work and enjoy being outside. 

Brian Sierakowski: Yeah. That’s great. I’m in south Texas. So my wife actually said to me the other day, like, oh, it’s really cool out. And I looked at the temperature and it was 87 degrees. 

Spencer Coon: Yeah. I know that very well. I’m actually from Dallas. So I know this very well. 

Brian Sierakowski: Totally. Cool, man. Well, thanks so much for joining us. So I’d love it if we could start from the beginning. I’d love to hear your story and kind of hear where you started? 

Where did your entrepreneurial career begin? 

Spencer Coon: Totally. I started my career completely not in the entrepreneurial scene. I was an investment banking analyst at JP Morgan in New York City. I did that for a couple years in a Latin American M and A group. It was a really amazing experience. I knew it was not long-term the lifestyle or the type of work I wanted to be doing.

But looking back, I honestly am still really happy that I did that. I learned a lot about how to work efficiently, let’s say, and just met a lot of people, learned a lot about a wide variety of industries, started to get a little more interested in tech, started gravitating a bit more towards that. And also since it was a Latin American M and A group, I did learn quite a bit about South America, got the opportunity to meet a lot of people who were very well connected down there and ended up being able to actually move down there and do a couple more years in investment banking, but working for a local Chilean investment bank in Santiago, Chile. 

That experience was really life-changing. I have actually lived abroad for a little over eight years, post-college and working full time and it’s been an amazing experience. It’s definitely helped shape who I am. And that’s actually where I met my co-founder Mariano in this.

So it was very transformative and yeah, not entrepreneurial at all, but it was, it was a good start. 

Brian Sierakowski: Oh, yes, certainly the going through M and A process is like hugely informative too, as you’re running a business, at least for you to have some sort of sense of, well, if we were to sell this thing or, you know, as you’re getting investment, like, what are people even looking at?

That’s such a blind spot for, for so many people. 

Spencer Coon: Yeah, absolutely. That’s honestly why I got into finance in the first place, you know, like I said, it didn’t last too, too long, but I knew that really that’s something, every business needs, right? Like you really can’t get away from the financial side of things, just for, hopefully for funding your business, making sure you’re profitable.

I wanted to have that base understanding of it. It is nice because yeah. You know, and the concept of valuations come up with VCs or with a potential acquire. Like I do have that base, you know, understanding from those years working in begging. So yeah, it was definitely, definitely good.

Brian Sierakowski: When did you decide to go into finance? 

Spencer Coon: I majored in finance at the University of Texas where I went for undergrad. So I already had this idea. I had a couple mentors and my dad as well has given me this idea. So I don’t want to take too much credit for it, the idea that finance is the backbone of any business and just a great base for you to have.

So I think I’d already decided that was a good place to start. I also was always way more interested in subjects like math and science and foreign languages. So anything with patterns, numbers, I always gravitated towards that. I think that’s probably another reason why I kind of had that in my sights.

Brian Sierakowski: Cool. Yeah, that’s really interesting. It sounds like when you were going through or going into college, you had this understanding of how important finance was to how important finance was to businesses, maybe almost like how applicable it gets. It’s a very transferable skill set. It sounds like maybe that’s what was in part attractive to you.

Spencer Coon: Absolutely. It was a skill set that I viewed that once you have that’s really an enabler to let you work and kind of whatever you want. I mean, you can go from that and work in any industry and you know it’s a skill that’s going to be valued and that people are gonna want to have on their team. So I think that certainly was the reason as well that I kind of caught my interest right from the get go. 

Brian Sierakowski: Cool. As you were going through college and studying finance, did you have any inclination that this was maybe heading towards you starting a business or was it really. Hey, I’m going to, I’m going to become an investment banker. That’s going to be really cool and exciting. 

Maybe at the time you thought not that much work or, you know, were you already thinking that maybe this was heading towards becoming an entrepreneur or I wasn’t just like, Hey, I’m going to get a great job and I’m going to be a valued member on whatever team I joined.

Spencer Coon: Totally. No, that’s a great question. I definitely already did have an idea that I wanted to run my own business at some point or at least work in a smaller team with some partners or friends that I really trusted. I already had that idea in my head. I wouldn’t say I was like the most entrepreneurial kid.

So I would say to anyone listening. Yeah. I mean, you don’t necessarily have to be the guy that ran a lemonade stand when you’re 10 and had all these amazing ideas when you’re super young to later go on and join a startup, or even found a startup. I wouldn’t say I was that guy, but I always thought I would like to do it. 

I think the reason is… there’s multiple reasons, but just the independence of being the master of my own destiny, sort of my dislike for busy work or doing things I didn’t really think mattered or were adding real value. Just kind of like wanting to focus my energy on what I’m worth that to me, like it truly matters and has an impact.

I think kind of knowing that all those things were important to me made me gravitate more towards, you know, Hey, someday. I think I’d like to start my own business. And I think also just like looking at it also from a financial perspective, like I knew that, you know, taking equity and ownership and things is certainly a great way to, to get ahead financially.

And just having that extra upside and incentive is something that I think was important to me too. So I think it’s kind of, I wasn’t sure I would do it, but it seemed like given the kind of lifestyle I wanted, the different goals that I had that entrepreneurship would be, would be a good fit. . 

Brian Sierakowski: Awesome. Yeah. I think either through an assumption that you would be a better boss than an employee or through the actuality of working somewhere and realizing, man, I’m just really not good at being employed. I think a lot of people figure out like, Hey, maybe I’d actually be a little bit happier if I were on the other side of the table.

Did you find that… you mentioned that sort of a diversion to busy work… you couldn’t really draw the reason for these things happening. Did you find that that school was challenging for you or did you kind of find your system to work around it?

Spencer Coon: I found a system to work around it. I think I was always just highly ambitious. Like in high school, I was the valedictorian of my high school, so school was not hard for me. 

But I think what I did is… I was just really good at figuring out on these tests, what exactly do I need to do? Doing kind of the bare minimum and figuring out tricks of the test, especially like multiple choice tests and things like that.

I was always, I think, very achievement oriented and maybe that was motivating me a little bit more in school. And then I think of busywork in terms of my first couple of jobs. When you are an analyst at an investment bank, you have just tons and tons of work to do. And it’s kinda hard to see how some of the tiny details in those last 20 hours of a 90 to a hundred hour work week are really adding that much more value.

I think that was probably even a little bit more frustrating and something that definitely made me think like, Hey, if I was my own boss, you know, maybe I wouldn’t have to be doing this. Even though of course you’ll always end up having to do some work that is not your core focus or something that you’re most passionate about, but you at least have like a little bit more control over it.

Brian Sierakowski: There’s some sort of a cosmic humor there that people say like, I am sick and tired of these 70 or 80 hour a week workweeks for working for somebody. So I’m going to start my own business. And then in the first couple of years of that business, they’re working like a hundred hours a week. It’s like, you got the right answer, but you, you got there the wrong way.

Spencer Coon: Yeah, totally. 

Brian Sierakowski: I’m curious. I’ve sort of heard about the investment banking world a little bit. I’m curious, could you  share a little bit more of your experience there. Like, what was that day-to-day like, you know, what were the tasks of those 120 hours every week? What was the breakdown of what you had to do and had to learn to be successful in that role?

Spencer Coon: Totally. Like I mentioned before, we were on an M and A team. So we were advising really large corporations on M and A transactions. When a company wants to acquire another business or divest a large part of their business, or even sell themselves, like sell the whole business, they’ll hire an investment bank like JP Morgan to advise them on the transaction.

Obviously we’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars, even potentially billion dollar transactions. It’s quite a complex process. There’s a lot of variables involved. One of the main things they can help with is valuations. So one of our big paths was the super complex one: Like how do you value a business? That’s got hundreds of million dollars in revenue and profits. 

So a lot of what we’d be doing as analysts is creating and maintaining models. Like financial models that can try to, even though it always ends up being more of an art than a science, but models to help these bankers and these executives wrap their heads around what this really complex and large entity is worth and then creating a presentation.

You’re building these models to kind of get the raw data that you can use to back up your sort of pitch as a bank and then presentations, you’re putting together presentations. Really long, many times, like hundreds of pages, PowerPoint presentations for the senior bankers to go meet with CEOs and other executives of their customers to explain why this is the right business for them to buy out of all the thousands of potential ones. Here’s the value we think it is. Here’s the structure you should use. 

It was nice. You run in really small teams and I think that’s a big reason why the workload is so high. You have just really small, efficient high-performing teams. I got exposed to a lot of very senior smart, experienced well-connected people at a really young age.

I was 22 when I was doing this. That was one of the things I liked the most about it is just that exposure to just really smart, ambitious, and experienced people, working directly with them on projects at a pretty young age. 

Brian Sierakowski: It sounds like there might be a pretty even breakdown, but do you have a thought around how much time was spent on actually doing the work, creating the model?

Like actually doing the paperwork around, what is this thing worth versus the time spent on preparing the presentation? Was that like a 80 20, or is it like a 50, 50? Where did the time breakdown go? The actual doing of the work and actual presenting it?

Spencer Coon: Totally. Yeah. That’s a great question. I would say it would skew more closely to the 80, 20 than 50 50, where the 80 is actually preparing the presentation. Just because, I mean, if you’re JP Morgan and you’re going to charge someone, you know, millions of dollars for advice in a certain transaction, things have to be polished. Things have to be perfect. A

That is another pro, something that I valued about my time in investment banking.. You’re just really trained to do everything perfectly, double, triple checking, everything. You actually become really good at making nice looking presentations, and we can get in this later, but we didn’t end up actually raising any VC money, but I put together many decks.

And that was quite easy to do after my experience at JP Morgan. So yeah, you do end up, I would say like spending more time on the presentation side of things and on the actual work of like, how much is this thing worth, for example.

Brain Sierakowski: When you said 80, 20 is 80% of that going towards building the presentation?

Spencer Coon: Yes, but some of that is also analysis. It could be a page of like, well thought out bullet points for, here’s why we think you should use this structure in buying this company. It’s not all just like, you know, formatting and making it look pretty sure. 

Brain Sierakowski: Yeah. That makes sense. That’s interesting. I was sort of wondering about that too. It strikes me as one of those things where you could really spend a bunch of time… I guess I’m trying to choose my words correctly here. It’s not enough to just come up with the right answer, right? You are in a realm of persuasion.

You’re kind of saying like, Hey, this is the work that we did and follow me along this path. And then we’re going to make some sort of recommendation or arm you with some sort of decision or some sort of data. So just delivering them an Excel file probably doesn’t really get the point across in a way you want it to. 

Spencer Coon: 100%. Totally. 

Brian Sierakowski: Did you ever find yourself in the position to recommend against doing an acquisition? 

Spencer Coon: No. I was like extremely, extremely junior, you know. At JP Morgan. I was a first and second year analyst. You’re pretty far down the totem pole and these are like very big complex deals.

We’d have some insight or some disagreement with a VP I was working with or an associate I was working with over a valuation or something like that. But yeah, no, I was definitely not senior enough to be kind of disagreeing with any of the CEO’s on like certain decisions.

Brian Sierakowski: You weren’t walking into the board room and flipping the table over? 

Spencer Coon: (laughing) I wasn’t in the boardroom at all? I was in my cubicle. 

Brian Sierakowski: Makes sense. Are you saying it’s kind of more like by the time it gets to you, they’re like, okay, we’re like diving in due diligence style. We really want to construct the model. 

We’re pretty sure that we want to move forward with this. We’re getting to the point where we’re sort of negotiating terms and those sorts of things was that sort of more the nature?

Spencer Coon: Maybe someone would come to us and say, Hey, we want to buy a company with these characteristics.

We want to buy, you know, a solar company in Brazil, you know, between a hundred and $200 million of EBITDA, some characteristics like that. 

And then we would actually go out in the market and do a bunch of research and you start a network and the variety of awesome tools that we had at our disposal to build a list of like, Hey, here are the 10 companies. We can connect you with CEOs. Here’s how we value each of these. 

We would do a lot of that as well. It’s not that the customer would come to us and they. I already know for sure… I want to buy company XYZ. Just tell me how much it’s worth. 

It was oftentimes a little bit more involved than that, but it kinda ran the gamut, like what deal you, you were assigned to.

Brian Sierakowski: Got it. That’s cool. Yeah. And you, you already mentioned the, you sort of gained this like double, triple checking, you know, skillset that the skill set of like precision and accuracy. 

Was there anything else you learned either as far as the skills that you gained or just like generally through analyzing the finances of all these companies of like, Hey, here are like something like, we will never do this with our money or even just like kind of tactical domain level experience that you got that really rubbed off on you.

Spencer Coon: That’s an interesting question. I mean, I’m sure there are many things. I guess one that comes to mind is just, you really do learn when you spend enough time modeling and building out financial models. How really the true value oftentimes is much more just using them as a framework to understand kind of where you’re going and to understand how different inputs and variables could affect the outcome.

Using it much more than that, then taking this thing as a roadmap. You always end up seeing that there’s just way too many variables and unknowns for the models to accurately predict what really happens. So they’re much more of a framework than like, Hey, I can just throw these numbers in this model, and oh yeah, I see that in three years, you know, my revenue is going to be 200,000 and MRR, perfect! 

The one thing you know is that it will not be accurate. That’s the one thing I can assure. 

Brian Sierakowski: That’s cool. Yeah. So the model is more of a decision-making tool. It almost sounds like when you were building the presentation, even that process is like, all right, I want this slide to present this information.

You can almost work backwards from there. It’s like, okay, well, what do I need? And then,  geez. How do I even think about this data that we’ve already gathered here? 

Spencer Coon: One hundred percent, yeah, much more of a guide in the framework is how I would use it. 

Brian Sierakowski: Yeah, that’s really cool. I’ve been doing some sort of independent study and I’m one of the kinds of areas that I’ve gone down to sort of like these different… I’m kind of into a personality type rabbit hole at this point.

And there’s so many different models, but one of them is like the Indian Ayurvedic tradition, one of the things that you said, really, I was like, oh, that, that sort of fits in where they have these different personality types. There’s three of them. And I was listening to the definition through somebody that’s like a business coach.

So he’s sort of outside the realm of medicine and science, but he’s kind of like, okay, well, people who are like this. They’re going to say, let’s just try it. And then people like this, they’re going to say, let’s try it. And then people like this are going to say, you know, let’s measure it and then see what we should try.

So it’s really kind of interesting how you can use those, I imagine arming different types of people with those models. And, you know, I guess whenever you deliver it to the CEO of the company, depending on what type of person and providing anything that I’ve researched is either accurate or correct.

I could see them, you know, is this something that is supporting their intuition? Is it driving their intuition? Are they, you know, even mentioned, sometimes you’re doing a snapshot of the market. They’re saying, okay, let me measure, let me see what’s out there. And then we can determine what the next step forward is.

So it’s such a cool experience that you had going through that and working with, you know, really learning the value of like, what are these tools? And like, what’s the best way for me to deploy them into the world? 

Spencer Coon: Totally. A hundred percent. Yeah. How different types of people might kind of react to that? Being aware of that, how that might affect their reaction to it or how they want to proceed. 

Brian Sierakowski: That’s awesome. Okay. Cool. Well, okay. So we’re now to the point in your life where you are totally burned out on investment banking. Actually, it sounds like you moved to a different firm, you started living abroad. So you kind of made up an intermediary switch. 

Was the work similar? Were you still experiencing the 80 hour weeks after you moved to South America? 

Spencer Coon: Yeah. I mean, it was similar, but the workload was much less, so yeah. Instead of maybe like 80 to 90 hours a week, it went down to more like maybe 60, not working on the weekends, being able to like make plans for events for maybe some time off or just like, yeah.

Like, knowing that like your Saturday was most likely to be free and you could go, you know, kind of do whatever you want versus like kind of waiting for that, like email on at the time Blackberry. And you’re like, well, no, this weekend I need to go into the office. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to make that move one.

I definitely knew I wanted to have an experience living and working abroad. And then two, I really felt like just two years seemed like it just seemed like a short amount of time to already change and do something radically different than investment banking, because it does take so  long to get up to speed and really feel like you can finally start being a contributor.

And so I wanted to kind of build on that experience a bit more. I didn’t want to leave immediately from investment banking. So this is a way for me to check one box, which was really wanting to live and work abroad and another box of improving quality of life a little bit. But at the same time, like still being able to build on this kind of experience that I already gained in investment banking in those two years.

Brian Sierakowski: Cool. And I don’t know if you already mentioned this, but how did you decide on South America? 

Spencer Coon: I’ve always just loved the Spanish language. I loved it immediately. I’m from Dallas, like I mentioned. I think everyone in Texas is required to take some Spanish in middle school and I always just immediately loved it and was decent at it.

I think it’s just because I’ve always loved patterns and numbers and you know, if you like and are good at memorizing and understanding patterns, then that’s definitely good, good skill to have for learning a foreign language. And I then studied abroad a few times when I was in college.

I went to Spain and then I went to Argentina a couple of times and I knew I wanted to use the Spanish language. I was already pretty much business fluent at that point before I had even moved abroad. And so I knew I wanted it to be a Spanish speaking country to be able to use that skill.

And South American just seem to make a lot more sense. That’s kind of where the group I was working at JP Morgan. It was a Latin American focus group, so I had a lot of contacts down there. Spain seemed just a little bit harder. It’s maybe a little bit more developed, maybe a little harder to break in, whereas maybe there’s fewer people in, at least at the time, in South America who  maybe had a couple of years of experience at a place like JP Morgan. So maybe it was a bit easier to have that door opened. 

Brian Sierakowski: It sounds like you did a great job of looking at what resources you had available to you and looking at your goals and okay. What relevant experience do I have and what can I deploy? 

And then based on that, it sounds like you made a very rational.. It doesn’t seem at all like, you were like, You know what, I’m moving to South America. Like one day you just woke up and like, you know, packed your bags and you were going out there. It sounds like, at least from my perspective, and in retrospect sounds like you had a very, like well-reasoned well thought out decision to, to move there.

Spencer Coon: Well, I appreciate that. At the time. I was definitely a little nervous to leave because it is quite hard to get an investment banking job at a place like JP Morgan. It’s a pretty competitive process.

And once you’re in, if you just stay on the track, you’re pretty much guaranteed to have a really good experience, and be at a high level pretty young. Financially it’s obviously very good. Be connected with a lot of people. It’s kind of a scary track to give up. But just looking at it for those three reasons I mentioned earlier, I was excited about doing it.

It took a little while, but once I thought about it enough, I realized that for me, at least, it definitely made sense. 

Brain Sierakowski: Right. You had to let the model settle in your mind first. And once all the sheets were filled out, you’re like, okay, cool. We’re good. Let’s give this a try.

Spencer Coon: Totally. 

Brian Sierakowski: Cool. Awesome. Is there anything else that you learned being in South America, working there on a similar kind of job, but certainly a different locale. And like you said, maybe a different part of me wonders if almost, and maybe this is a weird thought, but almost has a little bit more of a startup mentality because, you know, JP Morgan has been around forever.

So like you mentioned, there’s a, you know, the market’s a little bit newer and things are a little bit more emerging. Did you, did you kind of get like a startup flavor from that? Or was it, was it still, you know, investment banking is naturally a very established market. , 

Spencer Coon: I would say it was a bit more of a startupy feel. It’s certainly a much, much, much smaller firm, the one I was at.

It’s called Larrain Vial and yeah, I don’t know if they don’t have too much of a presence or at least I don’t think they did at the time, outside of South America. And it’s very big in Chile and a couple of other countries, but yeah, in terms of scope and scale, it’s definitely on another level than JP Morgan.

I definitely enjoyed the switch from the ultra mega corporate huge team at JP Morgan to a little bit smaller team where I probably knew everyone a little bit more, processes weren’t quite as defined, there was definitely a little bit more room for kind of your own thinking and your own way of doing things.

But it’s not like it was super startup-y. I was still very junior, so it’s not like I was in charge of making too many decisions at that point, strategy wise.I could sense that this  change was a change in the right direction for me, so it was probably an indicator to say to myself, like, Hey, maybe I need to go even a little further down that road and get into an environment that would be even a little bit more than a startup-y. 

Brian Sierakowski: That’s great advice. I think generally, if you think that you want to start a startup or work at a startup, I always recommend working at a big company if you can because you’ll know pretty quickly if you’re like, Hey, this definitely is not for me. You’ll get that flavor. 

And it sounds like you sort of went through that process of… I don’t know how big JP Morgan is, but I imagine it’s quite large. Is it like thousands of employees? Tens of hundreds of thousands?

Spencer Coon: Like hundreds of thousands, yeah. 

Brian Sierakowski: Okay, yeah. That’s very big. Just for scale, what was the headcount of the new firm? Are you going to like hundreds or is it still thousands? 

Spencer Coon: It’s definitely still, I would say maybe in the tens of thousands, definitely thousands, but my immediate team was so much smaller. Certainly there were nowhere near hundreds of thousands of people.

There’s like a few offices, not like, you know, massive offices in pretty much every major city in North America and Europe, most of the world, so yeah, definitely totally different scale. 

Brian Sierakowski: I imagine… maybe you weren’t on this side, but I would imagine that the pitch would have to be a little bit different too. Did you find that that was the case to get clients to work with this firm? 

Spencer Coon: For sure. I think the pitch there, you know, with JP Morgan, oftentimes you can sell the reputation of the firm itself. Like it’s so well-established, and it’s done so many important deals and like you know the vetting process they do. 

So in some ways the sell is not quite as hard. I think with Larrain Vial, the biggest value add they were giving, in addition to having a lot of really smart people, is the local knowledge that they had. So there’s not a whole lot of investment banks with deep knowledge of local economies in places like Chile and Peru and things like that. So I think that was maybe a little bit more of their selling point. 

Also, at the time I was still relatively junior, so it’s not like I was directly making the pitch to the CEOs of their potential customers, like saying, here’s why you should hire us. So I felt like it wasn’t really that involved with that.

And that was actually a really interesting thing for me, switching from investment banking to when I did start our first startup was like having to switch a little bit more into that sales mentality, because really that’s not what I’ve been doing. I was very good at creating these models and managing numbers and creating presentations and making kind of these observations on the market with different like considerations. 

I was kind of proving a point, but the sales part of things, especially like directly customer-facing I was definitely not doing neither in New York, neither in Chile

Brian Sierakowski: Yeah. I think it’s a good time to talk more about that transition. What was it like going from the investment banking world into doing my own thing, starting my own company?

Spencer Coon: Yeah, totally. I think when I decided that I wanted to leave, there were a few different factors. I had done a couple more years in investment banking, so I felt like I had fully taken advantage of those initial year or two, where it was mostly about learning and then getting to contribute a little more the next couple of years.

So I kind of felt like I had gotten out of investment banking what I wanted. I had some savings in the bank, so I knew I had both the savings and experience. I knew that if I left, you know, I’d still have those four years of having worked at established companies and the experience I gained from that. 

I felt confident that if, for whatever reason, it didn’t work, I would be able to go back and find a job in a couple of years. I didn’t think there’d be so much of a problem there. I had some savings in the bank to fund things and pay myself during these first years where you’re not paying yourself as much as intern to the salary and then also met the right partner.

That was a big timing thing too. I sort of said to myself, like, Hey, you know, if I find the right opportunity soon, it could be the right time because of those things to start pursuing that. 

And then actually someone I worked with at JP Morgan, her boyfriend at the time is actually my co-founder of Beamer and other products that we’ve built.

She introduced us because he was in Santiago. I met Mariano, that’s his name, and we just kind of hit it off immediately and just really realized that we had a ton of like overlapping and complementary, I guess, compliment is the better word, skillsets and networks. 

I was coming more from the business side of things, had a pretty big network in the US and finance and then Mariano was coming from the tech side of things.

He’d been working first as a developer and then managing his own software development firm doing custom dev work for banks and other big corporations in Argentina. He had the tech knowledge and experience managing a tech team and a nice network in Latin America. 

It just seemed like kind of a good confluence of a lot of different factors that made me start feeling comfortable with kind of taking a leap of faith starting something new.

That combined with an idea that we were both psyched about, and that was a good opportunity. We decided to go for it. 

Brian Sierakowski? Did the introduction happen first or did the idea happen first, or did the intro happen first? 

Spencer Coon: The introduction happened first. 

Brian Sierakowski: How did the idea come about? Was it the sort of thing of like, Hey, like it seems like there’s a good connection here.

Were you almost looking for something to work on together or was it sort of like a co-evolution?

Spencer Coon: Totally. As soon as we hit it off and realized how complementary our skill sets and networks were, we immediately did have this idea that it would be cool to work on something together.

I think we even said in those words, like we should do something together. I think originally we were gearing more towards something that would be a bit more financial. 

I mean, that’s certainly like what I knew a little bit more, so something more lines along the lines of like creating an investment fund to invest in startups and tech companies in Latin America, where I could be the link to know how and capital in the US and then Mariano would be the link to sourcing people and knowing “How do we vet startups today to invest in?”

It was more along those lines of what we first started, but then we didn’t talk for a bit. Mariano actually came back to me with an idea for the first product that we built, and this is not Beamer, so it’s not what we currently do.

For context, I guess this was like eight years ago, maybe eight and a half. He, at the time, like I mentioned, was managing a group of– he basically a software development company. So there’d be, they would do custom dev work like building online banking sites like BBVA in Argentina, you know, deals like that.

So he’s managing a large group of developers and he felt like he needed a better way to manage their work and collaborate because they weren’t all working in the same office. He wanted to be able to communicate and manage tasks and projects online, like in one centralized tool. So that was the idea he originally had.

It was sort of like a peer of Yammer. The idea was to create an internal social network that replaced the outdated intranet and be a little bit more dynamic, a little bit more bottom-up, a place where you could not only communicate with your colleagues, but also collaborate, creating projects, creating tasks, managing them, following up on them- all from the same platform. 

He came to me with that idea to target South American companies specifically. And that’s what we did first. I don’t think we had the exact right team or capital or go to market strategy to make that work. 

I think we built a really nice product. I think it was very easy to use and once people did actually discover it and use it, like we got great feedback and they did really like it, but it never really took off how we want it to. There was no exponential growth.

It was never, we got traction. I mean, we even closed some interesting names, like Telefonica was a customer of ours and a partner Tinto, which was like the largest call center companies in South America. So we closed some big names, got like a decent amount of customers, but it always just felt kind of hard.

The sales process didn’t feel easy. It felt kind of more like we were kind of, you know, cramming this product down people’s throats, maybe that’s a little crude. But it was more of than people seeing it and being like, ah, like immediately understanding the use of it and wanting to use it. It didn’t feel like that.

We ran with it for a bit, but I think we kind of always knew that the current version or with the current go-to-market strategy we had, you know, wasn’t exactly right. 

So we ended up actually kind of doing some product analytics and just trying to figure out what do people like about this product? And it had a chat feature. It had an in-app chat where you could just send simple chat messages to your colleagues. 

We noticed that, like, you know, 95, I don’t know what the exact number is. 90, 95% of the use of this product was the chat. That’s what people wanted– the chat. They weren’t using things like the posts and like the projects and like all these other, what we thought were going to be really cool features, or they weren’t using those quite as much.

So from there a couple of years later, we pivoted and we launched a second product, which we call Hibox. And the idea was to make something similar, but not targeting as big a company. It’s like not trying to be like an intranet, building it more for SMBs and having it be more like a collaboration tool for small and mid-size teams.

The idea was to have the main kind of UI via chat. And then on top of that build in some communication capabilities. So have a chat where you could also, in addition to sending chat messages, you could also video conference your team, and then you could also manage your tasks directly.

So you could actually like, you know, create projects, you could create tasks, you could assign it to people, set due dates. It’s not just like Slack. Slack at this time was just starting out. We didn’t want it to be just a communication platform.

We wanted you to also be able to like, get stuff done and like track real work, not just create a bunch of noise. 

Brain Sierakowski: That’s awesome. How long did you go with the first iteration of the product before you said, like, I think we need to do something kind of different here. 

Spencer Coon: That’s a good question. I would say it was probably around two years.

Maybe we were starting to say that like a year and a half in or two, and then probably we’re launching, or maybe even a year to a year and a half. After a couple years we’d launched the first product, we were already pivoting and kind of at least launching like a beta of this second product.

Brian Sierakowski: Interesting. I’m just thinking there’s probably somebody out there listening right now that’s thinking, oh, I wonder if I’m in this case of, you know, we’re getting some traction, it’s not totally crashing and burning, but it doesn’t seem like it’s like lighting the world on fire. What were some of the things that you were seeing and how did you make that decision?

I feel like the challenging thing in your case was, you were signing customers up. It wasn’t like, you know, if you sell zero customers, then that’s clear. And conversely, if you’re getting a thousand new customers a day, then you’re like, oh yeah, this is, this is great. We’re on the right track. 

But for people in the middle, how do you know that? And then maybe if you can speak a little bit to, once you have that information, how did you decide what you were going to do? You know, almost kind of bringing back the investment banker models of like, well, first you need to gather the data, you know, analyze it. But then you just have data. 

How do you actually take action on it? 

Spencer Coon: Totally. Yeah. Happy to speak to this because I think it’s a really complex issue and I definitely don’t think there’s any one size fits all. Or like, if this is happening XYZ, then you know, you need to do this, kind of like a metaphor. It definitely feels to me like a little bit more of like an art than a science, like how you know what to do, but I’ll just kind of briefly walk through.

Cause we’ve actually pivoted twice, so I have been through this and definitely have, if not expertise, at least some experience to share. 

So the first time, when we launched Hibox originally, and I think really in both cases, when we launched the new product, we were not launching… 

It was not like, okay, product A is not working and we’re sure of it. So we’re going to go a hundred percent into product B. So stop everything for product, a hundred percent of the dev work and sales and marketing and everything now goes into product B. It was a pretty slow gradual process. 

And in both cases, I think what we thought originally was that product B, the new product, could actually potentially even serve as a lead magnet for the previous product. It’s like, we weren’t really ready to give up yet. And we’re definitely still of course, doing a lot of sales and marketing and dev work for the prior product. Not in all cases, I’m sure, but for us, I think that was good because we didn’t just rush into it kind of blindly.

It allowed us to: One, keep making money from, you know, keep having like, you know, sales and revenue from the prior products to fund the development and the marketing of the new product, but also just taking it slow, still giving the other one time to see if you can find something that does work. 

You find that one marketing channel that is your go to market channel and you can really double and triple down on that. And then maybe product day. But that didn’t happen for us. And in the case of Hibox, I would say, which was the second part we built a similar kind of growth cycle happened.

We grew a bit more, I think it was a bit better product market fit. I think we were just more experienced in terms of creating good UX and making it easy to use and, you know, a few like, you know, marketing channels that worked and just becoming better at selling it. And so it worked a bit better, but still kind of the same thing.

We oftentimes felt like the sales cycles were just longer than we wanted. And then for the amount of effort we had to put in, it’s like, we weren’t able to charge quite enough for it to really make sense. You know, it was kind of like more of an SMB pricing, but oftentimes it felt more like enterprise sales type cycle, which is not what you want.

We kind of got to that same spot with the second product and then we… I think we had really cool insights for the last pivot we did. We had a really big, painful internal need, which was, we are building a ton of amazing new features for our users. And we have no way to let them know about it.

The only thing we have is email and no one’s opening them. They’re getting sent to spam and promotions. It’s not in context. We can only send out like, you know, I don’t know an email every once a month even feels like a lot, maybe once every two months. 

We needed a better way to notify our users in app about these amazing new features improvements that we’re building for them because they need to know they need to use it, it would cause them to be more engaged, churn less, upgrade more. 

So we built basically an in-app change log sidebar widget for Hibox for our second product. And that is what became the kind of initial version of Beamer, which is the current product that we work on. 

I think when you are pivoting, I think it’s nice, at least for us, it was nice to have some sort of experience in product A that led us to have some sort of insight or reason or facility to build, you know, the next thing, like the new product, because I think that’ll make you much more successful.

When we built the first version of Beamer, we were like, well, this is going to be a great way…. We’ll give it away for free and this is going to be an amazing way to build a database of leads to sell Hibox and then totally that did not happen. But that was our idea at first is to kind of move it slow and not the hundred percent pivot immediately.

Brian Sierakowski: Interesting. I think from product two to product three, it makes a lot of sense that you’re sort of like developing, you’re getting into this kind of iterative process of trying things out and sort of analyzing how they do. But it almost feels like to me, like the big leap that you took was between product one and product two.

And I totally appreciate, I think you were, you’re totally correct to say, like, we’re not gonna burn the boats. We’re not going to shut the first product down for the sake of the second product, but there had to be something there where you said, okay, you know, we’ve hit some sort of threshold here where maybe he feels like we’re getting diminishing returns or something, you know?

And then you said like, well, let’s, you know, we are now open to the idea of bringing something else in, like, what was, what was going on? Like, what was that determination that you made of like, okay, like we went from being a company that’s focused on one product and we’re doing this thing and we’re trying our best at it to okay.

Maybe it’s time to broaden our view just a little bit. 

Spencer Coon: Totally. I mean, I think, yeah, at least in the case of when we launched Beamer. You know, and I think almost in both cases, I don’t think we immediately thought that it would be a new, separate standalone product. With Beamer, we were just going to build an add-on for ourselves and internal development for us to use. In the case of Hibox, it was like, well, let’s build something and maybe we can even market it under the same site,, maybe it’s still a part of Joincube, that’s what we called our first product. And it’s just like the SMB version or something. So it was always like a pretty gradual, I would say, process. 

And as you start building it out more, and maybe you share it with some friends… that’s kind of always, our process is like, okay, let’s share this with our core group of five to 10, like entrepreneur friends, and see what they think. Let’s get an outside eye on this. Maybe we’re just a little too myopic.

Maybe it’s just us thinking about this. Let’s see what someone else who doesn’t have our particular biases thinks about it. I think when you do that, and if you kind of get some positive feedback, there are people saying like, well, Hey, no, this is great. Like, I would use that or I would pay for that or, you know, I’d use it, but maybe you should add this, you know, just kinda depending on their reaction, you can sort of get a first litmus test of, is this something that’s worth pursuing a little bit more or not. 

Brian Sierakowski: Got it. Okay, cool. Yeah. So it almost sounds to me like if an entrepreneur in a similar situation came to you… You’re sort of very quick decision-making process would be like, well, first of all, do they have something? Or are they in the case where they don’t have any customers? 

And it almost feels like if you don’t have any customers, then, okay, you might need to go back to the drawing board. But if they have customers and they’re in these conversations, and maybe they’re noticing things, like you mentioned, the sales cycle is a little bit too long or, you know, cost us too much money to acquire a customer, either through ad channels or just like, well, we can sign up a customer, but then, you know, we need to dedicate a person to supporting them or whatever the case is.

So there’s kind of… if the entrepreneur could then articulate, what is it about your business? What’s working and what’s not. Then as they’re provided, they’re talking to customers and provided they are having those conversations they can start to search for… To you, it sounded like sales cycles are really long and kind of expensive.

So you were thinking, okay, well, what can we do here to decrease our sales cycle? And you said, well, maybe selling to smaller businesses, a subset of the functionality that would be more relevant to that business. Let’s try focusing on that. Is that kind of like the cycle dramatically simplified?

Spencer Coon: 100%, that resonates a lot. What are the specific problems? Too much churn or, you know, other things you mentioned. Can you pinpoint that and improve it or fix it in your own products? Or do you need to actually launch something new to get to those goals you had.

I can give an example that we had. For example, our biggest goal was always, how can we get our users to promote our product without them needing to do it consciously? Like “Sent from my iPhone”, we always wanted that and we can never figure out how to do it with high box or junkie you the first two products.

And that’s why as soon as Beamer came about and we realized, oh wait a minute, this could be a standalone product. We thought this is perfect. This is perfect for product-led because basically all of our customers are just going to install. They’re going to bet our script and they’re going to show the Beamer widget to all of their users.

And in many cases, a lot of our customers who could use Beamer, most of their users are also good potential customers for us because we’re selling to SaaS. So yeah, just an example, like something we were always trying to fix and those other two products never could figure out what to do, built something new, solved that in a huge, in like the perfect way. 

So that was one of the factors that kind of led us to being more open to pursuing that more and more and putting more and more of our resources into that. 

Brian Sierakowski: Cool. Yeah, it sort of strikes me, or it almost to me sounds like the similar process you went through when deciding to move to South America. It’s like you have this skill of being an inventory master or something like that, where you’re like, okay, let me like, sort of catalog it.

Correct me if I’m wrong. It sounds like you don’t necessarily do this consciously where you’re creating lists, but you’re like, okay, well, what are our strengths? Like, what’s good about the product? What are our weaknesses? You know, that’s like the long sales cycle or, you know, salespeople are too expensive or it’s cost us too much to market it.

And then you kind of take all these things and then you start to collect them. I don’t know if I’m accidentally creating, like reinventing the concept of like SWOT. And you’re like, okay, well, whatever opportunities, like, you know, like, okay, cool. Well, you know, people are really digging the chat side and then people, you know, and, oh, well we needed this tool for us.

You know, this is something that we have available to us. It almost feels like you have this real scale and sort of cross-referencing of like, what do we have? What are our strengths? And then what am I hearing in the marketplace? And then can we use that to bridge the gap between using this thing that we have, like some things you didn’t have already, some things you had to develop, but we’re operating from this element of strength of like, how can we use sort of what we already have to address or resolve the issues that are, that are being presented within the company that are slowing.

Spencer Coon: Yeah, totally. I do think that’s a strength of our team. And I would say even especially of my co-founder Mariano is just exactly what you described. Take the weaknesses and see what you can do to make those opportunities. So, yeah, I think that’s something I’m sure everyone could have benefit from. 

We don’t keep like written lists or anything, maybe that would help, I don’t know. But doing it either consciously or unconsciously. I think it’s certainly helpful. 

Brian Sierakowski: Yeah. I suppose you’d give it a try, but it just sounds to me like this is something that’s innate in you and maybe sort of drilled into you from the investment banking world, but it just sort of feels like your internal operating system loves to process through these sorts of problems and, you know, kind of connecting the… of course it always sounds a lot easier than it probably was when you were going through it.

But, you know, it’s just interesting when you look back, it’s like, oh wow, there were some pretty clean, you know, clean lines, clean resolutions between the issues that we were having and you know what we were, what we were working through. 

Spencer Coon: Yeah, totally. Yeah. I think looking back, it’s always easier to kind of see how the dots connect, but yeah, we were, we were definitely conscious of it and kind of trying to do that.

Sure it didn’t hurt. 

Brian Sierakowski: So it sounds like we’re at the present day. Tell me about Beamer. You gave me sort of the basic idea. What are you working on now? Where’s your attention currently? 

Spencer Coon: Yeah, so it’s a hundred percent on Beamer and it’s something that we’re all tas a team team really psyched on, really excited about.

We launched the first beta version of Beamer a little over three years ago, so not too long ago since then. We just like immediately could feel the difference and people’s reaction to the product, their adoption of it, how quickly they were adopting it, the feedback they were giving us on it, the willingness to like be early kind of beta testers and use the product, even though it didn’t have like everything on their wishlist, but even still, they were like psyched on actually using it and like using it in a real way, actually kind of like installing it for all their users to see.

So we could just really feel that tangible difference. I mean, the first thing we did was an AppSumo launch actually. I’m glad we did that. For people who don’t know, it’s got a huge community of people and for products that are just starting out, you can market to that community, typically you offer a lifetime deal. 

So people will typically pay around one month of what you would typically charge or what you’d like to charge for your product, but they get lifetime access to it. So obviously you do this when you’re at a very, very early stage. Like we didn’t have any bank customers at this point, but it’s just a good way to get a lot of kind of initial early adopters really playing around with your product and giving you real feedback.

The lifetime deal also can be very limited in terms features that they have and there’s upgrade opportunities. But yeah, as soon as we did that, I think we sold maybe three or 4,000 of those in a week, but those lifetime deals and that was a really big indicator to us.

Like, Hey, people really see the value in this and maybe there’s a lot of people who would. Then kind of more and more, we started focusing more on Beamer and I mean, within, I think I need to check the exact number, but I don’t know, probably within like five or six months, Beamer’s MRR was the same as the first two products combined.

And that was with hardly any marketing spend at all. A hundred percent bootstrapped, like we’d raised kind of a friends and family round for, to build those other two products. We didn’t raise anything for Beamer, just bootstrapped using revenue from those products.

And even still, it was able to surpass them in just like six, maybe even less, maybe it was four or five. So it was really obvious. That was nice. That was not a hard decision to go with. And it just  the business model that we were looking for so much better, like being more product led and more self-service and automated.

So we’ve been running with that since then. We’ve since sold Hibox and joining keep is still around, but very, very much in maintenance mode. That’s got a few customers that still love it and, you know, we provide service to them, but it’s not, not a big drag at all on our resources.

And yeah, that’s kinda where we’re at now. The vision for beamer… What we’re trying to build is a platform to help SAS companies build better products. So how do we do that? We basically give them tools to identify what sort of features… so we started out as just like a change log in a sense like expanded.

Now what Beamer does is, I would say, much more complete. So now you can, and it’s something we’re launching probably to be launched right around the time of this coming up. I don’t know how long this will take, but certainly like around there. The first tool you have is the ability to identify what features you should be building the way you do that is the roadmap tool. 

So you can actually show your users. Hey, like these are the features we’re thinking about building and have them upvote on features so you can determine okay, of these features in these different stages, here’s the real priority. I’m not just guessing. Here’s what my users really are telling me is the most important for them.

And then it also has a feed feature request tool so that your users can go in a more organized quantitative way and tell you here’s the features that I would like you to add. You’re identifying what features you should be building.

Once you identify that and build the feature, you’ve got the change log and a bunch of other in-app modals, like snippets and banners to notify your users and let them know, like here’s what we built. We’ve built this thing, go use it with a lot of smart tools like segmentation and analytics to measure impact and feedback.

So you can see what they think of that specific update. And then kind of to close the feedback loop for product teams, we have an NPS survey tool and we’ll be adding some other things like CSAT and other feedback measuring tools so that you can determine, okay, over time are all these features that I’ve identified in them built. Is that really adding more value to my user’s experience? You can kind of like measure that over time and by user segment. 

So that’s kind of the vision going forward is how can we just do that better? And yeah, we’re psyched on it. 

Brian Sierakowski: Wow. That’s really cool. It totally makes sense to me of like letting your, letting your users know, is actually one of like the, when we look at businesses from Baremetrics, when we talk to customers, but also from the private equity side. When we look at businesses, it is basically universally the case that customers of most SaaS products know about like 5% of the functionality. It’s so critical, you know?

And even, even within the Baremetrics world, we would get people that would, would cancel and they would say things like, yeah, we really loved the tool, but we just wish we could segment some of the metrics. 

And like, Aw, geez, we have segmentation for like everything. It’s just really complex and we’ve invested a bunch of time into it and it’s just like, man, just like not everybody knows about it.

So I think it’s a critical step for SaaS businesses to like, make sure that you feel like you’re… I mean, I think generally product teams, once they are ready to launch something, they’re like, okay, we’re done. Like we’ve been working on this. We did the research, did the customer interviews. We did the testing and the Meyer frames.

And then like when you launch, you’re like, okay, cool. It’s done. And it’s like, well, actually from your customer’s perspective, you haven’t even really started.

So yeah. It’s so critical to get that information across. And then, yeah, it’s like, I feel like, what do we build next? And what are we doing?

What do our customers actually care? Over time, I’ve really begun to think about that Steve Jobs quote or whatever, You can’t ask people what they want. And as I’ve gotten more into more exposure to businesses, and I’ve seen what really works in the real world, especially with Baremetrics customers across our portfolio. 

You can’t just go obviously going too far on the other side, you know, hand to mouth, but if you want it to double the satisfaction of your customers and find real revenue growth opportunities, you have to have the conversation correctly.

I think, for example, instead of asking, like, what feature do you want? You’d have to say, like, how much would you pay for this feature? And if somebody says $0

Spencer Coon: That’s your answer. 

Brian Sierakowski: Then you know, it’s nice to have it. You know, it doesn’t mean that you wouldn’t do it, but you should ask: what would it be worth for you to have this type of functionality?

And they’re like, we would pay you $8,000 a month for that. We will give you three months up front. You’d be like, okay, I’m getting a stronger signal for sure. You know? So yeah, like really being able to dig into what to do next. I totally believe that. Especially, if you have any sort of reasonably sized customer base, even, I mean, even a few dozen customers, you can really start to drill in there.

It’s really cool to hear you approaching this from a full cycle perspective. Cause then, people will be excited. Well, first off they’d be expecting it to launch because. Customers asked for it. You’re almost pre promoting it and then they can see it launch.

And you’re like, awesome. Like we, we asked for this thing and then it was delivered. And it’s just a, really the, the further out that you can draw that draw, that funnel or that process. I think the more happy your customers are going to be. Totally. 

Spencer Coon: Yeah. It’s really cool to hear you say that as well. And I totally agree too.

Like you definitely need to have a decent sized customer base, you know, maybe at the very beginning, you are needing to have a little bit of that fish in, and, and certainly for some people, they just may have the vision and they don’t kind of need desk customers and they’re Steve Jobs or whatever it is, and you know, they know how to do it… 

Brian Sierakowski: If you’re Steve Jobs, don’t worry about it. 

Spencer Coon: But for everybody else, it’s good to have a little bit of like more quantifiable insight into what your users really want. Like, and as you say, like, once you have a bigger user base and you’ve kind of identified your main buyer persona. And you’re asking the right audience, you’re not asking the wrong audience. 

I think in that case, it definitely can’t hurt. It can help a lot. Just what you were saying about the whole cycle and prepromoting, that’s really cool to hear you say that because it’s one kind of effect I think we’re seeing a little bit now that Beamers is a little bit more widespread and got over a thousand paying customers and many more free.

And a lot of them are some of the top SaaS guys again who are calm, you know, Hotjar, LaSeon FreshWorks as like, these are all, all using, you know, they’ve got like big customer bases. We’re kind of seeing now that there’s sort of this like virtuous cycle, because it’s like, now that the users are seeing and they’ve been shown like a change log and they can see like what’s new, that’s kind of like incentivizing them to as a user to demand more of that company and be like, Hey, I’d also like, you know, this new feature and seeing that, and having that demand from the user is, you know, making the product teams kind of incentivizing them to motivating them to build better products. 

It’s kind of a cool virtuous cycle for the industry to have that more open communication between users and product teams and just, you know, build something that’s even better and, and sort of more impactful.

Brian Sierakowski: Yeah. That’s interesting. I think it’s very dangerous for me to disagree with you on these sorts of topics, given your domain. But I would almost argue that the use of the word demand, you know, kind of like the creation of demand I think is maybe not correct. I think that all of our products have customers that want stuff all the time.

The difference is that there’s not a convenient way for them to tell you, or they’ll say like, ah, you know, it’s not a big enough of a deal. Like, yeah, it’s kind of frustrating. I have to click here. Then I have to click here. Then I have to click here. Once you know about it, you don’t need to worry about it.

It’s like, well, the issue is that your new customers that you’re trying to set up, haven’t gotten over that. So that might be a deal killer for them. You make it really easy to start to harness the features that those customers are looking for, you actually can hear from them and actually get the feedback versus people kind of suffering, suffering in silence, which we, we all, unfortunately, due to our customers a little bit.

Spencer Coon: For sure. No, I think that’s a good way to put it and yeah, just kind of like having that channel available is the, I mean the demand. Yeah. And it was always there. It’s just not like easy for them to let you know what they’re thinking. So, yeah. I agree with that. 

Brian Sierakowski: Cool. Well, Hey Spencer, this has been, this has been awesome.

I really appreciate you making the time to chat and I love hearing you walk through this story. It’s so cool you know, kind of see the lessons that you’ve learned earlier on in the skills that you’ve gained earlier on it. Like seeing you applying them in a major way. And it’s always cool to like, hear somebody, you know, hit a home run, you know? 

Like product three made more money in the first three months than product one and two together. I mean, that’s just like, that’s really cool. And I hope anybody who’s out there. That’s listening. That’s in that spot. Maybe they are on product two. It’s like, Hey, you’re you gotta keep going. Your Beamer is out there. 

So yeah. Keep going for it. Is there anything else you wanted to cover? Anything else you want to say to the listening audience before we close it up here? 

Spencer Coon: Oh, I don’t think so. I just really appreciate the opportunity. Thanks for doing this thing. It’s awesome. Have tuned into the episodes already and super good. Appreciate you taking the time to chat and having us on. 

I would encourage, I mean, just reading into what you said. Just be persistent and be scrappy. I think that’s two of the things we did well, and I think that, yeah, just because, you know, the first product’s not working as you want… 

Like if you’re persistent and scrappy enough and lean enough, you’ll have time to find something else that does work. So yeah. I think that’s an okay message to leave with. Awesome. 

Brian Sierakowski: I agree, awesome. Thanks, Spencer. Well, yeah, thanks so much for coming on and we’ll, we’ll, we’ll have to, we’ll have to catch up soon.

I’m excited to, if it’s not live already by the time we launch this, I’ll make sure that we do a little, we do a little update to make, let everybody know when those features are. 

Spencer Coon: Yeah. Perfect. Sounds good. Yeah, you can check it all out at www.getbeamer.com. It’s our site and yeah. Thanks again, Brian. I appreciate it. 

Pleasure. That was our conversation with Spencer Coon, founder of Beamer. If you’re looking to get your features in front of your customers to tighten up your product development process. Get beamer.com. 

If it’s SaaS analytics you’re looking for, check us out at baremetrics.com. Hope you enjoyed the episode and invite you to check out our other founder chats.

And if you’re able to leave a review or share with a friend, it goes along the way. Thanks for listening!