This is the full transcript for Episode #210 of the Wild Business Growth Podcast featuring Nick Fogle – Audiogram Pioneer, Co-Founder of Wavve and Churnkey. You can listen to the interview and learn more here. Please note: this transcript is not 100% accurate.
Nick Fogle 0:00
You don’t just brainstorm and come up with ideas. That’s probably the worst way to find a idea to work on. You find a space you’re interested in and you find problems as you gain proximity to that space
Max Branstetter 0:24
Hey, the Welcome back to the Wild Business Growth Podcast. This is your place to hear from a new entrepreneur every single Wednesday morning who’s turning Wild ideas into Wild growth. I’m your host, Max Branstetter. Post bachelor party. Thank you very much. I am the founder and Podcast Producer at MaxPodcasting. This is Episode 210, which is how much I can bench with one arm blindfolded on on a bad day. Just kidding, don’t try that. And today’s guest is Nick Fogle. Nick is a co-founder of Wavve one of my favorite podcasting tools ever creates those fantastically amazing audiograms you see all across social media. And he also is the founder and CEO of Churnkey, which I appreciate the pun in the name. We talk a little bit about that. But they are all about making it as easy as possible for business owners to reduce churn. In this episode, we talk everything from Nick’s journey, thinking he was going to be a lawyer to changing up quite a bit, dealing with a ton of student loans debt they’re getting into the world of entrepreneurship and how to reduce self-doubt how to experiment and find problems that you might back your way into that you can build businesses around. And even some Better Call Saul and Severance. It is Fogle enjoy the show.
Already, we are here with Nick Fogle, the dude behind one of my favorite podcast marketing products of all time Wavve W-A-V-V-E, as well as your newer baby Churnkey, but serial entrepreneurs super cool dude. We were talking about we probably crossed paths at Podcast Movement back in 2018. In Orlando before that, but our 2019 actually. But Nick, thanks so much for joining How you doing today.
Nick Fogle 2:35
Thanks for having me, Max. I’m doing great. Looking forward to getting on here and chatting with you a bit.
Max Branstetter 2:39
Perfect, cool. I mean, I mean, you’re doing great already. So like if that’s like the goal, just get on a chat like you know that. But we’re going to talk about Wavve, we’re going to talk about Churnkey. But before that, I heard that you basically taught yourself to code to code anyway. So that that weird, basically taught yourself to code while you were working as a shuttle driver, like the job. How did just explain that’s amazing.
Nick Fogle 3:06
It’s kind of the Nick Fogle origin story, I think, just to rewind the clock and provide some context around that I had. I’m a kind of middle of the tear millennial born in 1986. And I was I was an ambitious guy in college, I said, okay, like, I’m going to study economics. And I’m going to graduate early in 2008. I had interviews with Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, these different banking institutions. And if anybody can remember what happened in the fall of 2008, the bottom fell out, particularly in banking, horrible time, you know, you would think you need economist during this period of time. Nobody wanted an economics major. So, all right, what am I going to do? Well, I worked at Walmart for a little bit, and I said, enough of this, like, you know, I gotta find a real job, I’m gonna go to law school. So I kind of like doubled down on education, and made a bad situation way worse by going to law school and taking on tremendous amount of debt. And then I graduated in last like 2012 law school, I did not like practicing law. Eventually, I hit a point where I was like, I can’t even pay off my student loan interest payment with the amount of money I’m making as an attorney. So here’s where it gets really crazy. You know, you think you’re already struggling you know, you’re an attorney like you know, stick with it. But I was depressed I was miserable. I I remember just driving down. I live in Charleston, which is a beautiful area, but I remember just driving down and like crying to myself Park alone on the battery. I was just, you know, I’d never been felt that disenchanted like an unhappy with where I was feeling totally stuck at this point, too. I was like, we’re about to get evicted from our apartment complex. We, I was newly married. My wife worked at a nonprofit. We were just it was a bad situation. So I was desperate. And I put a housing wanted ad out on craigslist. And I said, you know, tried to hit like all the right boxes like nonsmoker, notepads stable married couple like all that stuff. And you know, we really got blessed in this total here Hail Mary. I mean, we could have found like a serial killer or something, you know with a housing one a dad, but this woman that her she built a guest house they lived far out in a remote area, but they built a guest house for her parents who had unfortunately passed away before anybody could live in the guest house. She said we’ve never rented it out. But your message, you know, I saw your message randomly It spoke to me and I want to give this to you for $1,000 a month all all utilities included, and we said this is it like we’ve got to do this. Here’s the catch. This is out toward Kiawah Island, which is if you know anything about South Carolina geography I doubt many listeners do. It’s very remote. It’s like 45 minutes from the middle of nowhere. Like it’s it’s just like, beautiful, but it’s remote.
Max Branstetter 5:51
Real quick. Is that where that golf? Yes. So that knew it sounded familiar,
Nick Fogle 5:56
most people that the PGA Tour like most people are aware of Kiawah as this beautiful golf resort. And, you know, that was the only place where I could find a job as like a shuttle driver at this resort. So here I was, you know, with a prestigious law degree, becoming an attorney, I have my economics background and had always been, you know, striving and ambitious. And I’d realized, though, that I don’t want to do law, I don’t know what I want to do. I was like, kind of down and out. And I swear this was like such an inflection point in my pathway. And I think a lot of listeners may identify with this idea of, you know, you do everything that you think you’re supposed to do you grow up your parents say, be a doctor, be a lawyer, those are the best callings you could possibly have. I think this is particularly true for millennials who like grew up and there were these very clear routes that you should take, you know, you go to college, you get a four year degree, you do these things. And here I was 25, I guess at this point, gotten married, you know, I checked all the boxes. And that story and narrative had not panned out for me. So I was like, I’m going to reset, and I’m going to do something that seems unconventional, I’d always been creative. And I had the startup ideas, things I wanted to work on. And I had reached out to a few people to help me build this, like legal education startup I wanted to build. And of course, this is a naive founder. And people who’ve tried to do this may identify, you have an app idea. And you reach out to developers and say, Hey, I’ve got this wonderful idea, will you be my business partner and helped me build it, I’ll give you like, 30% of the company or something, nobody is going to take a risk, no decent developer is going to take a risk on, you know, some unknown founder with an idea. So I was like, Well, I guess I can teach myself to code. If there’s one thing law school taught me it’s how to teach yourself, you know, big dense volumes of information. So
Max Branstetter 7:41
I thought you’re gonna see if there’s one thing law school taught me it’s how to code, I was like, Wait a second, that’s the biggest twist I’ve ever.
Nick Fogle 7:47
I will say that, you know, a lot of people are intimidated by learning to program because you think this is like a very math based discipline. That’s the assumption people have. But if you have any aptitude for linguistics, or language, I think modern programming languages are more conducive to people that are good at language, if you understand, you know, grammar and language and syntax and choosing the right word. And if you’re building a narrative or a story, and you know how different things can change the way things work, and for law, this is fascinating. But if you’re in law law school, you learn how to look at a statute and figure out, you know, if this, then this is, you know, punishment, for instance, well, that is a very fundamental programming type of rule set, right? Like, it’s all rules at the bottom. So that hunch isn’t too far off, you know, if anything, law school taught me how to really think deeply about language and constructs, and it also helped me to learn how to work hard and teach myself. Now, if I were to rewind the clock, I would not have gone to law school. So don’t go to law school, if you want to do if you want to be a programmer, don’t go to you know, I would even caution you and say you may not have to go to undergrad and take out loans if if you want to be a programmer. So anyway, this is a long saga of my origin, but I think it does. People do identify with this, like, you feel like you’re stuck in an impossible situation. You have in you know, you’ve got to make ends meet. But you want to do something different. And I use this period of time where I was driving a shuttle and in between pickups, I would bring my phone at a time I even had like very low data limits on my phone with support. I think now it’s pretty much unlimited for people. But I would tell her that to my laptop, I’d hide it in my shuttle. So my bosses and people didn’t see like I was doing this on the job. I pull it out. And I would like do Codecademy, I think was one of the early tools you could use back then to learn and I just had this startup I was building so I just worked on and like, figure things out. And I think that’s the best way if you have a startup idea and want to learn to program, don’t just go through lessons mindlessly start building something and then just google your way to figuring out how to build that. And for me, it was like it was kind of a means to an end. And like of course I wasn’t gonna be able to build this ambitious startup idea. As a brand new programmer, that’s a tall order. But I learned that I love programming, I love that power that it gives you to create something from scratch. Like, with law, you can’t just like write a contract and see how it benefits the world. But with code, you can do that you can write something and immediately see people use it and enjoy it. It’s very, it was a very fundamental shift in like, wow, I can build something. Today, people can use that tomorrow versus a contract. Like, maybe that’ll never come into, I hope it never, you know, with a contract, you don’t ever want that to, you know, enter a courtroom, if you do your job, right, it should never get there. From that point, teaching myself to code and the shuttle took me like six months to actually get decent. But when this is your sole focus, and you start finding something you really like, you can get pretty good at something pretty quickly. And I was lucky enough to get an internship at a company called Blackbaud, which is a big, publicly traded, nonprofit organization here in Charleston, they got me an internship making like I think, was $15 an hour or something that, to me, that was more money than I’d ever made. And I was like, I’m gonna prove to these people that I am hungry, and I will do whatever it takes. So I worked really hard in that internship. And eventually, it turned into a full time job. And I just like, was really ambitious and kind of grew up through the organization over a few years.
Max Branstetter 11:20
And look back now and you’ve built and sold multiple companies, based off of if-then statements, so it all came in handy. But that’s, that’s really, really cool that you found this new love of programming at the perfect time, like when you were, you know, people say down and out or like just a tough time in your life. And you were looking for something else that was gonna get you inspired. And in there it was. So who knew it would have been coding in between shuttle rides in the fantasy golf Island? Yeah. If you look back now, you know, from the time in the shuttle to those early years at at Blackbaud. But was there anything that kind of foreshadow the fact that you would be actually starting companies one day?
Nick Fogle 12:02
you know, this is funny, I’ve always been one of these people that I tend to be more introverted. You mentioned Podcast Movement, you probably met my co founder, because he’s like, you know, with wave, he was the very extroverted marketing guy Baird Hall. And I was, I’ve always been more introverted, I’m not shy. But I like to, I get drained in these, you know, big conferences and physical events and stuff. So that’s been my personality, my whole life where like, if we’re in a small setting, shuttle ride very conversational, and can make deep relationships with people. And just have a great conversation with these people I pick up and, you know, when you’re driving a shuttle, you meet so many interesting people and a resort like Kiawah, it’s international business owners. And I would just talk to them and ask them questions and share my ideas and what I’m trying to do, and you know, where I am in life. And there were several people that said, things like, I believe you’re gonna do something really big one day, and I was like, wow, like, that meant a lot. And part of me, you know, that doubting side that I think everybody has, to some extent would be like, you know, the negative voice in my head saying, These guys don’t really know that, like, You’re a big faker. You’re never going to do that, you know. But you’ve tried to silence those voices. And you think about it and say, wow, like, this is a person who has succeeded in business. And they’re telling me based on this brief interaction that like, I’m going to be able to do that one day. Those were incredibly encouraging things. And I think that is transferable to anybody if you have an idea, and you want to talk to people about it, and share it, and look to the market and look to experience business people to help kind of validate that. And I think that’s one of the best things you can do early on, is ask questions and share things that you’re working on.
Max Branstetter 13:44
So I’m gonna keep asking questions, I’m really taking your advice to heart that, let’s move to some of your entrepreneurial journeys or parts of your entrepreneurial journey. So there’s plenty that you did even in between Blackbaud and wave. But I want to jump to wave because it’s especially interesting and intriguing to me, just because it’s literally one of the tools that still to this day, I use it often several times a day, during the week in front of anybody who’s, who follows me on social media, or has ever seen a little clip and audiogram of the Wild Business Growth Podcast, share it out or any other podcast, share it out. For a fact mine and my clients are using Wavve to create those audiograms W-A-V-V-E. And many, many, many, many people in the podcasting space are using Wavve. So it’s a really, really cool tool. And I know it’s evolved so much over the years. But you were involved in the very, very early days as a co founder. How did you get from the nonprofit in the in the tech space to creating something that would eventually be used by this curious podcasting industry?
Nick Fogle 14:53
Oh, yeah, I’m gonna give you the shorter version.
Max Branstetter 14:57
We’re gonna create 75 Wavve clips of this interview.
Nick Fogle 15:01
Let’s do it. You’re on the maximum plan, right? You’re on the agency plan that top tier plan. Absolutely. Yeah. And you know, when I look at the podcast artwork that you have I, I’m trying to remember, I know, I’ve seen this before. And I feel like you must have been very early. Because when you’re starting a business, there’s a period where you know, all of the customers, do you do you remember if you signed up when we were like, helping people manually create these,
Max Branstetter 15:26
it was a little bit after that, but I definitely worked heavily with support early on, and I I’ll have to go back. And I’ll put in the show notes have to go back and research when I first started using Wavve, but I remember like early on, after launching the podcast, I got a referral from someone on Twitter, like, hey, this Wavve is a pretty cool new thing.
Nick Fogle 15:43
The reason I mentioned that there was a period at Wavve where we were like manually creating all of the artwork for the videos. But just to rewind a bit. I had these I was working a full time job. I had all of the student loan debt. And it was like growing, I couldn’t even pay all the interest on it. Even with this new Blackbaud senior engineer salary I had I realized, I’ve got to just start something if I ever want to pay down this tremendous debt, I need to play some asymmetric bets. And one of those that I always wanted to do is get back to startups. And I had all these ideas. My wife was tired of hearing about them, I imagine. And one of her friends was tired of her husband hearing about all of you know his ideas. So they were like you guys just need to get together and like hash out these ideas. So my co founder Baird, and I started to get to know each other by meeting up at Starbucks. So
Max Branstetter 16:33
So Baird was that other annoying husband? Yeah, he was he was
Nick Fogle 16:37
our wives introduced us kind of. And we started meeting at Starbucks and talking about ideas. And our first idea, this was right around the time that Serial came on the scene. And we were getting really into podcasts. This is like 2015 I think the podcast Serial, not like Frosted Flakes. Yeah. Not Frosted Flakes, although I’m sure they have a podcast now. Yeah, that’s very sweet. Yeah, it’s crk. Nothing like Serial, and all these, like big podcasts were popping up. And I love listening to these on the way to work. And we wanted to talk about them. And we were like, how cool would it be if you could engage with other podcast listeners in audio format, we started thinking more about this idea and thinking there needed to be like a Reddit for audio. Which again, this is a very ambitious idea. If you are a team of two, you don’t have any like external funding or VC connections. And back then 2015 It was pretty, obviously way pre COVID. So no matter where you were, we weren’t going to raise venture money in Charleston. But we were too naive to realize that. So we spent two years building this really fancy Reddit for audio tool called you talk that was the name of it originally, you talk and bad name, we were eventually sued for trademark infringement that we didn’t, I should have known, you know, being the attorney. But these are the things you do when you’re moving.
Max Branstetter 17:50
You can’t Yeah, what is your counsel thinking?
Nick Fogle 17:51
Well, you can’t think like, this is another thing. When you’re building a startup, you can’t think like an attorney, because you would never start. There’s so many risks. It’s like, it almost hurts you more than it helps you in the early stages. So yeah, we built this app. And we had people using it, it was so validating, and we listened, the users were like, build this build that and we got some podcasts that were paying us a little bit of money each month. But ultimately, we couldn’t raise money, we could not monetize it. And without venture money, like, we can’t work for free forever, we left our jobs at one point, and I was doing a lot of consulting work. And as a Hail Mary, though, before we like shut that down. I was like, There’s got to be a way to like, make this go viral. And around the time WNYC, you know, big, they’ve got think Radiolab is one of their podcast, big podcast organization, they had created this open source tool, it was the first thing that I’d ever seen that let you create an audiogram. And I looked at that open source project on GitHub, and they’re all of these podcasts is that we’re like, I want to use this, how do I use this, and there was no way for a non technical person to be able to use this thing. So I was like, hmm, I’m going to just create this and set it up for a bunch of our existing communities. So I pulled an all nighter, release the ugliest looking thing ever after just one night. And we started sharing that. And immediately you’re like, how do I do this? How do I do this? So after a few weeks, we realized like, we’re onto something here, like people are willing to pay for this. So we were the first people to commercialize the audiogram take what they had built, and then like, go way beyond what they built and build it for, you know, everyday podcasters to quickly upload their artwork and add their snippet of, you know, the show snippet that they wanted to share and choose a different design and immediately they had something that they could share. So that is how wave was born. We said all right, well, this, you know, giant thing we’ve been building for two years. You know, we couldn’t generate much money from that. But within a few weeks, we’ve already you know, raised a few $100 Just from selling this the people we know The cool thing about wave is it’s got virality built in. So you add a watermark to it, people see it on social, and they go to your website. So in some regards, it’s like, alright, well, you got super lucky building that, and there’s definitely luck involved. But for your listeners out there, the lesson that I take away from that whole experience was that if you are passionate about a space, and you work in that space long enough, eventually you will find a problem that you can solve and people will pay for it. And for us, we thought we had found the problem and actually, you know, clubhouse Twitter spaces, what we built was that, but we just, we could never have built that ourselves. We needed venture money, we found this space. This problem, though, that audio does not share well, on social media. That was the problem. And we’ve helped to address that problem. So we just started building and over time we grew and grew and grew, I still had a date day job through all of that, because I again, I had crazy student loans. So I you know, from 9-5, I would you know, do my consulting gig or, you know, my day job and nights weekends, I use my PTO. Eventually I had another job and I use PTO to build way features. So for about three or four years, like that was my life is work all the time. But it paid off and paid off in a in a big way. Looking back, I wouldn’t do anything differently.
Max Branstetter 21:23
I love stories like this, where it’s like a founder start a business, they think it’s going in this direction. And then they find something that’s like completely different. Or maybe it’s a little part of the business. And they’re like, oh my god that like this is it. This is really like the new business. And we had a while back we had Stacy Madison, who is this is the Stacy from Stacy’s Pita Chips on Oh, wow. And she had a little food cart, where they serve like pita sandwiches and pizza dishes. And they just decided to like, toast up these pieces of pizza one day and sell it to people and people were like, this stuff is amazing. And she built another business that was inspired like same sort of thing with in the in the bar space. But it’s almost like mentally feels like a giant weightless and off your chest when you like just feel like a natural fit of this is the direction we need to go. This is it. When you look at all the growth that wave has had since you started and started building it. What would you point to as being the biggest factors in actually getting exposed to more people and getting more podcasters? To sign up?
Nick Fogle 22:27
I think there are two things that two inflection points in this business. And just some additional context is helpful. When you’ve spent two years building something and it flops, you become more risk averse to what you build. And one thing Baird and I realized through that venture was like we need to be very intentional about building things that provide ROI, not just you know, what do users ask for? What do we think people are willing to pay for it? And we adopted that we call it money the Moneyball approach. I don’t know if people have seen the movie Moneyball. But it’s about you know, they take this very analytical data driven approach to, you know, dealing with a small budget, and we started operating that way. So one big factor was initially, as we were trying to figure out is, do we really go all in on this product, what we were doing at that point was, anytime somebody wanted to create an account, they pay us, then they’d send us their album artwork, there wasn’t even like a builder, you couldn’t create your own artwork with n wave, they would send us the artwork, we would create these designs for them. Ask them, you know, what style waveforms do you want, we’d set that up, and then they’d come back. And this was a big factor is like, wow, if people are willing to wait a day and still pay us, and that’s how bad they wanted it that validated the market demanded this, you know, very rudimentary product, very, you know, rough experience. And we did that for like nine months, Baird left to go to Europe with his wife. And I was alone, dealing with all the support requests. And I said, Oh, thanks so much, Baird well, and he had been the one setting up most of the stuff. So I was I hadn’t had a feel the brunt of this. I do a few here and there previously, but I was billing all of them. And I said, this is awful. Like, this is not scalable at all. Like we just can’t do this. So I was like, Alright, I’m going to spend a month. And I’m going to build create an editor where everybody can just sign up and build around. That was a huge inflection point. We also found our third business partner on Upwork had no idea that we’d actually find somebody that was that high quality on Upwork. But we did. And eventually we ended up making him a partner because his quality work was so good. So that all happened around the same time where we like, brought him on, I built this editor, we were moving more quickly building features. And that kind of launched us up to where we were doing $2,000 A month in recurring revenue. Still not a lot of money. We couldn’t, you know, pay the bills with that by any stretch of the imagination, but it was like the right movement we need to see the second inflection point was it goes back to this whole like, ROI based approach where we were like, Let’s add a watermark and I mentioned that earlier, but When we added the watermark for all the free accounts, it enabled us to like, be more aggressive with offering free as an option for people. So we got all these people that wanted to use the free tier, and that wasn’t, you know, a total loss for us because they were creating stuff that had the, the wave watermark. And that generated a lot of interest. The final inflection point that really changed things was we started hitting all the if you from, you know, on the engineering side, video generation is very expensive and difficult to do. And I had like 12 of these different servers, 12 different machines that were like handling and all every day, I’d be like, in there rebooting them trying to fix them manually. Another thing, that business process where people say you do things that don’t scale early, until you validated it. And you know, a year after I built the editor, we just could not scale. So I created a new way to handle this and use some new technology to do that. And that made it where people instead of waiting an hour for their clip to for their video to generate, it could happen in five minutes or 10 minutes maximum for it.
Max Branstetter 26:05
I was gonna say because I you know, especially like days that are really super busy. I will track how long it takes to do it. And it’s it’s within minutes these days. Like it’s amazing what you can do. And often we’ll do a bunch of wav clips back to back to back up, you can batch them and knock out a ton.
Nick Fogle 26:20
Yeah. And that’s that was not possible for In fact, if somebody uploaded like, you know, if Joe Rogan had used his I think early on, we got like Dave Ramsey, we got a few of these that were like, really big name podcast, and they had like a few episodes that were very long. And I’d be like, Oh, Dave, like, what do you do? And you bogged down on my servers? Good, you know, and
Max Branstetter 26:38
let’s get this turned into Gilfoyle from the show Silicon Valley of the garage is on fire.
Nick Fogle 26:45
I was Gilfoyle I had all my servers up there. And, you know, granted, they weren’t, did you have a name for your servers? They weren’t physical. I didn’t. But I viewed it as like a very personal attack when a customer who was paying us uploaded something and we couldn’t handle it. It’s like, Oh, why did you do this, but you know it. That’s part of scaling, though, you got to figure these problems out. And we were the first ones to create a with ADD of all the video generation apps I knew of at the time, we were the first ones to build a system that would actually take a video, chop it up into like, a ton of seven second clips, process it all and then put it all back together on the fly. So instead of doing an entire video, it would be like 1000 little videos and put it all back together. So that’s how that worked. And that was that final inflection point that was like, wow, like now people realize how quickly they could create things. And it was off to the races. So after that we grew to like probably $30,000 or 40,000 a month in monthly recurring revenue.
Max Branstetter 27:40
Yeah, I mean, the products, okay. I mean, don’t use them. No, it’s amazing. And yeah, the quality is obviously grown a lot over time. But even from the start, I remember thinking like, wow, this is like really, really cool technology. And then I think over time you made the user interface and just ease of use, like so much easier and quicker. I was like, This is amazing like this. It’s such a unique function, what it provides for podcasters. That’s waves on waves of wave, you can tell it like puns. Somehow you sold Wavve and evolved from Wavve to Churnkey. So, first of all, what do you think’s the top reason that you, you were able to successfully sell Wavve? When you
Nick Fogle 28:21
build a business, and it’s profitable, you start getting, and we also Republic, we would share milestones, because there’s this there’s this whole, like, indie hacker bootstrap movement, where the community supports one another in these efforts to you know, build products and do it yourself. Without, you know, a big amount of fundraising, those things tend to you know, if you raise fundraise, it goes on TechCrunch, everybody hears about those. And we were pretty early to this indie hacker movement, and we would share our revenue publicly, and we’d share our growth publicly. And in 2019, we got two calls in January of that year. The first one was from Spotify. And we were like, Whoa, like this is, I mean, we were just blown away with Spotify as business development. They were looking at making acquisitions, they were just getting into podcasting back then. And we’re like, we’re set for the rest of our lives. Spotify is going to acquire US and ultimately, they realized how small we were, I think, and we’re like, alright, like the legal paper we were going to use to do this deal is not worth it. But that same month, like a week later, we got an inbound from somebody who wanted to acquire the business for it was like, right at about seven figures. And this was hard for me to say no to it’s one thing to have a business and believe in the business and where it’s going. But it’s another thing to be financially strapped, not having a lot of resources. And to me that would have paid off my loans helped me catch up on retirement. And fortunately, Baird was in a very different place financially. And he was like, he saw things a little more clearly. He was like, hey, like, let’s look back at you know, where we’ve come where we’re going. And you know, maybe we could sell this in a few years and we took a few days to really think heavily on this decision and We realize like, okay, yeah, like, there’s no reason to rush and sell now, let’s give this a year and see what we can do to get it ready to sell. Because if we were optimizing this business to sell, we could sell it for a lot more. About six months later, we approached the broker that had represented this buyer and said, Hey, could you represent us now and like, you know, we didn’t know anything about selling a business or brokers. And they were like, yeah, like, you know, there’s no longer a conflict or anything the buyer had gone away. So they were like, Oh, they went over our numbers. And they said, your churn rate is 13%, which is, it’s pretty high when you’re looking at businesses. And part of it was the nature of podcasting. In general, you have a lot of podcasters that say, Hey, I want to start a podcast. And then they ended after three episodes, I have tremendous respect for podcasters, who can actually start and be consistent every week. And even when they’re not seeing results, it’s a very, very difficult thing to do, just keep at it consistently. And with way, that was the one of the bigger things we face was people that would do a short season, they pause, they want to stop, and they’d come back, or they just stopped altogether.
And we realized that we were going to sell Wavve, we needed to handle this problem of churn, figured out a way to bring it down. So over a year, you know, we kept growing and kept growing. But churn was this ever, you know, it was a problem that did not go away. And as you grow larger, that becomes more of a threat to your growth, like, eventually, you’ll plateau, you won’t pass that. So we paid $30,000 to this turned consultant, we were desperate, it didn’t really move the needle. And we started tweaking things internally. And you know, if you spend a lot of time in subscription apps, web apps, different tools, most companies spend a lot of time on onboarding. On activation, you’ll get this drip email sequence to like, make sure you get started. But nobody ever focused on onboarding. If you give all these customers attention upfront, why aren’t you personalizing the onboarding experience to number one, trying to figure out why they’re leaving, they’re gonna click the dreaded cancel button, there is a reason for why they’re leaving. So why not just ask them. And then the second thing we realized over time was knowing our customers podcasters have seasons typically, and there are periods of time where they just want to take a break, and they don’t want to pay for a tool if they’re taking a month off, or two months off. So we introduced the ability to when they’re leaving, if the reason was, I’m not using it right now offer them a pause and say, Hey, you keep all your credits, you keep all your account just the way it is. But for two months, we won’t charge you just come back and pick up your account the way it was, when you left off, keep all of your usage credits. Another thing that was very helpful was discounting. This is a controversial thing that some people feel weird about. But we realize not every customer has the same financial sensitivity, people have different budgets, budgets fluctuate over time. So you know, based on our customer, maybe we could try a different discount, see if that can keep them a little bit longer, because it’s expensive to bring customers in. And you want to keep those customers as long as you can. So we found a series of these different offers, that we could give people based on why they were leaving. And that had tremendous implications. For our core business, we cut churn from 13% to 8%. And if you’re a math person, this, this is hard, if you’re not a math person, this is kind of hard to wrap your brain around. But the compounding effect of recurring revenue when you can cut churn by even a small percentage is, is amazing. So like over the next year or so we grew turnkey to or we grew wave to almost $150,000 in monthly recurring revenue. A lot of that was directly due to turn reduction strategies. And also COVID brought in a lot of people that were starting podcasts and working from home or so. Yeah, and that is the origin story of turnkey.
Max Branstetter 33:43
I was gonna say So really your, your experience at the tail end of your wave journey. Like it was almost like churn was organically created just from the stuff that you were seeing on the in the way of business.
Nick Fogle 33:59
Yeah. And the idea for this is something to that a lot of people. When I come on podcast, I always at the end, I give them my Twitter handle and say DM me, and all the time I get people saying how do you create ideas? Or how do you get ideas for a startup? You don’t just brainstorm and come up with ideas. That’s probably the worst way to find a idea to work on, you find a space you’re interested in, and you find problems as you gain proximity to that space. So, you know, wave came out of our proximity to podcasts and radio, the audio space turnkey came out of our experience running a business. And we were, you know, really tied into this community of other founders and turn is a problem for everybody. A lot of people put their head in the sand because each turn is like a breakup, somebody leaves and it’s very personal. And a lot of people want that automated, they don’t want to look at every customer that’s cancelled and try to like, you know, win them back. So it was some Succot, some psychology and a lot of just business processes. So we realized, Okay, well, wave is in a really good place. We started getting acquisition offers at the end of 2020. We received 5 offers on Christmas Eve. And we did not solicit these offers. It was like at the end of COVID. All this money had been on the sidelines that would normally normally have been spent on acquisitions. And I think everybody at the end of the year was like, okay, the world’s not ending. Let’s find some companies and make some acquisitions. And we were very fortunate to have grown a lot have conquered churn that year, the thinking that was like, Okay, we’ve got a great business here, we actually, we love the product, we love podcasters. And it’s still growing. Why would you give up a business like this? And it really comes to it’s a very personal decision. Like, I had a two year old, and I was working like crazy still. And Baird had a little one on the way, I think, yeah, if I remember correctly, so we were starting families. And we were also not, we realized, we’re not great operators of this type of business. We’ve been working in this space for so long, we just felt like it was time to find a new home and have people that were more operationally focused to take ownership, and build some of the things that we had not built yet. The last thing is, we were thinking about our net worth and like, when you start a business and grow it, this was like 99% of my net worth at that point. So it was just like, the prudent thing would be to say, let’s find a new home. The last thing though, that’s important to notice, like, when you’re facing something like that, I’ve seen a lot of situations where people sell their business and in their loss, like, you know, what do I do next? And we knew, like, we want to keep building businesses. So we were like, well, you know, what we’ll rebuild. And we realize that we’ve built this tool that’s so amazing and instrumental for founders, and we love working with other business founders and understanding their businesses and helping them. We said, Let’s make turnkey its own product. So we kind of took everything we’ve learned from this turn tool we built internally for wave, we broke it out, we added a bunch of features, we made it so other businesses could like hook up to it and start receiving the same benefits. We kind of did a beta period. And the results were phenomenal and worked even better for some of these other businesses that we were testing and we said, alright, well, we’re gonna sell weight in March of 2021. The deal will be closed. Let’s launch turnkey publicly. And that’s the origin story of turnkey and like how we entered into this new space of going from helping podcasters create to helping other businesses with their churn problem.
Max Branstetter 37:20
And every now and then, cough cough, you get a podcaster, who has a business as well. So
Nick Fogle 37:26
yeah, well, and I think I’ll podcasters you know, most podcasts could be a business, if you are in a niche, you know, it’s I that’s what I love about podcasters, in general, is they’re all very entrepreneurial, and loved the idea of creating something entrepreneurs and podcasters are like the same people in my boat.
Max Branstetter 37:41
Yeah, it’s incredible. It’s it is like your own business. And now we got a business that’s helping out everybody with their own businesses. So it’s it gets very, it’s very meta meta wave after wave. But anyway, that it’s super cool that it came out a wave as well. And so the churn, Churnkey today, at the time of this recording, what is the most valuable thing that you offer for other business owners, in order to reduce churn in their company,
Nick Fogle 38:10
we totally automate the whole process of retention and churn recovery. So instead of having to, there are a few things you can do that or awful one is just like, throw your hands up in the air and say, these users didn’t value our product to begin with. That’s an assumption that we have to counter in a lot of situations, people are fixated on this idea that if somebody leaves, they weren’t a good fit for the product. And I have to say, no, no, no, like, there are a variety of reasons that people leave and with turnkey, we help you know, there is a big educational component in what we do when we will get on a call with the business and help them understand. And I’ll say, Hey, are you doing anything? After somebody clicks that dreaded cancel button? Are you just saying, Alright, see you later? Or are you saying like, you know, I want to learn as much as I can about why you’re leaving, I truly value each customer. And I want to learn about this. And I want to meet you where you are as a customer and figure out if there’s something I can offer to help you stay. So like that whole process of just saying, it takes 15 minutes, click a button, add this tiny little snippet of code to your site. And we will do all of the rest for you. That is the value of turnkey, you could spend six months building a very basic version of this yourself, which is what we did at wave it actually, you know, the problem with doing that is it takes you away from your core business with wav we should have been focused on building better tools for podcasters to create video, and instead, we spent like six months working on this very operational issue with our billing system and retaining people. If something like turnkey had existed, we would have never built it. We would just install it but it didn’t. So we you know, we built it ourselves and now it’s available for other companies. And just last thing I’ll note on this topic, earlier I mentioned that the thing about like you don’t really have have original ideas, you know, they come out of solving a pain point, as we were thinking about churn with wave and figuring out, like, how did the big companies solve this problem? We thought about Netflix and Hulu, you know, other big businesses that have large teams and are focused on every ounce of revenue. And they had things like this, that obviously the user experience is really bad on a lot of those like it. It’s like a dark pattern that sends you down a labyrinth of like, 20 different forms. But we were like, you know, we can do something like that and make it better, more user friendly, and learn from what they’re doing. And that’s, that’s where we got the idea. And we’ve just continued to improve and innovate on that.
Max Branstetter 40:36
I have to commend you, by the way that obviously I’m a big fan of puns. I don’t even notice it first upon turn company name. Churnkey. Yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah,
Nick Fogle 40:45
I forget it. You know, when you when you tell us to your company name, you forget why it’s that but it’s a turnkey solution to solving churn? Yep.
Max Branstetter 40:54
Perfect. Well, you should just, instead of calling it Churnkey, you should just call it a turnkey solution for solving churn that really rolls off the tongue right there.
Nick Fogle 41:01
I love that I’ll give you credit if we if we move to that. Perfect, cool,
Max Branstetter 41:05
and you can, you know, your new, you know, probably how to file the trademarks, and, and all that. But look, looking back now, now that you’ve, you’ve built I mean, at least three businesses now you’ve been entrepreneurial in a number of ways. What is the biggest entrepreneurial lesson you would say that has helped you to start and sell and grow companies,
Nick Fogle 41:26
you’ve got to stick with it. Things are yesterday for Churnkey, for instance, we had a big product release. And it was hard, we had some issues, and we had a competitor, you know, make a comment about what we were releasing, and we lost the big customer. And, you know, there are so many ups and downs when you’re early in a company and wave was a great example to where I mean, it took us 18 months to get the $2,000 in recurring revenue. If you’re pursuing any kind of entrepreneurial pursuit, if you’re building a startup or a podcast, you have to stick with it and just come up, show up every day and do the work and trust that over time, if you listen to the market, or your customers, and you just stick with it. Even if that business idea is not panning out for you, you will learn enough to pivot, change your direction, and eventually you’re going to reach the point of having a profitable successful business. So yeah, I think that’s the best thing. I can tell founders as startups, you know, they say, you know, you run out of money you have like infighting with founders, I think a lot of that can be distilled down into pacing yourself, showing up every single day, doing the work and just trusting that if you’re doing the right things, and the right things are subjective. But you’re listening, mostly listening to the market, eventually it’s going to pay off.
Max Branstetter 42:49
And speaking of listening, I have something for you to to help with your podcast, the world of podcasting, which involves listening. You’ve heard me speak in previous episodes about the Podcasting to the Max newsletter, well now officially have a lead magnet for the Podcasting to the Max Newsletter. And I know a lot of people don’t they kind of like try to hide the fact that it’s a lead magnet. But let’s I mean, let’s face it, that’s where it is. This has fantastic value for you if you are interested in starting a podcast or getting better at editing your podcast. So it is called How to Edit Your Podcast in Audacity. And you can access it by signing up at MaxPodcasting.com/Newsletter. That’s MaxPodcasting.com/Newsletter. Sign up, hit confirm once you get the email that you know asks you to opt in and all that yada yada, yada. And you will receive How to Edit Your Podcast in Audacity. And you probably already forgot it’s a lead magnet by now until I just remind you right now. So anyway, let’s get back to some waves in the form of rapid fire q&a. So let’s pay our way or pave our way or wave our way to wrap up with some rapid fire q&a. You ready for it? Yeah, let’s do it. All right, let’s go wild. And one of my favorite movies of all time is Superbad. And the character MCLovin, his name is Fogle. Did anybody ever in the past couple decades make fun of you in the in the middle of it? Yeah.
Nick Fogle 44:30
You know, I was a lowly intern at the big law office. And you know, law firms can be kind of like, you know, frat boy, a lot of these guys it’s especially where I am Charleston, a lot of it is kind of like a it’s like an old boys club and like, frat guys, and I didn’t like it and they love the idea. They would just call me mclubbe And they were like my club and you know what, what deals that we have the day or and I’ve had a number of people in college and it’s funny too, because I went and saw that movie in theaters and when they I can’t remember if it’s the scene with his ID or if they just I forget if they were just calling him that but yeah, instantly that
Max Branstetter 45:05
Hawaii ID Yeah, he had the why Hawaii ID were the only name was McLovin and not first name last name.
Nick Fogle 45:10
He’s such an endearing character that it’s like, it’s not even all that negative in fact to when I got married my brother in law called me that for like four or five years like the first five years I was married. I think he called me McLovin.
Max Branstetter 45:22
Oh my god. It’s amazing what popular movies can do now? Well, I’m very I’m very sorry to bring up some dark memories there. I didn’t mean I didn’t know you were teased about it. But he is a absolutely legendary character and a legendary movie. So I could I had to
Nick Fogle 45:36
ask that the teasing is all in good fun. It’s funny because Fogle is one of these last names. It’s just common enough that most people have like met somebody with the last name. But if you’ve seen that movie, that’s what you’re going to remember. Great movie.
Max Branstetter 45:47
Speaking of movies, let’s get to movies and shows. Besides Better Call Saul, which is Oh my gosh. Recording. Yeah, I did. Yes. That’s without giving away. Yeah, like it better than Breaking Bad. I don’t, I got to start breaking bad again soon, like from the start. Because watching these now I’m like, There’s no way this is better than Breaking Bad. But Better Call Saul towards the end got really good. So I don’t know, I
Nick Fogle 46:09
think it’s better. I think it’s better because it’s it’s more optimal. They had more they had more to work with as well. That’s true. And you kind of you knew where it was going as an audience. But that even still, it was better, like you knew what was going to happen. But in my opinion, it’s better because of Jimmy’s character Bob Odenkirk. He’s so it’s so endearing. And you just like you can’t help but identify with him on some level and want to root for him. And you know, the way it goes toward the end, you know where it’s going. And the whole time you’re like, how’s it gonna get there? It’s brilliant. I liked it better.
Max Branstetter 46:38
Yeah, it’s I just think Vince Gilligan is like one of the evil geniuses of of the past century, or maybe the past millennium. But anyway, besides Better Call Saul, so I’m putting a tough filter on it. What is your favorite movie or TV show that involves lawyers,
Nick Fogle 46:54
who I don’t like a lot of like lawyer dramas, because it paints the this, like, exciting view of the practice of law, and it entices people to come to the profession. When it is very boring and sucks. Most lawyer shows follow like a very dramatic litigator. And you know, maybe point 1% of attorneys these days have a lot of litigation going on. So I guess I’m not a huge fan of like legal shows, you know, Lost is probably one of my all time favorites. It doesn’t involve lawyers or anything, they kind of ruined it,
Max Branstetter 47:26
it starts with an L and lawyer starts with an L. So we’ll give it to you a little a little better.
Nick Fogle 47:30
It’s almost a cliche to like if you say I’d say the first two seasons, seasons of Lost, I love Succession right now that has a legal element to it, you know, this whole idea of m&a is and poison pills. And I don’t know if you’ve, if you’ve seen Succession on HBO, but no,
Max Branstetter 47:43
it’s not at all. So we’ll definitely do it eventually. But
Nick Fogle 47:46
if you like Lost, there’s a new show on Apple TV that came out this year called Severance. And the premise is pretty trippy. This idea of like, you enter this place of work. And when you enter it, your memories are severed. So you start off as like a new individual. And when you leave, the memories of who you are in the in the workplace are severed. And it’s this like amazing thought experiment of like, you know, what would happen if this actually played out? I just I don’t want to blow I don’t want to give anything away. But that might be like one of my new favorite shows. Again. It’s called Severance. It’s on Apple TV and Apple TV has got
Max Branstetter 48:26
Oh, yeah, well, Ted last. So that’s a whole separate conversation. But that’s Severance. That’s the one with Adam Scott. Right. The guy from Parks and Rec and Step Brothers. And,
Nick Fogle 48:37
yeah, he and he’s phenomenal. He’s Yeah, he’s the lead in that show. It’s funnel Apple TV. He’s just hitting homeruns nonstop. Ted Lasso. So you mentioned there are a number of others. And it’s my cheapest streaming subscription right now. So I’m like, they just need a little bit more content, and I’ll cancel some others. They
Max Branstetter 48:52
need some help with their churn if they know where to come. Yeah, on a totally different note. What is your biggest pet peeve?
Nick Fogle 48:58
Overconfidence, I’d say like,
Max Branstetter 49:02
Not to brag.
Nick Fogle 49:03
I don’t know. Yeah, I think dealing you know, I work with a lot of different founders and humility and people that are willing to acknowledge, you know, they don’t know everything. But that is a very underrated attribute. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Dunning-Kruger Effect is this. It’s a phenomenon that the less you know about a topic, the more you think you know about that topic. It’s kind of what we see on Twitter where, you know, COVID comes out and suddenly everybody’s like a genius epidemiologist. And it goes to this pet peeve I have around you know, I’m kind of the opposite, where I’ve always struggled with impostor syndrome and feeling like, I need to know everything about something before I can even weigh in at like a very small level. So that drives me crazy when I encounter people that are self proclaimed experts in an area that they really haven’t spent a lot of time in.
Max Branstetter 49:55
And then you moved around the time that you were starting law school. You moved to Charleston, which I still haven’t been to this day, but everybody loves it like my old roommate Matt, who used to like drive for his family’s business all around the country, said that Charleston was like, hands down his favorite place, favorite city in the country. What is your favorite thing to do in Charleston that is unique to Charleston,
Nick Fogle 50:18
our downtown area. And again, I have kids now, it’s hard to get downtown. It’s a small, quaint area. And it’s a very unique city. It’s a colonial city. We don’t have many of these unique, traditional colonial cities anymore. A lot of them have been overly commercialized. But just being like taking a day and exploring the downtown area, the architecture, the culture, it’s also unique and there’s not really anywhere in the US that has the same feel and culture. The beaches are five minutes away, which is fantastic. And there’s a reason I think Charleston has become so popular. I know Conde Nast has had like number one, cities on one of these lists for years. And we’re definitely seeing that with the influx of people moving here, but it’s just got a little bit of something for everybody. Or it’s got the history and the architecture, this unique colonial vibe. Beaches are great cost living is still reasonable compared to other big metro areas. Food you’ll find better food here than almost anywhere it can rival Manhattan in terms of the if you’re a foodie, I hate that word. But if you’re a foodie, it’s a great love.
Max Branstetter 51:19
I love when people call me a foodie. No, I’m just kidding.
Nick Fogle 51:21
Yeah, there’s there’s something for everybody in Charleston. And if you’ve never been and you just plan a week, do everything, you know, do the top things, you know, there are all these tours and things but via tourists go around, you know, take a tour of some of the old mine build like forts and monuments and downtown areas. Yeah. And then
Max Branstetter 51:39
last one is on a totally different notice. Well, I’m throwing these all over the place random idea, but you are someone who has had times in your life when you’ve had a lot of doubt. And you mentioned imposter syndrome. And I look back now and like you’ve done amazing things and created companies and like help helped out so many, you know, you can’t even count how many people you’ve helped out and made things easier for their business. What’s one quick tip for anybody who’s kind of just in a place where they’re where they’re doubting themselves or don’t really know what’s next?
Nick Fogle 52:06
You know, I hate it when people say you just gotta believe in yourself. That’s not actionable shout out Ted Lasso, believe in yourself. Yeah. Self-esteem. I even have like, if I were to go over here, my bookshelf, I have like self esteem books that I’ve kept to this day, because it was like, a time in my life where I was like, How do you like just teach yourself that if you’re not if you don’t have confidence if things have happened that have like, shattered your confidence, like, how do you bounce back? I even had people back then. It’s worth mentioning, like one lady that worked with a law firm met me while I was doing this whole internship transition phase. And she’s like, You’re being a web developer. Like, your parents must be so ashamed, like said that. And you got like some vocal person, somebody? Yeah, I love to see her. Now. Some people internalize those kinds of things. And I’m somebody that does that. And to get past that, like, I just had to start doing like, I just had to start building and say, you know, screw screw up, people think I’m not worried about that. What’s going to make me happy? What are things that and also setting long term plans and goals helped me to as an individual to think about my own personal progress and stop thinking about what others see me as, but like, am I being the best version of myself that I want to be? That’s the biggest thing that changed for me. And as you make progress in life, and you have evidence that you can look at and point to, it’s kind of this idea of, you’ve got a negative everybody’s got a negative doubting voice. And when you have evidence to the contrary, it’s easy to dispel those discouraging voices.
Max Branstetter 53:37
Holy cow. So we always wrap up with final thoughts. I think you kind of that was like a final thought was, that was yeah, no, I really appreciate it. So we’ll move the final thoughts up, you jumped the line. But Nick, thank you so much. This has been really really cool. And just really appreciate everything you’ve done and kind of opening us into like, the things that you’ve been to and how you’ve kind of tackled things in the past and now and so really, really appreciate your time and insights and where is the you alluded to earlier but where what is your Twitter handle in the place people can DM you and anything else you want to shout out about jerky?
Nick Fogle 54:15
I wish I had the McLovin twitter handle after our discussion, but I don’t I’ve just
Max Branstetter 54:20
I wasn’t gonna make a joke about you jokes.
Nick Fogle 54:22
I threw myself out there. I do have my name. It’s Nick Fogle N-I-C-K F-O-G-L-E, at you know, @NickFogle on Twitter. I keep my DMs open if you’re, you know, a business operator or if you’re looking at starting a business building a startup message me, let me know if you have questions if you’re stuck. I’d love I mean, the whole reason we’re building turnkey now we love helping founders. I love helping founders who are early or who are going through growing pains just Yeah, feel free to hit me up anytime there.
Max Branstetter 54:49
And we’ve never done this before. But if you want to hear the final thoughts as the last thing that Nick says just rewind two minutes and then listen to the final thoughts and then skip after that. Thanks so much, Nick.
Nick Fogle 55:01
Yeah, thank you, Max. This was fun.
Max Branstetter 55:05
Audiograms fly when you’re having fun as the saying goes, thank you so much, Nick for coming on the story sharing, coming on the story coming on the podcast, sharing your incredible story sharing your love for podcasters and, and entrepreneurs and all you do. And thank you Wild Listeners for tuning in to another episode. If you want to hear more Wild stories like this one, see I use the term story correctly. In that instance. Make sure to follow the Wild Business Growth Podcast on your favorite app and tell a friend about the podcast and then got go try Wavve with them Google Churnkey with them, maybe start a business with them. The possibilities are endless. You can also find us on Goodpods. And for any help with podcast production, you can learn more at MaxPodcasting.com and sign up for the Podcasting to the Max newsletter at MaxPodcasting.com/Newsletter. I got very original with that. Until next time, let your business run wild. Bring on the bongos!
