How Distro CEO Chad Ingram grew Distro to $3.4M revenue and 12 customers in 2024.

okay um thanks for having me and Nathan and founder path team um I'm happy to be here and we'll wake you guys up anyway I can see you guys on your laptops and phones and all that so hopefully we can be moderately entertaining and uh that you could learn a little bit about uh about this you know from my story in the story of distro so um to tell you a little bit about what what we're going to talk about uh we are um and tell you a little bit about my background so so I was in my last semester at uh at school in my undergrad and I was about to go to law school I was literally two weeks away from taking the LSAT and I had this huge change of heart and I'm like all right I need to be an entrepreneur and so anyway I started my first company in 2013 um after leaving school sold that three and a half years later and then in 2016 started um a company called jump and that that's what's a little bit more a little bit more relevant and you know preceding distro and um having started started that company um I I knew what I wanted to do at jump and I wanted to to study I did study like what everyone else was doing like I looked at Silicon Valley I subscribed to crunchbase I interviewed all these people and I like put together this like perfect plan of what a business should be what a startup should be like you know so anyway I'm having a conversation with a friend and and this this friend tells me uh or asked me like all right how's it going how how's it going building this business I'm like oh it's going really great um like I'm I'm recruiting the right people from these really cool companies we're we're raising we're raising money from these these big investors um and for a little context of jump we'd raised about 10 million we got to about 80 people by the time we had sold in 2019. and um you know I did this whole plan of all the things that we were going to do right and he looks at me he's like dude like sounds like you got it all figured out you sound like very very prescriptive and I was like okay that's fair he's like there's no one way to do anything I'm like that's also fair and so fortunately that conversation kind of woke me up a little bit about how to how to do things and so like definitely you could raise your hands if you want to but like who here keeps modeling and emulating everything that happens in San Francisco as the way to success I did it I know I know there's more of you out there that have done it okay so um so so anyway the point is is that there's more than one way to get the result that you're looking for and so I'm just going to share a few of them that we did at my last company a few years back and some things that we did a little bit differently you know at distro that we're doing today so um I'll tell you tell you a little bit about like what we do at distro for for a little bit of context here in a second but over the next little bit we're going to talk about some um some strategies and product and we're really going to talk more about strategies I'm not going to give you like a lot of tactics today maybe some ideas you might get but um and then we're going to look at at product and how you know what are some things that we can we can do in product and finance and then ultimately on the on the people side so um again a little bit more context about distro so when I was growing my last startup we were spending like about a million a month uh in total expenses and like 900 000 or so some somewhere in that range spend like four years something we're spending on on payroll and of that about a third of that was going to our engineering team and I remember thinking like this is crazy and I my Engineers were getting recruited like right and left has anybody had that issue before like your people getting recruited away from you yeah welcome right um it's still happening even though the Market's been weird the last few months but but anyway it's it's gone really bad and so the idea was that we could we could create another method for people to hire directly people around the globe and that's what distro is it's a Marketplace to find Higher and pay so we we went ahead and and put the idea together in the fall of 2021 um and then in this by the spring of 2022 we started selling in April and then in June we started having our first contract or customers uh that that we were invoicing and you can see here um going through you know the revenue growth and and I'll talk to you in a second about what happened in September October kind of the you know and some lessons learned there so going over the first section I want to talk to you about is thinking about creative ways and unconventional ways to um to test your Market to test your product by building an MVP okay so who here is a product or engineering leader okay cool with more Pride raise them a little bit higher okay okay so you're the worst offenders um of of what happens here so typically everyone says they won't do it but everyone literally does it they say there won't like take a long time to build their product but then another month gets added another month gets added like who who's guilty of this you all freaking do it don't lie to me okay so whether you're building a new product or launching a feature in your product I think the principle is the same like don't forget this figure out a way to launch faster that is so important you can drive a lot of Revenue very quickly by by launching faster I can't tell you how many startup you know entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs or whatever you want to call them keep telling me like oh yeah I'm building my product well when did you start two and a half years ago okay you've lost you've lost before you've even begun um so I'll show you some examples of that so getting to a sellable version as quick as possible and then funding um uh talk a little bit about that and then uh you know how to how to launch now so I pretty much already said that don't wait like at all like launch as soon as you can there's always arguments that it's not good enough there's always a reason to to uh to wait okay and the particular example of distro here was our challenge we had just enough seed money that I put in to to get the business started and we didn't want to wait very long we wanted to start selling immediately we thought a full-blown product would take us about a year to build really at best nine months but I knew like you know we were sandbagging ourselves a little bit and so I remember we took our team together and we're like you know if you're our founding members and we modeled out what the product should look like which is over here on this right side okay I know you can't read all the details of it but basically this is the user journey and customer experience then what we did is we tweaked it to say what components can we test manually or using someone else's product okay again you can do this with a like a full-on product you could do this with a feature so we did this right away so our engineering team got going on building our actual web application and then we got going on building what we can do to actually test the model it was amazing in the first few months we started Building Product within I don't know six weeks or so we learned that what we had already built needed to be deleted what if we had built that for a year we would be done we would have already missed the boat so think about that how can you go faster if you're the perfectionist CTO which I know you are because most of you are the same like think about ways to get to the essential part of how your product creates value for distro it was helping somebody meet somebody worth hiring somebody who was good enough and how to get them paid okay globally so distro issues payments to to people in over 200 countries and so we had to figure that out as quickly as possible so that's what we did and going back to that Revenue graph within a matter of a few months we figured out a way to add value and get to Market fast which would help us get it where we needed to go so a couple other examples these are some of the the applications that we piece together to test this it sounds really simple sounds really rudimentary but yes there are no code options for some of you like you know non-programming and Engineering Founders that like you can integrate these things very very easily in an afternoon to be able to at least test some things do you really need to build out a full-scale mongodb or could you just throw that data into Google Sheets to just test it or could you could you automate some of these functions out of a CRM the answer is yes you can now you know there's some arguments against you know product-led growth models that might be a little bit more challenging depending on what the product is but for a lot of SAS platforms this is possible there we go sorry okay then the last thing on this section um it's really simple there's a lot of Founders that struggle with with how to uh get to Market very simple create a list of people you know and you don't know make it 10. but get in touch with at least five of...