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Founder Interview

How Markup Hero Bootstrapped to $240K in Annual Revenue and 10,000 Customers in 2022 (Interview with Co-Founder Jeff Solomon)

Interview Date
March 24, 2022
Interviewee
Jeff SolomonCo-Founder
Watch
Watch the full interview

Company Metrics at Interview Time

Annual Revenue (2022)

$240K

Customers (2022)

10,000

Customers (Prior Year) (2021)

3,000 to 4,000

Team Size (2022)

3

Total Funding

$0

Historical Snapshot

These numbers were reported by Jeff Solomon during his interview with Nathan Latka in March 2022 and are a historical snapshot, not current figures. See Markup Hero’s current numbers.

Key Takeaways

  • 01Markup Hero had roughly 10,000 customers in 2022, up from 3,000 to 4,000 a year earlier
  • 02Annual revenue was $240K in 2022, all bootstrapped with zero outside funding
  • 03The core product is priced at $4 per month
  • 04Team of three: one developer, one front-end UX/UI person, and Jeff handling content marketing and BD
  • 05Jeff produces content every single week and receives six to seven inbound guest-post inquiries per day
  • 06Third-party writers produce first drafts for around $150 each, with Jeff spending about 90 minutes editing per article
  • 07Markup Hero ran an AppSumo campaign to gain early momentum with lifetime customers
  • 08The business was founded in 2020 during COVID
  • 09Jeff is a six-time founder whose prior company Velocify sold for $128M in 2017
  • 10Operating costs outside of founder pay run approximately $3,000 per month for hosting and infrastructure

Company Metrics at Time of Interview

MetricValueSource
Annual Revenue (2022)$240KFounder interview, March 2022
Customers (2022)10,000Founder interview, March 2022
Customers (2021)3,000 to 4,000Founder interview, March 2022
Core Product Price (2022)$4 per monthFounder interview, March 2022
Team Size (2022)3Founder interview, March 2022
Total Funding$0Founder interview, March 2022
Year Founded2020Founder interview, March 2022
Monthly Infrastructure and Hosting Cost (2022)$3,000Founder interview, March 2022
Cost Per Third-Party Article Draft (2022)$150Founder interview, March 2022
Inbound Guest-Post Inquiries (2022)6 to 7 per dayFounder interview, March 2022
Free Tier Monthly Screenshot Cap (2022)10 per monthFounder interview, March 2022

Growth Breakdown

Revenue

Markup Hero generated $240K in annual revenue in 2022, all from the core $4 per month product plus some lifetime deals from an AppSumo campaign. Jeff noted that the AppSumo campaign brought in lifetime customers rather than recurring subscribers, so actual monthly recurring revenue is somewhat below the simple per-seat calculation.

Customers

The company grew from roughly 3,000 to 4,000 customers a year earlier to about 10,000 by early 2022. Jeff credits organic SEO and content marketing as the main engine, alongside an AppSumo campaign that brought in a batch of lifetime customers.

Team

Markup Hero operates with a team of three: a developer, a front-end UX/UI designer, and Jeff Solomon who handles all content marketing, SEO, and business development. The lean team structure keeps operating costs outside of founder compensation to roughly $3,000 per month.

Profitability and Funding

The business is profitable and fully bootstrapped with zero outside funding raised. After roughly $3,000 a month in infrastructure costs and what the three of them pay themselves, Jeff says whatever is left gets put back into marketing.

Growth Strategy

Consistent Weekly Content Production

Jeff publishes new content every single week without exception, which he credits as the foundation of Markup Hero's organic growth. He writes roughly one to two complete articles per month himself and edits third-party drafts for the rest of the calendar.

Guest Post Exchange Program

Once Markup Hero's domain authority reached a meaningful level, Jeff began receiving six to seven inbound guest-post inquiries per day. He accepts only the strongest contributors, typically agencies writing on behalf of other SaaS companies, and requires two backlinks on external sites in exchange for one link in the article published on Markup Hero.

Adjacent Audience Keyword Targeting

Rather than competing only on high-difficulty annotation and screenshot keywords, Jeff targets adjacent audiences such as product managers by writing content on topics like product management salaries. These readers discover Markup Hero through useful content and convert at a meaningful rate.

Product Review Content for Competitor Traffic

Jeff writes objective product reviews of complementary tools such as Notion templates and publishes them both on Markup Hero and on platforms like Medium. Readers searching for those tools find the content, encounter Markup Hero, and often convert.

Usage-Based Free Tier to Drive Upgrades

The free tier caps users at 10 screenshots per month. When users hit that cap they receive a notification and a prompt to upgrade, which Jeff identified as the single most powerful driver of paid conversions. Feature-based upsells such as blurring and image insertion also prompt upgrades at the moment of use.

Best Quotes

We have maybe 10,000.
Yeah. There's no money at all. We just all do stripes.
I guess the the two big things are consistency, you know, like, I I produce content every single week and then distribution of that content, you know, whether it's through backlinking outreach or guest posting or just, you know, reposting and doing content elsewhere, but just really a lot of, you know, hustling on that front.
It costs us, like, $3,000 a month other than what we pay ourselves.
Yeah. Yeah. We never raised no money.
Probably, you know, when you build something, make sure you're actually solving a problem, not just build something cool. The first product I built was just really cool, but it didn't nobody really needed it. So nobody used it and we failed.

What Happened Next

This interview captured Markup Hero at an early stage in March 2022, when the company was running at roughly 10,000 customers and about $20,000 a month in revenue with a bootstrapped team of three. The figures here are a point-in-time snapshot reported by Jeff Solomon and do not reflect the company's current state. Visit the Markup Hero profile on GetLatka for the latest available data.

View Markup Hero’s current profile and metrics

Full Transcript

Introduction and Jeff Solomon's Background

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, folks. My guest today is Jeff Solomon. It's a real treat because he's a six time founder with three exits. Velocify in 2017 for a 128,000,000 is obviously probably the best known one. He's also been teaching and coaching entrepreneurship for ten plus years and invested over a 150 startups. Experienced in SaaS, content marketing, and many other many other areas like venture funding, b to b software, UX UI as well. Alright, Jeff. You ready to take us

00:22to top?

Jeff Solomon

00:23>> Let's do it.

From Velocify Exit to Markup Hero

Nathan Latka

00:24Alright. So 2017 was an exit. Did you jump right into markuphero after Velocify or no?

Jeff Solomon

00:30>> No. No. I did. Well, I played around for a little bit, you know, had a nice exit. So I took a little bit break. Was doing some angel investing, still working with Amplify, the accelerator that I that I founded, you know, previously in 2012, doing some deals there. And then mostly was consulting for a number of years, you know, just going into other companies that needed help with product and growth and marketing and stuff like that.

00:51>> And then maybe two or three years ago, started toying around with this markuphero product.

What Is Markup Hero

Nathan Latka

00:56So tell us about it. What's what's markuphero?

Jeff Solomon

00:58>> So it's a it's a highly commoditized space, right? It's screenshots, annotations, file annotation, image annotations, a ton of products out there that do it. Something I use every day. A lot of people use every day. And it was just a, I didn't really have a solution that I liked that did everything. And, you know, one of the things that we started doing was trying to figure out, could we get other SaaS applications to add this capability,

01:19>> right? So a good example is Evernote, which I don't use anymore, but I used to. They bought this product called Skitch and it was a screenshot and annotation product and they integrated it. And so it was really nice when you made a note in Evernote, you could drop an image in just like you can in Notion or any of the other similar apps, but you could right click on it, open it, annotate it, save it right

01:39>> back into the page. It was super useful. And none of the other products have that. Asana doesn't have that, you know, Notion doesn't have that. Like there's so many, any of the product management, monday.com, all these guys. So our thought was like, hey, we built this platform that is, you know, direct to consumer, direct to business person sales, and we have that and it's growing and it's nice, but can we make a library that other SaaS

02:00>> companies could integrate easily and add that capability? And that's sort of what we're out trying to trying to grow right now.

Pricing and API Beta

Nathan Latka

02:06Mhmm. Interesting. Okay. So that's the main focus. Now, what are you charging for this? When people sign up, what do they pay?

Jeff Solomon

02:12>> Well, on the core product, when you just go to our site, it's like $4 a month. It's a cheap, very low cost product, high volume thing. And then on the API, we're kind of still in beta, you know, we've got like a handful of customers using it. We're charging on a per markup basis. So if they have a thousand customers and five of them use it and the rest don't, they only pay for a total number

02:32>> of markups. It's kind of how we're pricing it. You know, so it could be, you know, a couple $100 for them a month to handle their whole client base depending on how heavily it's used. But we're still trying to figure out what's the best best pricing model. We're just trying to get some really good companies that have users that find it valuable.

Nathan Latka

02:47But starting off seed based $4 a pop, when did you launch the business? What year?

Jeff Solomon

02:53>> It was during COVID. Whatever. 2020, I guess.

Why Enter a Competitive Space

Nathan Latka

02:57Yeah. 2020. Okay. Got it. So and I guess, why jump into like a very competitive space where, you know, the winners really are the ones that have the best distribution channels, right? They're on the top of all the big blog posts. They dominate the SEO, blah blah blah. Because they're basically feature parity on everything else. Like, why do this? I mean, by the way, we're trying to quantify obviously the exact right philosophy. I think you guys

03:19had raised about $20,000,000 or something. Yep. And Yep. You sold for $130,000,000 and there were what, three or four co founders?

Jeff Solomon

03:25>> Yeah. Three co founders. It was at a slim cap table, like really nice exit for everybody. You know, to answer your question, I think it was a combination of one, I just didn't feel like there was one product that had everything. There was multiple products that I used back and forth to accommodate different needs. So that was one issue. I felt like there was a, there was room for improvement. And two, you know, I wasn't at

03:49>> the time necessarily looking to have another billion dollar exit or a huge exit like that. You know, I really wanted to build stuff that I liked that I used personally. And I had a team of guys that I met at a consulting company that were just looking for something fun to work on. And we kind of toyed around with some ideas and we were like, Hey, we can we can put something together that's really nice and

04:07>> maybe make a great lifestyle business out of it. And I tell that to founders all the time. It's like, hey, raising $20,000,000 and like going for the moon and taking fourteen years to get to a $130,000,000 exit is cool. But that's a lot, you know, it's like there's nothing wrong with the business that's throwing off $3,000,000 in EBITDA with three guys. You know, that's that's a nice business. So I was like, I think we could build

04:27>> that.

Sponsor Break

Nathan Latka

04:28Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time. Well, we've done this. We've built it into the beautiful interface inside of Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second. But you log in, you connect

04:52your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna

05:16get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation. Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna do a minority sale, that's different. And if you sell the whole business, that's a different valuation. You can see all those when I hover over here, right? So the teal is what a VC would pay. Yellow is what private equity And red is if you sold the whole thing outright. Now what's cool about this is this is

05:38not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction 1,200,000 seed round 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna see companies that have sold the whole business. Well, here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple. Maybe you're

06:04going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down, what they raised, what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold. There's never been a larger dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. All right, we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second, but

06:25if you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link, this link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. Or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products, click on get your valuation here, and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl. Again, all that valuation data live right inside the platform. I hope to see you there. Alright. Let's jump back into

Exit Economics and the Case for Bootstrapping

Nathan Latka

06:52the interview. Yeah. Well, I mean I mean, Jeff, can I try and quantify this? Right? So if you had raised 20,000,000 total and assume a 1x liquidation preference, it took you fourteen years to do this, but assume a 1x liquidation preference, 128,000,000 exit, assuming it was all cash upfront, there's about a 100,000,000 left to hit the full sort of waterfall cap table right after the 1x pref, assuming it's participating. You're splitting it amongst obviously the three

07:12co founders. If we assume you guys each own 33% at the beginning, plus there was maybe 15% ESOP, plus the investors owned another 20%. You're walking away net, like, pretax was something like 15 to $20,000,000 effectively. Right? But it took you fourteen years to do it.

Jeff Solomon

07:25>> Hell, yeah. I mean, it's a long ride, you know. Yeah. It was a long ride. And so the liquidity isn't as good as people think. You know what mean?

Nathan Latka

07:33I mean, basically, a million bucks a year. Right? As you could sort of maybe more than a million. A million 5 a year.

Jeff Solomon

07:37>> Yeah. Plus salary. It's like, yes, that's true. And versus can I make a nice business that's thrown off a ton of cash flow? It's very low cost to run. There's nothing wrong with that. And a lot of founders are just like, no. No. No. No. No. I gotta get the big bucks. I gotta do this big thing. I'm like, okay, man. But like a lot of people do a lot worse than me. Like that was a

07:52>> clean cap table situation. But I've seen a lot of people sell for $150,000,000 and walk away with like $300.

Nathan Latka

07:58Yep. Yep. No, no. It makes Most people, the math that I just ran through, and it sounds like you're sort of confirming that was around the right range. Most people don't run that math. Right? And they don't realize that it's effectively the same as if you bootstrapped a business of 2,000,000 that was spinning off a million in free cash flow every year. Yep. Right? And did it for fourteen years. It's the exact same thing, net net,

08:17but probably way less stress. No board meetings. Right?

Jeff Solomon

08:20>> Dude, board meetings are a nightmare, for sure. Yeah. It was a lot of stress. I mean, I was on my baby moon with my wife at that time and we were out of cash. It was 2008. We were gonna go under. Like, we were we were entirely mortgage at that company and we cycled through a 100% of our clients. They all went belly up. And I was like, I'll do it. I'm gonna shut this company down.

08:40>> I was in Hawaii talking to our investor and he was like, okay, fine, fine. We'll give you a bit more money. And we had to do, you know, a little bump raise at a flat valve just to stay afloat. Unfortunately, we were able to like really turn it around. But man, it was it was rough for a number of years back then.

Nathan Latka

08:55Yep. Yep. Yep. And did that that bridge round, they know they had you by the gut. So even if it was a flat valuation, I imagine the terms weren't very friendly.

Jeff Solomon

09:02>> Yeah. I mean, they were basically it was basically the exact same deal we had before. They just added more to it. So we just took some dilution. It wasn't like they didn't grind us beyond that, which was cool. Yeah. You know, they were in a tough spot too because they didn't want to lose their investment. You know, they were like, this company does have value, and they knew that it was a market problem, not necessarily a

09:19>> company problem.

Nathan Latka

09:20This was Volition, I'm assuming?

Jeff Solomon

09:21>> Yeah. Velocify. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, no. No. No. This was Volition was the second money in. This was Rustic. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

09:29Okay. Well, shout out to Rustic for not ringing the Founder over the coals when they needed a little extra cash.

Jeff Solomon

09:33>> Yeah. They were cool. In the end, they're good good dudes. But

Team Size and Customer Count

Nathan Latka

09:36That's awesome. Yeah. Okay. So you're now you're now building this. Now, how many people are full time on the team today, markup? Just three of us. There's just three. Okay. We love that. Love that. Alright. And how many paying customers?

Jeff Solomon

09:46>> We have maybe 10,000.

Nathan Latka

09:48We have 10 holy crap. Okay. That's so 10,000 at $4 a month. I mean, $40,000 a month in MRR? Mhmm. Wow. Okay. And where were you exactly a year ago?

Jeff Solomon

09:57>> Probably 3,000, 4000.

Nathan Latka

10:00Okay. Yeah. So I mean, nice growth again. And you have a 100 can control. Right? No no money raised?

Jeff Solomon

10:04>> Yeah. There's no money at all. We just all do stripes.

Nathan Latka

10:07Yeah. I love that. And so are you still co founder here?

Jeff Solomon

10:10>> No. The three of us are essentially co founders.

Nathan Latka

10:12I see. Did you split equity that way too?

Jeff Solomon

10:14>> Sort of. I had a little more experience, so it's a little weighted my side. But, you know, these guys these guys are are awesome, and and it's been a great we've just had a great team. Like, I have a developer. I've worked with some of developers over the years. This guy is phenomenal. He could do anything. Like, can you do this? He's like, yeah. I'll figure out how to do that. And then great front end UX

10:31>> UI product guy and then myself. And I just do all the all the the content marketing, just, you know, SEO, all that stuff, all the BD and and we just build. And it's just a fun project.

SEO and Content Marketing Strategy

Nathan Latka

10:42Tons of it. Yeah. So tell me about that. Right? I mean, there's a lot of people trying to get to $44,000 in MRR, but they're to have, six people on their content team. They've gone through eight SEO agencies. Like, you're a one man show doing sort of all that. So, like, what's the one thing you're doing on the SEO side that's working right now?

Jeff Solomon

10:56>> I guess the the two big things are consistency, you know, like, I I produce content every single week and then distribution of that content, you know, whether it's through backlinking outreach or guest posting or just, you know, reposting and doing content elsewhere, but just really a lot of, you know, hustling on that front. And, you know, once you, I found that once you get your domain authority up to a certain point, you start getting inbounds, people

11:22>> asking you to basically help them. And so that's my feed. I basically when someone hits me up like, hey, wanna write a guest post for you. I'm like, okay, here's the topics that I'm writing, like pick one, you know, and like, I they don't even get to suggest. I already know what I'm gonna write in my content calendar. I'm like, write this. And then in return, you need to get me two backlinks on, you know, other

11:41>> guest posts you're writing on other sites before I post this. And Mhmm. That that's been a consistent flow once we get to a certain point.

Nathan Latka

11:47And they build their link into the article they're writing for you so they get a backlink.

Jeff Solomon

11:49>> Yeah. Exactly. So I gave them one link in that article. Mhmm.

Guest Post Exchange Program

Nathan Latka

11:52Yeah. Yeah. Really interesting. Yeah. And you you've sort of built a product around this because in your footer, it says write for us, and you have a whole plan. I'm like, here's how you do it. Here's how you do sites, minimum 1,500 words, etcetera. Yep. Yep. Interesting. Okay. So so what percent of your content these days would you say you're writing versus this machine is pumping for you?

Jeff Solomon

12:09>> Well, I'd say probably sixty forty. They write at these third parties. Now I reject a lot, and I've gotten really good at filtering out who I think is gonna be a good writer. So I get at least six to seven inquiries a day, inbound inquiries. And a lot of them are are overseas, you know, content creators and I just ignore. But sometimes I'll get, you know, an agency on behalf of another SaaS company. That's gold. Like,

12:31>> if monday.com has their agency reach out to me, like, I'm gonna do that deal. You know, that could be that's a great partner for me. So and I get and a lot of those SaaS companies are doing that. So usually I get, like, three or four a week that are pretty solid that I know will give me good content and are also getting distribution on other sites. So I'll get some good backlinks from it, but it

12:49>> takes some filtering. And then in terms of writing myself, I'll probably write one complete article myself a month, maybe two. And then I've basically built out this model where I have these third parties writers create the first draft, and then I spend about an hour and a half editing. I found that to be the most cost effective. So I'll pay like a $150 for a draft and it's good, but not great, but good enough, you know,

13:11>> to get me started. They have a lot of the data in there and then I just reformat it, you know, tailor it and and post it. And so it takes a lot less time to do that. That's how I do that.

Nathan Latka

13:17I actually do the exact same. I recently hired a content agency for 3 k a month, but before I did exactly that. I hired folks on Upwork and Fiverr that did good enough for a $100 an article, a 150, and then you just take time for about an hour and polish it and get it out. But you're following a nice playbook here. You sort of have buckets of content. Right? So one of your buckets are effectively

Keyword Strategy and Adjacent Audiences

Nathan Latka

13:35product reviews. So there's one on here that's, you know, Nuclino October last year, the underdog knowledge based tool you should try. Right? So now is this Nuclino reached out to you and you said, fine. You can write a review about yourself on our site, but here's how it needs to be objective and you need to use markuphero and Nuclino screenshots, like that sort of stuff?

Jeff Solomon

13:53>> No. Most of that is stuff is is I've just done my keyword research to find out other products and services that I think are the right customers for us, that have the right users. And so I'll just write product reviews. Like, if you look I have a product review of Notion templates that I posted on Medium. It's also on our site. And it's I get a ton of traffic from that because people are searching for for

14:13>> Notion templates and it's a good article and then they see our product. So that's just a strategy where I just find competitors or companies that are like minded. That's been our whole product manager approach. Like I have a ton of content on product management. Obviously, our product has nothing to do with product management per se, but product managers use our product. Those are the right people. So if they're searching for product management salaries at Google, I

14:37>> get those people coming in and they're like, oh, cool article. Good. Oh, this is markuphero. Let me check that out. That could be useful for my career. That's one of our our strategies because there's only there's only so much traffic on like annotation, image annotation, or, you know, screenshot. Like, it's small volume. So I can't count on that as my, like, keywords.

Nathan Latka

14:54I love how you've stuck to, like, first core principles for SaaS. What I mean by that is you there's nothing more powerful than, like, utility based upselling, usage based upselling if you attach the right usage metrics. So your pricing is very simple, right? You restrict based off number of file uploads, number of Oh, sorry. Edit markups and annotations for a number of days, right? And then see your history for a number of days and also max

Free Tier Limits and Upgrade Drivers

Nathan Latka

15:16file size per per per file. You pay $4 a month. Basically, everything's unlimited. Yeah. Right? Do you have a sense of which of these four or five things is the most powerful driver of $4 a month conversions?

Jeff Solomon

15:28>> Yeah. It's it's mostly people getting to their cap of of screenshots per per month. Right? They hit their cap and they see like, oh, I need to do more. They get a notification, pops out, gives them month free, the whole thing.

Nathan Latka

15:41Oh my gosh. 10. 10 per month. I would hit that in a day. 10 screenshots.

Jeff Solomon

15:45>> Yeah. You hit that you hit that per month. Well, you can still do them and they get logged, but you just don't have access to the others the previous stuff. So people kinda get anybody that uses it regularly will find it to be, you know, too limiting. So And a lot of people just upgrade at that point. And we give a lot of coupons. So, like, you know, the of the of the user base, like, we're

AppSumo Lifetime Deals and Real Revenue

Jeff Solomon

16:01>> not at the exact number that you said in terms of revenue because, you know, we did we did a we did a big campaign on AppSumo, which gives us some lifetime customers. Right? Which isn't isn't, like, recurring. But it's still it's still very, very profitable for three guys.

Nathan Latka

16:13Yeah. How much recur I mean, was it more like 20,000 in a month?

Jeff Solomon

16:16>> Yeah. Closer to that. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

16:17Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I mean, that's that's I mean, that's slightly different. Why do I mean, actually, I guess your product is good for AppSumo. I I'm I generally don't recommend AppSumo to folks trying to build an enterprise like SalesMotion long term because it's discounting and lifetime value, but I can see where it makes complete sense for what you're building.

Jeff Solomon

16:31>> Yeah. For this product, it did make sense. Like, I wouldn't put Velocify on there at all. And the type of user on there is, you know, a very unique type of user. So it was a good play good way to, like, get rolling, you know, just to get the ball rolling.

Nathan Latka

16:42It's not a very diplomatic way. I would just say same people that sort of shop at JCPenney probably.

Jeff Solomon

16:48>> Nothing wrong about other type

Nathan Latka

16:49of user for sure. Nothing wrong. Nothing wrong.

Jeff Solomon

16:51>> It gets you some momentum. It gets you some momentum.

Feature Upsells and Collaboration Layers

Nathan Latka

16:53You have to know your audience. So okay. Cool. And is that 10 screenshot per month limit a more powerful upsell driver than if I scroll further down the page and you have these product based upselling like blurring, insert imaging, add signatures, etcetera?

Jeff Solomon

17:07>> The blurring is important. Yeah. Blurring comes in comes in heavy. Basically, any of these things you try to do, it prompts you right after. The signature is a newer feature. That's been a thing. The biggest thing we're working on right now, which we don't have, which is kind of, you know, keeping us I I know we're losing customers for is we don't have a commenting control and we don't have we've come up with this really clever

17:27>> way to do collaborative stuff. Like, there are products out there like Miro and that are, like, fully real time collaboration on the annotation side. We don't wanna go there. What we wanna do is create like what we're calling layers or sort of like you do your annotations and then you share it with someone else and then they can do it on top and you can like hide or show kind of like Photoshop layers or Figma layers.

17:49>> So that way it's not real time, but you don't really need real time. Just need to tell me your comments and then send it to this guy. Give me his comments and then send it to that girl and then give me her comments. And so it like keeps a layer of all these comments and and stuff. So that piece is missing and we get a lot of feedback on that. So I think that'll really help push

18:04>> and that'll be a premium feature for sure.

Profitability, Cost Structure and Bootstrapping

Nathan Latka

18:06So how much profit per month on 20 k top line?

Jeff Solomon

18:09>> Oh, it costs us, like, like, $3,000 a month other than what we pay ourselves Mhmm. To run the the hosting concert, you know, it's very, very nice.

Nathan Latka

18:16What? So you're pulling, like, 5 k net profit each month, something like that?

Jeff Solomon

18:20>> More than that. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

18:21More than that. Well, no. Including including what you pay yourself.

Jeff Solomon

18:24>> Oh. Oh. Yeah. No. We we just basically take whatever's left and use their Okay. Bit for marketing. So Okay.

Nathan Latka

18:29Got it. It's like maybe, like, 15,000. You just split up however you wanna do dividends. Right? Yep. Mhmm. Is that what you do for to maximize, obviously, tax consequences here? You just it's dividend is how you treat those?

Jeff Solomon

18:37>> Well, you know how it goes. We like run expenses and stuff.

Nathan Latka

18:39Are you in Puerto Rico right now?

Jeff Solomon

18:41>> No. My my engineer wants some movies going there next month to go visit. He wants some boom down there. He moved to Tennessee from LA, though. He's like, I don't wanna pay California tax anymore. Moved to Tennessee.

Nathan Latka

18:50That's funny. Alright. And you are, again, just to be clear, totally bootstrapped. Right?

Jeff Solomon

18:54>> Yeah. Yeah. We never raised no money.

Famous Five Rapid Fire

Nathan Latka

18:55Alright, man. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite book.

Jeff Solomon

19:00>> I mean, to great if you're going business books, but if you're going all time books, Name of the Wind.

Nathan Latka

19:06Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Jeff Solomon

19:10>> I mean, I I you know, the Notion Notion team, I'm always always keeping track what they're doing. I'm just really impressed with that product. I I use it day in, day out. So what's his name? You know, the CEO from there. Yeah. Yeah. No. Ivan. Ivan. Ivan. Yeah. I follow him him a good amount. He's been doing great work over there.

Nathan Latka

19:26Number three, besides your own, what's your favorite online tool for building markup?

Jeff Solomon

19:31>> Besides my own? I mean, I use Canva. I use Canva a lot.

Nathan Latka

19:33Number four, how how many hours of sleep each night?

Jeff Solomon

19:37>> Oh, I get at least eight. Okay.

19:39>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

19:40And situation, married, single kids?

Jeff Solomon

19:42>> I'm divorced, and I have a a great partner now.

Nathan Latka

19:45Yeah. That's awesome. Any kids?

Jeff Solomon

19:47>> I do have two kids. I got twins. They're 13. Oh.

Nathan Latka

19:50Oh, wow. Okay. And how old are you?

Jeff Solomon

19:52>> I'm 47.

Nathan Latka

19:5347. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Advice for Founders

Jeff Solomon

19:58>> Probably, you know, when you build something, make sure you're actually solving a problem, not just build something cool. The first product I built was just really cool, but it didn't nobody really needed it. So nobody used it and we failed.

Nathan Latka

20:09Guys, there you have it. Fourteen year well, entrepreneur built this first company over fourteen years, raised about $20,000,000 in revenue, sold for $130,000,000, netted out to about sort of 1,500,000 sort of revenue per year worked on the business. He goes, know what? I should just bootstrap my next one. Just do profits and do it the old school way. That's what he's doing with markuphero.com. Doing about $20,000 in revenue right now, $15,000 a month going to the

20:29bottom line. Team of three, high revenue per employee, which we love, just taking out dividends as they come in, as he continues to scale with really SEO content marketing being his main go to market motion. Jeff, thanks for taking us to the top.

Jeff Solomon

20:39>> Absolutely, my friend. Good to meet you.

Nathan Latka

20:42One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. We call it deal or bust. One founder comes on, three hungry buyers. They try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards, their expenses, their revenue, ARPU CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday one

21:07p. M. Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at two p. M. Central to make sure you don't miss any of that. Make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's

21:28an acquisition, a big fundraise, big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you want to take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You want to get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what people

21:50are saying. Sign up for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter

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