How Rocket Note CEO Dustin Mccaffree grew Rocket Note to $1.1M revenue with a 10 person team in 2025.

hello everyone my guest today is dustin mccaffrey he is a serial founder and solo's first small software as a service company last year started jolt as a side hustle and then joined copy ai as a full-time software engineer more recently dustin you're ready to take to the top yeah let's do it all right so take us back to the start you said you had a first small sass last year before jolt i believe right what was the smaller sass yeah it was called rocket note um it actually lasted for a while i started it back in early 2018 so that was kind of it was a it was the long haul ride with that one and what was it a personal sort of evernote like competitor or what was the company doing um kind of so it was more focused on youtube i actually learned to code online you know just watching a lot of youtube videos and stuff so i was inspired um to try to make youtube a little bit more of a learning platform and there were some competitors out there also doing like note taking for you know whether it was youtube or vimeo or trying to do them all at once but i wanted to build something that felt more integrated so it was like an in a really integrated more native feeling um chrome extension interesting chrome extensions are hot it's a great way to build an mvp build a user base get a lot of feedback how many users did you grow to so total signups was around 3 000 by the time that i sold it but the activity rate was pretty low on that so i don't even have like awesome stats on it i wasn't like doing that really well um honestly like my especially at the time things have gotten a lot better for me on this side but especially at the time like the chrome store worked really well for me because i'm not good at all the biz dev side of things and the you know like that that was the weakness of mine so having something that was had a built-in marketplace that's where i mean all of my users came from organic you know just finding me on that store talk me through the sale real quick before we go into jolt how did you sell the business um so i listed on micro choir um which is just it was so easy it felt almost too easy i had people like reach out um within you know 24 hours of listing um andrew had gone through you know and like made it all sound even a little bit better than i had originally said and like helped smooth out some of the numbers so that it like made more business sense because i didn't know what i was really saying um and then yeah i mean i i had people offering what i was asking for within what were you asking in that 24 hours so originally it's so funny i priced it really low originally i was asking 3 000. i had no idea like that i had something that was worth more than that i hadn't done my research really well um and then it was just bidding war up to up to my 10 000 that i ended up selling it for that's incredible okay so you sell this thing for ten thousand dollars um i assume like a good chunk of that was hopefully cash up front maybe there's a slight earn out or something in escrow but you take that cash what do you do with the cash how do you reinvest it yeah i mean the whole idea from there was just that i'd be able to fund myself building my next thing um my expenses so i'm married have two kids so like i do have expensive expenses you know um and i didn't so i it's funny the story gets a little more complicated because um i had been a co-founder in a company while all this was going on and before i sold rocket note i had co-founded a restaurant loyalty app okay and we had like raised money and done the whole thing and so i wasn't really making money for a long time and so selling rocket notes like okay now when the pandemic hit the restaurant industry was awful and so i had to split with my co-founder everything which was fine we're not like we're on good terms everything um but i ended up i i wanted more runway just like personal runway to be able to build my next thing um and so part of selling that um that felt smart to me is that i made connections with a lot of people not just the person who ended up buying the business but with a lot of the other people who were who were wanting to and everybody was interested in what i was going to do next and i was already showing them i already had like the landing page for jolt built um and so i was able to show all of these potential investors like hey here's what i'm working on next and so it set me up for the next step and rest is history so do you break break us into jolt yeah so joel it was supposed to be my full-time thing at the time i thought this would be like the next two or three years full time for me um jolt is a way to make any like static website um whether that's so like one of the crazes right now is like notion plus super notion plus potion um just being able to make you know notion into its own static website um on your own domain and stuff so joel you can turn any website really into a visual builder where you can add blocks and stuff to it and so you can just really easily like almost drag and drop style add you know your your email subscribe form or your comments section and things like that um so just it just helps transform your site into something that you can just add little blocks to easily and while you grab more water because you're battling through a cough while you're doing this which i which i which i appreciate i will i'm going to fill this base here with another question right so you um get put this on a timeline for us so when did you sell rocket note and when did you have your first years on jolt so i sold rocket note in um i think it was like october of last year okay um and then it took me until about january to build out jolt to the point where i had my early users perfect and what's the url if you want to follow along for jolt it's just jolt.so jolt.so and that's on trend let's go which country is that south what is that that's actually i think it's somalia interesting yeah interesting notion kind of sparked that and then now a lot of people are following along now did you do all the design for this and everything i did yeah this is great you're you're you're one of these rare cases you can code you're just resourceful and the site looks great i mean you're sort of you have it all in one shot huh thank you thank you so much i like design was so really i'm like i would call myself a front-end developer but having started so many projects like you have to end up learning back-end and then design like you just have to learn design i actually now work with a designer just on all my side projects but at the time i didn't so this was all me yeah um but like it's actually really nice as a developer if you can afford it it's so nice to be able to have somebody that's just always building your backlog of designs that i can then code so that's really yeah yeah so this is sort of like almost like i guess back in the day they were sort of unsexy you'd see these tools that were like wordpress plugins that would allow you to add more like drag and drop functionality like the discus comment stream for example you're sort of doing that before this new wave of like hey you know one page notion landing pages right yeah and so and but like even with so discuss people use that i don't love wordpress it's like kind of an old behemoth but um but like ghost for blogs right if you're familiar with ghost it's actually really hard to add comments to ghosts you have to like download your theme and then you have to make actual code changes to it zip it and then upload i think they removed the zip thing in ghost v4 but joel like all you have to do there's a section to add a little snippet into the head of your site and then you can just it becomes a visual builder for you yep so like on any site like that it's it hasn't been accessible in the past and so being able to bundle in you know i'm not making you add a new snippet and download your code and then add your disqus tag wherever you need and make sure that that plays nice like it's all just in a visual builder which which makes it handy and is jolt still pre-revenue or do you have users signed up and folks paying it's still pre-revenue excuse me no you're good yeah pre-revenue so so and then let's loop and get you know paul and copy and that whole story right so when did how did you get connected to copy ai um so i connected with chris i actually i have been following along on twitter um you know and and those guys are really fun building in public and they are having a lot of success and so you know i had thought for a little while that a missing piece for me was that i hadn't really been i hadn't really had a corporate job that was like a real rocket ship that i was part of so i had in the back of my mind like sorry take your time dude no no you're pushing through it no worries this is a key moment right there's a lot of there's a lot of front-end developers...