How Rocket Note CEO Dustin Mccaffree grew 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 that are like very resourceful that have sold side projects and they're always thinking man what would it be like to sort of be on one of these rocket ships behind the scenes and like their curiosity they just can't help but they want to get on one of them at least once just to learn yeah well for me the thing that was going to make that work is if the founders were were willing to to have me be part of and teach me things that were not just development right like development at copy ai that's not what's going to push me the stack is pretty much what i'm used to the thing that's that's pushing me is one of the things i'm learning like as part of a team that's something i really wanted because i want to like own another company and be building a team i don't have a lot of insights into how how to do that well and then the other piece of that is that like we're having lunch and learns on like how to be a good angel investor and like you know like that sort of thing like these are things that chris and paul know a lot about um and so to learn from them anyway we kind of jumped the gun a little bit the way i connected um is that i was just building in public and they were building in public and so chris i just like replied to a tweet of his and said hey i want to like i want to learn more or i want to be part of it just kind of joking and then he dm'd me he's like hey we always need more software engineers you know it's hard to find good talent and he he ended up using joel um and like poked around on joel really liked it you know liked the designs like the dev side of it excuse me take your time take your time man this is a this is the tight the building public community is a very tight one i mean one of the ways that i got connected with you is i literally went and used twitter search functionality type vip and then build in public as well and you just go look at all the tweets from people building and it's always like just crossed 50 grand in mrr or reaching my sas you know reaching these targets and it's but it's a very small community i mean there's probably only maybe like 30 or 40 like sas founders really truly building in public yeah yeah and there's like a lot of silent like lurkers who are also building but like people have all kinds of fears about building in public yeah um some of them are valid and a lot of them are not um i totally understand that so so you got you got that's how you got it interfaced with chris and paul you joined cause you want to learn you mentioned sort of what's the team size by the way right now i want you to tell i feel like i need you to tell the story more so i can just like not talk um sorry what's the size of the team today at copy still pretty small i think we're like two co-founders and maybe like eight eight team members something like that that's great that's great i got hired number three and then we've been hiring pretty quick after that i don't think we're gonna hire a ton more right now for early team but um but yeah it's it's really awesome the team is really tight-knit you're basically like encouraged to have a side project which is exactly what i would be looking for yeah it's kind of it's kind of the dream and it's weird to get a salary again like making money feels weird were you able to get it we're able to get equity um yep that's always a tricky conversation so to the extent you can talk about it talk about how that sort of went down honestly the the founders are just awesome so i didn't negotiate really at all i'm actually a big negotiator so when i didn't negotiate paul was like that's not how it works um but they would never know that like usually i would negotiate but i wanted to be part of it bad enough and like and had such low expectations they offered enough equity and a good enough like market rate salary that i didn't feel like i was needing to negotiate at all yeah i think that was like that that's something that feels really good with copy ai is that they just understand like what it takes to make people want to work for you and there just isn't a downside for me i expected there to be more of a downside i expected a lower salary i expected less equity um but that didn't even have to be a conversation can we can we i don't want to like reveal your financial situation but there are people looking to find people like you and they're wondering like how the heck do i incentivize like dustin so can we put brackets i mean can we say like one to five percent equity and you know you know 100k to 300k in terms of salary are those fair brackets sure yeah i i would fit somewhere i mean really with equity i feel like early equity in a startup that's like obviously growing when i had and i'll be like really up front i guess with my numbers that i had before i would love that yeah and because i gave away equity like with my my angel back startup um and so i was giving away between like 0.25 to 0.5 percent and that was with a lower we had like lower valuation than copy ai has so i wouldn't have been sad with with anything like even even a little lower than 0.25 percent i would have been fine with and that's usually like it's over years you know and it's got a cliff and things like that and they offered more than i expected i can say that much yeah um and so really nice i don't know if that would continue you know if other people are looking to work at copyright yeah that's great what what is i don't know if they've put this out there but what is the copyright evaluation currently i'm not sure if that's out there okay well you got to push them to put it out there they got to do a tweet a twitter thread on it i know like right now they do um investor emails right yeah and so i'm not sure i'm not sure what's out there yeah i'll say like they want to be as transparent as possible it always gets a little tricky when you're raising money you know and you have a lot of people that have stakes um and so really the goal and part of what what chris and paul have done from the beginning is like let's raise a little bit from a lot of people um we're getting so off topic but i think that's really smart right because everybody has a little bit of skin in the game but nobody has enough that it's like you feel like you have to listen to them yeah no that's a great that is a great model you're seeing a lot of these like power super angel rounds where it's like a hundred investors three million dollar round and it works right you just gotta find someone set the terms and then go from there so this is great um one other question i'll ask here because i'm curious how you would tackle us from the developer perspective at copy many people would look at a tool like copy and go oh they're really good at bringing top of funnel and via twitter they're really good in public but churns got to be crazy there's got to be people signing up they test it they're like wow this is cool but there's no real long on like ongoing use case what are you doing from a development perspective to try and make the onboarding very addictive to present like long-term use cases so people don't turn yeah so what's funny with copy is that it's so early like to me you look at the product it's like to me it's pretty obvious that the ui the ux is is crazy early i've i've wanted chris to talk more about this but like the back end like single messy long file um the front end is a hacked together webflow site that's made into a web app literally like it's it's rock bottom as far as product can get so it's only up from here so what we're working on right now no offense to chris he built something that's like a million plus ar yeah um but like right now basically everything is is up from here we're trying to use the existing product to have like better like customer insights so that the next version of that um is just based on data more than anything else um and so we know like you know which tools of ours convert best we know you know which we know when people are like copying something wholesale or if they're tweaking something and then taking and copying it as far as like copy ai results um the goal with the next version is to be able to pinpoint our users a little bit better so there will be like something that's pretty familiar with a lot of sas products you know where you onboard yourself a little bit and like identify yourself as hey i use this for for school or i use this for my job and then what's your job those sort of things but we don't have any of that in place right now yep very cool dustin are we going to see jolt listed on mike require here soon because you're going to just falling so in love with copy ai you're not gonna have time for it um i'll always have something i'm working on so whether that's like jolt for the next few years and while i'm at copy or if it's if it's you know a handful of other things i actually have like several other things that i'm always working on so um but jolt's gonna grow right now it's only got like a couple of real blocks but i want it to have tens of blocks you know to start and then i think yeah will i sell it one day yeah absolutely guys we're gonna save dustin's voice and skip the famous five but again an incredible story here right side project chrome extension lists on microchoir sells for ten thousand dollars plows that money into a new tool new tool called jolt while he's building jolt in public finds the copy ai team joins the copy ai team gets some equity gets a good salary it's sort of weird to get a payment or a salary uh for a guy that like like dustin who's hustling building in public but again he's learning a ton at copy keeping the side projects we'll see what happens next dustin thanks for taking us to the top oh thanks so much nathan it's been fun one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the 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