How SeriesCode CEO John Stelle grew SeriesCode to $1.2M revenue and 10 customers in 2024.

just got done editing this interview you guys are gonna love it before i do that though i want you to know that i'm going to be in the comments for the next 30 minutes or so answering your questions if there's additional questions you want me to ask the ceo next time i interview them leave them below or if you're just loving the data points i get ceos to share click the thumbs up button below that's your way of telling me you're loving this stuff and i'll get you more of it additionally again i'll be in the comments answering any questions you have all right for 30 minutes enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is john steele he's been coding since he was a teenager and had a career in i.t before he went to law school and decided what he really wanted to be was the ceo of a sas company siri's code is his company was founded upon his passion for coding he's married has two kids and cashed in on two world series of poker events john you ready to take us to the top yes i am i kind of want to just talk about poker screw sass i'm fine with that going to vegas tomorrow for ces and uh i plan to play on the weekends so that's interesting what what's the just uh for sassio's listening that might get invited to like backyard bbq texas hold'em games what's like one tip you'd give them just to stop losing so much money playing hold them oh man there is so much um that one's really really hard actually i would say if you're in denver or come to denver come to my backyard game you play in the garage right no one's gonna want to play you when you say you've cashed in on two world series poker events man you want to play with the newbies no they like it right it's a challenge plenty of people knock you out right if you're good if you're a good professional player you cash in 15 of your tournaments so there's plenty of chance to knock me out yeah i love that no one of my this is like i don't i never really talk about this publicly because uh it just has never occurred to me but um i i like slowly in san francisco and new york city got invited into these like super high-end kind of texas hold on poker groups where it's like lps investors exited founders and we all play and honestly that is some of the best friends i've made in the best networking ever because you sit there for eight hours you only play ten percent of the hands and you talk and network the rest of the time yep that's exactly right i love that all right let's focus on series code so what came first by the way poker or series code uh poker did actually okay i started when i was i think 21 in tucson arizona wow okay so when did you launch series code the series code um the parent company is auxiliary teams and it was launched in 2016 and then series code is an offshoot of that that launched this year okay so you launched it in 20 oh i guess 2019 or 2018. oh sorry 2019 or 2020 2016 and then oh yeah sorry 2019 series code uh rolled out okay so for those that are not familiar with it what's the company do so we provide world-class software development at a startup price so we help startups build their sas products so actually we serious code we don't have a sas offering ourselves we help other people build theirs okay so can you talk about one or two that you've helped build um so there's uh 11 software who's out in portland oregon they do internet internet authentication in hotels so if you've stayed at a marriott you've probably used the software there to crack open the lid of your laptop and put in your last name room number to get online um there's a company in in austin texas called swoovy they do uh it's a dating app where they connect people to go on a non-profit volunteer adventure okay so give me a general sense of scale here you launched it i started doing this last year what how many people are on your team today just as just you i know so we have 28 people worldwide so and we're remote first so there are four uh five of us here in denver but then everybody else is spread around the globe okay now you've bootstrapped this it's really an agency correct yeah 100 bootstrapped okay we love that and how many engineers are the 28 um it's about 20. i don't have to recount but yeah that makes sense right if you're building sas apps you're heavier on engineering um yeah and what's the typical so so i mean what's the typical gig if someone's sitting right now and they're going nathan i'm a business person with a big idea but i can't seem to get a developer to work for me at a decent price and they want to use somebody like you what are they going to pay you to get a kind of a basic mvp up so that's the thing right we go to a lot of uh you know like the fun conference or tech stars or rocky venture club and i get to hear a lot of people talk about the either themselves or the friend they know who you know scrape together 50 or 100 000 to build something but that's not enough to usually go get an agency to do something for you so they hire some guy in the basement i mean i'm in a basement but hey um you know they get some guy in the basement who they can afford and many times after that they have nothing to show for it and they're out you know that money was put on their credit card or their home equity so our goal was to bring world-class software development and you know true agency to people who wouldn't usually be able to afford it so we put together packages that help uh startups actually be able to afford it so people can split the payment between cash and equity um so for example our published rate is 84 an hour but we'll do a 50 50 split so you can get the cash portion that you have to pay down to 42 dollars an hour which is usually at or under what you're going to have to pay anybody else and for that you get a team leader and usually a front-end developer and a back-end developer okay i want to actually walk through a real example here right so like let's say someone's listening right now they have an idea the mousetrap they're gonna launch with let's say is a chrome application right so they want to pay you to build a chrome app um hopefully you're familiar with those i mean give me a ballpark how many hours yeah how many times that gonna take you to build so it really depends on how difficult it is a chrome app is usually gonna be pretty straightforward and usually we're talking mobile apps or web apps something a bit larger than that chrome app is probably in the 25k range but we like to tell people that when somebody comes to us and they say hey i want to build this app i just want you to build it and go away um they usually don't understand software because software never dies if you have customers who like your product it's going to keep going and going and you need us i tell them think of us like electricity yeah you're going to put it in your budget and keep paying i get that but i also try and like when i a lot of founders ask me about companies like you and they say hey should i work with john should i work with this other you know team that does and my answer is always the same which is define spec wise what you think the the lightest mvp you need is to get your first dollar of revenue right and then figure out how much they are going to charge you to build that mvp right correct so so uh chrome app kind of in 25k range and i know obviously these are ballparks they're highly dependent on the specs what what might a sas web app cost to build with you so sas web apps i i've seen them uh out in three months um you know oftentimes you can have an mvp to the first dollar in in you know in three months 90 days that's typically uh in the range of 50 000 okay um and then half of that can go on equity half cash so 25k cash okay so let's go down that so i'm a new sas founder i'm using you to build a web app i pay you 50k i don't have 50k so i pay you 25k tell me how that actually i own 100 of my company what percent are you getting for the 25k i don't pay you in cash so instead of there are other companies that do something similar and they have this standard we'll take seven percent warrant or something like that we um i don't think that's fair because you don't actually know how much we need to do for you so what we do is we accumulate an equity balance so when your invoice comes you choose uh okay i'll pay 50 we we store that balance up and we put it on to something like a safe or an equity kiss so basically when they it comes time to do a financing round we would participate like your other you know angel or seed investors okay so that's safe let's let's just stick with safe because it's more common than a kiss uh what what what are the term i mean what cap are you putting on it or is it so we don't put a cap we believe we'll take a smaller piece of a larger pie we don't want to and caps usually turn into limits for future rounds we don't want to get into that game we'll let people grow their company as large as they can okay so it's uncapped again 25k is now on the...