Aurelien Amacker, CEO of Systeme.io | How To Create An 8 Figure SaaS With No Technical Background

Welcome to Success Story, the most useful podcast in the world. I'm your host, Scott D. Clary. The Success Story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. HubSpot podcast network is the audio destination for business professionals who seek the best education and inspiration on how to start and grow a business. HubSpot podcast network hosts act as on-demand mentors through practical tips and inspirational stories. Listen, learn and grow with the HubSpot podcast network at HubSpot.com slash podcast network. Today, my guest is Aurelian Mk. Aurelian Mk is the founder of system.io. A tool helps entrepreneurs to launch their online business. System.io has over 6,000 users and collectively has helped online business owners generate over $11 million in revenue. Aurelian started making money online when he first started running his own blog. He then began teaching online courses to his audience, which generated roughly $500,000. Not bad. As he launched more courses, he realized that he was making less and less money as time went on. The market was more saturated, so he pivoted and actually using some of the lessons that he was teaching got into software, went through a lot of trials, tribulations. He bootstrapped, he struggled, but eventually got system.io to over $200,000 a month in revenue entirely funded by himself. He has gone through every iteration of making money online and eventually ended up being a SaaS founder. This is what we spoke about. How he built system.io from 0 to 8,000 customers. This is the growth strategy that he used without any funding. How he obtained $4 million now in ARR and how he's going to scale that to 6 million ARR in the next year. How he built a 100% remote company of over 60 people in 11 different countries, how he managed that, how he hired, how he onboarded, and how he was able to basically hire and manage this team originally just on his own, and also how he has built an affiliate program that has driven traffic for his SaaS product that generates over $300,000 in sales for him every single month. He's going to break down how you can build something similar for your business. So this is Aurelien Amique, the founder of system.io. Hi Scott, thank you for having me on the show. So yeah, that's that's right. I mean, I studied just like anybody else, like I was actually following bloggers online and I met a couple of them and they gave me some advice and I had this blog that nobody was reading about like personal development, you know, and I started working full-time on it. I actually say no to a really good job offer in Paris at the time and I started working full-time on my blog, traveling, and I started making a bit of money. I mean, it's exactly the story that you say, you know, so I started making money with my blog. I started building a following. I know that you are big on social media, so you understand what I'm talking about. I build an email list and then when I wanted to go to the next step, which is creating and selling a course, I surveyed my list, found out that they wanted to do the same, which is, you know, just making money blogging, so I created a course about that. And I hired marketing consultant that knew, you know, how to launch product because I really didn't know about that. And we, we, we, he helped me create the course, launch it through webinars. We made 10,000 euros, which for me was like absolutely huge. And we worked together remotely for a year and then we did this launch that made, so it made exactly 550,000 euros in sales in two weeks, which is crazy. And it's actually, we closed the launch, we were at the airport and we took the plans, we went to Phoenix, Arizona to attend Jeff Walker Jeff Walker's conference, you know, and I signed up for his mastermind where I stayed for three years. I know that a lot of things, but I wasn't, I never embraced the launch model, you know, and so I just left the group and I went on my own in 2015 trying to to find by myself what was working. And I mean, I was able to make like 20,000 euros per month in revenue just relying on my email list, you know, on my own courses, on my own content, but I kind of disappeared of the, you know, of the market. And yeah, I had this idea of creating software because I was following people building software and I was a great business model and I was listening to podcasts and I was like, oh, this is a very exciting business, you know, you have recurring revenue. These companies are a lot more valuable than your company when you just set courses, you know, so I was like, this is great. In 2015, I took the decision to do it and I failed at the beginning in 2016 because I couldn't find the right developers, but then early 2017, I found the right team, the right developers, we started building the product, we launched in March 2018. And today, so your numbers are not totally accurate. So today, it's old. So we have 8,000 paying customers. We do close to 400,000 US dollars in revenue per month. And yeah, it's great. So I guess that was my mistake. I guess I've hold this off an old cider and old interviews. Don't worry, yeah, don't worry. I mean, the numbers are changing fast, you know, so it's totally fine. So it's something that I just, it's interesting to me because you know, you've, you've always done this. You've built out, you've built out your name and you've built out almost a community around whatever you're working on now. And then you commoditize the pain point that the person that you've been, you know, building this community around is feeling because, you know, you had a blog and then you realize a lot of people would need to figure out how to start a blog. And then you sold the course on it. And then now you're creating a tool like, like what's, I say, system and not like system, system because there's a s y s t e m e dot IO. I don't know if that's the correct pronunciation. I just, it defaults to like my friends. I'm, because I, I feel like it's like system.io. It's totally fine. I mean, system.io with the English spelling without the E at the end wasn't available. So I just went with the French spelling. So and yeah, it's not perfect. But, you know, like, no, no, it's good. It's good. But it's still solving the problem, right? It's a, it's another SaaS. It's to help people build, build their business online. So what, so walk me through your, your mindset, because not everybody starts a product or tries to solve a problem with a community that they've already built. Sometimes they try and, you know, they try and sell something or build a product before they even have a community. So why did you, or what, what, uh, what allowed you to realize that building this product was a good fit for, um, you know, the, potentially some of the problems that you've had to solve as a, as an entrepreneur. Yeah. No, it's a great question. So what happens is that since I've been in this game forever, you know, like, when we started, it was actually some marketing consultant. He knew how to code a little bit. So he gave me some pages and I wasn't, integrate, it was integrated with the French payment processor that was absolutely horrible. I mean, uh, I've seen it all, you know, when click for us launch in 2014, um, I tried right away and at that time, there were some things that you couldn't translate on the payment page. So for me, you know, it was, it wasn't a solution. I tried, I remember, uh, using leak pages in 2013, and like, on a Sunday, I was working on a says page and I was struggling. And after like half an hour, I found out that I couldn't add more than like three items in the bullet list. I was like, wow, this is crazy. Like, I just cannot use this tool, you know, so I wasn't, I wasn't satisfied with the existing tools. And then click for us was, uh, became very popular in the French market and in the English market, of course. And I was like, yeah, this is, uh, this is a good product, but, you know, it's, uh, it's kind of expensive. So I thought that there was like, um, like my customers I knew them because I was selling courses, you know, I was hosting like some live seminars, sometimes stuff like that. So I knew them really well. And I mean, some of them, they were making minimum wage. I mean, when you're making 1200 euros per month, you don't want to spend like, uh, you know, a hundred dollars per month on, on just your like marketing tool, right? It's like 8% of your income. So I was like, let's make a tool that's more affordable. And also at the same time, I was like, okay, like everybody says, oh, you should get the best landing page builder and the best autoresponder and the best membership site, uh, uh, builder, you know, and I was like, what if you could have all the main features under one roof? So you don't have to pay for ex different tools and more important, you don't have to actually set these tools together so they work together, you know, because that's a lot of work. So that was that that was sort of the mindset behind behind building this out. Yeah, but I was like, oh, but I mean, maybe it's, it's impossible, you know, it's too many things and we just started building it anyway. And I had the right team and we were actually building the features in 2017. I started moving my own business on our own software. So first my uh, email list, then all our landing pages, up to forms, then all our courses, you know, and I was like, oh, that works, you know, that's what I use. So we launched it. And the thing is because we have, so our customers that tell us, oh, this is so much easier to use, you know, it's easier to use, it's faster and it's a lot cheaper. And it's funny because it's, it's so affordable. When people first hear about it, they're like, okay, it's like more affordable. So it's less good, you know, because people think, oh, more expensive, better, you know. And actually, when you ask our customers, they barely never say, oh, it's more affordable. They say, oh, it's easier to use. It's faster, you know. So yeah, I mean, I'm very happy with the outcome. You know, it's very exciting. We're growing fast. So now it's about like how, like how far and how fast can we go? So, so this is another interesting point because you're a non-technical founder. So that was something that's a big inhibitor for a lot of people. So pivoting from blogging, obviously, you don't need to be technical for that. Selling courses, yeah, you have to have a landing page. But like you said, you can, you can figure it out. So whoever, walk me through, you want to start a SaaS product, you don't have a coding background. What do you do? How do you find a good dev? How do you find a good engineer that you can work with that you know is going to deliver? What was your process like for that? Oh, it's, it's very easy. You fail, you fail a few times. So that's, I'm telling you because, you know, like the idea I got wasn't like a revolutionary, you know, because there were some existing tools like this already. And actually just in the French market, I've seen like maybe, I don't know, I'd say at least half a dozen people trying to do the same and failing because software is so hot. Like, I've seen people really like struggling for years, you know. And you can tell that, you know, they don't have the right people to build a good software, you know. So what happens is that, I mean, it's a, it's a city story like first, I was like, because I had a list of about like 30,000 people, I was like, hey, I'm looking, you know, for someone to help me develop this. And I had a customer, so a French guy living in Morocco. And he told me, look, I have a like software development company. We can do it for seven grand. I was like, seven grand, you know, just take the money, you know, and yeah, yeah, that's cheap compared to like, it's like, mostly it's going to cost you a lot. It's like 40, 50,000, 100,000 for a good application. Yeah, exactly. And I was like, you know, take, take seven grand, you know, I don't care. I see what he does. And it's, it was so stupid because I actually put the finger, you know, in a machine and I lost an arm, you know, because yeah. So, so he said, yeah, it's going to take like two or three months. And after two or three months, they were basically nothing. And it was like, okay, so it's actually a lot of features. And now we need to keep working on it. So I need to pay my engineer. So I was like, okay, so I'm going to pay monthly, you know, and these guys, they were so bad, like they didn't even know they were bad, which is. That's even worse. Yeah, I mean, it was so bad that actually with my wife, we flew to Morocco to meet them. And I remember we were in the meeting room. And they were so good at telling me, oh, everything is going to be fine. Don't worry. And at one point, I was like, hey guys, you know, I made some research and people keep talking about this crumb method. So I'm sure you've heard that. You're right. Yeah. And these guys, they were like, it's crumb. Oh, that's interesting. And he asked his developer, could you look into it? Could you, could you google it? You know, I was like, oh, this is not good. So it took me some time to realize that they were bad. And the breaking point was like November 2016. I was actually in my shower and I was like, oh, I sent an email to these guys to tell them that security is super important. It's been two weeks, two weeks. They haven't replied. What image did I write? So they replied to the email that I sent them. And then I was like, that's it. You know, if you ask yourself this question, that means that, you know, it's, it's stupid. Like, you're not working with the right people. So it's all like, hey, thank you. But you know, this is not working. I'm going to pay you till the end of the month. And we done, you know, and then I was disfraid. I was looking for developers. Actually, I spent two months because I was also working with a developer from Bangladesh. I was doing like some trying integration. And he was like, oh, I'm going to take over the whole project, you know, and it's going to work. You know, I'm going to hire some chip developers and upwork. It's going to work. And so he worked on it for two months. And then we plug this solution and everything stopped working. And yeah, so I wasn't working. So then I tried a few different more. And one day I found this guy. And this guy, this guy who was reliable, he wasn't like the other ones. He was like, oh, this, this is going to take two hours. And two hours later, it was done. And yeah, that's the big one. And that's something that every, like, you know, I just wanted to bring that out. And I wasn't sure if you had a good or a bad experience. But I'm actually, I'm glad that you not in hindsight, you know, obviously now you can laugh about it. But during the time probably wasn't that funny. But I'm glad that you had a bad experience that you could talk about because that's what a lot of people end up going through when they're when they're trying to build out a software product. And they're not to develop for themselves. It's just it's a minefield out there. And this is pretty cool. I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode HubSpot. HubSpot is the CRM platform that is easy to implement and is even easier to get your team to adopt and ask anybody that's implemented new technology in a company. The biggest issue is not finding it or buying it. It's getting your team and your company to actually use it and adopt it. 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Just last week, I just someone commenting on Facebook, beware of non-technical founders getting scammed by developers and someone applying and saying, that's not scamming. It's just the way the world operates. I was like, this is so true. It's not that they want to scam you. It's just that they're bad developers and that's how it is. We're a 100% remote company and I understood something. It's that you have two types of people. You have the people who find problems or excuses and the people who find solutions. I was trying out different developers and one guy was like, so he was a developer from Portugal and he was like, oh, but you know, the development process is complicated. I was like, yeah, I hear you, but you know what? There is this guy. He's working in the same environment and he saves two hours and two hours later, it's done. So at the end of the day, I just need people who can deliver solutions and find ways and that's it. So it's okay. So now you found a great developer. This is great. This is like walking through the lifecycle of a Bootstrap SaaS company. So you found a great developer. You started to finish your product. How do you take it to market and what makes you choose to not look for outside capital and just bootstrap it? Yeah, so because I was actually selling, I mean, I had my own online business, you know, so I was making like, you know, still courses right now. Yeah, selling courses is exactly actually a bit of coaching as well. So I was doing about 20, 20 to 30,000 euros per month in revenues. I was about just to fund the whole thing. I mean, I think in 2016, we did like, I don't know, like very little profits, like 10 or 15,000 euros, you know, and I remember I was I was having lunch with my wife once. I was like, you know, that's it sucks, but you know, we have to to to to you know, to keep trying. And in 2017, because we built the team to three developers, I actually made the loss of about like 10 grand, you know, so it wasn't like, I mean, that's that's what it is. They're full-time developers now, but you're making good money, but they're costing a lot. Yeah, I was able to pay myself a salary, you know, I was like getting in debt or whatever, but you know, that's what it is. So we launched in March of 2018, so I launched on my list, and I just promoted the software for two weeks. I mean, I mean, I'm an email marketing guy. I've been living off email marketing since 2010. So, you know, I just promoted, I made enough for to my list, and once the launch was done, we had, was it like 400 or 600? I think it maybe just 400 customers. Yeah, that's what it is. 400 customers. Off your first launch, 400? Yeah, exactly. 400 customers at mostly 27 euros per month, so that's like, is it like 10 grand? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's 10 grand, but I mean, I was still losing money because you have to remove VAT, then, you know, salaries, then affiliate commissions, because I had my own affiliate program that I had started in 2017 using our own tool. So I mean, yeah, it was, and then I kept, I don't know, because the offer was so good, we started getting some users, and I mean, yeah, it was increasing all the time. So a couple of really good points. So you did, you built an incredible product, but simultaneously, you're also being very competitive on price. Take the market strategy was hitting your email list, and then, but also the affiliate program. So these are all, I'm just, so these are all making sense. Walk me through the affiliate program and how that was set up to encourage people to, I guess, refer business. Yeah, sure. So I love the affiliate program, business model. I think it is just great. I remember back when I was sending courses, I could hear stories about people having. So people having just products like in fitness or in another industry. So just having products and an affiliate program and not focusing on traffic generation because it was completely relying on the affiliates. I was like, this is a great business model. You know, I wish I could do that someday. So with our tool, we launched our own affiliate program in 2017. So I told people, I told my lace look, I'm going to pay you 40% on all the sales you generate on our courses and on the software. And this also started attracting affiliates, you know, little by little, I mean, it's really a combination of the product is good. The offer is good. I mean, you know, like the price and and the affiliate commission is good. And today, we paying our affiliates close to 100,000 euros per month in affiliate commissions. And so you set it up so that you get affiliate commissions for lifetime or is it for a year and it's a percentage of all the recurring monthly payments as well. No, no, it's 40% as long as the customer space. You know, that's the thing like it's funny when you discuss about affiliate programs with many business owners, very real fun. It's the same story that I'm going to try to, you know, like I'm going to try to, you know, I'm going to pay you that's for one year or you know, I'm going to try to game the system, you know, and I'm like, this is stupid. Like I want to, being an entrepreneur, we all know it's about building value, right? So I want to be the value for my customers, for my affiliates, and for my team members, right? So I mean, it would be a very short, short term, cited to try to, you know, like, flow my affiliates. Like I want them to make as much money as possible. So they keep promoting us, they keep working hard. And I'm telling you, that's what, that's what's happening because I can see some people who, you know, are trying to make money online, but you know, they don't really succeed and then they promote our affiliate program and they start making money and it's great. And now you have grown the business to your updated numbers, four million annual recurring revenue. This year, I saw that appointment here that you sent over five to six million in ARR, still bootstrapped. No plans to raise money. You're just keeping it going as is for now, correct? Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's a very simple playbook. I mean, I'm already make, I mean, we're profitable. I'm already making, I mean, yeah, I mean, I'm making the money I'd like to make, which is a lot more money than I need. You know, so I can, we bought our dreamhouse with my wife. So we're going to pay off our mode gauging, I don't know, two or three years. We're investing, you know, I mean, we're doing great. And I'm reinvesting everything that comes on top of that. Very nice. And the one other point that I thought was interesting, that you are 100% remote. And I know that a lot of companies have done this, but you, you went 100% remote from the start. So how did you, how do you manage? How many staff do you have now? How do you manage them? How do you be remote effectively? I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode, Quantum metric. So what quantum metric is going to do is it's going to allow you to develop a single source of customer centric truth that can help you understand how to position your products, how to sell to your customers, because anyone is a digital leader who wants to understand your customers better. It should be 100% of you. You should want to understand the customer experience when they hit your website. And then you also want to understand not just your customers, but who else in the world is having similar experiences. 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All right, let's get back to the show. Yeah, so I think it's one of the of one of our strength in in my company is the ability to like hire people and trade them and make them grow. So today we have 65 people on the team in about 10 different countries. So French speaking ones, English speaking ones, Spanish speaking ones because we're expanding to different markets. And I don't know, it's funny, you know, because I think that I mean, I mean, it's the future, you know, you have a book by the funders of the base camp, you know, 37 million dollars. The root of book actually about it, that's called the remote. And it's great because they explain to you what are the benefits, why it's better. And yeah, we've been doing it since day one and it works fine, but you have to, I mean, everyone uses time doctor, a software to track their time and it takes some screenshots. So I don't spend my time, you know, like, stalking at the screen, obviously. But like when you have someone who's lacking or, you know, you're not really sure, you can check out what he's doing and sometimes unfortunately, I mean, it happened, you know, people doing like watching series or whatever, but it doesn't happen much. I mean, you spot these people very easily, right? So I mean, I think this is the future. I mean, you don't have any expense for the office space for, you know, computers, whatever. I mean, this is so much better. I mean, the best, the best benefit that people don't think about is that I don't have to go to an office, you know, and show up and show that I'm there and leave late so that the employees, I mean, I can do whatever I want. I just take my, my phone, I have the slack app. And it's crazy. Like I can go to the gym, I can go to the shopping center, whatever. And yeah, reply to my team members if I need to. Yeah. So, so you said it out and, and are you, you're not personally managing the 60 people. Have you, like, introduced layers of, of virtual management? Already remote, like managers. Yeah. Yeah. Of course, we had, we had to, I mean, so the way it works. So me, I'm in the company. I'm like the CEO, the marketing director or manager. I don't know how you, how I should call it. And I'm also the product manager. I'm the one supervising the product, you know, making sure it's great and taking decisions and discussing with the customers and developers and team members and stuff. So, I mean, the customer support, we have a manager. We have like 15 people in total. In our customer support, we answer our customers seven days a week, usually under two hours. So people, our customers love, our customer support, you know, because it's very, very effective. So I have someone managing that. Then the developers, it's mostly our lead developer, which is our first developer. I mean, I have a lot of different small teams, you know, and I manage them. I mean, I have one assistant that manages that supervises different teams. Okay, okay. Yeah, we have a lot of different teams. I mean, obviously, so you set this up this entire, this entire corporate structure has been set up remote. And that's how it's managed now. Very impressive. I think that you're right. It is 100% the future of how organizations can work and it saves you a ton of money. And it's very effective. Like I remember I was working in the office, you know, like 15 years ago and I was like sometimes I was like on dating websites, you know, I mean, you know, like it's not because you're at the office that you're effectively working, you know, so yeah. Yeah, yeah, no, that's true. It's true. And you know, question for you and also some advice for people that are looking to start their own thing. So like you said, you started a blog, you went to courses, you went to software, you turned down a job. If you were going to do it again, would you do it the same way? Would you go all in or would you do it maybe less risky? What's your what's your take on that for somebody wanting to start? No, I mean, no, I would do the same. Obviously, you know, like there is this questioning podcast like if you could talk to your 20 year old. That's my that's my other question I ask at the end. Yeah, I'm like, you know, like what could I say? Maybe I would tell I would tell me, look, but he don't, you know, don't stress out. It's going to be all right. Enjoy the ride because I was, yeah, I mean, there were some tough years. I'm not going to lie, you know, it's easy afterwards to say, everything is great. You know, no, it wasn't. I was actually feeling like a failure after I left Jeff Walker's Mastermind Group because I had my buddies making, you know, million your launches. And I was just on my own making, yeah, making, you know, making actually a good income. And I was feeling even worse because I was like, dude, you're living in Portugal. The minimum salary is 600 euros per month. And you're making 20,000 euros. And you feel like S, you know, and yeah, and I read the book, you know, the subtle of not giving your F. Yeah, yeah. And the main idea of this book is it's okay not to feel okay. And I was like, oh, that helps, you know, so yeah. It is true. And it's also, you know, for people that are high performing individuals, people that always are entrepreneurial mindset, and they want to do things and they want to build things, you measure yourself at a different level, which for a lot of people doesn't, it may not make sense, like it may sound pretentious, but it's, you do measure yourself at a different level. And you compete and you're pushing yourself. And you're like, if I made 20k this month, the average for it's like, holy shit, you made 20k in one month, but you're like, well, I made 25k last month. So I failed this month. And it's, you know, I think that even, even adopting that mindset at a, at a, at a smaller level, like if you, if you constantly strive to push yourself to have wins months over month over month, that's a positive thing because the end result of having that mindset will be you in a better spot, always. Even if it's not, you know, if you're in a job and you want to make $100 on the internet, if you want to make $100 yourself and you do that, just make 150 next month, make 200 next month. And then that, that's what gets you to the, because that's probably how your blog started. I can't imagine, I'm assuming it was just add sense. There was, I don't know how you made money in your blog, if you have, you had affiliate commissions or whatnot, but it wasn't making a lot of money when it first started, but that's where people usually started. Yeah, absolutely. And I was so happy. The first month I made 82 euros. And I was so happy because I was like, oh, if I went from zero to 82 euros, maybe next month, you know, I'm going to make over 100 euros. And after six months, I made a thousand euros. So, you know, but what happens is that, you know, that once you, you reach like, you know, they say 5,000 euros in revenue per month, like your level of happiness doesn't increase that much. So, now, you know, I'm getting to a different, like, a different field, you know, I'm like, okay, now I kind of reach my goals in terms of, you know, revenue in business, what do I want to do? So, you know, I try, because it's not all about like, so first I love what I do, you know, people tell me, oh, do you have an exit man? I'm like, what, what do you mean? Like, yeah, yeah, do you want to sell? Can I be able to sell? Yeah. I'm like, why would I sell my company? Like, what am I going to do with the money? Am I going to invest, you know, in the stocks and make seven, seven percent per year, like in the long run, with high volatility when I can make, you know, I don't know, 20 to 60 percent year of a year return with my own business, you know, it just doesn't make sense. And I just, I love what I do. Like, I wake up in the morning, I'm like, oh, I want to get a coffee and get started. I just love it. And my exit plan is that as long as I add value, as long as I feel that I'm making a difference and I'm having fun, you know, then I'm going to keep going, you know, I mean, why would I do anything different? I love that. And I think you, I think you, I think the biggest lesson here is, you don't have to, you don't have to end up where you're at or you don't have to, you don't have to start your entrepreneurial life, your entrepreneurial venture, your side hustle, doesn't have to go right into building a multi-million dollar software company. I love the steps, the steps that you took are so smart. That's, I think that's the way to do it. Thank you, everybody jump. Everybody jumps into the big thing, right? Everybody feels like they have to create the next Facebook, but it doesn't really have to be that complicated to start your own business. If people over complicated shit, like it doesn't have to be that, you know, time consuming or even, well, maybe time consuming, but not that complicated. No, I would rather go with something a lot more simple, you know, like, for example, so, I mean, I launched a passive, I mean, a side business that was like a blog about how to learn English, you know, where I was sharing how I learned English by myself, you know, because at school I was like terrible. And so that was like 2012. And I had a friend who was like super smart guy, living his guy, leading Paris with a good job, like speaking different languages. And he wanted to launch a startup in, like, how to learn languages. I was like, hey, you know, I know I'm ranking with my blog on how to learn English easily in the French market. I know I can build a blog around it and make money. Do you want to join me? It was like, no, no, I'm going to keep doing my thing. And I was like, that was super ambitious project with, you know, all around the world in every possible language with funding and stuff. So it quit his job, made like three different business plans, made a markup of a website, made absolutely zero sell and went back to the corporate work while I launched a blog that, you know, I took to, it wasn't much, it was doing like over 3,000 euros per month, but you know, like passive revenue. And I mean, you know, that's what you say, like you shouldn't try maybe to launch the, you know, the next Facebook just do something more simple, you know, and that's less risky because I knew that it would work because I was already getting traffic and I knew that there was a market obviously with people buying courses and, you know, books about learning English. I was like, I know it's going to work and it worked and you know, the funny story, I was, I had a team of three virtual assistants. One was working on this project and he left and later he built a blog about the same ID and today he's making like 50,000 euros in revenue per month. So it doesn't have to be, yeah, it's just interesting how people view on ownership versus what it can actually be. It's organic traffic, it's mostly profits, you know, and this guy is studying, it was my virtual assistant and yeah, and I saw my blog for 2,000 euros last year because I was like, oh, I'm doing, I'm not doing anything with this, you know, I want to focus on my main business, so I just saw it. Very smart. All right, I want to do a few rapid-fire cooler questions from you. Was there anything else that, yeah, no, it was very good. This is like, this is the perfect, the perfect interview, perfect discussion on, if you want to start something, this is in my opinion an easy way to do it and I have a lot of entrepreneurs on here that build very technical complicated things. This is something that people can learn from and I hopefully take inspiration from to just do something simple and do something to start and to honestly future-proof themselves from their job so that if they do get laid off or let go or furloughed, they have something that's making a thousand bucks, two thousand bucks passive and I think that's amazing. And not enough people, just not enough people show the progression of what entrepreneurship can be and how it can come in different flavors and different forms and I think you've done all that. And now you actually are assessed as software CEO. So that can be the end result as well. Okay, so a couple career questions. You already answered one of them. The what would you tell your 20-year-old self? Was there any other advice that you would tell maybe just a younger entrepreneur? If it's not yourself, somebody else? Just to like a favor execution, just do it. Do whatever, fast, learn fast and that's how it works. What was the biggest challenge you've ever faced in building a business and how to overcome it? Oh wow, that was definitely building the product, getting the product built, finding the right developers and this is so hard. And I'm like, oh, if I had not found these guys, where would I be today? And it's crazy. We work together. We just love working together. Like these guys, they're having fun. They love the job. We met already a few times, and it's great. Yeah. Good. So finding the right people is that's the moral of that story, especially if you're not a technical person. Yeah, absolutely. And it is very hard, honestly. Yeah. One person had a major impact on your life. What did they teach you and also who is that person? That's... Yeah, I'm a big fan. It could be a family member. It could be a mentor or anybody. No, I mean, I learned a lot with the marketing consultant that I hired Sebastian. So he's like Sebastian, so that's Sebastian, the French marketer. That's like his nickname in the English market. He's stealing the Jeff Walker's mastermind group. He's a great guy. I really love this guy. I learned a lot with him. So he taught me copywriting how to launch products and we have a different view. But yeah, I learned a lot working with him the first year when we were working on this launch that were great because mostly because of his copywriting and his work. Very good. And how important copywriting is at the whole other conversation. What is one source or book or podcast that you recommend people go and check out? Oh, it really depends on where you're at. There is of course like your podcast with a lot of interviews of successful entrepreneurs. Books, you have so many. I don't read a ton of books like five or six per year. I don't think it's that much. But do you have any anyone's in particular that you that you've liked the people would go? I'm a big fan of Jeff Bezos. I think this guy is such like the Uber entrepreneur, what he did, what he proved. So I read the everything store. I was great. I think the everything store is really a great book if when you want to learn about Amazon about the success story. I just finished reading working backwards by two former Amazon executives. And I was huge. I'm having like my tough team members reading it because it's going to help us a lot structure and the company, you know, and yeah, I mean, these are great. Okay, those are two good ones. And then one one question I like to ask everybody. What does success mean to you? Yeah, it's a great question because you know, as I said, like no, I'm getting like some rich rich rich people's problems, you know, so I'm like, hey, you can make a ton of money and still feel like it's some days, you know, and it's fine. So I think that success, you know, it's of course it's reaching your goals. You know, I love what I do. I want to keep doing it. But then it's about like, you know, making sure that you're not having some black spots and not taking care of important things in your life, like your family, your friends. So, you know, I'm trying to, you know, spend time on this, make sure everyone is happy. And, you know, I'm doing a good job, but not only my business. Good. Yeah. Very good. And then where do people connect with you? Go check out you on social, your website, your newsletter, all of that. Yeah, so I'm actually, so I'm on LinkedIn already an Maker. You can go sign up for system.io. So it's sys.com. We have a free plan. Actually, you can, it's pretty amazing. We launched it two months ago. We have, so actually it's funny because we have, we have over 100,000 three users, you know, it's a lot. And then there is the Facebook group where I'm very active because I don't know, I just like it. You know, I'm getting some feedback. You know, I'm replying to the question. So it's like system.io launch your online business, something like that. It's pretty easy to find. Very good.