🎧🍌 Stop Coding Emails, with Loops Co-founder and CEO Chris Frantz
How to skip a Series A, why engineers should do customer support, hype vs substance in startup marketing, and why sending emails is still a big problem for software companies
Chris Frantz doesn’t do many podcasts, and this latest episode of The Peel is fresh content on when to lean into PLG vs Sales vs hype for growth, fun stunts Loops did to acquire early customers, why they do zero marketing now, and the reason Loops’ customer support team is all engineers.
We also talk about why sending emails is still a big problem for software companies, his hilariously simple framework for building products, their extremely lax and last minute YC application, and how they skipped raising a Series A.
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Timestamps to jump in:
4:37 Email for software companies
8:28 Why email is a big deal
14:05 The future of email
17:00 Product vs Sales vs Hype led growth
24:33 Coming up with the idea for Loops
29:36 Building one of the first GPT wrappers in 2020
34:34 Lessons selling his first company
37:13 Doing their YC app in 10 minutes
40:53 Avoiding VC’s who add value
46:58 Skipping a Series A
51:37 Building in stealth for 18 months
53:21 Marketing stunts to get the first waitlist sign-ups
58:44 Four step cadence of building Loops
1:01:58 Personally onboarding every new customer
1:04:03 Balancing 996 with family
1:11:11 Cleaning wasp nests with a shop vac
Referenced:
Find Chris on X / Twitter and LinkedIn
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Transcript
Find transcripts of all prior episodes here.
Turner Novak:
Chris, welcome to the show.
Chris Frantz:
Thanks for having me.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, excited, excited to do this. Can you real quick tell me what Loops is just for people who aren’t familiar?
Chris Frantz:
Sure. Loops is the email sending platform for software companies. We make it easy to send email for your software company.
Turner Novak:
Maybe this is like a rhetorical question or maybe this is actually a very important question, but why is that such a big deal?
Chris Frantz:
We think email is still important. I, for one, probably get more email than almost anybody as the-
Turner Novak:
Email SaaS guy.
Chris Frantz:
Unbelievable actually, but we think email is still important. It’s the primary way the businesses communicate and we didn’t think that there was a single company out there whose entire focus it was to improve the experience of email sending for software companies. For e-commerce, Klaviyo did a really nice job. We didn’t see anything out there for software companies and it’s something that we needed at every company we started prior.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, I think I’ve heard you mention before that there’s like seven or eight publicly traded companies that are just email sending businesses. I mean I guess it makes sense but also blows my mind. It’s just that big of a concept.
Chris Frantz:
Yeah, definitely. Once you grow to that level, it typically grows beyond just email as a single channel and expands to text, in-app, and push, but Attentive, Braze, a number of others, and then of course, larger companies like Intuit, which now owns MailChimp sold for $12 billion I believe. So, there’s quite a few companies out there where a significant portion of their revenue, it’s driven through email.
Turner Novak:
If you want to expand a little bit more, it’s almost like a customer relationship channel. It sounds like a lot of these will expand into texting, push notifications, just other ways you talk to your customers. So, it sounds like if you really just think about what it is at the end of the day, it’s just a way to have a relationship with the customer.
Chris Frantz:
Yeah, it’s a way to communicate and in a medium that isn’t controlled by any one entity and everyone is pretty comfortable with. Email is one of the few good things on the internet at its core. Maybe not so much in the spam inbox and promotionals, but open source protocol, anybody can use it. It’s getting harder to do it entirely yourself now, but it’s a good thing that exists. In order to treat the channel well with respect it deserves and your customers as well, we do our best to install a bunch of safeguards to prevent any issues with you hitting spam or you sending spammy message to your customers. For example, our most recent change, we actually made it easier for your customers to unsubscribe from your email list.
Turner Novak:
That sounds like a bad, bad thing.
Chris Frantz:
Yeah, it sounds like a bad thing, but our goal is just to make sure that we respect the protocol both ways. The result of that also is that your customers tend to be happier with you, and if you have an overzealous marketing person or an engineer who doesn’t understand the current specs around that stuff, we handle that for you. So, you really don’t have to think about it. Our goal is to build the closed loop for email.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. Is that the significance of the name then? Because when I first read Loops, I thought like growth loops maybe. You send email, loop to another customer.
Chris Frantz:
That was somewhat the original intention. Reforge has a really good program or they did a decade ago and one of their primary things was growth loops and I realized at that time that loops.so was available. So, I purchased it, and then when we applied to YC, we had three or four different ideas ranging from email to privacy to a climate thing. We chose Loops. We picked a domain that we had already owned and that’s pretty much the story there.
Turner Novak:
Nice. So, maybe a little bit just going a little bit deeper on what you talked about before, but the way that someone might use Loops or the way that software companies use email, if I’m just hearing this for the first time and I’m like, “It’s whatever, it doesn’t seem like a big deal,” why is it such a big deal?
Chris Frantz:
What we found is that pre-series D companies, that’s our target market right now, pre-series D software companies, they tend to use anywhere between two to five different tools to email their users, which seems like a lot, but it does make sense if you start to think out what those different tools do and their unique use cases. It’s everything from notifications to product updates to a newsletter to investor updates to onboarding and then the whole world of transactional email. That can easily be represented in a number of different tools.
Our goal is that you can do that all in inside of Loops with a single tool at a single price point. We don’t charge you based on sending. We don’t charge you based on team seats and we have a single shared set of editor primitives that you can use across all of those things. So, what that means is your designer can create a couple shared components inside of one editor and then your engineers can use that exact same template. Marketers on your team, marketers, investors, anybody who happens to have access to your workspace and wants to use it can send with the same exact style stuff that your designer is happy with.
Turner Novak:
Do traditional email senders not work that way? Is it because the marketing team might use Klaviyo, the engineering team might have hard-coded some email sending thing that some guy built because he really wanted to? It just lives in all these different places and you don’t get this uniform experience.
Chris Frantz:
Yeah, it’s exactly that. So, marketing might use MailChimp, engineering team might use SendGrid. Somebody else on the engineering team might use something like Knock for notifications. Your product or community person might use Circle or Substack and then the founders might use something. Well, there’s a couple of dedicated platforms for fundraising stuff. If we put that all into one, then when you get is a lot of benefits from the shared thing.
You get shared access, shared primitives, shared components, shared design language, and it also means that if you managed to take email out of the code base, then if you need to update your transactional emails, it does not mean you need to loop in the entire engineering team, go through a PR review cycle, and wait until that process finishes. Let’s say if you wanted to update the copyright or something in a footer, now a marketer or designer or even somebody on the legal team could quickly do that and not have to go through the entire PR review process.
Turner Novak:
Is that what companies typically do? What percentage is actually coding all that stuff into the code base versus using a tool?
Chris Frantz:
It’s pretty high. It’s somewhat of a controversial statement by us to say that we don’t think email belongs in the code base, but what we have found is that if you send it all through one place and you only have one place where the problems can exist, that helps a lot with debugging. It helps a lot with getting things out into production and it helps a lot with having a unified brand and understanding of the email communications that goes out. If everything goes out through one pipe and you feel confident that it’s well-managed and well-built, then life gets a lot easier.
Turner Novak:
It reminds me of one of those things that email can be tons of upside, but also tons of downside. It can be a great way to communicate with people, great way to sell something to a customer, recruit someone, et cetera, but also if you send too many or bad emails, it’s a pretty easy way for people to say, “Oh, this Loops company, I hate them.” Block, delete, send a spam, ruin your authority, never buying your product, blocking the founder on social media. I never want to see this again because the email was annoying or bad. So, I guess it’s high stakes.
Chris Frantz:
Yes, it is somewhat high stakes. I think people undervalue the value of email transparently and the amount of pain that it can cause if it doesn’t work. If for some reason your transactional provider goes down and you primarily have users log in through email auth, like congratulations, your application no longer works.
Turner Novak:
Really?
Chris Frantz:
They can’t get into your platform if they can’t log in. Maybe some of them go through Google Auth, but if many need a two-factor auth or some type of secondary confirmation as you see with a lot of SOC 2 compliant companies, that becomes more of an issue. So, deliverability, uptime, reliability, all of that stuff is key and core to us, but we think that if you just let us handle email, we will promise to do our best to just make sure you’re sorted.
You don’t need to learn about deliverability. You don’t need to learn about any standards, dark mode and email. Making sure that uptime is consistent, that send time is within a certain period of time, literally none of it. Just give us the keys. We’ll drive, and at the end of the month, you pay us a certain amount of money. It’s mostly worked out pretty well. Our churn above a certain price point when a real company becomes a company and they have maybe 5,000, 10,000 users is practically zero and we’ve been around for four years now. So, we think we’re doing something right.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, just speaking about the importance of email, I think that there’s so many times where I’ll buy something, and if I don’t get an email or a text about it, you wonder did it go through? That’s that final confirmation of you pay for Notion Premium and then you get that email that comes through two seconds later, you’re like, “All right, good. I have it. The transaction worked.” The email it gives you, you know as a customer that everything’s good. It’s interesting too when you talk about this is a business. I’m just curious, I’m sure you probably got this a lot when you started the company. Email, how is that valuable? How do you get people to pay for that? What’s the opportunity in email? How much money can you really make building a company here?
Chris Frantz:
Yeah, our best customers are the ones that have been doing it for a while because they have very specific sets of expectations and then if we meet them, then they’re very happy to not have to think about all the typical things that come with email. It’s usually the folks that we see that are most skeptical are the ones that haven’t had their email down for an hour or two or for days without response from their provider or have had like DNS records, migration issues, and not been able to fix that. Once you’ve felt the pain, you know you don’t want to deal with it anymore. I’d say it’s pretty much equivalent to using a cloud service for your hosting versus trying to run the own metal in your living room. Once you’ve done that, you definitely don’t want to go back to how it used to be.
Turner Novak:
What comes after email? Because it seems like, in my opinion, maybe other people have seen the sentiment as too many emails out there. We subscribe to so many newsletters. I don’t open things. What does the future of all this look like?
Chris Frantz:
Yeah, I mean inherently, it’s just communication protocol for sending text. So, I think it’s going to be around in one way or the other. I’m hopeful, and we’ve seen it with Gmail since they’ve implemented Gemini Flash and other models for scanning that the spam and inbox filtering is just going to get better and then the stuff that you see is the stuff that you want to see. I think we’re probably going to see a big shift there. Open rates and click rates are already garbage. They’re obfuscated to the point of not being helpful for an individual. They’re only helpful in aggregate. I expect even that the shift in the future as privacy protections improve, which is a good thing.
Turner Novak:
So how will both of those shift?
Chris Frantz:
Privacy protections such as what Apple is doing with private email tracking, I believe, is the name of it. It prevents open and click rate tracking for iCloud users. In the newest macOS Tahoe and the related ones for iOS and iPad, they actually block UTM parameters as well in Safari messages. Most people don’t know this, it hasn’t been something they talked about, but they do broad sweep blocking. So, that’s everything from Facebook click IDs to Google Analytics IDs to, of course, like UTM source, UTM campaign, which might be used to identify and attribute an email. So, I think it’s just going to get closer to sending stuff that people want to read being the key and then people will let you know because they will unsubscribe and that’ll be your biggest indicator.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. It’s getting less data-driven almost.
Chris Frantz:
Yeah, and that’s a good thing. I mostly think it’s a good thing. We have almost zero analytics on our own site, aside from technical monitoring. I transparently don’t care at all about where people come from, how they find us, any of that stuff. We run no marketing, no sales.
Turner Novak:
So how do you know that anything’s working? Because it seems like you think the typical tech company, it’s like tons of experiments, all these channels, quantify everything, analyze everything. You’re doing the opposite. It seems like maybe it works, but how did you come to this conclusion that this is the way to do it?
Chris Frantz:
Well, you need a certain level of confidence to realize that most of it is garbage. So, prior, maybe six years ago, my career up to that point had been built inside of growth and marketing and I’d spent just gobs of money in terms of buying. I purchased everything from national television ads to national metro Subway rollouts to radio to podcasts, NPR. We were Line is Tech Tips’ biggest sponsor on YouTube for-
Turner Novak:
Oh, nice.
Chris Frantz:
... six months in a row or something.
Turner Novak:
Which product was this?
Chris Frantz:
This was Curiosity. It’s now a publicly driven company. It’s Curiosity Stream.
Turner Novak:
I was going to say it’s like the streaming.
Chris Frantz:
Yeah, I was one of the first employees there, the fifth hire I believe by John Hendricks. He was the founder of Discovery Channel and they let their marketing person go. I stepped into the role and then just grew with it, which was cool for a long time, but I spent a lot of money and I learned the value of ad tracking and spending. I mean we spent millions of dollars a month in 2016 in the heyday of Facebook ad tracking and all that stuff and grew a big distaste for it. What I realized is that the best way to actually improve your CAC, your customer acquisition cost or your CPA, your cost per acquisition is not to have better ads. It’s to have a better product. Everything is built on the product. That’s what you’re ultimately selling.
If the product sucks, no amount of advertising’s ever going to save you. It can help get you in front of people. Like the Cooley team is doing a good job of getting their product out in front of people by generating hype, but at some point, the product needs to do the work. So, I think it’s important to advertise a little bit in the very beginning to build yourself an audience, but at some point, the switch needs to flip to product. And then if the product can’t grow itself, if you’re in a B2B SaaS, it obviously varies by industry, but if the product can’t grow itself, then you probably didn’t build a good product. I’m sure there’s exceptions to the rule, but I think the greatest sign of product market fit is a company that grows exponentially month over month with nothing but word of mouth.
Turner Novak:
If I am not growing and my CAC is really high, is it just like you need a new product, the product doesn’t work?
Chris Frantz:
Oh, no. I would say if you want to do a product-led growth, B2B SaaS, that’s best in class. If you want to build one of those very specific companies, which we do, that’s the path that you need to take. If you want to build DocuSign, then you need a sales team and you need folks in major cities, you need a bunch of VC capital. You barely need a product and you need probably a very rich founder that can bankroll it during downturns, but that’s like a sales go-to market. If you want to do product, product first is got to be led with product, otherwise you’re not building a product first company.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, that’s right. There’s like two lenses. It’s like sales led versus product led.
Chris Frantz:
Well, there’s also hype led, which we’ll see how long you can go.
Turner Novak:
Is that real? Can you make a company with hype led?
Chris Frantz:
I think Mischief did that for a little bit. I don’t know if it’s sustainable long-term is what I would say. Maybe Red Bull is potentially the closest. Right now, there’s the world’s largest skateboard drop-in happening right now. It’s up on a skyscraper. It’s currently being livestreamed, millions of viewers, and they’ve just been doing this for a decade, maybe longer.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, I mean like 20, 30, 40 years almost.
Chris Frantz:
Yeah, it’s been a long time. So, maybe hype led is possible, but it’s hard.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, I mean if you even think about it, a lot of things are hype led. When I even think about sports leagues like the NFL, right? Each week it’s like, “Oh, this big matchup between the Chiefs and the Bills.” The first opening game of the season is a Super Bowl rematch or it’s the two undefeated teams are playing this week or this guy’s trying to break the record for the new all-time passing leader in week 15 or 16 or 17. Then in the off season, it’s like a draft and there’s always these almost big hype-able moments. If you relate it back to startups, it’s like launching a new feature, new product, new employee joining, we hit a milestone. There’s always these new things that are happening and that are all their own hype moments really at the end of the day.
Chris Frantz:
Yeah, there’s good corollaries between sports teams and startups, especially right now when salaries are very similar for star players, I would say.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, fair.
Chris Frantz:
Yeah. I mean with football or basketball, the core product there has been refined over a long period of time over a lot of scrutiny against audiences, literally tested against audiences. Teams have been drafted, just the best of the best. So, the hype cycle supports it, but no one’s going to watch a multi-hour game if it’s like with commercials, if it’s actually a terrible product.
Turner Novak:
That thing I think is incredible about the NFL. It’s like if you think about it’s like a three-hour TV segment with four minutes of actual gameplay, it’s like the perfect vehicle for delivering ads to the average American. Just an incredible business product in that sense. You’ve been able to shove so many sponsorships into it.
Chris Frantz:
Yeah, ChatGPT will be a better ad model.
Turner Novak:
Oh yeah. Fair, in the sense of you can weave monetization to that a lot better than traditional Google Search.
Chris Frantz:
Absolutely. Yeah. All they need is a directory at the bottom where it says, information may be inaccurate and contain promotional material and boom, that’s it. You can put ads in. You don’t even need to disclose them past that point, especially with our currently defanged FTC.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. So, what’s your opinion then on how valuable ChatGPT could be? How much revenue could that product do at scale, more than Google?
Chris Frantz:
I don’t know that I have the answer for you there.
Turner Novak:
I mean, it probably could.
Chris Frantz:
Yeah, potentially. I mean, the outside bet though, right, is like AGI swoops in and then why do we have ChatGPT?
Turner Novak:
True, just all be piped into our brains. We don’t even need an interface.
Chris Frantz:
Then the rate of progress happens exponentially at that point. So, brain inference becomes something that is no longer sci-fi and very fast. So, in a very real way, why does ChatGPT exist if knowledge multiplies every second?
Turner Novak:
Yeah, that’s true. We’re going to hit post-knowledge, post-AGI, post knowledge economy.
Chris Frantz:
Yes, but there will be email.
Turner Novak:
That’s true. A good way to tie it back. So, how did you initially come up with the idea for Loops? I’m assuming you came across this problem over years, but how did it all evolve?
Chris Frantz:
A couple companies ago, we were paying, one of the aforementioned publicly traded companies, a couple hundred thousand dollars a year. It was part of a three-year annual contract. It was no longer just annual. It’s almost three years. It’s very common in these publicly traded, previously listed companies.
Turner Novak:
Is that a pay up front model? You pay up front for the three years too.
Chris Frantz:
It depends. It can be structured in lots of different ways. Yeah, they have legal teams that are the size of their sales teams and the engineering teams are a fraction of both. So, I wasn’t happy with that model at all. Then at our previous company that we sold, we were using MailChimp and SendGrid. We were paying SendGrid like $100 a month and we’re paying MailChimp $1,500 a month, so $1,600 a month total. The services didn’t speak to each other at all. So, we had no idea if somebody got an email in one place, not in the other, if the customers think to one place, not the other, what the design looked like in one versus the other, if that design rendered the same everywhere, and it was MailChimp.
So, I remember when we went to cancel the account after selling the company, the pop-up ad that I got, and it stuck in my head, was like, try our new postcard delivery. I was like, “What? This is not where I should be spending my money. This is clearly not being billed for me. This might be great if I was traveling.” I did not understand who this ad was for at the time. So, anyways, that was annoying to me and then I banked out. I was like, “This doesn’t integrate with any of the tools that I need. It doesn’t fit into any of the flows. The templates are all about creating matcha lattes or something and sending out to your coffee store customers.” It’s not billed for software companies, and at the time, nothing was. So, that’s how it happened.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, I think it’s sad when I look back in my email or my DMs. You had DMed me at some point around when you started the company like, “Hey, we’re raising a little bit of money, if you want to chat.” I think I saw a year or two later, I remember responding. It’s in there in our DMS. I’m like, “Ah, I think I’m going to regret missing this.”
Chris Frantz:
Hopefully not. Hopefully, that guy fails, then I’ll be right.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, yeah. That’s always my mindset as a VC. I hope these guys fucking lose. I hope they fail. Yeah.
Chris Frantz:
You need the heuristic. You need some reinforcement of the negative belief. Otherwise, you’re just giving money to any schmuck that walks through the door.
Turner Novak:
My anti-portfolio on email news or email providers in general apparently. When I meet them, I just need to invest, obviously.
Chris Frantz:
But potentially, yeah, the heuristics are hard there for sure. I’ve invested in six companies and three of them have actually had series A’s.
Turner Novak:
That means successful. Yeah, that’s all that matters, right?
Chris Frantz:
Right. Yeah, it’s hard to know.
Turner Novak:
Of course not, but yeah.
Chris Frantz:
Wildly different degrees of valuations too.
Turner Novak:
Fair, which can and can’t. It doesn’t mean things. Sometimes that’s a good thing, something that’s a bad thing. The best companies are sometimes always overvalued, but that’s also something you’d say in 2021 or 2025.
Chris Frantz:
It’s very hard to know. The only thing I’m happy about being very right on is NFTs are garbage.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I feel like I got a lot of internet views and followers from commentating on the NFT mania, which was an interesting time in the world.
Chris Frantz:
I have a mental log of everyone that took a bite of the crazy pill and lost their minds. I remember, we all remember, we know what you did. We know what your avatar looked like.
Turner Novak:
I think my favorite thing though is I’m probably one of the only people on Twitter that still has an NFT as their profile picture, because someone made this fake NFT generator where you could have a normal profile picture that wasn’t actually an NFT. It had that hectogon, octagon. I don’t even remember. I think it was six sides, and it would make you a six-sided NFT profile picture without actually being an NFT. I did this four years ago and I’ve never switched it. They made it so that you can’t do that anymore. So, the only people that still have these NFT profile pictures are people that have had them for the last four years. I mean, I haven’t seen one in a year, so I might be one of the only people remaining on Twitter with an NFT picture and it’s fake.
Chris Frantz:
Oh, there you go.
Turner Novak:
One of the things I’m proud of.
Chris Frantz:
Well, I think Stripe’s doing some pivot back to blockchain or something. I don’t know. So, maybe it’s coming to Vogue, I guess, is what I’m saying.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Can you make an email in NFT? Was that ever a thing?
Chris Frantz:
Ah, man. I bet you could be. Anything could be an NFT, you might be an NFT.
Turner Novak:
That’s true. This whole podcast might be listening to an NFT.
Chris Frantz:
Yeah, yeah. Don’t mute me, bro.
Turner Novak:
So getting back on when you were starting Loops, I think you had just come off selling Snazzy AI was the name of the company and then so yeah, what’s the story there?
Chris Frantz:
We got really lucky in that nobody really seemed to care about ChatGPT, or sorry, it wasn’t ChatGPT at the time. It was OpenAI. It was GPT 3.5 at the time. We had played with GPT 2, but GPT 3.5 hadn’t quite come out yet, but there was whispers of it and I had seen a couple demos. And then I shot Gregory Brockman in email just randomly, never spoken to him before. I was like, “Hey, could I get access to this?” And he was like, “Yeah, sure. We’re doing a batch of 10 companies to get first access to it. What are you working on?” I told him and he was like, “All right, yeah, we’ll give it a try.”
Turner Novak:
What was it for people who don’t know that you were making?
Chris Frantz:
Oh yeah. Oh, sorry. Yeah, so we were making Snazzy. It was Snazzy.AI and it’s currently owned by Unbounce. Actually, I visited the site, maybe redirects now, but it was AI marketing copy. I never felt very strongly about it. It was a problem that we were really solving. It was more of like, “Ooh, cool technology. Let’s come up with a way to position it.” So we were one of the first GPT rappers, which is cool. In the same batch with us with Copy.ai, Jasper, and there was a couple others. Several others fizzled out. I think Jasper is maybe still going. They’ve pivoted three or four times since then.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, I think I actually remembered, I think someone said some really mean things about them on the internet. I saw the founder, I forget his name, but I think he actually replied and he shared some of their metrics. It seemed like they were doing relatively well all things considered. It was a really long reply too on Twitter. So, I was like, “Oh, it’s cool. They’ve navigated it to the best as they could.”
Chris Frantz:
Yeah. We didn’t have any real desire to continue in the market, but the business was growing like gangbusters. We were one of the first B2B companies to spend money on TikTok. What I noticed is that at the time I was like, “Okay, so we plugged this model in and there was no guardrails, right? It was awful.” None of the tooling built that we have today that makes it so easy, but one in 10 responses we got back was usable. But once you plug that in and once you get it in, then the core product itself is just maturing on the model side.
All you’re doing is you’re just rebuilding the tooling around it and making things nicer. Once we realized that, the dev stuff was mostly done, aside from the normal ask people want like reset password and invite your team members and all of the normal SaaS strappings. So, then we had a ton of revenue coming in very rapidly, literally within a couple days. Then I just started piping it all directly into TikTok creators. This is pretty early, so this is like 2020 or something, 2021 maybe.
Turner Novak:
Was this influencer marketing or was it TikTok’s programmatic?
Chris Frantz:
No, this was before that existed. Yeah, there was no ads on TikTok and there was no programmatic ad buy-in platformer or any of that stuff.
Turner Novak:
It was just DMing or emailing creators.
Chris Frantz:
Well, I found one person to run the account. I paid her $1,500 a month and she ran our account and we got tens of millions of views very rapidly in a couple weeks and then she started finding other creators and then she would find them and then we would pay them and that was it. I would just pay her $1,500 a month and I would pay these various creators directly, however much per video. It did gangbusters. Literally, there was nobody else out there that was doing anything like this. We could have scaled it and I should probably be on a yacht right now, but it wasn’t a good product per se.
We’re trying to build a very good product right now with what we’re currently doing. It was a good way to make money to make some person happy, I think, on the user side and to rapidly scale, but it was never anything I was very proud about. We sold it in under a year for a seven-figure sum to Unbounce who glued it into the core of their platform, and now they’re very AI forward and all of that good stuff. I hope it’s going well.
Turner Novak:
I meant to look Unbounce before this, but for me and also people don’t know, it looks like a marketing landing page builder and looks like they’ve probably evolved from there over time.
Chris Frantz:
Yeah. Unbounce back in the day was the premier landing page builder on the internet actually. So, if you were a marketing team, you were building them with Unbounce.
Turner Novak:
And there’s supposedly a big post out there. I’ve heard you mention in another podcast, but I couldn’t find the post. But I think you talked about just the process of selling it. Was there anything big that you learned through the process?
Chris Frantz:
It came inbound and it closed very rapidly. If I was to do it again and I don’t know that I ever will with our current company, but if I was to do it again, I don’t think I would have tranches of any kind.
Turner Novak:
Tranches in the sale process, in the way proceeds are received?
Chris Frantz:
Yeah. So, we got the proceeds up front, but then we had tranches based on revenue goals internally for also running the company aside the main one. I don’t think I would ever agree to something that impacted my compensation in any way, in a way that I wouldn’t have 100% control over. So, I mean that very high level but yeah.
Turner Novak:
I’ve run into that before with acquisitions where companies acquired, it becomes tucked into a part of another entity and then the acquired company inside the other one has a specific target that they need to hit, but then let’s say the founders are not involved in it. So, you have no control over actually hitting those targets. In all reality, if I’m the acquiring company, I’m probably going to make sure you just barely don’t hit them. It’s enough to pay you anything. The incentives are not aligned for you to actually get those targets, especially if people are not involved who are being compensated by them. So, that’s something I ran into personally with one of those, with a portfolio company that was acquired. I mean, I can imagine that that could go a lot of different ways.
Chris Frantz:
Yeah, I think it depends on the relationship that you have, the company, the goals that are created and all of that stuff. But high level, never letting anybody take your own competition out of your control if you can avoid it.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, that’s fair. You completely bootstrap that, right? You didn’t raise any outside capital for it.
Chris Frantz:
That was bootstrapped. We had investor interest, but there was no real reason to take that. Then after selling, we didn’t know what to do after we left Unbounce and I stayed with the same co-founder. We applied to YC. We had applied once prior, the two of us four years prior, and we didn’t get in. So, this was the second application. Like I said, we had a number of different ideas from privacy to climate to Loops for email, and we got in. They were mainly interested in Loops. That was our biggest pain point and where we had the most experience as well. We built something rapidly and saw some early adoption and decided that was the way to head.
Turner Novak:
Nice. What was your application like? I know you put a ton of work and tons of research into it and spent tons of time.
Chris Frantz:
No, we spent very little time. Yeah, I didn’t even know you could ask for referrals or recommendations or that people prepped really hard for this. I guess I was maybe a little naive. The first time we applied, I guess now 12 years ago or something, we drove to a place and we found a sequestered quiet room and blah, blah, blah. We tried hard. We did a couple takes. This time Adam texted me 20 minutes before it was due, “Hey, should we try and do YC this year?” I was like, “Oh, I don’t know.” Then we just knocked out a very quick application.
We did a quick Zoom call because it was like 11:00 PM or 11:30 or something. We just told jokes at the end of it for a couple minutes, way over the amount of time that it was supposed to run. We uploaded and that was it. Then, yeah, we got an email shortly after we did that. We did the interview process. It went on for 40 or 50 minutes. It was Michael Seibel, Brad Flora and somebody else. Then that night, we got a phone call and they said, we got in. I said, “I’ll have to think about it.”
Turner Novak:
Was that a negotiation tactic almost?
Chris Frantz:
No. I was like, “I got to ask my wife.” I was like,
“I don’t know, guys. This seems like a big commitment. Let me chat with my wife and make sure she’s cool with me having a three-month sprint right now.” We have a newborn. There’s a lot going on. I think Brad who called was like, “I don’t think anyone said that this year. We usually just get a yes.” I was like, “Okay, sorry about that. Let me call you back though.” Yeah, so then I did. My wife was like, “Yeah, of course, you’ve wanted to do this for a while. You should do it.” That was it.
Turner Novak:
So why did you do it? Because historically, you’ve always bootstrapped, YC’s a pretty big commitment. Sounds like it would be almost like inconvenient to go out there. Why do it?
Chris Frantz:
Well, we didn’t go out there. It was COVID. So, it was a COVID batch and I did it. That was one of the reasons that we decided to apply as well is my co-friend Adam is in Upstate New York with his family. I am in a small town in Maryland outside of DC with my family. We both have very nice lives that we’ve built and they’re not inside of San Francisco. So, we saw an opportunity there for maybe attending remotely and decided to take that.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. You describe it as it’s like a no-brainer if you want to build a big company. Why is that?
Chris Frantz:
Oh, because honestly, sometimes I wonder if it’s an IQ thing or if I just see things very simply or I wonder which side of the bell curve I’m on.
Turner Novak:
Because there’s arguments. You see people arguing extreme on both ends of the spectrum. So, why you should or shouldn’t do YC or the value of it.
Chris Frantz:
Yeah, I think you can just look statistically, YC tends to make good bets. So, if you want to be considered a good bet and statistically have a good chance of succeeding, maybe then you should do YC. It seems pretty clear to me, right? People go to Ivy League schools for a chance of success. It’s barred for entry in various ways, but all of these things are good indicators. If you pile on more good indicators, does it mean that you’re going to be a success? Absolutely not. But do other successful people have those similar indicators? Sure. So, why not pattern match yourself?
Turner Novak:
You, I think, raised a little bit of money around demo day or before demo day. I think that’s probably when you DMed to me.
Chris Frantz:
Yeah, we closed around before demo day, I think, a week and a half, two weeks before. We raised from a number of different angels and investors and generally been very happy. We made it very clear hopefully to our investors early on that the best investor for us was one that just let us build our business and we didn’t have to engage with too much. We don’t think an investor is going to save or build or do anything meaningful to the company. If they do, then that’s nice, but it’s not something that we should spend any time trying to make happen because that’s not repeatable and it’s not something that I’m going to get any real value of at this stage.
Post-product market fit, maybe when we’re like readying for IPO or we’re collecting funds and doing all of that good stuff and we actually need a serious bank roll, sure, but no investors flying to customer’s offices all across the country off a $500,000 pre-seed or something. There’s varying amounts of commitment and stuff in what you should expect, and I think at the pre-seed and seed stage, your investor commitment and expectations should be very low and it’s up to you to build a good company and then you guys can reconnect and see what that looks like in the future.
Turner Novak:
So then how did you suss out or determine who you wanted on board? Was there a certain way you thought about who you should bring on? It sounds like it wasn’t necessarily based on a value add per se.
Chris Frantz:
No, it was 100% of who I spoke with and who I enjoy speaking with. We talked to 40 investors. Around 32 or so were interested in investing in us, so we turned out the majority of them. It was who I enjoyed getting along with who understood the expectations. We had a couple investors who thought that they were doing these really big value adds. We were like, “We’ll be in the office every day. We’ll be the first person you talk to in the morning. We will text you on the weekends.” I’m like, “I will literally pay you to do none of those things. Please, please. Please, no.”
So it was just people who understood what it ended up being was a bunch of very successful founders. That was one of the qualifications. It’s like ideally you founded a company in the past and then folks that understood that it wasn’t their job to make our company, it was our job to make this company. As a result of that, I sent an investor update. I get some emojis and some LFGs and that’s about it.
Turner Novak:
Some rocket emojis. Yeah.
Chris Frantz:
If I need funds or something, I’m confident I could hit up any of them and get any amount that I needed to bridge any period of time, but we’ve been cashflow positive for a while. We’re growing, we don’t need any additional funding. I think they would more be confused as to why I was asking than anything else.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, I think a lot of people don’t realize that the VC high touch and always being in front of the portfolio companies, it’s really more for them than it’s for you as a founder. Because as an investor myself, I need things to talk about to my investors. I mean, you’re so removed from everything that’s going on. Really what you do is you give money to some founders and then it’s like Jesus, take the wheel. You just wait. They either die within one or two or three years or it’s like 10 years later and it’s like, “Hey, this might maybe be worth something, but you don’t actually know.” So I mean, as an investor, you get data points. It’s like, “Oh, these Loops guys. Oh, Chris is just an animal. He’s always shipping.”
You’re always in front of customers and you need data points to go back to your investors so that they think you’re good as an investor. Oh, they’re spending all this time with Loops. They’re adding all this value to Chris and the team and they know how valuable this company is and we know we’re going to get a lot. So, I mean, to your point, it’s really annoying. So, I think as an investor, it’s finding that balance of just like how can you get that from the portfolio? Oh, Loops, they’re tracking really well, these guys are on a good course, they’re doing well, but I’m not being annoying to the founders and texting them every morning and trying to go to the office and help them write code or something or introduce them to worthless customers or candidates.
Chris Frantz:
Yeah, I mean, look, I’m sure that’s helpful for some founders and maybe I don’t speak for the majority of them. I think if we’re going to VC side talk for a second, I think what Standard, Dalton, and co are doing with Standard Capital is interesting, and that’s probably as close to perfect from a venture fundraising vehicle that I’ve seen so far. So, Standard Capital is offering just the form that you fill out, similar to a Y Combinator application and then they crunch you some amount of Series A funding if it is accepted. That’s pretty much it.
I think that’s great for series A. I actually think that you could go even further with it. If I ever clear Loops or have any amount of free time, I’ve always wanted to do a separate fund where I just do my best to mirror Y Combinator’s investments because historically they have fantastic returns. So, I think you should probably just make a form on your page that just grants safes to any Y Combinator alumni up to a certain amount of money until the fund exhausts, and that should be the extent of it.
Turner Novak:
That’s a use case for NFTs. You get your YC safe as an NFT and you submit the NFT. It’s like, “Oh, proof of stake, proof of whatever they call it.”
Chris Frantz:
Jesus Christ. A legal contract is proof of stake.
Turner Novak:
Proof of safe is probably what they call it.
Chris Frantz:
Proof of safe. Oh yeah, sure. Yeah, there’s something there. Yeah. If YC ever launches an auth with YC OAuth function, I’ll spin that up. I’ll raise a couple million dollars and then I will throw out basically a self-funding fund that only invests in YC companies. Everyone gets a percentage of the fund and it’s done as safe. It’s a single click. You get a DocuSign, your email, nothing further besides a YC OAuth. I don’t want to even hear your company name, what your idea is, any of that stuff.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. So, one thing interesting that you said, maybe you mentioned this to me earlier, maybe we were recording, but you skipped a series A, like you had an opportunity. I think maybe you said you got a term sheet. I can’t remember if this is specifically what you said, but can you just explain that to me, the whole process and why you chose to do that?
Chris Frantz:
Sure. So, typically, I say typically as in maybe five years ago or so, folks looked into raising a series when they hit $1 million in ARR. That was the usual benchmark. So, we cleared that ago and we did look at fundraising, but I’ve never felt that we had product market fit. I mean we’re obviously the closest we’ve ever been, but I still don’t think we’re quite there yet. On the flip side, I can think of maybe five or six companies that do that I’ve seen besides maybe a local bodega or something.
That’s probably a pretty good product market fit. But we didn’t get there with where I thought we should be from product market fit side of it. So, we chose not to raise funds, cash flow positive and we’re growing rate that allows us to continue to hire and continue to build product and acquire customers with having to do any marketing or sales. When we hit that product market fit stage, we might look into it or we just might keep skipping until we end up at IPO acquisition or I retire.
Turner Novak:
And you mentioned the $1 million series benchmark. Is that still true today? What do you think the current market looks like?
Chris Frantz:
I don’t know what the current market looks like. It seems insane. I talked to folks and it seems like borderline NFT, crypto levels of insanity out there right now.
Turner Novak:
Why do you say that?
Chris Frantz:
Just because people are raising series A’s in 90 days, that stuff, 90 days from company inception, that thing. If you can build something, even if it’s a model and it takes you three months to do it, then other people can build something similar in three months. We spent a year and a half on the product before we launched it. Now, that’s not to say that we’ve built a better business or that we’ve allocated our time well or any of those things, but if you want to build something very good, very defensible, and something that has the foundations to be a decade, multi-decade long business, it’s unlikely that you’re going to get to that defensible state in three months.
OpenAI had been around for six, seven years or something before they launched to ChatGPT. It takes a while to build a good thing. So, if you see college freshmen building something in three months and then knocking down like $40, $50, $60, $80 million series, maybe the market’s a little frothy.
Turner Novak:
What would you recommend then to that college freshman? Should they not go through that process of launch video, some hype, raise a bunch of money? What advice would you give to that person or to yourself if you’re back in that moment?
Chris Frantz:
I think it’s a great way to potentially build wealth very early on in your life. It’s not clear if the goal is experience, if the goal is to build a good business, or if the goal is to make a bunch of money. I’m sure if you’re 22 years old, maybe you don’t know the answer either. You’re just doing what feels right and what makes sense in the moment and what investors are willing to give you money for. Investors are so scared of missing out on the next scale or the next OpenAI. They’re chasing everything that has AI at the end of the name.
Turner Novak:
And it’s interesting because I think you said you have a lot of customers that are AI companies, email still pretty important even in this era of post-AGI.
Chris Frantz:
Absolutely. Yeah. We want to build email for modern software companies. Most modern software companies today are building with AI at the core. So, we have companies like Replicate that build on us, and then we have also have companies that are a little bit newer like Granola. Just the other day, I saw Orchids, who’s the top of the web design benchmarks. It was funny. I saw them because Dylan from Figma tweeted a stat that they were number two in and Orchids was number one.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, I saw Orchids was number one. Yeah, I saw that too.
Chris Frantz:
I was like, “What’s this Orchids?” And then I was like, “Wait, isn’t that familiar?” And then I checked my inbox and I was like, “Oh, yeah, look at that.” They’re using loops. So, yeah. So, the best modern companies today are choosing to use us as well, but we have no AI features, not built especially for AI, but we have built a very robust, very stable, very nice-to-use platform, fielded entirely by a technical team.
Turner Novak:
How did you first get people to start using it back in 2022?
Chris Frantz:
Right? Well, we did spend a year and a half building this thing.
Turner Novak:
Is this 2023?
Chris Frantz:
Yeah. Well, so YC requires you to get revenue while you’re in. I don’t know if it’s a requirement. It certainly felt like it. Michael Seibel is a scared dude.
Turner Novak:
If you don’t get revenue... Yeah. Well, I don’t know. What’s the threat? What’s the threat that they give you? Do they just make you feel so disappointed that you didn’t get revenue and you just feel pressured into it?
Chris Frantz:
There’s some level of competition. You might be like, “Oh, I’m better than those guys” while they’re like, “Build blah, blah, blah.” But maybe somebody’s next to you and they just hit $10,000 and a couple days ago they felt the same as you. Now they have $10,000. Every week we would meet up and we would compare revenue. Michael Seibel would oversee it in our small batch and we would put it on a spreadsheet and everyone would look at the spreadsheet and you did not want to be last on the spreadsheet. He’d be like, “So why do you have no revenue this week?” I’d be like, “Well, reasons.”
He’d be like, “Okay, fine.” Then he would go to the next person and then they wouldn’t have those reasons and they would have revenue. You were like, “Well, was my reason good enough?” You start self-questioning and then eventually we just built something that users could use. It was very small, and again, we stayed in building stealth waitlist, whatever mode for a year and a half. We had users paying us, but it was a very small amount. We handpicked them off on the waitlist and it was just to make sure that the numbers continued to go up. Then we had users using our software, so we were not building in silence.
Turner Novak:
How did you first get people on the waitlist?
Chris Frantz:
Yeah, if you don’t have a product, you do need something in order to get people interested. So, we tried a number of different stunts. So, some of hype stuff. I think it’s a great way to kickstart an audience if you don’t have one already. So, we purchased a billboard in Times Square, and then we let Y Combinator startups put their ads on it throughout the day. We had a photographer post it up that we hired off of Craigslist who took pictures throughout the day and posted it through our company Twitter account and tagged the companies. That worked really well. We sent a bunch of swag out.
One of the more fun things that we did was we did a cereal called Loops, like in the old Airbnb style, Airbnb released McCain-Obama cereal boxes when they were trying to generate some interest in hype. So, we did that for us, but it was just for the company Loops and inside of it we put a 3D printed decoder ring. So, then when you solve the decoder ring combination, it takes you to a private URL. When you figure out the puzzle on the private URL, you get airdropped a hoodie. So, that was really absurd and it was professionally manufactured boxes. I hired a great designer. We didn’t have a product to sell. So, I just spend my time and energy on something.
Turner Novak:
It was a box of Loops cereal that had a decoder ring and then you had to decode the URL. When you went to the URL, you were sent a hoodie to your house or to your location?
Chris Frantz:
Yeah, it was way overbuilt. We did a couple hundred of these, right? it worked. A bunch of early customers were just like, “This is a cool nerdy thing. I get a box of cereal with a decoder ring in it.” I don’t know what the decoder ring’s going to do. A lot of them just kept it as like memorabilia and they haven’t even opened it. We actually have a surprising amount of hoodies for the amount of boxes that we sent out. So, we still have a surplus of hoodies, but I think all the cereal is gone.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. Well, there’s the one strategy, I mean there were some startups in 2021 that they would sell the hoodies, they’d sell merch. It was like software companies that had more merch revenue than product revenue, I think. I don’t know if you remember those days.
Chris Frantz:
No, no. Fast?
Turner Novak:
Yeah. There was one called Fast.
Chris Frantz:
They were doing $1 hoodies.
Turner Novak:
I mean, they did a very good job at generating hype back in 2021.
Chris Frantz:
And where are they now?
Turner Novak:
Yeah, so I guess it’s like hype can be good.
Chris Frantz:
Hype can be good. You got to have the product though. Got to back the product. Yeah, I think it’s a little different nowadays because hype gets you to a place where your product is in front of users. If those users haven’t used anything like that solution before and if it’s essentially a wrapper of a foundation model, then you can do some very interesting things. Then I think if you just only focus on hype and you have a very thin UI and you let the model providers focus on improving their model, then you act as this hype forward middleman that is maybe an effective go-to market.
I don’t think we’ve ever been in a place quite like that before where the product itself continues to improve and it’s entirely out of your hands, because as it gets better, your product just gets better and you don’t have to do anything but continue to pay them. I don’t know that there’s ever been a technology equivalent of where we are now. So, you really could, if you are an AI forward company, devote all of your time entirely to marketing and hype and sales and probably still have a decent business model until AGI wipes us all out.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, true. We’ve got about two years. I feel like we’ve had about two years for about two years now, but we probably have about two years until AGI wipes us all out. Maybe it’s a year and a half.
Chris Frantz:
I think the timeline updates depending on Anthropic’s funding cycles.
Turner Novak:
In my sense, I think it’s an unspoken secret of you can just look at the language that comes out from a lot of these guys of what are their incentives around the claims that they’re making. I think there’s the classic Anthropic. Dario’s has some clips that have gone viral about six months from now and 90% of all coding will be done by AI. It’ll be like exactly six months later, someone will repost it and it’s like, “But yeah, lines up with the funding cycle.” So do you think is it easier to get attention or build a product then?
Chris Frantz:
Yeah, it’s much easier to get attention. You can buy attention. If you have money, you can just pay somebody with influence and then you have attention. It’s a very simple transaction. There’s largest companies in the world are built around that, Facebook ads, which called into Instagram as well. Then of course, Google Ads, which is digital oil, if you will. So, yeah, it’s definitely much harder. It’s very difficult to build a good product for a specific audience that continues to improve and satisfy that audience. If you want to play in hard mode, do it for a combination of user demographics. So, we build for designers, for engineers, for customer success, and for marketers and pleasing all four of those types is pretty difficult.
Turner Novak:
So how do you describe the cadence of building Loops? I think it might be your pinned tweet on Twitter or maybe you just tweeted it the other day, but how do you just think about just the general flow of just what building the company and building a good product that looks like?
Chris Frantz:
Yeah, so I think it comes from the organization level. So, we have entirely technical staff. There’s nine of us who are remote. What that means is that everyone is familiar in communicating in a purely digital way, which means that our paper trail for any feature, for support, for any of that stuff is immaculate. It’s never like somebody tapped me on the shoulder and said this. It’s always written down and there’s paper trail, it’s line. So, anytime that there’s something that needs to resolve, it resolves very quickly. It also means that we have 24/7 global coverage, global technical coverage, which is fantastic because it means that we’re able to speak to corporations that are in international places that would otherwise be difficult to support.
Probably the best part is if you have engineers do support, you have fewer bugs because if there is anything that an engineer hates, it’s being told by 10 different people that this one thing doesn’t work and they’re the person that can fix it. If they fix it, then those 10 people will stop talking to them. It’s been a very effective way. I’d say it’s probably not a fit for all people on our team, but it is part of how we run the company and it’s important. So, we think all you really need to do is talk to your users, build the product, talk to users, build the product, and then share any updates to the product and repeat forever.
Turner Novak:
Until AGI.
Chris Frantz:
Until AGI.
Turner Novak:
Or heat death of the universe.
Chris Frantz:
Yeah, yeah. Heat death, IPO.
Turner Novak:
I counted IPO. That’s when you stop talking to them.
Chris Frantz:
We start talking to shareholders, not customers of shareholders now.
Turner Novak:
Oh yeah, true, true. Yeah. I thought that was interesting when I heard you say that the customer support team is engineers. You also mentioned you don’t use any AI customer service or customer support things. Is that still true or was that true?
Chris Frantz:
Yeah, well, we don’t have an AI chatbot. What we do use now is a tool called Zeus by Atlas. It’s good. I think it’s pretty under the radar. So, we use Atlas. They were one of our batch mates in YC. They were maybe our first customer actually, and we’ve used them since they started and vice versa.
Turner Novak:
What’s the URL? Do you remember?
Chris Frantz:
Atlas.so.
Turner Novak:
You guys got your so mafia going.
Chris Frantz:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
It’s Somali as a domain name, right?
Chris Frantz:
Yeah, yeah, for sure. So, Zeus is cool because it doesn’t surface as a chatbot in the app. It’s just a live chat on our site and if you ask me a question, it will actually suggest things to me as an answer and then I can choose to revise my answer based on the suggestions, send it as if it would sending from me, all of that. So, they never interface directly with an AI. Anytime that I use anything, it’s always human in the loop. It’s something that I see, approve, and send out.
Turner Novak:
I know you mentioned before you personally onboarded the first 300 customers for the first year. Maybe it’s even longer than that, but why did you do that?
Chris Frantz:
Yeah, the entire year and a half I did 100% of onboardings for every new user. I think it’s important to understand what you’re building towards and what the market is. If you don’t like talking to lawyers, you shouldn’t build a legal company. If you don’t like talking to people building software companies, you shouldn’t build tool that caters to them. So, I do like this audience. I find the aggregate level of autism to be similar to my own and it makes for easy conversations usually. I find that we’re still working off of the early figment designs and the early conversations that I had three and a half, four years ago because we fully understand this market, what needs to be done and what needs to be built.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, you probably learn a lot from your customers. It’s similar. You’re all building similar things, at least more similar than someone who has a CPG brand or an NFT thing like it’s software. You’re also building a software company. Just talking to those people, you’ll learn a lot.
Chris Frantz:
Yeah, you do. What I’ve learned also is just how incredibly talented our team is internally. What I will typically find, because we do the support and we build the product, we’ve gone toe to toe with many various engineering departments and 95, 96% of the time our engineering team comes on top with both the solution of how our data model is constructed and why it’s a better solution. These teams retain and they’re happy to build it and they tell other people about it. So, we think it works.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. One of my portfolio companies, he describes it as you want to compete against competitors, where they think of their engineering teams is the IT department. They don’t have engineering teams. They have IT where it’s like that’s what you want to be competing against.
Chris Frantz:
Absolutely. In the software space, 100%.
Turner Novak:
And speaking of things like 9/9/6, I feel like it’s the discourse, whatever that means. I actually heard you say you work seven days a week at Loops, so that’s like 9/9/7. So, explain that. That sounds even more intense.
Chris Frantz:
So I have two kids, a two-year-old and a four-year-old, actually just turned five. Look, I’m very plugged in. The first thing I check in the morning is inbox and Slack to make sure that customers aren’t being held up. There’s not an issue. Another way, I still do probably 60 to 70% of all the support myself. I do all the onboarding still myself. We don’t force onboarding, but I do it all myself and I am the point person for a lot of our larger customers as well. That’s all something that I’ve chosen and I’d like to do and it’s a place that I put myself in on purpose.
But as a result of that, I do find myself working probably more than most founders at our current revenue level or team size or whatever it happens to be. A lot of that stuff can be unblocked on my phone, which is cool now, but I still for better or worse try to keep up with engineering team and it results in a lot of work. I am not 9/9/6 though. I am up when I’m up and I am looking at my phone and I am on my computer often. Then between that is family and then there is pretty much nothing else.
Turner Novak:
That’s right. I mean I feel like I’m in the same boat where it’ll be like we went to Disney World with the kids a couple weekends ago. It’s like a four-day trip over a long weekend, super fun. But you’re in a ride about to get on Guardians of the Galaxy ride or whatever and an email and you’re like, “Oh, I got a quick read this or something.” You’re working, but you’re also on vacation. It’s one of those fluid things where I don’t know, I don’t think I could ever actually fully disconnect from anything, but also I don’t work 24 hours a day even though I do, if that makes sense.
Chris Frantz:
Yeah, definitely. Absolutely. I might not be strapped in front of the laptop, but yeah, I mean when I’m in the shower, I’m actively thinking about what the next thing is for us, what I need to discuss with people that day, what customer is this? And it’s always on my mind. If it’s not on my own, then my wife or my kids are or other members of my family and that’s what I have bandwidth for. It’s one of the reasons I can never move to San Francisco and build this company. I don’t have the bandwidth for it. There’s not a world where I go to coffee shops, period. People are always like, “Oh, the people you meet at coffee shop.”
I’m like, “When are you going? Why do you have the time to do that? What are you doing?” Yeah, Michael Seibel described it as increasing your luck surface area by living in a densely populated place with many talented people. But that only works if you actually go somewhere. If you are just only building your company and it’s happening remotely and you’re spending time with your family and you’re above the age of 30, but then you do not have that time. However, if you’re under the age of 30 and you’re in your twenties, then I think it’s a great place to build a company.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I mean, in one side, I always was... I don’t want to say hate, but I did not enjoy the political small talk bureaucracy of the workplace of you got to go hang out in the kitchen and talk for 20 minutes. But it’s like, “I got work to do and I got home 20 minutes later because of this.” But then in the other side, it is useful to just combine work in your social life in the same. I go to San Francisco a couple days a month, maybe a week, a month, and we’ll have a hosting event. It’s fun and you see some friends, but also, it’s work related, I guess. You hit it all in one shot, two kill multiple birds with one stone. So, it’s like, “Eh, I get it.”
Chris Frantz:
Yeah, it’s reasonable. It’s good. When people talk about being locked in and then they also drink matcha, they don’t make. I just don’t understand how those two things coincide, bro. You’re not locked in. My coffee makes itself in the morning. I go downstairs and I drink it and I’ve already replied to three different things before I gotten out of bed. That’s locked in. You know what I mean? I’m prematurely gray. I have wild bags. If you are lifting weights, you are not locked in. You are lifting weights.
Turner Novak:
Have you seen that one video? It’s like the one guy who talks about how he does three days in one day. He’s like, “When I wake up, I wake up at 6:00 AM and I’m doing all this stuff by 12:00 on my second day. By four PM, I start my third day and I do three days. Like you give me a month, I’ll compete. You give me a year. I’ve lived a lifetime. That’s probably one of my favorite videos.
Chris Frantz:
If you don’t look like you’re dying of some type of fatal illness, then you’re probably not as locked in. Honestly, this is the worst I’ve looked in my life.
Turner Novak:
Really? I was going to say, yeah, you’ve got the silver gray almost. It looks good.
Chris Frantz:
Thank you. I appreciate that. Genetically though, that probably shouldn’t be happening. Like stress, lack of sleep, children throwing things at me.
Turner Novak:
That’s fair. Is it a bag or is it just a bruise? Is it a bag under the eye or did you get hit with a block?
Chris Frantz:
It could be either. Either or depending on the day. But you see Sam, Sam’s not looking so good nowadays, right? He’s feeling it. He’s doing it.
Turner Novak:
That’s fair. Yeah.
Chris Frantz:
Show me those podcasts where they don’t look super refined. Show me them, where they look puffy, they look like crap. Elon always looks like shit. Do you know what I mean? You know that guy’s doing things. He looks terrible 100% of the time in different ways. Some days he’s bloated. Some days he’s got crazy bags and all his hairs. Clearly, that guy has got some other stuff going on. That is the least important thing. You need to look terrible to be successful.
Turner Novak:
So that’s the thing is if you’re a founder, you’re doing your first CNBC interview. Do you wear a suit? Do you get a haircut? Do you get a manicure or a face puffing, some treatment before, or do you go on just looking like you got hit by a truck? What’s the strategy?
Chris Frantz:
I think you got to get a double, I’m not really sure there’s any other option. You need you to clone a twin, have them trot out for all of the PR and all fundraising around the IPO, CNBC twin. It’s the only solution.
Turner Novak:
So this is somebody who looks really good.
Chris Frantz:
Yes. In your place, in your stead. Absolutely.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Interesting. Okay. I’ll keep that in my back pocket for when I IPO the Banana Capital and the PO podcast conglomerate in the future.
Chris Frantz:
Sure. Yeah. I mean, why wouldn’t you? Should probably start working on it now, to be honest, probably.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. One thing you mentioned I wanted to ask you about before we signed off, you mentioned you recently cleaned out a wasp nest with a shop vac. I’m definitely afraid of bees and wasps. It’s probably the one thing, it’s my irrational fear. I just don’t like them. I just avoid putting myself in those situations. How do you do that? How do you clear out a wasp nest with a shop vac?
Chris Frantz:
Yeah, I mean, you probably shouldn’t. One of the benefits of living in a small town is that you start to feel invigorated by some of your neighbors doing things that they shouldn’t do on their exterior and stuff like that. So, now I think I can do pretty much anything. These hands are made for typing and that’s just what they do. But every once in a while, somebody will send me text messages of something on Reddit. It was like some homeowner thing, which is a friend of mine did, and I was like, “I’m doing this.” So we had a couple hundred wasps that built a nest in one of our walls.
Turner Novak:
Oh geez. Inside the house or more exterior?
Chris Frantz:
We have a secondary mudroom area, so it was like borderline exterior, interior, but they had breached the interior. So, they made it into the secondary area, and we had about a dozen of them flying around inside there and then hundreds in the walls. So, my friend sent me a Reddit post and I have a shop vac. I filled it up with some soap and water, taped it to a rake, and shoved it up into the hole. I vacuumed up maybe a couple hundred wasps just in a period of eight hours. Totally cleared it out, found another one on the other house the other day, did the same thing, super effective. This weekend, I’m chiseling a bunch of bricks in our driveway. Just because it seems like something that I feel like I should be able to do. You should be able to chisel bricks.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. You got some confidence from the shop vac.
Chris Frantz:
Yeah. Yeah. I looked online. Apparently, you can use a screwdriver and a large hammer, and I have both of those things.
Turner Novak:
Are you trying to even out the driveway or something? Why do you need to chisel bricks in the driveway?
Chris Frantz:
We live in a nice historic home. It’s like 120 years old or something. The bricks are just as old as that, and they have been pulverized in the front of our driveway, like these little pavers. They’re basically dust. So, they need to be taken out and then either flipped if they’re not totally pulverized or replaced, and that means I also need to figure out how to cut brick, which is something I’ll figure out also.
Turner Novak:
Are you allowed to do this? Don’t they make laws? You can’t change a historic home. You got to get permits to do the smallest thing.
Chris Frantz:
You can just do things.
Turner Novak:
Fair. It applies to startups and historic homes.
Chris Frantz:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ideally, you do things with your car parked in front of you so the neighbors don’t see. But yeah, you can definitely do things.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Hopefully, you don’t have an HOA, one of those Karens who’s reporting everything.
Chris Frantz:
No HOA. No HOA. No HOA. We do have a neighborhood newsletter list who I’ve tried to convince to use Loops unsuccessfully.
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Chris Frantz:
I’m somewhat on the wrong side of the fence there in terms of my early entrants into the community, but I’m working on it. We’ll see what happens.
Turner Novak:
Well, yeah, I mean, I think that’s probably a good way to end it. It sounds like you have a lot to do this weekend with the driveway, with the chiseling, following up on the bees and the wasps, making sure you got them all. But yeah, this is a lot of fun. Is there any way people can find you, like Twitter? Is that probably best?
Chris Frantz:
Yeah, I’m @frantzfries on Twitter. I’m probably something Chris Frantz on Bluesky, but I haven’t checked in a year.
Turner Novak:
LinkedIn, are you a LinkedIn guy?
Chris Frantz:
I am not, but I’m on there as Chris Frantz, I think, and if you don’t get me, you’re going to get the drummer of the Talking Heads. So, really it’s a win no matter what.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Didn’t you say that someone emails you all the time thinking that that’s who you are?
Chris Frantz:
Yeah, Moby, a couple others people email me thinking I’m the drummer of the Talking Heads because I own chrisfrantz.com. Yeah, it’s cool. I mean, I almost went to a desert with Moby. I had to bail and tell him at the last moment that I’m not Chris Frantz, but I really want to meet Moby. Do you know what I mean?
Turner Novak:
Just figure out a way. Yeah, just go through with it one of these times and be like, “Yeah, no, I’m not actually the drummer from the Talking Heads. I’m just the email software guy.”
Chris Frantz:
Absolutely. Yeah. If you had used Loops, this confusion never would’ve happened.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, that’s a really good marketing pitch. Maybe you should try that for one here on Marketing Stunts.
Chris Frantz:
If we ever do a commercial, I’m going to reply to that email and be like, “Hey, Moby, I need a soundtrack. Here’s $50,000.” See, I told you I was a good dude.
Turner Novak:
We’ll be on the lookout for it. Maybe we’ll do a follow-up episode when you put out that first commercial.
Chris Frantz:
Perfect. Maybe Moby next to me. That’d be cool, right?
Turner Novak:
Yeah, that’ll be awesome. Well, cool. This is a lot of fun. Thanks for doing it.
Chris Frantz:
Yeah, for sure.
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