A lot of people ask me about my last company,
@PubLoft. They ask how we grew it to $24,000 MRR in 7 months with no investment. And of course, they ask how only 10 months later, PubLoft was dead. The journey was long and painful. Today, I share you the PubLoft post mortem.

We start the journey in July 2018. At this point. I already started PubLoft 1.0, grew it to $5,000 MRR, and failed in January of 2018. After working a job for 5 months, @rarelyJeremy and I decide to try again. With my sales skills and his ops skills, we knew we could do better.

It all started with on a whiteboard on the second story of @galvanize Phoenix. It was on that whiteboard, we decided do 3x our prices, let me handle sales and Jeremy, ops, and its when i decided to quit Chassi to try to get PubLoft to live up to its full potential.

Within a month after that whiteboard session, we had a few customers. Chassi was one. But the first major one was a customer in the CBD space. I remember closing in the @HillelASU library. $3,000/mo contract, done. We had our "seed" funding and some momentum.

I won't go in depth into our rise from August to December. In short, it was amazing. I was closing deals like a madman. YC companies wanted to work with us. I sold anyone who got on the phone. Jeremy didn't let a single customer churn...for 7 months. The two of us were machines.

$10k MRR ---> $15k MRR ---> $18K MRR. It seemed too easy. And it was. Business wasn't supposed to be this easy. And this is my first takeaway. When things are too easy, be cautious. Business is not supposed to be easy. Something HARD might be in your blindspot.

This is where the post mortem starts. I remember it was on Thanksgiving, our first CBD client wanted to upgrade. They wanted more. They wanted to pay us $8,000/mo for them. For all sorts of stuff. I knew something was off or fishy. Not about them, but the opportunity

I read somewhere that when you have a company, you should not let one customer take up too much of your revenue split, because if they leave, it caused chaos. I knew this. but I also knew $8,000/mo was a shit ton of money. I went with the money, not the gut feeling.

And for the first few months, things were cruising. IN December of 2018, we still haven't churned a customer thanks to Jeremy. Thanks to me, we had a venture scale growth rate with no VC investment. So what happened next? We got an investment offer, for $100,000.

It was an accelerator with an investor we all know and some of us love and some love to hate. (I personally have a lot of respect for him, and there's nothing but love from me). We thought, there was no other chance like this to join the big leagues. So, we decided to take it.

This is the point where I think I am in over my head. The reason I know this? It's because I think everything is fine. Everything has been so easy up to this point. I, as a CEO, should be figuring out why this was, and get in front o the shit storm that is about to come.

but no. because things were so easy, I expected them to be easy. So, that 100k grand started to go quickly. 5k on this LI ads guy. 2k/mo on legal. 55k salaries for Jeremy and I. We started spending. And at this point, I had very little financial intelligence

Not only do we spend on things. We spend $$$ on people. We hire a salesperson to replace me. We hire ops people to replace Jeremy. We try to delegate out of our positions. Because we needed to focus on fundraising. And speaking of fundraising, we were not an attractive investment

I didn't understand this at the time, but we looks a lot more like a service company than a SaaS company, like we were pitching. Investors liked us, not our company, and we were getting very little traction. But so on this front. But, so far, things are going okay still..

At this point, at least I had hope. Things weren't going super well. but like. I knew it was going to work out one way or the other. I had my emotions in check. And this matters because my emotions are powerful. I can do insane things with my emotions when i'm in control.

The big was when I was on a call telling our LI ads guy that I wasn't happy with the performance, when Jeremy walked in and told me he needed to talk. I asked can it wait. hHe said no. He then proceeded to tell me we lost the $8k/mo customer. I said "okay", and kept working.

The reason we lost them is because they were being acquired, and the company acquiring them didn't want us on their expense sheet. What's ironic is that this customer was our best customer. We got them top #5 on 5-10 high traffic keywords and drove tons of business for them

So just to recap:

- We hired people to replace us, the company needed us the most
- Fundraising is not going well
- Our MRR was just cut by a third on a moment's notice.
- and we are burning real serious cash by now.

And I didn't know what to do. So, I didn't do anything really. No huge changes. I kinda went numb. Emotionless.
This is where I failed as a founder. This is the moment we were doomed. I pretty much let the rest of the year happen to us, not the other way around.

Instead of rapidly trying to grow revenue again, I told myself a story that there was a bigger opportunity in the creator space (there was). So, GigLoft was birthed. Instead of being a good founder and stay focused, I deviated. I started something else. Shame on me.

Just because I was right, doesn't make IT right. I had writers I was supporting. I had a team I was feeding. I had an investors trust. And I had Jeremy's faith. I should have acted differently. I should have taken us from $16,000 MRR to $100,000 MRR. Instead, it only went down.

And because it only went down, we needed to make cuts. Deep ones. We were burning money really quickly. So, this takes us to Galvanize in SF, 2nd floor. Instead of creation, I was destroying. I called every writer we couldn't afford, and told them there would be no more gigs.

And it was kinda easy, in some ways. Many times, we make decisions and enforce them, even if we dont agree or wasnt our fault. This is tricky. but this time, I could look writers dead in the eye and tell them it was my fault. No one else's. It was devastating.

And I lean more into GigLoft. I remember pitching GigLoft at the accelerator. I pitched it to David Sacks and told him it was a pivot and he was almost disgusted. he should have been. but I was mentally done with PubLoft and on to GigLoft. So the rest of accelerator was all GL.

The last month was kinda dual focus. We were relying on PubLoft for our revenue and GigLoft for our future. We were told to focus on one. We didn't, we focused on both. So we were in a constant state of split focus All the time. All in on nothing, half assed on everything.

And us running out of cash very quickly, so the pressure cooker was one. Once the accelerator ended and we moved back to AZ, things got grim. Money was low. We had team members leave. We were all in on GigLoft at this point, but it was too little too late. Not enough $$$ in bank.

I remember Jeremy and I were talking in September 2019, and we realized there was nothing left. No more salary for us. Done. So I made a extremely emotional decision to drive up to SF to try to get a VC to invest. I was going up there with a check or this was over.

I drive up, I realized how burnt out I am after a year of hell, so I drive back down literally the next day, and i start looking for a job, as does Jeremy. This stage of PubLoft was done. The company I started in 2017 ,failed once again.

Soon after, I DM @kellysmithinaz to see if @prendalearn was hiring, they were, I got a job there, and the nightmare was over. As was a sad ending to what was once a year. of promising potential. The chapter closed as the new one with Prenda opened.

That's what happened. Here are some overall reflections on takeaways I have on the year. I will refer back to these consistently as I try to make @fwdthinkingcity the largest success in my career.

1. Margins matter, even in the early days

$24k/mo sounds good, but we never evaluated the COGS of this and how much it really cost us to produce our content. If we realized how low our margins were, we would have made many decisions differently. Watch your COGS.

2. Don't hire people you don't have a absolute need for or people you don't know how to train

People are expensive, so if you hire them, make sure you have something for them to do, and you make sure they do it well. If either of those two are absent, you're wasting money.

3. Your own emotional state will be thrusted onto your company whether you want it to or not

My emotions were the companies emotions. I should have had a wall, between what I felt and what people saw, but they were equal. This crushed the moral of the company, as well as my own.

4. If things are too easy, look harder for problems

Business is not easy. It isn't meant to go smoothly. If it is, try to find the reason it's so easy, and give yourself reasons something could go wrong. Because, something always goes wrong eventually.

5. Love what you do, and if you don't, be self aware

I didn't have a deep passion for PubLoft. Content was not my life's mission. We let Jason invest, and he wanted a huge outcome. but I knew pubLoft was not my life's work. Be self aware about this before you take money.

6. Keep going

it's only a failure if I don't get back up and try again. I learned so much from my time with PubLoft. All of this is applied to @fwdthinkingcity and i'm THAT much better ofa founder because of it. It hurts, but dont let an L today be an L forever.

Supplemental reading: https://forwardthinking.substack.com/p/how-not-to-spend-100000-285