Managing cancer, an agency and building SaaS products
Chris Dunlop had a lot on his plate and crushed it
I love to hang out online. Since I had an internet connection when I was 10, I’ve met many cool people. I’m so glad I can get into conversations that previously happened behind closed doors.
In the last few weeks, I’ve connected with half a dozen people, and Chris Dunlop is one of them. He just replied to my tweet, and we hit it off from there!
He owns an AI agency (Cub Digital) in New Zealand that he opened with 3 other co-founders and managed while battling cancer. I thought I had to share a snippet of his story with you.
Let’s get on with it!
Managing both cancer and an agency
Kenny Alami: Navigating cancer and brain surgery, on top of your responsibility as a business owner, I’m assuming delegating and ruthless prioritizing are the name of the game for you.
First, how has it been to manage all that and second, what strategies have you put in place?
Chris Dunlop: I got cancer on 9 December 2022, so after we had been in business for 2 years. We signed a massive client on the 1st of December with a project due on the 18th of December 2022, so that was absolutely hectic at that time. It was also personally extremely scary for me but also this beautiful and rich experience, meeting amazing people and getting some fresh perspective on life. I think it’s helped open me up personally to being more risk-averse and more pragmatic, just getting things done, setting bigger goals, and trying to compress time frames.
It’s one of those crazy things that forces everyone to stand up. It also forced us to rapidly hire to fill the gaps, so while chemo was on, we hired 4 new people, and we ended up with 20 people.
The asynchronous process was a key process. We focused on making it so that people could read and write things, and we didn’t have too many meetings.
I’m fortunate to have such an immensely awesome group of people I work with. They really shouldered a lot of the load and are still doing that to this day. Having family and your best friends allows you a bit of a superpower in that, in a crisis time, they are going to go above and beyond to help you and do whatever it takes. We definitely have a culture at Cub of trying to do well, even when the odds are stacked against us, and it feels like we have been tested and have had to overcome a significant number of hurdles since we started. I think that’s baked into the legacy at this stage.
In the movie Fury, Brad Pitt and his mates are in this tank, and they are getting owned, but then they all joke that it’s the best job they have ever had. That’s how I feel sometimes. There are things and chaos going on, but it’s fun being in the trenches.
In terms of specific strategies
We have a formal Monday meeting catchup with the leadership team. Running through clients, people, and weekly todos.
We have 3 clear, simple, and easy-to-follow goals so that everyone knows what the bigger prize is. Currently, that's a revenue goal, a goal to open a new office in Australia, and a goal to make our company the best place to work.
We try to batch work that I can help with so that I can come back and be effective on the odd week that I was feeling healthy.
Building a family business with 4 co-founders
Kenny: You mentioned having 4 co-founders. Nowadays, we hear about the solopreneur or generally more about 2 co-founders.
How did you meet the other founders and did you test out the partnership with small projects first? What was the revenue threshold for you all to go full-time on it?
Chris: There are 4 of us in total. I work with one of my best mates and my 2 brothers. We all had careers and all shared the same dream of wanting to have our own business. My 2 brothers are developers, so I had seen the work that they had done at their companies, and we thought we could figure out how consulting works.
We jumped into it with no committed revenue, which was an interesting way to do it. There were a lot of disadvantages that brought, like stress and pressure to get work, but it also was a superpower in a way, as it meant you had no choice but to work hard, and there is that saying, there is nothing more scary than cornered rats. That’s how I felt for about 1 year, to be honest. It wasn’t long after we started that Covid hit, and then we went into a massive lockdown in NZ, and no one picked up the phone or took a meeting.
One thing that I printed out and referred to a lot during this time was Paul Graham’s essay, What Startups Are Really Like. He has 20 points listing what startups are really like, and it was a good reminder, as we have experienced most of the things on that list.
We all had some personal savings, so we burned all of our boats and were like, “Okay, we have to succeed. We don’t have a choice otherwise.” We rented an office from day one, which I think was an awesome investment. Some of our best ideas came from just being together each and every day. We were really strict on office hours, coming to work at 8:30 and leaving at 5:30.
Products vs Agency work
Kenny: I see you’re building a SaaS product. I assume you need enough runway to pay your team to develop the product while others work on client work.
What’s your general goal here? Do you want to replace part or all of your client income with product revenue? Right now, how do you balance it out with client work?
Chris: Our goal is to eventually have our income come entirely from SaaS products and the consulting business is the vehicle to grow that.
We have started that and deployed one product to market (with the help of some venture funding), which is kindello - a childcare marketplace. We have also made our timesheet system. We built a prioritisation product that we use when a client signs up to Cub for consulting work. We also built an awesome habit tracking website where you are rewarded stamps. Screenshot below.
The current product we are building is a bespoke CRM tool. It’s really just a mechanism to test out AI and so we have a whole bunch of automation in there. I do about 2 sales calls a day, and these are typically for enterprise clients, which have a lot of paperwork and follow-ups required. So we have built a CRM that handles and solves all of those problems.
It’s funny because our whole brand of Cub is a reaction against consulting, hence our website and the way we work. It’s definitely a unique and random style, so when I am pitching clients I tell them, “Hey, we don’t want to be consultants forever either, this is just a stepping stone for us.” So we tend to work with clients that we like. But the longer the consulting business has gone on, the bigger it has grown, as I think the approach does register with clients.
Now in our fourth year, I see the consulting business as an advantage as we get to see many different patterns, work with businesses, and see what opportunities exist in the market for different SaaS products.
We set revenue targets. If we were making like 3 million a year, we could dedicate a team to just be working on products full time. The way we balance things out, is that we treat the internal project like it’s an actual client project. So we have to have a firm scope. We give extremely clear boundaries of what is in scope and what is out of scope. We then try to get that first slice of value as quickly as we can. We built our timesheet system in a month for example. It used to cost us $500 a month for our whole staff and now it’s $30 a month.
Nowadays, we tend to wither the storm on our own. Chris had people around to support him. What about you? Did you join a community of independents or do you have people around able to support you when shit gets tough? If you need some pointers, reply to this email or leave a comment below!
3 juicy links of the week
I Acquired a Small Newsletter, Here’s What Happened
I’m also acquiring a newsletter, so that article was timely. I’m curious to see the results and see the engagement as well as the unsubscribe rate after acquisition. I’m going on a rampage and trying as many new things as possible. It’s been quite fun. A lot of work but very fun!
Here's Why Your SaaS Side Hustle Isn't Working As Expected...
In this 8-min video, Rob Walling emphasizes a repeatable and teachable system and getting away from luck to vet business frameworks. He reviews why you shouldn’t try to build as many business ideas as possible because it only focuses on luck and not finding a way to repeat success. We’ve talked about people flaunting lucky strikes and he’s very in line with this here.
Are you poor? Start an agency!
Ha! The bait is strong on that one. But Mitya makes a great point. Freelancing and agencies require very little upfront capital to get started. The barrier to entry is way lower than for other businesses.
If you want more, here’s what I got for you
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