BootstrFM

Welcome everyone. Welcome to BootstrFM episode eight. Things are going super fast. We're, we're, almost getting into the double digits there already when it comes to episode count. That's amazing. I'm Erwin, I'm hosting Bootstr together with Dominik. I'm a startup founder myself, I have a product called Tailscan, and at some point Dom and I decided to start a Twitter space for, um, Our curious selves to find out about the people we interact with daily on Twitter, find out a little bit more about them by inviting them as guests, and also in the process open up the opportunity for others to both listen in, learn, get some insights, and potentially speak.

So, before I asked Dominik to introduce himself, we also want to ask all of you, if you do have any questions for our guests, definitely drop them in the comments or request to speak. That's fine too. Dom, would you like to introduce yourself as well?

Yes, with a [00:01:00] passion. Hey guys, I'm Dom. I've been bootstrapping for the past, I think three and a half years now. The Product I'm working on the most is called Helpkit, which is a tool that turns Notion pages into a professional help center. That's my bread and butter. I would say that I'm working on the most. And the rest is just like funny side projects.

Thank you, Dom. For this episode, number eight, we have a special guest, Jesse, who's going to join us. Jesse is building Bento. Jesse, would you like to introduce yourself as well? Yeah, sure. So, uh, my name is Jesse. I live in South of Japan and I'm building email marketing and automation platform called Bento. I've been running it for, oh, I think I've been building it for about five years, full time, two and a half. And yeah, it's all going pretty well. It's a pretty fun business to run, especially building in Japan.

Thank you, Jesse. You're in Japan, right? So it's a little bit later there right now. It's what time is it? 10 p. m. I've been going to bed so early, like recently as well. So it's a pretty late [00:02:00] my time, but all good. All good. I'm like, I've got a little thing called a kotatsu, which is like a heated bed, oh sorry, heated table. And underneath it has like a little heating unit. So I'm very like, kind of cozy in myself. Oh, wow. That sounds amazing. I want one too now. I'll post the photo later. It's pretty cool. All right. Terrific. Jesse, I would like to, kick us off with a little bit of history about you, because you've done things before Bento. So, we're very curious. How did you just get started building products in general? And what are the things that you did before?

Yeah, I mean, I kind of started my working for myself journey, like back in 2015. Before that I used to work in, like, e commerce and used to, like, run e commerce sites back in Australia. Um, working for a company, I then kind of, like, negotiated with my boss to work remotely. And then in 2015, kind of Worked remotely for that company, but then also started like picking up clients along the way. I was mostly doing like marketing and agency work at the [00:03:00] time. And then to cut like a very long story short, I kind of progressed from being like a freelancer to running an agency to kind of like tinkering with code on the side. I'm like self taught, so I kind of like taught myself Ruby on Rails as like my first You know, development framework and kept tinkering and building from there.

And then, I don't know, kind of like spun up a couple of little like side projects here and there. None of them really went anywhere. And I was doing this on the side whilst I was running the agency and kind of like doing client work. And then ended up, yeah, I'm trying to think where the best, where, what are some things that. I kind of like booted up, but yeah, ended up, uh, starting Bento five years ago. And again, working on that on the side whilst doing the agency. And then sold the agency two and a half years ago and then went full time on Bento after that.

Wow. Cool. So the agency, just briefly, but what was, what was the agency doing? Was that web development or like. Yeah. Yeah. So the journey for the agency was freelancer, then bringing [00:04:00] together like, other contractors and stuff and doing like a full service marketing agency. And then, that was pretty hard to be honest, doing full service marketing was just like a very, very hard thing. So I ended up focusing in on the one part of that agency that was pretty fun to run, which was kind of writing content for other businesses. Then it ended up. Scaling that part of the business up to a content agency called Rider Co, which, uh Yeah, did really, really well over the years and was a really, really fun business to run. I ended up getting bought by two really close friends and they're still running it today, which is pretty cool.

Wow. Amazing. So you acquired that and then that gave you also like the opportunity to build the next thing more calmly. Yeah, it did. It did. Yeah, and it gave me like a really good cash buffer that made me, you know, obviously feel safe. And did allow me to fully focus in on Bento. Up until that point, Bento was kind of, not failing. It just, it wasn't really taking off because it didn't really have my full focus because the agency was kind of like paying all my bills and, you know, [00:05:00] putting food on the table, and especially during COVID and stuff, you know, wanted to keep the agency alive and keep paying for my bills and keep paying for rent. but yeah, after I, I exited the agency, I had a good cash buffer and I was like, all right, I'm going to go all in on Bento, went all in on Bento. And it really started to take off after I kind of gave it full focus. Like if I look at my kind of stripe chart, it's like kind of, you know, pretty static, stays the same, stays the same, go full time on it. And then it's. Kind of hockey stick ish, which is fun. But I think it kind of goes to say that focus does play a really large part in, in SaaS success for the most part.

Yeah, for sure. That's interesting that, you know, you put in full, full focus and it's, it's exponential growth from the world. Like, exponential outcome from there. That's cool. Before Bento, did you have any products specifically that would like have some traction or anything that you tried out with, or was Bento the first hit? I tried stuff, right? Like, I think I built like a journal app at one point. I built [00:06:00] a, like an SEO rank tracker, which Was hard, but didn't really go anywhere. Like my friends would buy it, and I also wasn't, I think I was like nervous at the time. I think up until I started, working on Bento, I wasn't really like confident in my coding skills. Something that was kind of a little bit different with Bento was, when I started that, I partnered with a really cool guy called Andrew Colva, who's an amazing rails Developer. And I basically used the profits from my agency to pay him to help build Bento with me. And I kind of like learned through watching him build. And then I kind of took more and more on, so up until Bento and up until working with Andrew, my like dev skills, I wasn't super confident.

Therefore, I wasn't really, really like confident getting users and bringing them into my product. But then after working with Bento and like seeing a, you know, a senior Rails engineer at work and like, Getting mentored by him, I then got a lot more confidence. And as I was working with Andrew, I would take on more and more of the code base and my dev skills got better and better and better. And yeah, and then now I basically run it [00:07:00] full time by myself and Andrew's no longer involved. He's actually working at ClickFunnels, which is pretty cool. But yeah, and I really enjoyed building, uh, building Bento that way, like that kind of like mentorship approach, basically take profits from agency, find someone who's really, really well skilled, learn through their kind of expertise and workmanship, and then yeah, take on more responsibility as you kind of get more confidence, like a really cool way to learn.

So that was like, if I imagine you had him like as a freelancer, you were just paying him sort of like as a development fee, right? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And then we would like work together and riff on stuff together and build features together. But my dev skills at the time, like five years ago, weren't that strong and so having someone tackle a lot of these hard problems, see how they tackled it, I got to learn quite a lot through that process, which is fun. Honestly, I love that because like as a self taught developer myself, if I would have thought about this in the beginning, well, to be fair, I wouldn't probably have the funds to like [00:08:00] pay a really good engineer to help me through all of this.

But if I would have known that I would have probably just asked like a bunch of friends to help me through that because I learned so, I have made so many mistakes by like, teaching myself how to code, like just small things that later on, I just had to rewrite a bunch. If I would have had someone that like shows me the way, man, that would have been awesome.

Yeah. And I think that was the thing with like, before I started going into SaaS, like I had only really worked in e commerce companies, distribution companies, and in like the marketing space. And I didn't really know what like good engineering was or like what it is to be like a developer. I was just doing stuff myself in like my own little like bubble and silo, and I think by finding someone to help who knew what they were doing, had run engineering teams, was an amazing, phenomenal developer, just kind of like shortcut a lot of stuff. And yeah, running the agency full time as I was, like I was doing Bento part time and then. Working with Andrew very much part time.

My main [00:09:00] focus was the agency cause I needed money. And so that was what I was focused on, but yeah, it was really, really good. And it meant that I got to learn just way faster than I would have by myself. And that was very, very obvious with a lot of the other products that I built where I kind of like may have got stuck at a certain point with those products and given up but with Bento again, cause I was also, I guess it's actually something else that's kind of interesting is cause I was paying, an external contractor as well. It also did keep me focused and committed to the project to kind of like keep chugging away at it over time. Which, yeah, I think it was also a major contributing part because the other projects as well, I could always just stop doing them before they kind of ever took off and there wasn't really like any sunk cost or anything. I just, you know, would ditch those projects. But with Bento, I kind of, I had money that I was constantly investing into it, and so I was kind of committed for the long distance for those projects.

Right. Yeah. It's just more painful if it doesn't turn out to work, right? Because you're investing. Yeah. That [00:10:00] makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is the first time that I think we've heard on Bootstr the approach of having the, uh, you know, building an agency first and then, you know, hiring through that way. Basically to mentor you through to, to build it more build it out and then, you know, slowly switch from that and in your case, even have the agency be acquired after, and then full focus on the product is, it sounds like a very smooth. Well, you know, if you zoom out, obviously there were hurdles, but it sounds like a very smooth logical path to it. That's amazing.

Yeah, I mean, the path, I think, makes a lot of sense in hindsight, but yeah, very, very tricky. And yeah, no, makes sense in hindsight, but was very, very tricky along the way. Yeah, understandable. Well, you do have two things to keep up at the same time, and that's the other side, of course, yeah, that makes things harder. All right. Cool. Those are great insights and like a quite unique approach. So for the next question, we wanted to ask a little bit about Bento because for those that [00:11:00] are listening in right now, feel free to search up, about Bento, but correct me if I'm wrong, basically an email marketing platform, if I have to put it in a category, and so it's quite a competitive space. There's quite some solutions out there. A whole range of, uh, different approaches to things as well. And so I wanted to ask, how did you validate your approach with Bento? And how do you differentiate? Bento. Like, did you do that at the start? Did you decide to differentiate already? Or like, I'm going to do it this and this way, And so that's why it's going to work or did you iterate and try multiple things with differentiation until something worked?

Yeah, a little bit of all of the above. So like with Bento, when I initially started, I was initially just trying to solve a lot of the problems that I was personally running into when I was doing like kind of consulting and contracting work on like the marketing side. So, in the beginning, Bento started off as like a personalization platform. We would track users, add some tags and custom fields and [00:12:00] then, you know, personalize the webpage based on like who they were or their kind of buying profile and all that kind of stuff. And then over time, I just kind of Kept building features that I could also help my existing kind of clients and customers with.

So at one point, like I built a surveys product inventor, which like, you know, you've got an account, you can dig around and there's like a little surveys area. Like that was something that I built specifically for one client and customer, and then another couple of customers, I think asked that they're like, Oh, you know, we've got all this great tracking ability and you know, we're able to dynamically tag people and add custom fields based on all the stuff they're doing on the website. It'd be great if we could also like email them. So a lot of the time I was just selling Bento to my existing clientele, my clients, and then just trying to solve problems directly with them.

And I think the differentiating part was that I was just doing marketing work and then very intimately working with my clients and my customers to try and like solve very specific problems. And then a [00:13:00] lot of the solutions that we came up with, I just think are a little bit unique and quirky sometimes and yeah, I think a lot of the differentiation is like a marketer has built this platform instead of like a developer or NSF, kind of company. So you get a lot of kind of unique stuff that I think a lot of our customers kind of appreciate, which is kind of cool.

Can you give one example of the thing that differentiates you specifically. Oh, like one very specific feature is, um, back when I used to do like, email marketing for some clients, I used to hate when I sent an email off with MailChimp that after I sent it, if I made a mistake, I was screwed. So if I emailed a hundred K people and the email went out, I was like. And the link was broken or something like that was like the worst day of the month, you know, whereas with Bento, we've got batch sending and the whole reason for batch sending was because I was so like, scarred from all my client work. So now in Bento, when you send a broadcast out, you can take, you know, your list of 100, 000 and [00:14:00] send to like.

5, 000 every hour and, you know, send it over the course of a day or whatever. And at any point in time, pause the broadcast, edit it, all that kind of stuff. So that's like a very specific example where it's very hard for someone to screw up, and that feature only exists because I screwed up a lot in like my past and a lot of customers, if they ever switch off Bento to like another platform, they often come back because of those kind of weird niche, quirky stuff. Another unique feature is like, we've got a concept, which is incredibly niche called, tag groups and they can be unique. So in a lot of, uh, CRMs, you get this thing like tag explosion over time where your users could have 20, 30, 50 tags on their profiles and in Bento you can set it.

So someone can only have like one tag in a group. So you've got like a lead tag, a customer tag. If the lead tag gets applied, then the customer tag gets applied. The lead tags automatically removed. So it kind of like keeps everything clean. And a lot of users use that niche feature and they really, really love it. And they kind of wonder [00:15:00] why it's not in other tools. And again, that was only built because of my experience, like kind of running email accounts. So yeah, there's a couple of, two examples. And when you say there were a couple of customers that, that asked for it perhaps, or like wanted it, and it turned out to be used by many more. Is there a particular way where you found It worked really well to get customer feedback because this is, for me, for example, it's very clear. There's a couple of customers that are very vocal and, you know, they talk quite a bit to you. And then I do struggle quite a bit to get things more interactive.

I have a Discord community. It's usually quiet in there and I have a hard time ramping that up, for example. So I noticed for you and your Discord channel, it's much, much more active. Is there any particular way or like some tip that you could potentially share, to get the most feedback? I mean, with your product is your product the type of product where people will want to be talking to you pretty like regularly? Like with Bento, it's [00:16:00] kind of like, it's true where people are constantly proactively trying to kind of reach out. And it's more about me trying to make myself really available than anything else.

So I make sure that people can book calls whenever they want. Our Discord's always available. I try and like open up as many channels as I can, but with a product like Bento, I'm not really kind of seeking conversations so much. I'm more trying to facilitate making it easy for people to talk to us. Because email marketing is like quite like an intimate activity, I think, cause you know, our customers are talking to their customers. They don't want issues. They don't want mistakes. They want to make sure that what they're doing is the right thing. Like I had a call with a guy today. And a Turkish marketing agency, for a whole bunch of cruises and stuff and had like a really large list and the guy was like just super nervous.

He like didn't want to make a mistake. He was afraid of a whole bunch of stuff. He didn't know about our batch sending feature and all that. And he was like just getting started and he'd been burned [00:17:00] with other platforms, and so it was really kind of paranoid and a lot of the call with him was just showing him a lot of the features, making him feel confident that he's not going to make a mistake and just walking through and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, with Bento, I haven't really found it hard to kind of drum up conversations just because I think a lot of people want to talk and they kind of like want to get going and stuff. Does that make sense? That kind of perspective? Yeah. So the product basically lends itself a little bit more for having those conversations because you need to have them anyway in some shape or form.

Yeah. Yeah. And then during like the first 30 days, like when you sign up to Bento, I think we're pretty aggressive making sure people know that we're there to talk to and then when people have that kind of confidence that are like we can reach out at any time and talk to Jesse, then they do, you know, when they got a question and they reach out, if they want to book a call, they can, they can do that but it's really important, I think, during our onboarding for the first 30 days that people get [00:18:00] emails, they get in our discord, ideally they have a demo call and we try and like check all those boxes off. If that makes sense.

Right. Yeah. I have a question, like in terms of the fact that you make yourself so available, right? How much of your like daily time spent on Bento would you say consists out of talking to customers, doing quote unquote, I guess, customer support or onboarding? Do you see this now as like your main task at Bento? Do you still code? Cause like, every indie hacker's problem at one point is that your customer support becomes so high that all you do all day seems to just be answering support tickets and you're like, huh, I want to work on the product.

I want to do that stuff, and then maybe obviously you start outsourcing, but for you, it sounds like you spend quite some time on that. Yeah, this is a cool kind of like topic. So I think like, if I was doing all my support, on email and kind of like how a lot of my competitors do it. I think, yeah, I would, I think I would be spending [00:19:00] way more time on support, but because I would probably say 90 percent of our support's in discord, and a lot of them are actually in like private channels. So a lot of our large accounts, we've got private discord channels that we kind of talk to our customers in. A lot of the time it kind of feels like, I don't know if you've played like video games, but like, it's like doing area of effect support, like AOE support, where I'm able to like answer one customer and another customer will like do a search and find that answer or like, I'll help one customer and then like three others will be lurking and they'll see that and they'll learn from it.

And they kind of get, you know, AOE support that way. It's just running support on Discord has been like a huge unlock. And I've got like my friend Caleb, who runs a company actually in the same city that I'm in called Native Shark. He was the one that encouraged me ages ago, and he runs like a beta consumer language learning app and he encouraged me to start a Discord. And I'm like, so grateful. And it started out like really quiet, obviously it's like me [00:20:00] and like two people. And then now I think there's like a thousand. And they're obviously not all active, but a good chunk of them are and it's just been, I don't know, it's been like kind of critical to keeping the growth like steady.

I was talking to my wife about this yesterday. I was saying like it's kind of crazy, like the company's, I think last year our revenue increased by about 100%, but the support loads, like hasn't felt like it's increased at all, which again, I attribute almost all to the community and kind of like Discord, uh, support style it's been like, really, really fun to run and Dominik in terms of your question in terms of like hours I'd probably say like support is maybe like focused one hour a day and then like passive I don't really know like I'm on my phone quite a bit but like passively maybe like one hour to two hours and then coding and kind of like in the work stuff is probably like four maybe four or five And all the stuff in between.

This year I'm trying to do like six hours of work a [00:21:00] day. Last year I did about eight hours a day. Every day. Nice. I wonder like, is it also the fact that what I've been like hearing a lot from people that are running Discord channels for support is that at one point your own customers are becoming your own customer support staff. So they're gonna basically answer each other's questions. Does that happen to you a lot too? And then I like want to cry, but like, it's pretty rare. It's like, it's fairly, yeah, it's fairly rare that, that happens, but it does happen. I think like in my space as well, people are just like pretty happy to also talk to the founder and also like, Put in some feedback.

I mean, today, if I just like think about today, today I got some feedback from a couple of users. Like they threw something up in the ideas channel and I worked on them and I shipped them. And a couple of, there was a couple of extra additional requests in like private channels and I worked and I shipped those. I was working with like another customer on deliverability today [00:22:00] and I kind of like based on working with them, kind of like rejigged how. We manage a whole bunch of like our IP pool type stuff on that. So a lot of my coding is also at the moment heavily involved with a lot of the support work that I'm doing, you know? So yeah, it kind of feels a little bit like they go hand in hand. It's not really like I'm so overwhelmed by support that I'm not coding anymore. It's kind of like, Oh, the support helps me know what to code a lot of the time.

I feel like the one thing with channels like Discord that always at least kept me from doing it is the fact that it's a synchronous communication channel, right? So someone will post a question and then because it has this chat like feature people are, I would imagine kind of expecting that you reply in like, I don't know, like minutes or maybe like an hour ish. So have you ever thought about that? Just like the last kind of point I want to touch on, because for me, I would be so anxious the entire day thinking there would be someone just waiting for my [00:23:00] message, you know. Yeah. So as opposed to having like an asynchronous email type of thing where you're like, all right, I'm going to give myself a couple of hours. I can chill. They know it's an email. It's going to take a bit of time, you know? Yeah, I think there's also like a bit of a personality fit here.

So like during the daytime, I don't mind quickly replying to someone, and often people just want to know that they've been acknowledged, not resolved. So it's better to be like, Hey, I'll get to this. Or Hey, like I'm out or Hey, I'm walking my dog or whatever, I'll come back. It's better to be like honest and let them know, you know, you've seen their message and you get back to them. Um, and hopefully like you resolve it later. So that tends to be more critical. The issue that I had was nighttimes, to be honest. So during like Japan daytimes everything was all good, but then all the Americans wake up when I'm going to sleep.

And that was really, really tricky. So I ended up hiring someone on my team called Anja. She does support when I go to sleep and a lot of our job is mostly telling people to wait until the [00:24:00] morning. Again, replying really, really quickly just so people know that, you know, we're going to get back to them and we always do, but we let them know we're going to get back to them and then I could just get back to them in the morning. Yeah, and that system works really, really well.

Yeah. I think there's a lot besides, you know, obviously hiring someone, there's a lot you can do to minimize the effect of people wanting instant answers in Discord. I noticed that all the people or 90 percent for me, 90 percent of the questions I do get turn out to be from people that just join and so when they do join, they get into the channel with some announcements like, you know, very brief, like what is this about? What can you ask here, et cetera. With the notion that I'm in Asia most of the time, so I'm not available., And there's actually a couple of people that have in the past responded to others going, Oh, Erwin's asleep right now.

Like he'll probably respond in like two or three hours. Those are other customers, which is amazing. So I love the Discord community thing. I think it's super helpful. I think, honestly, [00:25:00] Jesse, I think I asked a couple of things in your Discord at some point, but I searched an equal amount at the bare minimum and just already found answers, so I didn't have to ask it.

That's cool. That's actually also really cool to hear as well. Yeah, for sure. No, I think it's a golden move, especially if you're listening in, if you do have a product yourself or you're trying to build one that is a bit more on onboarding heavy specifically, or potentially support heavy or with a bit more integration. Yeah. Having a community is a great way to go because. I think it's such, um, I don't know, as Jesse said, really, it's just an intimate experience, I think. Well, I got a question kind of for you. Like, you went through the Bento onboarding through Discord kind of approach, right? Yes. What was your experience?

So, and for those listening in right now, I use Bento since, what is it? Six months, something like that. Yeah, I think so. And, um, so for me, I came from using Mailjet, Mailgun, and I felt like I wanted to target people a little bit [00:26:00] more and have like a bit nicer way to make flows, email flows. Say this person has signed up, but you know, hasn't activated the license yet after like two days, like send an email. Kind of stuff, and so yeah, Land on Bento went through the onboarding. I think two things I very much remember, Jesse. First of all, or three things. The first of all, you did a demo, I think for these kind of products, the demo is very helpful.

It was very short, really liked it. But it was a breath of fresh air to get some of the doubts out of the Out the way, right off the bat. Number two was in your onboarding in the app. I noticed that at every single page you have a specific video that you record and it's talking That's be huge by the way me, that, yeah, you're, yeah. Can I talk about that quickly? So, sorry to interrupt. Can I talk about that? Yeah. So like, um, early on, I think in like 2021, one of the biggest issues I had, and I think you kind of briefed on it with the demo part was that like people didn't really believe that Bento could do all the things that I was saying that it could on the [00:27:00] marketing inside, which I think, I think it makes sense.

A lot of people don't really expect a small team to be able to build a product that can compete against like ActiveCampaign, MailChimp, Drip and all those kind of tools. And so to counter that, I again made myself open where I could demo the product and Show people that we, we did that. But then also in kind of every step of the signup, there's like a video of me kind of explaining that I'm like real and you can kind of trust us. And I think even when you get to the credit card page, I kind of like have a one minute explanation of why I asked for the credit card and all that, and I think that kind of like over the top personal approach making my face, You know, available everywhere and putting the videos all throughout the signup process alleviated a lot of like anxiety people had about switching email platform.

Um, and a lot of those videos are old, like. Yeah, they're two or three years old and I just don't want to replace them because they kind of feel like a little bit magic, if that makes sense. But yeah, you can kind of continue, but [00:28:00] the videos at every step of the sign off, I think was really, really critical and continues to be a really, really critical part of our kind of like onboarding flow.

Yeah, I think it makes total sense. So again, for anyone listening, if your product does have like a bit more intense onboarding, those videos, I think if you do them right on every page or like a super explanation, yeah, it just takes away tons of, you know, potential for people not to go through onboarding and stuff. I very much recommend you looking into it or sign up for Bento, right? Like try out, see how Jesse did it. And then, the last thing that I noticed was you are Relentlessly thorough in the support part, which I guess is just, again, it's the product needs that you couldn't leave people on their own.

And I think, you know, just having like a support page isn't enough, but yeah. So that last thing very much helped and see people, um, with their niche things being listened to as well is also very helpful. So, don't underestimate your onboarding people. It's very important. You [00:29:00] cannot not spend time on that. It's important. Something that I see kind of like a lot of indie hackers, kind of miss the mark on is they, They don't want to get on calls with smaller customers, but in like sales, all of the time, you kind of just got to go to onboard, treat everyone almost the same. So like a 30 customer, I try really hard to give the same support as I would a 1, 000 a month customer.

And that's like, sometimes I give more attention to 30 a month customers than I do the more expensive ones. But I try and not look at like the MRR and more just look at making sure that they get through that first 30 days, and it doesn't really matter who they are. Just try and get them through that first 30 days. And then once they're kind of through those 30 days, they're integrated, they're on, and they're kind of good to go after that. But my focus is, all right, once someone signs up, how can I get them success in the first 30 days, no matter what? And then that's like my only real focus, and I think that attitude's been kind of critical of, of just getting some good momentum behind Bento. And also like a lot of [00:30:00] the 30 a month customers have led to like huge deals down the line. Which again, like looking back, was kind of critical getting a lot of those 30 a month customers. They like recommended a friend who has like a 500 a month MRR customer that they'll refer or 1, 000 a month.

Or I think like, I think, I remember one, a surprise once, this one 30 a month customer referring like a 4. 5k a month customer, like our way. And I was just like, Oh, this is sick. But it kind of reinforced that idea of holy moly got to treat everyone the same, you know, got to always treat everyone the same and never kind of like judge a book by the cover. Cause you just never know where stuff's going to lead. That's the best bridge you could potentially give me for the next question that I wanted to ask. Yeah, go for it. I'll have to ask it quick because Dom is pinging me in the chat of like, I want to ask questions too. Dom has questions too. Wait, but, I have one more question, which was about the acquisition part. So how do you continue to grow? And [00:31:00] how do you do the customer acquisition? Because it's also, again, it's a competitive space. Yeah, so, there's a little bit of, like, a nuance here. So, like, for me, with Bento, the main focus is running, like, a sustainable business.

For the long term, I've got, like, a one and a bit year old daughter and we live like quite like a quiet, nice life in Japan. And so for me, my main focus is like a good, profitable, sustainable business that I can kind of run whilst, you know, raising a family. And so, my focus on growth is like a sustainable growth. So, there's a few parts to that. One is like making sure our pricing, like on average, our pricing ends up being like on average, like 200 a month around that price range. So, you know, I've got lots of 30 a month customers, but I've got customers that pay a little bit more on average, monthly is in the $200 range.

Um, and so for me, we've only got like a couple of channels going, we've got like YouTube going, like people that do like a review type [00:32:00] stuff, like review content on YouTube. We've got Twitter ads that I run quite a lot of and then I'm just like pretty active in like a lot of communities. Um, and so like our lead volume is not super high. Uh, but again, at the average 200 a month price range Um, on average, I'm able to stack MRR pretty good month over month and so yeah, I'm not really like focused on high volume leads, I'm more just focused on like, yeah, good quality leads from good quality sources. So, yeah, YouTube and Twitter are probably like the only more markety ones, uh, and then everything else is kind of like just my involvement in certain communities and just talking a lot and making a lot of friends.

How well is the Twitter ads going for you? Because I've seen this tweet the other day that the ROI on Twitter ads is absolutely insane. Likely the highest out of all paid ad channels and I doubt, but how is it for you? It's really good. I really like it. Um, they've got Like a new beta ad targeting [00:33:00] group. I think, I think it's new. I don't know. It says it's new, but where you can target people based on their search history, and I'm running quite aggressive ads on that, at least for me. And yeah, it seems to be really, really good for me my approach for advertising with Bento. Bento is kind of like a unique product where someone could literally see us And you know, consider switching to us for like 6 to 12 months, and so, my main job a lot of the time in paid advertising is just making sure that people don't really, like, forget us.

And so, yeah, like, a lot of the way that I've structured the Twitter campaigns is, like, so people just constantly just see Bento over and over and over and over again even though the audiences are potentially quite, like, tight and small, that audience is, like, just deeply saturated. You know, people see the ad enough time that when their current provider annoys them or whatever, they then They're reminded of us and then they, they reach out, they book a demo and they can start my grad from there. But yeah, that's been my strategy for [00:34:00] ads. They're kinda like always on campaigns. And, I always ask on demo calls, how people heard about us, and I know the Twitter one is, very profitable and again, sometimes you don't know, like I'll have a month where I'm getting like a lot of 30 a month customers coming through, but then I may get like a pretty large whale and then that kind of like pays back for months of ad spend.

So you just don't really know. I just know on average, it's kind of like working out pretty well. Nice. I also like recently started finally getting a bit into like paid acquisition channels, looked into ads and I wasn't even aware of the fact that there's these like multiple layers of like, I guess, getting in front of your audience with ads, you know, like the first one being that you want to just get people to see you, right? Just get impressions. And then down the line, they just want to keep you in the back of their heads as opposed to like, I guess what you would as a typically Indie Hacker think ads are, which is just you have, you display ads and you immediately want to get conversions.

I think there's like a big, big difference, which I just learned like literally the other day, even though it seems [00:35:00] so obvious one thing I, yeah, I was going to say in like a, you know, like a really competitive market, like email marketing, I can't really compete in like SEO and stuff, you know, like I can't really do organic search cause I'm up against HubSpot, I'm up against MailChimp, like there's just so many large competitors and I can't really compete that and so I've tried to simplify like my goal. with advertising, and it's just like, all right, for very specific audiences and groups of people, just make sure they like, never stop seeing me. And over time, that audience will slowly, you know, again, when they feel like it will move over to us. But that that approach works well for me.

And I think if you're going into like a really competitive market, it's kind of Yeah. The only approach that you can really do, which is either, you know, standard sales or this kind of like, make sure that people never really forget you and keep the ads always on. But yeah, cause I can't, can't do AdWords, can't do organic search. I'm kind of priced out of the email marketing space [00:36:00] completely for that category.

But I love that. I love that because you managed to find your own, like acquisition channel that works for you while like, having so many like really strong, I guess, competitors that have so much money, like excess cash to spend on like, I guess, crazy advertisement. One thing I wanted to ask you as well is you mentioned that you hired someone. How many people are now working at Bento in total? Yeah, it's me, Anja, and then like some contractors. So incredibly lean, but that's by design because the agency had a lot of people working in it. And I think now, especially running Sorry, especially having a family.

I don't want to talk to a lot of people who want to be around my family. And so, by design, I'm seeing how far I can kind of like push Bento of like just me, Anja, and with contractors. Um, but again, I just want to keep it very, very tight and small. I think this year I may change my opinion on that especially hiring like [00:37:00] developers, but, yeah, for now I want to keep it really, really kind of tight and small. And again, that's if growth stays steady, then, I'll keep it as is.

Do you have any like tips and tricks for finding good contractors to work with? I don't know if you noticed, but like I've recently read on Twitter quite a few tweets about like, or posts that people get really, really burned in general, hiring people. Do you have any tips and tricks on how to like get people that are actually awesome?

I think it depends what type of roles you're trying to like hire for. I personally found that my personality worked well. Like this is actually something else that's kind of interesting. You've also got to hire people that live in regions that work well with your personality and time zone as well. So for me, I really liked working with people in Eastern Europe because it worked really well with the time zones, like I would basically work during the day, do a handoff in the afternoon, and then they'd work overnight and I really liked that kind of like working [00:38:00] style and the personality wise I always got along really well with everyone that I hired in Eastern Europe, and in other regions.

The time zones and the personalities weren't like the greatest match. So I mean, you've kind of just got to hire in a lot of different regions and try and find like what, what works best for you. It's kind of been my philosophy, I think on hiring is just trying, like, for example, The American time zones I always found impossible to work with just because there was no real crossover, only a couple of hours and so that, I could never really pull that off. So yeah, that's kind of like how I think about it. Like a lot of contractor relationships I find, especially if you're living in Asia and stuff, tend to fall flat just purely based on time zones alone. And so, yeah, looking at other time zones is great way to kind of look at hiring.

I love that. That's actually a really, really important point. Finding the right time zone to work with cause I would imagine otherwise you make your life probably harder than it should be, one thing you also mentioned early on [00:39:00] is the fact that you were talking a lot also like on Twitter and your blog, you talk about like the quiet life, right? So one thing that Erwin and I were really curious about is that in terms of like your work life balance, how do you just handle the fact that you run your own business? Everyone that runs their own business knows how stressful it can be, especially when there's a significant other or even like an entire family you got to take care of. How do you juggle between like work and your life? I guess like work life balance.

Uh, I don't have the answer. Like, I just don't have an answer for this. Cause it's like, it's all hard. It's all just really hard. Right. Um, and you just kind of got to figure it out. And you also have to go to work out what's most important to you. So like for me at the moment, like. I love waking up and working at home, where my daughter can run into the room and give me a hug. Right? Like she started doing that recently, like, which is just like a really new thing where she runs up, goes daddy, daddy, daddy, and then like hugs my [00:40:00] leg.

And it's like, it's the cutest thing ever, and it's so cool that my work facilitates that where I can kind of like see my daughter grow and you know all these different life Changes like every time she changes and gets new skills Like I'm at home to actually like a view all that stuff like that's important to me So I try and yeah, I make my work work for the things that I want, Which is to be around my daughter as she grows up and so yeah, I think you have to just work out what's most important for you and then you gotta Make the business facilitate that and then be really comfortable with the trade offs because there's of course going to be trade offs, right?

Um, you just kind of just got to be comfortable and happy with them. so yeah, and then like the other thing as well is just trying to work out like what type of vibe your business is. Like I think for Bento and like the email marketing space, I've said this to like a lot of our customers where like Bento is kind of like a local coffee shop, whereas a lot of our A lot of our competitors are [00:41:00] like Starbucks and the big chains. And so by kind of telling my customers that that's the general vibe that they've got, um, they've also just got a lot more chill and relaxed vibe when they're dealing with us. I also find like our customers are like really, really kind when they're doing their support tickets, they're not really like grumpy or angry.

Whereas I know I've spoken to support teams that a lot of our competitors and some of the support tickets they get from their customers are just like really hostile and angry. But, with our customers, because they're dealing with us, everything's really personal. People are just really kind and quite nice to deal with all the time. It's very rare. We have like a bad, Acting customer. And if it is, they're generally like a new signup. It's almost never our existing customers. It's always like a new signup who's acting bad and again, I think that's just like you know, we've put out a certain vibe about the business and we've kind of attracted people who resonate with that for the most part.

This is such a cute analogy, like the idea [00:42:00] between, you know, companies being more like Starbucks versus your local coffee shop that is more personalized. But obviously some parts, I guess. Take a bit more time, but therefore the quality is much higher. Everything you do, it just seems more personalized and I love that. That's such a neat way. I think also to communicate to your customers, if they would get a bit like, you know, iffy about some stuff also, I don't know if you heard this, but I heard that if your child hugs you once a day, your MRR increases at least by 10 percent month over month. So the more bugs you get, the more your MRI increases. Yeah, no, it's true, man. It's true. I believe it. I believe it.

One last question Erwin and I had that obviously is, I guess, the biggest elephant in the room. Is that like, how is living in Japan and what made you move there? Yeah, so I was doing like the Nomad thing since 2015, and so I think around 2019, I always get the years wrong, but around 2019, I [00:43:00] like kind of came to Japan and At the time, the agency was really busy and I was like working on Bento more and more and I was just tired. I was sick of moving every 90 days or 30 days, depending on the visa and I just kind of wanted to settle down and I always really, really liked Japan and my now wife had an apartment available. She's Canadian. She's been in Japan over 15, 16, 17 years and moved in with her and then COVID happened, everything locked down. And then, yeah, I don't know, we got married and had a kid and it's just been a really, really fun country to just go on this journey in. I've just, I've enjoyed every single part of it.

It's really, really good. And raising a family here is like phenomenal. Childcare is so affordable. Food's affordable. Everything's. Surprisingly affordable and great and such high quality as well. So I think in Japan, like we can have a really high quality [00:44:00] life, way cheaper than I'd kind of get anywhere else and you know, I grew up in, in Sydney, Australia, probably the same quality of life. I probably get paid 20 percent of what I would in, in Sydney, you know? So, yeah, I love this country. It's really, really fun to live in.

Have you manage to find like similar sort of founders slash indie hackers in Japan? Yeah. Cause I think like you said, you're not living in Tokyo, right? So you're living a bit outside of. Yeah. Well in Fukuoka, which is all the way down south. So here I've got like a friend, Caleb, who runs Native Shark. Yeah, they're a bootstrap startup, and there's a couple of other like founders in the city, but honestly, like when you have a kid, I kind of like saying it's like you got family, friends and work, and you can only really pick two to really focus in on and at the moment it's like, it's work and my family.

Right. I don't really have too much time. Like I hang out with [00:45:00] Caleb sometimes, but don't really have too much, I've actually found a lot of solace in there's a community called like the Dynamite Circle. It's run by like the tropical NBA guys and there's a crew in Tokyo. That kind of catch up all the time and there's, you know, a whole bunch of dads there and like really great guys. And like, we all just hang out and I go up there, I'm trying to go up there a lot more now. They've got something on every single month and every time I go up there, I just feel like energized and it's, you know, a lot of fun. So, the kind of indie hackers and people doing stuff online kind of community is here in Japan. It's just tricky to balance when you've got like a kid and stuff. Also I find in Japan people like pretty by their choice, self isolating. So you kind of got to like pull them out of the house sometimes. But yeah, other than that, that there are a lot of people here. I've just kind of got to make more time for it, which is always a bit of a it's always a thread that I keep pulling up.

I think Dom wants me to, uh, I don't know if it's Dom or me, but, we [00:46:00] always have a bit of a discussion part at the very end where we invite some other speakers as well. If anyone has a question for Jesse, if Jesse wants to stay. Yeah, I can stay, and if you guys have any other questions, I'm happy to answer them as well. If anyone does, feel free to use the request to speak button, we'll see you pop up and you can participate in the current questions discussion or ask Jesse something that you would like to know. I can kick us off already with the first question, which is, let me see, is from Charlie,

who posted it about half an hour ago, question for the space. Free plans versus paid only? Now this is interesting. It's literally yesterday or today on Twitter, where one person was, very clearly advocating for start, you know, free with your SaaS, potentially just don't charge money and then once, it seems to have traction at a paywall because having, finding end traction and paywall is like quite difficult. [00:47:00] And then, Mark Louvillon as we all know him, at, almost a few hours after posted to DitchFreePlans because only 3 percent of users upgrade. to the paid ones, and it's just better to start with paid right off the bat because indie hackers, you know, indie hackers, they don't have unlimited money, right?

Money's important. Whereas VCs can do the free first, monetize later. So, these are two very contrasting opinions, and I find it, interesting how both of these can coexist amongst the indie hacker community. Jesse, what do you think about this? Yeah, I hate free plans. I had to offer one for Shopify like we've got a Shopify integration and we added a free plan on that one. And so I've like experimented a little bit more with it recently and I'm just not, I'm not a fan. I may even. Roll that back pretty soon. So my approach has always been to be paid up front. So we offer a trial, it's 30 days, it's a credit [00:48:00] card up front trial, and as we kind of like talked earlier in the space, during your sign up, there's like a video at every single step of the way. And when you hit the credit card one, there's a video of me talking and there I kind of explain why we have a credit card, and frankly, like, it's a security thing for us because we deal with a lot of spam, a lot of attacks all the time, and a credit card's a great way to stop people from signing up and, you know, doing malicious stuff like sending, you know, crypto emails and stuff like that, so, yeah,

and so that's the thing. If I put credit card up front and didn't explain why we do it, a lot of people would abandon but because I do explain a lot of people watch that video and they go, Oh yeah, cool. Like that makes sense. And then they put in their credit card and continue signing up. So I think if you're going to do paid with a credit card up front Just think about what the user is thinking, like when they hit that page and try and, I don't know, maybe put a video next to it and [00:49:00] talk through why you do credit card up front. There's probably a good reason for it and yeah, just try and get rid of any kind of like doubt that the user has and once they trust you, they'll put in the credit card and hopefully buy. So that's been my approach and it's worked pretty well.

I also have an opinion on this, Erwin. I've been thinking about this a lot the past few days, because as of now, Helpkit for like two and a half years has been running a seven day free trial, no credit card up front and it has been going really well so far and also the fact that there's a lot of discussion about like 30 days, 14 days, seven days, I would say in my personal opinion, especially in B2B SaaS, if you can decrease your trial period, you should. If your product just takes a lot time to implement, obviously you have to vary, but I think the less time you can put people on a trial. And that also kind of goes into the other part of like, should you offer a free plan or not? And I think it, you can only, as an indie hacker, right? All you [00:50:00] care in the beginning is like, you want to get validation. You want to see if someone is really interested in your product and you will only get this if someone is actually paying for your product.

And so I think if you really want to offer a free plan, you only should do that. If you can. First of all, afford it. And with afford, I mean, if your onboarding process is so smooth you have your knowledge base. You have like, everything is so self service that you have to practically don't do anything and also it's so simple that people likely won't even send you customer support requests because it is so easy. Then you can kind of, I would say, go on and try having the risk of a free plan. But even then, I think you would need to have some sort of like, value metric in your app that kind of like shows value, but then it's so little that people are like, okay, this app already provided value.

But now I'm ready to pay because I exceeded I don't know, amount of like, I don't know, whatever, like credits I got or something. So then it kind of makes sense. But if you're, especially in B2B, like companies are just [00:51:00] used to either a free trial and then it's over or give us a credit card and let's see how it goes I think a lot of indie hackers make the mistake that they just think, Oh, my product is not worth charging or like, I just want them to like check it out. And, maybe they will upgrade, but in reality, most cases as an indie hacker, you, I think you save yourself a lot, a lot of pain, if you just ask for the credit card or you do a very short trial and then see from there.

Yeah, something, I think like a lot of indie hackers as well, they worry that like someone's going to put in their credit card, forget about it, and then like charge back and stuff and on that note, like we're really aggressive of cancelling accounts. So in like that first 30 days, like on you're on my team is we'll send a lot of emails like we've got an approval process as well. So you've got to be like approved to be able to send emails on our platform and so people don't respond to those emails. We just cancel their accounts. Even if they're putting the credit card and stuff, cause like, we don't want those dormant [00:52:00] accounts on the books.

And so we just, yeah, proactively cancel them and so, I don't know, I got like a chargeback last month and I was like the first one in ages. Again, cause we're constantly canceling accounts that we don't think are gonna kind of like survive or get through the 30 days and so yeah, that's an approach you can do if you kind of like worry about chargebacks or people kind of like forgetting about their billing.

That's, I also think it's a cool thing. If you are like having free users for your app, I think, if you think about it, it's kind of a cool thing, right? Cause you provide some sort of value and people sort of get it for free and then there's obviously like a variety loop. So people are essentially talking about it because it is free, and so that gets, I guess, the ball going. But then again, I would only do this, if you really like, not if it's your first indie hacker business and you wanna get to like Robin profitability, if you like, wanna just play and then just experiment, then you can definitely do it.

But I think in the beginning, if it's your first business, you wanna bootstrap, just stay away from it. Yeah. [00:53:00] Yeah. Sorry. I was gonna say, um. In the email marketing space, it tends to be true that almost all of our competitors, like ConvertKit and MailChimp and Drip and all those guys, they all have a free plan, but they'd never start with a free plan. Like all those companies like ConvertKit and Drip from memory, like when they started, they were always paid up front and then when they started making a lot of bank, Then they offer the free plan and I like that approach. I think having the forced constraint of being paid only to begin with and start earning a lot of money, and then when you have So much profit that you can kind of look at the free plan as like a advertising channel almost.

Then you can kind of like open up, but I don't know. The same way that you kind of wouldn't be spending a lot of money on ads when you're getting started. I don't think you would do the same with a free plan.

Yeah. I think I fully agree with this. My two cents are, well, so it's interesting, actually got to make this distinction both Jesse, you and Dom as well, you have a product that is, It's [00:54:00] relatively, you know, there's quite some onboarding and there's quite some, the people got to do some effort, the user's going to do some effort to get the value. For me, it's quite different where the tool that I'm building is, is slightly different where the value, there's no onboarding, first of all, you're like, you install it, you can use it. That's it. I played with a free plan and a lot of people requested this for me personally, but I decided against it because, all of my code is client side and so there's not actually some backend handling it, which is great for me.

There's no cost involved. So it would actually make more sense for a free plan because it doesn't cost me anything, but for me, I basically is you know, it being paid as a way to qualify a lease so that I'm very sure that I'm not going to get, like support requests from like free accounts, et cetera, or like requests from people that aren't necessarily paying. So yes, it's really just a I guess in your words, Jesse, keeping the books clean. My way, what I would say is if you decide not to go for a free plan, [00:55:00] make at the bare minimum sure that friction is as low as possible in an onboarding flow and then the second thing actually is provide the quickest value you potentially can. So for me, you can try the tool on the website it's embedded inside the website. So there is literally your trial there without any sign of whatsoever. It's just a click of a button. Now I'm in kind of the unique position to be able to do that with this kind of tool.

I think every product has some strength you can play into, and it's really worth considering, you know, how can you decrease that time to value for potential interested users. Really think about that hard, like a good other example. I quoted this before, I think in some episode, Nico from talk notes, where you speak in audio and it uses AI to like put it into a nice format, say a list or a memo or whatever. He has a demo as well on the landing page where you can enable it through the website, talk, and then, you know, you get an output and you can literally see what it does if you would get that [00:56:00] product and so yeah, then it takes away kind of the necessity for a free plan, because people already experienced the values and they just, you know, if you do it right, they just want more and so they, they pay for it.

I don't think we have other questions. Jesse, would you like to touch on something that we haven't mentioned before? Something you'd like to share or a tip perhaps from you to the audience? Nah, I don't really have too many tips. I think the only piece of advice that I have is just kind of like, I don't know, try and like lower the stress in your brain as you kind of build. A lot of these startups just take like a really long time. Like with Bento, it took five plus years at least. Oh no, it took like the last two years. I think we started to get a lot of traction, but first couple years didn't really, like, get anywhere, but throughout that time I was pretty chill about building Bento and I didn't stress too much. Like, on Twitter and stuff, I see a lot of indie hackers kind of, I don't know, being quite anxious or stressed if their startup's going to make it work.

If you are really stressed, get another job or something on the side and kind of, like, keep hacking on the side, but try not to, like, [00:57:00] demotivate yourself as you're building. It works out if you play the game long enough. I think. So yeah, it's kind of like my only little bit of advice. And I think this year as well, it's like an election year in the US and stuff. So I think people are just generally going to be a lot more anxious in general. And so if you can just try and like be mindful of what you consume this year and so you can continue kind of like building calmly. Try not to, again, stress yourself out because building a business is hard enough. You don't have to be like hard on yourself as you're going along.

I think that's terrific advice, honestly. I think you're right, when I look on Twitter, yeah, there's quite some anxious responses sometimes or some ad hoc kind of decision making. I think honestly, I may be guilty of that myself in some moments, you know, when something gets a bit more tricky or hairy, you got to make decisions quick. Yeah, I think more calm leads to better. I think that's a great way to put it. There is one more question. I [00:58:00] just get into in my chat from Fok, who's also listening, a good friend of Dom and I he's asking if someone were to build a new product in a competitive space like Bento, How would you get started? Like, what is the thing to go for and try out right off the bat? Um, Hmm, I think for me, one of the big things, like you can pick a competitive market, but you got to try and work out like what competitive market you're trying to go after it's the email market is kind of interesting because it's competitive, but it's also quite large just because a market's competitive doesn't mean it's like necessarily large right. And then the other thing with the email marketing space is the average that a customer could be paying can be quite substantial. So for me, Just carving out a very small piece of like the email marketing kind of category it's not really too difficult. I just have to, you know, do things a little bit better, offer a little bit better support.

And a lot of people are happy to kind of like move and start trying us out. So I just kind of [00:59:00] like when going into like a competitive market, I would just be mindful of that. It's like, all right, is it going to be possible for me to build a product that can compete? Is it possible for me to like carve off a little portion of that market? Or is the portion just like really, really small? It's like a hyper competitive space and I can't actually grab any customers from there yeah, they're like the main things that I would consider and then again, also like If I do grab any of those customers, they're going to be paying enough that I'm able to actually like stack MRR month after month.

And yeah, cause you know, if it's a very competitive market and it's a very large market, but you're just bringing a lot of like 5 a month or 10 a month customers, it's very hard to build like a, a calm. Good business, off that. But again, if, you know, your average customer pays 200 a month, you don't need too many of them to be round profitable you know, you don't need too many of them to replace a salary. So that's kind of like how I think about it again, that kind of like mentality building a local coffee shop [01:00:00] business not necessarily a Starbucks.

Yeah. I think honestly, that's such a good way to put it, as Dom said already. So yeah, I would say that's a great thing to keep in mind to, you know, try and build that local coffee shop. And then speak to an audience or speak to the type of people that are really interested to do a tiny bit better than, say, Starbucks. Yeah, those are great insights, Jesse. Thank you for that. I think it's actually it's a breath of fresh air. Honestly, the calm building business slowly kind of mindset. I think more indie hackers should consider it versus building the next AI Writer . Well, I mean, you can still build an AI writer if you want , you know, but calmly. Yeah. But, and I'm sure there's like a local coffee shop AI writer out there, you know?

And I'm sure there'll be one that lasts kind of like the distance. But yeah, I don't know. I do think this year is kind of like the year to build calmly, build steadily focus on building like the right product where you're able [01:01:00] to stack MRR easily, so try and stay away from products where you're just charging, at least on the B2B MRR, like B2B side, like a Bento side, try and boost your MRR where you can charge 200 a month, 400 a month, build a product like that. It's just a lot easier to kind of grow something steady, um, that way.

Yeah, great. I hope we at least inspired one or two people in the audience to consider this and hopefully have them get back later going, well that episode, that's the one that changed my life. I hope so. I think my brain was able to work. It's, what is that? 11, 14. It is getting late.

Can you quickly explain to us, Jesse, what is a heated table and the kotatsu?, what's the fuss about it? ? Yeah. Yes. What is that? Yeah, no, so like, it's, um, okay, so it's 11:00 PM I think it's like seven degrees outside Celsius and so it's like pretty, pretty cold. And, Japanese houses don't have insulated heating. And so, what they do have though is heated tables called [01:02:00] Kotatsu, and they're basically like tables with a heating unit underneath and then like a blanket that goes over them. They're incredibly cozy. Like if you've watched any animes and stuff, maybe you see like kids sleeping under them and stuff.

But yeah, they're like very, very cozy. They're very great to work on. And so I'm like sitting on the floor with my legs under the kotatsu, it's all heated. Uh, it's pretty cozy, man. And then like, you know, the pets sleep under them and stuff. So often I put my legs under and the cat's there and it's like fun, but yeah, very, very cozy . So it's a cool place to chat to you guys at. I just ordered one no way. Really. No, but I'll . I literally searched on heated table in These are. Oh, you'd be surprised, I'm in AC all day. Although maybe I should just step outside, but like, still. Sometimes, like, they're pretty cozy, like, even in the summer.

This is an insane thing for me to say, but in the summer sometimes I, like, put my legs under the kotatsu with the aircon on, which is not [01:03:00] the smartest thing to do, but it is really cozy. You know, do they have an AC version where it's, like, AC'd underneath the table? I'm in Japan, man. I'm sure they do. I'm sure there's, I'm sure there's an AC version of it.

Have you Googled it? Uh, it's K O T A T S U. Honestly, I just searched for Japanese table I just Googled it. It looks absolutely fabulous. I didn't even know this exists. They're so good, man. They're so good. If anyone wants to walk away from anything from this, like Twitter spaces or X spaces, it's to buy a kotatsu for the winter. They're great.

Oh, that's amazing. Jesse, thank you so much for joining us today. No worries guys. It was really fun and for answering thank you for answering all our questions. There were a lot of those. I know it's very late, but, got some amazing insights and learnings, I think hope everyone enjoyed the space. We'll also have another space next [01:04:00] Wednesday at most likely the same time. It might be an hour earlier or later. We'll have to check, but in any case, follow the Bootstr account, that you can see on the top left, to get the announcement for the next space, and give myself, Dom, and Jesse also a follow, to get more information on Bootstr and see how Bento's doing as well.

And I hope all of you are having a great day ahead of you afternoon, evening, wherever you are in the world and talk to you all next time. Nice. And someone just asked for a photo and I just posted it under the thread, so, of my kotatsu. Perfect. Perfect. Nice. Thanks guys. All right. See you guys later. Peace out. Thank you. Ciao, ciao.