Brian Pontarelli: Leveraging Unbridled Optimism to Propel your Business

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to My Biggest Lesson, the show that brings you the key learnings from the most influential founders, executives, and investors in the Colorado Tech community. My name is Adam Burroughs. And I'm Chris Erickson.

[00:00:13] Together, we are the co-founders of Range Ventures, an early stage venture firm based in Denver. You can find out more about what we're up to at range.vc. Our guest this week is Brian Pontarelli, CEO and founder of Inversesoft and Fusion Off.

[00:00:31] I first met Brian over a decade ago when he and I co-chaired part of Denver Startup Week and I've been following his progress ever since. He's bootstrapped his company's to impressive scale, culminating in him taking on his first investment ever last year of $65 million for Fusion Off.

[00:00:47] Brian, thanks so much for joining us today. Yeah, thanks for having me on. Awesome. Well, we've known each other for a while and I've seen from afar your impressive entrepreneurial journey. Love if you want to share it with our audience.

[00:01:15] I mean, you've been at this for a while bootstrapping until recently which we'll talk about. Love to hear how you got started and how it's taken to where you are today. Absolutely. Yeah, it's kind of a wild ride. So I was working at a startup.

[00:01:28] A couple of buddies from Orbitz started it and they asked me to join. I wasn't one of the founders but employee number one essentially. And we were trying to give you with LinkedIn so we're trying to do sort of reputation management for professionals.

[00:01:42] And as part of that, we wanted to filter profiles for profanity, obscenities, those kind of things as well as for other content that Google just doesn't like. And so we really wanted people's profiles to rank well. So we couldn't find anything.

[00:01:56] I ended up just kind of building kind of a crappy little filter for them. And then I started thinking, I'm like, I can't be the only one that's looking for this. So I asked them if I could take it home and they said, yeah, we don't really care

[00:02:09] about that. We're doing this social network thing. So I started building my own implementation of it just nights and weekends. After about a year, launched that, started to get a little traction.

[00:02:21] It took me a little while to figure out how to actually make it work but had some pretty big companies pay me to build it exactly how they wanted. Which is great because I got immediate customer feedback, got a roadmap from a customer

[00:02:33] that's willing to pay real money. And so it helped me get that product up and running and that eventually became CleanSpeak. We pushed and sort of really worked on CleanSpeak for about six or seven years. And then just sort of realized, we were a little early.

[00:02:48] There wasn't a huge market there. It was great. It did good revenue but it wasn't going to be hyperscale. The team at that time was only a handful of people. We basically went down to three of us, sat in a conference room and just dreamed up ideas.

[00:03:06] Long story short, after lots of trials, starts, things didn't work. We eventually landed on login and we needed a solution for ourselves. So we built our own solution and then it just kind of morphed into this product.

[00:03:20] And then we renamed it to Fusion Off, launched it and then it's just been that sort of hockey stick growth ever since. Amazing. What year was that? Did you guys pivot it and need this?

[00:03:31] We started coding on it in like 16 and then we launched it like the end of 18. So the nice thing about having a product that generates revenue with a small team and covers everybody's salaries and covers everything we need is that we didn't

[00:03:44] have to take money and we were able to really focus for about a year and a half, two years to build the product the right way. No MVP. When we launched it, it was an MVP. It was like this is a production quality product that can go.

[00:03:58] That's amazing. Well, it's really interesting having these two different companies and products that you worked on and sounding like one was, you know, modestly successful, okay. And the other one is really kicking off seeing that difference between what real product market fit looks like.

[00:04:15] I'd love to hear you describe that. So there's two ways to think about it. One is like a customer comes and tells you exactly what to build, right? And then when you hear it like from 10 different customers, you're like, okay, this is probably what we built.

[00:04:25] The other one is like you're solving your own problem and it's so painful of a problem that you know that you can't be the only one. You're like, I can't possibly be the only person with this problem.

[00:04:35] So we actually ended up having both of those things almost at the same time, right? And one of the things that's different with our products than most products is that they're downloadable, which means that people can actually download it and run it like traditional software, which means

[00:04:52] that it's the second thing downloaded, it has to be ready to run. Like it can't be like kind of janky and broken and not working because you don't have an opportunity to patch that. So we thought about things very differently and when we built both

[00:05:06] products, we thought about MVP product market fit. We thought about all of that from the get go. It's like how do we do exactly what people need and get this into a form that people can use right out of the box?

[00:05:16] And how did you decide for most of your entrepreneurial journey to bootstrap, not raise investment along the way, and then ultimately recently saw you guys raised a big round, your first financing ever? Not for lack of trying. So applied to tech stars, talked to founder group, multiple signs,

[00:05:34] talked to access, talked to a bunch of them, right? And we were talking to them for CleanSpeak mostly because that's what we had back then. Once we started working on Fusion off and actually got it launched and with the notoriety from Ossozero and Octon, Fordrock and

[00:05:52] all these others, we started to get a lot more interest. But by that time, we were already profitable, already continuing to bootstrap and still seeing large growth and success. And so we kept saying like, why do we need the money? Right?

[00:06:07] And then this year just happened to be the right combination of everything. It's like market is primed, lots of new folks raising, lots of growth. I think we're ahead of almost everybody except for Ossozero really.

[00:06:20] And we wanted to capitalize on that and not fall behind in any way. And so it was an ideal time to say like, OK, if we go get some money, can we accelerate our growth and just really pull ahead of everybody?

[00:06:33] And I think the answer was resounding yes. It's like not only yes, but like we have to do that. Fantastic. That's amazing. I mean, it's so great to just hear you raising money for what it always should be for, right?

[00:06:46] Which is, hey, we see the opportunities to go do this versus last few years. Hey, like this is just what everybody's doing. We want to go to our own. We want to go get press. Yep, exactly.

[00:06:57] Great to see somebody doing the right way that I think everybody is woken up to largely in the market, which is an exciting time to be right now. Loved it to get your perspective too on what it's been like

[00:07:07] because you've done this for a while, building a company in Colorado for so long and how that's changed, if at all. Cara is great, right? So I'm a native. I think we have great resources. We actually have great schools. We have a good tech scene.

[00:07:21] You know, we get kind of sidelined a little bit because there's a lot of other hubs that are bigger and sort of more they're a little bit more not stable, but a little bit more solid.

[00:07:32] But the nice thing about Colorado is that we have this mode where we just like we don't do dumb crap, right? We don't like I forget who said it. It may have been Brad Feld, but we don't take money from VCs go out

[00:07:47] in the back, you know, alley throw in a dumpster and light it on fire. We just don't do that. We take money. We do smart things. We we try to get profitable. Like we try to do good things and add real value, which is very different.

[00:08:01] And so that mode of operating is is the way I think inherently. And maybe that's just because I'm from Colorado. But like everybody else I know tries to do that same thing. Like I don't hear a lot of people saying like, yeah, I just raised around.

[00:08:14] I'm going to go spend it on all this crazy stuff. It's like, yeah, I raised some money. I'm going to go spend it really strategically or like, no, I'm going to boost draft this thing as far as I can go because that's, you know,

[00:08:24] another model that's pretty pretty Colorado century. I should do a survey in this. I don't know if there's any Colorado stirrups that have ever had a private chef. Well, I do remember I went to the Zengrid office and we were

[00:08:38] actually looking at maybe day back in the dirt. Yeah, that was there was a little bit of a heyday. They were opening offices all over the place and they opened one that was like right on Broadway and they did have a private chef.

[00:08:49] And I was like, oh my God, this is insanity. But they were that was like right close to the Twilio acquisitions. So like I could there are some few crazy things that went on. But that might be the only one personally been out to the Bay

[00:09:02] area and eating some pretty amazing meals and multiple startups who had no business having personal chefs. That's for sure. So, Brian, let me know you've been involved in the community for while. You and I work together at the startup week stuff years ago.

[00:09:15] What's the company locally right now that you're excited about not fusion off? Yeah, so there's two. One I was looking up, but I'm really excited about rabble.ai. That's Josh Trillick's new venture. They're doing some really cool things around helping marketing,

[00:09:33] attribution, helping with growth that once you find your crew and find your ICP, how do you blow it up? I think that's actually a really cool idea. And they come from taking massive data sets and like churning through them with well data labs.

[00:09:51] And they're sort of applying a lot of that to this venture just in a different way. So they're good data people, right? And so I have a high host for that. And then I've always liked that's on bud. Like they just provide a great service.

[00:10:05] They know what they're doing. You know, they scaled really nicely. And I'm always interested to see how on bud continues to grow and succeed. So those are two that I like. Well, fantastic. Well, Brian, I'd love to segue into kind of the main topic of conversation here,

[00:10:21] which is your biggest lesson. And you've obviously had the rhythm roller coaster or multiple startups now and love to hear what's what's the biggest lesson you've learned in your career so far? So I think the biggest lesson that I can provide to like other entrepreneurs is

[00:10:40] you have to come at your every day and everything you do with just like unbridled optimism, right? Like you're going to hit bumps. You're going to be peeved. You're going to like just like want to quit like and it's in things will be

[00:10:54] painful and you'll just, you know, you're going to get in arguments and it's going to be it's going to be hard. But if you don't at the end of the day say, well, that was brutal, but I still

[00:11:03] know we've got something here and I still know we can succeed. And we might not even have written the product yet, kind of like in my case, but I'm confident that I have the right people. I have the commitment and I have, you know, the programming and engineering

[00:11:17] skills to get it done. That is the only way to overcome those hurdles because otherwise you, you know, hit too many bumps and your people will like, we'll just fall out. They'll be like, I just can't do this anymore. I just can't do this anymore.

[00:11:30] And I don't know how to do it specifically, but taking in, in whenever you do hit a speed bump, going back to your original idea and your original excitement that you had the day that you quit the day job and

[00:11:43] you jumped down, you know, and you started doing it. That helped me get like re-energized like day after day. Right? I'm like, this is still exciting. Like I get to do whatever I want to do.

[00:11:54] You know, we get to call the shots where the masters of our own destiny, all that stuff, but you have to like instill it in your being. Some people just can't do it, but like the folks that can, like they generally see great success.

[00:12:07] I answer this is a fantastic lesson. Obviously every startup is going to have those, you know, crucial moments and ups and downs for sure. And everybody looks to the founder, right? And they're going to read, they're going to read your, your facial expressions, your body language, everything.

[00:12:23] And they're saying, is this something we should still believe in? What, what's, is there like a specific time or times you can think of, or maybe you were really feeling you're questioning it, you were feeling down or feeling stressed and you really kind of had to

[00:12:35] dig deep and say, okay, like let me reset and get positive again. Yeah, I think when we knew that Clean Speak wasn't going to be the rocket ship and we kicked around a ton of ideas, picked one and that fell completely on its base.

[00:12:55] It was pretty disheartening, right? Because you know, you spend, we spent about nine months coding and just like got it to a pretty good state, tried to sell it and like nobody bought it. And it was brutal. And so what we were building was a forum, right?

[00:13:09] Which goes really nicely with a profanity filter because we had this nice clean forum. Well, that was brutal. And so like, we devised this plan. I said, okay, we're going to call this the Ram it in the ground plan.

[00:13:23] And this isn't for everybody, but basically what we're going to do is we're like, you know, we're all tired. I don't know if we can like find the energy to do one more, but like Clean Speak's generating some great revenue.

[00:13:33] How about we just like sit on that until it like completely just like, you know, nose dives into the ground and like, that's probably going to, you know, make us a good chunk of money. And I don't know, let's do that.

[00:13:43] And so with the idea that we had this plan B already formed and we knew what it looked like, it kind of gave us the motivation to go back and say like, Hey, you know that login system that we built for the forum, that thing's kind of cool.

[00:13:59] Like how about we just see if we can like sell one or two of those and you know, spend a couple of months like tweaking it and building it right because we were building those two products in parallel.

[00:14:09] And that plan B got everybody's head back in the game and sort of like, we sort of had a new set of eyes on everything. And we went back in, spent another couple of months finishing off what became Fusion off, launched it and like just

[00:14:24] had a lot of interest. Like, and we had people finding us like, we're like, how did you find us? We're like not even ranking in Google. And they're like, we just really didn't want to use October. So we just like kept searching and searching.

[00:14:34] And then we found you and like, you guys are great. We're totally buying this. I'm like, holy crap. And that was, that was amazing. Right. And that just kicked everything back into high gear and everybody was like fully on board.

[00:14:45] But that was probably the darkest moment and that heart is pushed to get back that momentum. But that plan B really helped. Got it. That's really interesting. Well, it's a credit to you obviously that you've been able to retain even if a small team throughout.

[00:14:59] How did you, how'd you do that? Right. Was it really in it? It sounds like in your case, you know, some founders have their, their coming from industry. There's one problem they're really obsessed with. It sounds like in your case, it was more about

[00:15:11] really just loving the team, you know, the construct that you were working in. And it wasn't about the specific idea. So we have always thought about ourselves as like an engineering company, right? Kind of akin to like a Google or like an Oracle.

[00:15:29] We, we love the products that we have, but it was more about the engineering of them and getting like just building something awesome that's engineered really well that developers want to use that, you know, provides value and fills a need. And the idea didn't matter as much, right?

[00:15:47] It's always great to find an idea that he is going to scale, but building the engineering portions of it were more exciting to us. And so that's a great way that we retain both the people because they fit that same mode, but also we're

[00:16:03] able to move fluently between products without having to be like, you know, this is way out of our, you know, league or it's like total. I've never done this before. I mean, you don't know anything about this industry. It's like, well, we're engineers.

[00:16:16] We can, I'm sure we could figure out the industry. I'm sure we can build something awesome and then I'm sure we can sell it. So like, let's just do that. It's interesting. And now as you guys are scaling, right? And you're going to have layers of leadership.

[00:16:28] How do you, given thought to how do you make sure all those layers of leadership below you kind of keep that same mentality of riding that roller coaster, keeping the optimism, keeping that North Star. You know, it's easier for you as the founder, but

[00:16:42] how do you like permeate that throughout the organization? Yeah, you just, I mean, it becomes part of the culture. Right. And so like every time you have an all hands or every time you're together, it's always about like saying simple things like, Hey, you guys

[00:16:58] realize that like how awesome this product is. Right. Like we are kicking everybody's butt up and down the street. Like nobody can catch us. And we're even taking business from the big guys. Like that's incredibly hard to do because we have like this freaking awesome product.

[00:17:15] Dude, we're like crushing it. Just getting that little bit of enthusiasm and getting that little, you know, idea in people's heads. It works. And then it becomes viral. Right. It just kind of spreads and then everybody starts saying that we also like to say like

[00:17:31] the product is completely sellable. Like it's production ready. Got all the features people need. Like sure, we're going to improve on it, but like that doesn't need a, we're not at MVP and have like years and years worth of work to do.

[00:17:42] Like let's just go sell this thing. It's awesome. So really just really focusing on the, yeah, really focusing on the positives. Right. And I think you mentioned before me, even when you didn't really tell like you didn't really have a product to sell and things weren't selling.

[00:17:56] Focusing on the positive, which is, Hey, we get to call our own shots. We get to work with a great team. We get to be, you know, coming up with cool ideas. Right. That's a positive. That's a huge positive. Yeah. I mean, that's only people can, you know,

[00:18:08] dream of it, right? Like, and we say that to people when we hire, like, Hey, listen, this is going to be the easiest. This isn't going to be the easiest job you've had. You know, this is going to be a lot of work

[00:18:17] and it's going to be really hard. But when's the last time you got to work at a company where everything you do matters and like you might code something or do a marketing campaign and within 24 hours, you will see people actually using that feature or clicking

[00:18:31] on the links that you built, right? Like that matters. Like everything you do matters. You're not just a cog in a massive machine. Like we do things that make a difference every day. Yeah, that's awesome. Right. Well, you can see why you've had success and

[00:18:45] kind of why you built that culture. I mean, the passion and the positivity is definitely authentic and you exude it. So no doubt that Fusion Auth will continue to be be successful. Thanks so much for coming on and that's a phenomenal lesson.

[00:18:58] Where can our listeners follow along with what you guys are doing at Fusion? So the main places that we live, obviously are our website. So FusionAuth.io. We're pretty big on LinkedIn so you could follow our company there. We do updates and we have fun and post

[00:19:12] crazy stuff, which is always a good time. Developer memes are our main bag, so that's fun. And then we're pretty big on Twitter as well. So those are kind of our three main places to check us out. Awesome. Thanks, Bright.