037: From Developing a Multi-Million Dollar Accounting Software to Helping Businesses Build Successful Software Products (w/ Steven Bristol)
Summary: Steven Bristol co-founded, built, marketed, supported and sold a multi-million dollar SaaS software product called LessAccounting. LessAccounting is an easy-to-use small business-accounting software that allows clients to easily track online invoices and carry out their bookkeeping tasks conveniently. <br> <br> He is also the co-founder of LessEverything, a company that builds software for different clients, creates integrations between products, and improves companies’ conversion rates. His program adventure started as a 9 year old writing BASIC. In the past 28 years he has written many languages, become a Ruby on Rails core contributor, and a 2007 Google Summer of Code Mentor. <br> <br> He is a former motorcycle racer and has gone over 150 miles per hour with his knee on the ground. He is also a proud father of three. <br> <br> Core Revenue streams <br> <br> Steven jointly runs LessEverything, Inc. with his co-founder Allan Branch. They have two revenue streams with the first being offering consulting services to people who want to build successful businesses. He has been applying his talents and 10-year business experience in helping different SaaS products get to market and do better in the market. <br> <br> Their second revenue stream is a business division called LessFilms.com which makes marketing videos for diverse clients. <br> <br> Starting out in business <br> <br> Never wanted to be an entrepreneur because from observing his entrepreneur parents, he felt it was too much work. He never really held a job for long and eventually felt formal employment was not for him. After he left his last job, he partnered up with Allan Branch to start working on LessAccounting. They also started the umbrella company LessEverything, Inc. <br> <br> The viability of LessAccounting <br> <br> He thinks they succeeded with the LessAccounting idea out of sheer arrogance and non-belief in failure. Their bar of success was also very low so they just needed the idea to generate enough money for them to sustain their company’s operations and meet their personal financial obligations. <br> <br> The tech world was not very saturated with similar products back then and therefore it was easier for them to market LessAccounting and secure enough users to generate considerable revenue. <br> <br> Main competitor issues <br> <br> QuickBooks, their biggest competitor, saw them as a threat, and being an established company, they had an upper hand in terms of marketing. With their limited marketing budget, Steven and Allan became the first Twitter trolls. They discovered that majority of the Twitter reviews related to QuickBooks were negative so they created a website called weallhatequickbooks.com to leverage on the negative reviews. <br> <br> Steven believes that QuickBooks used to replicate some of the features on LessAccounting into their product. <br> <br> Getting the first paying clients <br> <br> Steven and Allan had a lot of friends on Twitter who were either in the tech world, offering consulting services or starting their own business. They leveraged on that by tweeting out that they had launched LessAccounting and people immediately signed up for the free trial. At that point, Steven had not even developed the billing code but built it within a month so that they could start charging people to use the software. At first, they had about 4 paying customers and that number grew steadily from month to month. <br> <br> Growth strategy in the beginning <br> <br> Never really had a growth strategy but concentrated more on building LessAccounting. Steven and Allan did consulting work in order to generate enough income to finance the development of LessAccounting. <br> <br> They used a lot of word of mouth by attending conferences to make friends who would recommend them to clients. Steven used to speak at Ruby on Rails/tech conferences glo...
