Software as a Service, Creating a Solution, Building an Organization

Welcome to building better developers, the developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well hello and welcome back. We are starting a new interview this time around. We're speaking with Tim Branion of True Fans and we're going to talk a lot about software software as a service, creating a solution, building the organization around it. We're not going to get necessarily into the details of the technical side of the code, but more about how he has built a couple of different businesses, particularly with a software sort of bias towards it, as he refers to it as essentially like a digital real estate. I think you'll find it's very interesting how he's approached it as a non-technical person looking at a very technical thing. It's not that he has no clue or anything, but he's not a developer yet, has put together some really good firm solutions in the software space, particularly software as a service. So let's get talking with Tim. Okay, so this time around we are speaking with Tim Branion of truefans.com and we're going to have a good conversation. I can tell you just out of the gate, this is going to be a fun one. We're going to talk about a little bit about creating a business and content and monetizing that, but also just some of his experiences. We're going to find that there's a lot of areas we're going to touch on that I think you will be interested to hear. Grab your pencil and paper. It may take some notes along the way and we will have a pretty good time. That's good as far as I'm going to go as far as introduction. So I'm going to throw this to you, Tim. Why don't you, in your own words, give us a little bit of, tell us about yourself and how you got here. Yeah. So thank you for software having me on the show, Rob. It's good to be here. We've already had a nice kind of quick introduction before the podcast started. And yeah, so I got here through a platform called Podmatch. I think that's how we met, right? It's where we matched and connected. Just such a cool tool. Shout out to Alex who owns that one. He's a buddy of mine. But yeah, my story is really simple. I grew up in a small town, Kokomo, Indiana, the Midwest, not a whole lot of opportunities. The military made a ton of sense for me. I wanted to change my life and I was on this kind of success journey. And it made a lot of sense based on, you know, some of the guys I saw that came back from that experience that decided to enlist. I thought, man, you know, love it or hate it. I think I could do this and come out better. And yeah, I did. I did just that, but it wasn't long after. Like I got into contracting, worked overseas in support of the Department of Defense as a contractor, really good money. Long story short, I got really restless and discontent, started to become obsessed with freedom. How do I get out of that? How do I make half of this money that I'm making now but own my life and time and not, you know, watching my family through a computer screen? And that brought me to the idea that technology made a lot of sense. Apps, software, digital, e-commerce, all of that was an ideal solution, at least the time I thought they could pay me not only with flexibility and some time freedom, but also create a global business and create some residual passive income. So, you know, I never set out to have a really great idea. It's just been really good at having belief on fire after I saw some problems and thought of some solutions for those problems that I could sell. And that's where I'm at now, man. I own a software company on multiple software tools. Digital real estate is what I kind of like to call it. And I'm in this new journey of helping people and teaching people how to, whether it's building an app, how to structure their business in an LLC, just all this stuff I've gathered in 11 plus years as an entrepreneur, the wins and losses, the whole journey. So, yeah, man, excited to be here and dive into a conversation. Wow, that's a conversation itself. There's so many directions to go there. So let's start out with, we'll go back a little bit to your, I guess, some of your founding principles or some of the things that started you off. So from your military background, and I've seen a lot of people have gone into this, how did that maybe affect you moving forward? How did some of the things that you learned there carry forward into the business world? And particularly the entrepreneurial side, as you said, you wanted more freedom. But of course, with that, then you've got to have discipline to be able to do the things that you need to do. Yeah. So I think resilience, I got a lot of resilience out of the military. A lot of the times it was hurry up and wait. There was a lot of rules and structures and things in place that didn't necessarily make sense. There wasn't like an ROI. It was sometimes just do this because you were told to do. And maybe that aggravated some of the entrepreneurial sort of control guy that I am. And so that aggravated some of the desire for some change. But the military gave me a ton of just perspective on teamwork, a ton of perspective on challenging situations, how to adapt and overcome, how to look at things differently and find a way out. And in the military, my job specifically, I mean, you had to have a high level attention to detail. And in some cases, if you didn't find a solution, it could be the matter of life and death. So when you translate that sort of thought process into business, unfortunately, it's not, at least for me, it hasn't been life and death, like making tactical decisions in this world. But I think military experience helped with that teamwork, all that good stuff. I think the biggest thing for me was just wanting to maintain success, a trajectory of continued success and working with a team to make impact. I think that was all fueled and I don't want to say agitated, but enhanced during my time in the military. And that's a lot of, yeah, I was keeping that, I was just sort of throwing that out there. I think it's great how many facets of that translated into the real world. And I think that's one of the things we actually sometimes talk about is that people come from, which we'll talk about that more as we talk about the content, but people come from these different walks of life and you have sort of a, I guess, sort of like a picture of what it is that they do. I think military, a lot of people just, it's like, oh, well, you just, you run around and you shoot guns or something. They have something that's very simplified. And I don't think it's until you've worked with people that have come from that background that realize, oh, there's a lot of structures, a lot of organizations. There's a lot of core business principles that are part of that. And really, they're part of any organization. So whether you're, I don't know whether you worked in a local school district or whether you are working at a company as a manager over like the grocery and produce, there's like, there are those core principles that you're going to get regardless. And those do translate into other areas as long as you can, sometimes as long as you can help communicate those a little bit. Tying that in that you're the, you know, your latest, I guess, or one of your latest endeavors, the true fans is really about producing content is about, you know, getting content out there and monetizing and getting it to the people that it makes the most sense for. How did you, I guess, so starting with that is how did you, how did you come up with that as a, where did you, you come around doing that and say, Hey, this is something we need to do. Yeah. So a lot of things suck for content creators right now. And a lot of, you know, people are aware of that. Now we were talking about that a little bit, even before this, now we started hitting the record button, but a lot of, you know, I think historically content creators have been undervalued and underpaid. I think, you know, censorship is a bad thing. I think removing people from platforms and demonetizing them is a bad thing. And I think it's safe to say a lot of creators were disappointed with that and feeling underserved. They were looking for, you know, something different. And we, you know, we saw that and we saw the opportunity. We looked at competitors that were out there in our space and we thought, you know, what, what's the thing that's going to make us the logical choice for content creators all around the world? Or what are the multiple things that we can do to be a home and a logical choice home for content creators all around the planet? So some of those things that we created or that we thought we would do was to make a hundred percent invite only platform for content creators. So not just anybody can join. There's, there would be some exclusivity to it. And that was to help with, you know, not only security, but avoiding the thing that we outlined was, was not going to happen, which was adult content. So we don't allow adult content. That was the other thing. And we needed to gatekeep this community to ensure that it's, it doesn't fall victim to what's so predominant out there to avoid the stigma. Next thing we did was we thought, okay, well, we can pay more and not only can we pay more, we can pay faster with global instant payouts. And here's some features that we can put together that are, that are really creator focused and they're going to, you know, be unique in the market. So that's what we did. And that was three and a half years ago now. And we've got well over 600 and some odd thousand users across the planet. We're in 43 different countries. Last I checked, the team's growing. The, you know, it's been super fun and just cool to meet different creators and learn in the process and listen to some of the pains, listen to some of the good things and just help them, you know, almost become a hybrid of like creator entrepreneurial hybrid, because many creators, at least that we meet aren't, you know, haven't been in e-commerce, haven't been, you know, in the tech space, haven't been selling, maybe don't even know that they've got a lot of potential to earn because they have influence or they have a tribe of people or they have, you know, attention. And so we really kind of helped them wield that as, you know, as a, as a new found sort of superpower, depending on how far they want to go with it. So our platform, in short, helps content creators share maybe the content that they're already creating or diversify it a little bit to be the most exclusive or the most rewarding to their ideal, or to their audience. And the platform allows them to sell subscriptions and allows them to get donations, tips, gifts, pledges. They can go live. They can have encrypted messaging. There's no limiting algorithms. There's no limiting reach. So it makes a ton of sense. And in the exchange, you know, there's no cost for somebody to join outside of our service fee. So we take a small service fee in exchange for customer support, tech support, infrastructure management, running the dev team and building out the platform that is this vehicle. And then they maintain the majority of earnings that are coming through their community. So how do you go about, how did you grow about growing this community? And how do you go about, and cause you said, one of the things you want to do is you want to essentially vet people as they come in so that you can, you can maintain that, that high level. How does that process go? How do you go through adding somebody in? Yeah. So we, we, right now we use a lot of different methods. It didn't start this way, but we use search engine optimization. We've got videos. We have a whole referral program where a vetted verified creator can invite other potential creators or friends or people that would be a good fit. And then they go through a reduced application process where they can sign up, set up and launch through their friend. And then we pay the referral 5% for life on all gross volume generated through that referral. So it's kind of a friend telling friends, not network marketing. It's only one level, but we do like to, you know, give credit to people who refer and tell people about us. So that's, that's one another way. The main way that I've always, you know, not only done myself, but helped other tech companies and the thing that they struggle with the most, which is new client acquisition is teaching them a direct marketing system, like a direct outbound marketing system that uses typically Instagram or LinkedIn, depending on where their ideal clients are to go out and tap somebody on the shoulder digitally with an ideal message or a pitch that then results in a conversation being booked or a calendar event being booked or inviting them to a demo or an evergreen webinar, or just to maybe sell it directly in messaging. But that's typically, specifically, that's how we started was through a very manual, almost old school style, direct outreach campaign through virtual assistance. After me and one of my founding partners kind of went the way first, we learned what our messaging was, who's really responsive to it, like what niche of creator. And then we started doing more of what worked and anybody can do it. It's been fun to kind of turn the light bulb on for a lot of other tech companies to use this method that we built a platform with or work with. So yeah, that's and then outside of that, I think we were starting to, we might start to run ads soon. We haven't really ran any successful ads at this point. I get a lot of people that hit us up saying that they're the man and I just, I don't know yet. We'll see. That's kind of a sketchy world in a lot of cases when you're hiring somebody that does your marketing stuff. Yeah, it's definitely a little bit of a, you know, uh, not entirely a crap shoot, but it can be, you know, it could be, you got to do your homework. That's for sure. You need to make sure that you do your due diligence on that. Totally. Now, how did you, what was the evolution of your tools? Did you, is it a website and then you eventually worked into building an app for it or did start out an app? How did you, from a sort of a technical side, how did you, how did you architect this out? Yeah. Well, um, it started out as an idea that was drawn, started drawing and writing it out on a Google form. And then that drawing turned into a clickable prototype, very bare bones, sort of minimum sellable product prototype, the original ideas. And then that prototype turned into a quote, which was the, what's called an SRS or a blueprint, if you will, kind of like if you're going to have a house built, you want to see all the parts and all the backend and the things that's going to take the timeframes, et cetera. And then that turned into an initiation of the project. And we started out with a web-based SaaS, which is just a software as a service, a mobile app or mobile, or excuse me, web-based platform. And then that evolved into an app, a couple of different variations of an app. Yeah. It's typically how it goes. We've seen that work really well, not, not only with building, our own projects or products, but when working with stakeholders and other companies, no matter who they are, if it's municipalities or, um, yeah, start a small startup, a large company, the process stays the same because it just, it works. It helps clear any ambiguity. And it's those three kind of pieces that I just talked about extracting the idea into a written and visual sort of rough draft, turning that into an actual blueprint. And then, yeah, then from there, once that blueprint's done, creating a quote and an estimate from what's been agreed on is the thing that they want to build. So that clears a lot of the ambiguity. And that's the number one thing that I think kills most projects before they, you know, ever even see the light of day is the lack of cohesive communication. Yeah, I agree. That's, uh, that's one of my, I often use that as a joke is that I'll see people, you know, from the development side, I'll see people come out and say, Hey, I want to build, I want to build a site like PayPal, you know, or something and say, okay, you're going to have to give me, or I want to do something like Amazon. Wow. Why don't you just say, I just want to do something because you didn't help me by saying that. And, and I know people have the vision and they see this thing in their head, but it's getting that out, extracting that out and saying, okay, what do you really want? And then how do you really think this thing works? Because there's going to be situations like, Oh, well, you just do this. It's like, no, that piece you're talking about is some huge complex technology that you're not going to have access to maybe initially. Yeah, no, you got, you got it. And that's, that's kind of my, one of my specialties is helping someone bring their idea into fruition through a series of questions and suggestions and, you know, some drawing and then just having a good hand on the pulse as conversations are happening, bringing the right team members into document and then facilitate cross communication because you're, you're a hundred percent right. That's the number one thing. You know, that really, it costs a lot of companies or people a lot of money and a lot of stress and time, maybe some tears in that mix too. That, that's, you know, the reason why is, is lack of communication and an effective system. Now, was this the first, was this first time you'd had a, you'd built like a SaaS site? Had you done something like this before that sort of, cause that's a, that's a, we'll say a very wise approach to take. And so I'm assuming that's like, you know, you weren't just born with that wisdom. So is this something you learned somewhere else? You had a past experience or? Yeah, man. I had to pay for it. You know, I think I, I didn't pay for a typical tuition. Like I didn't go to university for this and I didn't pay a coach, you know, for this directly. I read books and stuff, but I learned through failure through, you know, I gave myself permission with a high level of belief early on that I could build an app and a software. I just, all I needed was a dev team. Little did I know I actually needed to be able to communicate and work in cohesion with the engineering team to build it to fruition. So that, that was bought through and learned through failure. I mean, that's the best way to describe it. It was through my own tears, through my own money, through my own anger, time spent. You know, I've been in this game a long time now. I say a long time. It's been, it's been over 10 years that I've been tinkering with tech and learning. So I, and while I'm not an engineer or coder by trade, I know enough to, to have a conversation and assist with, you know, cross communication between a, you know, a product, product idea guy, like all the stakeholders, the guy with the idea and the passion, and then the team that's actually going to roll up their sleeves and bring it to fruition. Yeah. And that's a, that communication is a, it's one of those big gaps to fill. It's always, it seems like that's often the hardest thing is it, because business and technology have very different languages, very different focus, very different experience with the technology. And so connecting those two is a valuable trait to have for sure. Having the idea is fun, man. Having the idea and knowing what it's going to do and seeing it in advance, it's such an important characteristic and knowing what the pain is and feeling how this thing is going to solve it, this idea that you have is going to solve. That's wonderful. But the hard part for that dreamer and that thinker is taking that, that energy and applying it into the real world through paper and a pencil or through, you know, even if you want to stay technical, Google and writing out and being very detailed about what's going to happen through this journey that the customer is going to go through. And, you know, if they, if they focused on bringing that to fruition, not the how, but the what and the why, the result of that, what's going to happen, why is it there and the result? Yeah, it's going to help with communication. So that's, that's part of my job is to ask those questions and dig into it. And then I think the visual design helps that more creative person go, Oh, this needs to go here, here, here, here. So it clears some of the ambiguity. So that's, that's our process we've seen work well. And yeah. Yeah. That, that visual side, that's why I've been a huge fan for years of that, like the clickable demo, like you mentioned, where you, you know, you sort of take that picture and then you put it into something where it may not have a whole lot of real, but it's like, now I can, I can click on stuff. I can move stuff a little bit. I can see it as it will look like on the computer and not just a, you know, something scratched down on a sheet of paper. And then it is amazing how informative that is to everybody. It's like, Oh, Hey, this is sort of where we're going. And sometimes you'll have somebody that's like, wow, the vision I had is nowhere close to that. And that's a good thing. Or sometimes it's a bad thing. You know, someone's like, Oh wait, no, we've got to do something completely different. Or you put it in front of your face and there's sometimes there's those ideas that are, they're awesome. You know, it's like, to me, it's usually the, you know, the thought of, you know, you're out drinking with friends and you have this brilliant idea. And the next day you're like, that was not that bright, but there's pieces of it. And so you have that clickable demo that now you can say, Oh, wait a minute. This wasn't exactly, this isn't going to work in reality, but you know, we can tweak here, we can tweak there. And the next thing you know, now we've, we have made the steps we need to get to that solution. Yeah. And like on that topic, like I didn't know how to use some of these tools when I first start started, but out of necessity and out of desire to improve on my ability to communicate and bring something to life. I paid even money for that. I paid a buddy of mine, I think it was last year, two years ago. I really wanted to learn how to use Figma, which is a prototyping tool that's free, at least for the base level package, or at least it used to be. And he, you know, for 500 bucks, he showed me this. He's a UI UX designer, he's a really sharp guy. He showed me just some of the basics that I would need or a guy like me in my position would need to be able to help explain a feature or help draw something out outside of just pen and paper. Not really the best drawer, but you know, there's tools like that that you can use. There's no code software tools out there that you could pay for and piece something together. There's, you can print out on regular paper, the user interface of an iPhone and start drawing on that blank sort of user interface on a printed out piece of paper. There's a Figma, there's Adobe XD, different tools that you can use to prototype or design or wireframe. And, you know, your YouTube video away or question away from figuring out how to do that. And it's, you know, skills, skills are only going to help you. It's a good personal investment, in my opinion. Oh, very much so. And I like the word investment there as it is, you're spending some time or money, but you are going to get something back for it. You know, there is a return on investment that you're going to get out of that. Yeah. Knowing how to do stuff is cool. I mean, it's very helpful. Save you some money. So now your solution is, TrueFans is both basically like a delivery platform and a content creation platform, correct? Is it you have both of those pieces or? Yeah, to an extent. Yeah. It's more so you bring your content there. And, you know, the type of content you bring as a creator should be your most valuable stuff to your audience. You're segmenting your existing audience from free viewers to paying members, paying subscribers, TrueFans. These are your people that, you know, don't just hit the like button, that don't just comment on your stuff, but they're actually, you know, they want to see you win and they're in on your mission. They're your community, your tribe. And that's who would subscribe and join you inside of your TrueFans platform. So a bunch of different use cases on how a creator would segment their content, depending on what type of creator it is. So like, for example, we're on a podcast now, right, Rob? And you and I had a conversation before this even started, some cool stuff. So if you had a TrueFans channel, one thing that you could potentially sell is a series of questions before the podcast even starts. And then you share the rest of the podcast, like 90% of it out to your audience and let them know, hey, as always, if you want to hear the last five questions where I go deep with, you know, whoever the guest is, and maybe it's a series of questions like they're really interested in, that could be something that's enticing to make somebody want to join you. And then of course, you know, know that their funds are going towards your business and supporting the channel and supporting, you know, your way of life. And that's really all it is. It's just, you know, multiply that use case across hundreds, if not thousands of different niches of creators, whether they're fitness influencers, educators, models. Yeah, musicians, philanthropic companies, there's so many different people that could benefit from that running a community. And that is where we will pause. Don't worry, we're coming back. We have a part two, we will wrap up our conversation with Tim. We're going to continue to talk about how he got there. What were the thoughts? What are some of the seeds that got these things going as we go further into this conversation? So again, as always, it seems like when we're talking to these people, great time to have your pencil and paper note taking a device or application, because there's some really good ideas that come out of these things, hopefully that will help you as you're building your solutions for your company, your boss, or whoever it happens to be. That being said, it's time to get out there and work on those solutions to go. So go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nor podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success. Please check out school.develop-a-nor.com. That is where we are starting to pour a lot of our content. We've taken the lessons, the things that we've learned, all of the things that make you a better developer, and we're putting it there. We have a range of courses from free short courses up to full paid boot camps. All of these include a number of things to help you get better, including templates, quick references, and other things that make us all better developers.