A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
He hit $40M ARR, exited for over $100M—& raised only $1.5M. Here's how | Ian MacKinnon, Co-Founder of Later.com
In 2014, Ian launched a simple product: it let social media marketers buffer Instagram posts. It was originally a hackathon project. But it quickly gained users. So he and his co-founders went all in.
They raised just one small seed round. His main competitor, HootSuite, raised over $300M. In spite of that, he built a $40M ARR business that sold for well over $100M.
Here's the story of how it all happened. And why there's an option besides bootstrapping and raising round after round: it's called the one & done.
Why you should listen:
- Why you won't know if people love your product until you charge them.
- How to use content marketing to drive inbound traffic.
- How user experience can be a big differentiator even in a competitive market.
- What the acquisition process is like and why it often drags on.
Keywords
startup, product market fit, user feedback, monetization, content marketing, growth strategies, social media management, entrepreneurship, user acquisition, pricing strategy, startup, growth, competition, user experience, influencer marketing, acquisition, exit process, founder advice
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:03:05) "Ian's dumb ideas"
(00:07:27) Hackathons
(00:10:41) Finding a market
(00:13:30) Early feedback
(00:17:50) The growth curve
(00:21:08) Turning on pricing
(00:26:35) A seed strapper
(00:31:58) Focusing on small and medium businesses
(00:38:24) Being well positioned
(00:43:19) Bough by private equity
(00:47:50) Relief
(00:50:59) A new project and a piece of advice
Ian MacKinnon (00:00)
We turned on the pricing and man people were mad. Some people were like it's always the vocal people extremely upset that we are now charging for the tool leaves for business and they're saying I'm never going to pay for it. And we'll think if you're complaining about something that you're not going to pay for your opinion doesn't matter because the worst thing you can do is stop being a free user. Because word of mouth just doesn't work like people just don't sit around talking about what apps they use and what cool tools. Maybe they do, but it's not at a rate that you can really model and derive some success from. need to have better channels than we launched big on product hunt and then word of mouth spread from there. That has worked well once with Instagram itself, and that's probably about it. From a technical perspective, keeping it simple. lot of I see a lot of like technical founders wanting to do microservices and all these things that you do much later, early on thinking that will help. I've never regretted keeping things simple in terms of having continuous delivery. Like there should be one button that takes your software and puts it out of production every single time. We, never regretted doing that later. It allowed us to go so fast.
Pablo Srugo (1:05)
Welcome to the product market fit show brought to you by Mistral, a seed stage firm based in Canada. I'm Pablo. I'm a founder turned VC. My goal is to help early stage founders like you find product market fit.
Well, Ian, welcome to the show.
Ian MacKinnon (1:24)
Thanks for having me. You started, I guess, later.com 2014. Instagram was what, like two years after getting bought that massive like billion dollar deal?
Ian MacKinnon (1:34)
Yeah, 2012. I remember people being upset that Facebook bought Instagram. They were they were mad like it was their money that was being spent and then it turns out to be one of the most successful acquisitions of all time.
Pablo Srugo (1:45)
People get mad online, man. People just get mad online. I don't know what it is, but it's just, you know, I post a lot of LinkedIn. It's just inevitable. Someone will find like anything like anything on anything to complain. It's pretty incredible.
Ian MacKinnon (1:58)
As a founder, I can also kind of get hating on a team that was 12 people that got acquired for a billion dollars. So I mean, I'll admit -, yeah, envy there. that's what a lot of it was because like 12 people! You got away with hiring a grand total of 10 people above the two founders and got a billion dollar exit!
Pablo Srugo (2:18)
For what it's worth, think Zuck and maybe a few people close to the deal are the only people in the world where they thought it made sense. know, there were like crazy amounts, right? But I think most people like me probably like you would have said, or this is absurd. I mean, no revenue. Like you said, 12 people a year and a half or so after founding. Just makes no sense. Now it's worth Few hundred billion dollars. So not bad.
Ian MacKinnon (2:39)
at the time Facebook's market cap was still something high. And I remember if you look at it from the lens of it was like a single digit percent of their market cap to take out their biggest existential threat. Through that lens, it does also kind of make sense. So maybe walk me back to that, to that time, like just curious on the, the origin story of, what later was, but maybe before that, how do you get into that? where does it start from?
Ian MacKinnon (3:04)
It starts from having a little note on my iPhone called Ian's dumb ideas and I recommend everyone have this because everyone gets startup ideas all the time and 90 % of them are going to be utter crap and that's fine. But the trick is you write it down and you'll probably know within 48 hours if this is just a dumb thing that I wrote down when I was drinking or just in you know got too convinced by someone who was too excited at a conference or something. The trick is to write them down.
Pablo Srugo (3:31)
Do you still have it?
Ian MacKinnon (3:33)
I still have it, although I did clear it out. I recently because I was like you know as I'm starting to something new about okay I got to focus on the new thing and not you know so you know what it's like it's awesome having ideas and buying domains it sucks actually building it. So I had to let go of some dot coms pretty recently idea I had was I had heard you know so this is like in twenty thirteen you know Instagram is just starting to get big is getting some commercial interest.
And at the time it did not have any kind of a API especially that would allow you to publish content to it. And I had heard marketers complain about how annoying it is to get content in there. And I had this idea of like well what’s the next best thing. And really we're just sending a push notification to your phone to some app that preloaded everything ready to go. So it was at least like two clicks to publish at a time. So really a glorified reminder service.
Pablo Srugo (4:27)
So this is, just for context, those not in the marketing world, this is- at that time, guess it'd be like maybe what Facebook and Twitter where you'd set up your posts a week in advance, two weeks in advance, whatever it is, and they just go out on a schedule.
Ian MacKinnon (4:38)
People were used to using existing tools like Buffer and Hootsuite and just had to accept that if you wanted to get content into Instagram, you had to go native on the mobile app. But they did have an in-app hook that allowed one app to send content to another. So our whole thing was, well, what if we send a push notification, load it just in time, you can still schedule it on the web and at least that kind of friction of getting content from your photographer or whomever and getting it into a device to publish. We can at least make that flow as easy as possible. Again, this is back in 2013.
Pablo Srugo (5:10)
You'd go on the web, you'd load it up just like anything else, but then when the time came, you'd get a push notification on your phone which, would open up the IG app?
Ian MacKinnon (5:17)
No, well, it’d open up our app, download, then kick over to and also have your caption copy to the clipboard. So you get pasted in. it just removed as much friction as was possible. And it sat in a note called Ian's dumb startup ideas for a long time until the fall when the founding team were entering a hackathon together and we were just kind of kicking ideas around what to make. And I was like going through my notebook of my ideas came across that one. And my co-founder, Matt, said, no, this is the one. And he kind of knew like how bad the problem was for marketers trying to get content into Instagram, because everyone knew this was again, dating ourselves 2013 Instagram was new and hip so we built it at a hackathon and then it kind of just went from there.
Pablo Srugo (6:03)
Was this normal for you like was this your first startup or were you used to just building things on weekends and this one just happened to take off.
Ian MacKinnon (6:10)
This was not my first startup. at the time we were actually all working at other startups as founders in some cases the I've always loved tinkering and building. I’m a software developer through and through. I've made dumb apps. I've made, you know, fun apps. I've always loved hackathons, especially back then. I like kind of seeing how quickly you can make things because all too often in a job you learn how to make software at a large scale, you know, especially if you're working at a FAANG company or something. But then you turn around and try and like, OK, make an iPhone app. You realize how tricky it can actually be to make just a smaller piece of software. There's really a different set of rules because there's just certain things that you don't have to consider. Like when I was working at SAP, Anytime that I wanted to use a third party library open source, it had to be approved by the legal team. So when you put people in that and that's just a different way of making software. And I think overall the industry has gotten a lot better since then, but still there's something to be said of, okay, how quickly can you throw up an app?
Pablo Srugo (7:12)
There's also, mean, the flip side is you also have so much infrastructure that you rely on so many other things going on. And then when you're like truly you in a blank canvas, you start from scratch is a different feeling.
Ian MacKinnon (7:21)
And you know when you have to have your encoding standards and there's no one telling you you have to write tests but there's something magical about doing that so I really like hackathons. We wanted to this one that we entered was very much can you be a startup. This was the best idea that we had that seemed like it was addressing a problem that some group of users had because other startups that I had done kind of had that problem where they were going for too wide a market and didn't really speak to anyone deeply. And the best piece of advice I always give to young entrepreneurs is don't try and make a lot of people happy a little bit. Try and make a small number of people utter fanatics about your product. It's a lot easier to increase the number of people who like your product than it is to make people care more. You know, you're better off having a group of fanatics and spreading out than spreading down.
Pablo Srugo (8:12)
Well, and the other thing too, which is interesting at least in this case, we'll talk more later, but sometimes you can overthink things. I wonder if, you know, in this case it’s a hackathons., Hey, we've gotta build something. This is one of the cool ideas we have. Let's just go ahead and do it. And things, you know, and we'll talk about how things move from there. But like, you know, if you had started more like, let's create like a billion dollar company, right. And then you kind of overthought things you would probably say to yourself, well, this is a cool idea, but like who's going to do it? Buffer's going to do it. Instagram's going to do it. whatever. Like there's no opportunity here and maybe move on to the next thing. At least that's my assumption from the answer.
Ian MacKinnon (8:42)
I'm convinced no billion dollar idea looks like a billion dollar idea on zero like who is going to know that crawling a bunch of profiles at Harvard and making a directory of people was going to turn into a trillion dollar company like you just you an element of chaos that's going to make sure nothing clear is going to get to unicorn status.
Pablo Srugo (9:05)
So you build this at a hackathon and then what happens? do you launch it that weekend?
Ian MacKinnon (9:11)
We came pretty close but unfortunately especially then getting something into the app store does take some time and iteration and that's actually good for you. as much as you can have a good demo in a weekend having a product that's ready to be used by a consumer is going to take a little bit longer not that long but when you're having you know working on another company and juggling that with other things but we did have a designer on our founding team which really helped a lot of things that would otherwise be developer designed. One of the things that we always got complimented on was how good Later looked. Even back then it was called LaterGram before we rebranded it because before someone told us to it really was kind of the spring of 2014 when we really started to launch. But through the winter we could do things like beta test with people. And the great thing about the app store is that you can roll out by country. We had it rolled out in Canada long before the US precisely so everyone we know could try it beta tested we can get feedback we would do that we'll let a new version add a few more countries but it was really the spring before we got to the US with our 1.0 launch because until something is launched there it might as well not exist so you can go through all of Apple's various you know beta schemes or you just launch Canada only and no one's gonna take notice of it anyway unless you tell them. So we have this great beta testable country here.
Pablo Srugo (10:33)
How'd you get those early users? Was it like friends, people you knew, or did it kind of start spreading on its own?
Ian MacKinnon (10:40)
An interesting thing we, and this is very much a product of 2013, 2014, was we could tell by using various Google ad tools that a lot of people were searching for schedule Instagram posts and there was not a lot of competition for those search terms like there was wasn't a really good you had some products that were straight up hacking the API you had people talking about how it doesn't exist and what that really was able to tell us was that there was a market for something here that I'm scheduling post that you know there was clearly a need for it and the lack of an Instagram API meant no one could really do it at the time. The question for us then just became is our little kind of halfway solution going to solve a problem for a big enough market. So we had no problem getting sign ups. had 20,000 sign ups ahead of launch. The question was, they going to accept our product for what it is? The main conceit being it doesn't publish automatically. But we were able to get those search terms of schedule Instagram posts quite quickly. So we always had a very good Google inbound that led us to have such a large wait list ahead of when we launched.
Pablo Srugo (11:50)
So you kind of just leveraged SEO basically to get set up to get the wait list going?
Ian MacKinnon (11:55)
And this is another thing I tell entrepreneurs is that how are people going to find your product? Google is a great front door. If people are searching- if you're trying to get into a space where a lot of people are already owning the words, the search terms, it's highly optimized. You're to have a hard time breaking into that. But if you're early into a specific area, it kind of lets you know that you're not going to have as stiff a competition because word of mouth just doesn't work like people just don't sit around talking about what apps they use, what cool tools like. And maybe they do, but it's not at a rate that you can really model and drive some success from. You need to have better channels than we launched big on product hunt and then word of mouth spread from there. That has worked well once with Instagram itself, and that's probably about it.
Pablo Srugo (12:38)
Yeah. I mean, there's gotta be something viral, something social, some reason for people to talk about your thing. Like just think about the things that you talk about and the B2B tools that you use at your work. You know what mean? Like it just not until it's big enough and then it takes on the life of its own.
Ian MacKinnon (12:54)
I do want to meet the person who's like, you know what? I got the best ETL tool from the sales guy who reached out. And let me tell you all like-- that just doesn't happen. people talk about dating apps and that's about it. Like, you know, people will advertise for free when there's sex involved and that's about it or probably any of the other deadly sins. But it just people don't talk about workflow optimizations.
Pablo Srugo (13:17)
So by the way, I'm curious, like as you're doing this beta on the one hand, it sounds like a pretty simple app, simple product. As you said very niche, very focused. What sort of feedback were you actually getting besides like bugs, Hey, this broke that broke, whatever. do you remember any sort of insights you got in those early days that actually like made a difference in terms of how good your product was?
Ian MacKinnon (13:36)
The big one was why didn't it automatically post? The big thing we had to learn was that people don't read. in our onboarding there were three touch points where we made it clear that this doesn't post automatically. The key use point is schedule on the web. We'll get it to your phone just in time. Three points in on-board and still that was our biggest support request. We were just that was just the main conceit of the product and that held until we got the auto publish API came through. The other thing that we found very interesting was people were having a lot of problems because they were trying to manage multiple Instagram accounts at one time with it. Which at the time you couldn't actually flip between Instagram accounts on your app. Like you actually had to log in and log out, log in and log out. And our app only allowed you to do it to one account at a time early on. And that was when we learned like people were going through the painstaking process of “I've got a scheduler, I've got a schedule post, I have to log in to the correct Later account, then the correct Instagram account. And those were the hoops that they were going through in order to do this. And that was kind of another validation that people have this problem so bad.
they will go through these ridiculous hoops in order to help. And we were always proud of like, okay, we are helping a small group of people, social media managers who have to publish to Instagram content multiple times a day who have this problem so badly. They are doing these ridiculous things. And we then added the ability to have multiple profiles. And that was kind of when we started to realize like, okay, people are using this. We can start charging for it in that way for business purposes. But you just find that people were just-. We thought this is such a simple product. How can anyone use this in a way that we haven't thought? But until you kind of get these people to use it, it was actually a bug they were reporting, but it was because they had to log out and back in. It was this big. And it wasn't until we kind of drilled down, you're managing multiple accounts with this. And now we didn't really realize that social media managers did that because we thought your company, you hire social media manager. They use it for their brand account. But we didn't realize a lot of little companies will hire social media managers and those blur kind of freelance juggling multiple clients so we had to also work for someone those people could use.
Pablo Srugo (15:46)
What do you think about like the first thing you said there I think for me is really interesting- you told people three different ways that you know this is not going to post for you and yet that was the number one request like what does that tell you about customer user psychology you know like in terms of a broader lesson that you share with other people or yourself now that you build new products.
Ian MacKinnon (16:06)
We were not a newcomer to the social media management game there was as I said Buffer and so many others and others even more the way they had kind of trained these users to do this that this is how this goes he were just used to this happening and also we quickly realized that our customers weren't really cognizant of our relationship with meta Twitter is like they just wanted it to work that you know they request things like one of the frustrations of working in this kind of a platform situation is you get requests from users but You know, it might be for some of that's just not possible given the API limitations, but they're still going to be upset. And every now and then you get some other smaller company that's literally hacking the API to give those features. And you have to say like, no, like it, there's a lot of nuance. And when you're in between those, you kind of have to educate your customers about that. And as you're growing, it can get a little frustrating because you educate one group. And then if you're growing well, you have enough new people who are encountering those same issues and you have to onboard them. And by the way, they're not going to read all that well. They're, you know, they're going to want, they're just going to have certain expectations given what other players in the industry are doing.
Pablo Srugo (17:18)
Yeah. I think that makes sense. I think for me, at the end of the day, you said it right. people just want things to work. Like they just don't care about the nuances. They don't care about how hard things are. They don't care. Like what's behind the scenes is just like, does it work? It’s that simple? Like that's it.
Ian MacKinnon (17:32)
As was famously said, they care about their problems, not your solution. Like that's what's interesting to them. It's not, you know, this bespoke thing you made. Like no one cares that you spent months and months working on this thing. Sweat, heart, and tears. They care about your own problems and no one's ever going to be as precious about your software as you are.
Pablo Srugo (17:50)
So walk me through maybe like the growth curve. Like how quickly did you get to hundred users, thousand users, et cetera?
Ian MacKinnon (17:56)
So we launched in the spring of 2014, by the beginning of the summer. We hit about a hundred daily active users which you know doesn't seem like a lot of the time like I had a lot previous companies that didn't have that and when you have a hundred people you've never met using a product you made every single day for their jobs you know if you got something like how big it's going to get is there but at least you are making something that people are actively logging into because I think the default state for most apps are no users and no use and you know they're not going to find it they're not going to use it they don't like it and that’s a big thing you have to overcome. So having a hundred daily actives, know, product market fit’s kind of a nebulous concept, but I knew we were on to something
Pablo Srugo (18:41)
And those are free to be clear, free users?
Ian MacKinnon (18:43)
yeah. They were free. But even getting people to do things for free, you'd be amazed how hard that can be. especially when you're dealing with something like a workflow where people are fine paying for stuff. so through the summer we were growing and by the end of the summer, I feel like we were at about a thousand daily active users.
So in about a three month span we grew like that. I mean, we were growing like 10 percent a week. Like, my God! like those were just, you know, having a product that's growing 10 percent a week is just really not granted. You're starting from 100. So the math is pretty-
Pablo Srugo (19:13)
But still, it was all inbound through SEO?
Ian MacKinnon (19:15)
through SEO. We started the blog. Content marketing became a very important thing. Actually, at that point, we hadn’t been blogging yet, but we knew that that was going to be the later on. The blog was going to be our big content but through that summer yeah I was mostly just SEO rolling out word of mouth we got that we hadn't really started the marketing levers just yet and it was in the fall that when we were realizing you know keep in mind we're still part time on this we're working on other companies that just aren't going as well we're having to kind of figure out how we're gonna do this and we were like well if we're commit to it I want to make sure this problem that we're solving something people really care about. way back in the day I was in this startup accelerator. and was called grow lab in Vancouver and Dan Martell was one of the advisors. And this is before Dan Martell is like what he is now. and the best piece of advice I got from him out of that was you get the real feedback after you ask for five bucks, like whatever you're making, whatever you're building, once you ask for money, then people start talking about it seriously. And so taking that advice, it was okay. Well, let's charge for money. Let's just charge something arbitrary, make sure people care about this enough. Like the problem that we're solving is worth something. So I think we were-
Pablo Srugo (20:27)
And they're set up like a freemium or something, or you just told everyone, you have to pay now.
Ian MacKinnon (20:31)
It was a freemium, but it was very much if you were using it for your job, you're going to be paying 20 bucks a month. So which actually triggers this whole thing, because in order to charge money to set up Stripe, you have to have a bank account, for a bank account, you have to have be incorporated for anyone listening for the love of God. Don't put money into your personal account from that from your company. That just is a mess. Don't ever do that. So you are right. Get your incorporation. And now we're incorporating with decide, hey, what are we as a founding team? It triggers this whole thing. But around the time we had a potential angel investor who found us. So all these things were kind of come together like, let's now make this a real thing. Also, the cost for hosting and all the tools that you use are, you know, starting to pile up. So let's just make sure this is real. We turned on the pricing and man people were mad some people were like it's always the vocal people extremely upset that we are now charging for this tool they use is for business and they're saying I'm never going to pay for it and one thing is you're complaining about something that you're not going to pay for your opinion doesn't matter because the worst thing you can do is stop being a free user but it also really sorts out who's using it for you know use it is not and we got I mean we had in that first month 20k of MRR
Pablo Srugo (21:45)
oh wow
Ian MacKinnon (21:46)
when you're all part-time founders that is more money than God has. when you have no salary expenses and your hosting costs all in there are like a thousand bucks a month you're just ready to make it rain
Pablo Srugo (22:00)
and it's funny how that stuff is so relative like I'll never forget when we were early days at GymTrack my last startup and we were talking about fundraising and I remember Lee my co-founder saying dude if we had a million dollars we could do anything literally and that was like it was believable ,It's true. Like that's all you need, you know, and then you raise a million or you get to it….
Ian MacKinnon (22:23)
Yeah, well, the problem with raising is you kind of set different expectations. If you're an indie dev, 20K a month, I think that's the standard for all these built in public guys. You know, like at that point you can quit your job look comfortably and you can live off of that, do it full time. And that's the dream. But we have that. But you'd be amazed what you get used to. And then you're just always chasing growth. And all of sudden you're hiring people and they're taking up that revenue and this is what you dream to do as an entrepreneur.
Pablo Srugo (22:50)
Did you raise then that round around then?
Ian MacKinnon (22:53)
Right. Like how we raised an angel round with a safer, I don't think safe-
Pablo Srugo (22:59)
How much did you raise?
Ian MacKinnon (23:00)
I think it was only like $200,000. But what was interesting, it was from a firm called Rocket ship BC and they found us. So they kind of model themselves as like a quantitative venture capitalist. So they just found us probably from producthunt beta list or something and they had some tool that was able to show that they kind of knew our growth trajectory better than we did and they were really interested in investing and they definitely wrote a check before it was almost cases where they were writing a check before the company existed. We had to incorporate it and get it all kind came together in the fall of 2014 and then you know we're off to the races we realize they're like okay this is starting to go wrapped up any other project we were working on the founding team went full time on this because we were like if we're not even marketing.
You know, and this is going like this. Truth is, we are marketing. We were doing SEO. A lot of people say like, I've done no marketing. It's like a lot of times they just be you've done no paid marketing. And you know, there's a certain respect, I think devs don't have enough respect for marketing
Pablo Srugo (23:55)
definitely not.
Ian MacKinnon (23:56)
It is important in lot in physio. you have to market everything. I'm constantly having to market things. It's just in different ways. Just might not be even paid advertising, but that's not even necessarily the best way of doing it because what we found like I said was the cut the blog was one of our best ways of bringing the right audience in because you'd be searching for something and you know … my life for so many years was telling people I work at Later and people telling me I love your blog because I'm like cool but you know there's also an app yeah yeah that's great but the blog is amazing
Pablo Srugo (24:31)
Tell me more about the blog then like how wide did you guys cast a net I assume it was around social media or something I don't know what was the blog?
Ian MacKinnon (24:40)
Yeah, I was on social media and but they were really good at if you were searching for how to do something online making sure a Later blog article was there and up to date and they were just relevant like we were playing with TikTok back in 2020. that was fun back then because TikTok was kind of the unserious one they even let me make some TikToks and for a hot second. I what my concept idea was like the best performing TikTok on the Later TikTok feed and the idea that an engineer is running it... I was just an asshole around that time but then I got supplanted pretty quickly because you know
Pablo Srugo (25:14)
Do you remember maybe back in those early days like you know 2014 15 what some of your biggest blogs were? were there any that just like blew up or was just like consistent?
Ian MacKinnon (25:23)
I think there's a consistent. I'm sure there was a few that blew up but I think it's just the consistency and the number of times I'd be searching for something to learn about a socially concept and then get a Later article as number one .. You start to understand it. And like I know the people who wrote it, they were all really talented social media folks who've gone on to even bigger and better things or still there. Like it's always been a great way to bring in his content marketing. I think a lot gets slapped on is how much people are still using Google to find things and you can pay to be at the top. And sometimes it's more authentic to have content there nudging the people. Now I think enough people do that. It also kind of contributes to Google being what it is now, where it's almost really hard to get an unbiased answer to stuff from, you know, like people now add the word Reddit in there, but at the time, especially it was really good to get people still is for that matter, but it gets a very competitive once you're in a more mature market.
Pablo Srugo (26:20)
and walk me through this. I know you did like this kind of one and done fundraising, right? Like you can go full bootstrap, not raise a dollar. You can go down the venture train. You did something in the middle, right? Which is you raise a little bit of money once and then you were done. Was it just that 200 K or did you add a bit more to that?
Ian MacKinnon (26:35)
That 200 K was before there was an angel round and a seed round was in the summer of 2015. We did 1.3 million, so the term I've heard that I like is a seed strapper. You're not bootstrapping. You're getting one round. I heard that and thought that describes it pretty well and we were always profitable. We never really touched that money, but it was really good to have because you know some months you know we talked about the incumbents. They started taking our idea into their own products pretty quickly once we proved it out. And when that happened, we had one month where we were just flat towards the end of 2015.
Pablo Srugo (27:11)
where were you at revenue wise? Like you did 20 K. When did you launch? Like when did you do that paid thing? Twenty K was fall within late 2014?
Ian MacKinnon (27:15)
fall 2014. by late 2015, early 2016. So around then we hit one million ARR obviously that being the big day.
Pablo Srugo (27:26)
So let’s call it a year after monetizing. You hit a million ARR ish.
Ian MacKinnon (27:29)
Yeah.
Pablo Srugo (27:30)
It’s really quite a ramp.
Ian MacKinnon (27:31)
Yes,it is. But then you get used to how quickly, especially during the good time when, you know, we were definitely a benefit of the pandemic, you know, who had that kind of growth trajectories as more marketing's building online that there was a time-
Pablo Srugo (27:46)
But that was way later. Like we're talking that was 2015. Did it keep going up pretty steadily from one to three to nine sort of thing? Or what was the kind of ?
Ian MacKinnon (27:54)
It did. Except for when we had, you know, Hootsuite launched their competitive product , their competitor offering. Then we were flat and it was really nice to have that money that we raised then just because it was this nice little cushion of but then you know the people who are going to leave because of that left and we continued on our growth trajectory curve.
Pablo Srugo (28:12)
But also I’ll let you dive on that because that to me is actually quite fascinating like first of all you must have expected that at some point Hootsuite or buffer whoever was going to-
Ian MacKinnon (28:20)
We really didn't because the whole push notification thing was just so different and so our whole product was around this non-standard publishing flow that we couldn't think from a product perspective, why would you Sully your nice API? Like why do you want the pain of having to educate your users about this flow the way we did? Like that was our whole thing. this is how we were making a name for ourselves in an already mature market.
Pablo Srugo (28:48)
But even then you must have, you must've thought, okay, if not that then at least Instagram at some point will polish it, have an API just like anything else. then they'll do it.
Ian MacKinnon (28:56)
Which they did. We were never worried too much about Instagram doing it because you know, as long as we had access to it, it was still going to be there. but we didn't think it was going to happen. It did. We got a little worried and then it turned out to be, you know, I know some people say, don't worry about your competition, but it's kind of impossible to not to because they are in a competitive space and true. There's more room to run than you might think. And you know, again, the company didn't die that day. It just had a flat month,
Pablo Srugo (29:25)
but that was the one month. That was the impact? One month flat? OK.
Ian MacKinnon (29:30)
But when you are used to crazy growth, a flat month, you're like, this is the end. I'm gonna have to go get a job. You know, enough of this fantasy land startup business But yeah
Pablo Srugo (29:41)
Well, how do you explain it? Looking back, because like Hootsuite, let's say, and you guys in the same city, so like Hootsuite was kind of the behavior like you're in the same city . They've got all the forms. Plus like from a user perspective, if you're posting on Instagram, you're probably posting on Facebook, Twitter, whatever. So you already have a Hootsuite account. it's like, why am I paying for two things? Like there's so much, there's so many theoretical reasons why that should be the death of you sort of thing. It was just one, how do you explain it looking back?
Ian MacKinnon (30:06)
And I remember in the time I could come up with dozens of reasons why we are so dead. but cause yeah, like why would you pay for both? We were charging a premium. You can just have it done there..turns out there are just people who didn't like that particular product. It's not like they had a monopoly in the market anyway. The other players came out and all because once they did it everyone else had to as well. So buffer had a similar offering. So you know it was definitely affected some of our growth. But this is the nature of how things were. if you have some that is proving out, some larger company is going to do it. We thought we were different enough that it would really make their products too janky to do that. But It turns out that people really liked our UX. People really like how we did things and there's something to be said about designing a product that was image and video first because if you looked at buffer and Hootsuite, especially back then, they were very much designed for a Twitter centric world. You know, everything is very tech space. Media is not the first class citizen where our product was very much media is the first class citizen. Let's bet on that and that's where the future is going to go and it's absolutely what happened. And you know, this is a big bet to make back in 2015, but little do we know like 2015 2016 that was kind of the peak of Twitter anyway like you kind of flattened and then went down from there but there are just people who will not like whatever products you're competing with and there's still a market to be had there and you can differentiate your offering and it did make us think about like well where are we going to grow the product what are we going to focus on this is the very nature of competitive environments at least. better products for everyone
Pablo Srugo (31:38)
where do you go because that's the crazy part like this happens when you’re like a million in revenue, you get to 40 million, so there's like a lot of room to run from here. And yet you do that in this kind of pretty competitive, hard to differentiate environment. Like where do you start taking things after this first product hits product market fit?
Ian MacKinnon (31:58)
Pretty quickly you realize that a lot of our competitors, the larger ones, they were going for the enterprise market and that was just what they were going to focus on. They're going to leave the smaller ones like if we decide we're going to focus on that. So we intentionally never had any enterprise offerings precisely to focus on the small and medium business. And I know that seems like a small difference, you know, other things like we started adding support for Twitter, Facebook, and all the other ones are ourselves. We just became multi-platform again, focusing and just having better tooling. And early on, like one of the big friction points and something I was very proud of as a developer is that with Later when you uploaded an image, we could perform all the image manipulations in the browser. Again in 2015 this was a bigger deal than it is say now where everyone has the built in croppers and what you can do because you had to get to very specific aspect ratios in order to push with Instagram. But where that became useful is that when the publishing API came out it would enforce those in order to publish it. So what we meant is we could just you could upload auto crop and it just a faster process to get things in. Whereas other ones you had to do before you upload it. So just any point where you can remove friction you're going to delight users. keeping in mind that all your competitors are going to figure that out pretty soon. So you have to constantly be looking for like, where can we remove friction? Where can we make this easier? How can we make this better? And that's where product management becomes key, one develops a certain appreciation for product managers, especially good ones, they are really hard to find because if they can go out and have a good understanding of the pains that your users have, that's what really can make great companies.
Pablo Srugo (33:35)
It's interesting. It sounds like you're finding ways to- If you think about SMB as an enterprise, enterprise cares about security, they care about collaboration, they care about all these kind of like more overhead type things, whereas SMB cares about like easy to use, friction, simplicity. And it seems like that's where you are focused on. I'm still fascinated, I guess is the right word by the fact that you were able to turn that into such a meaningful business in spite of like... I mean, VCs are just so jaded, right? Like we're almost trained to be like, well, feature versus platform, like, you know, incumbents will just add this, you know, and the thing will go away. And, for what it's worth, we've seen it. Like we've seen companies that have like this type of product market fit, but then they flatten out at like 5 million or 10 million because the dynamic changes around them. But in your case, obviously that didn't happen.
Ian MacKinnon (34:28)
It did happen because back in 2018, the auto publishing API came out and pretty much all the existing platform players could have a better solution than what we had. Unfortunately, we were well positioned to adapt to that because we had all this tooling built in ready to go. But the market does change because eventually later on we can. This is kind of where we saw- closer to around the pandemic where we saw, you know, eventually we've reached not peak Instagram, but like, you know, we've gotten all the early adopters, people who are going to do this already use it. So this is where we kind of later eventually started moving into influencer marketing.
Pablo Srugo (35:02)
Walk me through like you’re at about a million end of 2015 by 2018 when this happens, how big, big is the company?
Ian MacKinnon (35:07)
By 2018. Ooh. So we have had like a million users by then. think March 2017 is when we hit a million users. Not that users is really that good a metric of anything because that's really a hundred million or one million signups. And we knew like not like most people signing up for us. We're not going to be, you know, you're going to get people personally wanting to schedule content. They're just not good fits for whatever. Because of my wide marketing net, you're going to get a lot of people who aren't good people to use your product by 2018. At that point, we're probably like 30 people, probably five million in ARR like this because we're very niche tool at this point where we are for, you know, marketers with a very specific visual focus. Yeah, we're like five mills, which again, seemed like so much at the time. But eventually we were at 40. You said we are 40 when we exited in 2022.
Pablo Srugo (35:57)
I mean, we focus mainly in private and if anything obviously at 5 million and now with all the competitive deniers, like that clearly is proven on that product, right? But what was the pivot to the influencer piece? What was that product?
Ian MacKinnon (36:07)
That was really just kind of the acquisition that happened. We knew that social media management was going to be really hard as a tool to exist on its own, to exist in because they're just, we talk about the platform issues, like the, you know, the great and worst thing about Later was its relationship with Instagram, like as Instagram was, you know, the next big thing we're attaching ourselves to that or incredible growth be through it. But we're always not the whim of whatever their policies are. Like I remember very clearly in June of 2018, we lost our API access because this was right after that whole Cambridge Analytica fallout where all they got really particular about users of their API being properly credentialed and verified which is understandable but they did that all apps all at once and due to some admin error they thought we weren't a proper business or we'd miss something, so they cut us off and that happened for three days and this is after the auto publishing API was out so we were basically a useless product for three days in June of 2018 and I basically didn't sleep those three days because the team that was helping us I think they were based in Singapore through Meta and so whenever we get responses to my ticket I had to be up to like get as much as I could. So eventually that happened but it was kind of this very stark reminder of when you're basically playing in someone else's playground. Anyway so that is to say like that was kind of when we knew like OK we're building this great tool but in terms of where how it can get bigger it need to be part of something bigger. And this is where we started to look through MMA options. That's where Maverick acquired us in 2022, with the influencer marketing plan.
Pablo Srugo (37:58)
But that's a big, I mean, there's a, four years between that time and 2022.
Ian MacKinnon (38:02)
Yeah, they happened pretty quick. because I was running the auto publishing API was there. And so we kind of met the expectations of what people were doing. Those were the great, those were the rocket years. Those were, you know, we were adding, there were months where we were adding a million in ARR, which is crazy to think about.
Pablo Srugo (38:17)
So even though you were worried about this kind of like being too tight to Instagram, you still kind of kept doing what you were doing right and Tony knows a Toe-in.
Ian MacKinnon (38:24)
Yeah. And then again, we were riding Instagram, its growth as a marketing tool. We just saw that crazy, you know, that was also when our marketing was firing at all cylinders. Like there just more people using it like we were in each tool. And another thing I tell entrepreneurs is that sometimes you to be in the right spot when some other factor happens like, you know, the best people in crypto were in or like. Companies in Web 3 and crypto were there before it went mainstream You know coinbase has been around for a long time before any of this happened So if you're kind of making it after the fact you not have the same opportunities But we were just in the right place So when you saw Instagram getting becoming this mainstream marketing tool We were well positioned already for that before it was a sure thing like we were starting this back in 2013 when it was just kind of teenagers For the most part and a few very avant-garde brands that were posting content on there But that was, you know, it takes a few years to go mainstream. That's what we just saw that crazy trajectory.
Pablo Srugo (39:23)
That was what? like five to 10, 10 to 20, 20 to 40 kind of thing?
Ian MacKinnon (39:26)
Yeah, it's, it's kind of a blur how quickly that all happened before the acquisition. that happened, and now we rolled in and of course, now the acquiring company got rebranded as Later. there's now Later influencer marketing and Later social media management and Later Link in bio all great tools. but yeah, it was kind of, cut the next thing about influencer marketing is that just, just a bigger space and, It just is kind of where things are going. You can kind of see SEO is getting more competitive. You can see paid advertising getting more competitive. It's just hard to find people. And influencer marketing is this whole other channel where it's useful to have tools like Later to make, you know, this great suite of products.
Pablo Srugo (40:06)
How did the acquisition happen? I know again, we talk mainly about PMF, but whenever there's an exit, I like to go deep on it because that is for most people kind of like the end goal, right? Some people want to go public and run this company forever, but most people at some point, imagine an exit event., just take us through that. How did, what was the process? How did that come about?
Ian MacKinnon (40:25)
If you imagine all the worst parts of dating and all the worst parts of home buying and put them together, that's what selling a company is like. you get ghosted so many times, you put yourself out there, you try and find someone who's a good partner.
Pablo Srugo (40:40)
Did you have a broker? you had an outbound process?
Ian MacKinnon (40:42)
Yes. It wasn't a big bank, but it was, you know, we had, know, as I call the real estate agent trying to help. So I think it was a two year process from beginning to end. Now, granted, that was COVID through COVID and which was just a crazy time to think about trying to do this. But because, we knew this, we had strategic, we had private equity companies, every little sin your company has ever committed is out. if you've ever gone through a due diligence process, you kind of realize how everything you need to do is documented and needs to be documented. You get asked about data breaches. Have you ever had to do that like we had an issue where we had security with a credential stuffing attacks against us buffer had something similar but we kind of caught it before any Later users were spewing out pro-russian propaganda through their accounts like buffer had that problem at the beginning of the Ukraine war. But like those are all the things but we disclose that to our users like the one who had like accounts compromised because they were using passwords. So we kind of had to disclose that to our users like hey go you know actually said We reset your passwords, but we can tell a similar threat actor did something to buffers when I reached out to them when they were going through that. But we had to disclose all those little things we did. Every employee termination that didn't go quite right, like those all have to come out. So I think the big thing you have to get anyone listening to some of the due diligence process is every contract you ever sign, make sure you have that like some folder somewhere where everything gets stored. Every little piece of information, every disgruntled employee. You have to have documentation for everything is you have to have it out there. Like if someone's going to acquire you and spend just ungodly sums of money, they're going to want to know what they're buying. You have to just put it all out there. So I remember like every piece of open source software we use has to be disclosed. They want to ensure that it's all properly licensed, which made me understand why SAP was so particular about --- But they went crazy like, come on, it's an MIT license. It's fine.
Pablo Srugo (42:39)
So in terms of those two years, you're obviously meeting different prospective buyers. does this mix of this- cause it was a P firm and another kind of late stage startup that ended up, they ended up merging with like, how did that, how did that come about?
Ian MacKinnon (42:55)
they, so some of the ventures just had an interest in us. They already were interested in Maverick and they thought we would be, Later would be a good bolt on for it. You see that a lot in the private equity. think a lot of entrepreneurs don't really realize like how many companies get acquired by private equity.
Everyone envisions like, okay, either I'm going to go public or
Pablo Srugo (43:17)
Google. Yeah.
Ian MacKinnon (43:19)
Yes. In the, in the parlance, a strategic buys you, but there's also the other option, which is a private equity company buys you and rolls you into something they're trying to make bigger. And that was the case with us where they, you know, the focus was going to be on influencer marketing. And that seemed like a good idea like we said, we need to be a social media management. You'll need to be sparse, weighing bigger. And this was definitely a good fit for that reason.
Pablo Srugo (43:39)
And so was it like an equity equity buyer or part cash part equity?
Ian MacKinnon (43:42)
Both. A bit of both. Yeah.
Pablo Srugo (43:46)
OK. What was like the range ultimately that you guys got bought for?
Ian MacKinnon (43:49)
Enough that I got Fuck You money out of it. I think it's pretty public. if you Google you can get the number and figure it out. no one ever told me I wasn't supposed to tell anyone but everyone gets so cagey about those numbers.
Pablo Srugo (44:02)
So we'll say over nine figures I guess at 40 million ARR you don’t have to say
Ian MacKinnon (44:07)
yes. Yeah yeah yeah. Yeah,
Pablo Srugo (44:12)
A really good one, especially for this kind of one and done seed strapper. You know, because one thing when you go out and raise 50 million, 100 million and then the bar goes up. But if you raise like one round, you know, a couple million bucks and you exit, frankly, for anything above like 20, 30 million, you're doing well. Anything about 100 million, you're, know, you're laughing.
Ian MacKinnon (44:31)
Yeah. And this is I think a lot of people have this idea that I can't start a company until I've raised money. And in software, that's just not really true, especially if you can make it yourselves. Like now on the angel investing side, see companies that are, you know, I'm getting pitched or some syndicate I'm part of and they're talking about like, I'm one of these outsource developers. I'm like, if you do that, you know, you have a cost associated with your core product where if you just have a developer who's on your founding team, kind of working for sweat equity, you can really do pretty well. You don't need to raise. Like you can get really far just with your own time. which isn’t true in a lot of other industries. can't really have a startup oil drilling company with just intellectual capital, like the way you can with software. And also the cost of drilling software keeps coming down further and further. There is value in raising money just for having the connections. I've always likened raising money to political marriages in Game of Thrones, where we're kind of just aligning our households and you having invested in me, our houses are now aligned to go do some other objective, is so becomes in handy more than you might think because having some professional investors who are well connected, can really open some doors for you. Like when we needed to have a contact at Pinterest, we can just talk to our investors, see if any of them know what they are. You know, I know it's a cliche where that, know, VC say, we're here to help, but the good ones can. And also when it comes to exit time, they've seen it enough times where chances are you've never sold a company in your life, but having someone who's seen that from your side in your corner with aligned interest is really valuable. Probably don't need to be raising tens and tens of millions. think a lot of you know, it becomes the headline of this is one of the things for Later. We never had the big headline though. You know, Later raises ten million dollars series B. So we were kind of quietly plugging along trying to get whatever marketing oxygen that we could. But those are kind of good events for publicities when you raise money, which becomes useful when you're trying to recruit because you do also have to build a brand. So there is a little value but you know it it was really good to have only raised one round because if we had raised at a higher valuation later on there might be investors who say hey we can't take that you haven't returned enough like especially if you're not hurting or anything. Whereas for us it was like hey we think this is kind of a good time we need we literally need to be part of something bigger. And from their perspective you know they got in at something like six million pre. So when we're talking around nine, no one's given a shit when we're talking and they're in at six million pre. They're like, yeah, you do your little more shots that we've never had to raise. But we also had a ridiculously cheap burn. Like one of the things about having a company in Canada, you can run a lot. If your revenues in US dollars and your expenses are posting Canadian, you can, you know, kind of be that cockroach. That's hard to kill.
Pablo Srugo (47:25)
So let me ask this. mean, I have a company right now that's going through an emanate process and it is so taxing on the founder… everything they don't want be doing around legal around D.D. is like absorbing every single waking hour of theirs. my question to you is after you go through that, you sign, it closes money lands in your account. What did that feel like? know a lot of people like to say, was like exciting, like I was some lotto winner. It was relief. was like, it's just done. It is just there. I don't have to look at it, you know, the deal actually closed while I was on vacation in Cancun. and because originally I was supposed to close – again, this is a long process. was originally supposed to close in January and my wife was like, let's go away for somewhere during the winter. Like we usually do. And I'm like, I don't know when this is going to happen. And eventually she, you know, this is going on and on, and I think what people also miss about this is that you have other people in this, if you're married, like I am, You have a spouse who's kind of like ask, Hey, how is it going? Cause you know, she has a bit of a stake in this too. It's like, you know what? There was this trademark issue. So it got delayed two weeks. Well ,we have to secure the trademark for Later. Cause we didn't quite have- and this happens all the time. it's very frustrating. And also you're just talking about software development lawyers, which is just
Pablo Srugo (48:48)
Not fun. That's right.
Ian MacKinnon (48:50)
Yeah. But you're going through and it keeps going through and eventually she's like, well, we got to go somewhere. Why don't we go away for your birthday? I was turning 40 and she’s like, no one can complain if you're away for it. I'm like, sure. It'll definitely be done by then. Spoilers. It was not done by then.
Pablo Srugo (49:04)
So by then was when? When’s your birthday?
Ian MacKinnon (49:07)
Late April.
Pablo Srugo (49:09)
Oh wow. Okay. January to late April. Yes.
Ian MacKinnon (49:11)
So we're having to live this and like hanging over our heads and deals fall apart all the time. Like we had other deals that did. I think people don't realize the natural instinct of a deal is to die. It's a very natural thing.
Pablo Srugo (49:24)
It's not like raising money. Most money raising efforts you sign a term sheet you assume it's going to go through and it usually goes through like M&A there's so many things that could go wrong.
Ian MacKinnon (49:32)
Hence I say the worst parts of dating. it is people you can get ghosted and you know because you're dealing with big sums and sometimes even big egos but you know so we're in Cancun and I'm having to sign all these documents on my phone it got to the point where I wasn't even reading them I was just like okay if I'm fucked I'm getting fucked I'm just sick of it. That's how done I was with this and there'll be some typo in the docu sign. So they come back again. I'm just like, 'm hoping that I'm not agreeing to anything that’s changed. And you just hope that your guys have it covered your lawyers that you're paying a ton or handling it. And then it got done. And you know I was in Cancun when I signed the file documents and then the money landed the next week. But again, it was so, but it was weird because it was like in a holding company in an account that I signed up of for remotely. So it just didn't feel real, but I was just, again, I was more glad that the due diligence process was finally fucking over. Like that was that to me, that was like my happy point, not what had landed. Then I got used to what had landed in my account. Don't get me wrong. But yeah, in the moment it's it was relief. wasn't excitement.
Pablo Srugo (50:38)
That's awesome man. And well, let me let me end with this one question that we typically end on. If you could go back, you know, when you were just starting Later or even now, because I'm sure you kind of talk with lot of founders and kind of give advice. Like what's some of the most common advice that you find yourself giving, you know, early stage founders?
Ian MacKinnon (50:59)
So I'm actually I'm starting again. I left Later at the beginning of this year, enjoyed some me time, but I'm starting again. I want to work in the security space. I want to tackle phishing that problem, stopping it, not doing it myself. Although I like to think I'd be pretty good at it when everybody the internal test was there. So my new product is going to be it's called Stingray. So if you go to stingray.security you can check it out. I'm working on a browser extension in order to make sure you don't do something you should not be because we have all these tools to prevent cyber attacks but we don't really have a whole lot that kind of focus more on the social engineering aspect. So that's my new thing. You can sign up for the waitlist at stingray.security. Got my little pug in there. Like I said always be marketing even as a developer. But some of the things I am doing this time around is-- what's nice is that I don't have to raise quite so quickly. You know, we did cause you know, we had great investors, but we never really needed it. We kind of just did cause we thought that's what one does to be a real company. I'm in a business where I can kind of hold off on doing that. I'm to talk a little bit from a technical perspective because that's who I am. I know there's always like what I would do different from a technical perspective, keeping it simple. a lot of, see a lot of like technical founders wanting to do microservices and all these things that you do much later early on thinking that will help.
I've never regretted keeping things simple in terms of having continuous delivery. Like there should be one button that takes your software and puts it out of production every single time. We I never regretted doing that later. Allowed us to go so fast. Having a good test suite even when you're on your own is really important because I've seen what can happen to companies when they have too much technical debt. And there's a lot of little things that you can do early on to make that happen. You know, so having kind of coding standards, even when it's just you.
having some degree of testing because so many unforced errors can happen because you didn't bother to write even a simple test. And if writing tests for your software is too hard, that kind of points to a deeper problem. Like I'm a big fan of Ruby on rails. I know it gets flagged for speed and whatnot, but it's good enough for Shopify is good enough for Google Airbnb. There's so many good people who I know a lot of very successful people who built their companies on Ruby on Rails and weren't chasing whatever the latest technical framework is. So that's kind of what I have to say about the technical side. Those are all I think a lot of that kind of get just thought of because I know so many founders they're looking for a technical guy. They want a technical person and they don't really kind of look into this how and start up engineering is really its own particular thing. Other ones I'm making sure I have all the proper trademarks right out the gate is I don't that holding up you know anything later on but again it's the same problem. Find a problem that people care enough about. There’s a lot of products that people are kind of vaguely interested in and that's never a good you want like things that are going to stop. So I'm hoping the problem of phishing is big enough that that's what can be you know find a novel solution to and just kind of enjoying the moment. I remember a lot of things. There's a lot of up and down stress like I think you just have certain expectations for growth and it was a little bit above its best ever when it's a little bit below. It's the worst time ever. just, you know, having a little more appreciation for the ride that's going through because it's fun. These startups are fun. They're bands for nerds, for the people who were not cool enough to have a band. This is what we got. So go make your band, enjoy it, have fun, go be a rock star or at least the nerd equivalent of it. But also pay attention to your technology stack.
Pablo Srugo (54:39)
I'm curious actually on your phishing startup, just really quickly, how's it going to work? Like, is it going to look at my emails and know if it's phishing or not?
Ian MacKinnon (54:46)
My whole thesis is that the mail is not the only way you get phishing links. How many phishing texts have you gotten in the past while we have a lot of tools, assuming emails, the only way you're going to get scammed. also get people phoning you pretending to be visa with false charges. There's a point where, and honestly, the phishing sites are doing some pretty amazing things to cloak themselves from Google and other scanners because they're trying to do that. Ultimately, think the only way we can know you're about to get phished is if you have a rendered page in your browser. And like that's kind of what we're looking at, looking at being the last line of defense to prevent you, your grandma from entering their credit card into a site that they shouldn’t.
Pablo Srugo (55:24)
Awesome. Cool. Well, it's been it's been awesome having you on the show.
Ian MacKinnon (55:28)
Thanks for having me, Pablo. It was great.
Pablo Srugo (55:30)
I just gave you content that you liked so much you actually listened to the end. And guess what?
you didn't pay a single dollar. Not only that, I didn't even put any ads in your face. So you just got a bunch of content for free. And now that I've delivered that value, I'm asking for something in return. Open your app, open Apple podcasts, open Spotify, open whatever app you use to listen to this and hit that follow button. It's actually gonna help you because it's gonna help you make sure you don't miss out on the next episode, which you liked so much that you listened to the whole thing.
