Building a Profitable AI-Driven Design Platform Without VC Funding

0:00 Joan Westenberg: You're listening to a Day One FM show.

0:07 Dan Anisse: Pick My Brain is the podcast where founders pitch me their startup and I try to give them some useful advice so they can connect better with potential co-founders, investors, media, and of course, customers. My name's Alan Jones and I was a founder myself for about 15 years, and after that, an angel investor for another 15 years. So yeah, old. Some of my ventures have been successful and some failed disastrously, But I like to think I've learned a thing or two along the way, and maybe some of that can help you. So if you'd like to learn how to tweak your pitch, subscribe to the Pick My Brain show now wherever you like to listen to podcasts.

0:40 Speaker C: Hello and welcome back to the Unfunded Podcast. I'm really excited to be talking to Dan today. We've, we've gone through a few different kinds of companies on the podcast, you know, agencies, service-based businesses, software businesses, but this is something a little bit different. This is an AI-driven design platform, and I'm really excited to hear about how this has been built. So Dan, welcome to the podcast. I'm excited to have you.

1:06 Joan Westenberg: Yeah, thank you, Jane. Likewise, really excited to be here. Keen to chat and, yeah, and cover some insights that I hope you, you and your community will find useful.

1:15 Speaker C: Absolutely. Look, and I'm just going through the platform. It is sleek. It's beautifully designed, it works really well, it's a great tool. How has that reaction been to it? Are people enjoying using it, are people getting on board with it?

1:29 Joan Westenberg: Yeah, for sure. I think we've been lucky enough, I guess, to have an agency background ourselves building websites. So when we did build this, we always have that, I guess, that main persona in the back of our minds.

1:41 Speaker C: And it comes through, like it is beautiful. It looks and feels lovely.

1:45 Joan Westenberg: Yeah, thanks, John. I think it's, yeah, it's, yeah, we've just been lucky enough to be that persona and I think that's what's important in building a good product. You obviously experience it yourself and you're able to see that come through, which is good.

2:01 Speaker C: So what's the elevator pitch for Relume for people who are tuning in, listening to it now? What is this company? What are you building? What are you doing?

2:09 Joan Westenberg: Yeah, sure. Look, AI, in short, Relume is an AI website builder tool. That connects to your favorite platforms like Figma and Webflow. So you're able to generate a website in minutes using our component system and easily export that out to kickstart your project either in Figma and Webflow. So yeah, we've seen it as a great tool to not only generate ideas and get ideas from a website point of view for wireframes, but also most importantly kickstart an actual project and be the base of a project that they're going to build for either their team internally or for a client as an agency.

2:48 Speaker C: I'd love to hear about your background before you built this. You mentioned that you've got some agency experience. What was the story in the lead-up to building Relume?

2:57 Joan Westenberg: Yeah, so Relume, co-founded with myself and Adam, and we originally had startups before, but we always wanted to build We always wanted to build a company, another startup from our previous one. So from that, that's what was one of the main catalysts and driver to want to develop an agency model. And we had the assumption that being an agency ourselves will uncover insights and ideas and opportunities. And funny enough, it actually played out exactly the way that we anticipated. And that, yeah, that was the catalyst of starting Relume. So Relume originally started as an agency. Websites specifically, building for clients. And then from that, we were internally building out our component system to build with clients. And quickly we saw that that was the actual opportunity for us to go deeper into and turn into a product, which led into us launching a component library. And then the component library effectively became the base of what we've now built today is the website, AI website builder tool, which essentially uses all the components in the website builder experience.

4:14 Speaker C: So a lot of startups that I talk to in the AI space, they've definitely gone down the VC funding route because, I mean, you know, I know AI is expensive. What's been your approach to capital and to dealing with those expenses?

4:27 Joan Westenberg: Yeah, look, I think we focus really in the initial stages of remaining profitable. So we want to, I guess, focus on building a product that people actually wanna pay for, which is—

4:43 Speaker C: Unusual these days.

4:44 Joan Westenberg: Yeah, unusual. It's crazy, right? You build a product so you can sell it. But yeah, so in the initial stages as an agency, yeah, obviously we're not getting funding in the agency model, but When we flipped to the component library model, yeah, as I said, we've always been able to remain at a profitable stage and kind of continue to allow that as we've grown. So whenever we've increased revenue, we've also then considered hiring more people. So we've kind of kept it at a ratio that allows us to accommodate not only salary costs, but cost of AI and other, obviously other things that are that add up, but we're just here always try to align expansion with growth. So if we grow X%, we're going to then lean into getting people to join the team. So then it does narrow focus. I feel like when you do have excessive options or resources, I don't think you're gonna be as intentional with what you do. Whereas because we can't afford to, we're like everyone has to almost input into Relume to give us something. So just narrows the focus down and makes us build with more intention when we're releasing products.

5:58 Speaker C: How much crossover was there between the agency business and the product business? Was the agency funding the product?

6:05 Joan Westenberg: In the initial stages, we, yeah, the Relume agency effectively was the angel investor into the Relume product, but Yeah, that was the base funding that we needed. But it was probably after 6 months that we were able to phase out the agency and then fully work off the actual revenue coming from the Relume product. So yeah, it was about a 6-month phase out, which ended up being, yeah, really ended up being something that worked out quite well. But we were lucky enough to use that initial funding from the agency or from the capital that we received doing projects to kind of like fund the initial, um, uh, launch into agency, uh, launch into the product world.

6:53 Speaker C: So Relume is profitable as an AI product?

6:56 Joan Westenberg: Yes, yes, as of, as of today, yeah.

7:00 Speaker C: That is wild, honestly, because there are so many AI companies who are coming up and they're just burning through VC money like at an insane rate, but they're, they're, they're so far away from turning a profit. So that's such an interesting different experience of it. That's quite cool.

7:15 Joan Westenberg: Oh no, thank you, Johnny. It's definitely, I think, coming back to fundamentals, like I said before, like if we have this force function to actually have to build product that makes money, I genuinely believe we end up pushing out better product because we can't just release things just to release it. So I think that force function has helped us actually in a way actually build a better product. So I think it's worked out well so far. We're a team of 19 as of today. So again, as we grow, more people hopefully will be joining and just continue to sort of like use that profit ratio to decide how we expand.

8:01 Speaker C: Have you ever been in a startup or run a startup that has taken VC funding?

8:07 Joan Westenberg: Oh yeah, that was my first. That was the first one I launched and it's such a different world.

8:15 Dan Anisse: Yeah.

8:16 Joan Westenberg: Yeah, look, there's pros and cons in both. I wouldn't say like one is better than all or one is going to be the way you should do it. It really kind of depends on the situation that you're in. But originally when I first, before I co-founded Relume with Adam, I've started a company that was a comparison affiliate website business.

8:38 Speaker C: Yeah.

8:38 Joan Westenberg: I needed to raise money, so I went down that whole VC route, raised capital, but quickly learned how to burn through money and understand it's just a different model. You're building in anticipation to have something huge happen, whereas when you're bootstrapped, or how I experience now because I've done both, it's building more incrementally and seeing the gains when you push something out. So it's a different approach and obviously depends on your end goal as a product. Like what do you want to, like if you need to get mass reach, then yeah, obviously maybe funding in the early stages could help with that.

9:19 Speaker C: But it's not for everyone. Yeah.

9:21 Joan Westenberg: No, it's not for everyone. I'm glad in hindsight, I'm glad that that learnings though, taught me subconsciously to not go and raise off the initial stages. That's where I think a lot of things are that the approach is not the best approach. It's like in the initial stages when you don't even have a concept, you don't even have like 1,000 customers or 500 customers, I feel like what that taught me, that experience is before you go out and even consider raising, just at least build something internally with the founding team to prove that it's worth investing more time to build a product. Yeah, build something, an MVP. Yeah, that— yeah, it's not crazy.

10:06 Speaker C: Yeah. Uh, so how do you and Adam divide up responsibilities as, as co-founders? Who's, um, who's focused on what?

10:12 Joan Westenberg: Yeah, so in the initial stages, we're also lucky enough to get on our third founding member, Slater, who's our CTO. So Currently it's 3 of us leading Relume. Adam is focusing more on the product side of things and managing pretty much the product team and the designers there.

10:32 Dan Anisse: Yeah.

10:32 Joan Westenberg: Slater is focusing, is CTO, so he's obviously focusing on engineering and the resources there. And myself is CEO, so focusing more on the broader aspect, strategy, vision, but also in my actual lanes, I share marketing a lot with Adam. Being a small team, we've stretched as the marketing department and a lot of the operations for me as well. So everything else outside of product and engineering, I try to move along.

11:00 Speaker C: Have you found it's been hard to tap into AI talent in Australia? Have you hired outside of Australia?

11:09 Joan Westenberg: Well, it really depends. If you're going to talk specifically like AI talent, we're talking like a machine learning engineer because that we've seen, there are some great opportunities here in Australia. We've been lucky enough to hire someone for that locally, which has been great. But everyone else, I guess it's more learning AI on the fly. So whether or not you're an engineer, you've got to understand more of the prompt engineering side. You've got to more understand these large language models. And if you're a designer, you've got to start rethinking about how AI impacts the visual experience or the UX and UI. So new patterns are arising of how you would approach a design versus how you would have designed for this specific scenario 3 years ago. So we've been lucky enough to have those engineers and designers really come across to embracing AI. And then, yeah, locally—

12:10 Speaker C: Locally?

12:10 Joan Westenberg: If they're not working at Canva or Atlassian.

12:14 Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah.

12:15 Joan Westenberg: Or even, yeah, Dovetail.

12:17 Speaker C: Or Leonardo. Yeah.

12:18 Joan Westenberg: Yeah. There's Leonardo now. Or they're still gonna, they're probably gonna go get everyone after the acquisition. But yeah, we've been lucky enough to still be okay. But I do know as we start to scale, if we want to keep local talent, it could become a little bit more difficult.

12:36 Speaker C: So the goal for Relume is to make AI-powered web design accessible to as many people as possible. How do you approach pricing this product considering how expensive AI can be, what that's going to look like, and how customers are going to balance this with tools like paying for Figma, Webflow, and so on? How do you approach your pricing?

12:57 Joan Westenberg: Yeah, look, it's a great question. Funny enough, Joan, we are launching a new pricing as we speak tomorrow.

13:04 Speaker C: Amazing. Okay.

13:06 Joan Westenberg: You've probably seen the pricing on our website at the moment. Yeah, yeah. It was optimized for a component library. So it wasn't necessarily built or factored in when we launched the site builder tool. So we do want to increase accessibility to Relume. So we are making that starter plan cheaper, almost like 30 or 40% cheaper. So that's going to help increase the ability to use Relume for your projects and actually incorporate into your process. Because we're also, like you mentioned, you got to factor in a Figma subscription, a Webflow subscription. So these things add up and we just got to be conscious of how we fit into that mix. So yeah, definitely optimizing and always thinking of the best ways to approach pricing, which will be launched tomorrow. And I think, and you just, but then as a business, you're right. You also got to be considerate of the average cost per user from an AI perspective. So it's where engineering mixes a little bit with with commercial where I'm commercial, where we need to just like really be conscious of the, of what is the average spend for a free user or for a starter user and just modeling that in to understand, making sure that you're not blowing the budget and wiping yourself out.

14:23 Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. What have been some of the biggest challenges that you've faced to scale Relume from where it is right now? What's kind of freaking you out on the horizon?

14:34 Joan Westenberg: Look, there's a lot of things, but I think scaling really comes down to, I guess, having a good team. And I think getting— you can just go out and get another 20 people to join your team and expect, you know, go from 20 to 40 and you double your output. But I think That's not necessarily the case. So it's the biggest challenge at the moment is just how to scale a team and in making sure that everyone is working effectively and at their best versions of themselves. So as you grow, we've quickly learned that it's not just one person managing the code base or managing a design system, it's multiple people. So we're at this fun stage right now, or challenging stage of like how we can start to build in systems to scale with the people that we've got. And I think once, or we are close to, it's not far, but getting that moving in the right direction, I think will unlock a lot more opportunities for us to take on more product opportunities. And I think for us as founders and leaders, we've got to get really good at building a good base for the first 20 people. So then when we do decide to scale, we know we've set the base right. So if anyone else joining on, we've kind of given that the right— create the right foundation of a culture and a team. So that's obviously the biggest challenge when it comes to scaling. And then obviously there's going to be new entrants and there's also going to be incumbents. So two types of competition that will eventually come in and obviously play in this space. It's not like I follow them directly, but you just got to be conscious of what's going on so you are not you're making the right move. So yeah, just got to be aware of what happens there and yeah, but just really continue to focus on building the best product experience that we can.

16:31 Speaker C: And on that, how do you balance reinvesting in the technology versus investing in other aspects of the business? How do you play that balancing game?

16:41 Joan Westenberg: To be honest, every cent of capital is put in towards people.

16:46 Speaker C: Yeah, okay.

16:47 Joan Westenberg: That is our biggest investment. Going to start doing a little bit more training on AI with our new person who joined, machine learning engineer. So there's obviously going to be some training that we'll— so we have to allocate some capital there to build some training models. But overall, capital expenditure is directly attributed to people. And we push the limit of how much we're making and then how much we need to— what's the ceiling of what our costs could be. So we like to squeeze that as much as we can. To make sure that we're hiring the best talent to join us.

17:27 Speaker C: And how are you attracting that talent? 'Cause I mean, you know, Canva can offer like, I don't know, like magic unicorn dust on tap and all that stuff. You know, these companies throw everything at the wall. How do you make that work?

17:41 Joan Westenberg: Look, I think the best thing we have at the moment is impact. So you can go and join Canva and be number 4,036, or you can join Reelum and be number 21. So I think to, It depends on that certain individual, right? If that person, the right person, wants to contribute to building something big, but they want to be part of that, they just don't want to be cog in the wheel, they want to be part of that journey. So I think the opportunity and why I believe people are joining Relume at the moment and why I hope they will continue to join is the fact that they have a chance to actually make genuine impact in their careers and not just kind of move the needle a little bit, but actually come in and say, this person built this feature and this feature got adopted and has been used by X amount of people and also increased revenue. So that to me is, it's hard to, it's the nature of being smaller. And that's the one thing we have way above any other of these larger startups at the moment because of the nature of our size. And I think the other thing is as well as working on also opportunity, we've proven without any marketing that we've been able to build up over 400,000 signups with the product that we've got. So that in itself was like, well, come in and help us continue to make this impact. We've already proven that the community likes what we're doing. It's not just a startup. So there's traction there. So when you combine the fact that we've got some traction and got some reach from a brand perspective, and you can actually come in and make impact based off like your attributes and your skill sets. I think that combination to me is like— and I'm biased, but I think it's like the best opportunity you could ever want if you actually want to be the best version of yourself.

19:30 Speaker C: So there's a distinct cultural aspect to that answer, and I'd love to hear about how you're approaching that culture, because, um, yeah, if you're using that differentiator of purpose and value and impact How does that translate through to the culture that you have with your team?

19:47 Joan Westenberg: Yeah, I think the culture currently at ReLearn now is focused on really, I guess, our number one principle is be the best version of yourself. And I think if everyone has that attitude, that means they're going to raise the bar, raise the intensity, raise whatever is needed to be done to get things over the line. So I think that's what our— what we're currently building our culture around. It is— we call it— we, we believe ourselves, we're an elite team, uh, because it's small, so we have to be impactful. So those, those things are one of like the biggest drivers for us from a culture perspective. And just having accountability and owning your space. So once you do come in and you are, you know, brought on, uh, for, for this certain role, it's just owning that role and, and adding not just doing that role, but taking that role to another level and teaching us and the other people in our team a few things. So yeah, at the moment, it's an exciting culture, it's a driven culture, and we're motivated to win, really. We're just really all there to motivate it to win and win together.

20:57 Speaker C: Can I ask the uncomfortable question? As a founder, how stressed are you? Do you mind me asking that?

21:04 Joan Westenberg: No, no, no, not at all. Look, I think I know there are points where I'm on the brink, but—

21:11 Speaker C: Yeah.

21:12 Joan Westenberg: I look at it, it comes down to like out of work activities. So, it's not an easy job.

21:22 Speaker C: Fuck no.

21:23 Joan Westenberg: It's, yeah, not at all. I would say it's like, but I think the lot of outside activities that I do, staying fit, going for walks, spending time with family, and just really kind of switching off allows me to have better intensity when I return. So, if things, to be honest, Sharon, the best hack of all time, if I feel like I'm really fried, is try to go for like a 2-hour walk.

21:49 Speaker C: Yeah.

21:50 Joan Westenberg: Around my area. And I think that instantly resets me and gets me back into a zone where, yeah. So, yeah, it's like, it's a healthy amount of stress. It's not stress that's chronic stress, repeating. It's a healthy amount that I like, bit of a dose, uh, that it gives me that intensity that I need at this current stage that we're at.

22:10 Speaker C: I love that answer. I'm a big believer in walking myself. It's just getting that— getting yourself away from it all. I'm curious, do you think you'd be able to maintain that level of balance if you had taken VC funding?

22:21 Joan Westenberg: Hard to say. Like, I don't think— regardless of that, it's my capital or another source of capital, I hold myself to high standards to win. So even if a VC came in and said, this is the goal to win, or this is the goal that we want to be successful, I don't think it would impact myself personally. It could have other ramifications of like, you have to hit these goals. But I think being, I guess, at this point that we're at, we have the ability to kind of collectively decide what the ambition is. And I wouldn't get a VC if I I wouldn't get a VC on if they didn't have alignment as to like what I believe that goal is. But yeah, I have a high expectation. So I think regardless of funding, I'd probably just be more brutal to myself than a VC would be.

23:13 Speaker C: That makes sense. I get that. I'd love to talk about as a bootstrap company, it comes down to customers. It comes down to who you can actually sell the product to. How are you approaching marketing and customer acquisition for Relent?

23:30 Joan Westenberg: It's not— I was saying, I don't want to sound too cliché, but it is honestly genuinely building the best product for your initial niched amount of users. And then that builds out a referral mechanism, an organic one. Which they start talking about you. So it's been our current strategy as we speak. So every acquisition we've got to date and I look at the traffic, it's like almost 80% organic.

24:03 Speaker C: Yeah, wow.

24:04 Joan Westenberg: We have, and that's a function of product doing its job, delighting the customer and then that customer telling that person. So that loop of us continuously optimizing product, making it better, delighting the customer, the customer then telling that person is that creating that viral loop allows us to have got to where we are today. And then the combination of that is with working with a lot of, um, content influencers on, on YouTube.

24:32 Speaker C: Yeah.

24:33 Joan Westenberg: And connecting with a lot of these, that has been also been one of an awesome driver that we have got a lot of support from, uh, in the initial stages from these influential YouTubers, um, who have a good audience. So that, that model of Building an awesome product with referrals and people talking about us and then getting ourselves front and center with these people who have these communities has really been the secret, I guess, from all of that. But I come back to the fact that none of these YouTubers or content creators would even give a shit about us if we didn't build a good product.

25:10 Speaker C: Yeah.

25:11 Joan Westenberg: So that's the core to the success in the bootstrap world because you don't have funding. We haven't been able to spend thousands on a Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn ad. So we've had to, like, again, nice forced function. When you're bootstrapped, you have to build something that people actually want to pay for. When people pay for it, they're delighted. They're delighted. They're going to talk about it.

25:30 Speaker C: Would you consider taking on funding in the future? Is that a hard no? Or if the need to scale calls for it, would you take on some VC funding?

25:41 Joan Westenberg: Oh, look, I've never Running a company like this and what we do, I never have hard nos in a lot of things, to be honest. I think my job is to always continuously get us optionality. Having optionality is the most important part. So I think that if there is that time and place where we believe we see there's a strong reason as to why, then yeah, I definitely will consider it because my main person or main thing I have to make sure I look out for is Relume. Like, what is the best interest of Relume? And if that means that we need to raise money, then yeah, I will consider it. But up until now, it's just always getting ourselves optionality as a company and having networks in these, with these VCs who are also great people that I talk to a lot. So having a good network, having optionality, but never disregarding it if it's going to make Relume better.

26:39 Speaker C: And what would make Relume better? Like, how are you thinking about constantly improving this product?

26:46 Joan Westenberg: Oh, continuously listening to that community of what we've built out who are passionate and care a lot about what they're doing and continuing that journey of the job to be done. So we started off with Relume to enable designers to build websites quicker and faster. Now, we haven't finished our job. We've taken them from sitemap to wireframe, but we have not finished the loop when it comes to the design. So for us, how we improve Relume is continuously solve the job to be done, which is design and launch a marketing website. So we are at the stage of just, you know, very small part of that journey. We want to continue to go down that journey. And I think that's really the main goal as we continue to optimize, as we continue to come up with our product strategy, we're very led by that job to be done and we want to just keep solving those jobs and improving that for that customer.

27:47 Speaker C: Has there been a pivotal moment in the development of Relume that you look back to as, okay, that was important, that was the inflection point?

27:56 Joan Westenberg: Yeah.

27:56 Speaker C: Yeah?

27:57 Joan Westenberg: Yeah, I know exactly. August 2023 when we launched the site builder tool. So we had the option, right? As I've said, we were, first we were a component library. Yeah. And we had over 1,000 components at the time. And we had the option— or AI obviously was introducing itself. And then we had that option to say, okay, cool, how do we want to incorporate AI to improve this process? We love speed. We love improving the time to build a website. So how can we use AI to leverage the components to enable our Loomers to build better websites? And—

28:31 Speaker C: Yeah.

28:31 Joan Westenberg: That was that point where we had you know, two paths. Do we continue to build like this plugin experiences inside of these other apps like Webflow, Figma, and enable the components to, to be built there? Or do we build our own platform that, you know, what it is today takes in all these components? And I remember we had that, you know, flexion point of making that choice A and B, and I'm so glad that we chose option B of build our own site builder experience and enable them to put together the components there and use AI to generate websites in Relume because effectively we think that we could build a better experience, have more control over that. So that was a great option and that was one of the most important decisions we made because it ended up doubling our MRR in 2 months.

29:15 Speaker C: That's huge.

29:16 Joan Westenberg: It was in August, which is when we launched it. So yeah, that to me was really awesome part of that company, point of our company. I'm glad that we took the harder route because it ended up paying off real well for us in the end.

29:30 Speaker C: How much do you worry about people like Webflow, for example, basically just copying what you're doing and trying to eat your lunch? Is that a concern?

29:41 Joan Westenberg: Look, it's— I'd be stupid not to think about it, like, in terms of, like—

29:45 Speaker C: You don't seem stupid.

29:47 Joan Westenberg: Yeah, but I try not to get too overwhelmed because I think that the whole part of the experience is more than just generating a website and clicking publish inside of Webflow. So there's more to that journey, I believe, that we're looking at and considering and solving. So the process is just as important as that output. So whoever, Webflow or any other company decides to go down that route, I just have to back the fact that we're building a little bit more of a process behind how they arrive at that final output versus just you know, get that final output and then expect that to be published. So there's more to it in our opinion, but I guess we'll— we just got to continue to optimize and build the best experience that we can and play up— play what we see. We can't be too caught up yet because we don't know their moves and we just need to play what's in front of us.

30:45 Speaker C: What's the relationship like with Figma, Webflow, with the people that you've integrated with? Is that a positive relationship? Is it pretty much just arm's length?

30:53 Joan Westenberg: No, I think we've been lucky enough to have really good relationships with both Figma and Webflow. Webflow specifically, I know a lot of the people in the team, I'm really close with a lot of them. It feels like it is almost when we go over to Webflow Conf, it feels like it is the same team. Yeah, and we're going to Webflow Conf again. We go every year, so we get to catch up with the whole team then. And I think that's important to that relationship, uh, because in the end we're building an awesome experience and that's just helping them plug the gap of what makes, I guess, Webflow a better experience for these users.

31:34 Speaker C: And I guess that's what makes it an actual ecosystem, right? It's all working together.

31:38 Joan Westenberg: Correct. And yeah, and that's the whole move of what, uh, Webflow have done in terms of building a plugin marketplace. They want to incorporate incorporate developers like ourselves to build better, to wrap experiences around Webflow because as a platform, you can't build everything. So a similar approach to Shopify, obviously, you know, makes the experience a little bit better. So that's the relationship that we're just improving the experience from our perspective. And that just benefits the Webflow user. So that's built an awesome relationship for us over 2, 3 years.

32:12 Speaker C: Is there any plan to expand who you integrate with? Because there's a bunch of different website builder tools, things like Squarespace, things like Wix. Would you look at expanding in that way?

32:26 Joan Westenberg: Yeah, look, it definitely— it's definitely not off the cards. It really comes down to our current community of who we've got and what else platforms they're looking at. So if we see an overlap of like, hey, our persona who's already using Reeloom already uses these platforms, then that's what's going to help dictate where we potentially expand from a platform-wise. We've already integrated or in the process of integrating a React integration, which will effectively allow us to connect to a lot of headless CMS. So we've seen that opportunity within our community of people that want to leverage and work with React components. So that's our first expansion.

33:08 Speaker C: Okay.

33:08 Joan Westenberg: And then, yeah, depending on what our users push us towards, that's what's going to influence our moves.

33:13 Speaker C: And so you're having conversations with your users, you're asking them about what they want and trying to maintain that close connection with them?

33:20 Joan Westenberg: Yeah, for sure. We're lucky enough to have a Slack community that we're pretty engaged with. We've got over 11,000 people in there that we talk to regularly, and it's the source of a lot of our inspiration, to be honest, talking to them.

33:37 Speaker C: Doesn't that take like a lot of community management?

33:39 Joan Westenberg: Look, it does, but the community also kind of self-manages itself in a way in a lot of aspects. So there are a lot of people who are helpful in our community that help other people in the community. And we also got a great team that does look after a lot of the issues or a lot of the any other things that pop up in our in the Slack channel.

34:01 Speaker C: Looking ahead beyond expanding, beyond other platforms, do you have a long-term goal for Relume that you're comfortable sharing? I always ask people on this podcast, would your dream be to be acquired, to get to an IPO? What's the thinking here? Or is this something you want to pass on to your kids one day, assuming computers still exist in the future? Yeah.

34:24 Joan Westenberg: Oh, that's funny. Yeah, no, look, to be honest, We've never really tied ourselves too heavily to a goal. I think the mission right now for us is to build the best experience on the internet to build a marketing website, and that incorporates design as well. So I think that's where we want to focus 100% of our effort, energy, and focus on because then again, Joan, like I was mentioning before, that gives us optionality. Those things then arise. If you build the best product, the best experience and just focus on that, then sure, if there's ever a time of an acquisition, you've built the best product, so there's a high chance of that happening. If you want to IPO, then you've got that route. If you want VC funding, as we mentioned before, that could be an option. So focusing on one thing unlocks so many things which I don't have to think about and I don't put too much brain power to that. I just focus on building the best experience that we can. And I say this to the team all the time, like, as we continue to build out more awesome features and functionality, that unlocks more opportunities. Like, it's a new level, always opens up a new level of things that we get to do and consider. But yeah, full focus on building the best experience for, um, creating a marketing website.

35:42 Speaker C: It genuinely sounds like you love what you do.

35:46 Joan Westenberg: I'm glad that comes across.

35:48 Speaker C: Yeah, it really does come through. Yeah.

35:49 Joan Westenberg: I think I've been privileged and lucky to have found a dream job that I happen to have also co-founded, but that's not the important part. I've just got a really good job and it mixes all my passions of strategy, design, and business into one thing. So yeah, I'm glad I just get to work here.

36:13 Speaker C: That's awesome. Just before we wrap up, I'd love to know, do you have any advice for other bootstrap founders?

36:18 Joan Westenberg: Yeah, yeah, I do. I think the main thing is build the product, build, like, have the highest focus and intensity of just getting something out. And it doesn't have to be the most perfect experience, but if you've got a hunch on an idea and you've got something, yeah, that you back in your mind, there's so many no-code tools out there that you can use to whip up an experience in a week. Right. Which I think is the most important thing, period. I've done two different ways of building a product and I will do the Relume way a thousand times over because it allows me to have proven that what I've built people actually want. So then regardless of funding or raising money, I know that what I'm building is something that I need, I want to continue my efforts. Because even if you go raise money, It's still your time that you're gonna invest into this. So you wanna improve the odds of knowing where you are gonna invest your brain and your time and your prime time as well into something that actually could move the needle. And the best way of doing that is proving out something, getting 100 customers, getting them to pay, getting them to actually care about and building a community parallel to that. And that builds up that brand loyalty. So you do those two things of like proving, using no-code tools or, or co-founding with a, someone who's more technical, getting something out the door, getting runs on the board, everything opens up after that. And I think it makes it a lot more pleasurable experience. Obviously, there's still going to be hard parts of it, but it just, just, you know, just the foundation's right. People actually care about what you're building. Then there's other challenges, but at least the foundation is good. You can, you can grow from that.

38:02 Speaker C: That's fantastic. I love that. Dan, thank you so much for joining me. This has been, this has been a really cool conversation. Um, Like I said, Relume is a beautiful product and what you're building is very fucking cool. So thanks for taking the time to chat with me and yeah, I really appreciate it.

38:19 Joan Westenberg: No, likewise. Thank you for having me on board and I hope what I've shared today, one small part of it, if it's useful for anyone, I've done my job. So no, appreciate it and thanks for having me on.

38:29 Speaker C: Thank you.