The D2Z Podcast
Gen Z entrepreneur and DTC agency leader Brandon Amoroso talks with some of the best in the marketing world. Brandon and guests reveal their top business-growth strategies for anyone in the online space–whether you are a brick-and-mortar business looking to scale or an established online business trying to grow. Consumer marketing is under constant and dramatic change, so Brandon aims to tackle new problems with a fresh Gen Z mindset. The D2Z Podcast delivers insights, strategies, and tactics that you can use and aims to shift how you think about business and your relationships with your teams, partners, and customers.
The D2Z Podcast
How to Turn Service Experience Into SaaS Success with Sam Chlebowski - 123
In this episode of D2Z, join Brandon Amoroso as he dives into the world of SaaS with Sam Chlebowski, co-founder of Motion.io —a transformative client portal and project management tool tailored for agencies and service professionals. Discover the genesis of Motion.io, how it’s revolutionizing client interactions, and gain insider tips on transitioning from service-based models to product-focused enterprises.
Here's what you'll learn:
🚀 The journey from concept to execution in launching a SaaS platform.
🛠 How to identify and solve persistent industry problems with innovative software solutions.
🔄 The benefits of transitioning from a service-based model to a SaaS product.
📈 Strategies for rapid growth and scalability in the SaaS space.
🤝 The importance of team continuity and leveraging previous work experiences.
💡 Practical tips for early-stage product development and customer feedback integration.
Sam Chlebowski
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-chlebowski-80041694/
Motion.io - https://www.motion.io/
Brandon Amoroso
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonamoroso/
Web - https://brandonamoroso.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/bamoroso11/
X - https://twitter.com/AmorosoBrandon
Scalis.ai - https://scalis.ai/
I'm Brandon Amoroso and this is the D2Z Podcast building and growing your business from a Gen Z perspective. Hey, everyone, thanks for tuning in to D2Z, the podcast about using the Gen Z mindset to grow your business. I'm Gen Z entrepreneur Brandon Amoroso, founder and president of retention as a service agency Electric, as well as the co-founder of Scaless, and today I'm talking with Sam Chbosky, who's the co-founder at Motionio, which isa client portal and project management software for agencies, saas companies and service pros. Thanks for coming on the show.
Speaker 2:Yeah, good to be here today, brandon. How you doing man.
Speaker 1:Good, good, We've got to change the scenery. As I was mentioning before this, in the childhood bunk bedroom right now Not the usual podcast setup, but I had to make sure we could get this recorded one way or another. But before we dive into things, can you give everybody a quick background on yourself?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so my name is Sam Chlbalski. I am one of three co-founders of Motionio. I know you gave a little bit of background about our product. It's a SaaS platform that is really geared towards anybody who does any type of client-facing work, so that can be agencies, that could be lawyers, law firms, accountants. It's kind of where we've really found that we oftentimes work best Basically, anybody who has to collect stuff from their clients. We streamline that process, we automate aspects of it and we provide the clients of the businesses that use us a really nice white-labeled portal solution where they can do all of those things. They can chat, they can communicate, upload files.
Speaker 2:And the business was really born out of problems that my co-founders and I all faced in our previous industries. One of my co-founders, perry, was actually my boss at a previous business and I kind of led the customer success sales marketing teams at that business. It's called Brighter Vision. It still exists, but we sold off that business in 2020.
Speaker 2:Had a really fun exit out of that business and then in the two years that followed, we were kind of talking about like, hey, what were these problems that we faced with Brighter Vision? And the thing that kept like staring us in the face was like it was so hard to get the things that we needed to clients to deliver the service or the product that they paid for. But we needed ways to like, automate and streamline that and we ended up developing our own system for that internally. But after we had exited Brighter Vision, we basically took those learnings and we developed the SaaS app out of it. So we've been in business now for a little over two years. We started accepting paying customers last year and, yeah, we're right in the mid six figures mark of annual recurring revenue, but really growing pretty fast. In basically the last three months we've basically grown 85%, which is pretty cool for us, so it's been an exciting time.
Speaker 1:I think it's a story that you hear time and time again where the next business comes out of the current one. It's a very similar situation to me. It's a similar situation to a lot of folks that have come on to this podcast previously. I think that just goes to show when you're in an environment, you're able to pick things up that should be doing done better, and then, more often than not, it comes out of a service model or something that isn't actually a software product, and I've seen a lot of agencies or other businesses that are service focused make that transition into SaaS to solve some of the problems that they had with the SaaS tools that they were using at that time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I could not agree more and I think that there's a really good piece of advice in there too. If you are somebody who's like earlier on in your career and you say, hey, I want to, you know, eventually launch a product or I want to build a company, I think that one of the best things that you can do is find early stage companies, like small teams, that you can go and work with and really learn as much as you can, because it's going to expose you to not only like a new market that might be facing potential problems that you could solve with your own product, with your own company down the road, but it's also just going to teach you like the fundamentals of business. And that's a lot of the things that I learned when we were building Brighter Vision and you're exactly right, that business was. We eventually did launch a SaaS product within that business, but at the beginning it was really really service focused. We were building websites on WordPress for clients in the mental health industry, and it grew over time.
Speaker 2:I started I was employee number three there. When I left we had 35 or so employees 25 of those were working directly under me and it really taught me a lot about management, about business fundamentals, and allowed a really great launchpad for what we're doing now at Motionio. So totally agree with that.
Speaker 1:What do you think about the sort of the continuity of of the team Cause you mentioned that one of your co-founders you've previously worked with in the business before this. Do you think that that helps if you sort of cause I've heard about that, you know a lot of times as well where there's like a founding team and they will go from company to company and sort of be like the SWAT team that starts things and then moves on to the next problem.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a good question, Not one that I've been asked before, but I think it's really a superpower. One of the benefits of doing kind of what I just shared, where, like, if you're early in your career going to work for a small team is you make some really incredible connections. Those connections can have really wild effects for your career If you recognize, hey, like I can learn a lot from this person, or this person you know has a area of expertise. It's not my area of expertise, but I can build together with them because we complement each other's strengths, we fill in where the other one is weaker.
Speaker 2:And then, just as a side note, even if you are going out and trying to like raise some money for a startup that you're building, that's something that, like, investors like to see too, and I think that that's proof of that continuity being helpful in some aspects. It's not to say you can't launch something on your own or you need this like group of vetted people around you, but it's just that there is a little proof of like hey, if a team is moving from one product to a next, especially with a track record, people value that because they've seen it play out well before. They've seen success with these small, tight-knit groups of people that know how to build a team around them, know how to complement each other's weaknesses, build on each other's strengths and stuff like that to complement each other's weaknesses, build on each other's strengths and stuff like that. So, yeah, the continuity of the team is something I didn't realize how important and valuable it can be, but I think it's absolutely been a blessing.
Speaker 2:At Motionio, our third co-founder, zach, who is our CTO I'm more responsible for all of the marketing initiatives at motionio but our third co-founder actually at Brighter Vision, had the office like the floor above us with his team and he had a startup that was kind of in a similar space as Brighter Vision but focused on building websites and doing marketing in the funeral slash death care space Really like very niche industry but very interesting and he eventually ended up exiting that business as well. And then now here we all are at motionio.
Speaker 1:No, that's, that's really cool. I think that definitely makes a lot of sense in terms of the continuity of team when it comes to investment, because the same goes for, you know, like being a repeat founder with a previous exit. You know you already have that track record. The first time entrepreneur risk isn't there as much, and that's why you end up with serial entrepreneurs who just have three, four, five different businesses. Not all of them are successful for the most part, but it just shows that you sort of know and can fast track your way through.
Speaker 1:I think those first couple of months I know for me, the second business, there's so many things that I don't have to relearn. That just puts us ahead of where we would have been if this was the first company, and so then goes back to as well, having started a services business beforehand, now going into SaaS. It's better to go this route than the reverse, necessarily, because with SaaS I think the margin for error is much slimmer, because you're not profitable to start, you're not just like sort of selling yourself and your services, and so I much prefer this way than the other way around.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's another really good insight. I mean, software is hard and it's so different than building a services-based business, because in some ways service-based businesses are easier but in other ways they're also harder. The harder aspect of service-based businesses are easier, but in other ways they're also harder. The harder aspect of service-based businesses is there's always a input to output that you need right To provide this service. You need X, y, z amount of labor, even if there's things like AI and you're using that to help you and streamline your processes, or automation to help and streamline your processes. You're using that to help you and streamline your processes, or automation to help and streamline your processes. At the end of the day, there does come this human capital cost associated with it, where SaaS the big benefit is. You remove a lot of that direct. Hey, I need this many people working this many hours to provide the services for this number of clients. You remove some of that but at some of that, but at the same time, there's all of these things that I never really considered before building this business that are immensely challenging. Some big hurdles that we've had to overcome is determining what features we prioritize and when, because you just can't build everything all at once, but especially in those early days, you'll get a lot of people saying, hey, I need X, y or Z if I'm going to pay you for this product. So you have to do a matrix of all right. Well, this type of customer is requesting this feature, this one is requesting this type of feature. What lane do we want to go in? Where do we want to, what do we want to pick and how can we group these types of customers together to be able to find some scalable channels to be able to sort of find our niche, find our lane that we want to be in, and go ahead and focus on it? That part's really hard.
Speaker 2:Where I feel like with services business is it's like hey, let's just say, for the sake of an example, I'm building websites for customers. Right, I get a couple of good customers that happen to be in one specific industry. Let's call it landscaping. I have validated that already, that I know that, hey, there's a group of people out there. They're landscaping businesses. They want websites.
Speaker 2:There's no other real or maybe the competitors are like expensive or outdated. I can go after that pretty quickly. There's not a lot of feature experimentation I have to do where with a software product that is a constant process and sometimes you can get it wrong Early in our sort of life. At motionio we took the feature, we took the product in one way this is when we were still in early access. But we built the product one way and people just weren't using large parts of it. So we ended up essentially burning the code base to the ground, rebuilding it from scratch about eight months after we started and it turned out it was one of the best things that we did. But that experimentation can be can be challenging.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree, and getting your product out there, though with, with customers, has been the most valuable thing for us when it comes to figuring out what to be prioritizing and what to experiment, cause when we were pre-launch, you're sort of doing most things even if you are doing customer discovery, interviews and whatnot in in a vacuum, and it's way different when you get, you know, paying customers onto some sort of a product and their feedback is as real as it can get at that point versus, oh you know, just asking somebody hey, what do you think Would you use this? Is this good? Because before they're actually paying it, before they're using it in their actual workflow, the feedback is only going to be as good as it could be.
Speaker 2:Agree entirely, and that's one of the really great things that my co-founder, zach, pushed us to do was basically like hey, we have this product, it's about ready to launch. We just need people to pay us something. And it doesn't even really matter what that amount is, because it's exactly like what you shared. It's really more of the mindset of them paying. Their advice is going to be a lot better. The things that they say it's not going to be wish lists of things, it's going to be. Hey, I need this specific thing to solve this specific problem when, before people are paying you, it can be really hard to distill everything they're saying.
Speaker 2:I find that, as long as somebody is paying you something, the feedback, the insights you're going to get, are going to be a lot more valuable. So that's another piece of advice I would share. Just in hindsight of building this business, like when you're, when you are ready to launch or you have a product that's even in a minimum viable state, get 10 people to pay you at least something, even before you have like public pricing. Say, hey, will you pay $10 for this? Would you be willing to pay $20 for this, whatever it is, just because that's going to get you to the ultimate amount that you want to charge for much faster, because you're able to bring that value to your customers, to your users, much faster.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the strategy that we've used since we're entering into a category that already has, you know, pmf with other tools that are out there is just, you know, tell people, we'll match your existing contract at 50 of whatever you're paying, and so we don't really even have our pricing structure figured out yet. We're just, you know, 50 of whatever you're paying, because you're still paying us something, and in some cases it's still a fair amount. Uh, so we can demonstrate that both to ourselves but also to to potential investors, that we have a product that's worth paying for, but we also don't have to be so tight and locked into. You know, this is the way that we want to do our pricing structure, because I think that'll evolve over time as we onboard more customers and see what sort of value we really are being able to provide.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that idea of basically hey, what are you paying right now? We'll do 50% of that. Those early users, those early customers are just so valuable, it's like. But it can be hard, especially in those early days, to like say, ah, we're leaving a lot of money on the table. I would push anybody to do exactly what you did. It's just like, hey, try not to worry about the money early on, because it's more important for you to be learning than it is to look at the actual dollars coming in Now. Sometimes that can be tough, sometimes it's not feasible if you haven't raised investment or you don't have a source of you know money that you can tap into, whether that's from you know another business or a previous business. But if you are in that situation where you can charge less just to get early customers paying you, I think it's always a wise decision.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that is something that I think comes with a late mover advantage. You know you're coming into the market five years after a bunch of things have already been in place, and you know there's I say there's like evolutions in any sort of product category into the space right now of they've all been bought by a holding company or private equity or whatever it may be. The founders are long gone at this point. It's just not the same as what they were three, five years ago when there was still that same level of care and motivation amongst the team working with the customers, not know, not figuring out how do we just increase profitability as much as possible so we can package this back up and sell it to somebody else. And so we're, you know, a lot more nimble and lean than what you would expect for a business that's been out there for that long, and you see how bloated some of these tech companies got, especially during COVID and all the subsequent layoffs as well. That's something that we're trying to capitalize on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I love that mentality.
Speaker 2:I think that now is one of the best times to be a startup founder whether it's a service business, whether it's a software product because during those 0% interest rate days there were so many companies that were just gobbled up. Money was cheap, right, and it was company after company getting gobbled up, getting rolled up. We were one of them in our previous businesses and now, after the guard has changed, a lot of those companies, the level of service, level of care, the level of attention that they're able to give to their customers is just far less than what it was. And I think that if you can take this hands-on approach, especially as a software founder, people really want that personal connection in this sort of sort of post COVID period that we're in now, and if you can provide that face-to-face experience, you really care about people's businesses. You're not just some faceless software company that they are used to or is the norm within your industry. It can be a really, really powerful thing. So I love your mentality around that. It's one that I share almost to a T.
Speaker 1:I got one question for you to wrap things up here. If you were talking to a product founder, or a hopeful product founder, what's one tip or trick or piece of advice that you would give them that you would have wanted to have known before setting off and building your own product company?
Speaker 2:Yeah, one of the things that I wish I would have known a lot sooner and this is a little bit more sort of tailored towards marketing in particular but the power of experimentation. It's okay to do things that don't work, and you should be, especially in those early days, be trying everything to get the word out about what you are building, what your business is doing. In our early days I had a podcast I did for 52 episodes. That podcast generated maybe 10, 15 leads, and now we generate a few hundred every month. But in that I learned a lot about how to produce video, how to do short form content, how to basically build this repertoire of skills that I didn't really have before going in. So when you are experimenting, keep in mind that, hey, even if it's not working, you're still learning things along the way.
Speaker 2:But on the same hand, my second piece of advice is know when to call it quits. Know when to kill an initiative, to kill a channel and flip. Focus on the next thing, because that's something that I don't think, in hindsight, I didn't do quickly enough, like there are certain things that I was doing that I should have just cut off sooner Probably should have stopped doing that podcast a lot sooner so I could focus on our YouTube channel, which I really focus a lot of work in now and it can be helpful to know, like, hey, if I don't see this result by this date, time to move on. And that can even extend to things beyond marketing. If it's like a specific sales strategy, if it's a specific approach to customer success or a product, kill the things that don't work, but don't be afraid to experiment, would be my advice. To like wrap it up in a nice little bundle.
Speaker 1:The podcast is interesting, though, because it doesn't really generate a whole lot of leads for us in terms of people that are not actually coming on the show, but for the HR podcasts that I have, you know, we have like 200,000 plus college students who are subscribed to, to our newsletter Wow, and so we're we're. We're getting people on the show that could be end users of our product who would never respond to us if it were not for the fact that we had this podcast, that they were able to come on, and so like it's like a soft sales sort of funnel in a way, because we're getting like public company CPOs and, you know, director of people operations to come on and talk to us for 30 to 45 minutes about early career advancement and things like that, and then just naturally in conversation, you know they ask what is this parent company that actually owns this podcast? And so then that leads to demos and them being a lot less guarded than if we were just sending them like cold email, outreach or something.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that is a great strategy. That's actually like part of was part of my motivation for our podcast early on was to build those connections because it's just, you know you're having a conversation and people respond way better to like hey, do you want to be featured in this thing? Then do you want to hop on a sales call with me? Um, and if it sounds like a fit over the course of your conversation, great, you can just mention your product, see if they're interested. But, um, for us and the reason why I chose to ultimately kill off our podcast was I was posting our podcast episodes and snippets of it on YouTube.
Speaker 2:I would do the long form, video version, as well as short form, and we started to see, like, oh, we're getting actually a lot of our leads from our YouTube channel. People are subscribing, clicking the link in our bio to start a free trial. Maybe we should just double down on YouTube, and that's what I tried doing for a month. It started working really well and I said, okay, great, it's time to focus all of my efforts into this YouTube channel because this is what's generating us far more leads. So it's kind of that like pick and choose, that push and pull. I don't think there's any one right strategy for people. If I had saw results with our podcast similar to like what we were seeing with our YouTube channel, I would have kept going with both. But you know, ultimately you got to gravitate towards what works, I think.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I definitely agree with the picking one or you know, the few things that work well and doubling and tripling down on them. It applies to everything, even like our DTC clients at the marketing agency. Yeah, just do TikTok or just do Instagram. Don't do TikTok. Instagram, facebook, Twitter, pinterest, like you, have to be intentional with where you're spending your time, especially when you have finite resources. Thank you for coming on the show, though, before we hop, can you let everybody who's listening know where they can find you and your business online?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you can find me on LinkedIn If you look up my name. It is just Sam. And then I have a very complicated Polish last name, cholbowski. That is spelled C-H-L-E-B, as in boy O-W-S-K-I. If you want to check out motionio, you can go to our website. Just type in motionio into your browser, sign up for a free trial, check us out. We also have a really active YouTube channel. Once again, just type in motionio, we'll come right up, and there's a bunch of really cool software guides for other SaaS products, as well as like tutorials for the motionio platform, so we'd love to connect. You can also send me an email. I keep my inbox really open and that is just sam at motionio.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well again, thanks for coming on, for everybody listening, as always. This is Brandon Amoroso. Awesome, well again, thanks for coming on For everybody listening, as always. This is Brandon Amoroso. You can find me at BrandonAmorosocom. Electricmarketingcom or Scalistai, and we will see you next time.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much, Brandon.