Episode 04: Turning Your Passion Project into a Career with Mike Kelly
Mike Kelly 0:00
I think we all have this image that like co-founder, C-level employees, like are just different type of people and we're born with a silver spoon and their life has always been amazing. And of course, they have all this stuff. You know, I was a mechanic putting tires on cars when I was in college to pay my way through college, there's no you know what I mean? There's no like special thing about this, right? It was just, it's just the grit to go through it, and just get pie in the face and just keep going anyway.
Matt Johnston 0:34
The human experience is the greatest project any of us will undertake. It's often the one we spend the least amount of time working on. My name is Matt Johnston. I'm a self-professed personal development junkie, retired pro golfer, I now work for an organization that provides employee and health benefits to hundreds of thousands of people. It should be common sense to realize that what happens at work is what people bring home in what happens at home comes to them to work, but that's too often ignored. That's why each week I hope to uncover a little more around what it means to be a human working and living in the 21st century. We'll be learning from experts, having conversations and getting insights into all those things that fall at the intersection of life and work, emotional and physical health skills and money. All the relationships we navigate each day, and of course, the purpose and meaning we all desire. This is The Human Assignment.
Hello, and welcome to The Human Assignment podcast. Today, I'm thrilled to share the conversation I had with someone who's become a good friend of mine over the last year, Mike Kelly. Mike is the co-founder and CTO of MemberVault, a relationship marketing platform that's changing how we engage and sell online. The story of MemberVault is actually quite interesting. If I understand it correctly, Mike along with his wife Erin, founded MemberVault about five years ago, and really did so by accident. At least for my take on the story. Erin was working for a very successful coach, who was trying to scale their business online - trying to offer online solution for her community. And the things that she was looking at - the software solutions that she was looking at - the out of the box solutions didn't really meet her needs. So, Mike, who's very talented developer working 9 to five 5 at a big tech firm or, most likely a 7 to 11 job started working on the side project for Erin's boss. And what started as this passion project for one client has turned into a company that is supporting thousands of people - to build communities and monetize their offerings.
Mike and I are in a business group together, so I get to hear a lot about MemberVault. And as you'll hear in this interview, he's just he's incredibly passionate and dedicated to serving the clients on their platform. And it's his passion for what they're doing is infectious. And one of the things that I find so fascinating about what they're building, and the platform and I've had a chance to dig around a bit - and I'm looking to develop some, some offerings on MemberVault - but not only did they help people with niche skill sets, to monetize what they do, and then of course, build a business around their passion area, but they're also these people are also able to bring together a community and build an audience of others with these similar interests.
And I just find it so fascinating to watch these, these communities grow because of platforms like MemberVault, so we dig into a little bit of that on the podcast, and I just I always love talking to Mike. And the reason why I wanted to bring him on is he's such a, he's such a candid and smart guy. And he's an entrepreneur that's in the trenches of start-up life right now. He's not someone that's looking back after a long successful career. He's someone who's dealing with day to day realities of tough business decisions, of customer complaints, and, of course, raising a young family while trying to pursue these huge career ambitions. So, it's a lot of fun talking to Mike here. He's a funny guy. He's got some great perspectives on business in life. And I think there's some great insights on how he's attempting to handle it. All right now, so I'm thrilled to present to you, my good friend, Mike Kelly.
Mike.
Mike Kelly 4:36
Hey, man, how you doing today?
Matt Johnston 4:37
Welcome to the show.
Mike Kelly 4:40
Thanks so much, for having me. I am so pumped. I just I love the message and the mission that you're putting out here and I'm just I'm grateful to be here.
Matt Johnston 4:48
Man, I we've been talking about this for many months now and I can't thank you enough for taking the time to be on. So, to get going, I think thought that, you know, as we've spoken before, there's many different directions that we can go. And I'll probably go in all those directions. But why don't we start off by talking about what do you - you're the founder of MemberVault. What is MemberVault? And what do you guys do?
Mike Kelly 5:21
Sure, yeah. So, I'm the co-founder and CTO, aka tech guy, here at MemberVault. And MemberVault's, a relationship marketing platform, which is kind of a new angle on the whole course platform. You know, there's a lot of course platforms out there. There's a lot of way to get content out there these days. And what we're trying to do - what we've learned, the thing that everyone knows, but nobody talks about - is that it's really, really hard to make a living, selling courses and memberships and content right.
And most of us 99% of the people selling courses or memberships, or something like that, their bread and butter is actually working one-on-one with people, right? So, it's like providing services or one-on-one support or anything like that. And so, what we're doing is we've built a platform that supports that aspect of your business, while letting you expand out into more evergreen stuff like courses and memberships. You can start kind of dipping your toe in and start selling stuff there. And eventually, again, if you're successful in that, you can go ahead and transition to all of that, but yeah, so that's what we're doing. That's what MemberVault is.
Matt Johnston 6:34
Who do you support on MemberVault?
Mike Kelly 6:36
Now, this is cool. We have we have all different kinds of users. Um, what we're solving, right? The problem that we're solving is really simple. And I always I hate when people oversimplify complicated things, but I'm about to do it. So, I believe selling content or services to an audience is just about having an audience, putting stuff out there, and putting free content out there, until you kind of like gain their trust. Once you've gained enough trust you can go ahead and people will start buying from you, and they'll start being customers. So, it really is that simple about like getting an audience, getting in front of people delivering value, and then until they build up enough trust to buy from you. And so that's really what MemberVault is set up to do.
It's the set up to like okay, you have an audience - whether that be a Facebook group, whether that be an email list, whether that be the listeners of this podcast, right like whatever it is, you have an audience somewhere - you want to give them value and so MemberVault is a second home. It's like a Starbucks in between work and home, you know, it's a second home for people like that are outside of your - that are in your audience that want to get closer to you. But maybe they're not ready to like, pay you yet. You know what I mean? But it's a tough sell to go from like, generic, like, audience. If I'm listening to your podcast, going from that to hiring you as a one-on-one coach is a big jump. So people need some trust building in between those two steps and there's not a lot of options in between those two. And that's really what we're doing - is we're trying to create a second home.
So to answer your question, the people that can use us, there are people that are coaches they're people that are just doing courses or memberships, there's we have a growing number of authors who use MemberVault as that in between spot where you buy a book - so there's a book Run Like Clockwork, Mike Michalowicz, Profit First, he wrote a couple slam dunks out there, great business books, and he's using MemberVault to host you know, sometimes you buy a book and it's like "Oh, to get your Clockwork kit or to get like your downloaded like extra goodies." He's using MemberVault to host those extra goodies for the book. So, if you buy the book, you get access to this, you know, to this Clockwork Kit that's on MemberVault.
And then they're using MemberVault to go ahead and expose people to their, like workshops that they do in person. And they've been able to they've been doing this for over a year now with member vault, and they've been able to completely sell out all of their events, never promoting it, just literally just getting people off of number. So just exposing people and it makes sense, right? Because you're exposing your audience to the offers that you have out there. So really, if you have an audience and you're selling something that's the digital or service, you can use MemberVault.
Matt Johnston 9:39
Well, I want to dig into to that service in a little bit. And certainly, the opportunities that are available to people because of services like MemberVault now and the fact that your customer base is no longer local it is it is global. But why don't we I want to just take a step back because you're running this cool start-up, supporting entrepreneurs and you guys are growing quickly. You've got a great community but how did you get there? You know, it seems you've got this sexy title now but how did you get to MemberVault?
Mike Kelly 10:15
Yeah, right? Did I did I set out to be a CTO and co-founder? That does sound swanky, doesn't it? The honest truth is that we kind of fell into MemberVault and I don't mean like fell into it, like dumb luck. Somebody handed it to us. But we never intended to go out and - so I'm co-founder with my wife Erin, who is - she's the - I'm the technical piece. She's the, you know, really kind of the strategy content piece of it. And you get her emails, you get how her brain works. Her brain works in that way and she's a visionary. I'm an implementer. So, we're a great pair when it comes to this.
Matt Johnston 10:54
Results are amazing. By the way.
Mike Kelly 10:56
I'm so glad, MemberVault wouldn't exist. If she wasn't there doing all of this, like, really important stuff that I have no interest or ability to do. So, it's great. But MemberVault started as just the course platform, an easy to use course platform, for one client. We've I built it custom. Erin was an OBM, which is an online business manager, for a coach. She was working one-on-one with people and wanted to kind of get some content out there. And at the time - this is like three years ago, three or four years ago now - the course platform, landscape was a little rough. It was either like way overkill, you're gonna pay 300 hours a month or some janky WordPress plugin that will break every time you try to use it, right? That was kind of the options at the time. And so, they were complaining about it. And me being a developer, I was like, I'll build something better. And so, we kind of like - I was like - I built something better in a weekend.
And here we are four years later I'm still working on it but yeah, so we just kind of built it as a custom solution for one person. But we retain the rights to grow it if we, you know, if we wanted to do so. But I never thought it was going to get there - it was always a backburner. It was always just something - it was a passion project, right? So, like, I would work on member vault after I clocked out of my kind of 9 to 5. I just kind of, would take the time. I was still a developer, but I was I was a hired gun for other companies, right. So, I felt like as a consultant at the time. Yeah, so I like I did stuff for like Michael Khors and Comcast and all these like big companies, and you would never know my name when it comes to that.
But, you know, it's like something that's outsourced 10 times past and, and I'm actually the guy in the, you know, office coding this stuff. But um, yeah, so I would clock out from that job. And I would just work on memorable and it was just, I was really passionate about it about kind of like, building this platform as a MemberVault. You build stuff as fast and cheapest possible and kick it out the door as fast as possible, right? That's the name of the game because we, you know, no client's got infinite money to like dump in this stuff like this. So, everything's very project based, and you're like, go, go, go. And I always I'm a passionate person, which you know, you're the same, you're cut from the same cloth, right? So, it's a double-edged sword. It's great because we love what we do. We pour our heart and soul into it. But it's also painful when we don't get to do it the way we want to do it. Slapping something together and kicking it out the door and never seeing it again. always felt a little empty to me. And I wanted to build and continue to nurture something.
And so that's what remember all I saw the opportunity for that. But again, nobody was paying me for it. It was just the passion project. And that one coach that was using this platform, she had a pretty good audience. And Adrienne Doris and she's fantastic. She's great. She's doing really good things now too. And so, she was client 001. And people that were using the platform kept asking her, like, what is this platform? Like, this is great. This is really easy to use, I like this. What is this? Can I get this too? And so, and we were always like, it's just a custom thing. Like, if you want, we can install it on your site, too. But like, you know, it's not a platform. Enough people bugged us about it. That we were like, "Alright, alright, alright." Um, and Erin was actually really against it at first too, because I was like, "Oh, let's do it. Let's do it."
And, and Erin was like, "No, do you know how much goes into building a platform like this? Like it? We can't just kick out a custom thing like we have now. Like, there's marketing, there's training We have to do onboarding. There's, like, there's so much more that goes into it." And she's right. So yeah, so she's right. She was really against it. But the drive was there. . Enough people were asking us to do this, that we were like, Okay, let's do it. So, we went through like a formal beta. And I had to, like, make it more user friendly for other, you know, for new people to use.
And just kind of cracking the safe, you know, little by little, and, and for the first like, two years, it was really, I think, in the first two years, we kind of opened it up to the world. And when we opened it up to a world, nobody cared. Honestly, because we our messaging wasn't on point. We had no idea who we served really. Like we knew what we did, we knew the platform was great, but it had rough edges because it was a new, and we're bootstrapping. It's not like we have the funding of Teachable or whatever. We didn't get a $5 million grant. Like we're literally building this in, you know, in our spare time. It's got rough edges. And yeah, so we roll this out, nobody cares. And we just, you know, just keep working it. But for the first two years, I think we have a total of like 40 users. And from year two to three, we jumped up to 3,000 users. And now today we're like three and a half years in. We're about to break 5,000 users like account.
Matt Johnston 16:30
So, when did you make the leap to go full time?
Mike Kelly 16:35
Yeah, so again, Erin and I are pros at juggling. We were very good jugglers. Again, it's funny that we only rolled out with MemberVault publicly around the time my son was born - and he's like three, he turned three in June. So, it always gives me kind of a - MemberVault is about as old as my son. So that's pretty easy to figure out. And so, it is kind of crazy to that in that time we've had two kids, and kids are a lot of work. Kids are way more work than then software platforms are, let me tell you. And so that's been the juggle, right? It's like, "Alright, how do we make money? How do we build this platform and keep our kids alive and happy?" You know, that's kind of the struggle - and keep ourselves sane. And so, it's been a big balancing act. I think we both been completely full time with MemberVault for about a year and a half. You know, I was taking oddball jobs here and there. I still had a lot of connections and so did Erin. So, she would take some one-on-one clients here and there and while we were building this thing, but it really only came into like a year, year and a half ago, where we finally started saying no to freelance jobs. Because we wanted to spend more time in MemberVault, and it was a risky jump at the time, because we remember it wasn't really financially ready to support us yet. But we knew it would never get there unless we gave it some more love. So, it was kind of that tipping point moment of truth, if you will.
Matt Johnston 18:19
What happens in that moment - that tipping point? Why did you jump full time? Did it just require that much time and energy from you both or it was just?
Mike Kelly 18:28
Yeah, you start to realize, there's only so much that a human being can accomplish in a day. Right? Like, like I said, it's a balancing act, or I should say, it's how effectively can you use your resources, right? And when you're building a company like this, it's not a lot of resources, not a lot of resources are required as far as like, like money and building materials or you know, those aren't resources that you need. You need brainpower, right? You need attention, you need time you need, you know, these are the things that you need to build that.
Those are the assets that go into building something like this. And so, you start having to get really picky and efficient about where you're spending that time because you can easily - that's why there's so much there's so much brilliant software out there that will never see the light of day. Because it's just in the bike shed people are tinkering with it, but they're not spending their time, they're not organizing your time in a way that like, is going to get the platform moving forward. And it's a really hard balance. So, I think it just got to that point where MemberVault, in our eyes, had proven itself as a valid business. And we knew that it could support us, but we had to like go both feet in the canoe, you know, not one foot in one canoe, one foot in the other. The only way to do is to put both feet in.
Matt Johnston 20:04
There were a number of things that I'm going to go back to that beautiful thing about this - about recording a podcast that you can go back and listen to the gems that people dropped, but one of the things that I find so interesting is you started with one person. Started with one customer, building this for one person and then when you had this grand launch. It's not like the - it's not like the cities came running to knock the door down. You just kept pecking away.
Mike Kelly 20:40
Yeah, in fact, all we got were trolls. All we got - like we released it like we were like, great. I mean it was just a monumental amount of work to take something custom built for one client and make it reusable for multiple. There are a million tech things that need to happen, there's a million documentation, and there's so much that goes into it. More than I ever realized, and I'm in this industry. And so, it was shocking to me how much work went into that. I never use software the same anymore. I always think about the people behind it now. And we released it out into the world. And we're like, great people have been asking for this. But we were so muddy about our message. And our messaging was that we're a course platform. And but we weren't really specific about what our advantage was like, why would you use MemberVault? And we're like, because we built it, you know? And I would throw out tech jargon, because it's backed by Amazon, ECS and RDS and all these things that nobody else cares about.
And so like, we just didn't have our messaging down, right. So we rolled this out there, and everyone was like, "Okay, well, I still don't understand why would I use you over teachable, or Thinkifick or, you know, all these other big course platforms that do the same, if not more than you." And it was very humbling. It was a humble pie and a half. And there was a lot of moments in those beginning months - year really - where we both really wanted to pull the plug and run. Because we're like, all right, it was a good, it was a good test. But, you know, we can't go against these giants in the industry. There's just no way, how can we compete? But there was so much passion, we still we had a group, we had a core group of just great users, who were always pushing the boundary of what MemberVault could do. And they would always - and we just paid attention, like, how are they using this? What problems are they facing?
So, we kind of like went, we studied our users and we asked them questions, and we're like, what are you facing? "What are you doing?" And this is where we kind of discovered like, "Oh, there's a gap here that none of the course platforms are addressing." They're always - they're all like, "Build your course, slap it out there sell it to some people." And I'm like, "Well, great, but how do you get it out there? And who's gonna buy it? Like, how are they gonna?" You know, there's all these like, questions that, okay, well, great. If you don't have an audience of, you know, 200,000 on your email list, you're not going to sell enough courses to make anything happen. And so how do you do this? And so, these were the problems that we were kind of facing. And we saw how our users were using MemberVault, and they also weren't using MemberVault for just courses. They were using MemberVault to host trainings for internal purposes. They were using MemberVault products, again, for like digital accompaniment for books or things that aren't - you don't think as courses but they're digital content.
And we realized, like, wow, we really have something here. And our trick that we had that no one else had was, we really track all the engagement that people have in there and we have some gamification in there. So, as users are in your MemberVault, consuming your content, they're earning EP - engagement points. And we're able to use that metric to not just measure, who are your hot leads, but what content is working for you and what content is not working for you. All of a sudden, we have this like thermometer for not just who in your audience is great, right? But like, what content is great to most of us get content out there, and we just we have maybe open rates, maybe we have a conversion rate, you think, oh, it converted at 4% sales on this thing? That's great. Well, who like Why? Why did they, you know?
Matt Johnston 24:41
What's unique about that 4%? Right, exactly. Why Did that 4% convert?
Mike Kelly 24:45
Right? Can you repeat that? Do you know who? And who was on the fence who almost converted but didn't. None of this stuff was available at the time and we realized that people were able to glean that information because of what we were doing. That's when we made a shift. And we're like, you know what, we're not a course platform. We've deviated from that path. We're relationship marketing platform. And now we've changed the game and we changed the yardstick. And so now people are like, "Well, how do you compare to Teachable?" Like we don't? If you want to slap a course out there and just sell it to people, go ahead. I mean, I'll give you the link. But if you want to engage with your audience, and really see what's happening, and be able to pivot your business and you know, know what you're doing, then check out MemberVault. I mean, so it's just a whole different ballgame.
Matt Johnston 25:36
So, Mike, one of the things that I do want to do really want to dig into in this as we're chatting here is, who are those people? You know, you give a high level of who's using MemberVault as in like, who you're servicing. I wanted to sort of dig a little deeper into who those people are. Meaning like, who are these crazy entrepreneurs that you're supporting? Like, are they you know, are they - is it someone who's so brilliant that it's hard to relate to them? Or, you know, I've been on the platform. So, I've seen some really, you know, interesting people that I would never have imagined would be, you know, we'd have an audience the way they do.
Mike Kelly 26:20
Yeah. Oh, yeah, there really is there truly is all walks of life. I think that's been my favorite part about doing this. I mean, we have people that like read angel cards and are into like, are into woowoo so deep, I don't even understand what's going on. But they but they do it really well. And they have an audience and, you know, they're, they're doing all that.
Matt Johnston 26:42
And their audience is, is a global audience, right? Like, it's not just, you know, whoever's in their community or in their city. MemberVault gives them - the internet gives them - the opportunity to serve someone in Istanbul, and someone in Georgia, someone in Washington.
Mike Kelly 27:06
Yeah. Well, I mean, we have users in literally every time zone at this point, you know, like, there are people all it's a little mind boggling to be honest with you. How global everything is now. It's just - it really is mind blowing. But um, but yeah, so there's users in all walks of life, right? And so really it is like people that - anyone has content. We have a lot of health coaches, mindset people, there's financial people using Istanbul, right? And because they want to communicate these lessons to their audience, right. And then there's people that are using it just for like, internal use, right? So like, maybe they have, maybe they're a bigger company and they have a team and they want people to go through onboarding or you know, whatever, that kind of stuff though, they can use MemberVault for that aspect of it too.
But for the most part, what we find is that the most common use for MemberVault are people that are providing services and content, like digital services or content for people, right? So, whether that be coaching or hiring me to build your website or whatever, any kind of one-on0-one service, right? that's usually where the bread and butter is for most businesses. But everybody wants to scale that into something a little bigger, right? Or they just want to use MemberVault as a value add. Right? So there's people that like sell - you sell high ticket items, like high dollar items. So, let's say it costs $1,000 an hour to work with you, Matt - it probably won't be long, right? - and so with $1,000 an hour to work with you, not everyone's going to just jump on that right.
What you need to do is cast a big net, and you need to build trust and you need to nurture the people that are on that track. And so that's what memorable can allow you to do. So, you don't have to actually sell anything in MemberVault directly. You know, like there's this misconception that you need to sell courses, or you need to sell an eBook, or you need to sell - you don't. You just need a handful of really high-end clients, you can use something like MemberVault or whatever, to cast a bigger net and to just nurture people and see what cream rises to the top. And nurture them, you know what I mean? And then voila, you got all your lead generation and sales in one place.
Matt Johnston 29:30
Yeah, I think that one of the things you know, just we have we have we go back and forth on what you're doing and a thing that I just find so cool is that there's more opportunities than we ever thought were possible for people with some sort of level of expertise. Even in my background being golf, I could have used that you whether it's MemberVault or another service to engage a broad community in terms of that area of expertise. And what I just what I hope people can get out of this is, is that there's services out there - MemberVault and others - and the expertise and community that can that are in it together with you, w I think you guys do such a great job of creating, to monetize the things that you're really interested in. So, I think what you guys are doing is just incredible.
Mike Kelly 30:32
Yeah, well, we have one of our oldest users with us is - not old in age but oldest with us - I don't know how old he is. But he's, he basically works with like his audience, his recording studios, and like people that like are into that stuff. Like his whole MemberVault is set up to like, you know, talking about mixers and downloading audio files, and this is like, totally - like it's so specific. I go into his account. I don't even know I'm looking at right but like he's been killing it for a year on a MemberVault because he's got an audience and he speaks to them. And he's a quirky guy like he's like doing something very unique, right? And but there's an audience for that. And I think a lot of us shoot ourselves in the foot. It's easy. It would have been easy for him to be like, yeah, "I'm into it all but nobody else cares about this stuff." And here, he's built this little empire for himself. And he loves it.
Matt Johnston 31:28
So cool. One of the things I would love for you to share with people is that, you know, I get to see firsthand that, that you as a start-up founder, you and Erin, I mean, you just you it's a fairy tale life. Like now that you've now the start-up is going and successful. You know, the reality of being a being a tech entrepreneur is you know, the kids don't cry anymore, and life is easy.
Mike Kelly 32:01
Right, yeah. [Laughing]
Matt Johnston 32:03
Now you have two kids at home, and I know that it sounds very sexy but what it what are the realities of running your own business?
Mike Kelly 32:14
Do you know people with kids now? It's is wonderful, right, and I do I practice gratitude on a daily basis, because it is amazing not just the time we live in and what we have, but like, I'm grateful that we have the space and knowledge to do what we do. And yeah, so the all that's very true. However, fairy tale's a tough sell. Maybe one of the old Grimm fairy tales where like somebody dies and we learn a tough lesson and you know that that's the type of fairy tale this is. No, the reality is, it's hard. It's really, really, really hard. And I don't mean that to be sobby. I mean, that to just be real just be gritty. I've been I think we all have this image that like co-founder, C-level employees like are just different type of people and we're born with a silver spoon and their life has always been amazing and of course they have all this stuff you know, I was a mechanic putting tires on cars when I was in college like to pay my way through college.
There's no - you know what I mean? There's no like special thing about this right? It was just, it's just the grit to go through it and to just get pie in the face and just keep going anyway. To make some gambles along the way and see what see what happens. And again, it's not always easy. Financially, it hasn't been easy. Running a start-up is a month to month kind of thing. We chose not to take any funding - any outside funding. We almost did, I know you were - you know, we were talking during that time too, and that was a really hard decision because we were - start-ups consume a lot of money they really can.
And we fundraised it ourselves and did amazing. I'm so grateful for that but like that was a hard decision before that it was really a month the month. Every night I was like crunching the numbers and being like how's this gonna work? Is just gonna blow up in our face? And that was while we were getting successful you know you hear all these stories all the time about the success killing people. And it's true right because we have a free tier we have we have to pay customer support no matter what, we have to pay our server fees no matter what and you know, it takes time to build that stuff up and runway is hard to build and so financially it's really hard. And I think mindset was even harder mindset in once you get - you think that like, when you roll something out, nobody cares.
You think, "This is the worst. Nobody cares, right? If I had if everyone was like signing up, I would be so much happier." But what happens is everyone starts signing up and the platform starts catching on. And you think, "Oh shit, all this stuff isn't finished yet. It's not good enough. I need to like brew a pot of coffee stay up all night to fix all these things that I don't like about the platform." And we all know that's a moving goalpost you can't ever get ahead of that, like, that's never gonna be good enough, right.
And so, I think that was the hardest part is once people started paying attention, and started signing up, it actually got harder, because I was like, now there's something to lose. Now I'm like, "Oh, my God, I hope like we're not as glossy as these big platforms." People are trying to measure up against it. And we had people coming onto our site and leaving us nasty chat messages like, "This is crap." Like, "Go home and die," like awful things. And I'm like who said this, like, why would anybody say this?
Matt Johnston 36:06
So how do you handle that?
Mike Kelly 36:09
I cry. No. It was really hard at first, you know, you really you take it - I mean to this day when I see negative feedback, it is a punch in the gut. I don't know if that ever goes away, right? It's like, oh, that stings. What you learn is that you don't need this thing to mean you give up. You know what I mean? And what's really been fun - reframing is huge. I used to run like all of our chat support, we didn't even have a support person at first, it was me. I don't think people realize when they would go on chat support or go on our site chat. They were talking to the CTO, the guy that built it, like it's not how small we were, you know, like it was like, is like almost a one man show here. And so, I don't think people realize that.
They didn't realize they were talking to the person that was that built the whole thing and would get butthurt over this. And it said they thought they were talking to a random customer service person, that and but I reframed it and I thought of all the tools that I use, there's some crap ones that I used once, and I never used again. And there's some ones that I really love, and I use constantly and if I took the time to write a message, whether it's negative or positive, it means that I care. You know what I mean? If you truly thought MemberVault was crap, and not for you, and you don't want - and you wasted your time, even looking at the webpage, why would you engage with the chat about it? Right, like, I reframed it, I'm like, this person is giving their time. They're being dicks but like, whatever they're giving their time. Still, I was like, so I'm gonna engage with them.
And so, I would actually have a candid conversation with these trolls, one guy that told me I he told me - oh man he cut - he chewed me out. And he was like, "This is garbage. Why would anyone use you? Your examples look outdated. And there's so many better platforms out there and why are you bothering wasting everyone's time?" I mean, this guy was ruthless. And I took a deep breath and I responded, I was like, you're absolutely right. We actually are. We're not as glossy as these big guys. But we're really young start-up, and we're doing something that no one else is doing. And we're growing. We have plans to do all these things, too. I thank you for your feedback. Like this is really good. And we actually ended up having a dialogue. He's now a user. So yeah, yeah. So, he signed up. He's a user now, and he's paying us and he's a big fan like so. Wow.
Matt Johnston 38:52
So how do you get to that point, you know, like that's is that is a really gritty mindset. That's an amazing reframe. How do you how do you put yourself in the place where you can? Where you can do that instead of, you know?
Mike Kelly 39:10
Saying I suck?
Matt Johnston 39:11
Yeah.
Mike Kelly 39:13
I don't know. I just I guess, giving up just never felt like an option to me like I would roll out the options, you know, the things in my head. Again, it's, I don't want to, I don't want to gloss over the fact that like, it doesn't suck. It sucks. When someone gets on and tells you what you've poured your heart and soul into sucks. It's not easy to hear. Point blank, it makes me sick to my stomach. even thinking about it. I'm like, "Oh, god, that was terrible. Right? And I know that's not even true, right? And it still hurts. So, I think just kind of going into that like letting it hit your face. Right? Don't even duck just let it hit you and be like, "Whoo, that was rough." And then decide what you want to do like, so I would think like, "Okay, well do I want to give up? Like why? What would that mean? If I gave up, it would mean that I have to go back to getting clients and dealing with bullshit and you know, or getting a job or, like, do I want to do that? Do I want to give up on this thing that I love working on every single day?"
Because that's the thing I get to work on MemberVault every day for the past? Probably three, four years, I have done something in MemberVault every day. It's better than the day it was before. And I love that, and I don't want to stop doing that. So, I'm like, "Am I gonna let this one tool bag totally throw off all of my dreams?” No, of course not. So, then you're like, "Alright, this guy hates me. That's fine." And then you and then you can come from a place where any guy what's hard to do? My challenge is not going you know, I'm from New Jersey, right? So, I have I have a little bit of the aggression in me if I'm not careful.
So like, what I have to watch is - remember that I'm a co-founder and this, you know, like a business owner, and I can't come back and be like, "Well you suck more," and then like, get into a fight, you know? That's where I need to take a deep breath and be like, "Alright, how do I how do I want to respond?" Like, I don't really want to beat this guy up online. That's not that's not the right thing to do here. And so, I think that's the hard part for me is not getting into like a bra about it. But you know, other people their challenge might be not closing the chat, crawling into bed and putting the covers over their head and hiding for days you don't like that might be the challenge for them.
Matt Johnston 41:46
Everyone's got their trigger.
Mike Kelly 41:49
Everyone's got their triggers, right. Yeah, and that's what I get angry. You know, Erin, Erin hides. She's like, "I just want to read my book and not talk to anyone." I'm like, I need to go out and fix everything and you know, we all have our things. I think it's just recognizing that and then deciding what you want to do.
Matt Johnston 42:08
Yeah. Well, Mike, I just I so appreciate you I always so appreciate your candid nature and I think that that's what I'm trying to hone in on in this podcast. And maybe that's for me in the, in the early stages, the messiness of it all I, you know, typically when I listen to interviews, you sort of hear this high level, you know, looking back from the armchair of the of the glory days. It's so much fun and feels so real hearing from someone in the trenches. I guess one of the last thing I just want to touch on is your dad, and a husband and running a company, and you talked about balance, and I know that it's something that you're constantly working with but you guys are just doing a really cool job of it. So, you can you talk about what that looks like to try to balance all those balls?
Mike Kelly 43:08
Yeah, absolutely. There's a story that I heard - I totally forget where I heard it. But it's one of those cautionary tales, "Confucius say" kind of stories. And the gist of it is this guy goes on vacation and he sees this old man on the dock catching fish. And this guy's like an expert fisher and this old guy's just like, pulling these fish out. And then he gets like a basket enough to feed his family and goes home and feeds his family. And the next day, he comes back to the dock and he's there beating up the fish again. And this guy is on vacation goes up to him.
He goes, "You're like you're killing it. Like you could start a business. You know, you could sell you could catch more and sell these," And the guy old man's like, "Well, why would I do that?" He goes "Well, because then you could buy a boat and you could go out and you could catch more fish and sell more, and you could open up a store as well." - "Why would I do that?" He's like, "Well, because then you could start, you could hire a team for people to fish for you. And you could just be the business owner and you could be getting paid."
He goes, "Why would I want to do that?" You know, because, you know, like, what would you do? "So, you would have free time you said what would you do with your free time?" And the guy's like, "I'd fish." So, it's just one of those like, those are the things like that I that story always sticks with me and I probably butchered it. There's a way better version of it. But the gist of it is I think some so much of us get into this, like, we need more.
We can finally get to this place, but check in what the places first you know, like, what is that for you? I know for some people, right? For some people. I know people here co-founder CTO, people assume I work 12-hour days I have a Tesla, a swanky office. All these things I don't. I have a Jeep with two kids' seats in the back, a home office. But I only have to work like three hours a day maybe. And so, for me, wealth is freedom. If I got all this money and all this stuff, what would my end goal be? I would want to be able to kick back a little bit and spend time with my family.
Like, you know, I - we joke about how kids are the death of all sanity and it's true, but I love them to death. Right and I want to spend time with them. They're never going to be little kids again, like this is it? And so, do I want to spend my kids' childhood hustling 12 hours a day to build this company so that one day I can take some time off and hang out with them? That's so stupid. Why not hang out with them now? And slowly build the business, you know? Yeah. All right. We won't hit a million dollars in revenue this year. It's fine. Maybe it'll be three years down the road. I'm okay with that. Because right now I have everything that I need - that everything that I want.
And I think that's the big message is figuring out what's important to you. And I'm not dissing the Tesla and the swanky office, and the team and the sexy tech, I love all that stuff. It's just not as important as the freedom for me, right? So, I think everyone just needs to check in with what's important, and make your decisions based off of that. And what you might find is you're the guy on the dock fishing. And even if he did all this crap, like you would still just come back and do the exact same thing that you're doing.
Matt Johnston 46:44
Hell yeah. Thank you. Well, I think that I think that's a perfect place to end. Mike, thank you so much for taking the time today. But also pushing me to do this podcast because it I wouldn't be doing this if it wasn't for you, and your encouragement and also this adage of - go with imperfection and learn from there. And so, I just want to appreciate you for you for being you and all your support. And the candid nature of this, this interview is all you, man. And what you guys are doing at MemberVault is a very, very cool and you're helping people to make money sharing what they love to do. And I think that in essence, it's really, really neat.
Mike Kelly 47:38
Thanks, man. And again, don't undercut yourself, man, this is a great podcast. I love what you're doing here. And yeah, this is this is all you brother. So, this is this is awesome. But thank you so much for having me on.
Matt Johnston 47:51
To be continued.
Mike Kelly 47:53
Indeed.