00:00 - Opening and early ventures
02:00 - Learning through pivots and first acquisition
09:30 - Founding Relume
18:00 - Launching the Relume Library
23:00 - Growing and leading the team
28:00 - Design-led structure and management
31:00 - Bootstrapping versus raising capital
33:00 - Integrating AI and maintaining design taste
34:30 - AI workflow and future vision
35:30 - Closing remarks

Francesco:
“Hey, Dan, thanks for coming in.”

Dan:
“Oh, good, Francesco. Thanks for having me.”

Fra:
“Great. Well, this is the first podcast I record myself. So let’s see how goes. Let’s see how this pans out. The first question that for you is so this is not your first venture. You’ve done this before a few times. Can you just tell us a little bit like what’s your path that led you here?”

Dan:
“Yeah, I think my path is interesting one right I’ve gone from t-shirts to tech, power bands to mowing lawns. It’s been an interesting journey. I think, yeah, ever since uni I’ve always been tinkering around with ideas, concepts, and always just want to sell something. You learn it in these, learn marketing in one of these classes that you need. But I think one thing that really kind of excited me was doing the thing and testing it seeing it happen in real life. So yeah, that’s what kind of compelled me to test and try things. So yeah, it from clothing. Clothing got me into tech, which was probably my first venture where I learned how to raise money and, and get involved in the whole building an app web app. And then yeah, we got to build a web app, which is a comparison website business, learned how to grow a team to parallel to that. Then also was able to meet my future co-founder, Adam. Came. Yeah, Well, he was friends. He is friends with my sister back at school. After his uni, he wanted to actually go do something that was real. And that’s when he came and worked with me at my first startup or tech startup called Phoenix. So yeah, so worked on that. And then I think that’s where learn a lot about how to build a good product, the principles of building a good product, product velocity, how to ship. And I think we quickly learned as well how to pivot. So from that comparison website business, we’re doing a lot of affiliate marketing, influencer marketing. And then from that, we were able to identify influences that were influential and ones that won’t and won’t performing. And then we built some algorithm around that to kind of help surface up more influential influencers and the work that the team did with that was so cool. So we were able to kind of build an app that verified found good influences that are actually going to help us sell more product. And that eventually became more of the actual product that is what was more popular in terms of sales traction. We pivoted into building that one, we called it Lumio, and that quickly got a lot of traction quicker than the original business comparison website business. And we pivoted into that and that became a pretty overnight success, so to speak. But yeah, after five years, five years, five or six years, that that grew, got some really cool customers. And then we got an offer, an acquisition offer pretty, pretty early on. And took that worked overseas. So I got my startup education on the and got a nice little win. And I worked overseas in Germany with the company who brought us out. And I think also got to enjoy a lot of traveling in Europe. So that was kind of like the journey of going from just testing ideas, getting myself really curious about things. I think that’s one thing I love still to today. Just super curious.”

Francesco:
“So when you finished study, didn’t go to work for someone else? Like you went straight to this?”

Dan:
“No, I haven’t. I haven’t. I let it had a job in between a few failures. I had a job for six months.”

Francesco:
“The job was six months?”

Dan:
“Which was force upon me from my family because I said, you’ve literally gone to zero so you have to go work here with a family friend. Who in the end, I really loved working because it was at a coffee company, like doing sales at coffee. Which got my love for coffee so I appreciated that six month stint.”

Francesco:
“Nice, nice, So, and then you launched ReLume.”

Dan:
“Yeah, and then ReLume evolved again. Coming back overseas. Super curious about wanting to do something again, full knowing you have to have real insights to build a proper company from my previous experience. Wanted to do something with Adam, so him and I decided to start off. Relume we had a hunch in the freelancing web design agency space, no code space, so we had a hunch that’s kind of like where we wanted to go. So we thought, okay, the best way of learning about this space or this industry is to start an agency that is just building on web flow. So we just niched ourselves as a web flow agency that builds, building websites, and from that, that was Relume, right? And you clear some Relume orders.

Francesco:
“So the agency was called Relume?”

Dan:
“Yeah, we started that in August 2020. Coming up to five years, shit, five years. Coming up to five years as a company, Relume. And yeah, that was the nucleus of why we started Relume. We wanted to get insights and as planned, that was the nucleus for us starting the Relume library and us launching as a product company. So you launched the agency. And you learn firsthand that the problem is actually every time with the website, I actually have to do this thing all over again. Yeah, yeah, was like the repetitious nature of building the wireframes. Yeah. And we follow, I guess, a framework of the job to be done. And when we had repeated all these wireframes so consistently, templates wasn’t solving that job, you know, or anything else on the platforms or whatever we were seeing. So we thought, okay, cool, the best approach for this would be to build our own internal library, which we using repeatedly. And that became the actual nucleus of the first. And how did you go from there to launch? Because that’s not an easy step. Yeah, so there was a clear fork in the road here. So Adam and I thought, cool, this is what we want to do. This is the insight. So it was August, 2020, we started Relume and it was the insight we probably had in probably in one year. So in about August the next year, probably a little bit earlier, June, 2021. And we said, okay, this is the idea, but we need to focus. So Adam and I split in a way where I focused on the agency building.”

Dan:
“Still maintaining revenue and getting a I guess a nice little cash injection for seed capital and Adam focus purely because he he didn’t raise any angel investment did you know what the agency was angel investor and so yes we build out some initial capital from that I maintain operations whilst obviously working with Adam strategically, but he was doing the actual the work on the product. Yeah, we kind of split which divide and conquer, but I think eventually we came back and then we launched the Relume library in January, sorry, November 2021. And yeah, November and then a couple of months later, we were able to get a lot of decent traction, MRR, which was so cool to see that we actually were making money from the thing that we built. And also most importantly, we were able to get our third co-founder come on, which was Slater. So we lacked a lot on the technical side and we were able get our founding engineer, Slater, who I met previously at another startup incubator. So I guess the new version of Relume was born in Jan 22. It’s myself, Adam and Slater. And yeah, we had this product, this Relume library component. Only in Webflow at the time. And that’s when we focused on obviously growing that business. And I think the agency kind of phased out a year after that, which was pretty cool.

Francesco:
“Nice, nice. So like when you launched the first version, like you got this product. I’m curious, like how did you like go to market? How did you go and sell that? Because obviously like you were already like having clients, so you were like more like trying, you your sales.”

Dan:
“Was more focused around clients, not agencies. Yeah, yeah, correct. I think parallel to before even running the library, before launching the Relume library, Adam and I were pretty active in the Webflow community. So we’d be creating YouTube videos, we’d be getting on podcasts, we’d be getting involved in conversations in the community. So we already kind of a following, so to speak, or some reach in that community. So when we were able to launch the library, people already knew who Relume were. Other agencies and freelancers. That was kind of like our, we started off with a decent base, right? And then so when we launched it, had an instant, instant. People could see us straight away. So it was yeah It was a way for us to kind of build a little bit of a distribution in a brand. So it wasn’t just nothing So then when we were able to launch freedom library, we actually were able to get people seeing it Yeah, well we’re kind of probably I think the rule was getting rid of the live agency Was when we’re able to fully pay ourselves from the MRI. So I think we got to that within five to six months, which is cool, which was for four, there three of us and then eventually it became five at the end of that year. But yeah, it was a rule, like we can cut off the agency. I was waiting to cut off the agency. Was just like, when you got a product, right, that’s scaling and you can impact thousands of people instead of five. It was obviously a strong motivator. As much as I love the experience of an agency, I think just when you compare it to a building a product, it’s pretty cool. Yeah, I know. I know what you’re saying. But yeah, we all know. Agency owners, we do know. There’s good days and bad days, overall, think building a product is also a cool It’s different thing, yeah, for sure.”

Francesco:
“I’m sorry, I’m just going back to the point about like when you launched just for a sec. So like the first version that you launched didn’t have a build apart from like, I’m assuming like Stripe and payment. Oh, it was all no code.”

Dan:
“Yeah, Adam and I built it using Webflow. Remember stack? Yeah. Which is the off like the users and that and that connected us into stripe. Yeah. So I remember stack JetBoost, which is a filtering. Yeah. Functionality, so you have the filtering functionality, which is JetBoost member stack for memberships and payments, and Webflow as the web app. And that was, that was a stack, yeah, was literally those three things. Is a very unique insight, but it’s also very cleverly executed because like the tendency, I think when you find inside is like, I want to build something, I want to like get engineer. Yeah. And that becomes like immediately like a much bigger piece, right? Yeah, like, I think obviously is a lot different today. Yeah. With what we have available to us with AI. But back then, I’ve always was a big believer that you work within your constraints, like you have force constraints work within that and drew the bet do the best thing you can do at that time. Because then you don’t have to wait, then you don’t have to wait to launch six months on something or find an engineer as a blocker. I the best validation, there’s always way. And we found a way three or four years ago and there’s even better ways now of even multiplied by 100 of building an MVP. Yeah.”

Francesco:
“What’s something that Relume has taught you that you didn’t learn from the previous ventures?”

Dan:
“Oh, working with large team. The previous ventures, I think I capped out at. How many? How big is the team now? 25. Wow, that’s a lot. Sorry, yeah. What’s the split between design engineers and ops? Engineers around 10 and 9, including Slater, I think it’s about 10. Product team about 6. It’s a product engineering led company. 16 of us, I think, all in that. And then the remaining is in growth and sales and support and people. So the remaining nine split out. All in Sydney? Australia, there’s, think there’s 17 of us. Yeah. 15 of us in majority Sydney. We’re majority Sydney, couple of us interstate and then the rest overseas all across the world. And is what’s the learning?”

Dan:
“Yeah, learning on that is running a team, Francesco. You can read books about team management and leadership, all that stuff. But until you actually have a team that you need to lead, motivate, and get aligned, that’s incredibly difficult, right, because you can only learn by doing you can’t you can read principles, obviously, but every team dynamics are different. So your team is completely different to mine, even though it could be the same number. So there are some principles though I can draw from. So principally, yes, took a lot of learnings from books and podcasts. But yeah, when you actually have to apply it to it’s hard. And I think what’s interesting is that you go from a founder that, you know, was doing the stuff to then a founder that needs to get the best out of people that they work with. So that’s a different job and it’s a job that you didn’t start off with but you evolved to. So think having the ability to just be mindful of that and learn how to do that job well is something that… I’m still learning compared to previous ventures. Previous ventures maxed out at eight, nine people. So didn’t get to the scale that I like. And I think that’s one thing I really love about Relume and learning how to kind of like still.”

Francesco:
“Did you find difference between like there’s a, you know, like people generally say like between 10 and 20, Yeah, I think the biggest gap I’ve found was mainly, yeah, around going, going above.”

Dan:
“More projects, right? So I think around eight, nine people, it didn’t feel like we’re still very close, as we’ve doubled that, it’s actually like added more projects, more people. So I think it’s more like the complexity of having three or four parallel projects at the same time, which makes it probably the hardest part, which is why I’ve seen the biggest difference. Yeah. And how do you like, like… keep tabs on what the team is working on. You said two or three different projects running parallel.”

Francesco:
“First of all, like, can you talk me through how the team is organized? Like, they have like a pod, like, problem manager, designer?”

Dan:
“Yeah, and we operate in our own way. I don’t know what the term is. So we lean light on, so we’re light on management, so to speak. So we kind of like try to get the designer and engineer more. In sync as a team, a designer could have multiple engineers in a team on a project. And then we do have one product manager kind of like helps oversee all those parallel projects, all those running projects. But overall, we like to kind of lean into that team to have full ownership responsibility of the outcomes and the product manager just unblocks that team rather than manages that team. So that’s how we kind of, that’s how we operate on a product perspective. And I think obviously as we grow, trying to maintain distributed teams as much as I I personally love the idea of teams, So an AI team, editing teams, having focus, I think is the main driver behind keeping teams small, but also… actually having a team focus on one specific thing. That’s how I hope we can continue to scale really in the future. Nice.”

Francesco:
“Yeah, so going back to the question I asking before, how do you keep tabs on how close it looks?”

Dan:
“I think there’s always visibility in Slack channels, what’s going down there, but I think overall the most exciting meeting we get at Relin for me is the end of the week. It’s called the wins of the week. And each team presents their wins of what they’re working on. It’s like a showcase. Yeah, it’s a showcase of their projects that they’re doing. It’s a great way for like not only just myself, but the whole team to see what teams do because growth doesn’t see what this product person or customer or sales sometimes doesn’t see what this product person. So it’s good that the whole team gets visibility on that. That’s one thing I love. I think it’s really cool to sort of see it all come together and that also allows me to get a good understanding of what’s going on, but also working closely with Adam and Slater. We’re aligned in sync weekly, so that kind of then knows what’s going across the whole team. Nice, nice.”

Francesco:
“Curious about how you guys work. Because it’s a bit of a unique mix, right?”

Dan:
“You generally have more PMs, an equal number of PMs and designers, and then one designer for six engineers, that’s the ratio. That’s the ratio. It’s all different ratios. For us, this is why we have actually, supposedly, a higher ratio of designers to engineers. Four designers to nine engineers. Yeah. Which is… And how is managing a team full of designers? Like what is the… Well it’s awesome because then each… It makes the product decisions we make on each project more focused. So I think I like the idea of leaning less into… But that’s why… That’s why we have less management so to speak because having a designer… focused on maximum probably two projects means they can actually focus and build out and give feedback without being stretched too much, right? Which then in effect allows them to also de facto manage that project, right? They’re like they’re focused on that. So I think the ratio of designers, engineers is very high because it allows them to have more ownership and more autonomy of like what needs to be done.”

Dan:
“Which also means that product managers job, like I said, leans more into unblocking them rather than managing. And I would rather scale more designers and engineers as a pod or as a team in like one, let’s say one design to two engineers. I’d rather scale that model across and have less management because then I’m going to get, I think better outcomes for those teams. I’m going like closing the loop on the, on the team. So this is where you are at the moment. You have this kind of design led business with teams that are mostly into execution that is a light level of management.”

Francesco:
“I’m curious, when you started building the team with Adam, you started thinking about who’s the first person I’m gonna hire? Obviously the the fund, the funding engineer is probably the first one obviously, but after then, how did you process that part?”

Dan:
“Well, it’s different because we are a bootstrap. The way of thinking, in my opinion, is different to like if you raise money, you just kind of go get as many people as you can, right? Because there’s an expected burn rate that you need to hit. So for us, it’s based off like what do we need? What do we need to build? And that naturally led us into hiring more designers from engineers. So our first couple of hires was a designer and an engineer. So that we’re a team of five for actually a long, long period of time. And that was where we kind of a lot into what do we need to do? And then that means what, who we need to get for this and yeah, as we’ve grown, kind of maintain that as a way of thinking or a philosophy. So like, what do need to build to see who we need to get? And I think that’s also allows us to then get those persons working on the most highest leverage thing. Otherwise, if we’re just hiring five people just to hire, then it’s hard. I prefer people coming in working on the highest leverage things rather than just getting people in because you have to.”

Francesco:
“Because there’s a head count you need to hit. Yeah. Do you think it’s a problem for founders when they raise in terms of like…”

Dan:
“Depends. It’s about how you think about it. It’s interesting one, right? The model of like scale up, get as much people in and grow your team and build can equal bigger enterprise value if you execute, but they’re also can go the other way. It depends on how well… invested the founders are in getting product market fit. That’s the one issue. What I’ve seen with companies raising is that they’re just focusing on the raising element of like the idea of like raising and creating a company, but they’ve kind of lose sight maybe in like achieving product market fit, which equals revenue, which equals validation. So I think that’s kind of where it can get lost. Like it’s cool to have a company of 50 people and I don’t know what that could be, but -Million dollars a month? Like it’s sometimes the focus can get lost more there rather than just building a really awesome product. And bootstrapping you got no other option. If we don’t build a product that people buy, we don’t have revenue, we don’t pay people. It’s as simple as that. It’s probably like a good way of like. Know, like operating is a more lean and mature way of, because at some point, you know, even if you raised, you need to be profitable. Need to, you just like, you know. Exactly. So we’ve had the reps in getting capital efficient and knowing how to reach profitability, which is the end goal, you’re right, of when you raise. But I think, yeah, yeah, without pays out for us to be a good thing in the future. I don’t know yet. But I think so far, like the decisions we’ve made, I think is, is it’s been, it’s been working.”

Francesco:
“For sure, yes. I hope so. We spoke to Oliver, I think, the previous episode, and he was mentioning the importance of taste and the domain expertise when building with AI. Obviously, we asked him lot of questions about what do you think about AI and what’s happening and so on. Everyone’s talking about that. How do you think about integrating AI into Relume you know, without losing, you know, that product taste?”

Dan:
“Yeah, that’s a, that’s one of the biggest ones that I think, I think for us, how you maintain taste, or I guess, building something that actually people want to publish. And actually export as a website and put live. Think that I think for us is the philosophy is building around or building AI on top of a system. Because building on top of some sort of system allows you to get a little bit more consistency and then within that system, this is where we can help. Drive better taste, at least we can help improve the chances of taste. Yeah, this is the style guide, but also the components. The components are built with ways where the spacing is done a certain way, or we’re a heading font to body ratio, text font ratio. Certain things that we’re implementing in the wireframes and also the style guide that we are trying to improve the taste of so to speak. I think yet by building on top of a system that allows us to improve the designers, chance of AI having good taste. And also, for us, it’s reducing the chances of AI missing. Like, AI can miss a lot because of the context and it can go super wide or just super limited. Like, we don’t want our web designers to miss. So we’re trying to draw design experiences so they can’t miss. And what that means is that, yeah, built around a great system, would run better than the components, but also the design variables that we put in style guide. And as well as that is that building AI on top of the system allows us to kind of increase the chances of the output being a lot more consistent. I guess that’s also like unique to, to, to Relume in the sense that you have defined through the component, like the context and this is what you need to play with and those are the limitations that you have. Yeah, for sure.”

Dan:
“We started off as a component business and I think it’s been the best decision or best thing we’ve ever done because it’s then, I think, gonna allow us to also have a point of differentiation in this era of AI. AI can take you super wide, AI can lose consistency, AI is not good at sometimes understanding context, so I think building our, I guess, Relume on top of our component system is, yeah, good point of difference, but also, I think it’s… I’m excited to sort of see like what it can scale to as well. Yeah. Yeah.”

Francesco:
“How has working using AI tools and building using AI changed the way your team workflow has been working through? Let me rephrase the question. How was working with AI tools and building a product change? Your team’s workflow.”

Dan:
“Yeah. So how was working with the tools and building AI product change your team’s workflow and if yes, change anything. Yeah, it’s interesting. Because when you’re an AI first company from a product perspective, it also means that the appetite of using AI internally is a lot higher, supposedly. But for us, that’s, that’s what I For us, that is the case. We lean into a lot of AI in terms of processes, whether or not it’s in the design phase, whether or not it’s in the research phase, whether or not it’s in helping automate a lot of laborious, repetitive tasks so even the support team can scale themselves. So how can we use AI to scale the team, but not so much on the replacing side? I get the… to optimize AI to replace people, even from a design perspective. But I see more as like, can we use AI to… Enable people to do more and that’s from an internal perspective like how I could leverage whatever agent I can use to help one of our team members do more and focus on more higher leverage things and also from the philosophy from a Relume perspective, right? Like how can we continue to build an AI tool that allows web designers to do more not be replaced so to speak. So I think that’s kind of like where I lean into both from a product perspective and also internally. It’s more like augmenting what the internal capabilities are. Yeah, I think there’s going to be a percentage of things that AI is going to replace without a doubt. Even now, I don’t have to ask a question to maybe one of the lawyers because I got AI to look at a term sheet and give me some insights. So certain things like that. But in terms of me doing more higher strategic M&A deal, I’m not gonna use ChatGPT I’m gonna go to that lawyer, M &A lawyer and do that. So I think it’s just pushing the value further up, which means whoever you are, web designer, person working in the company, you just gotta embrace these tools to see how it can make you the better version of yourself.”

Francesco:
“Yeah, that’s cool. How do you see Relume grow in the future, change in the future?”

Dan:
“Yeah, look, I think for us, it’s, again, it’s continuously seeing how we can leverage AI to make a web designer’s workflow more efficient, more streamlined, and more aligned with the client. So building in a way that enables them to turn them into super Loomers, so to speak. A Relume user is a Loomer. So how can we turn them from being a Loomer into Super Loomers? And I think that’s how we kind of look at new features, new things that we want to build and how we kind of like… envisage real and going forward as well. It’s yeah, how can we build more tools around that that Loomer to help them leverage AI to become 10x or take on more 10 times more projects or make 10 times more profitable on one project is that I think really interesting to me. Okay, that’s interesting. And are you thinking like at some point you will I saw that you launched components for Figma side? Do you think about moving a little bit more like separating Relume from Webflow? Yeah, we already have, yeah, you can create a website in Relume, export that to Webflow, as you know, and also Figma, but also React and HTML. So we kind of already have a broader outside of the Webflow community, but I think in the end of the day,”

Dan:
“For us, it’s just focusing on building an awesome experience in Relume and building a website, and then how they export that or decide to publish that. I think we try and be a little bit prognostic with that and focus more on just the best experience inside, within Relume. Okay. Are you thinking about also what’s happening outside of the design workflow?”

Francesco:
“You mentioned about communication between the freelancer and the client.”

Dan:
“Definitely. It’s internally dubbed as Loomer OS, or guess Loomer operating system. It’s something we’re looking at, of course. How can we prove the work for us, not just the website? There’s a lot of like, I think we spoke about this last time. Because I think there’s a lot of ways to go about it. But yeah, it’s definitely something we’ve got, we’ve looked into, had some concepts, but yeah, as a small team, it’s all about focus. Yeah, for sure, for sure.”

Francesco:
“How do you think about moving from an agency business into a product business? What is your business principles?”

Dan:

“Yeah, 100

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