1130 time for Sean Tepper.
Let's give him a call.
Make sure I'm on time.
Yep.
1130 Sean.
There we are.
Hi, Sean.
Hey, how's it going?
Payton.
Pretty good.
How are you?
Pretty good.
Where you based?
I have to give you a call to make sure you found it.
All right.
How's it going?
Very smooth.
Took me less than 30 seconds.
Okay.
Awesome.
All of our emails must have made sense, I guess, because you found your way here.
Indeed.
You found us via PodMatch.
Is that correct?
I believe so.
Yes.
We've been getting a lot of people through PodMatch.
It's really good for us.
I think a week or two ago, we had like 100 applicants.
We're growing and I'm excited.
Okay.
Good for you.
Thanks.
PodMatch, I've tried a few other services.
I can't think of them offhand, but PodMatch is the one that I still use.
Oh, sweet.
Yeah.
So you've tried a bunch of them and you just keep dropping them.
They're not working out for you.
What's the deal?
Yeah.
I think there's two others in the market and a little clunky with the user interface.
Okay.
I wasn't getting much results, but PodMatch is, they're pretty good.
Yeah.
So far, I've had nothing but good reviews on PodMatch, so I'm excited to keep it going.
Do you know anything about Vision Pros or is this your first interaction?
Have you looked at something?
This is my first interaction and I have not had time.
My SaaS business, I'm just knee deep in technical stuff as we speak, but yeah, I try to do a
lot of podcast appearances, so please tell me about what you got going on.
Yeah.
So we call this a pre-show, but really we're going to use it as like mini podcasts.
I'm going to ask you a couple of questions about your vision and what you're doing and
what's your why behind what you're doing.
And it's really just about visionary leaders.
So we want to know how you're doing, what you're doing, why you're doing it.
And so we'll take these clips and we will post them as like mini podcasts across our
Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and we'll make sure to tag you on those if we have your information.
A second level to this is that if I like how everything is going, then I can push you on
to our live podcast, which we do.
We are scheduling that out in September right now, I believe.
And then we'll do that one live and if I push you onto that, then we'll give you all of
the questions beforehand and we'll make sure that you're prepared for it.
Sounds good.
Yeah.
Any questions for me aside from that?
Straightforward.
Okay.
Then I'm going to ask you to tell me about your vision and there's going to be a couple
of broad, like they sound broad questions and that's how they're meant to be.
They're phrased that way so you can take it from your experience and just run with it.
Gotcha.
Sure.
And it's Sean Tepper, right?
Correct.
Yes.
I'm trying to make sure I'm pronouncing it right.
Here we go.
Here today with Sean Tepper.
Please, Sean, tell me about your vision.
Yeah.
So for context, I'll keep it really quick on what Ticker is.
Ticker is a platform, a subscription platform that helps people confidently buy and sell
stocks and there are about 400 million retail investors in about 16 countries.
Right now we have about 9,000 customers in about 50 countries around the world and we
want to help more people that are entering the market invest with confidence.
So for example, Nvidia is all the rage as we speak.
Is Nvidia actually a good or bad investment?
Same thing with Tesla, same thing with Apple, same thing with Microsoft.
But we do that with a lot of stocks around the world and our platform and not only that,
we'll know what decisions to make, like when to buy, when to sell, how to reduce the risk.
So really we're focused on getting to a million subscribers over the coming years and based
on the size of the market, we know we can get there.
Okay.
So starting from the beginning, where did your vision come from?
What sparked this in you?
Yeah.
So I'll keep this high level.
I've got about 20 years in business, about 15 years in investing and I started the hard
way with investing.
I went through a merger of a business in the 2000s.
It was just an agency, a service business.
So there wasn't like a multiple.
It was like, hey, all debts and liabilities wipe clean and you get a fresh start.
So I knew at that point in 2010, I wanted to create some kind of SaaS business and in
the same time get into investing.
Instead of me, long story short, instead of me working for money, how do I flip that equation
to get money working for me?
So investing, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, they're really the guys a lot of people look
up to.
So I started Angel Investing.
We're investing in private companies and that's a losing game for most people.
I made some money, lost some money, did that for five years and in 2015 or 16, I'm like,
I have to do this the right way.
I have to follow Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger.
So I went down the YouTube rabbit hole.
I read as many books on investing as I could and I found a guy by the name of Phil Town
who provided some of the mathematics, some of the calculus equations in a book.
I won't talk about those here, but people can check out Ticker.
We are open source with our calculations so people can use those calculations.
We always say, go create your own version of Ticker.
We really don't care.
But I wanted to create a green light, red light decision making process.
When you're sitting at the stoplight in your car, it's not like, maybe should I go forward?
It's like you trust the green light, red light rating system.
How do we do that with stocks?
So I created a gamified experience in Excel, used it for four years, making returns that
are about 15 to 50% per year.
For context, the S&P 500 is about 8% after inflation.
So I'm like, all right, it's beating the market.
2019 comes around and I start sharing this Excel sheet with a few people and everybody's
like, hey, you should turn this into a software to share with others.
So after like 10 years, I finally have a SaaS idea.
Just took over overnight to get this thing moving.
But it took about a year to build the first version of Ticker.
And then it took six months to get the first paying customer.
But that's what building a SaaS is.
You got to get people on the platform for free, but in return, you got to ask for feedback
on how to make it better for them.
Because it's not my tool, it then becomes my customer's tool.
So yeah, then fast forward to today, in 2024, we have over 9,000 customers.
So that's the backstory on the platform.
That's incredible, man.
I mean, you got to start somewhere and you started from the hard point, huh?
Right.
I guess I always like to make it difficult.
I think it's the best way to learn is whenever you headstrong, you just dive into it and
you face headfirst all of the issues that you're going into and you just figure it out
from there.
Right on.
So in your personal life, what is your why?
What's pushing you forward?
Freedom.
In my 20s, when I had that business and that service business, I was working like 60, 70
hours a week and it was around age 29, age 30.
After that merger happened, I'm like, I cannot do this anymore.
I have to work smarter, not harder.
So my driver is financial freedom.
Fortunately, it was a year ago.
I'm just over 40 now.
I'm 41 and it was at age 40.
I was able to go full time with Ticker.
I bootstrapped it for three years, so kept the day job.
Since that merger, I'll keep this quick, I did a lot of corporate contract and project
management for a lot of big companies and that was great experience.
But I'm like, I don't want to work in big business.
I don't want to work in corporate America.
I want to create my own schedule.
So I fortunately, I get to wake up and do whatever I want every day.
I love serving my customers.
I love building Ticker.
During the summer, I take Fridays off.
I do not work Fridays.
I actually play golf or I should phrase that I tried to play golf, but my wife and I, we
enjoy work life balance to the nth degree.
Life is about living, not working.
So that's my wife.
Absolutely, man.
I believe in freedom and work life balance needs to be a priority in life for sure.
My last question is kind of like a A part, B part type question.
Sure.
It's why do leaders hide from funding their vision?
And then part B to that is how can leaders lean into the funding of their vision?
So I'll ask you a question.
When you mean funding, do you mean raising venture capital to fund their idea?
So this is one of the questions I was letting you know about beforehand.
It's kind of broad and it's broad because there's a bunch of ways to take it.
I want you to take it how you see it and run with your experience.
So I'm going to answer this probably in a different way than you never heard before.
So with achieving a vision, it's not so much funding.
It's your resourcefulness, not resources.
I know there's lots of other people that talk about that.
You can either dwell on resources or dwell on resourcefulness.
And the ones that really come out on top are the ones that are resourceful.
They can find ways to get it done.
They have the vigor, they have the drive, they have the creative ability to get from
A to B with or without funding.
And in my case, leaders who have a vision that are letting funding get in the way are
not resourceful.
And I know a lot of entrepreneurs like that, they're like, well, I can't get my idea off
the ground and I can't move forward because I don't have funding.
I'm like, you're not creative.
You're not resourceful.
You're not going to get anywhere with that attitude.
And they don't like that response, but I really don't care.
So in my case, ticker is completely bootstrapped.
I knew after building businesses and executing projects, we're working for a big company.
Some cases you have a little bit of money and some cases you have a lot of money.
And either way, you have to get it done.
You got to find a way to get it done.
Otherwise you will not have a job tomorrow.
That's essentially it.
So I applied that methodology to ticker.
I'm like, I'm going to make this happen.
So I actually, MVP to be transparent was $30,000.
I'm like, all right.
I've always had another LLC for consulting.
I built up funds in that.
I applied the funds to the MVP.
And then whatever revenue comes in, this is why I kept my day job for three years, not
three months, three years.
So I could take every dollar the company made and put it right back into software engineering
to make the tool better.
That's being resourceful.
Keep your day job.
Otherwise it's like, where do you get the money?
Well, you can go to the casino.
You can, right.
You can go to friends and family and it's like, I don't want to put the risk on them.
I'm like, I am taking the risk.
I'm going to figure out a way to do it.
Bootstrapping just made sense.
Absolutely, man.
Well, in that you answered both part A and part B.
So that's it.
Those are all the questions I have for today.
But if you're interested, I know I could get you hooked up with one of my team members
to talk about, where was it?
Where was it?
Talk about, you said you wanted to get to a million followers on your LinkedIn or Instagram
or which platform is your main platform?
Subscribers, like paying subscribers on ticker.
So for content, yeah, our model, we're subscription based.
We're B2C play B2C.
I could talk all day about this.
You want to charge where people are willing to pay, which is about Netflix pricing.
So we're 15 bucks a month or 99 a year.
You can do the multiple on that a million times $15 a month.
That's a nice monthly reoccurring revenue.
Gotcha.
Okay.
So if you were interested, I could get you in touch with someone on our team about connecting
better with our audience across social media.
Would that be something you'd be interested in with your audience or my audience with
our audience for vision pros?
Okay, sure.
I'd be interested in learning more.
Okay.
Yeah, I can get you in touch with them.
Aside from that, let me pull up this.
I'll show you what I'm doing.
I'm going to push you forward to the main live podcast because I think you've got a
great vision.
So I'm going to type in approval.
And so if I can spell come on, I know how to spell approval.
There it is approved.
It's not approval approved.
I swear I know the back end of this CRM.
I swear I do.
And then if you're interested in getting more podcasts, I have a email I can send you if
you were interested in that.
Sure.
Yeah, please.
I'd like to learn more intro.
So this is going to be this right here.
It'll be something along the lines of 15 to 18 podcasters that we work close with.
And we refer back and forth people to be on each other's podcast.
So it should send you an email every so often.
Whenever they're looking for guests.
I just don't want it to become like a spam in your in your email.
So if it becomes a little bit too much, feel free to unsubscribe from that.
And then lastly, there's one more thing that I show distribution, Facebook ads distribution.
We send this it's just like a video talking about how first class business does ads distribution.
You would pay $100 and we would do all that Facebook distribution ads for you.
But it's in the video I'm sending you it says you don't have to pay.
It's not worth paying.
You don't have to spend that kind of money with us.
It's all good.
How to do other ways that work the same.
Those are the three things and I will be sure to pass you along to the rest of my team because
I'm just kind of the front man.
I call myself the office guy.
Whenever it comes to helping people tweak out their social media and figure out how
to connect with our audience.
That's not my forte.
I'll just pass you along to the rest of the team.
For context on your business, it sounds like you guys have an agency.
Is that correct?
So I am essentially the gatekeeper to the main live podcast.
But whenever it comes to the whole business that we have going on, I just do this podcast
section.
I just pass people on to first class after that.
Got it.
Okay.
First class is a different business and that's a mark.
Is it like a marketing firm or ad agency?
We help businesses grow is my understanding.
They're helping businesses grow with CEOs, CFOs and CIOs.
We help give them the tools and the team behind them to keep them growing.
Okay.
All right.
All good.
Cool.
Yeah.
Thanks for the context.
Yeah, absolutely, man.
But that's all I've got for today.
So I'll pass along your information and someone will be in touch.
And I sent you that link.
It should send you a link to sign up for the actual live podcast in September, I think
is when we're scheduling.
Cool.
Well, thanks for the opportunity.
I appreciate the bump forward to the next level.
Absolutely, man.
We want to help you get there.
All right.
Well, we'll see you soon.
We'll be in touch.
Okay.
Sounds good, Peyton.
You have a good day.
Thanks, John.
Bye.
I got him.