Robby McCullough, Beaver Builder

[00:00:55] Sanjay Parekh: Today we're speaking with Robby McCullough, one of the founders of Beaver Builder, a complete drag-and-drop design system for WordPress. While running a successful web design agency, friends Robby, Billy, and Justin were approached by a non-technical client who needed a website page builder tool so they could consistently update the site without possessing web development skills. After an unsuccessful search for a tool that met this need, the trio founded Beaver Builder in 2014. Robby, welcome to the show.

[00:01:24] Robby McCullough: Hey Sanjay. Thank you.

[00:01:27] Sanjay Parekh: I'm excited to have you here. But before we get into kind of Beaver Builder and how all of that started, I'd love for you to give us a minute or two on your background and what got you to where you are right now.

[00:01:40] Robby McCullough: Okay. Let's see. I grew up in the Bay Area. San Francisco Bay area, and I had a passion for computers and design and coding from a pretty early age. I was fortunate to have a computer around and I started learning Visual Basic programming back when I was young and tried making little games and apps and things like that. And then later on in my early twenties, I was working odd jobs, restaurants and things like that. And I had this realization that I wanted something that was going to be more of like a career for work. So, I started getting back into technology and web design and building some small web apps and things like that. And then eventually I started working with my now co-founders at our website agency, which was called Fastline Media.

[00:02:34] Sanjay Parekh: Cool. Awesome. So, I've got to ask, because you mentioned getting a computer when you were young. What was your first computer?

[00:02:41] Robby McCullough: Oh gosh. So, it was a family computer, interestingly. So, my dad was always a PC guy. He was always running Windows. And then but then my mom a little later on, like for a while it was just like we had ‘the’ computer, and it was the only computer in the house, but my mom, I think it was one of her, I think it was my aunt who was a good friends with my mom started working at Apple. This is probably back in like the early nineties. But my mom got an Apple computer, so there was always this dad was a PC guy and mom was Apple. And I was mostly on the PC. Like I mostly used dad's computer. Yeah. And then when I got my first computer, it was a PC.

[00:03:24] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. So, that first computer dad's computer, was it a 286? 386? 486? Do you remember?

[00:03:30] Robby McCullough: Gosh, no. I honestly have no idea. Yeah. Yeah, I wish he was still around to ask.

[00:03:35] Sanjay Parekh: What about mom's apple? Was it a Mac or one of the pre-Macs?

[00:03:39] Robby McCullough: Let’s see. So, we had the old like boxy, like the black and green screened Macs in school. I remember those. And then, the first computer of moms I have memories of was back when they did the kind of clamshell like color design, like the all-in-one units.

[00:04:01] Sanjay Parekh: It sounds like that was a Mac. I only asked because my second computer was an Apple 2C way back in the day. So, I have a love for the pre-Mac computers that Apple used to put out way back then. Okay. Let's get back on the topic, otherwise we're going to talk about computer tech nerd stuff here for a long time. So, was this when you joined your co-founders and by the way, how did you find, how did you meet your co-founders?

[00:04:29] Robby McCullough: Yeah, it's a funny story. So, we met through Craigslist. I had been doing some like freelancing jobs and just honestly trying to develop like a little bit of a portfolio of work to go and try and get like a real job. And yeah, they had an ad on Craigslist, and I remember they sold it really well.

They're like, it was like, come join a Silicon Valley startup in its early stages. And, you know that phrase, fake it till you make it? Like that used to be common. They were a legitimate business and doing well and it was legitimate work, but definitely they sold it like it was going to be more of like the classic like Google offices where you walk in and there's like massage tables and pinging pong and all that kind of stuff.

[00:05:12] Sanjay Parekh: And there, there was none of that. I take it.

[00:05:15] Robby McCullough: Let's see. There was an Xbox, there was an Xbox, and there was an Apple tv. We used to do fantasy baseball every year. So, we'd stream a lot of baseball games in the office. But yeah.

[00:05:27] Sanjay Parekh: I think you're definitely the first and so far, only person on this podcast that said that they met their co-founders on Craigslist. I don't think anybody else has said that yet. So, you've got that feather in your cap. Okay. You met these folks. Is this your first time doing something entrepreneurial or did you do anything entrepreneurial when you were a kid? Or were there any entrepreneurs in the family? Mom, Dad, somebody else?

[00:05:55] Robby McCullough: So, I had a good friend in high school and he later on went and started a company through Y Combinator. He joined the Y Combinator accelerator and got funding and that kind of inspired me. I got to watch him progress through Y Combinator and start his company and grow his company. At the time I got turned onto the Hacker News site and started reading Hacker News regularly and just I'd always enjoyed building websites and web apps. And some of my first projects were like forum sites, and I'd throw some Google ads on there, and it was just like a way to make some extra spending cash when I was younger. But then seeing that kind of ecosystem of entrepreneurs made me realize, I'm not too far off from starting a business. Like this is a serious way to make a living. So, I did a few websites and web apps that made some pocket change but nothing like particularly entrepreneurial before that. Yeah. And not in my family either. No. Now actually, my mom recently, she's actually, she just retired, but she went back to school as like a second career and started a therapy practice. This was after I'd started a business, but she has started a business and closed a business now.

[00:07:22] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. So, she got to watch you be an entrepreneur and take that lesson for herself. That's awesome. Okay, so you found these two guys, got lured into a Silicon Valley startup which, was it funded, not funded?

[00:07:37] Robby McCullough: No. It's all self-funded.

[00:07:39] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. So, totally not like a Silicon Valley startup. So, you got weird in this startup. And then what happened? This was not doing Beaver Builder yet. This was just doing web design and how did Beaver Builder become a thing at that point?

[00:07:55] Robby McCullough: Yeah. We were doing website design. We did a lot of photography websites, and we did a lot of kind of small local businesses. Those are kind of the two areas we specialized in. And you mentioned a little bit in the intro, but the classic story that we like to tell is we were working on WordPress and we all had some development chops and we had a client that came to us and asked us to build his site with a page builder tool specifically because he wanted to be able to make changes. I think he'd had a website before that he'd worked with a freelancer or an agency, and every time he wanted to update a photo or a heading, he had to go back to that company and it was a pain. So yeah, he wanted us to use a page builder so that he could get in there and make the changes himself. And we like balked at the idea because, we were developers and we wanted to write the code and we're like, oh, we don't want to use a page builder tool. That's too easy. But we did it for them and we kind of had this eye-opening realization. Because he was right. He was able to take over the site, make his own changes. It made the whole process a lot easier for everyone.

But we didn't love the experience of the software that we used to build it. And we were looking around for something that was more of a what-you-see-is-what-you-get-style tool. Back then a lot of the WordPress visual builders worked in the admin area. So, you'd put a little box in that said heading and you'd type the text in. Then you'd have to go to the front end of the site and refresh, and it would show. So yeah, we started working on one on the side kind of nights and weekends. My technical co-founder Justin Busa, this was mainly his drive. He would come back into the office each morning and be like, look what I did. I was up all night and my wife's mad at me, but check out what it can do now!

[00:09:44] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. Did you, as you're thinking about this, like this client is basically asking you to create a tool that negates you guys as an agency, right? Like you're building a tool that cannibalizes your own business thing. Did you think that through of, Hey, what are we doing here? Is this really smart? Was there any thought about that? Or you just went in.

[00:10:09] Robby McCullough: Good question. It's funny because we learned a lot more about running an agency after we started selling software. We got involved in some business coaching groups and a mentor of ours early on ran a conference where he'd bring in a lot of like product people, but also agencies. At the time we didn't really do any kind of like a service contract or have any kind of recurring revenue, and I remember we'd spend a lot of time in the day going through emails from people that we'd built websites for with just those little updates. And in hindsight, what we should have been doing was charging some kind of a recurring service fee. But if it was just like a login and update this or that, like we would just do it and not charge them for it. So, yes and no. Like we probably could have been doing better in that sense, but at the time it was helpful for us because that client didn't come back and use up our time that we weren't charging them for.

[00:11:11] Sanjay Parekh: Right. That's interesting. That's interesting. Okay, so, when you started to build this out as a team, how long of a period of time was it from, hey, let's start building this to, we actually have a version that is not going to fall over, and people can use.

[00:11:29] Robby McCullough: It was probably about a year. It was a little messy because Beaver Builder, there's the page builder part of it, and then there's also a theme. And the theme was if your listeners are familiar with WordPress. WordPress themes run on all the sites. We had a theme that we used when we were building all of our client sites that was like a boilerplate back in the day. It was like a bootstrap based, I think like CSS framework and markup framework. And we were doing this legitimately, but like a lot of the development time we put into building Beaver Builder, we were able to do on like our clients’ time because we were actually working on client projects while building this thing out. But I'd say it was about a year in development and then internally we were using it during that time. And then we decided to try and productize it and sell it.

[00:12:21] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. Okay, so you start productizing it. You're still running the agency. You're still working for clients. At what point in time, and I think this is true, what point in time did these things cross over and you're like, the agency no longer makes sense, it's all in on Beaver Builder?

[00:12:39] Robby McCullough: I mentioned we had a business mentor, so his name's Chris Lema. He was doing a lot of blogging in the WordPress space around, best practices as far as running a software business. And actually, at that conference, he threw a conference in Cabo. And we were still doing both, we were doing Beaver Builder, we were doing the agency. I think around that time, like we were doing under a hundred thousand dollars a year in revenue, but we were growing. And someone, multiple people actually told us...

[00:13:13] Sanjay Parekh: A hundred thousand on the Beaver Builder side or…?

[00:13:16] Robby McCullough: Yeah. Yeah. Like within the first year we were doing under a hundred thousand. But there was maybe like, four or five months where we were getting like a sale or two a month, and then we were getting a sale or two a week, and then we were getting like a sale or two every day and it was growing and there was something there. But we were reluctant to jump all in on Beaver Builder because we'd built up this business and brand recognition with our agency and we had ongoing clients. Like some clients we had been doing work for, like projects that took, a year or longer that were consistent, and it was a really difficult decision to make. We did eventually decide to go all in on Beaver Builder, and we fired all of our clients. We stopped taking new clients. I guess we did that reversely. We stopped taking new clients, then we fired our ongoing clients and, yeah, decided to go all in.

[00:14:14] Sanjay Parekh: Like how did that make the team feel, especially the three of you as co-founders? Was there anything nerve wracking about it? Were there, late nights that were worrying about, are we going to be able to make this work? What were your concerns?

[00:14:30] Robby McCullough: Yeah, absolutely. It was very nerve wracking. It was a big decision. Around that transition point, we all kind of had to take a little haircut on what we were making, too. We were like, okay, we're not going to take this project on. We're going to be scrappy for a couple of months here and just hope this thing works out. And luckily for us, it did. Beaver Builder continued growing at that pace. And it wasn't long before it took over the agency business as far as the revenue we were bringing in and we were able to support ourselves with it. But there was a few months there where we didn't know if that was going to happen and we were throwing away what felt like all of this work we'd done to build the agency business and the brand and the trust with our clients and all that, and we were just going to dump that for something new.

[00:15:21] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. In those early days when you were seeing that increased clip of people buying Beaver Builder, was there something that you were doing to get that flow of connections and sales, or was it all organic? How did that happen?

[00:15:38] Robby McCullough: It was mostly organic. We were doing all the classic, trying to inject ourselves in conversations and blog comments. Like I'd have a Google alert, like anytime someone mentioned a page builder in a new blog post or something, I'd go in and a lot of it was like, not slimy, but a lot of it like didn't work. Like we would email people who had prominent blogs in the space and say, hey, we'd love to give you a free copy of our software. We're doing this thing. We're really excited about it. And you would send out. 20 of them a day and hear back from one person that was nice enough to just say no, like didn't just delete the email kind of thing. But then it was definitely a snowball effect where our product was solid and at the time, and to this day, really still, it's like one of the best options out there. Early on, I guess there's a lot more competition in the WordPress space and in the page builder space, but, back then, we were one of the only games in town, and when people started using it and seeing the benefit, they started talking about it. So, we had a lot of word-of-mouth marketing, like once that started, it slowly started rolling and picking up speed and momentum.

[00:16:50] Sanjay Parekh: That's fascinating. And I think a lesson in how you do marketing. Sometimes it just, marketing happens to you. You don't do the marketing.

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[00:17:23] Sanjay Parekh: So, let's switch gears a little bit and talk about managing business and, really, you guys went through a bunch of it, right? So, you had the stress of family and personal commitments. You had your own little small business and then you had this side hustle on top of it. How did you three manage all of that and make it all work?

[00:17:45] Robby McCullough: I think I had it the easiest because at the time I was a single guy. I didn't have a family or kids. I used to joke around — it sounds horrible thinking about it now. I used to joke around and be like, hey, if everything like goes to heck, like I can just move back in with my parents, Both of my co-founders had children and wives and more established families. Actually, the reason they hired me originally was because my co-founder Billy was having twins and he was planning to take some time off around the time his twins were born. So, they wanted to get some extra help in there.

One interesting thing I guess that happened pretty early on in the business for us was, we're all based in the Bay Area and around Campbell, California. But my co-founders both decided to move out of the Bay Area to get bigger places for their growing families and when we started, we were all working in an office together. But then maybe I'd say maybe two years-ish into the business, we decided to go fully remote. Because they were moving out of the area. Way pre-pandemic, pre-working remote being mainstream these days.

[00:19:03] Sanjay Parekh: En vogue. That's interesting. And so how did you, as a team, when you did that, there really wasn't a lot of discussion about being a fully remote team. How did you manage that and figure out the challenges and deal with all of that stuff to make it work as a team?

[00:19:23] Robby McCullough: In WordPress, one of the co-founders of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, also is the CEO of a company called Automatic, and for anyone outside of the WordPress space, it's very intermingled and it's a little complicated to describe how that all works because wordpress.org is a giant open-source community-run project. But then Automatic is this multi-billion-dollar valued corporation that contributes to WordPress, but then they also do hosting and various other things. And Automatic has, I think, always been a remote company. If they weren't always, they from very early on were fully distributed. And Matt and a lot of people in the company would write a lot about how they managed that, and they really championed the idea of having a distributed company. It was more popular, I think, in the WordPress space. And they were writing and sharing a lot of what had been working for them and again, encouraging that this was the future and it was a better way to do work.

[00:20:34] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. It's interesting. I didn't realize that they were remote that early on and promoting it. I don't think that's been discussed that much during the pandemic or even now. Fascinating. Okay. Now you guys are at the, this point where it's how many employees in the company?

[00:20:55] Robby McCullough: At that point, I think we were just, we'd hired one contractor to help us with support. So, it was the three of us. Plus, one guy who was already working from abroad.

[00:21:08] Sanjay Parekh: Okay, so you're at four back then. Fast forward to today, how many people are you now?

[00:21:13] Robby McCullough: We're about 20 to 22. We have a few kind of, again, it's a little complicated. We have a few contractors that we work with that we feel are part of the team, but basically 20.

[00:21:23] Sanjay Parekh: Okay. And everybody is spread throughout. Is this throughout the US, throughout the world. How far away are we talking?

[00:21:30] Robby McCullough: Yeah, throughout the world. We have a maybe handful of US-based employees. We have a few employees in the UK and Canada, Philippines and India and a few other places around the world.

[00:21:44] Sanjay Parekh: Okay. Wow. So, how do you, with a team that's relatively small like that, how do you manage across a team like that? And it seems like the advantage would be that everybody's in a different time zone, so you almost have a 24-hour cycle of people always working and being awake and working on stuff. Does that work out for y'all?

[00:22:03] Robby McCullough: It has worked out for us. We're pretty flexible. I think. I guess again, since like post-pandemic now and seeing how a lot of other companies have handled the transition from going from in-person to distributed, we're definitely on the side of a lot more casual, get your work done when you can, when it's comfortable for you. We, in the states, keep a standard nine to five schedule where that's where we're online and available and we encourage everyone to do their best to try to be around during some of that time.

One of the things that we've been doing since very early on is on Thursday we have a standing Slack meeting where everyone comes in and we'll, occasionally we'll make some business-related announcements, but for the most part it's just an opportunity for everyone to say hi. We talk about what shows we've been watching on Netflix or when the World Cup was going on, we'd be talking, like whatever was happening in the world that people were interested in. Like just in this last week, we have one woman on our team who always lets us know when the Powerball lottery gets above a certain amount. So, we all, usually end up going and buying Powerball tickets and daydreaming about how, if this person doesn't show up on Slack tomorrow, we know they won because they're never coming back.

[00:23:27] Sanjay Parekh: There you go. There's no company pool buying of Powerball tickets?

[00:23:31] Robby McCullough: No, we haven't done that. We haven't done that yet. Maybe we should. I don't know. I don't know if it's actually something I want to encourage. Like it's fun. But I also always feel a little bit like, I don't know, this is probably, I'm probably not going to win this. Why am I putting my money into this?

[00:23:45] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah, 300 million a cash option split 20 ways is not a bad outcome, I'd say. Yeah, maybe you don't need to worry about everybody quitting their job because you get to quit too and somebody else gets to take over Beaver Builder.

Okay, so talking about this distributed team you've got, and you're one of the three folks that is leading the team as a co-founder, how do you manage kind of sleep and wellness and all of that. Because, conceivably, somebody might have a question or an issue at 11 o'clock at night, three in the morning. How do you manage all of that?

[00:24:24] Robby McCullough: I think I really have to speak for me and my personal experience, but I think I've gotten better at work life balance as time has gone on. We've also, like us, three co-founders have hired folks to take over some of our day-to-day work. And there was a time where, it was like the three and the four of us like answering all the support tickets or, if the website went down or something like that. We'd have those kind of emergency calls or emails that were like, something needs to be fixed now. Whether it's weekend or middle of the night. And we all lived that lifestyle for many years and, I was guilty of not overworking, but just spending way more hours in front of the computer than I'd like to admit. And constantly checking my phone. And when those things came in, getting distracted and it was distracting from my relationships and things like that too. We've gotten a little bit better at just letting things roll and dealing with things when we can, as opposed to feeling like we have to be on call every minute of the day. But there still are a few, like when the website crashes, that's a big one. Like you got to get the website back up.

[00:25:40] Sanjay Parekh: That's true that's not, eh, I'll do it on Monday type of thing. So, I guess that part of the sales pitch of the Silicon Valley startup was accurate. All the other stuff was not accurate necessarily, but there you have it.

[00:25:54] Robby McCullough: Technically it was true, but yeah.

[00:25:59] Sanjay Parekh: You don't get a lot of sleep. You have to work on all the things. That's very true for a Silicon Valley startup. Okay now you've been doing this. Oh, I meant to ask earlier. How did you come up with the name Beaver Builder of all names, like why Beaver?

[00:26:16] Robby McCullough: Okay, so it's a good story. We originally, so our agency was called Fast Line Media, and when we launched Beaver Builder, we rebranded early on, so it was originally called the Fast Line Page Builder after our company name. And one of our early customers was a marketing guy self-proclaimed and he was very outspoken and very direct, to the point of it being offensive sometimes. But he sent us this email and he was like, you guys, I love your product. I think it's great. But your marketing sucks. You're not doing this. You guys need to have a blog and you should be doing this. And he is and oh, by the way your name is awful. It what? It's not memorable. What is Fast Line? And so, he planted this kind of seed. He said you guys need to change your name. And it was like a little, it was like a little offensive, not offensive, but it was like, oh, it hurt a little bit. It was like well, this isn't fun to hear, but maybe he's right. So, we spent, a couple months trying to come up with a new name and we'd all think of something that we liked, and we'd go over to the like instant domain name search site. And we'd type it in, and the domain wouldn't be there and be like, oh gosh.

[00:27:31] Sanjay Parekh: The classic way of naming things, is the domain available.

[00:27:34] Robby McCullough: Yeah. Is the domain available? Exactly.

[00:27:37] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. It's funny I have to commiserate a little bit. When I was doing my very first startup, we actually had a product and we had named it Spot. And it stood, it was an acronym, Systematic Position Online Targeter. And so, it was a dog and one of these investors that we talked about talked to very early on. He could not get off the fact that it was a dog, and he would just keep talking about it peeing everywhere. And eventually we were just like, we renamed it. He never became an investor in the company. But I think it was good that we did it. So, you went towards the animal name. We went away from the animal name. But that's interesting. I think it worked out well for both of us. Okay. So, you've been doing this now for quite a bit of time. Now looking in the rear-view mirror, like looking back is there something that if you could go back in time, you'd do differently? And what would that be if you could do something differently knowing what you know now?

[00:28:43] Robby McCullough: That's interesting. One big thing that kind of rocked us in the last several years was, so again, we're a WordPress plugin where we're built on top of the WordPress platform. Several years ago the WordPress group announced that they wanted to start working on a new editing experience. WordPress, just quick history started as a blogging platform. Still is a blogging platform, but it's evolved into being a more full-fledged CMS. And it runs a huge number of...

[00:29:18] Sanjay Parekh: CMS for listeners that don't know, content management system.

[00:29:21] Robby McCullough: Yeah. It became the go-to platform for building a website for many years. And it still is. There's a lot more options out there with things like Squarespace and Shopify. But, yeah, it's one of the top five or three choices if you want to get a website online. And so, the WordPress group announced that they were going to create a new editor that, they called it Gutenberg. At the time it was Project Gutenberg, but it was going to be a visual editor that was very similar to what we were doing. So, I guess a good analogy is that we used to hear all the time is Apple and iPhones and the App Store, right? There were all these companies that would come up and they'd have the, like the, what was it called? There was an app that did the light shifting during the nighttime. So, when you're looking at your phone at night, it would make it a little more orange and a little more like they dimmed the blue light. And it was a really popular app. They had tons of sales. They were like a business. And then Apple announced one day that they were going to make that a core feature of iOS. And that company went from being there to being gone.

[00:30:30] Sanjay Parekh: Same thing happened with the flashlight apps. I think in the early days there was no flashlight on phones because there was a fear of burning out the flash, right? Because if it gets left on too long but people hacked it and then they just, they all built it in.

[00:30:44] Robby McCullough: Yep. Yep. So, there's a give and take with building on top of someone else's platform. You get the benefit of the user base and just the community and things like that. But then there's a chance that they're going to take over what you're doing.

So, we were afraid that was going to happen to us when they announced this new editor project. And we were, oh man. I remember it was a conference, a word camp where they announced it. And I remember people coming up to me that night at like the after party and being like, oh man, sorry to hear that. Like it must've been a good run for you guys, too bad. And there was a lot of F.U.D., like fear, uncertainty, doubt, that was going to be the end of page builders, and then in hindsight, like Gutenberg, that project has been coming along. They've got a really great new editing experience on WordPress that you can build out a page and drag and drop things around. But WordPress, it's running 40% of the top 10 million sites. Like they have this huge usage base, so they have a lot more guardrails and restrictions on things that they're able to do. And whereas we're a little bit more agile, we've always been able to dip our toes in new browser technology and stay relevant.

[00:31:54] Sanjay Parekh: Looking back at that then what would you have done differently? In terms of dealing with this?

[00:32:02] Robby McCullough: I think we would've maybe continued going all in. So, at the time we were like, okay, maybe we should look into doing a new product or we should, look into investing more in like our theme or some things that are going to be more of complimentary to what WordPress core is doing. And we did go that route. And in hindsight, I don't know if we needed to. It's worked out, but yeah, and we certainly didn't need to have all the kind of anxiety and again, F.U.D. that we were going to be gone in a year or two when Gutenberg matured.

[00:32:36] Sanjay Parekh: Again, that was the accurate part of the Silicon Valley startup that they sold you 9, 10 years before. All that fear and uncertainty, but generally that's about entrepreneurship too, I guess. People don't talk about that so often, but, man, there's a lot of worrying about things all the time. That's our job being founders.

Let's switch gears a little bit. Let's talk about any kind of technology or app or systems that you use, and you've implemented that you'd recommend to listeners who might be running a small business, starting a side hustle. Is there anything that you use that you're like, oh, other people should definitely use this same thing?

[00:33:15] Robby McCullough: That's a good question. It's not particularly related to the business, but one of my favorite apps that I've started using recently is called Read Wise and it's a browser extension but it also syncs up with my Kindle. And what it does is it's, you can highlight something, anything. If you're reading on the Kindle or if you're reading a website or an email you can highlight it and it'll save it. Then the Read Wise app is basically something I've been looking at or trying to look at every day. And it'll pick six of the highlights that you've highlighted in the past and it'll just surface those for you. And it says a different six every day, and it's repetitive. If you want to learn something, it'll help you see it regularly and they'll space out the number of times that they show you the same thing. So, it helps like kind of surface ideas that I thought were interesting and wanted to know and not forget about and keeps them relevant.

[00:34:17] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. That's an interesting one. Last question for you. If you were talking to somebody who is thinking about taking a leap and starting a small business or a side hustle, what advice would you give them?

[00:34:37] Robby McCullough: It's easy to say, just do it. Go for it. I think that, gosh, that is a good, that's a really good question. I think that the benefits of owning your own business are great, but then there's also downsides. Honestly, I would say if you're in a place in your life where you can dedicate the time then go ahead and take the risk. But I don't think there's any, it's not something that you have to do. I'm reminded of a friend, who was running an agency and he was doing well, but he was like, his family was growing. He was like moving into a new house and ultimately, he just, he decided the entrepreneur life is not for me. He went and he like got a real job. And he has been so much happier now. And I guess that's the part, like the part of me that's reluctant to just say, oh yeah, go for it. Quit your job and just start to take your side hustle to the moon. I've also seen the opposite happen where people who are really working hard and fighting in the entrepreneurial space went and got a job and had, all of a sudden, they had like healthcare for them and their families and they had a consistent paycheck and their quality of life improved a lot. I guess take a long deep thought and decide if it's something that you want, and if you do, go for it. But if not, don't feel guilty. Like we're in this kind of, especially in like entrepreneurial circles and communities and this whole kind of hustle. It's don't feel guilty if it's not for you. I guess just find things that make you happy and enjoy them.

[00:36:29] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. That is absolutely great advice. I love that.

[00:36:32] Robby McCullough: Yeah. That's a tough question. Yeah, that's a really tough question. Good one.

[00:36:36] Sanjay Parekh: But that was a great answer. I love that. Robby, this has been fantastic. Where can our listeners find and connect with you online?

[00:36:44] Robby McCullough: Oh, thanks Sanjay. Yeah, likewise. This is a lot of fun. So, our company, Beaver Builder, is WPbeaverbuilder.com. I am on, it's funny, I've been spending a lot less time on Twitter because it's just been a little bit of a mess these days. They changed up Tweet deck, which was my go-to Twitter platform, but I'm on Twitter still. Facebook and Instagram. The best place is probably to check our website or Facebook. We have a big group called the Beaver Builders Group on Facebook where a lot of people that use our product hang out.

[00:37:19] Sanjay Parekh: That's awesome. Robby, thanks so much for coming on today.

[00:37:21] Robby McCullough: Likewise. Thank you.

[00:37:26] Sanjay Parekh: Thank you for listening to this week's episode of the Side Hustle to Small Business Podcast, powered by Hiscox. To learn more about how Hiscox can help protect your small business through intelligent insurance solutions, visit hiscox.com. And if you have a story you want to hear on this podcast, please visit www.hiscox.com/shareyourstory. I'm your host Sanjay Parekh. You can find out more about me on my website at www.sanjayparekh.com.