Episode 1 | Founder of Trotto Speaks on Challenges of Enrepreneurship

The Transcript

Herdrapp (00:01.742)

All right. All right. Again, thanks, Andy, for jumping on. You know, again, I’m giving myself an introduction. one of the co-founders of Herder.io. We’re a project management company that’s looking to help empower small teams to turn their visions into a successful project. So with that being said, this particular podcast is to kind of help founders, you know, kind of gain some of the insights from people like yourself who jumped through

different challenges and hoops and gone through some of the things that a lot of people who are looking to bootstrap and do certain things can kind of gain and also maybe even just get some information about, you know, a Trotto as well. So, Candice, go ahead and introduce us and give us an idea around what kind of Trotto is used for.

Andy Kim (00:50.959)

Yeah, sure. Happy to. I’m Andy, one of the founders here at Trotto. Trotto provides a productivity tool called GoLinks. It’s essentially a URL shortener, but think of it as an internal employee URL shortener. So if you wanted to share resources to say your HR resources or your 401k, or if you had a central code base that you wanted everyone to be able to access really.

Easily, you would just type in go slash in the keyword. One way that people use it is to replace bookmarks, but another is just to share resources much more easily with your team. So GoLinks is something that started off at Google back in the early 2000s. We’ve actually have a story up on our website if you want to check that out about kind of the starting history of GoLinks. And yeah, we’re a happy provider of GoLinks to big companies like

Instacart and Figma, as well as small startups as well.

Herdrapp (01:53.166)

Okay, cool. Yeah, I did get a chance to kind of read through that story. Interesting how they were able to, you know, build something internally that kind of still spawned to, you know, other companies. Is that kind of how some of the other companies kind of, I would imagine as people who have used that before, you know, move or go to different companies, is that how like the word kind of gets out for some of those? Is that how the, I guess in a sense, the company.

kind of became what it is today.

Andy Kim (02:25.041)

Yeah, exactly. I would say that we are riding the coattails of a broader trend of go links going from just the very largest of companies, you Meta and Stripe and even JP Morgan have internal implementation of go links. And as folks leave those larger companies and go to smaller ones, they’re bringing, you know, this productivity tool with them. So I actually think that that’s, you know, it’s an area of

real interest for me in the idea that these large, primarily technology companies have so much more productivity per employee. And one of the reasons is because their internal tooling is so much better than what’s available to everyone else. And so if you take that as a SaaS product and you make it available to other folks and as folks kind of permeate the industry, that’s how you’re going to get really quick adoption, but also a lot of benefit to companies that are not.

the Netflix’s or the Amazon’s or the Apple’s of the world.

Herdrapp (03:27.758)

So with those people, as they go to those companies, how does the conversation start? As far as even marketing for you, how does people know that this is a problem that they need solved? How does that aha moment come to be like, oh yeah, we do need this product?

Andy Kim (03:36.562)

Yeah.

Andy Kim (03:47.441)

Yeah, we actually have some power users who are, I can think of an individual in particular who use GoLinks at Twitter, arrived at his new company and was like, I just can’t work without GoLinks. I just desperately need to have this. And so he dragged the entire company through the procurement process and was a product champion for us really. So there are power users who use this not just every day, but

eight, 10, 20 times a day. Like they don’t, and I could share my Chrome browser with you, but I truly don’t have any bookmarks, right? So like think of how often you would open up a URL in your bookmarks. You actually don’t have to do that. It’s way faster and keeps you in a just flow state if you’re able to just use GoLinks because us as humans, we organize information a lot of times by words, right? Like that’s,

Herdrapp (04:25.102)

Hmm.

Andy Kim (04:45.075)

the most common way to share anything. With bookmarks, have to remember the physical location of where that was, right? And a lot of the times, what you’ll find is that now when that becomes a personal productivity, hey, I know exactly where that is, like on autopilot, you could actually multiply that across all of your employees because now everyone’s using that as a shared resource. think of like,

Herdrapp (04:52.59)

Yeah

Andy Kim (05:15.097)

I remember when I was onboarding, for example, right? And my HR person sent me the link to file a harassment case or change my 401k contribution or anything like that is actually better served as a go link rather than as a bookmark or something that you’re definitely going to forget about. So yeah, that’s kind of the longer story of why certain folks find

Herdrapp (05:26.543)

Yeah

Andy Kim (05:44.455)

GoLinks to be so useful. Now, there are others that are not as frequent power users, of course. Those users may not even create any GoLinks. So we offer you as the user to create them, but often other people are just consumers of them. So you may select the GoLink that says, go slash holiday party. And you just use that resource once or twice a year, and you’re not actively using it.

Right, so there is a difference. is, you certainly see the kind of curve of adoption where we get power users and then other users who are just kind of along for the ride.

Herdrapp (06:23.328)

Okay. for NSC, so that’s, kind of brings a question to like, you know, as you being an entrepreneur and, you know, starting this, you know, business, like, you know, there’s a lot of people, I’m not sure, were you part of the early days at Google or like, how, how, how does like this business kind of land in your lap? Like, you know, for someone that’s like maybe looking to, you know, start a business or like, you know, you kind of hear sometimes the, the,

the sentiment that if you’re in that particular industry, it makes it easier to find problems to fix. How did this kind of land in your lap as far as the business itself?

Andy Kim (07:03.153)

Yeah, that’s actually an interesting question. So my co-founder, John, was at Google. And when he left, he was asked by his startup to start a internal GoLinks solution. then someone left that startup and asked him to do that again for his new startup, right? And so that’s kind of how this started to percolate in John’s brain, that, hey, this is actually something that could be turned into

a SaaS product, right? And it’s also obviously, GoLinks is something that he really loved using at Google and wanted to continue to keep using it, right? So it is something of a, like I solved this for my own personal kind of new problem at a startup. And that spurred the idea that, hey, this could actually be a startup of its own.

Herdrapp (07:56.968)

Okay. And so, did you like, you knew him as he was building this like out, or did you kind of like seek out like a co-founder, like how they kind of go as far as, cause I noticed like a lot of people as they’re like bootstrapping or, you know, know, building businesses, having like the right co-founder or, or knowing someone in your corner who can either code or know marketing or

things like that, like what was your like kind of avenue to know that you guys made a perfect fit?

Andy Kim (08:30.491)

Yeah, actually, so John is an engineer and he built the product.

Andy Kim (08:41.123)

He was definitely looking for some help in terms of sales and marketing and some of the other business needs. And he tried to partner with a couple of different folks and it didn’t work out. also at the time, so Trotto was started back in 2017. And so it took definitely several years for the revenue to pick up. And in the interim, he actually took a full-time job.

at a different startup. And so he was only able to work on Toronto part time. So that’s kind of where the part of my story comes in about a year ago now in early 2024. I actually bought into the business. I’ve been looking for an opportunity exactly like Toronto. And some of the things I was looking for was, hey, it has served large enterprise customers. It’s a SaaS product that has low churn. It’s something that

was small enough that that kind of made sense for me to kind of come in and take charge of a lot of different aspects of the business. And that’s kind of how we found each other. We’ve been awesome partners for the better part of a year.

Herdrapp (09:54.126)

that’s great. Yeah, because I think that’s another thing. Buying into businesses is some steps people never really think about. There’s a lot of sites like acquire.com and all these other places where people can just, hey, buy a SaaS and continue to build it from where was at. And I think that’s pretty cool because sometimes people think you have to build something from scratch and start it out from nothing.

That sentiment there I think can resonate with a lot of people, but because sometimes they may not know. like how now where you’re at, like, you know, with a lot of companies using it internally, like how do you scale the growth knowing that there are big companies like Figma and I think you said like Twitter, Instacart. Yeah. Yeah. And these big companies using it.

Andy Kim (10:44.699)

It’s the cart.

Herdrapp (10:49.006)

I would assume that helps with brand recognition and stuff like that. Did you have to go secure funding? Do you feel like funding is what you would need to get it into other companies, more sales and marketing? Are you more outbound as far as sales or is content creation your biggest kind of area?

Andy Kim (11:09.905)

Yeah, you’re hitting on the key crux of all of this right now. So number one, I’d say, I think it’s easy to blame funding, right? It’s very easy to spend money, but I think that’s actually the wrong thing to focus on. The right thing to focus on is truly like, what are the levers that you have today to be able to

Herdrapp (11:13.044)

Yeah, okay.

Andy Kim (11:39.795)

grow the business and get people to be aware about it, right? I think that depending on the type of business that you’re in, are a lot of different strategies, right? SEO, content marketing, cold calling. We’ve tried experiments in all of these, right? And what we found so far is that actually one of the things that helps us is time in market, right? So we’ve been around long enough that

There are old Stack Overflow, Reddit, Quora, things that people don’t even check anymore. But we’ve been around long enough that people at least have heard of us a little bit, hopefully. And again, like I said, we’re kind of riding the coattails of people leaving large tech, going to smaller companies, and bringing us along. So those are some of the reasons that help us. With that said, I…

Herdrapp (12:18.306)

Mm-hmm.

Andy Kim (12:37.437)

think that it’s definitely a mistake to try to be passive in this. And you have to do outbound. It is very uncomfortable, but it’s a necessary requirement if you want to succeed at the start. Y Combinator is probably an amazing resource for folks in terms of one of the bigger accelerators that

Herdrapp (12:53.218)

Mm-hmm.

Andy Kim (13:05.105)

we have ever seen, right? You get into YC, they give you kind of a playbook, and hopefully, you know, after demo day, you’re off and running, right? But if you carefully look at and read what people say after YC, right?

Herdrapp (13:07.975)

Bro.

Andy Kim (13:23.431)

There is the natural boost that they get from being part of there, right? But it is, I maxed out my number of LinkedIn connections every week and I had five accounts and I did that for a year. And on top of that, I was cold calling and cold emailing 50 people a day. so these are the little snippets that once you start to…

see and you can kind of read between the lines of what are the things that people did to really gain that momentum and ultimately lead to their success, right? It’s these ways of outbound growth that in a particular way, if you do them bad, right, it isn’t a good look for your company, right? So I’m not saying go out there and spam. I’m not saying go out there and, you know,

do things that don’t help the branding of your company, that it will be a detriment to you. But there is a way of, the only way of generating enough interest in your business and your product is really to go out there and get it for yourself. Like people are not gonna actively choose to pay attention to you. There’s way too many things going out in the world and everyone’s busy kind of doing their day job, right? And so you…

Herdrapp (14:43.531)

Yeah.

Andy Kim (14:50.809)

you have to pick your odds and you have to pick your methods and you have to do it hopefully well. But that’s really part of the crux of this is that you have to be able to sit there and actually do the thing for six months, two years, to two years until it actually starts to snowball into a successful route. I think even with Tiny Seed, that’s kind of the focus for us all.

Herdrapp (15:16.174)

Okay. Yeah, I did have one question. Like, so what’s the idea behind the trotter.to? Why the .to? I know like, you you might see some people use .io or .com or, know, whatever. Is there a history behind that?

Andy Kim (15:28.879)

You know, we’re actually, we actually are going to change to a,

either .co or .io. We did kind of an analysis of our SEO and we would definitely benefit from having a different domain than .to. So I think .to was just, know, Toronto was kind of the name that John had thought of and wanted to run with, which I think it’s a good name. But yeah, we probably didn’t do ourselves any SEO justice by having the .to.

Herdrapp (16:02.946)

Okay, I didn’t know if there was some history behind it or something or whatever. Okay, that’s good to know. So being an entrepreneur, what’s been one of your biggest challenges with running a business or even before you ran it, trying to become an entrepreneur? A lot of people, they face issues with family or career or knowing when to jump into the business full time.

Andy Kim (16:08.006)

Yeah

Herdrapp (16:31.256)

Like what’s been one of your biggest challenges?

Andy Kim (16:33.939)

Yeah, before I bought in, actually, I’ve been looking to buy since 2013, 2014. So I looked for the better part of 10 years. And the only right opportunity came last year. So it can take a while. I would caution folks to be very prudent about what type of business you’re buying into if you so choose to do so. And have a real clear understanding of

what it is that you’re looking for and why you’re buying it, right? Truly the biggest challenge though, and perhaps you have some experience in this, is that it is hard. And the hardest part is, so you have to do all of these things, like for example, I was just talking about all of the outbound activities, right? And there’s no boss telling you, like you have to reach out to 50 people today, right? There’s no, there’s,

Herdrapp (17:15.95)

you

Andy Kim (17:32.211)

there are important things to do, but they’re not urgent, right? And the reality is it can be a lonely endeavor, right? So one of the benefits that Tiny Seed has is that it’s a like-minded community of folks who are doing this, right? And it truly does give you the energy and the motivation to

keep doing what you’re doing, right? On the days that you don’t feel like, you know, doing what you probably need to do, right? Part of being part of a community like that, for me at least, is that it raises my ambition level, right? So in my day to day, you know, with my family and friends, there’s a certain level of expectation about.

work and life and that’s all good and fair, right? We all need work-life balance and it’s everyone kind of chooses to have different pursuits, right? But if you can surround yourself with people who are very ambitious and who want the very same things out of entrepreneurship and who also understand how lonely of a journey that can be, it is so helpful to have that community and we

I meet with a mastermind group probably once every two or three weeks. And we don’t talk about anything crazy, right? But just the idea that, like there’s three or four other people who are going through exactly what I am at a similar stage. Just being able to share our concerns and just talk through things, tremendously helpful.

Herdrapp (19:22.382)

Yeah, that’s good. like, you know, and I think what’s, you know, there’s a lot of, you know, people who probably realize like, you know, like you said, strategy is probably, you know, big in terms of understanding where the business is going to go. And like, have you had like that pivotal moment, like, or have there been any moments as you’re building this out where, you know, we need to pivot a little bit on, you know,

the direction this is going. Like have there been any pivotal moments in your career or I guess in your path as you’re building this out that’s been influential in the growth or? Okay.

Andy Kim (20:01.381)

Yeah, we’re at one actually right now. And I’ll share with you. This is actually the first time that I’m talking about it publicly. But it is certainly in the works and something that is going to happen. So John started this in part as an open source project. So there’s a core part of the app that’s open source. And then there’s layers.

Herdrapp (20:16.878)

Mm-hmm.

Andy Kim (20:31.045)

on top of that that create the kind of commercial version of this, right? So part of the commercial version, for example, is SSL, right? So big companies prefer to integrate with their SSL so they don’t have to manage individual applications and sign on as well as provisioning, right? So we have layers that make it more commercial, but…

The open source version is probably like 80 % of what you would want. And there are other open source options out there as well, right? We aren’t the only one, but we are definitely probably one of two of the most popular open source versions out there. One of the issues that we’re having though is that as a small team to be able to maintain both the open core and the commercial aspects is too much.

Right? So it’s like two code bases that you have to maintain and purely stuff like maintaining vulnerabilities, right? And updating for security purposes makes it onerous, right? So you have this like annual basically tech debt that you have to catch up to. And in addition, most of our users are implemented via a Chrome browser.

Herdrapp (21:45.742)

Yeah.

Andy Kim (22:00.451)

And Chrome has come out with this new manifest v3, which affects all Chrome browsers. And you’ll see some stories that you can look up on what that means for ad blockers and what that means for advertisers and all of this. But it is a nontrivial thing to update to manifest v3. And so there’s all of these ongoing costs that we have as an open source project.

Quite frankly, we have not had a single person convert from the open source to a paid SaaS version. It just means that the open source version is good enough for most circumstances. as you mentioned, a strategy, or just a pure evaluation of how some open source projects can be successful with a

Herdrapp (22:38.254)

Hmm.

Herdrapp (22:42.413)

Yeah.

Andy Kim (22:57.831)

commercial end to it, I’m not sure that GoLinks is that. And so we’re actually going to be taking down our open source project and just going with the SAS version.

And there are a lot of considerations that we have to think through to make sure that that’s done well. But that’s something that we’re kind of at the fork in the road today.

Herdrapp (23:16.781)

Mm-hmm.

Herdrapp (23:24.782)

Okay, yeah, and that kind of leads into like another question. So I know like as you’re you’ve been, you know, over the last 10 years, you know, looking for a business, has there been like, what’s some some like mistakes that you’ve made that kind of maybe slowed the process down or maybe time wise, you know, affected, you know, it taking a little longer, like, has there been like any

Or even in building this Trotto now, has there been any earlier on mistakes that you like, if I looked back, I would have changed this or not done this, or maybe even career-wise or just being just an entrepreneur?

Andy Kim (24:09.147)

Yeah, I think the, my consistent answer to that for looking for a business and for Trotto is both the same, which is you just have to take action, right? Like, you have to record that podcast. You have to post that podcast. You have to, you know, reach out to customers or potential customers. have to, essentially you have to do things that make you feel uncomfortable, right? In order for the business to grow.

Herdrapp (24:37.966)

All

Andy Kim (24:39.043)

And perhaps at a certain stage you do get to a comfort level, but, you know, I talked to tiny sea founders who are at a million ARR, right? Or 5 million ARR or, you know, 10 million ARR. And they are constantly, they have exercised this muscle where they constantly feel uncomfortable and feel like, you know, the next shoe is going to drop and something needs to be done or, or.

will need to happen and they just live in that.

version of being uncomfortable for the entirety of the business. So that’s really the main takeaway is you have to take action and you have to live in that uncomfortable feeling.

Herdrapp (25:18.166)

Yeah, yeah.

Herdrapp (25:27.798)

Yeah, and I know like a lot of people like, you know, you hear like time is of the essence, right? A lot of people have finite time. They don’t they, you they got families and people still have jobs like what’s what’s some routines or patterns you’ve taken for yourself to make sure you got the most out of your day or, you know, the business because, you know, a lot of people, you know, they got kids and like you said, they got a lot of sacrifices that they have to make. And I’m sure as people get older, you know,

some of those things do change, know, so like what’s some habits and routines you kind of keep for yourself, you know, as an entrepreneur to make sure you’re not, you know, wasting a lot of the time that could be put use elsewhere in the business.

Andy Kim (26:10.181)

Yeah, the thing for me is to really key in on what are the levers that I have today that if I look back three months from now, I wish I would have spent more time on, right? So one of that is for us, customer outreach, right? Like, hey.

how many founders of businesses that have 30 to 100 employees that I tried to talk to last month, right? How many engineering directors and IT managers who used to work at Google, Microsoft, Facebook, et cetera, and now are at new companies, how many of those folks did I try to talk to last month? And just try to…

you know, build that into a daily routine, right? And make that a key metric for me. So you have to track it, you have to, and you have to go do it and you have to, you have to do that over a long period of time. So I think those are the important things. Like whether it’s going to the gym or, you know, eating healthy or anything like that, you just gotta kind of make it not just a, a, you don’t want to build up, you know, all of the motivation to do that. It just has to be a habit and a routine that you just go do.

Herdrapp (27:32.692)

Yeah. And, and, and as we’re like, kind of get close to the end here, what’s like, like, what’s kind of next for, you know, just, know Trotto, you talked to, you hit on a couple of different points. I mean, I know you said, you know, you got like a lot of kind of big companies you’re after or that you’re currently at. And, and I can probably attest to you wanting to get into, you know, bigger and bigger companies, but even as the company as a whole, like what’s like kind of the next thing you think Trotto.

needs to do to kind of scale or grow outside of, like you said, your sales and marketing and stuff. Are there new projects on the horizon or is there new things you kind of want to do outside of the links that you think internally? Because I would imagine too, as more people use it inside of companies, I’m not sure what metrics or whatever you would probably get, but are there other insights that you’re seeing that this can probably provide or enhance?

outside of just the traditional removing the bookmarks and things like that.

Andy Kim (28:35.889)

Yeah, so one of the things that we are really focused on is how can we make this the best productivity tool for a certain group of folks, right? Engineers are actually our first adopters. So part of what we want to try to do is figure out how do we simplify any resource or link that an engineer would possibly want to access and make that the best.

Herdrapp (28:47.448)

Mm-hmm.

Andy Kim (29:05.373)

possible situation. So for example, we have programmatic links. So if you have, let’s say, several repos in GitHub, you can actually access them much faster using the programmatic keywords. So you could just use your repo name and be able to end up at your repo without having to set up go links for each of your repos. Or if you use Jira to track issues,

Herdrapp (29:23.637)

Okay.

Andy Kim (29:34.723)

You could say go slash JIRA slash issue number, and you would end up at the JIRA issue immediately. So there’s little productivity hacks like that that I think we can continue to keep building on and just keep iterating on the product itself. I would love for HR, actually, to be a bigger adopter of GoLinks and use it for…

onboarding more frequently. I think it’s just a natural extension and even for, you know, sales teams and customer success and marketing teams as well. So I think there are specific use cases that we can definitely do to make the product better. And it’s just a matter of us continuing to talk to our customers, talking to, you know, very specific individuals that are in certain roles at companies, whether it’s small or large, right.

We certainly do have large customers and we certainly want more of them, but even the smaller companies too, right? There’s a different level of sharing where at a big company you have big company problems and at small company you have small company problems. So hopefully we can solve them, solve problems for both.

Herdrapp (30:50.286)

Do you find it hard? Because I know like, you know, with sales and marketing and outreach and stuff like that, you know, obviously the different dynamics of the business, you know, probably makes it maybe a little harder to get to like the stakeholders of who would make the decisions and stuff like that. But what an application like this, like, is it, is it hard? Because I’d imagine it’d probably be application dependent, like, right. Like, like you said, getting to someone in HR to do this, you know, internally.

might be a different conversation versus like, you know, getting to like a tech, you know, manager or something who understands, you know, problems that they’re having. But the business side probably makes a difference, I would imagine, because like talking to someone at like Netflix versus like a company in your local, you know, backyard is going to be a lot harder. How do you kind of navigate that? I mean, understand like who to go after, like things like that.

Andy Kim (31:47.057)

Yeah, they all have different problems with outreach, right? For example, engineering is ridiculously hard to actually have a conversation. It’s just hard, right? The actual outreach is less successful there. But when it is successful, people are a lot more what I’d call problem aware.

Like they are more aware about GoLinks and they’re more interested in having a conversation. Funnily enough, it’s harder to reach, but once you do, then it actually is very effective. Sales and marketing and even HR folks are actually easier to get into contact with, right? The outreach is much easier.

Herdrapp (32:17.484)

year.

Andy Kim (32:36.999)

The issue is they are not as problem aware. And so the concept of GoLinks may not be as familiar for them, even if they worked at Google, for example. They may just not have used GoLinks before. So since they aren’t problem aware, there’s a little bit more product education that needs to happen there. But either way, outreach is hard.

And either way, it’s a necessary thing that needs to be done. So that’s kind of the net of it.

Herdrapp (33:05.186)

Yeah.

Herdrapp (33:13.13)

Okay, so you know, we’re gonna kind of people like find you at our you own all like the platforms like Instagram like the kind of do kind of just different like like then

Andy Kim (33:22.279)

So we’re on LinkedIn and we have a Twitter account. We’re not quite active or X, whatever you want to call it. yeah, certainly on LinkedIn and on our website for sure. And you can reach me directly. It’s andy at trot.to. So yeah.

Herdrapp (33:27.392)

Okay. Yeah.

Herdrapp (33:41.678)

All right, well, yeah, yeah. Well, thanks for spending the time today and kind of giving us some good insights. I’m sure, like I said, a lot of founders and entrepreneurs, hopefully that are here in this can, you know, kind of hear some of the things you kind of went through and, you know, the hurdles you jumped through to get to where you’re at. Like, you know, that’s the thing I think with the.

you saying like it took you almost 10 years to find a business you wanted. You know, there’s probably people right now, you know, thinking like I got to get something now. I got to land a project now. And I think we, me and a friend, you know, we were working on something back in 2016, right. And we’re still trying to figure out something. So, you know, it’s almost like the entrepreneurial spirit that kind of keeps going around. definitely some good insights.

Andy Kim (34:26.163)

Totally.

Herdrapp (34:28.674)

So again, thanks for being a part of the podcast today.

Andy Kim (34:33.213)

Yeah, definitely. Thanks for having me on.

Herdrapp (34:35.242)

Yeah.