Episode 2 | Scalelist identified problems they can solve within their expertise.

The Transcript

Herdrapp (00:00.736)
Okay. So yeah, I’ll give you, you know, just a brief introduction about myself. So, my name is Kevin. I’m one of the co-founders of Herter.io. So we’re, we created a, me and a friend, a startup to it’s basically a project management company that empowers small teams to help drive, you know, ideas in, you know, brainstorm, you know, into actions and, help them kind of get, you know, more aligned with, project management at a

smaller level. So, but outside of that, this podcast, we’re, you know, we came up with a lot of different startups and I came with the conclusion that there are other entrepreneurs out there that, you know, would like to hear from other successful entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs about some of the struggles they’ve gone through and just some of the things that they can kind of share to give better insights on. So, you know, with that being said, you know, if you can, you know, maybe just,

Tell me a little bit about yourself and then, you know, what inspired you to kind of start a scale list.

Youssef (01:03.379)
Super, yeah. No, thanks a for having me on the podcast, Kevin. I’m really pleasure to share as well. I also am a big consumer of video content or podcast content as well. I’m to other individuals who are one, two, three, four steps ahead of me to learn from. So to give you some context, I’m the founder of a group of companies called The Scale Group, in which we have a cold outreach agency doing cold email, LinkedIn, as well as cold call.

Herdrapp (01:17.848)
Mm-hmm.

Youssef (01:31.869)
The agency is called The Scale Lab, so thescalelab.com. And I’m also the founder of a SaaS called Scalist that we started about two years ago. The group itself started five years ago. My background is I’ve always worked in sales and venture capital. I started at Google, Amazon Web Services. I worked then for VCs in Europe and in Asia. And I’m myself now based in Hong Kong for the past seven years, during which I was recognized also for being a Forbes 30 under 30.

entrepreneur and a word I would say that made primarily my family very proud for the first time. So yeah, I’m over 30 today, so I don’t usually mention it. But the reason why I started the journey of doing business, I’ve always wanted to do that since I’m a child. It was a call for independence, creativity, doing kind of your own thing. That’s what generally people would say as well. But in particular, since my skill set is in sales, I

Herdrapp (02:06.83)
Hahaha

Youssef (02:29.051)
saw something throughout my career, would say, which is people, every business needs sales, generating revenue, but people typically, or companies that lack two things. One is either the skill set to do it or the right people to do that. So they’ll always need some kind of support to get there, whether that’s through a service or through a software. So that’s why I’m currently doing both. The agency itself is run by its own team located in Hong Kong and in Singapore.

Over the past five years, we generated over 15 million US dollars in pipeline value for our clients. And now I’m focusing 100 % on the SaaS Scalist. Scalist is a currently, it’s a LinkedIn and LinkedIn sales navigator data extractor. Functions kind of like a scraper if you want. And it’s used by sales teams all over the world who look for the prospects on LinkedIn itself, but don’t have the means to export them into their CRM or simply into a spreadsheet with professional emails.

phone numbers, basically any data point that you need to do outbound thereafter. So BD Teams still seems use it regularly, you know, like instead of manually copy pasting or having to use some kind of tool that exports it and then search for the emails, it just does all of it in one click and then it structures all of your lists. Imagine you’re looking for 10,000, 50,000, 100,000 people, you may have too many spreadsheets to deal with and Scaleless is all centralized. So it just makes it easy for you to…

organize your target market actually.

Herdrapp (03:59.834)
Okay, and so you’re saying the scaleless is a part of a bigger group of other applications. what was the driving force behind, like what was the aha moment that you saw like scaleless was needed for businesses? Like what brought you to that decision to kind of need an extractor?

Youssef (04:06.365)
Correct.

Youssef (04:21.361)
Yeah, it’s a good question. I the truth is, I think it’s a very standard story of an agency founder who identified a problem that we solved with the agency. So the scale lab.com outbound agency, we were doing a ton of cold outreach, email, LinkedIn and cold calling, but it was taking us a lot of time. That was back in 2020, 2021. One, I’d say there was no AI agent. There was no chat IPTs as well. There was no way to…

scrape or do some level of automation. was really the beginning of automation in sales. We were struggling a lot in creating large lists of contacts we would need to get in touch with over email or LinkedIn. So we were using several tools, some that were like just kind of a Python developed internally. And we realized that a lot of people were asking us, Hey guys, how are you able to super quickly know a company’s target audience and very quickly within a few days, be able already to engage with them.

Herdrapp (05:08.142)
Mm-hmm.

Youssef (05:19.251)
And so we had our developed our internal tool that was doing exactly this. So solving our own pain points, because we saw it at different companies and therefore making a product out of it. And we realized that was actually a huge thing. For now, I the product itself was launched about a year and a half ago. We just joined an accelerator called Tiny Seed. It’s a, an accelerator focused on B2B SaaS companies. So I’m super happy. We’ve just joined in October.

Herdrapp (05:40.715)
Mm-hmm.

Youssef (05:47.027)
And now there’s a lot more actually that we’re up to the way.

Herdrapp (05:51.124)
Okay. Yeah. So I think, you know, and that’s the thing where I see what a lot of founders is trying to find like the divide between, you know, because obviously you guys were in that space, you know, right? So you knew the problem that you were having. I see, you know, as far as being like an entrepreneur, I can see where there’s a lot of people who are currently in an environment where they can find problems to solve and turn those into real businesses.

And I think sometimes maybe some people might go too far outside of what they’re normally known to do to try to build a business. And I think that could be a big issue as well. But it seems like you guys found like a nice niche within your current scope of the agency.

Youssef (06:36.347)
Yeah, I mean, the agency was a starting ground for the SaaS and probably other businesses. mean, every time that we see a problem at scale, you know, we can solve it either with human intervention and that’s therefore an agency or with technology. And therefore that becomes a SaaS or possibly now we’re talking more about agents actually. So yeah, it was definitely a good validation for us because we’re not digging into a problem that we’re unaware of. It’s just a problem that we could see.

Not only like every month or every week, was literally a daily issue.

Herdrapp (07:08.361)
So for you guys, know, kind of more in a unique situation where you already had the agency, you probably had like a little more funding than what someone who would be already an entrepreneur would look to. So like, how did you guys, did you have to get, was going with Tiny Seed on this particular funding, was it a need for additional capital because you saw like, okay, this is a great idea. We need to put more fuel or backing into this particular product. What was the reason for someone like yourself?

Youssef (07:36.827)
Yeah. I mean, it’s also a very good question because the way you make it sound, it sounds pretty easy. And when I look back at it, the transition happened over 2024, actually. last year. It was, I have to say, it was really painful. And I have to say it was horrible when we were in the middle of transitioning from the agency to the SaaS because we had no funding. And that’s case of most founders. typically you think, okay, I don’t have funding. I cannot focus on it. And

The only way I can grow is to put time into my SaaS, but you’re also lacking time because when you’re an agency, you sell and you also deliver the work. So the issue is how do we enable us to have more time and therefore be able to transition to the SaaS? The only way we could do this, we thought about two ways. One is, okay, we could fundraise, but fundraising takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight. Or we can voluntarily accept to take in less clients on the agency.

therefore allow us to have more time and progressively reinvest that time on our SaaS. And that’s what we’ve done. mean, it is probably the longer path because if you have capital, you can immediately switch and be like, OK, we hire a managing director. We can go on the SaaS right away within a day’s time, like as soon as you have the capital. But since we didn’t, and I think that’s the case of 90%, 99 % of the founders were doing an agency.

We just had to take the sacrifice of say, okay, we really believe in this. We’ve been seeing growth actually since January to June last year. Without doing much, I can’t say like without doing much because the little time we were investing was paying off and we could see that over a longer period of time. This gave us confidence to say, okay, I’m willing to cut my salary, to cut my revenue by X and therefore have more time because we will take in less clients on the agency and have more time to reinvest.

And we just built up a plan. We’re like, if we continue growing at this rate, which was a conservative rate, it would take us four or five months to be able to start paying ourselves from the SaaS rather than from the agency. That’s what we’ve done. And at the same time, I started looking for funds. That was talking to different accelerators. We got accepted. So I’m based in Hong Kong myself, my business partner, who I’m running at the group, the agency, as well as the SaaS, together is based in Singapore.

Herdrapp (09:51.788)
and turn.

Youssef (09:56.439)
a good friend of mine who I met in China actually over 11 years ago, 12 years ago now actually. Yeah, we just decided, okay, let’s look for funds as we also reinvest our time and the plan worked out in the end.

Herdrapp (10:10.99)
Okay, I don’t know if I might have heard earlier on. So in Hong Kong, are you from Hong Kong or did you move there in regards to?

Youssef (10:18.803)
Yeah, I’m so there’s a little bit more context. I should have maybe said it in the beginning, but I was born and raised in Morocco, North Africa, so Casablanca precisely. My mom is Austrian, so from Europe. And my dad is Moroccan. He met in Austria, then they moved to Morocco, had their kids there. This is where I grew up. And after high school, I spent more time in Europe. So studying in France, which probably explains also my accent in English.

Herdrapp (10:25.343)
no, sorry.

Herdrapp (10:29.944)
Okay.

Youssef (10:48.563)
I lived in Germany, in Berlin, in Ireland, where I did most of the tech work I’ve done before. So Google, some of the VC work as well. And I moved to Hong Kong about seven years ago in 2017 because I’ve seen several opportunities. It’s a city that offers a lot of opportunities, fast-driven, would say, networking-based, very finance-oriented, would say, less so SaaS, but there is quite a lot of tech as well.

Herdrapp (10:48.686)
You

Youssef (11:18.181)
So it’s just an interesting place to be. And I just got my permanent residency about two months ago, which means I do not need a visa anymore. It’s not a citizenship, but it allows me to stay and kind of continue building my life here.

Herdrapp (11:25.322)
nice.

Herdrapp (11:29.996)
Okay.

So with that, a lot of entrepreneurs, I’m sure, all over the world, just due to maybe geography or funds or just the resources, it seems like you traveled around a bit. As an entrepreneur yourself, even living in Hong Kong, what’s one of the biggest or toughest challenges you faced with growing this business? And how did you kind of overcome that with maybe whether it be language barrier or sales, marketing, all that type of stuff?

Youssef (12:00.467)
Well, I would say the first major challenge I was facing at the beginning, and that’s probably what a lot of founders who start out without capital face, is simply your own capital. Like what’s your runway? Like how long can you stay? And the wise decision is typically move somewhere that’s extremely cheap, that will give you a very long runway. Like move back with your parents to a town, place, a country.

Herdrapp (12:11.714)
Mm-hmm.

Youssef (12:26.867)
that is highly inexpensive, where cost of living is very low. You still have access to decent facilities or simply internet, I would say. So I think a lot of people move to third world countries or else, which is really good. think it’s a great idea. For example, in Asia, you’d hear a lot of people move to Thailand, to Vietnam, Bali, for instance, that are inexpensive. But I made the choice to stay in Hong Kong. Hong Kong is actually one of the most expensive places in the world to be in. But I was trading off the benefit, so the downside of

high cost of living, which I knew kind of how I could monitor a little bit, but there’s a threshold. I would say the minimum that I could live with in Hong Kong would be a maximum in another country. So I made that trade off still because I would benefit from a lot of different things. One is very low tax. Secondly is a very, very good infrastructure that allows you to do a lot more things within a day. So for example, going to one place or another,

Herdrapp (13:09.344)
Okay.

Youssef (13:24.339)
The public transport system is insanely good here and very cheap as well. So I could in effect have more interactions. I always judge my, let’s say days kind of by the amount of quality interactions I can have per day. That means, you know, can do more meetings, can go to more sales meetings, do conferences within the same day and so on. And also the types of people you’d meet who are two, three, four steps ahead of me in terms of building wealth, for instance.

I trade off, it’s a high cost of living, which I started calling the membership price. I pay a higher membership price, but therefore I get really good infrastructure, very good wifi, very good connections as well, and high inspiration as well. I would rather be the, let’s say, less successful or poorest individual within my network. So I have still drive rather than be the one that has most. And I do think that if I didn’t have this drive of, okay, every week, every month, I really have to…

Herdrapp (13:58.863)
Enjoy.

Youssef (14:24.019)
scramble and think about how can I pay my rent actually. I spent, for example, to give you just a simple example, at the beginning of COVID, I lived for a year in a hotel. I quit my previous apartment because I also needed to recover my deposit. Simple things as that. And I moved to a cheap hotel that doesn’t have a kitchen, doesn’t have anything. And I was just budgeting even what I was eating. It’s not the best. I was a single man at the time as well. Not ideal when you…

Herdrapp (14:30.755)
Mm-hmm.

Herdrapp (14:41.335)
Mm.

Herdrapp (14:51.982)
You’re right.

Youssef (14:52.455)
meet somebody and say, Hey, I just live in a very cheap hotel. can’t even invite you for dinner. There’s no TV screen or else literally just a bed, a shower, and some tiny table work that I could use as a desk. But that was a necessary sacrifice for me to move on. Cause if I hadn’t done that, I would have reduced my run rate by, I don’t know, five or 10.

Herdrapp (15:03.819)
You

Herdrapp (15:14.902)
Okay. And so like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that’s good. Cause you know, one thing with obviously, know, monetary purposes, yeah, some of those sacrifices are needed when you’re bootstrapping or becoming an entrepreneur. And you know, as you were growing those businesses, you know, especially from the agency or even just scale list,

Youssef (15:16.179)
term.

Herdrapp (15:36.514)
What was it like when you realized your business was gaining that traction? When did you know at an early stage, the agency is the way to go? Did you know when you needed to pivot or make additional changes in the business?

Youssef (15:51.763)
Yeah. Well, in fact, I I do live in both types of businesses, but as a beginner entrepreneur, know, like I started when I was 29, I’m turning 35 this year. So that was about six years ago. When I started the business, it was really with the intention of, okay, I want to do my own thing. I know I have a skill set. I know how to sell. And I actually sold, let’s say projects before I even registered the business. So, because I needed to test the market. That was for me, just a way of, like, it was my own MVP. had…

Herdrapp (16:16.206)
Okay.

Youssef (16:21.171)
built up a website, I had packages and I was just talking to different people selling, it was more consulting types of projects, but one-offs, not built on the hour. was like a package thing that would last for two days a week or else. And I started selling that and when I started picking up, so was like, okay, this is good. But to your question of like, when did I decide whether that’s a good type of business or whether that’s agency or SaaS or like when to pivot. In fact, I learned it throughout

growing the business. At the beginning, think I was an, like the evolution was I was an expensive freelancer at the beginning. Then my business partner joined me about a year after I actually started the business. Then we were two expensive freelancers. we could do, together we could input more and we would put it in the same bucket, which we called our company. Then when we started hiring people, this is where we realized, okay, we’re not just expensive freelancers. We have to think as business owners. And that’s a very different aspect.

think about, I should not work for the business, the business should work for us so that we can grow the business itself. Otherwise there’s no way we can do that. And that transition was actually difficult, not just mentally, but it was actually really draining because we were trying to do too much at the same time without having stabilized a team or a system, I would say, to run the company on its own. So we were just spread through thin. I burnt out twice actually, making

two different mistakes. The first one was spreading myself too thin. And the other one was really out of frustration, seeing that I was spending too much time on things that were low value with low leverage for too long of a period and burnt out again. And this is where in these critical moments, this is where you realize that something needs to change. If I don’t change, nothing’s going to change. So I need to change what I do. And this is also where we started the SaaS realizing, okay, I understand the business of an agency and its scalability per se.

It has its limitation, valuation. You’re like, if you work for the next five, 10 years on this, what can I expect in terms of exit? Potentially looking at other agencies, what are the multiples? How do they work? And an agency is still a good, really good thing. And I want to keep the agency because it’s a great lab to identify problems that you can solve with technology. It’s also really good to be just at the forefront of anything because you’re doing the work and you’re doing it at scale. Really good for that.

Youssef (18:45.459)
But I can say I have the highest hopes. mean, the agency can grow a lot for sure, but I see that the valuations are a lot higher with SaaS companies. And the scalability is as well, requires less people, systems are in place, churn is typically would say lower than in agencies. It’s productized per the nature of what the business is. Just in comparison, the time I would invest probably in SaaS would generate, that’s my estimate, personal.

may be different for others. know other founders who say like, I don’t want to do tech because the margins in SaaS, in the service can actually be extremely high and I can run a very profitable business without funding on an agency. Whereas you have to fundraise potentially a little bit if you do that. We don’t hope to fundraise more for the SaaS itself. That’s not what we’re aiming for. want to stay bootstrapped in terms of mentality as much as possible. And that’s why we chose also Tiny Seed because that’s what they promote in per se.

So yeah, the pivotal times came at crisis moments of suffering really. And I think that’s also a lesson for life. I was talking about it with our managing director from the agency just yesterday evening, which is, the toughest moments are the ones where you have to show up and where you learn the most. And if you welcome the challenge as a lesson, you can really get something out of it. And if you don’t, if you’re not challenged and there’s no discomfort, there’s usually no, no change coming, you know, like, like if everything is okay.

Why change something that works? That’s kind of the lesson as well.

Herdrapp (20:14.99)
All

Yeah, so it seems like that’s one of the, almost like a big, one of the biggest positive impacts on your business. You you understanding that, you know, you have to step back and, you know, change the role in what you are. And I think what a lot of entrepreneurs, know, you know, even myself, you know, there’s been times where you’re so used to doing a specific task or you’re starting it out and the delegation, you know, some people have problems or figuring out how to delegate, manage people under them.

even figure out like when you are starting to scale, you know, what, you know, when do I have to, you know, shift gears and, you know, focus my energy somewhere else? So, you know, you know, with that, what ways and now do you kind of use? know you said you’re in sales, but as far as like marketing and growth, what ways are you are you marketing like the scale list? Are you doing it through like ads, social media, things like that?

Youssef (21:12.573)
Well, yeah, very good question. mean, since we have an outbound agency, the more obvious way for us to market our SaaS was to do outbound. We’re like, hey, let’s use our own dog food and what we’re good at. So email, LinkedIn, and we tried some cold call as well. And in fact, at the early stages of the business, it worked, but it was not as impactful as we thought it would be. We have our system running in the background.

Herdrapp (21:19.002)
yeah. Right.

Youssef (21:41.979)
So we’re like, okay, there’s kind of a ceiling at that level because it’s a low ticket SaaS and typically people don’t jump on calls. They might try on their own. And you have to do a lot more volume in fact, to get just some responses of somebody who’s like, okay, yeah, I’d be willing to try. A lot more than for the agency, our target audience is typically, let’s say SME to mid-market types companies who have a sales cycle of three to nine months, ticket sizes of minimum five figures, which is very different our SaaS.

Herdrapp (21:50.561)
Yeah, okay.

Youssef (22:09.971)
Average ticket size is about, it’s like three figures. So very different target. The market is a lot bigger actually than the audience that we run with the agency. We’re still applying the principles. worked. very first, the aha moments came from posting content on LinkedIn. My business partner and I, we both have collectively about 60, 65,000 as of today, followers on LinkedIn who are all primarily salespeople as well.

So we’ve been distributing that and this has picked up at the beginning. We saw that posting content on, you know, how to export leads from LinkedIn sales navigator, how to find people’s email addresses or like how you can do it within five minutes instead of like five days or five weeks. That helped a lot at the start and realized, okay, content is actually really the way forward. And back in let’s say late 2023, I started doing YouTube. We had a YouTube channel for our agency, which worked pretty well. And I thought, okay, I could do…

videos for Scalists as well. Since we can see the keywords, the search terms were searched quite a lot as well. I started doing that simple videos, without much editing. was a loom video showing how I do it. So when I started posting a few, just because you have to have consistency, you can’t just post one and hope that’s enough for a test. And this has been picking up, actually. We can see really on our stripe a little curve going higher and

Herdrapp (23:22.488)
Mm-hmm.

Herdrapp (23:35.265)
nice.

Youssef (23:35.441)
We started asking as well our users as a self-attribution, how do they find us? And within six months, and this is where we realized, okay, we have to make the switch. 50 % of our page users came from YouTube in fact. So now we’re this year investing a lot more in YouTube. I mean, I’m a big believer generally in sales driven by a personal brand. You know, when you generate value and I really appreciate what you’re doing, Kevin. It’s…

Herdrapp (23:49.316)
wow.

Youssef (24:02.547)
It’s just like, the time you’re taking to reach out to founders, to try to pull the nuggets from them and organize this for others to use as well on their own. It’s amazing. And it really creates a bond with you as a person. I mean, I do want to listen to your other podcasts, what the other guests you’ve invited, because I know I’ll learn from them faster than if I was searching for the information and trying to read or else. So, and that connection is good because you generate a lot more inbound. And if you do outbound, you have already presence.

Herdrapp (24:10.232)
Mm-hmm.

Herdrapp (24:19.182)
Yeah.

Youssef (24:32.051)
can imagine Elon Musk sending you an actual email with his email. You’re like, OK, I might want to respond to this person. It’s an extreme example, but just to put this in perspective.

Herdrapp (24:38.014)
Yeah, yeah. So. Mm hmm. Yeah, and I think you hit on a good point there is about consistency. And I think, you know, far as with the YouTube and social media marketing, I think a lot of founders, you know, sometimes they have that, you know, maybe whether it be burnout or too many lanes, trying to pick too many lanes. And I think you hit on a good point as far as like, you know, you did the one video.

And some, you you can’t just do one, you do multiples. And that brings me to another question I had. What kind of habits or routines do you kind of keep to keep yourself focused and productive as you become an entrepreneur, as you’re taking on more, you know, not necessarily more tasks, but your business are starting to grow. So you got to kind of focus yourself, focus yourself a lot more kind of routines that you kind of keep for yourself and make sure you’re not veering off into too many small tangents.

Youssef (25:31.603)
Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean, I’d love to hear from your other founders that you’ve interviewed how they see things because I’m a big advocate of focus and time. Typically, know, like everything you achieve or you experience in our life is also a matter of where your focus goes to, where your attention goes to. And typically we are, you know, our attention is soaked by so many things when you’re an entrepreneur. First of all, you have to do a lot of things, but then you have your personal things and then you have

this little boy here, your phone, that is just full of notifications and everything on your phone is made for you to be glued onto it. know, notifications, the screen, the colors, everything attracts your attention on it. And I always think about does the time I’m spending, is the time I’m spending on whatever app, on whatever task, is it generating revenue for me? Yes or no?

Herdrapp (26:02.268)
Yeah, right.

Youssef (26:25.459)
There are things that don’t generate revenue for you, not like hanging out with your friend or partner, or you could be very rational and say, okay, the time I’m getting with my partner helps me to relax and therefore I can generate more revenue. I don’t go that deep because I don’t want to rationalize my relationships, but I mean it with a simple thing. For example, I used to be on Instagram because it was a great way for me to connect with friends who were all over the world because I lived in multiple places as well. But I realized if I spend one hour per day on

Herdrapp (26:50.722)
Mm-hmm.

Youssef (26:54.835)
On Instagram, calculated, let’s one hour per day means 365 hours a year. That’s little over 15 days. So if I could recover fully 15 days of my pure attention, undisturbed, how much more could I actually achieve? And just refocusing this and being mindful about, you know, how you spend your time. This is a routine that I have with anything. When you reach out as well, Kevin, I mean,

Herdrapp (27:02.666)
Yeah.

Youssef (27:21.425)
I had to make the judgment call of, okay, if we’re spending an hour together, is this revenue generating or not? This is just my vision as an entrepreneur. Of course, I I looked you up and I think it’s really good what you’re doing. And I love also being on podcasts because it gives me also lot of ideas and connections, but I always value things about my time. I am a big advocate of saving and protecting your rest. Big time. I go to bed usually at 9.30, 10 PM.

I wake up early, I’d rather wake up early in the morning and just have a lot of time, go for a walk or else it really frees up a lot of my headspace. But that wasn’t who I was when I started. When I started, I was doing late hours, you know, because nobody, when you’re on a nobody’s going to tell you, okay, the day is over, stop working. You’re like, if I do more, I will get more. You think like, know, output equals, I input equals output, but it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon. So you have to do it consistently.

Herdrapp (28:08.556)
Yeah, right.

Youssef (28:19.899)
And you start realizing, okay, after burning out two times, there’s something really wrong about my routines. And not focusing on rest was number one, not being mindful about where I invest my time was number two for me. And the rest is really simple things as I eat healthy, I workout, I just keep myself, let’s say healthy as much as I can. I say no to a lot of things, invitations, whatever. And I sometimes I just ignore, I can come across as rude when I don’t reply.

But in the end, you know, it’s just that moment where you may feel rude. The next hour you’ve already forgotten about it and you realize, okay, my time is better spent here than that there. And I don’t even need to continue thinking about, sorry, I didn’t reply to this email or else because people will always be asking things from you and they will have an agenda for your own schedule. so yeah, protect your time. That’s my thing.

Herdrapp (28:56.046)
You do.

Herdrapp (29:03.049)
Yeah.

Herdrapp (29:15.33)
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And I know, you as we’re wrapping up here, you know, I was, you know, wondering, so what’s next for, you know, you as an entrepreneur or a founder for your business, any insight, exciting projects or goals that you’re setting for yourself for, you know, this coming year, you know, it’s growing the agency, growing the scale is whatever, you know, as far as what you have in mind.

Youssef (29:35.601)
Yeah, absolutely. No, absolutely. mean, for myself personally, I have always a guiding word for every year. Last year for me was allowance. So just allowing things to happen and not clinging too much on certain things. That gave me lot of intentionality and mindfulness in my own approach to life and business as well. This year focusing on wealth. That doesn’t mean only financial wealth, but it can be spiritual, emotional, creative wealth or else. This guides kind of my actions in general.

So one is now we have an agency that is run fully by a team. The SaaS that just was accepted in a next chapter with a piece of funding. So scaling what we’re doing and investing my time intentionally to generate the growth. With our SaaS, obviously this year we’re aiming to reach our first million ARR. So that’s a big goal that we have, but we can only achieve it if we have 100 % of our time. I do think also that’s, I mean, not I’ve been repeating it, I’d say this year that

2025 is the year of agents with AI. We’ve been looking at this since the last, since the past summer, and we’ll be coming through with that equally with the agency as well as with our SaaS. think it’s the wave that needs to be served. We’re looking, for example, at Hopspot. They’re doing a lot of things for whoever’s listening. mean, do take a look at agents.ai from Darmesha as well. Really good stuff. And that’s the kind of wave that we’ll be surfing. So Kevin, if we’re talking…

in a year’s time from now, you couldn’t hold me accountable about, okay, have you guys been to reach your million ARR and what’s the story with your agents?

Herdrapp (31:07.758)
Yeah. Okay. Yeah, for sure. I will. Well, so working up, you know, anyone listening, where can they find you, follow your journey? Any of your handles that you’re using out there?

Youssef (31:21.977)
Yeah, mean, primarily now you can find me on YouTube as well as on LinkedIn. I’ll share my email as well. YouTube, we are on ScaleList, scale just like a scale and list like, you know, a shopping list. So ScaleList and also the company is called scalelist.com. You can find me on LinkedIn. My last name is very difficult to pronounce. So if you type Youssef and ScaleList, you will most likely find me and over email, it’s Youssef, it’s Y-O-U-S-E-F at scalelist.com. Happy to answer.

Herdrapp (31:33.163)
Okay.

Herdrapp (31:44.449)
Okay.

Youssef (31:51.603)
emails, jump on the call as well. Typically for people who listening to podcasts, if you have more questions about how we transitioned, happy to give that answer because this is where we got stuck for a long time.

Herdrapp (32:02.99)
Okay, well thanks. know what, hey, appreciate you jumping on. I think you gave a lot of great insights for entrepreneurs listening. Again, you know, the Herder app. So we’re gonna be posting, you know, a lot of these podcasts and, know, I’ll definitely for sure share with you the information once we start getting these going. So.

Youssef (32:21.211)
Awesome, yeah, looking forward to it. Thanks Kevin.

Herdrapp (32:23.895)
Yeah.