Latest / Exit Algorithms / The Truth About Bootstrapping an AI Startup with David Pourquery (#80)
Transcript
- Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Welcome to Exit Algorithms, the podcast where we decode what it really takes to unlock growth, streamline operations, and prepare your business for a high-value exit. I'm your host, Pete Vera, and today I'm excited to introduce David Porquiry. He ran his first business at 19, worked with venture capital and private equity, and is now founder and CEO of Gross.ai, an AI-powered Google Ads management platform. David, welcome to the show. Glad to have you here. Groas: Hey Pete, thank you for having me, it's a pleasure to be on. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah, absolutely. Can you share a bit about your background and yeah, some of your your business journey and what led you to to gross? Groas: Sure. so yeah, look, I I studied computer science at university. I've been programming since I was quite young. and then when I finished that, effectively, this was during COVID when I graduated, so there were no jobs on offer. I hadn't planned to to get a job. My plan was to go travel around Southeast Asia, do some Muay Thai and chill. That was impossible obviously, because you couldn't travel. and look long story short, I was doing this final year thesis on How you could use AI to best basically predict the success of early stage investments, so VC investments like Seed and Series A. And how you could use that to actually go find these these companies. even before you know before other people can. So was doing that thesis during my final year. A venture capital firm in London heard about me doing this thesis. And then basically just said, Hey look, this looks great. Please come do this for us. And I was like, all right, well, look, I have literally nothing else going on right now. I couldn't leave the house. They didn't even leave the house at the time. So cool, fine. Sort of fell into that. So I was there for about seven months, which was cool. I implemented some really nice stuff for them. And then whilst I was there, a P firm heard about some of the stuff I doing there. Different role this time, so not really just on data side, but like just more more generalist investing. Long story short, ended up joining that private equity fund. Small UK-based fund. Think about 400, 500 million under management, maybe a billion, but on the smaller side. And then I was there for two years, learned a lot, really beneficial, and then from there got recruited out by a much bigger US fund called HIG, who have I think 80 billion now under management. And so I went there. And I was there for two years, I think in total, two and half years. and then, long story short, whilst I was there is when I started to think about and and develop what eventually became. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Groas: Grow us today. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: You have s like a good you know financial industry background as well. has that experience with private equity, you know, changed how the way you build and and run your business? Groas: Honestly? Honestly, no. Honestly no. And I would say arguably those I mean, like running your business solo by yourself. And I started this with effectively very little money, right? had to hire a team, et cetera, et cetera. So the early days were very rough. Bootstrapped from zero. yeah, I think that's completely different to the life you live when you're, you know, sheltered and and cushioned in a nice in a nice job. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah. Groas: Absolutely nothing to each other. If anything, I had to unlearn a lot of the thoughts and a lot of the the the way they think when doing this. Maybe at a certain point of scale it does start to become interesting, right? Maybe once we reach I don't know, thirty, forty million a year, possibly, then some of these things can start to become relevant. But otherwise, no. Otherwise I try to forget a lot of the their other ways of thinking, to be super honest. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Interesting. Yeah, not the answer I expected. What are the some of the things you had to unlearn, would you say? Groas: I definitely see it in like the more corporate world or whatever is, lack of urgency. Right? Speed to action is unbelievable. And you can argue say that when when you're closing deals, whatever, whatever, like in the day to day operations of the business, in the businesses that we owned, right, especially at the the the my most recent firm, which were probably, I don't know, between two fifty and a billion of revenue, right? It's people heavy. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Groas: Yeah, people move slowly, we make decisions slowly. This is all crap, right? the way I'm running this now is like I want time to action immediately. And if it's not perfect, I don't care. Like we just have to go, go, go, attack, attack, attack, get punched in the face and figure it figure it out on the way down, rather than get everything perfectly. Like I'm maybe that's just my nature, by the way. That's also probably why I hated that environment, just to be super clear. Like whilst I was there, I was thinking, how the fuck can I how can I leave ASAP? so Yeah, I think I had to unlearn those behaviors and those in those thinking patterns like attack, attack, attack, you have to move quick. Yeah. Which is more in line with how I am, to be honest. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah. gotcha. Ma makes sense. Maybe the experience with venture capital was more relevant to your you know, to Grow As? Groas: Yes, that's an interesting one. So look, I I said earlier, fully booster up so I've kept 100% ownership of the company. Which for me was a non-negotiable. So like I I I knew that before. We get approached by VCs all the time. Even like yeah, very, very B VCs. I have personal good friends of mine who who are VCs who own their own VC funds. So like I know that world incredibly well. The reason I was so stubborn, stubborn about not raising money in the now we don't need it, but in the early days. I definitely did. I definitely it would have it would have definitely been helpful to have two, three mil in the bank, right? The reason I have it is because what I saw a lot, and I saw this a lot, and this is what what sort of broke my heart a little bit is and I saw it countless times, you have an entrepreneur, entrepreneurs do the hard part of building a good product and building a good team. Those are the hard parts to get right. Building a good team is like very hard. But like product is arguably easier today, but I saw this was like maybe five years ago when I was working on it. They do all of that hard part. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Hm. Groas: But the problem is they then don't grow quick enough and then can't raise their next round of funding. And the company does. Even though they have done the the like the good things in place, right? And I saw that countless times and I was like, I wouldn't want that to be, you know, to be me. the other thing obviously when you're you know, when you get a VC investing in you, you work for that investor. Let's just be very clear. People who are like, I'm an entrepreneur, founder, you report to investors, you have a fiduciary duty. To tell that those investors exactly what's going on 247. That as well was not something I was super on board with. maybe that led also to a lot of mistakes early on, right? Maybe I could of course corrected a lot of dumb decisions I made. But at least this way I get to own my decisions, right? And anything that happens is because of me. And I can we can also pivot much quicker. So anyway, that's a long way of thinking that yes, I I definitely learned some stuff, but I would say it was not the model that I knew I wanted to go with enough. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Mm. Yeah, yeah. If anything you went the opposite direction because of that experience. Groas: Correct. If I to be honest, if I hadn't worked at VC, I probably would have fallen gone into the trap of what I see a lot of like young founders do. They get excited about the raising money, but they get excited about the LinkedIn post. We raised twenty million to revolutionize this. You don't understand what you've sort of signed up yourself into. Like they don't actually understand mechanics of what that relationship is like. like preferential shares, like all that that most people don't see that from the outside in. So like I knew this knowledge, which is why I was very stubborn about I want to do it my way, basically. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Y yeah, definitely. What are some of the advantages you you've seen being boot bootstrapped? Groas: Yeah, look, I think changing being able to change direction if and how well, like just to give you some context, like we completely I mean only took me six times to figure out well done David, but like redo our entire how we package our offers, how we do all of that. Before that's like a decision cycle. we need to talk about it with the board and then we'll discuss. Like I we can move on our feet as we see Vin, as we see the market shifting. So like being able to make my own decisions effectively, right? Based on the data I'm seeing and I have to run it past anyone. for me has been very beneficial. I don't think I would have the same motivation to work as hard as I do if I had to have somebody else I have to report to. I personally don't think I would. So I think that yeah the big one is autonomy. Also autonomy on how I want to build the team. Right? Who I want to hire, fire, like whatever, like whatever whatever comes, but do we want to be remote? Do if we want to have an office, where is the office? Like all these sorts of decisions I've been able to make myself. And I think that's very valuable, at least for me. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Definitely. Yeah, and you mentioned building a good team you said what's your process with that identifying good people and and deciding when to hire more people. Groas: So hard. It's so hard. I think you do I think you always the ultimately the decision still comes down to instinct, in my opinion. At least for me. Like I will emit there has to be a gut intuition. Credential, sure, you like look at somebody's where they were before, where they went to university. I personally don't care for these things at all, actually. Really. I don't even ask I'll ask for them. for me it comes down to always what my gut tells me about that person. References are often useful, but I think the the energy that you get from an interview. at least for me resonates a lot. so that's that that's one aspect, right? And the other aspect I think is important is they themselves have to understand what you're doing. Like they have to be they have to have some conviction on their end that this is a worthwhile thing to do. If they don't, then it's not gonna work out. so it has to go both ways. It has to go both ways. I think they they need y you need to be sure that they understand like your mission, the conviction behind it and they themselves have some conviction. Even if, you know, Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Groas: They might not be all the way convinced in day one, but then once they join, you can take them to like that final set. But I think that is very important for sure. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: I'm curious what is you know, a a client engagement look like at GrowAs? Like what are the some of the first things you you look at? Groas: It's ch I sorry, I laugh because it's just changed so much. I'll give you some context. Okay, cool. Grass started off, so when I when I left my job in private equity or whatever it was, grass started off as a a recommendations tool that used AI to hopefully improve your campaign performance. Okay. Entry fee was $99. Actually, before that, it was like $49 for up in for up to like 2k of Aspen. Tiny, tiny ticket product. it but it was something that you had to come in and use. So you had to come in and use Grass to get the benefit of it. Okay. that was like the first three, four months of the company was that. We released it to the world, and obviously there was actually a lot more AI hype around then, so got a lot of users, good stuff, great. Then what occurred is it's funny, like the most demanding and annoying users were like the people who didn't know Google Ads at all. And they would be like, huh, but like can this not automate my entire account and like make me money while I sleep? Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Groas: But I mean that that's a tough ask, but we can do that. So that just got me thinking, is it even possible to have full autonomy on Google Ads? When I say full autonomy, it means you connect a campaign and it optimizes it and scales it better than any team of humans physically can, because ultimately measure buying is a data game and if you can act on that data quickly, you're gonna be what human can do. Period, simple. So that wasn't that got got us thinking, that basically prompted a six month rebuild where we went from tool, like a little tool that people had to use and log in, great, to then building our own custom models. And then having full autonomy, which is we're now no longer a tool. It's grass when someone refers to us as a tool, I do get personally very offended. We're not a tool. You don't use grass. so what happened is first of January of this year, we released full autonomy into the world, which means you connect a campaign and you basically by doing that you can file existing marketing agency or whatever it is. Great. So from January, I think, to April, April, May was pretty crazy. We released the thing into the world and we just did this. Right. So the tool days are there growing, growing, growing, okay, great. We're learning a lot. We're improving the product, we're improving, etcetera. Second we did that, we just went completely vertical for those four months. which is great. But what I realized in those four months as well is like we have to alter how we serve people based on exactly who they are. So like let me explain. A marketing agency using grass is ten times less Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Groas: needs almost no support from us because for for them we're really just a software execution layer. We don't get involved with their end clients. They connect their client campaigns to grass, never tell them a thing, then can basically sit back and do nothing all day, right? And then collect the difference between what the client pays them versus what they pay grass. They are the best customers agencies. Also because they have Google ads to running around, they instantly get the value prop. It works for them from day one. It also it's amazing it's really validating also for me just to know like people who be doing Google ads for 20 years are like wow this is amazing. So that's type one. So we realize we have to serve agencies in a different way. And also they probably need different pricing. Then I think the other big shift to realise is business is coming to us. There we have to actually treat things differently. Because in it we were treating initially all businesses the same. Whether you're massive company, tiny company, where it's gonna be like a done for you sort of thing. We're gonna come in, we're gonna get really involved, whatever, whatever. What we realize is actually this needs very different treatment. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Yeah, got it. Yeah, sounds a yeah no, started with a de do it yourself. and yep. That's awesome. what's the ultimate goal with with Grow As? Do you do you have a you know, a five year plan or exit strategy or anything in place? Groas: Correct. No. try and I think like probably short sighted thinking, but at least because of because of the initial those initial phases, which were so like brutal and tough, right? Very little money, trying to build this thing. I was thinking day to day. I was like, I literally just need to survive. I've left this job, gonna run out money soon. I was living in hostels in Southeast Asia in the early days, right? Not very fun. Obviously now we're in a different place. But those those early days were tough. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm-hmm. Groas: So I was thinking data. I was like, look, we need how can I get one more customer today? How can I close X more, whatever, whatever. I think that mindset, that urgency is still a little bit there. I obviously do try and think of like longer term, maybe a month out, two months out where we to be. I don't have plans, like I never started grass with an exit in mind. So I'm I want to make that clear. I wanna ideally, if everything goes to plan, I'm still running grass in some capacity in five, ten years to come. Right? Because I Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah. Groas: At least from my perspective, our competition, the people like I'm coming after personally, are the behemoth old guard sort of marketing agencies, w WP media. These guys manage, I don't know, forty, fifty billion dollars a year of ad spend. Like that's where I want to get to. That's my personal I want grass to be along those names. That takes time. That's not a two-year, three year job. That's a ten year job. so I don't I definitely don't have a plan to exit. Obviously, we've been profitable. We I had to be profitable from day one. so that's like Hopefully that that keeps happening. I think I there could be a future though where I replace myself as CEO and transition to a more sort of chairman sort of role. I can see that future for sure. but as of now I think we're still so focused on the mission at hand, right? It's it's it's also a space that moves so quickly. Like I never thought we'd start aggressive, like we would do this full autonomy thing. I never even thought we would do like full agency, like so much has changed in a year. I have no idea what will happen the next in the next year. I just don't know. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah. Man, that's exciting. I'm excited to see where where it goes too. a lot of small businesses are trying Google Ads and just not really getting it right. What do you what do you see as like common common mistakes businesses make with with Google ads? Groas: Mm. Sure. Yeah, yeah. Tough. So just context, we've audited thousands of accounts. Thousands. Not not hundreds, thousands. So we've seen everything. And I'm still surprised, and I I don't mean this disrespectfully to anybody, but I'll I'll keep it real. I'm still surprised at how low the bar is in terms of like what what what we see accounts come to us with. We're spending not a lot of money in Ask Times, like maybe 10, 15k a month. I'm like, how are you even doing this? How are you even spending that amount of money? Like this this account is a complete joke. It's a mess. Like nothing works. and if you just did a couple things right, you could actually sc end up spending 50, 100k a month profitably. Right? So the bar I think is so, so low. Really. We see that all the time. it's low for a lot of reasons, right? I don't know. I think it's tough. Some we've seen it where some business owners think they know better and think, yeah I can figure this whole thing out. Like i Google Ads is really challenging. It's a tough thing. Changes a lot as well. Like you need to be on the pulse of things. Right? What not one algorithm change can completely nuke your old structure. You have to be on top things. So that's like the one thing. It's like ignorance, maybe some arrogance where like, yeah, I can do this, this can't be that hard, and then your results just suck. And you're like, well, Google Ads is a scam. Well, Google is worth trillions of dollars, they make hundreds of billions fr a year from it. It can't be such a scam because clearly you're doing something right. That's that's that that's that's step one. And I think the other is Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Groas: And this might might sound a bit harsh, but I think the the marketing agencieslash marketing landscape, the bar is really low there. I think like ninety-five percent of people in that space are are doing very poor work. Very, very, very poor work. And as well like we see this as well because that when we were getting on call sometimes and saying, Hey, like it's a we can do done for you, right? So like we're effectively your n now your agency, people have such an aversion to it because they've been burnt by so many agencies in the past. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Groas: and it's like, god, it's tough. So like yeah, I think also just a bar as a a at the industry level is low. Why? Because the entry like anyone can start a marketing agency. Anyone. Like you don't need some sort of credentials or anything. Spin up a landing page, fake some testimonials, fake some case studies, and you can start trying to sign clients. so yeah, I think the the the mistakes are I mean, I didn't really answer your question, but it's just sort of like what we see in the So we can get technical if you want on the actual mistakes that what we see, but Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah, I'd love to get a little tactical. Groas: Mistake number one. Accepting Google's recommendations. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Groas: Google will say you should do XY, you should put everything on broad match, you should run just PMAX, you should do all these things. That gives Google complete control of your account and you end up wasting a lot of money. So by de facto, like be very careful with what you accept from Google. Okay. Other thing, keyword level decisions as well. Most people don't do any actual research when it comes to selecting keywords for their account. And they go block they they just put everything on broad. and that the you keyword research is like the most important it's really, really important starting a new campaign from scratch. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: No. Groas: Most people overlook that. They'll just put like random keywords they think they want to show up for. That's not actually what you'll show up for, by the way. So that's that's the other thing to make sure. copy. I think cop copy is an interesting one. I think you can haven't I've I've rarely seen like awful cases where I'm like, this is insane. How the hell are you running on this? Most people seem to do okay-ish with their copy, like a business owner knows what they want to convey. They often use AI tools to help them. So I think that's probably not not so bad. The other big general Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Groas: a general issue we see is the the landing page experience. So most people don't put any time or thought into building a very good landing page, which is extremely important because you can do everything perfectly correctly on the Google Ads side. If your landing page sucks, so you you won't you're just throwing money down drain. I think landing page is a very big one, right? Like use the use best principles, make sure you design it well. yeah. High level, these are like the the I think the big things I see. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: you mentioned change, it's changing rapidly, of course, with AI. how how has it been affecting it the most? I mean, you know, website clicks are down right over fifty percent, and SEO's completely c different now. Yeah, w what are you seeing? Groas: Yeah, yeah. I see up. So Google are going for a massive change right now. They have to, right? They were forced they were forced to do this by Chat GPT, right? So when the when the Chat GPT came out in in late twenty two, and it was like some big big thing, I think the the alarm bell started ringing Google's office and that okay, we need to like this is gonna have a very big impact on us on how people search. The problem is they can't overnight just switch off this humongous ad engine they've built, that is their entire revenue center. They can't do that. So that the I I think short answer is they're gonna do that but slowly and over time and phased out. I think Google search will eventually look effectively just like ChatGPT does. Right now it doesn't, you still have an AI overview mode, all that sort of stuff. I think on a long enough time period, it's just exactly that. that then makes them because by doing that, they them themselves, by the way, have to completely rebuild a lot of their own ad engine stuff, all that sort of thing. So yeah, so we're seeing some very big shifts. they're adapting well, right? They're a huge company. A lot of them people counted them, counted them out early on in the out of the airs. They have more compute than anyone, they have a lot of talent. They're gonna be just fine. Google is still gonna be like I I don't see it like Google's gonna be out of business because that that's just not gonna happen. That's just not gonna happen. but search itself is changing a lot. Like what it does what it means from our perspective, probably just probably a good thing for us, actually. All of this is probably a good thing for us. because it means that Google's gonna push a lot more, let's say, autonomy and AI inside their ad platform. And you need things to counteract that and keep the advertiser in control. That's that like that's a big thing now that that we're doing on our on our own algorithms. Google is pushing for you to show up in some nonsensical terms for some nonsensical things. We have stuff in place to make sure that doesn't happen. And so an advertiser who's maybe not super clued up might just give c complete control to Google and then burn a lot of money. So I think probably a good thing for us, overall. But yeah, they're having to change their their business quite a bit, I think. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah, definitely. Do you do any consulting around you know, just AI or just advertising on other platforms besides Google or just staying on the Google train? Groas: Yeah, look, so I I don't wanna say we've cracked Google, right? And we're like, it's time to move on. It took us like a year and a bit to like get to this point where at a product level I'm like, yeah, this is like best in class. Like no one has philotonomy, or at least we were definitely the first to have philotonomy, right? There's people who are not gonna have it. Of course it's gonna happen, but we were the first to have it. I you know, I debate a lot with the team, right? what what's next? What's next? And there's a lot of possible avenues that we could go, right? so one of them was SEO. Like we can build something around making sure you show up in SEO results or or the you know chat GPT, make sure you show up there organically. The problem is, and the reason we actually haven't done that yet, not saying we won't, but we haven't done that, is because I don't know what edge we personally have in building a product within that space. Like I know what we have for Google. Like we try on our models because we had all these users, we've been doing we've been at it for a while, like we definitely have an edge there. Building something brand new in a new vertical, I don't know if we have an edge in there right now. Right? that's that that's one thing I would say. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: I'm curious how your your personally leveraging AI as well. It you know, within your your business. And I'm sure it's changed, you know, it changes every month, but since you first founded the company to now, how's it you know, how does it affect your day to day? Groas: I see the biggest has obviously been on the engineering side engineering side by far, right? Like without a doubt. So when I first started GRASS, like I think what what back then maybe took us three months to accomplish could have been done today in like two weeks, maybe, maybe less, arguably, if you really know what you're doing. So I think the engineering side is we can do a lot more with a lot less people. and my expectations for what we can deliver and how quickly we can push stuff has gone through the roof. I think the turning point for that was December twenty twenty five. That was the turning point when I think Opus 4.6 came out or 4.5, clawed Opus 4.6. That was like the complete game changer for writing code quicker, writing whatever. but we s I saw an overnight shift. I'm not necessarily writing any code these days myself, personally. but obviously I talk to our to to my CTO every single day. the short answer was we can do a lot, lot, lot more with a lot less. that's the first thing. And then look, there's a lot of cool AI tools that you can use. like Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm-hmm. Groas: AI note takers, that sort of thing. I'm getting a lot of value from recording calls that we do, whether that's with existing clients, whatever, customer calls, demo calls, whatever it is. And then using AI to basically figure out all right, what are the biggest pain points people are facing? Where do we strip up on this call? That's what I think that's super powerful. That probably wasn't doable to this level a year or two ago. but yeah, at least for me those are like the main two, main two things. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yes. I think a lot of business owners can, you know, relate to that that experience. great. one practical takeaway for business owners wanting to get more out of their paid advertising right now. Groas: Yeah, for sure. Okay. If you're already running Google Ads and you maybe you're you've you've hired somebody to run those campaigns, or you're doing it yourself or whatever it is, go into Google Ads and then look at the change history button. Click it. That will show you all of the changes that are occurring in the account. If nothing meaningful is being optimised, like or being tweaked at all, if it's been a week or a few days or two weeks since like anybody has changed anything, you need to reevaluate what you're doing. That's my tactic tactical bit of advice. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Well, Ben great great conversation, David. appreciate all your insight today. Where's the best place? Listeners can can find you and learn more. Groas: Sure. so our website's probably the the the best starting point. So groas.com. Now we upgraded from the dotai to the dot com, so that's big change, yeah. and my my personal email is dp at groas.com. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Awesome. I'll leave that in the show notes. Thanks for coming on today. It was great great talking to you. Groas: Thank you, Pete. Pleasure.