Friendly Show

Andrew Culver: BulletTrain, ClickFunnels & Family Adventures 🚀 Live from Rails World 2024!

• Adrian Marin & Yaroslav Shmarov • Season 3 • Episode 5

What if you could transform your entrepreneurial dreams into reality with just a few strategic moves?

Join us as we sit down with Andrew Culver, Chief Product Architect and Chief of Staff at ClickFunnels, during Rails World 2024 in Toronto 🇨🇦

Discover the inspiring journey of how Andrew transitioned from creating and eventually selling Churn Buster, to developing an open-source SaaS boilerplate, Bullet Train, which paved his path to becoming a key figure in the Ruby on Rails community.

Not only does Andrew discuss his impressive career trajectory, but he also shares the personal side of his life, balancing his professional responsibilities with family adventures around the globe. 

We (Yaro & Adrian) first met Andrew Culver at Rails SaaS in Athens 🇬🇷
Andrew has an amazing positive energy aura, one of the friendliest and most inspiring people in the community!

  • Build Rails apps 10x faster with AVO
  • Learn RoR 10x faster than Yaro did with SupeRails



Speaker 1:

Hello friends, it is Yaroslav from the Friendly Show recording live from Rails World 2024 in Toronto, canada, and today as a guest we have Andrew Culver, that is the Chief Product Officer and Chief of Staff at ClickFunnels. Hey, yaroslav, how are you doing? Doing great, so nice to have you here.

Speaker 2:

Oh man, I'm so glad we made it. We're here together. We've hung out before, obviously in real life, in Athens, Greece, and we've seen each other in other places. It's incredible. I don't know. This conference is unbelievable. The energy is just incredible. I'm so glad to be here.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I'm just walking around and I can't focus on one thing, because there are so many exciting stuff going on all around.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's interesting and there's definitely going to be some people that are listening to this that weren't able to attend for one reason or another, and certainly one of those reasons was a shortage of tickets, and I think, honestly, I'm just looking forward to more and more additions of Rails world and hopefully they can grow the scale of it, not because big conferences are better, just because I want more people to be able to experience what we're having.

Speaker 1:

So last year I think we had around 600 tickets to sale. This year we had 1,000 tickets. I wonder how much up can we go and still have everything sold out.

Speaker 2:

I don't know. I'm curious to find out what they do next year. But, amanda, if you listen to this, I'm hoping for maybe 2,000.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that would be nice. So, andrew, you work at ClickFunnels as the chief product officer and chief of staff. Could you please tell me more about your job?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so ClickFunnels is an internet marketing platform, so it's probably best described these days as an all-in-one platform that people can use to run their business. So originally, one of the sort of innovations that ClickFunnels brought to market was this idea that whoever can pay the most to acquire a customer is going to win in a market. If I can outspend you on ads when selling a product, I'm going to be able to buy more ads than you and you're never going to win any bids. And I'm going to win all the b more ads than you and you're never going to win any bids, and I'm going to win all the bids, and so my product will win in the market. So ClickFunnels provided a tool called Funnels and really educated the entire industry on this concept, but also provided a tool that allowed people to do that and it created many successful entrepreneurs.

Speaker 2:

And then what Todd and Russell sort of realized was, as people become more successful, they also have all this back office stuff, they have all this business operation that needs to run, and so the platform has grown out in its surface area and yep, it's still great funnels like a industry leading funnels platform. But it also does email marketing, e-commerce. But it also does email marketing, e-commerce, payments, business automation, like all of that stuff on platform, and the whole purpose of the software platform is to make it as easy as possible for people to pursue entrepreneurship and also to be as successful as possible. So that's the whole thing.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and in the Ruby on Rails community I think you're most known for bullet train, saas, boilerplate yeah what do you want?

Speaker 1:

to know about it. Yeah, so I was actually very excited that it was open sourced. A couple of years ago I first learned about it, I think around 2018, and the price tag was like a thousand five hundred. For me at that point of time it was a bit too much. But I think a year ago I made a video of creating a new application with Bullet Train and just digging into the code in the open source code was really cool because there's a lot of really nice patterns. So you were doing Bullet Train and now you're at ClickFunnels and could you tell me about your career? What brought you to creating Boilerplate? How did you end up with ClickFunnels?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So it's all tied in together. It's kind of a long, winding road but a lot of sort of threads that came together in the end to where I am now. So the interesting thing about Bullet Train is that's actually what ClickFunnels is built on, so the flagship product of ClickFunnels. We have a product called ClickFunnels Classic and there's a piece of the sort of my career story there as well. But the ClickFunnels platform that I was describing is actually an application built on Bullet Train and it was my partnership with ClickFunnels an application built on Bullet Train and it was my partnership with ClickFunnels, originally as a consultant, that allowed me to open source Bullet Train from being a commercial product to something that was freely available. So if you go all the way back to and ask the question like how did I end up there or why did I pursue Bullet Train, I think for me it's an interesting story.

Speaker 2:

I've always been sort of entrepreneurial. I was always entrepreneurial and my wife, on the other hand, was very not entrepreneurial for a bunch of reasons, but because of her background. I remember when we first got together she sort of said I would like it if you weren't an entrepreneur, like literally like don't start your own business, go get a job. And that seems like if you know who I am, you'd think like, how did that ever work? But you might know me, but you don't know my wife and my wife is the most incredible person Like I love she is. I loved her from the moment I met her and so nothing was off the table for me, even though I'm like so obviously entrepreneurially oriented now, at the time it was like I'm going to do anything to get the girl right. So we agreed I wouldn't be an entrepreneur and I actually went into like straight Fortune 1000 sort of corporate life, managed a team had, you know, 13 DBAs, front-end developers, back-end PHP developers. I was a PHP developer myself and I did that for like four years and at a certain point.

Speaker 2:

But the startup ecosystem was super frothy at that time this is like 2007 through 2010. And so there were always opportunities and the corporate game was so, especially in that particular organization. Every company has its own type of corporate dysfunction, but I really grew tired of the corporate dysfunction that I was managing in my specific management position and I had the opportunity to join a local Rails consultancy and this was so interesting to me because PHP didn't have like PHP now has Laravel Laravel's amazing, but at the time it didn't have. Like PHP now has Laravel, laravel's amazing, but at the time it didn't. It only had like Zend framework and all these little tools, and so I would have to build my own active record and all of that stuff in order to make PHP nicer to work with the database and all of that. And then I looked at Rails and it had all the batteries included right. And then I looked at Rails and it had all the batteries included right. And so when I had the opportunity to join that consultancy, it was an opportunity basically to retool, to learn new tools, and so I took it and I loved it, but it was very startup-y and not particularly stable, if I'm being honest. And so I went there. I worked as a consultant, learned Rails. It was an incredible opportunity, incredible experience. The consultancy didn't make it like, didn't survive, but I had a client relationship there that I was doing a really, really good job on building, helping them build a product, and that became my first independent client.

Speaker 2:

Now the reason I went back and told the whole story back to the genesis with my wife is at that time when the consultancy failed and my paycheck bounced and I had left that corporate job with an agreement that if the startup quote unquote didn't work, I could always just come back.

Speaker 2:

They would be happy to have me back. And I asked my wife. We were driving around that day I'm now unemployed, trying to figure out what I'm going to do next and we're driving down the freeway and my wife says, yeah, you could go back and get the corporate job. And I asked her you want me to go get the corporate job, you want me to just go back there. And she's like you're it seems like you're really good at what you're doing, like this consulting thing and working with people and building products. And I feel like if you just go back, we're never gonna know what you could do, and I'd kind of like to see what you can do. And so at that point, literally that was like permission from Carly to go out on my own and become an entrepreneur, and that's what I did. And so from there, you know, there was more, much, much more, uh, many, many more rails projects and I also read that you had a tool named churn buster yeah.

Speaker 2:

So the client that I had was a wedding marketplace called borrowed and blue and we thought, when we built this product this was going to be, we were going to charge people for upgraded business listings in our two-sided marketplace. And we did great. Like, that whole business actually lives on today as the wedding marketplace of Zola, actually lives on today as the wedding marketplace of Zola. So when that business was sold, it was sold to a pretty big wedding startup here in the United States based out of New York City, and so it lives on. But that product was really great. We were going to sell these listings and then, hey, it's subscription revenue, so it's going to last forever. It would be to set it and forget it.

Speaker 2:

And then we ran into the problem. Actually, actually, credit cards, like of all, if you charge a hundred credit cards on any given month, 10 of them are going to fail in that month, and so on and so forth. And that was when we were basically we encountered this issue with churn involuntary churn in that case and so at that time I basically made a deal with the CEO hey, I'm going to solve this problem on my own, outside of this consulting arrangement that I have with you. I'm going to build it on my own dime and I'll sell it back to you for whatever $500 a month or whatever I was charging them and that, actually that solution became a whole product called Churn Buster um that I ran and grew for a few years and then finally sold it in uh toward the end of 2015.

Speaker 1:

So going back to Bullet Train, yeah, I think it was one of the OG SaaS boilerplates, because I have the impression now that there are so many of them inside Rails and for all other frameworks, and it might have been the first really good one in the Rails ecosystem.

Speaker 2:

Oh, thanks, yeah, so the story there is.

Speaker 2:

I sold Churnbuster, I exited myself, I left borrowed in blue, I invested a significant amount of equity and I was ready for a break and we were in a position to do it.

Speaker 2:

So we moved to Japan for six months, lived there with the kids it was awesome and then, when it was time to get back to work, the question was what did I want to do? And I'm not going to lie, I did not do a great job of figuring out what my sophomore effort, my next startup, my next product, was going to be. So I dragged my feet on it for a long time, but the one that ended up kind of landing was Bullet Train, and the thing that motivated me to do it was I had had the experience of building a SaaS and I loved it, and I just wanted to try to do something to enable more people to have that experience. Basically, take allow more software developers to ease the the path toward becoming an independent entrepreneur, and that was it. That was really the motivation behind Bullet Train. And, yeah, that's I mean. Hopefully it still helps some people with that today, and so now at ClickFunnels.

Speaker 1:

You are chief of staff, chief of product. What does a day at work look like for you?

Speaker 2:

Oh, wow. You can probably guess, yaro, it's pretty busy. So we've got a staff of a hundred people really different. I have to say this one thing about being my own entrepreneur when I was doing the bullet train thing um it you're always looking for, like, what's the next piece for growth, what's the next thing? That was like, yeah, we have bullet train, but, uh, what are the other potential ways to grow revenue? Uh, is it adjacent products? Is it like a conference, all of that stuff. And that's extremely tiring when you're always trying to figure out like, what's next, what's the new thing? Now we've got a product at ClickFunnels. We've got a product roadmap and a strategy that spans out months and years that you're trying to execute against. We know where we're going and the best thing is, it's just one thing right, you're focused on one thing. So in that way, even though the days are very busy, it's a lot of meetings, there's a lot of conversations, and but it's against a roadmap and a vision for what we're doing, that's so inspiring, like we literally exist to help people be successful entrepreneurs, and our metric of success is can we help them be more successful than if they just went to the business office by themselves and we know that those businesses fail at an alarming rate. So it's not that everybody comes on our platform and it is a successful entrepreneur. We're just trying to help give people a better fighting chance of starting their own business, changing their lives, all of that stuff, right, um, because that was what I experienced. So, in the same, for the same reason that I built bullet train, this is like the much broader version of that helping, uh, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and hopefully, by the time I'm done, millions of people pursue entrepreneurship.

Speaker 2:

So what's a day? Look like it's constantly just working against whatever the next biggest hurdle is in that mission. So it's busy, but there's never a day that goes by where I look back on it at the end of the day, when I sit down with my family and think like, oh, what I worked on today didn't matter and that makes all the difference. So I, I've got all the energy. You know me. I've got energy for busy, a lot of energy, yeah, and I'll travel and I'll do everything that's required in order to be successful in the position on behalf of the company and the mission of the company. Yeah, so it's busy, but I don't want. It's just really important to me that people not misconstrue busy as like bad right. It's busy in the best possible way.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, cool. And you also mentioned your kids. How many kids have you got?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I've got two kids. I've got a 16-year-old boy, a 13-year-old girl. They're sort of in their prime right now. We're having a great time. So, yeah, we live in just outside of, in a suburb of Los Angeles, california, and so it's beautiful weather, the kids have a school that they go to that they really really love. And, yeah, one of the things I really love about our kids for Carly and I, we traveled a lot. Right, when I was self-employed running my own business, we traveled a lot. We lived in Japan, we lived in Canada, we've lived in Virginia, los Angeles. We've been to many countries. I've taken my kid to Athens that was how I got the idea for the Rail SAS Conference in Athens was traveling with my son, who had been studying ancient Greek and yeah. So our kids my son's really intellectual, my daughter is like a really really great artist and they travel. They are very proficient travelers and I love that about our family. It's something that's, you know, a little bit unique.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's really great when teenagers get to see the world before they graduate school. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Okay, thanks so much for joining the podcast. Yeah, this was really fun. Thanks for having me on, and let's get back out there and enjoy the show.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, there's so much to do at Trails World, let's go. All right, see you.

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