PubGENIUS: Pioneering Development Solutions with Kevin Stubbs

Welcome to Hack to the Future with Kyle Roof. I am Kyle Roof. And today with me is our guest, Kevin Stubbs, the co-founder and CEO of pubGENIUS. Welcome, Kevin. Thanks for being here.

Thanks for having me.

So, Kevin, I want to go back to the beginning of your LinkedIn research. And you started as a Flash game developer. I think my first question is, were you a massive fan of Homestar Runner? And were you like, when you saw that, like, I got to do this. This is my career.

Wow, that's taking me back. I didn't expect that question. Yeah, I think Trogdor was from Homestar Runner, right? Yeah. Yeah, at that time growing up, it was the thing to do in school was to share the flash games, right? Play RuneScape, flash games, helicopter games, and stuff like that. So it was kind of a golden era for an indie web game developer. So kind of a lucky way to get in.

It's crazy to me, I think you stopped developing around 2013, like seven years later, Flash isn't even supported anymore. That's crazy to me that you could be how big it could be and you could be developing games in it as this is how you're making money. And in that time, it's gone. Like it doesn't exist anymore. That must've been kind of maybe you saw the writing on the wall and transitioning into more of a full stack developer to get a few more languages under your belt.

Well, yeah, my game development tenure was quite short-lived because as I mentioned, it was a popular thing to do during school, high school, and middle school. So I started writing and selling flash games when I was still in high school. So it wasn't seeing the writing on the wall, but more like getting into a more traditional, quote-unquote, career path because I was lucky enough to grow up in Redmond, the Seattle area where Microsoft is located. And so I made these games and sold a couple of them, not for that much money, but it was a lot for me at the time. And it was something that you can kind of prove to somebody that you just meet in that area that you can code. You have some ambition, you're self-motivated, stuff like that. So that was lucky to do at that age, I was lucky to meet somebody from Microsoft who could hire people at his discretion. And so during high school, I was starting to work on the Windows Automotive team. We're getting on, I think it was called Ford Sync, the second one at that time. So that's kind of, and that wasn't web development either. Web development came later, even though that's mostly what I'm doing now. That was C, and C++ for embedded platforms at that time.

Very cool. So then you did work for Microsoft for a bit and then you transitioned into a CTO role.

Yes.

And then from there, that's when you launched pubGENIUS, is that right?

Yeah, this CTO role was a small startup that I co-founded. So it was, you know, they need a technical guy. Let's call it CTO. It was not that much of a big deal. We had Amazon as a customer, actually, for that startup. And it was something in the was called home. I don't remember what it's called now, but you buy something from Amazon and you have a contractor come out to install it, like some electrical work or whatever. And we were verifying licenses because they had a team in South America that was doing that manually. We said, well, we're in the same Seattle area as you. How about we just write something automated? Why do people have to do it manually? And they paid us for it. And then they decided, yeah, we'd rather just do it manually. And then the other companies that were offering the same thing as them would need the same software. We didn't get traction so we just said let's find something else to do.

And then that leads to pubGENIUS. When you, when you started that, I've started a few companies myself and I kind of have this thing. It's like, you get the idea and you get the people on board and you, and you decide, okay, we're going to go for this. And then it's kind of like a now what moment like, like, you know, how do we get clients? Like, what are, what are we going to do now? What was it like kind of getting that first client? Did you already through your contacts before having things lined up or did you just jp in pounding the pavement, so to speak, and trying to find something?

Yeah, I don't know that this is necessarily something that we did right, but what we did for both that that Amazon startup, all right, the one we had Amazon as client plus this initially what we started pubGENIUS as is we only started it once we had somebody at least verbally committed to buying what we want to sell, whether that's a service or a product. I don't know if that was a mistake or not, but basically, we had this validation that somebody wanted to pay us for some work and we kind of ignored all the other research. Like, well, if one person wants to pay us, surely there's more business behind that. And so we jumped into everything else because some of the initial obstacles were so easy for us. But I think, and this could be a similar thing with funding, is that it's probably good for you to struggle through finding your initial clients, finding the funding. The reason I'm saying that about finding funding is because you have to prove your idea to investors. Whereas if you have an idea and you self-invest, you can easily kind of wave your hand to get rid of some problem. Like, oh yeah, there's maybe nobody wants this, but I think it's a great idea. So I'm just going to do it. So I think having obstacles in your way is, it's probably a better indicator that you're going to succeed than having an easy start.

Well, sure. That also shows your market fit. You know, when you're saying going on, getting that client, they're going to kind of direct you like, this is what we're looking for. And you're like, Oh, thank you. That's what we want to offer. Kind of thing. It can kind of help you guide in terms of like the direction of the company that can go or the services or products you're going to offer for sure, when you, actually let's, so if people aren't familiar with, pubGENIUS, can you give us the 32nd elevator on, on what you guys do?

Yeah, so what we do today is operate as a development agency. So full-stack app product development. And sometimes as a venture studio, which means that we will partner with some startups for a mix of cash and equity instead of just cash.

How does that work out? Well, the equity part.

In terms of success or the, it's mixed. It's mixed we're, it's something that we're sort of doing as a mistake, let's say, or just by chance. It's not something that we're going out and looking for companies to partner with like this that is a model that some venture studios do, and I assume they're doing it successfully.

Yeah.

For us, it's more like maybe we have some connections to somebody that we already know, basically, and we know their track record, we believe in their idea, and we have extra resources. So as a development agency, you don't want to have everybody at 100 % utilization. Everybody's working on a project right now. It means that you should probably hire more people. So ideally you are going to have some idle resources anyway. So if you know somebody that you believe in that has a product and you can just turn your idle resources onto this instead of just sitting on their hands, then it's better than nothing. Ideally, yeah, you'll make a lot of money out of it, but in the worst case, it's you're in the same situation that you had before, that you have developers spending time and not producing anything. So I think for us, it's been worth the risk. We haven't seen any success from it, but we're pretty optimistic about some things that we're doing now.

Oh, that's very cool. I think that's always the dream when you're running an agency is to, oh, we could get a piece of this. You probably only need a handful to take off, but I think that's an extremely important point that you made that you've got developers that aren't at 100 % utilization. They have time, so you're paying for it anyway, and it makes it a much safer risk to jump on that.

I think that's a very valid point and a very strong way of looking at it. And the times that we've done in agency work where it's been a percentage, it's never worked out. But I think to your point, we were at 100 % utilization with our people. We're kind of taking it on as another client, if you will, which then is taking away from something else that could be revenue generating rather than filling time on somebody who wasn't doing anything anyway. I love that.

Getting into the fun facts about Kevin's portion of our show, I understand that you are a polyglot. And a polyglot, I think the benchmark is four or five languages that you're proficient in. Is that right?

I have no idea. You know, can write anything that you want on LinkedIn. So I am, I love learning languages. I speak fluently English. It's my native language, Italian and Russian. Right now I'm studying Turkish. I'm staying in Turkey right now for a couple more weeks and then I have to move on for the visa limit. And in the past, I've also studied Georgian and German. I tried a little bit of Korean.

Okay.

That was very difficult and I gave up a little bit, but I hope to come back to that eventually.

I gave Korea a pretty solid year and a half, almost two years. At the end of that year and a half, I really couldn't even talk about the weather and it was pretty disappointing. And I had to give it up.

It's very very difficult. My problem with Korean is, that this is the first time I ran into this with a language where I can kind of do everything, like picking up the Korean alphabet is not difficult. It takes time, of course. But my problem is that when somebody says something in Korean, I can't repeat it back to them. So it was very discouraging because there were some basic phrases like goodbye that I was just not able to pronounce correctly. And I thought, you know, at that time I was in Korea for two or three months and I thought I'm going to leave soon anyways, probably should work on something else. Yeah, it's like even Georgian, which has some very unique sounds. It's you can kind of pronounce some words like the ones that are very difficult.

You can pronounce them back more or less in an understandable way. And Korea was just like

Now the other tricky part about Korean is that verbs are conjugated based on age. You know, the person that you're speaking to. And you conjugate if they're older, you use one ending. If they're younger, you use another ending. So if somebody spoke a word at you, one of the tricky parts is you really can't speak it back to them because they're a different age than you. And so you're going to have to conjugate it differently. So it has the root part of, say, the verb. But it's going to have a different ending, which always makes it a lot of fun. And some people get insulted if you use the wrong one.

It was like that. Those are the honorifics, right? Is that what it's called?

Yeah, so like if you're speaking to someone older, you'd use an imnida at the end. And if you're speaking to someone younger, you'd use yo. And then two other fun ones are thrown into the mix just to make it even easier.

And some of the words are different, not just ending, right? For the royalty level or whatever the most, the highest ones are.

Oh yeah, I didn't even bother. Couldn't even... wasn't even close to that. But I can tell you that goodbye depends on whether you're leaving or you're staying. So if the person is staying, you would say anyonghiseyo If you're leaving, they're staying. It'd be anyonghaseyo But Also just to add for the fun. Just adding to the fun. It's not just goodbye. It depends on object permanence almost.

Getting into your growth at pubGENIUS, you've had tremendous growth. And I think what I saw again, if LinkedIn is to be believed, you've had over 100 MVPs, which is phenomenal in what, like five, six years or something like that?

Yeah, we started, we initially started as an ad tech startup and we pivoted into being a development agency maybe three years ago. So that would be in the last three years.

That's unbelievable. Do you still do some of the ad stuff or is it that you've completely pivoted away? Or are there some mainstay clients you still have that on or you maybe use it as some lead generation or is that pretty much gone and you've completely pivoted over into just development?

We do a little bit of ad tech or monetization work for two clients and then the rest moved on to former competitors. But the one interesting advertising client that we have is a large, I guess it would be an affiliate network in a way. They're driving as much traffic as they can, qualified traffic to websites that people would sign up for financial information. The interesting thing that we've been able to do with them is to take the monetization knowledge that we know from before when we were fully at a tech company and mix it with what we've learned as a development-focused company. Because as you know, the page speed matters a lot for revenue. So when they're driving almost a million dollars of top-line revenue per month on these sites, very, what seems like a small improvement to the page speed results in a very noticeable improvement to their bottom line profits. So by combining these two things that we're very experienced in, we're able to deliver something very unique. Another agency wouldn't be able to deliver the same kind of advice, expertise, and execution as we can.

I love that. Are there any MVPs that stick out in your mind as notable? Like somebody was pretty cool or maybe someone was challenging and you overcame or anything like that.

Yeah, one that I'm particularly happy about working with is they're a German-based startup, VC-backed, and we helped them launch their beta a couple of years ago. This was in our first year as a development studio. And I just love working with that founder with Dennis, but also, you know, they're covered by TechCrunch. They were featured in the App Store a month or two back when they fully launched publicly. So it just brings me a lot of pride to have worked on these kind of startups. Because they're, and it's sort of what we started to base our opinions on, like who we want to work with, what kind of projects we want to work on, is that we enjoy working on the high-quality projects, working with clients that care about the quality of the code, but also how it is for users that they want to create something perfect. Rather than, and this was just everywhere in the ad tech space, people spinning up the worst quality sites possible because everything for them is about the margins. You want to make it as cheaply as possible, but it still works so that you can make your money. Outside of that space, you can find a lot more people who care about quality. So you know, we have a limited time to be working on things in our lives, but also just You're not probably going to be working on the same in the same role forever So during these years that you're doing this I'm speaking as like a developer or an agency owner or something like that I think you'll feel a lot better working on focused on the quality projects. Focused on working with people that you enjoy working with that care about that quality and so on. Yeah, we were, we saw this glimpse into what that world is like and we're like, we want to find as many clients and projects like this as possible. So it was a very long answer to a short question.

I know that that's fantastic because you know, you think about, think about your perfect client and you might not know what that is until you have that perfect client. And then that's something that you can base off of like, okay, this is, this went so well. What are the things, why did this go so well? You know, and it was what they wanted, the quality they wanted, the product that they wanted, the type of people that you're working with, the founders over there on their side and you're dealing with. And then you can really kind of get some punch points out of it like, okay, this is the criteria and these are perfect clients. And if you can then guide yourself towards that, you know, life is a lot better. Yeah, I love that. So I think one of the things that you attribute to your growth is actually in client acquisition and something that we discussed before we started recording was that you built some internal software for that.

We don't need the secret sauce on the software, but just conceptually like how, what in your mind, and I think I know the answer. I think this is kind of what you do, but the optimization of tasks is I think part of what you drive towards. And that maybe was kind of the genesis of we can build some software internally to handle portions of our lead generation. Would that be a fair statement?

Yeah, it's pretty accurate.

How does that begin? Like what's step one? If somebody wanted to, I mean, I think we all have the idea, I'd love a piece of software that helped me get leads. But like if you want to build, even just building software in general, what would be like a step towards getting something that is viable, like, and could be used internally for some aspect of growth?

Yeah, I guess you would want to separate that into two categories. One is you're solving a problem you already have and it becomes, at least if you're a developer, you will understand a very clear path on how to execute on that. And then the other category is I have an idea and you're trying to figure out how to start to build that idea. So it's sort of more of an aspirational thing rather than, fixing a problem that you already have. So for this lead generation, it's solving a problem that we already have. So we get most of our leads from Upwork and you have to look through a lot of job postings to find ones that match, especially us because we're targeting, it goes back to that quality thing, targeting people that care about the quality, we're willing to pay the prices that they need to pay for us and stuff like this. So it's a small segment of people that are on Upwork that we want to apply for. Which just means that we have to make more applications. So that's very time-consuming. And some people enjoy doing that more than others. I don't enjoy writing these proposals. So I built some things that can make myself a lot faster, with less copying and pasting. You're able to spend more of your time customizing what you're writing for that person to tailor it. And then it was thinking, well, how do we make this something that other people can do? So how do we distribute the workload? Or how do we scale this up so that we could hire somebody in the future whose whole job is to manage these proposals with some kind of business development manager? So we just started to build that software along those lines of, we want to do what we're already doing faster, more efficiently. We want to understand the data better of how effective our proposals are. So what, there's so many different things that you could apply for in Upwork. Are you getting a lot of traction for your mobile development proposals?

Getting traction for your Web3 proposals, is your close rate for one much higher than another and why? Is there something wrong with your proposal? Is your pricing out of like not matching what the market is? So just some insights from data that the Upworkey doesn't provide to you. So we can take that data for ourselves and analyze it internally. And then also thinking about how do we scale up the agency so that you can easily replace somebody. You, we're going to be running this agency for a long time. Let's make sure that Kevin doesn't have to write proposals every day for the next 10 years, or something like that. So making it easier to train somebody new to come in and do as good a job as the original person was doing it. So moving that institutional knowledge into the software instead of passing it on from one person to another.

I like that. I agree that I think the best software ideas are the ones that probably have the best chance of success are the ones that are solving a problem that you have. Because then you understand the ins and outs of it. But then kind of taking it a step farther and looking at some data-driven points to make your software better. Kind of that analysis that you would be doing maybe by hand or even intuitively putting it into that fix, if you will, then providing yourself a better product.

I imagine once you get to the point that you're happy with it, that you can use it successfully. That's the point that it can take on a life of its own and be, I mean, you can surely use it internally forever, but then it could also potentially be offered to the public as well. I love that.

Yeah, we're planning to do that once we're really happy with it. We're planning to see if other teams or even individuals would want to use it. I know a couple of people recently asked me for advice on how to start using Upwork. Like, what should they put for the proposals? What tips do I have? Stuff like that. And so, yeah, I see the potential for the software to help anybody that's using Upwork be more effective at it, especially people that have a lot that they need to organize at once, like a big agency, as well as people that are new to it that haven't established a process that's effective yet.

You know, that's a great point as well. I think a lot of people think of a platform like Upwork as a race to the bottom. But if you're doing it this way, you can find those high-quality, high-ticket clients. They exist. They are there. It just takes a little extra work and this is something they can cut through a lot of the noise and get and find those clients for you. I love that. Awesome. Well, Kevin, I don't want to take too much more of your time. I appreciate you being on. I imagine it's a beautiful day coming up in Turkey for you.

Yep, it's quite nice out.

Thanks so much. So, Kevin, I appreciate you being on. Thanks, everyone for listening to Hack to the Future and we'll see you next time. Thank you.