What's the Startup?!

Grit, Growth, and Customer Insights: Kory Payne of Ujoin on Startup Success

• Kaylan Thompson

Share episode

In this episode of “What’s the Startup?,” we sit down with Kory Payne, founder of Ujoin, to dive into the gritty realities of building a B2B SaaS company from the ground up. Kory shares his journey from humble beginnings to hitting major sales milestones and achieving product-market fit.

Throughout the conversation, Kory opens up about the challenges and sacrifices of startup life, the importance of listening to customers, and how customer feedback has been key to Ujoin's growth and innovation. He also discusses how staying true to your vision, while being flexible enough to pivot, is the secret to long-term success in the competitive world of SaaS.

Whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur or an established founder looking for insight on scaling, this episode is packed with valuable lessons on grit, growth, and the power of customer insights.

Timestamps:

00:00 - Intro

02:30 - The origins of Ujoin

06:15 - Hitting a sales milestone and finding product-market fit

10:45 - Challenges of building a startup and staying committed

15:00 - The role of customer feedback in product innovation

18:20 - Building a team and a customer-centric company culture

22:30 - Advice for early-stage founders: grit, determination, and pivoting

25:45 - What’s next for Ujoin

Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and share this episode if you found it helpful!

Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Sprocket Podcast! If you’re ready to dive into the world of startups and innovation, visit us online at Sprocket WKY to learn more about our mission and how we support entrepreneurs like you.

Ready to check out the space? Book a tour with Tiffany, our Community Coordinator!

Got a business idea? Apply for a mentorship session with one of our experienced mentors!

Stay connected and join our growing community on Instagram for the latest updates, inspiration, and behind-the-scenes looks at what’s happening at Sprocket.

Let’s turn your ideas into reality—together!

Sprocket is proud to be supported by Team Kentucky, the Commonwealth's Cabinet for Economic Development. Learn more about their initiatives and resources at ced.ky.gov.

Kaylan:

Kory, welcome to what's the startup. Thanks for taking some time out of your day to chat with us. Introduce us to who you are and your company.

Kory:

My name is Kory Paine. My company is UJOIN. In the industry lingo, we call it B2B SaaS, which is business to business, software as a service. We're not a mobile app. We are not looking for individual consumers. Our customers are public shares firms, non profits, anybody that really wants to have a stake in any kind of public policy.

Kaylan:

Y'all recently, so Ujoin recently hit a large sales milestone.

Kory:

Yeah, I mean we, it feels great. This startup journey. The journey for me, for us was really in, it's been one of sort of sacrifice and gutting it out, gritting it out. So yeah, to hit them sales milestone is, it's just cool because you hear it time and again, startup founders go on a journey. And it's true. You're putting a lot of, you can be doing other things. You can be going to get a job in your field, making good money, having savings for retirement, but instead it's you do this other thing. So it's cool.

Kaylan:

So why this? So you could be doing other things. Why this journey for you?

Kory:

I don't know, I guess there's a, there's a thrill in it. I've never been a person that really just chased money in itself per se. So I was always I'm passionate about my work, but I guess there's just there's a freedom to it. There's a joy in it, and there's also I know this field very well and I think I can do it better than the people that are out there that are doing it. I can do it in a way that's more compassionate with our customers, that is more fair more innovative. And so there's just a thrill in it. And then, the financial upside is cool to. I have the freedom to do things differently where we can pay our staff very well and make sure that they're, happy and, they can develop as professionals as people. And there are so many new models out there. There are different ways of doing things. As a business leader that is just more holistic in terms of staff and policies. And so there's it's cool to be innovated that way too.

Kaylan:

So how long have you been on this journey?

Kory:

I moved into a fifth wheel camping trailer in, I guess it was 2013, is when I made the decision to not pay a lot of rent and put all my money into a startup. But we didn't launch our first MVP minimum viable product until I think it was 2015 and it was just a pretty immature product at that time. And it's slowly built up.

Kaylan:

So you're nearing your 10th year. You just your MVP is 10 year anniversary. Yeah. What has changed since then, either with your product or your startup or yourself?

Kory:

Yeah. Everything, it's such a, it's such a building journey and Sprocket in a way is no different, Monica had the little closet and the next to the brewery with some 3d printers and and now we have this beautiful space with some really awesome program work happening and so it's really no different. You just stay at it and make it better. One step at a time and then you keep going.

Kaylan:

How have you yourself grown as a founder? What are some either characteristics or things that you see in yourself now that you didn't have 10 years ago?

Kory:

I, in terms of like my principles really haven't changed, but it's really just stacking knowledge and, learning best practices, learning from the people around you. And so I don't know. I got some more gray hair. I live in Kentucky. When I first started the company, I was living in Hawaii and so I don't get in the ocean as much. But yeah I, it's more exciting now because it's more real and the sales are coming in and it's it's way more exciting.

Kaylan:

So 10 years in and it's more exciting now than it was when you first started.

Kory:

Oh yeah.

Kaylan:

That's awesome to hear.

Kory:

Yeah. What's

Kaylan:

on the horizon for you guys?

Kory:

So it's really just sales. We, you hear this thing thrown around PMF product market fit and that means different things to different people. But essentially when you hear that thrown around, people are saying you've hit on something and in the startup world, the going saying is that until you're making a million dollars a year, you're just an experiment. And it's fairly true because you can, I think B2B SaaS companies are a little more sustainable. They're a little more defensible. And when I say defensible, I just mean it, there's less chance of you just flaring up and fizzling out with mobile apps and things like that, or a very crowded, saturated market. There's a higher risk of that happening. But we feel like we've hit that product market fit to a degree. And so now it's all about. I'm going to market aggressively, figuring out that game where before it was really, how do we make this? And we're still going to improve the product obviously, but I would say until now it's been really focused on product development and listening to customers and that doing that diligently has allowed us to get to this product market fit. So now it's all about putting gas on the fire and like doing that. the sales thing, which I don't, I haven't known anything about, but I'm learning it. And I'm, I know that to do certain things sometimes just get out of the way and find somebody that knows how to do it and learn from that person and give that role out. And so that's really what it is.

Kaylan:

Looking between now and when you made your very first sale. What are some of the. The challenges that looking back, you had faced along this way.

Kory:

In terms of talking about a startup journey that other people can relate to, it's really just the big challenge is just grit. There's so much there, honestly, like when we first started the thing, my inclination was to just give this thing out for free to everybody. That's what we did. And nobody used it.

Kaylan:

Oh.

Kory:

When I say nobody, I mean nobody. So I was like, so let's do this. Let's make it 11 a month. Then maybe people feel like there's some buy in, this thing is real. We got one customer.

Kaylan:

Okay.

Kory:

Couldn't convince anybody else. So then we ratcheted it up to 39 a month. Not a few more customers, nobody was using it. And by this time I had moved to Kentucky, had gotten married, we were thinking about starting a family and, my wife is sitting there, and she is so supportive and, along for the ride, but we're both of us were thinking, what's going on. Then we ratcheted, just for the heck of it, ratcheted it up to 250, 000. So I'm going to that confidence can only come from truly knowing a marketplace and knowing a product and knowing your customer and that came from me being in that field for 15 20 years and knowing it and understanding it. And if it hadn't been for that, and it was just an experimental idea, I probably would have folded, closed the doors and given up. But I still believe, that this thing had a shot. And so that was a big challenge.

Kaylan:

People in markets are always evolving. How do you stay in that industry and stay in the know and stay at the heartbeat of your market?

Kory:

Just, yeah, just the information, it's a worldwide web. So the information is out there. If you have a desire to stay on top of things, you can do

Kaylan:

it. What does so the feedback loop from like customer feedback and making that way to your like product iteration, did that change over time? Is it different now than maybe in the beginning?

Kory:

Not really. And and honestly it's really not super intentional. It could be more systematized, but really, it's. It's almost anecdotal because, we work with the customers so much that once you hear things enough times, you know it moves to the top. We have a system. We've got our buckets of product development, we know, and we can move things around and prioritize them, hear things enough times you move it to the top. If you're in a sales demo and somebody says, do you have this feature and you don't have it. You put it on the list, if you keep hearing it, you move it to the top and then, you work through it that way.

Kaylan:

How did you go about finding and securing those first few customers?

Kory:

That, is just boots on the ground, talking to people and, and software as a service. Again, our marketing approach is not a sort of like spray and pray and it's not just about eyeballs. It's more about quality rather than quantity. So we are looking for quality sales leads so that we can then go have a human conversation with them and get them on board. So that's how we did it.

Kaylan:

What were some maybe unexpected strategies that actually worked really well for you?

Kory:

We got into a tech startup accelerator, and for anybody that doesn't know what an accelerator is, I guess I can explain that, but essentially these are mini bootcamps that are, the first one was in Hawaii. It was called blue startups. It's like a three month intensive course crash Course MBA specifically geared for startups, the intent of which is to give you chops on how to run the business in a strategic way, but also coming out of the accelerator. The idea is for you and they usually give you a financial investment at the beginning of this as part of the crash course. And then the idea is that coming out of this, you are ready to go court investors, get on, bring on some investment money and. Make a run at it. That's the whole idea of an accelerator. Anyway, so we did that and then we were in this one in Baltimore and people kept saying, you gotta do, you gotta do phone calling, cold calling, you gotta do call and calling. And I was open to it, but I just wasn't sure. I had a really good sales lead list from my market and I thought, okay, let's just hit it. So we sunk 10, 000 into doing a bunch of cold calling nonstop, four weeks and nothing happened. We burned through the cash. We got a bunch of angry emails. What are you doing? Calling me? How'd you get my name? And it just, it really failed. That's not to say that it can't work. Maybe it could, but that didn't work.

Kaylan:

So it sounds like that kind of thing. Shaped because you talked in the beginning about building relationships and meeting with people and putting a face to a name and having conversations. It sounds like maybe this is made it into your sales process now.

Kory:

Yeah. Yeah. And I think calling could potentially work if maybe it's done the right way, but it's it's a funky game. It seems to be we're not going to be. be doing it aggressively unless we have some affiliate marketing thing in play or if we have a customer of ours who is very happy and they're willing to open some doors into other people in other states that are doing similar things to them as an intro. So we're going to attempt to do things that way.

Kaylan:

What do you think helped build your momentum from the first customer to now? Do you, can you look back and see like maybe points of acceleration?

Kory:

Yeah, that's a good question. It's different for everybody, different for every market, different for every personality. But for me, what, what worked was just putting in the time and having the grit, I'm going to grid it out, but also being willing to sacrifice to say, I know to get this product from here to here, we need a programmer. So I'm willing to take all whatever money we're making in this company. I'm willing to take that, pay the programmer and I go get a different, another job. And that was a game changer being willing to do that. And then when we got to a certain level, Luckily, here in Kentucky, they are, the states generally are in a sort of arms race competition to bring tech startups. Every state in the country is trying to get tech startups going, as the information economy moves forward and and so I'm working to help make sure Kentucky has that for opportunities for Kentucky that's. As a side project, I have a vested interest in that and policy can play a big part in that. But luckily there were some investors in the Louisville area that just gave us a small investment and that was, once that happened, that was the first time I, both myself and the technical co founder were able to go full time. And that's when, to answer your question in a long winded way, that's when things took off. Because all of a sudden, I'm not working a different job where I'm trying to like squeeze in sales demos or work with the programmer, which isn't really fair to the employer that I was working for either. And, but I was squeezing those things in on a lunch break or whenever I could. But that was a game changer. After that, bam, things took off. Product was developing. I would, it just, that, that's when things took off.

Kaylan:

Did you foresee that? Or did you hope for that? I think it's so wild to picture that moment where you decided, okay, any money that I'm making, I'm going to give it to this programmer. I'm going to go take a different job. I'm sure that maybe felt like a huge step back. Did you know that was going to pay off?

Kory:

It's just, I was so focused on the process. Yeah.

Kaylan:

I need

Kory:

to get from here to here. How do I do it? I don't know how to code and this guy ain't working for free. This person is not doing it. So there was a time actually where I did have a technical co founder who was working for equity only early on and that was cool. But this person was also working another job and so both of us were, it just wasn't enough. So yeah, and I knew to get from here to here. This programmer is really good, really efficient and trustworthy and works hard. So you know, it was a clear path.

Kaylan:

How did you know it was time to make the transition back into your business? Of course you never left, leaving the other job and knowing that it was time to go back in,

Kory:

yeah, really COVID hit and yeah. And that company was cutting jobs, cut my job. And then I was at a point where I was not sure what to do. Then Sprocket came along and Monica was looking to hire somebody to help with Sprocket. So that was exciting to me. So I jumped in with Sprocket and was commuting up here from Murray some days. But working from home some days and and that changed that but yeah, eventually the game changer was the little investment money from investors in Lexington and bam, we were off to the races and then we never looked back and all it took was a small amount of money because the product had matured and was really good. So it was all about just having the time to go get customers.

Kaylan:

The spark was there and then you just put some fuel to it. Were there any key decisions that you can look back and say that really moved a needle for my business.

Kory:

Yeah, I, paying the programmer would be one, but I would say it's also a lot of non decisions. So tell me more. In the startup journey or whatever, there's always like shiny objects dangling around. If I just do this, then we'll take off. And it just doesn't happen that way. It's just, it's so rare when that kind of lightning strikes that, but people are always chasing it. It's. It's why people go to casinos, it's why people hang out at gas stations and scratch things off tickets. So you're just, you're chasing a dream that, that really is luck to a certain degree. And it just doesn't happen. So it's really just finding your North star, which in my case was my customers. They they'll guide the way. And especially in a city. It's a SaaS business where, it's not just a one trick pony, it's a large platform that has a lot of moving parts and and so it was really just staying true to that, that to me kept us on the right track.

Kaylan:

When you say your customers lead the way, what does that look like tangibly?

Kory:

Yeah. So it's I guess it's not if a customer asks for something, it's not like we race off and drop it. Up everything and go do whatever they ask for. But we definitely don't forget about it. And, it's all about having systems to track your conversations and making sure that you're constantly we reach out to our customers. If they don't if they're not using the product or logging in for a certain period of time, then bells go off in our head. It's not oh, let's don't, we shouldn't talk to the.'em, because we don't wanna remind them that their renewal date is coming up and we, hopefully they're not paying attention. And then the renewal payment triggers, it's more just Hey, are you getting value out of this thing or not? Because if you're not, then we wanna know why. And it's fine if you go away and you don't use this again. But I'm more interested in your feedback on why you're not finding value in this thing than trying to trick you into Yeah. Paying for another year.

Kaylan:

Yeah.

Kory:

And. And that mentality is really, it's going to serve us well because we're hungry to find out what's working, what's not. And so tangibly it looks like it's in conversations, it's in email exchanges with customers, it's in having the system set up to remember the feedback and then implement it. And and then, there's other things that we could be doing. We're working on that stuff, but I'd say that's it.

Kaylan:

Now is that something that you train your team members on too? Is it something that everybody, if I sat down and say, it said no, what's the North Star of your company? And they say customers.

Kory:

Yeah. Yeah. It's in the conversations. It's part of our DNA. We have a list of company qualities that, gets talked about and it's It's all about compassion for customers, um, compassion for each other and and talking about it and sort of, living it is, it comes to life. But more than anything, it's just along with all of that, it's just smart business practice to just listen to your customers. It's more important than money and you'll hear it in the startup journey all the time. Even if you read the letter. Lean Startup, here was a guy at the sort of dawning of the era of tech startups who, did a business plan the old fashioned way, wrote it out, did all the research. And in back in the day you could do that market research, write your business plan, put a ton of money into everything, and it would have a pretty high hit rate because the environment was relatively static. With tech startups, everything to a, to a. So There you

Kaylan:

go. What advice would you give to someone who is maybe a couple steps behind you maybe they're even just about to make their first sale or they're about to try and make their first sale or they're in that nitty gritty first season.

Kory:

All I know is what worked for me and, and is, we're still like in my mind, we still haven't quote unquote made it where we're a work in progress and the vision is way up here. We're working towards that. So I don't, I'm not like some startup guru or anything, but the stuff that I would say is safe to say is if you feel like you've got something. It's a combination between if I listen, if I took everybody's advice, I would have screwed the whole thing up a long time ago. So I just stayed true to what I believed. And there's a sort of grit, hardheadness, determination, whatever you want to call it in that. But there's also like a willingness to pivot, a flexibility that you know, you're smart enough to listen to the marketplace, listen to customers, be willing to, we call it pivot, which means. It's adjust where you're going based on feedback loops. So I think it's that balance of determination, but listening to the market, listening to, adjusting your assumptions. And then, nobody talks about it enough. I don't think, but it's also got to be fun. Yeah. And you've got to bake that into the thing, like there are stressful times with your staff and everything, the end of the day, you got to make it fun.

Kaylan:

What are some ways that you keep the fun alive?

Kory:

I think just Knowing that everybody's human and, as far as staff management goes, it's like helping them become the best version of themselves. And it's no different than, I grew up playing sports nonstop. So for me, it's pretty natural. My dad was a coach and a teacher. And so it's no different.

Kaylan:

Awesome. Kory, thank you so much.

Kory:

Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for being here. Appreciate it.