Adam Hayes

About.

Hey, I'm Adam 👋

I've been building in the startup space since I was 18. I didn't know how to build anything back then. I would just draw out app ideas in my notebooks. I'd fill boxes with post-it notes of app ideas that would one day change the world.

Maybe I became more pessimistic, or more realistic as time went on, but I realized I wasn't going to become a billionaire before the age of 22 like my predecessors did. So I dove deeper into the space. I started app ideas with my friends. I competed in startup weekends, business pitches, anything I could get my hands on. I took unpaid internships to learn, and did a sketchy job or two that I found on Craigslist.

Before graduating I built a website that brought communities together. It was great. I was leading a team of 5 engineers and 2 biz ops people. But once we got a working product I realized something: I didn't know how to grow it. Which was actually the most important part. This was before TikTok could just deliver you 1,000 views overnight.

So I moved to SF to learn the art of growth. I was lucky enough to get an internship at The Hustle, and after 2 months they hired me full-time. I got to learn first-hand how to grow a product. Soon I was running our paid ads, spending more money on ads every month than I had in my bank account. It was fun. Challenging. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I got to be a part of the My First Million pod. I set up the first podcast studio and was the "sound guy" for a while. I got to sit in on awesome interviews with people like Scott Belsky.

During this time I met my future co-founder, Andros. He was an engineer at Instagram. Once a week after work we would sit in a nice hotel and order a pot of tea, talking about our aspirations, what we wanted to build, how we would make our dent in the world one day.

Then COVID hit. The world became work-from-home, and we started building apps on the side. The Hustle got acquired by HubSpot. We had scaled a product from $0 to $4M in just over a year, but to HubSpot a $4M-a-year product is a drop in the bucket. It was clear I didn't have the same exciting future there I had before. And my dream at The Hustle was always to learn how to grow something, not to climb the corporate ladder. When the time was right, Andros started fundraising, and at the end of 2021 we had $4M in the bank and an incorporated company. It was hard to leave The Hustle, but it was time.

We built to a team of 10+ people. It was a blast. We were traveling, living in Airbnbs. We'd spend a month in Mexico City then pop over to Denver for a couple of weeks. We were grinding hard, but it was electric. We were 1 month from raising a Series A. Then the market tanked. Instead of having our hands on that $20M, we had to tighten our belts. We built products that were making decent money, enough for an indie hacker to brag about online, but we were a VC-backed company, so our goalposts were a bit higher. We downsized the team and focused on value.

During this time AI emerged, and we had to evolve with it. We built a handful of good products, but none that broke out. 1M+ users on one, 300k on another. But we knew in our hearts they weren't it.

So now we're back to the bare bones. It's me and my co-founder going all in. We utilize AI to be more effective than when we had 15 people (which blows my mind). Our goal is to stay as lean as possible and get as big as possible. A true bootstrapper mentality trying to win in a VC-dominated space.

When I first built the company I was shy online. I thought posting about myself was taking away from my business. Now I've ripped that band-aid off. I think it's better to share and build goodwill, and the bigger your personal brand becomes, the bigger the opportunities your company can unlock.

So that's a little bit about me. I'd love to hear your story, drop me a DM on any platform. Until next time, my friend.

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