From Hectic to Moxie: Building a CRM That Freelancers Love

Most Valuable Lesson or Insight

The most valuable lesson from this conversation is that entrepreneurship is about creating a business that doesn’t feel like work. Geoff Mina emphasizes that success isn’t just about making money—it’s about building something you’re passionate about, solving real problems, and enjoying the journey. He also highlights the importance of adaptability, listening to your community, and viewing every decision as an experiment rather than a potential mistake.

Top 5 Between-the-Lines Lessons

1. Entrepreneurship is About Freedom: True success in entrepreneurship comes from creating a business that aligns with your passions and allows you to enjoy the process, rather than feeling like a grind.

2. Community is Key: Building a product like Moxie isn’t just about the technology—it’s about fostering a community where users feel heard, valued, and part of the development process.

3. Mistakes Are Experiments: Geoff’s approach to mistakes as reversible experiments removes the fear of failure and encourages continuous learning and improvement.

4. Adaptability is Essential: Freelancers and entrepreneurs must be willing to pivot and adapt to market changes, whether it’s new technology (like AI) or shifting client needs.

5. Customer Service Builds Loyalty: Combining great technology with exceptional customer service creates a loyal user base that sticks around even when competitors offer more features.

5 Actionable Steps

1. Start Freelancing Gradually: If you’re new to freelancing, ease into it by starting as a side hustle while maintaining a stable income. This allows you to learn marketing and sales skills without financial stress.

2. Treat Decisions as Experiments: Approach business decisions with a mindset of experimentation. If something doesn’t work, pivot and try again without dwelling on regret.

3. Listen to Your Community: Engage with your clients or users regularly. Their feedback can guide product improvements and help you stay ahead of competitors.

4. Focus on Reversible Decisions: When making changes, prioritize reversible decisions (like branding or product features) over irreversible ones (like spending all your capital). This reduces risk and allows for flexibility.

5. Combine Technology with Great Service: If you’re building a product or service, pair it with exceptional customer support. Loyalty often comes from the experience, not just the product itself.

Transcript:

[Speaker 2]

Hey people, welcome to Business Chats. Today we have a very special one. Our first male guest, Geoffrey Mina from Moxie, the best CRM out there, of course.

Basically, we're going to talk about how you have any questions. I already have some questions that people send me for you, yeah. So I think they want to put you in the spot today.

But basically, I'm really curious about his process to becoming basically a freelancer. Not a freelancer, but an entrepreneur, I believe. And the biggest mistakes and wings that he has had in this journey.

Yay! We did it!

Finally! Amazing. Love it.

Gotta love it. How are you today?

[Speaker 1]

I'm doing great. How are you?

[Speaker 2]

I'm great. Thank you so much for asking. Just finishing up my day, you know, as usual.

[Speaker 1]

Yeah, my day feels like it's just getting started.

[Speaker 2]

Yeah, I feel like it's Monday for me. But anyway, there's a long list of things to do tomorrow. But anyway, can you tell us who you are, and why are you known for right now?

[Speaker 1]

Who am I? I don't know. That's a good question.

My name is Jeff Minna. And I don't know, what do I do? What am I known for?

So right now, probably with this audience, I founded a company called Moxie back in 2019. I'm the CEO of that company and been having a great time building products for freelancers and creative entrepreneurs for the last few years. Awesome.

Been building tech startups since I was like 22 or 23. I started my first one. And so over 20 years now, all kinds of different companies.

This is my first kind of non enterprise SaaS companies. So it's been an interesting learning curve, you know, selling single licenses instead of big contracts. But it's been fun.

[Speaker 2]

Yeah, that's so cool. I didn't know that.

[Speaker 1]

Yeah.

[Speaker 2]

Have you ever worked for someone else? Or have you always been rogue?

[Speaker 1]

So I did, I was employed for other companies, doing software development from like, when I was 19 to 23 or 22 or 23. And then I was employed by one of the companies who acquired a company of mine for a year. That was miserable.

Didn't enjoy them. Yeah, I can imagine. One year contract came up and I was out of there.

So you were like, yep, nope, this is not for me.

[Speaker 2]

Bye. Thank you so much. I love that.

So in this very long career, and also very short career as an entrepreneur, what do you think successes?

[Speaker 1]

For me, it's, you know, obviously, everybody always says, you know, you're a successful entrepreneur if you make money, which I think is fine. Like everybody has to be able to support themselves with their entrepreneurial endeavors. But, you know, I feel like after, you know, 20 something years building companies and a lot of cool technology, like, I really don't feel like I've worked many days in my life.

Like, I, you know, I feel like I'm putting in a hard effort, but it's not, it doesn't feel like something that most people would call work. And I think that's really the key success indicators when you've created a business that you enjoy building and operating and, you know, participating in so much that it doesn't feel like work. Like that's, for me, the true spirit of entrepreneurship, because you get to carve your own path and, you know, spend your time how you want to spend your time and focus on what you want to focus on.

[Speaker 2]

Yeah, I get that impression every time I sort of interact with you. I get the feeling like you're like playing with like, curious, how does this work? How can I fix that?

Let's just do this. And then all of a sudden, someone talks about something on Facebook. And you're like, Yep, I just changed that because I why not?

[Speaker 1]

I mean, it's, it's one of the really cool things about Moxie is that the community who's using the software is so engaged and invested in the success of it. And in all of my kind of more enterprise B2B SaaS companies, that was not the case. It was like, you know, people just didn't didn't really care if it solved the problem, it solved the problem.

They didn't have a whole lot of investment.

[Speaker 2]

So what do you think changed with Moxie? Because I feel like it comes from you guys.

[Speaker 1]

I think it's, you know, when we first started Moxie, I don't remember who said it, it may have been one of the investors in Moxie, but he, he called me unemployable. You know, it's kind of what you were getting at before, you know, I can never go work for somebody else. And I feel like the whole community of Moxie users were all unemployable.

[Speaker 2]

We are.

[Speaker 1]

And so like, I think that's why it's different here. Because like, I, I feel like I'm just part of the community, not, you know, a founder of a company, like, I feel like we're all in this together. And it's just fun.

And like, we're trying to solve problems and collaborate and, you know, just make work more fun for an easier, you know, at the end of the day, that's what we're trying to do is make work easier for all of our, our users.

[Speaker 2]

So that's absolutely right. You've made my life so much easier with Moxie. I cannot even tell you.

So how did Moxie idea come up?

[Speaker 1]

So one of the other co-founders of Moxie, his name was, his name is Daryl. He's no longer around, but he was my chief revenue officer, one of my past companies. And so we worked together very closely.

I was CEO, he was CRO. And like, there were just annoying problems that we were constantly having to solve around systems. You know, not, not too different from what freelancers have to solve, but just at a bigger scale.

And he was also a freelance photographer on the side. He loves, he's a great photographer. And, you know, after we sold that company, started talking about what, what kind of problem we wanted to solve next.

And I definitely didn't want to go back into like an enterprise B2B space. And, you know, kind of thought about all the problems we had bringing together like our CRM and our ticketing system and our invoicing system and like all the things that Moxie brings together. We had like Salesforce and Zendesk and, you know, enterprise accounting system.

I can't remember the name of it. But like none of them talked to each other and we spent way too much time, money, man hours trying to make them all work. So that was like kind of near and dear to me to have this one stop shop for all of your business problems from a technology standpoint.

And then, you know, Daryl was like, well, let's go build it for creative freelancers and entrepreneurs and small agencies. Cause he's struggled with the same problems in his photography business. So we kind of merged those two ideas and Moxie was born at the time it was called Hectic, but now it's Moxie.

[Speaker 2]

Why was it called Hectic?

[Speaker 1]

So originally, you know, one of the fun things about startups is it's all about experimentation. And so we had this grand vision of this juxtaposed marketing message where like, we were, we were the antithesis to hectic lives, you know, of freelancers, like solve it. And it ended up being a really hard branding exercise to, to actually execute on.

And people were just like, why is this called hectic? It's not hectic. Not really inspirational.

[Speaker 2]

It's not what I want to have in my business.

[Speaker 1]

Yeah. But it, you know, the original plans and some of the, I think some of the early marketing, it looked like it was going to be like a, like we could have fun with it, but it ended up causing friction. And so we rebranded and went to Moxie, which I think is a, it resonates a lot, at least for me, in terms of what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur.

[Speaker 2]

For sure. You have a lot of audience in Australia, by the way, they are hating me right now, because I'm doing this at 5am their time. So I guess they were in love with the word hectic.

A lot of them were like, Oh, I loved it when it was called like that.

[Speaker 1]

Yeah. So they were the only ones upset when we changed them.

[Speaker 2]

Yeah.

[Speaker 1]

Like, they were like, your, your birth logo and the word hectic, like it was so cool. And everybody in North America and Europe was like, yeah, great. I don't want to say hectic.

Yeah, but no.

[Speaker 2]

Would you say that that was maybe the worst mistake that you've made with Moxie? Or did you make others that you were like, well, I wish I didn't do that?

[Speaker 1]

I don't know. I have a different, I have a different perspective on what's like mistakes in startups, and business. Everything is like, if you go through your life as an entrepreneur with the mindset that everything's an experiment, and some things have the outcome you predict, and some things have completely different outcomes, then you're not fighting this constant, like, internal dialogue around like mistakes and regret.

And like, I wish I didn't do that. It's just like, okay, you know, we tried that it didn't work. So then we go do something else.

[Speaker 2]

I love that.

[Speaker 1]

And I like to, I like to put like decisions into reversible and irreversible buckets, right? There's some things that are irreversible. If you raise a bunch of money, and you spend it all, that's irreversible.

If you make some changes to the product, or your branding, or even your company name and logo, like those are reversible, like they create some friction when you go do big changes like that in business, but it is reversible. And at this point, you know, we only have, you know, kind of some legacy OG users who even remember Hectic at this point, it was probably 10%. So, you know, it was a fun experiment didn't work out.

So we rebranded.

[Speaker 2]

I feel like that's one of the main characteristics that we as freelancers need to have, we need to be able to pivot whatever it is that we need to, and adapt to whatever is happening in the market, in our business, in our clients lives, like, whatever it is, we need to be able to adapt to be able to, to come through.

[Speaker 1]

Yeah, I mean, especially, you know, some, some verticals are more impacted than others right now. But, you know, AI completely changed the way content writers approach work, and even some software developers. And so freelancers and solopreneurs who have a positive attitude around pivots and change, and, you know, maybe changing your whole business model, you know, you're, you're more likely to not get discouraged and go find the next opportunity that whatever this environmental change has caused, and you just go figure out a different way to make money, you know, and a lot of times you can see these big, you know, macro changes in the way people consume media or tech to your advantage.

[Speaker 2]

How do you, how do you see, because it's not easy to know when to take action on those changes, and when to be like, I'm just gonna wait it out a little bit more. Do you feel like you should just jump on it as soon as you start seeing signs, or you should just test it, or what's your approach on that?

[Speaker 1]

I mean, there's gonna be a lot of, you have to go into that, right? Especially as a freelancer, you're usually on a very small, you know, tight budget in terms of the income you're bringing in, you know, a lot of people who are one-man operations, like, they don't have a ton of excess income coming in to experiment, and so there's a, there's a balance there between just going and chasing shiny objects, which may, you know, make more money if it works, if, you know, your hypothesis is correct, or, you know, kind of staying true to those clients that are still paying you, but starting to look at where the trends are happening and, you know, get your toes wet in more of a controlled manner.

So, you know, I think it's really personal risk tolerance, and how fast you pivot, and how holistically you pivot your business is going to be, you know, the ultimate factor in when and how fast you do it.

[Speaker 2]

Yeah, and a little bit of gut feeling in there. Now, to me, Moxie is the best CRM out there, and I feel like a lot of people agree. Why do you think that is?

[Speaker 1]

Definitely, I don't like to ever talk badly about competitors. I think that, you know, everybody in the space that's trying to provide CRM tools to our audience are doing it for the same reason. I think that we kind of had a special silver bullet here, in that we had founders that were highly technical software engineers, and also really good product thinkers.

And when you look at the other, you know, Bonsai, Dubsado, HoneyBook, they all kind of have the same genesis, which is they were creative freelancers who decided to go build a software company, which means that they were probably spending money on building product from day one, which means that every change, they have to either, like, have a team, or, you know, they need to outsource it. I don't know what their internal staffs look like. But, you know, we kind of had this, you know, recipe where we had really good product people, we had really good marketing people as founders, we had really good software engineers as founders, and it just allows us to move faster, and listen and react to feedback in a much more, in a much shorter cycle than what, you know, what you see with some of the other platforms out there.

[Speaker 2]

Yeah, to me, honestly, is the feedback thing. And the fact that your customer service is really amazing. And just the fact that we can jump on the chat and just annoy you with stupid questions.

[Speaker 1]

You know, that's always fun. That philosophy I've brought into all of my companies. So they're all, like, highly listen-focused.

You know, our salespeople do less talking than listening. And, you know, our support people are always willing to talk. Like, it's just been, you know, from very early on.

And I always believe strongly that when you couple good technology with amazing customer service, like, people become loyal to what you're doing very quickly. Because, you know, we have, arguably, there's, you know, probably plenty of features on Bonsai or HoneyBook that are better than Moxie's, but we have people stick around until our feature set catches up, just because, you know, it's just a different type of company to do business with. And, you know, hopefully, people have fun, you know, joking around with us and throwing out feature ideas and seeing, you know, their feature requests turn into a feature.

[Speaker 2]

Yeah, and it's fun being part of that development process. Just throwing an idea out there and someone be like, oh, that's actually a cool way of thinking about it. So one of my friends, Mariana, who's using Moxie throughout her business, and she's in Australia right now, so she's asleep.

She asked me to ask you, when is Moxie going to implement autosave?

[Speaker 1]

I think it's, most of our things have autosave. I think there were a couple, like the new agreements did not until two days. Yeah, so we had, I don't remember who it was, but one of our users who's been around for a while, lost like three hours of work the other day.

And she like messaged us and she's like, guys, what the hell? Where's autosave? And I was like, oh shit, we forgot to put the autosave on the new agreements.

That's kind of what, you know, you use beta modules, like expect to find some unexpected things. You know, that module, it was incredibly complex to build. It has a ton of features.

And so, you know, we've been fixing bugs and improving stuff for two months now. And I think as of today, we've fixed every major bug, including the missing autosave and some other stuff. So I mean, it's, you know, if you don't have a tolerance for being disappointed in software, occasionally, like don't ever use a beta feature, because it kind of comes with the territory.

[Speaker 2]

Absolutely. I have another question for you. In your experience, what's the best advice that you can give a freelancer?

[Speaker 1]

I guess it really depends what stage. Good questions, guys. So I mean, for an early freelancer, I would tell them to get into freelancing slowly.

Otherwise, it can be incredibly stressful. You know, I think we see a lot of what we refer to as like side hustlers, as the starting point into freelancing, you know, full time job doing a little bit of freelancing, see some success there, like maybe you go to like a part time job and part time freelancing. And, you know, eventually you get to understand how to generate new business.

So I think that's where most people like they underestimate how hard it's going to be to get a consistent revenue stream. You might be the best graphic designer on earth. But if you're not a good marketer or salesperson, you're going to have a really hard time closing deals.

So, you know, easing into it and having an opportunity to learn how to sell to go do some workshops with good salespeople, like learn some of the marketing techniques. You know, in a situation where you're not scared of running out of money next month, like I think that's a, you know, that's probably the best advice I would give to an early stage freelancer.

[Speaker 2]

That will definitely keep the fun in the process for sure. I have one last question for you. When is Moxie joining TikTok?

[Speaker 1]

I saw Michelle's watching. She's the one.

[Speaker 2]

What do you mean? TikTok is amazing. And the conversations that we're having on the Facebook group will go viral in seconds.

I swear to you, think about it.

[Speaker 1]

TikTok may be an amazing platform for creators. I just personally, I'm also not a big social media person at all.

[Speaker 2]

Michelle is interacting right there. Now she's stressed. No, we don't want to stress you.

It's fine. We'll just keep it on Instagram and Facebook. It's okay.

[Speaker 1]

I mean, I'm sure you guys could pressure Michelle in the Facebook group and she would probably start putting content on TikTok.

[Speaker 2]

No, we love Michelle. We don't want her to be stressed. Thank you so much, Jeff, for your time.

It's been great. I will share this with everyone. Well, I'll keep just nagging you on the Moxie chat from time to time.

Thank you so much for such an amazing app.

[Speaker 1]

See you. Thanks.

[Speaker 2]

Bye.