From Idea to Acquisition: Steve Edwards on Building a SaaS Company with Nearshore Devs | Nearshore Cafe

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Brian: Welcome, everyone, to the Nearshore Cafe podcast. I’m Brian Samson, your host. I’ve been doing nearshoring for a long time, and this is the podcast where we talk about all things Nearshore. Before we dive in, I want to give thanks to our sponsor, Plug Technologies. Plug.te is a great way to connect with all the talent from Latin America to grow in US companies. If you’re a CEO and you’ve ever thought about, “Where in the world do I go to find talent?” this is going to be the podcast for you. We’re talking to Steve Edwards, and Steve has had quite a journey all around the world to find the right talent, and it led him to Latin America. So, without further ado, let’s welcome Steve to the show. Steve, great to have you!

Steven: Hey, thanks for having me today. Looking forward to it. We know when we talk, right? Little passion about finding the right developers can be a challenge, a make or break, and all that fun stuff.

Brian: Absolutely. Well, Steve, I want to just give a chance for you to share a little more about your story. So, before we even dive into the craziness that we talked about before the show, just tell us more about Premiere, what it is, and also, how did you get here?

Steven: All right. So, I’m, we’ll start kind of in the beginning. I’m a small town Wisconsin boy that wasn’t ready for college. I went to the Army after high school, jumped out of airplanes in the 82nd Airborne Division. Then I realized quickly, financially, it wasn’t a good thing for me. I like to, like my mom says that I had a champagne taste on a water budget back then. So, I got out. I started to go to college at night while I was in the Army and knew what I wanted to do.

Then I moved to Florida after I got out of the Army, went to FAU, got a job in sales out of that as a stockbroker. So that was my first job out of college. I transitioned from there to a mortgage broker. And then after the mortgage industry kind of died back in ’07, I got recruited by some friends to do outside sales. What we did is we would build sales teams for AT&T, T-Mobile. A lot of them outsource some of their sales from businesses to business, door-to-door, and retail sales. So, I got recruited to run their B2B division, launched that, and worked for them.

Four years later, they came in and they said, “We’re going to shut down your division. You can either go to door-to-door sales or retail sales.” And I’m like, “I don’t want either one of those.” But the reason I bring that up is when you’re building a sales team, how do you build a sales team? You go to all the job boards, all the job fairs, the colleges, the companies that are putting on, and you find your talent. Well, I ran into this company up in New Jersey, and I really liked the way that they did their events. It wasn’t a daytime job fair where everybody was unemployed. This was an evening job fair. It was geared directly towards salespeople. And they did kind of a presentation format. Each company came in and stood in front of them and said, “Here’s who we are, here’s what we do, here’s what we’re looking for, here’s why you should work for us.” I loved it. I was like, “This is the most efficient job fair I’ve ever been to.”

So, fast forward, when they laid me off, I went to the owner of that company and I said, “I love what you do, but I don’t want to work for you.” So, we negotiated for six months, and I went in, I bought a license agreement, and I ran North Carolina down to Florida, Texas, and Arizona. So, I was putting on in-person job fairs for nine years.

In 2018—or 2017—I had one of my mentors come to me and he’s like, “I just landed this company and they do virtual reality.” He’s like, “Man, I want you to get on a call with him. This guy wants to show you something.” Great guy. Shows me a thing called a virtual job fair. Now, in 2017, nobody was talking about virtual job fairs. And I’m like, “This is the future. This is it.” I instantly fell in love. I said, “This is it. This is where I want to go.”

Well, the guy at the other company wasn’t as big of a fan. We put, we both put in some money. I was doing the virtual, he didn’t want to. It was always a reason, reason, reason. We decided to finally part ways, right? So, we parted ways mutually. He only wanted in-person, I only wanted virtual, and I said, “This is it. I’m going 100% virtual job fair.” So, it’s 2018, no more in-person for me, all virtual.

Then I started having some issues with the company that was running the events. I look back now, I know I was asking them a lot. They were a startup at that point. You know, they were a couple years in the business, but I was asking them to do something that really nobody was doing yet at that point. That market was so small, was out there. And when I’m telling them, they didn’t, a lot of them didn’t understand how I wanted to do it, because I was really taking what I did and trying to put it in the virtual world. So, finally, they messed up really, really bad on something, and it made me look bad, which my clients were upset about it, which I said, “Okay, I’m going to leave. I’m going to go cancel my contract with them.” I went to another company, and they said, you know, pretty much in their contract was, “If you use us, you can’t, you can never build your own.” My attorney goes, “If you’re going to do it, this is the time.”

So, we said, “All right, we’re going in.” So, we went on, and I know we’re going to talk about the development side, so I won’t get into too much, but I’ll just say that I said, “I’m all in, going in. We’re building Premiere Virtual.” We came out, we went and got, you know, a software development firm, which we’re going to get into in a minute. But that’s where it came from. It really came from, “Here is my industry. I saw that people would rather apply online than wait in line.” So, I’m like, I just said, “Here’s what it is, here’s how I can solve a problem.”

And at the time, I was talking to recruiters—I won’t say the company, but phenomenal company, one of the best management training programs in the entire country. They love to hire athletes, love to hire people right out of college. All the recruiters are young, sharp, and that’s what they’re looking for, and they couldn’t figure out virtual. The technology was still where they didn’t understand it, and they had a hard time with it. So, getting it out, I knew there was going to be a three-year process of me teaching everybody, “Here’s really what it is.”

Now, eight months in, as we’re testing it, I decided after we did our first test event live, I’m going to change my business model. So now, instead of me hosting the events where I’m going out and getting the organizations and the attendees, I decided to turn it into a true SaaS platform and license it. So now, my developers didn’t have to start over, but there were a lot of changes in how they built it when it was just for me to now everything else. So, that put me a little behind schedule there, but then once we started taking on clients, you know, then we were in a really good situation.

We launched in 2019. Everybody knows what happened in 2020. That was just a big catalyst for what virtual could do, what remote work could do. And I think that, you know, was it a blessing? Absolutely. Was it watching, really seeing that that’s where the trend was going anyway, right? The technology was coming in for virtual events. COVID just sped it up. And now it’s, you know, I think I was at that time the fifth main platform that was going to be out there. Now there’s a lot more, right? Because a lot of people want to kind of jump in the mix and think that suddenly it’s so easy to build the software. And, you know, even people when we talk to vendors are like, “Well, you just popped up because of COVID.” And I’m like, “Do you understand we’ve been building this for over a year? We launched last year.” Like, you’re not developing a powerful platform like it is in a couple days. But people that don’t know technology, they think, “Oh, website, we can put it up easily.” So, that’s where we got. And we got acquired last year. So, we built a pretty big brand out there. Got bought by Career.com, which is a phenomenal company with what they’re doing as well. So, things have really worked well. And not just me, but three of my competitors got acquired, too. Pretty much the three biggest players in the industry all got acquired. So, here we are.

Brian: Yeah. So, what I wanted to get into, maybe as a bridge to our eventual part, is you figured out technology. You didn’t start as a tech guy. You weren’t a computer science major. You were sociology, a successful sales guy. Can you talk about what that was like as you started to learn how to build a SaaS company? What was the learning curve like for you?

Steven: You know, it was a huge learning curve, and to this day, I’m still learning. It was tough because I knew—and I’ll say this, this isn’t a bad thing, right—but my brain works different than a software genius. The way that I see things and they see things, right? We both are intelligent in our own ways, but we see things differently. So, I really kind of took that role as, “Here’s what I want in here, you put it down, you put it in there.” So, we took the ideas, myself and my business partner Gary. Gary’s a little bit more organized, a little bit more detailed than me, so he would build out kind of some of the schematics. And I’d say, “This is what we want.” And it’s like, you know, we, as a salesperson or a leader, I want to push this button right here, and this is what I want to happen. Whatever you’re doing in between, you’re doing it, right? I don’t care how it gets there, but I want this button to do this, this button to do that.

So, it was more of I had to learn, and it wasn’t immediate. It wasn’t until I finally hired on a director of IT that I learned a lot of that, right? Because the people that we had around early on, in, we’ll call it that role, they were more of, “Okay, we’ll get it done.” They weren’t showing me. So, you know, I would have these calls, and we’re going to talk about this in a little bit, have these calls, I have no clue what was going on. And I’d be like, “So, how long is it going to take and how long is it going to, what’s it going to cost me?” That was my mindset. “I need this done now! What do you mean you’re going to do this? It’s going to take three months? Building a website should be an overnight process, right?” Because I was that guy that then when the clients came in, I’m like, “Man, I was that guy just a year ago.” And I can look at it now. And, you know, we’ll have some calls now and I can take the majority of the calls, and I feel comfortable.

I used to go to a lot of these networking events, and I went from sales networking events to suddenly IT networking events, and I’m like, “I do not fit in at these things.” These, they’re talking, I’m like, “Yeah, drink over here please.” Like, I had no clue what they were talking about. But it took me a long time to get it, and it’s still, you know, trying to learn, trying to get the people around you. That was the big learning curve for me. Still not 100%, but I know when I have like my engineering calls. And I think it was Henry Ford that said it back in the day, he’s like, “I’m not the smartest man in here, but I can push a button and get the smartest man.” And I kind of believe in that too, and that’s really how I built my businesses. I don’t know everything, but I know if I need something on HubSpot or operations, I can, “Hey, Gary.” If I need something on the sales, business development, “Zach.” Something with the clients, “Glenn.” Something with IT, “Josh.” I know who to call, and you know, or put them on the call that they need to. And I’ve built, you know, really a, and a lot of people say, right, that team, that family atmosphere and stuff like that. But, you know, we’ve ranked in the top place to work here in Florida a few years in a row now, because I truly believe that, you know, because I’m going to go to them and say, “Man, I don’t know.” I don’t always just say, “This is my way.” You know, we have one of the biggest things in the platform that we want to put in that I want to put in, and guess what? We’re not putting it in. It’s, and it’s, I want it, right? I was a CEO, I should be able to get it, but it wasn’t something that was, that our clients wanted, and we really kind of built the business around what our clients want.

Brian: I think this is a great segue then of, you’ve got this great idea, non-technical founder. And the reason I’m hammering on this part is I think there’s a lot of people listening that can relate. You know, they didn’t get the computer science degree. They don’t know how to code. They’ve got a product vision. Software is eating the world. They want to do something. Maybe they don’t, like you said at the beginning, “champagne taste, water budget,” you know. Take us, take us from there. You know, like what were your, what was your game plan? How did you think about, you know, who should build this, how much should I budget, where should I go, should I hire somebody locally? Like take us through that whole journey. And I know this is probably going to go around the world a little bit, and I can’t wait to hear more.

Steven: So, yeah, this is the fun part, right? This is, you know, like we talked about, right, this is the one big chapter in my book that talks about all the challenges because it is to me such a big thing. And I made mistakes. I lost a lot of money because I didn’t know, right? Now, if I could go back today, if I could have found Jose, who’s my director of IT, if I could have found him early on, or somebody like him, I would have given him stock in my business to help me, right? Because what I did is, did I lose you?

Brian: No.

Steven: Okay. So, here’s what I did. I went and did what everybody used to do before ChatGPT. I went to Google: “software development firms around me.” That was it. So, I went and I looked at a bunch of them, and I was really trying to stay here in South Florida where I live, because I wanted to be able so I could walk into their shop. Right? I’m going into something I have no clue about. So, I walk into the first shop, meetings right here. I think I had been connected with them somehow or somebody, but their office was five minutes from mine. So, I get in there, and I’m talking and they’re like, “We like your idea. $250,000 for it, and it’ll take a year to develop.” Like, “What are you talking about? $250,000? Like, you’re way out of the ballpark, and a year shouldn’t take that long.” He’s like, “Yeah, it’s going to be $250,000. You know, we’re going to build all this. This is what we’re going to do for you.” Right? That’s $250,000 without changes. Now, remember, I already told you I changed the business model once. So, we, I walked out of there and I was like, “You guys are crazy,” right? Like, it wasn’t, but they were a shop that was here in the US.

Now, I also should point out, I was bootstrapping this. There was no investors, there’s no VCs, no angels. This was out of me and my wife’s pocket, you know? And she didn’t know everything out there, but that’s for another, that’s for another time. But we were, I was spending everything, right? And I knew it, but I went and I, so then I went and I interviewed three other firms. Get on this one with this one firm, and they’re, they’re like a huge, or a big, $60 million software development firm. They’re big players. Interviewed them, I’m on a call with them. I didn’t, I didn’t know anything. They said they had a beautiful PowerPoint. They’re showing me everything, telling me what it’s going to be, project manager, this, this is the monthly thing. Here’s what we’re going to have. And I’m like, “I don’t understand anything you’re telling me.” I’m like, “You’re speaking Chinese to me right now, and I don’t understand Chinese. Just tell me how long is it going to take and how much is it going to cost me?” So, like, “Okay,” you know. And they had their fee of what it was, and they were, you know, they were based out of India, and I, I was like, “Okay, I don’t understand it, but, you know, I, I like where they were going on monthly, on a monthly thing.” Right? There was no commitment. I could say I want one developer or I could say I want 10 developers. I love that process, and I’m only paying monthly. I was great with that. I’m like, “I don’t gotta pay $250,000 upfront. I’m paying less.”

So then, I went and my last company, I went and I talked to a couple other companies, but I narrowed it down to the kind of three. So, I went and I talked to this other one. They were in Boca, and I sat down with a husband and wife, and they talked to me in salesperson language. I understood everything. And they’re like, “We’re not going to see you for three months. We’re going to develop everything. Here’s what it’s going to be. Here’s the cost.” I said, “I’ll sign a 12-month contract with you right now to do this, if you give me a little discount.” They’re like, “Well, we won’t do that, but we’ll give you this for the first, you know, this. And then after, like, 90 days, we’ll give you a little bit of a discount, blah, blah, blah.” Like, “Okay.” Their dev shop, I thought they were, they were in Boca, but all they did was outsource into India. But I loved what they had to say, and I was like, “I’m in, let’s go.”

I come back three months later, it was nothing like I wanted. That was my first frustration with that. And then I was like, “Okay, we’re doing it,” and it was like, it was just slow. And I’d tell them what I wanted, and then there would be bugs, there’d be issues. I’m like, “Something’s, something’s going on here.” And then I, you know, I had a conversation with the, with the owner, the husband, and him and I just butted heads. He didn’t like it because I called him out that his developers were terrible, that they didn’t understand what they’re doing, that nothing was going the way. So, him and I went, and I was like, “That’s it. I’m, I’m pulling it. I’m pulling away from you.” Wife calls me, “We don’t have to do this. Like, I’ll take over your account. You know, let’s just you and I. He’s just very passionate. You called him out.” I’m like, “He sucks.”

So, long story short, I’m very upfront about things. So, long story short, I started working directly with her. We were going, and all of a sudden, we had huge issues. We’re having issue over issue over issue, and they couldn’t get what I wanted. And I, and I kind of explain it like this: Let’s just say they were a freshman in high school level of where they’re at, and I was asking them sophomore and junior level stuff, and they couldn’t do it. So, I realized right at that point is I, I need to make a change. So, then what I, what I did, I went back to, I, well, I went back to the company that was $250,000, and I said, “I got a prototype. How much you going to be?” “There’s $250,000, and that’s nothing like you wanted. We have to start over from scratch.” They’re like, “You should have went with us, you wouldn’t waste that money.” I was like, “You’re, you’re not that nice of a guy. Like, you could have changed it, right? You could have worked with me.” I even said, “What about a partnership in here?” They didn’t believe in the product enough to go that.

So, I went back to the other place, the big, big shop, and I said, “Okay, I’m going to switch over.” So, we did a middle-of-the-night. I’m on with their devs, and we locked out the other company out of everything. We changed all the passwords, did a just a takeover. Next morning, I emailed the other people. I said, “We’re no longer working with you.” Right? Contract’s over. It’s month to month. We were done.

So, I’m working with the other company now, kind of, right, hostile. We get in, takes a little bit of time, start having challenges, same kind of challenges that, that we’re having. And I’m kind of in a frustrating. They’re not getting there. I want to leave them. But I’m like, “I already switched once. Like, do I really want to start over?” And this is what every person in my, kind of, stage at that point goes through, right? Like, should I leave? Should I not leave? Am I going to start over? Because they kind of put it in your head that if you leave, you’re going to start over. And so, I was like, “Oh, I already did that once. I don’t want to do it again.” And then they did some more things. So, I text the owner, and I said, “Hey, man, I just want to let you know, CEO to CEO, here’s what’s going on with your company.” And he goes, “You don’t mean anything to me.” This text back, “You don’t mean anything to me.” I was like, “That’s it.” Right? This guy’s there. I talk to my attorney. I go, “You know, let’s, let’s, let’s figure out how we can get out of this last one.” My attorney goes, “Steve, he goes, ‘I looked it up, he goes, you’ll be like the 120th lawsuit against this guy.'”

Brian: Oh my God.

Steven: He goes, “This guy, he just, he gets people like me, comes in, drags them through because he’s got bigger pockets, and then he goes, he drags on these lawsuits until these companies can’t pay.” You know? So, the guy didn’t care. So, I was like, “You know what? We’re going to have to figure out something.” So, this is when I went to my third development shop at this point. And at this point, I went, I went right here in the US. It’s more money. I went to a different company. I met him at now. I’m going to all these tech associations. So, I met him and they were really good. You know, they were good, but they were super expensive, and I just couldn’t, couldn’t do it. It was just, it was, it was a lot.

And then all of a sudden, kind of, I was doing it, but then I’m like, “Hey, I’m paying you guys for a project manager, but I got a project manager on my side. Why am I paying double?” So, all of a sudden, we came in, huge events coming, and our chat doesn’t work. And I’m like, “You need to fix the chat.” And like, “We can’t do it. We can’t get it done.” I’m like, “I have an event, and that’s the number one thing in there, is the chat. Like, we have to have this running.” You know, like, we’re in, we’re in, at this point, it’s pre-COVID, right? We’re not even into COVID yet. And I’m like, “We got to do something.” So, I go out and I talk to a couple other firms. Well, now I’m within this tech association here in South Florida, so now I have contacts. So, I go and I, I talk to two of the contacts that, that I know. One of them is like, “So, it’ll be $20,000, and I don’t know if I can get it done.” I’m like, “Well, that’s not really reassuring.” Talk to the other company. This guy’s like, “$5,000, and we guarantee we’ll get it done.” And I’m like, “I’ve already gone through two of the cheap ones. Is this the right decision to make?” Like, I’m like stressing, like, “What do I do?” I’m like, “I got to take a chance.” So, I went, company’s called 2:00 AM. I went to them, and I said, “Matt, you got to get it done.” So, they brought one of their guys in, and the guy crushed it. Fixed the chat. We had one week, fixed it, fixed everything. And I said, “I want him full-time.”

Brian: Did you, I think he froze.

Steven: No.

Brian: I’m good. No, just, just saying, “Wow.”

Steven: So, the guy did it. I’m like, “I want him full-time.” So, Matt’s like, “Okay, we brought him in.” Then I said, “I want another one.” Matt, I’m like, “I like you guys.” So, at this point, I’m, I’m working, I got two shops working on this thing. And the other shop, the guy calls me like, we kind of became friends a little bit again through the, through this networking, and he’s like, “Steve, I see the writing on the wall.” He goes, “Let’s just, just go. You’re moving obviously towards them. You’re giving us less work, which is less money. Like, let’s be done.” So, I parted ways with them. Then I went to Matt, and I said, “Okay, bring me another one.”

And at this point, the, the software, and I know a lot of people listening here understand software, but I like to explain it in case there’s somebody that was like me out there that didn’t understand, right? If you take a car and your headlight breaks and you fix your headlight, and as soon as you fix your headlight, the back rear tire breaks, then you put a bandage on that, you fix that, and then the muffler breaks, you fix the muffler, then the horn breaks. It was like they were putting Band-Aid on top of Band-Aid on top of Band-Aid to fix this, this legacy platform of ours. And I was so frustrated. We’re having challenges. So, I said, “Matt, start from scratch.” You guys got this working, right? Just make sure that this is running, but we’re starting from scratch on a second platform. Because now we’re in COVID. So, I’m running a legacy platform here that’s working now, we got it working, but it doesn’t have all the features I want, and we’re building something from scratch. You know? So, now we’re, you know, almost another year into developing this. So, I’m running kind of two platforms at this time.

But that’s where Matt had, you know, I had guys from Argentina, I, you know, it was there, Croatia. There were some other ones in, in South America, but I don’t remember all of them that they had. But I would say, “This is what I need.” So, he would bring in an expert, and we would get these things done. And it was just, it was great because I went up, I had six developers at one point, plus their Dev Ops guy. And it was just great because they were keeping one running, building another one, our Legacy or our 2.0 platform. And it just, you know, I’ve had a great relationship with them now. You know, it’s, it’s, I think it’s probably one of the best things is now that I found the relationship and I can have, you know, I can call that owner over there and say, “Hey, I need, you know, I need this for a little bit.” You know, and his guys are great. You know, and when we, when we got acquired, I did lose some people. You know, I lost my director of IT, I lost my director of marketing because now the parent company had all that already. And I was like, “Okay, you know, like,” and they had, they had a lot of internal developers. They had a lot of internal developers over there. And I was kind of worried that I was going to lose mine, and we didn’t. You know, my developers have been phenomenal, and they’re taking on more projects and stuff like that.

So, I love the, the, the Nearshore, I love the outsourcing of it because I think it’s there. I just had, you know, it’s, it’s not of where the developers are sometimes, I think it’s the quality of what you’re getting. And I think with some of these, you know, these shops that are, you know, in different countries that are charging you $25 an hour, and they’re paying a project manager, a salesperson, another person, a team lead, and the developer, I’m like, “How much is that developer really getting, you know, like five bucks an hour?” And I get it, there’s a lot of developers in some of those countries, but, you know, I pay, I pay more now. And I wish I had this team when I built my original platform. I mean, you never know, right? I think you got to, you got to make mistakes, and I think that’s where, you know, life is, is by learning the mistakes. But if I can tell any, I mentor a lot of kids now that are, or kids, I say, guys that are like starting software companies, and I go, “Listen, you’re going to get frustrated if you don’t have an IT guy on your team that, that knows something. You’re going to get frustrated because these things take forever.” You know, I was at lunch with a guy last week, and, you know, he’s telling me, I’m like, “Kind of warned you a little bit about who you were going with, and you went the different direction because they promised you stuff.” And yeah, you’re seeing it, right? And then it’s like, you know, again, we’re thinking things are going to be quick, but they’re building, you know, you got to build the structure.

But I was very fortunate with, you know, Jose at the time. Jose’s like, “Listen, Steve, you don’t build a house, you know, you don’t put the windows in first, right? You got to put the foundation down, and then you got, you know, put up everything before you can put the, you know, you got to put the studs up before you put the walls up.” So, it was like, I, I learned that, but I learned it a year in, you know, and I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t have the right things. You know, and I was in, you know, I was in some mentor groups, but the mentor groups, the people that were mentoring me were more on sales and marketing side, not on the IT side. You know, I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t have that, I didn’t have that person. You know, if I would have went back, if I would have, you know, let’s say I could have had somebody early on that I could have said, “Hey, here’s a percentage of my business, be this person.” And I tried it. I did try it with a couple people. And I think now I know one guy probably is like, because he just saw when my book came out, he was like, “Congratulations, I remember when I was first there.” And in my head, I’m like, “Bro, you remember I offered you, I offered you a percentage of this business, and you said no. You’d rather take cash upfront.” But, you know, that’s, that was a choice he made. You know, I tried to get that because I didn’t, I didn’t know. I didn’t know a lot of the stuff.

Brian: Steve, if we could go back, and it was a fair point you made that there’s good developers everywhere, so we don’t want to get too, you know, general about regions and countries. But just from your own personal experience, what was it like working with Latin America being based in Florida versus working across the ocean with with those teams in India?

Steven: One of the reasons that I, and this is why I asked them to get some, because I wanted people in my same time zone. That was a, that was a, that was my biggest, at the time, that was my biggest motivator because we had some people in Russia, yeah, I’m sorry, Spain, Croatia, and I’m like, “I need somebody in my time zone.” You know, I mean, yes, they were there early in the mornings and stuff like that, but, you know, I didn’t like that middle of the night stuff. They’re doing stuff, then I look in the morning, I’m like, “This doesn’t work, right?” And then trying to get on calls and stuff like that. It’s, it’s a challenge. You know, and I don’t, I’ll never say the language barrier because I think, right, as long as people, right, I mean, I speak English, right, and I’m running the company, so, you know, ideally, I’d like it so I can understand them. But I’ll never say that. Right? I’ve never had a developer I’m just like, “I just don’t understand what you’re saying.” I’ve never, I’ve never had that.

But they just talk in a different way, and they don’t, you know, how we explain things and how we put it down was very difficult. You know, and I got Josh, who kind of runs my IT now. He came in just kind of on the support side, and now he’s worked his way up in the company. And I tell him, I’m like, “Josh, you know what, what makes you so successful as an IT guy is you can understand the business units and the IT side.” So, I would take stuff, I would show him drawings. I’m like, “Josh, come in the office, I’m showing him drawings of what I want.” And then he would go put it down so the developers understood it, which was, which was great. And then again, so like my developers now, I’ll be like, “Here’s what I, here’s what I want.” And I love it when they tell me, “Nope, that’s not going to work.” I’m like, “Why?” Right? And they’ll tell me, but they’ll show me a better way. And I like that. You know, so, you know, some of them don’t do that. Some of them say, you give them this, and that’s how some people want it. I don’t mind if my developers say no if they can give me a better way. If they say no and it’s just no, we’re not going to do that, well, then we have a problem. You know? But usually it’s no because there’s a better way or have you thought about it this way? And I’m like, “That’s a really good idea.” You know? So, yeah.

Brian: From my, from my personal experience, that’s what really drew me to Latin America, is we get that pushback, we get different ideas. You know, I strongly disagree, Ryan, with this direction, but have you considered this?

Steven: Yeah, and it’s, it’s good they’re in the time zone, right? I can get on a call with them, you know, like, not the exact time zone, but, but, but we can get on, you know. And, and, and here’s another thing that I really think, and this is, this is tough to find, very tough to find. You have to look at it, right? So, when I look at my business, I look at it from the client standpoint of view, right? So, who are my clients, or who are the people, end users on our platform? Are job seekers and organizations. Now, some of them are older, some of them are younger, some of them are tech-savvy, some of them are not tech-savvy. So, you have to build that platform so that everybody can use it. Right? In our world, it’s got to be there. So, what I told my developers is, I go, “Sometimes I go, you’re looking at it because you’re, you’re intelligent, you’re, you know, you’re a developer, you’re seeing like, here’s the way.” But a regular, you know, candidate that’s, you know, maybe a blue-collar job that’s out there, may not understand that.

Brian: Yeah.

Steven: And it took my developers a little bit of time to really understand that. And I’m like, “We have to look at it from this lens over here, not just what looks good on the back side of things.” You know, you can make it too complex. Now, some softwares are great, they need to be that complex. Mine didn’t. So, you know, taking those developers and getting them to really look at it from that standpoint of view, so when they come in and say, “Well, you should do this. Here’s why we’re not doing it this because of this is the way that most candidates are going to look at it.” And then they’re like, “Oh, that makes sense.” Right? So, I can have, you know, great conversations with my developers now, you know. And, and, and we’ll go back and forth and get the best way that’s, that works for, you know, the clients, right? And for them, right? The, the, the best overall way that’s going to be there that’s not taking shortcuts, that’s not, you know, jeopardizing security and stuff like that. How are we going to do this to make sure that this platform works when I hit this button and I want this to happen?

Brian: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Steve, when you think about just your, the devs you’ve worked with in Latin America, you know, it sounds like you mentor a lot of other founders, a lot of people building technical products. Any like best practice advice on how to get the most out of your team in Latin America?

Steven: So, this could either sound really good or really bad, right? So, you know, we have, we used to have two-week sprints, now we went to like one-week sprints. But we have a weekly call with them. Slack is set up so that anytime they drop something in there, I can see what their question is. So, having a great, you know, kind of that open communication through Slack and weekly calls. And the weekly calls are, “Here’s what’s updating on the sprint that we’re going.” Right? We use, we use Jira, right? So, we track everything on our Jira board. And Josh kind of tracks everything for me. But to me, it’s the open communication and weekly communication. Even if it’s a 10-minute call, they got to have it, right? Because they can get in, kind of tell you, “Here’s where we’re going.” You know? And then if they’re, if they’re doing really well, it’s like, “Great. Hey, here’s where we’re at, right? Oh, I finished all of these tickets in the sprint already.” Well, now I can add other stuff in here, or, “Hey, I’m a little behind.” “Okay, why are you behind?” You can figure it out. You know? And we loved our guys in Argentina. I will tell you, my, my old business partner just flew down there, and he met up with a guy. You know, and you don’t see that a lot, right? But, but because it was such a, you know, he was a great developer. So, that one of them, you know, and like I said, we’ve had some really, really good ones, and some ones that weren’t as good.

Brian: Yeah, sure. Awesome. Well, Steve, this has been, oh, I’m sorry. Please, I didn’t mean to interrupt.

Steven: I know, I was going to say is, is, you know, from a founder standpoint, if you’re not a tech founder, get involved with the tech association that’s in your local area. I don’t care if it’s Hawaii, Alaska, Florida, New York, Texas, they all have tech associations. Get involved with that. Now you’re going to be around more people. Yes, it may be a little different in the beginning, right? Like it was for me. But you start to get to know people. You’re knowing the language, you’re understanding what that is, right? You’re now respected in the community or, or in that community as well because it took a little bit of time for me to to to break in. You know, but like I just won some awards, you know, for the 2023. We won the the best collaboration award with three other organizations for South Florida Tech Hub. I could have did that four years ago, right? Never would have been able to do that. But I built that community, and if you do that and get a mentor that’s out there that that, you know, either they’re a mentor group, an association, or find somebody, you know, I, I don’t know all the mentor programs that are out there. But there’s, there’s some really good ones, and you can find somebody that can, can answer those questions and help you on that.

And one thing that I will tell, and I’ve told two people that I mentor right now this thing, do not ever be afraid to walk away from your dev shop. So many people get scared that, “Oh my gosh, I’m going to have to start over.” Yeah. If I would have pulled the trigger sooner, I probably would have lost less money or spent less money. And, and, and it’s, it gets to be this point, they’re there, right? Both these two people I mentor, they know, they know my whole story. They know everything. I sat down with them, I’m like, “You gotta pull, you gotta pull away.” And both of them are like, “I can’t do it.” Because their mindset is not in the right place. Their mindset is, “Oh my gosh, I’m going to spend, I’m going to start over.” And I’m like, “You’re not.” People can come in. Developers learn code, right? My developers now are learning code from the parent companies to be able to, right? They’re, they’re a good developer can come in and learn code. Yes, maybe if, maybe they don’t know Ruby and they only know PHP and Laravel, I get that, right? But you find another dev shop that writes in their language. Don’t be afraid. It’ll cost you less money in the long run and less headaches. I had hair before I started the software company, not a full head of hair.

Brian: Yeah. Awesome advice. This is gold. Steve, this has been absolutely fantastic. I mean, so many takeaways for non-technical people thinking about software shopping, looking at all around the world, trade-offs, all that stuff. So, huge thank you. Where can people find you? Tell us more about where, where they can find Premiere Virtual, where they can find you.

Steven: So, Premier Virtual is real easy, it’s premiervirtual.com. My email is steve@premiervirtual.com. Also, you know, if you’re looking for, right, we, we had 30 minutes to go over a lot of stuff, right? The kind of talk Nearshore that’s here. I just wrote a book, it’s called *Weeding Through the BS From Idea to Acquisition*. Just got published, it’s on Amazon. You can Google “Weeding Through the BS book,” and it’s there. But any entrepreneur, it’s great for, because it’s going to tell you the challenges. A lot of people see, “Hey, here’s the success,” right? Entrepreneur built a business, got his business acquired. That’s kind of the goal of a, of a lot of people out there. But it talks about the pitfalls and the challenges are in there, right? I have a whole chapter, I think it’s the longest chapter in the book too, all dedicated to what your podcast is about, right, is why choosing the right developer, right, going why Nearshore is so important and good and and why they should do it sooner than later. You know, and it talks about that in the, in the book because that was such a big challenge to me. But yeah, you know, they can, they can always reach out to me. I’m on LinkedIn, Steve G. Edwards, that’s, that’s on there. You know, look me up, and if anybody ever wants, I’m on a, I’m on Veterati as well. If you’re a veteran and you’re looking for mentorship, they can find me on on Veterati.

Brian: Amazing, Steve. Thanks so much for the time. Let me just give a quick shout out again to our sponsor, Plug Technologies, plug.te. Great way to connect to developers all over Latin America with US companies. Thanks everyone for listening to the Nearshore Cafe podcast, and a big thanks again to Steve. We’ll see you next time.

Steven: All right, thanks for having me, Brian.

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