Making $1M+/MRR as a serial founder

This week I'm interviewing Jekabs Endzins, a serial founder making over $1M with multiple projects. It was pretty interesting to learn about his thought process. Let's get started.

What's your name and what are you working on?

My name is Jekabs Endzins. I am now 110% focused on Roibox. But I do have other tech businesses – Tweetdeleter (Tweet deleting SaaS tool used by 3 million visitors from 200 countries) and Tapbox (Self service solution agency that is being transformed into SaaS – rent our software to run a swarm of self-service devices like hospital reception, cinema ticketing, food etc.)

You're working on so many projects at the same time. How do you stay organized?

I am quite good at multi-tasking. I also like to build businesses with other strong professionals, so we can split the responsibilities. Delegating tasks is important. Usually at the start you have to do a lot of weird stuff that doesn’t require in-depth knowledge/IQ but it’s more important to move fast.

When the initial traction is there you have to take a deep breath and decide how to scale it. I pause once we reach that moment where I have to make the decision how to balance my workload. Until then, it’s just pure delegation whenever possible, automation and just doing it yourself in super-fast pace.

Are you noticing the 80/20 (Parreto's principle) while working on your projects (10-20% of the projects bringing 80%+ of the revenue)?

Absolutely – at the moment Tweetdeleter is making most of the revenue and it requires max 1h per week, while I truly believe that with Roibox we are onto something really big so I am ready to spend all the time there and see the revenue later.

I think revenue is not the right metric to follow. Potential is more important, otherwise it wouldn’t make sense to start something new. For me usually those interim moments (between different jobs) are the ones when I start something new and if it starts to gain traction I have to make the decision how to reallocate my time or get some outside help.

Doing business is numbers game, so the more chances you have the bigger probability to get to something big.

You seem to be in so many niche markets/industries. How do you decide what market to go into?

I network with a lot of people, ex-colleagues, course mates know that I am go-to person to brainstorm new idea, invite to do business together. That’s how 100% of my business teams and ideas was born. I do not focus on the idea or niche, it’s more about do we have the right team for this business idea and sound plan how to test it with minimal effort. The best entrepreneurs are lazy, I think I am one of those .

At what point do you decide to abandon a project? Can you describe the last 2 times when you did that?

Traction – I stopped my fashion brand because of this, biometric payment system – not the right team to raise capital, gorilla marketing agency – legal problems to get permit to do reverse graffiti (cleaning streets with high pressure equipment from local municipalities), party equipment rental – family business, I just didn’t see it scale and lost enthusiasm. Also I was tired to deliver all the equipment myself of weekends and evenings.

What % of your time do you spend building vs. marketing (here you can list 1-2 examples)?

Building 80% - most of my products are product led which I find more natural and interesting. For Tweetdeleter our initial goal was to build the best product in the niche and get free traffic with SEO, so we switched on first paid campaigns only 5 years from beginning and still today it is heavily dependent on SEO positions and free traffic.

At Roibox we spend most of our time improving our algorithms and making sure that data science is available to any marketing person in a simple format.

How do you maintain all of these projects (in terms of security/framework updates, etc. This is more of a technical question).

I am not a tech founder. So I always have tech people in the cofounding team and this their responsibility. We have had a lot of funny tech issues – API removals, running out of server resources, bans etc. You learn from them though, get stronger and make sure you never repeat them. No one is killed because the service is not working for a few hours.