Jesse Schoberg has an enviable life as a founder working from Thailand. He enjoys a great lifestyle at a fraction of the price back in the US. I chatted to him about growing his DropInBlog business into a SaaS success story.
Why did you become a founder?
My brain doesn’t really work any other way. I was a lifelong entrepreneur selling anything I could get my hands on. When I was in high school I sold jean samples out of my trunk, thighmasters on ebay, and a variety of other arbitrages. Once I discovered coding and websites I knew that was the life I would chase.
Can you tell us what you’ve achieved so far as a founder?
I was running a dev agency for quite a few years. During that time I learned a lot about a lot. We did wholesale development for other agencies because I became skilled at finding top global talent — something most traditional agencies can’t seem to grasp. We did work for small companies all the way up to tier 1 stuff like Nickelodeon.
We had a solid team and were doing good work, but it was clear agency life did not scale well. Once we got in the $200,000 revenue range that became quite apparent. During this time we decided we needed to pivot to product.
Between 2015 and 2018, we launched and ran a variety of websites. We had a lead gen site for franchises, form processing SaaS, and DropInBlog. Then in 2019 DropInBlog got traction and it was clear that it was going to be “the one”. We sold the lead gen site to our top lead buyer for around $100,000 and the form SaaS for another $100,000.
With $200,000 in the bank we had some runway and it was all-in on DropInBlog.
What problem does DropInBlog solve?
You want to add a blog to any site not built in WordPress. That could be custom coded, or any no-code builder like Shopify, Framer, or Thinkific. The magic is it works inside the existing template, so you don’t have to create a custom theme or host on a subdomain.