David Cauthron
Appearances
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
I did the thing you probably would never set out to do is I picked technologies that I had no idea how to implement at the time. So my background was in Java development. I did architecture development for a number of years at TI. But when we come to this, we really looked at what is the customer problem we need to solve and how do we scale it?
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
You always hope to build with scale in mind. I think any startup will tell you that. And we did. But there's always a situation of, OK, what's the minimum thing that we can deliver to sell the product today? And so some areas that we still need to scale on is like analytics. We utilize a DynamoDB database that doesn't provide great analytics without a lot of effort.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
We also went with an AWS Lambda backend that was great for when we were building the product because it's really low cost. You only pay for what you use. But we just recently had to refactor over to Fargate because of the performance really wasn't as good.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
And we were starting to have to turn on provision concurrency, which if you don't know what that is, just means that it keeps the Lambdas online. So then you lose all of the reason for serverless platform. There's that form of scale and we're constantly iterating and improving and adding to that to continue to scale as we continue to grow the company.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
There's also probably the biggest scale, I'm a little concerned about it, is just customer acquisition. If you think about the construction market and generally those individuals are not highly technical people. We are going into that again. We're tackling it differently from you can't just run ads all over the place because they generally aren't on Facebook and Google.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
And so you have to actually go into the markets that they're in. You have to face you have to talk to them where they are and meet them where they are. And so we actually go to a lot of trade shows. That scale is hard, too, because you're constantly traveling. Every next show, you're having to bring in big banners and things to those shows.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
as you bring on the first people into your startup one of the really challenging situations is you're now responsible for their car payments you're now responsible for their mortgage right then you're also saying hey i've got this vision that i want you to believe in and i need you to come and follow me and honestly it's for me it's one of the scariest moments of building that team
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
very nervous when we first hired our first couple people because I wasn't sure when they first looked at the code or they first looked at what we were doing or if they first saw our first customers, are they really going to believe in us? And honestly, that first day was so easing because they were like, this is awesome. Let's go.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
I couldn't have asked for a better team to work with and better people.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
Our first one is we launched or tried to tackle just too much scope right out of the gate. One of the things that we did is we said, you know what, we're going to build optical image recognition from scratch. I had a friend of mine who we hired in for a short period of time.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
who was a fantastic image AI expert, worked for companies like Neato Robotics with their vision program and their vacuum robot, as well as Google. So incredibly knowledgeable. And so we tried to say, let's go ahead and actually build our own ACR application from scratch. And we still have it. It's still in a MVP situation, but it was just too much for us to take on at the time.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
What we really fell into was just trying to take on too much versus focus on getting the minimum product that we can to our customer and having them see it and giving us feedback. And so we inevitably stopped that and stopped that investment and said, we're going to have to change scope a little bit. We'll just utilize what's in the market today.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
There's also a number of rollercoaster rides that we had with our payment processing partners. We had just signed a contract on with one of the partners. I won't say which one they are, but we just signed a contract and said, hey, we're going to be able to now issue credit cards with you. And it wasn't, but two weeks later, we started thinking, hey, you know what?
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
We're going to need treasury as well, which is essentially being able to do ACH transfers and wire transfers throughout the program. And so we went back and said, hey, we'd like to be on this solution as well. Let's go ahead and add that to the contract. We received a message back saying, unfortunately, we're not going to be able to move forward with you, period.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
Whoa, like our world just fell apart. Thankfully, we found an option to get out of that. We were able to move forward. Now we've got a great partner in our payment processing. But it was like your world just comes apart because you're like, we're relying on this. And just a kind of a big mistake putting all of our eggs in that particular basket at the time. But we moved past it and we're good now.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
So one of the things my mentors told me is one of our probably biggest challenges is that we're very product-focused individuals as founders. Really things that we have focused on for the future is just customers. We need to get onboarded. We're shooting for 100 customers by the end of the year. And so we're still just growing the platform, polishing what we've already built.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
We're a little earlier than some of your previous podcasts, but we launched just last month. And so we're just focused on growing the customers as fast as we possibly can. But from a future, from a roadmap perspective, we're looking at what is the ultimate goal that we have as a company.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
And that should be, you can call it a mission statement or your vision, but it's the one sentence, the one fixture that you're going to be constantly focused on. And that focus for us is to enable the movement of money in anything we do. So what does that mean? And so the next set of things we're doing is invoicing and payments and then more card options.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
But that vision is really anywhere money is moving, we want to be in the middle of it. So money's coming in from invoices, money's going out from payments, money's going out from expenses. So we can be at the center of The reason for that is automation. A lot of platforms, you think of something like a QuickBooks and their accounting solution that they have in place is very manual heavy.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
Although they've started adding some automation in place, but it's still very manually heavy, requires a bookkeeper to be in place. And we integrate with QuickBooks, but our vision is not really to replace them.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
It's to add on the automation that we can so that front office person, not sitting there typing into a keyboard and doing data entry, they're calling your customers to follow up on the next deal and be able to sign the next contracts and making more money for you.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
And so that's really our vision is be at that core of the movement of money so that we can automate everything that you're doing from a financial perspective.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
I had a situation as a child, I was never allowed to quit. So even as a young child, it was, you got to get this done. And so it's probably both a superpower as well as a hindrance for me today. My wife doesn't appreciate it necessarily all the time because when I'm focused on something and in that flow state, as you may call it, I don't let it go.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
And so I'll work into the night late to finalize something. But I was taught that from an early age, you just never quit. And I think you have to have that as a startup. You can't quit because the ones that don't make it are the ones that quit ultimately. And this is one of the hardest things you're going to do.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
You're told every single day you suck from every investor that you meet and you got to meet a hundred of them. And they're all going, yeah, you're just not good enough yet. And so you just never quit. The second thing, and really is a longtime mentor of mine and our advisor at OutPave, his name is Gershamin Boeja. He was the previous CIO of Texas Instruments.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
He's often doing some pretty amazing things, but he has constantly challenged me to think differently. One of the stories I love to tell of his is we were going to go meet with him and we had to deliver a particular product. And he was asking us when this particular feature of this product was going to be delivered. And I said, Gershom, I've got great news for you. We just completed that today.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
And his response was, but why didn't you complete the second and the third feature by today as well? And I'm like, wait a minute. You asked me to complete this on Friday of this week, but you're now raising the bar to Monday. Wait a minute. I didn't even have to have that last feature done. Now I have to have all three. He's always raising the bar. You never make it to the finish line.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
But the way that you can bring that into the startup world is you're really never done. There's never a finish line. This company's never finished, right? You're always raising the bar. You're always getting a little bit better every day.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
And if you continue to focus on that versus, oh, there's a finish line and that's what I need to get to, you're going to look back a year from now, two years from now, three years from now and go, wow, look at all of I've accomplished by just getting, again, a little bit better every single day.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
First thing is really test your idea on a napkin before you test it in code. You need to be talking to customers first. We talked a little bit about it earlier, but you really don't dive in as a product person or as a developer, an architect, and just create the product without understanding the problem and really thinking outside in.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
I think that's a trap that a lot of us just fall into is we don't think properly. about those customers and the outside in perspective of what you're going to go build. If you start with the napkin test, would you use this? Is this something you really need? Do you see this problem in your industry?
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
I think that'll help you to reduce actually the cost of your build because overall you can build something that your customers need right from the beginning versus iterating on it later. And it's a lot cheaper to do at the beginning. I mentioned it earlier, but you're going to be told you suck a hundred times.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
And one of the quotes that we utilize at OutPave is focus on what you can control versus what you can't. What you have versus what you don't and where you're going versus where you were. And the idea behind that is just the factor. You can't control things, your investors. Like if somebody's not willing to invest in you, move on, go to the next one.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
If they tell you you suck, use it as fuel to get better, right? That is your fuel to say, you know what? I'm going to come back and prove you wrong. Oh, your product's not going to work. I'm going to come back and prove you wrong. It's going to work. A lot of times is you can look at every other startup and go, man, they have a billion dollar investment or a hundred million dollars of investment.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
We don't have that. What do you have? What are your strengths? What can you use to accelerate? And then change that focus and change your perspective to those things. That'll engage you and make you be able to deliver something really challenging that most people can't. And then the last one is a lot of people won't take this leap. They don't want to start a startup because it's hard.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
And it's, I'm going to leave my job making whatever six figures a year and go, Oh, I'm going to start a startup and make nothing. Yes. But ask yourself, ask your 80 year old self. If you looked back and you said, you know what? I should have made that decision. If you think that person at your 80 year old self would say that, You should be doing it. You know what? You'll figure it out.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
We are a construction residential services, financial and spend management company. We focus on expense management today, but adding more services around finances throughout this year. What we're trying to do is really help small, medium businesses manage their finances. And the construction and residential services sector is a market that really hasn't had disruption in this case.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
And we needed to pick technologies that would do both. Java will scale, but it's generally very single node scaling, depending on how you architect it. And we really are looking at something that was a newer platform, easier to develop on, and we could easily hire into. My name is David Cothran. I am CTO and co-founder at OutPave.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
A lot of them are still doing very manual accounting, if not doing receipts and shoe boxes. is very focused on trying to help those customers automate. And we really started our company from a point of trying to help our customers solve a problem. The challenges that they have every day with even just technology to begin with and looking for that kind of help.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
One of my best friends from childhood called me and he was in an entrepreneurship program at SAP Concur. And he was in a program trying to lead this company as an SAP product to create it for small and medium businesses there. Now the product has changed quite a bit since that point. We redesigned everything, but he started it there from a factor of just a company within SAP.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
He was in a division of 1,000 people, 250 teams, and there was a promise of if he won that, he would get roughly $3 million to start the business as a subsidiary of SAP. He was one of the teams that got to the final stage and essentially won, but they shut the entire program down, including all the companies that had previously run and pulled the funding.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
About that point, he calls me and he says, hey, I'd like to start a company and I need help with a head of engineering. And are you available? Would you like no money and to actually give us some money to start the company? And I said, yes, that's exactly what I want to go do. I think of it almost as something as if I was 80 years old and I looked back, would I have made the same decision?
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
And the answer is absolutely. I would not want to miss this opportunity, especially working with a friend of mine. And we've had fun since.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
Like several of your recent and previous podcasts, we scoped probably a little too much for MVP. It took us about nine months, which is not too bad, but we tried to launch both web and mobile at the same time. And for probably six of those months, I was still working at my previous company. Long nights and weekends to get there.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
We started with an AWS platform on Mern, which is Mongo Express React to Node.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
We actually switched over to Dern, and I'm still questioning, which is just we added DynamoDB instead of MongoDB and a little bit of TypeScript and focused really just on trying to get a product out that our customers could utilize from day one to actually solve at least a part of the problem, being able to issue cards, credit cards to the customers for expenses.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
automate those expenses directly in the application, and then manage those by categorizing them as well as limiting what you can spend on. So it's really changing the way that you think about expense management.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
I did the thing you probably would never set out to do is I picked technologies that I had no idea how to implement at the time. So my background was in Java development. I did architecture development for a number of years at TI. But when we come to this, we really looked at what is the customer problem we need to solve and how do we scale it?
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
And we needed to pick technologies that would do both. Java will scale, but it's generally very single node scaling, depending on how you architect it. And we really were looking at something that was a newer platform, easier to develop on, and we could easily hire into. And so that's why we went with an AWS platform with Node and Express and React.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
It also gave us the latest and greatest from just building that front-end technology to make it easy for our customers to utilize. And so one of the things that we really focus on at the company is simplification and wanted some technologies behind that to make it easy.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
One of the focuses that we have at Outpave is outside-in thinking. And I define this a little bit as kind of the fish situation of how to win friends and influence people, if you've read that book. There's a story in that book that talks about do you catch fish with ice cream sundaes or do you catch fish with worms? And you don't like to eat worms. You like to eat ice cream sundaes.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
And one challenge that a lot of companies get into is they create ice cream sundaes. They create things that they want to see in a product. And what we really focused on was we wanted to create a product for our customers. Every single day we're trying to think about from an outside in. So where we started and how we started with our roadmap is actually just meeting with customers.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
We sat down with pool companies, we sat down with turf companies, lawn companies, And we utilize our investors, but also our contacts, my family. And we just found everybody we could talk to that was in the industry and talked about what problem are you having and what would you like to see in the product?
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
And then even from when we're looking at the product and how we build it, we're thinking, okay, how would a customer think about this feature? How would they use it? Would they be confused by it? And one of the things that we decided to do in the roadmap and that simplification is even use simplified language.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
If you look at accounting software, generally you've got credits and debits and all of these things that you talk about. But when you talk to construction guys, they're not going to know that language. So even utilizing simplified language that they would know, for example, one of our menu items is get paid. Everybody's going to understand that.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
We really try to focus on that simplification of the language of the product and make it easy to use.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
First off, obviously, Zach and myself have been friends. We started together. And one of the things that you hear a lot, especially in startup, is don't work with your friends. But actually, it's been one of the best things that I would say has happened because we grew apart from each other and we weren't able to work that closely together for a while.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
And this has really helped us just even have a lot more fun, actually, and really enjoy hanging out with each other. But from the team that we hired, we're really focused on building a team that had passion over capability. That's a weird statement to say, but I care more that you come in with the right mindset, that you come in with a passion for what we're doing,
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
and the ability to go build or learn or do anything that we need you to do versus I want the right person who has the right skill set and exactly what they need to go do. So one of the things we did is I hired our software engineering manager with someone who worked for me in the past. He didn't have the right skill sets. He wasn't a MIRN expert.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
But he came in going, you know what, I'll go learn it. I don't mind. Let's go figure this thing out. And then we started hiring developers in the same sense. We did put the rec out saying we want someone who knew React or Node. And we did get those individuals. But for another example of this is the individual who leads our mobile platform now didn't start there.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
We said, you know what, go learn React Native, which is where we built the mobile platform. But what we really saw in her was, and in the rest of the team, is just the ability to want to learn a passion for what we're doing, a belief in what we're doing, and wanting to just make the vision that we were bringing to the table happen.
Code Story
S9 E28: David Cauthron, Outpave
And that's where we just really looked to hire the team and how we built it.