Joey Kissimmee says that he’s not techy, but he has created iPhone apps, SaaS products, WordPress themes, and is now working on WordPress plugins.
He says that he has always been a hard worker. His first job was washing dishes in a beat up old sandwich shop in Chicago when he was twelve. In 2000, he started working at Walmart and doing a little business online to make some extra money to have fun with his wife and kids. “At first,” he says, “it was just selling junk on eBay.”
But he found some mentors, he listened, he learned, and he implemented the things he learned. He created a few tools that he couldn’t find and then turned these tools into products. Somewhere around 2008 or 2009, he realized he was making some pretty good money from his online business and decided to take it seriously. By early 2010, he was able to retire from his job at Walmart to work his online business full-time.
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Key Segments

[03:00] Joey is not a developer, so how did he get into the SaaS world? He says he’s not techy. Joey wasn’t even sure what SaaS meant until long after he was creating SaaS products.
[03:55] He didn’t set out to become an entrepreneur; he just wanted to sell some junk on eBay.
[04:25] When he first started to get involved with marketing, his mentors were creating little tools to perform tasks.
[05:05] He started creating iPhone apps in 2011, and that’s where he really learned to hire people to create things.
[06:25] Anything he had to do repeatedly, he would pay someone to automate for him. He systematized his processes and created tools for himself.
[07:00] In about 2010 a buddy in the affiliate marketing world told him: “Dude, you could sell this stuff.”
[07:40] He was a good listener, and he took action. He just implemented what worked. He created TubeSlicer.com as a tool to do the five things he knew how to do with Photoshop for creating YouTube thumbnails and then turned this into a product. He did the same thing to create Image Ad Creator a product to create images for split testing Facebook ads.
[09:15] Every product he created was to solve his own problems, and then he figured out a way to turn it into a viable product. He created Tube Slicer, Image Ad Creator, TimelineSlicer, and Podcast Artwork Slicer out of his own needs. Appendipity, his premium WordPress theme, was created the same way and turned into a huge success.
[10:00] “I don’t care who says what, outsourcing is an art form.” When you’re outsourcing you don’t have to know coding, you have to know the lingo.
[11:30] Rule #1: Know how you want to use the product. The coder doesn’t really care about or understand the Ux (user experience). Your problems aren’t unique. There’s a good chance that a dozen other people have the same problem; so if you can figure out how to solve it for yourself, you just solved it for a dozen other people.
[12:14] Rule #2: Know the lingo.
[13:00] To communicate Ux to the designer for his WordPress designers he draws on a legal pad and then scans it and sends it to them. For iPhone apps, he used Balsamiq to do wireframes.
14:30 Once it’s working the way you want it to work, fiddle around with the look of it. Once the mock-up’s done and you’ve got a working prototype, send it to the designer.
[16:00] His go-to place for designers was oDesk. He also used Freelancer and eLance. (Note: oDesk and eLance merged in 2015 and formed Upwork.)
[16:40] You could get hosed in many ways. The developer and the designer could overcharge you. People could also steal your ideas. One way Joey protected himself was not to give too much information on the job posting.
[17:00] Joey gives an example of how he does a job posting and then explains his filtering process for hiring.
[18:50] Once he has filtered out the best candidates, he shares more detail privately with them. If he has a good feeling about an individual, he does a live Skyp