Hey, there, Freedom Fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I'm the founder of Mixergy, where I interview

entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses for an audience of entrepreneurs who are just listening in and picking up some good ideas for their own companies. John Doherty is someone who I interviewed a while back and he and I have stayed in touch because I've been impressed with what he did with Credo. He created what to me was a marketplace of agencies. If you need to hire an agency to do your SEO work. You could either ask all friends, or you can go to Credo and they'll help you find the right one. Or if you need to find,

I don't know, someone to do your digital ad buying, you can look around, ask your friends, or you can go to them, and you know they're going to have a vetted agency for you, and they're going to do a little bit of a matchmaking service. That's what Credo was. I watched the thing

grow. I did an interview about how it launched, and today's here to talk about how he sold it,

and how he has now been running this new business, Editor Ninja, which is a service that will basically give you editors on demand. If you're writing content, you turn your content over to them and make them part of your workflow and they make sure the thing looks good. I've used them. I've been a customer. All right. And we can talk about this interview. Thanks to my sponsor, Gusto. If you are like me, if you are like John, if you need somebody to, if you need a service that will handle your payroll and benefits right, go check out gusto.com slash mixergy. But first, John, congratulations on the sale. He sold the business. Thank you, Andrew.

Thank you.

Yes. Yes. It was quite the ride. I'm happy to be back. Thanks for having me back. I always appreciate it. John, I saw you here in Austin. I didn't realize that you had sold the business at the time. You were kind of like on an almost sold, almost not. was there ever a moment where you looked and you said, all right, I did it. I crossed the finish liner. Was it always a

slow exit from this thing that you had created? Yeah. So I think when I saw you in Austin, we

hadn't inked the deal yet. So I was like not, I may have mentioned it to you. I'm not, I don't remember,

but we were like super close to it. I think it closed a few weeks later. That moment of like

got it across the line happened. I mean, like the, so the day after we closed the deal in like

into September 2020, which like ironically enough was seven years to the day

of me getting laid off from zillow um so like you know uh in the bible it's a it's a number of

completion and so it's just like ironic and hilarious to me on that it was seven years to the day

um but we closed it at like 3 p.m on a Wednesday and I had and I had an 8 a flight to Mexico City the next day with my wife. And I was going to a conference in Cabo. And like, we landed in, we inked the deal next day my wife and I landed in Mexico City. And I looked at my bank account. The money had hit. And like, dude, that whole next like four or five days, I was just like out of my body, like just did not feel like me just a huge like just boulder lifted off my shoulders, you know? And so yeah, I just kind of like, I kind of floated through life for the next couple of months, to be honest with you. But like felt just out of my body and my wife looked at me at one point. I think it was like that Saturday and was like, this is the most relaxed I've ever seen you since we've been together. And it had been almost 10 years at that point. So I was like, okay, I made the right choice. So that definitely happened. How much did you see in your bank account? I can't talk about that. Unfortunately, I can't talk about that. More than a million dollars? Not more than a million dollars. No, no. But it was enough for us to feel comfortable for a while with me getting a new thing off the ground. And so the thing that I wondered was, why a new thing? Why not just stay in this business? This business was growing. It was

produced. Was it growing actually? I assumed it was. It wasn't actually. It had tapped out.

You know, I started the business. I first started it Crito in 2013 as a side project when I was

working for an agency in New York City. It was before I went in house. And yeah, and so basically just short answer is over the 10 years that I ran it,

nine and a half years I ran it, the economics changed.

So many people came up, Al Tormozzi wrote his book about offers and all these people

came up offering an insane number of leads and X number of days

like sort of thing the pandemic happened marketing got a lot more expensive like it just the economics

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