Julian: Hey everyone. Thank you so much for joining the Behind Company Lines podcast. Today we have Chelsey Roney co-founder and CEO of Proxi. Proxi is powering the future of personalized navigation, providing the easiest software anywhere to build, crowdsource, and share interactive maps for brands, bloggers.

Coworkers and communities. Chelsey, thank you so much for being on the show. I'm so excited to chat with you. And as we were chatting before the show, I'm so fascinated with no code platforms and getting into that whole revolution of where the world, I think personally is going to enable faster not only building of companies, but features and really just creating an efficient process around, you know, building product.

But before we get into all that good stuff, what were you doing before you started Proxi?

Chelsey: Yeah. Thanks for having me on Julian. So excited to be here. So before Proxi, I actually owned a local services business in the Seattle area and I had owned that for a couple of years and grown it fairly sizably in that time and then sold it to work on Proxi full-time.

But prior to that I had owned a, or developed a bootstrap SaaS company. Yeah. Uh, That addressed an niche in the, OR niche in the university space and. that was purchased by a private equity firm, and that led me down the line of knowing that you could build and sell businesses. And yeah, so at this point I've done a bootstrapped business, a debt back business, and a venture backed business.

And it's all been a wild ride. But lots of fun. And then I have a stint in corporate America as well. in at Microsoft and at Boeing. And so yeah, I feel like I've kind of touched quite a few worlds , but yeah, business building is. Early stage is my bread and butter and I love it and I love that there's no thrill, like starting a business.

Julian: Yeah. Man, it's so fascinating to think about, you know, your journey and was that, you know, university where you started working with SaaS and then you worked with services and then now back to, you know, SaaS platform or how would you describe product? This is SaaS platform as well.  

Chelsey: It's not the, it's not, yeah, it's a free for everyone right now. Or unless you have a very large team, but yes, . Yeah. Easy for you.

Julian: Yeah. What was it like just in, in things, thinking about, you know, for early founders, you know, what advice would you give them going through the first kind of motions of building a company and going through that learning curve?

How do you tackle that learning curve? And one thing in particular that, that really fascinates me is, you know, things always move at such an expedited pace. And organiz. The activities day to day is, and I think one of the biggest challenges a lot of founders face, so I'm not sure if you have any strategies for what or what, any learnings from what you learned early on to what you take and carry over now to, to this company.

Chelsey: Yeah. Wow. That's yeah, so I think in terms of like, advice to founders who are just getting started is just take action every day, all the time, even if you're not. Right. Just deciding on the next Right. You know, the next best thing to do in doing it. Yeah. And a lot of times it's an educated guess and really you don't have a lot of time to think or analyze things.

Yeah. Too much. And so just taking that next right step is, has been my. What I've done and it has worked. And you know, a lot of times, like you make the wrong choice, but at least you're moving forward and then you know, for the next time that you've made the wrong choice. So it's no big, as long as you're learning, that's the valuable thing.

And then I think in terms of like day to day-to-day, and tracking for every business, I've always had a priority list for every different. aspect of the business. So like, yeah. Accounting, marketing, growth, et cetera, product. And every day I try to just choose the activity that has the most roi.

Yeah. And unlike a lot of people, I don't like check my inbox all the time. I don't respond to te, you know, like, yeah, I'm a little bit hard to get ahold of sometimes, but that means. Or that's because I'm always trying to focus my time on the next biggest roi, you know, item that has roi and I'm not, I try not to get lost.

I mean, it happens. I try not to get lost in the. minutia of, yeah, because you could paper push all day long.  

Julian: Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. Thinking about your past two companies, obviously we want to get into Proxi you know, in, in a moment here. But going through the different acquisitions, the different types of acquisitions that you've gone through.

With your previous companies what were those conversations like leading into the, and when you're a founder, say with a few options I'm sure you had in, in front of you, how do you kind of decide what, who to partner with and who to move forward with when you're going through the different potential offers that you're receiving And in navigating those relationships there, how do you know who the best option is?

Not even just from a money standpoint, but I'm sure there's other things you considered along the way.  

Chelsey: Well, in terms of the first two exits, the first exit was a, again, it was a SaaS business and a private equity firm approached us with a price, and I was a little bit inexperienced in this. , and I thought I was, I just said, wow, like I can sell a business and this seems like a really great number.

Like, take it. Yeah. Like you can have it. And so they, you know that, I think that was a really unique experience because they didn't come in looking to do a whole lot of due diligence. They had already done a lot of research before they reached out to us. They had talked to our customers. They already had done all of this legwork.

And so when they got to us, they knew, they were sure of their decision. And I think. Fairly rare actually. Yeah. And so they approached us, you know, first meeting like a letter of intent, like it, it happened really fast. I it was crazy. And so we didn't have a whole lot of thinking to do there. And yeah, it was a, you know, a good price.

And we just let it go. And then with the second business, it was a services business. And I actually chose people. Who had been working with me, I chose several of them and , I kind of shopped it around and I said like, this is the price I'm looking to sell for. Is this something you want to take on this because you'll have to go get a.

alone too. You know, like, can you handle that? Like, can, do you feel like you can grow the business? We've been working together for a long time, so, , I guess I wasn't approached there. I went out and approached other people who I thought would be good stewards of my customers and the business itself, and then, you know, gave people like a price that I was looking.

And then with venture capital, I guess we haven't, obviously we're not selling Proxi proxies, you know, still growing and really amazing , but in terms of like choosing who to work with and taking money to run the business. . You know, we always look for investors who share the same long term vision as us for the product and for our users, and then also people that we genuinely enjoy being around.

Because you do have so much exposure to those investors and you work with them through really important decisions. So, I think it's really important that you. for us, it has been really important to get along with the people we work with.  

Julian: Yeah. What was the inspiration behind Proxi? Just, you know, coming from the background you had, it was a service business you were selling before you were in a SaaS company, but what in particular about, you know, it's what kind of geospatial mapping tech technology.

Chelsey: I am good friends with my co-founder and we've been friends for about a decade since our time in undergrad, and we both live in the Seattle area and she was in her local Facebook group. It was Proxi started in for Halloween 2020, and that was the first Halloween of the pandemic. And parents obviously wanted to give their kids a really fun like holiday experience, but parents were worried about their kids coming in contact with Covid.

We didn't know a whole lot about it. . And so this parent had started a mess or a, like a post in the group and it said, if you are doing covid safe candy delivery, like leaving a bucket outside or doing a candy shoot, then leave your address in the comments. . And so hundreds of people were leaving their addresses here.

and my co-founder actually has experienced building maps for one of the US intelligence agencies. That was her initial job out of university. And so when she saw this, she knew that like that's, you know, looking at a list of addresses is not really a usable format for humans because yeah, , you have to understand your proximity to those addresses.

And so what were you gonna do? Like type in the first address and. You go to it and then you type in the second, but the third and fourth are closer to the first. And the second was, you know, like, how's that actually usable? And so she actually turns this post into a map and allows people to crowdsource it.

By stringing different tools together. And it was a really manual process. And since we're good friends and I've built businesses, she called me up and she's like, this seems so strange. There's nothing on the marketplace for this. Yeah. And for collaborative maps is what I mean. Yeah. . And so we do a lot of research and we figure out that there is truly no great tool for collaborative mapping online.

And yeah, that was how we got started. We built that MVP and we got it out into the world. And then people started asking us for more features. And a lot of the people who found us were actually not individuals. They were businesses or organizations. And they were looking to get out information to their customers on, you know, where to go and what to do in a local area.

Yeah. And so we started developing features for them, like brand, you know, you can include your logo, you can brand the map, you can customize it in any way. You can get analytics on map, viewership and con Yeah. Conversion. And then you can, of course, collaborate on the map if you choose to do that with your community.

It's just been growing ever since. So our current mission is to like make the best tool for casual cartographers on the internet. And that can be anyone from an individual to like a hotel. Yeah. To like a chamber of commerce or what a nonprofit, whoever wants to come and make a map can. And then we'll transition to a place where people come to go and figure out where to go and what to.

Because Yelp in Google is kind of a bad experience at this point.  

Julian: Yeah, no it's so fascinating and. You describing the product. I mean, it blows my mind because it really puts the map in the user's pocket now to be able to not only customize, but utilize to the highest ability. I can't tell you how many times I'm frustrated with adding stops on Google Maps just to make sure I'm, you know, going to the right places and in the right order and making it extremely efficient during that process.

But also sharing that with somebody else who's maybe. A caravan, if you're going with a team of people to totally locations. What do you think like in, in terms of the capability for people to not only utilize this technology but then become more, will the maps get more sophisticated because there's more engagement?

What are some of the, I guess, effects of having kind of a crowdsourced model to be able to, you know, collect information and utilize it in a more proactive and I guess almost efficient, productive way?

Chelsey: Let's see. I have a lot of thoughts on that. I think, you know, we've added a lot of features to help support some of these experiences that you just mentioned, like point, numbering is a new one that we just added so people can no, you know, order the points however they wish. , you know, custom categories, custom filtering also that you can more easily navigate the world using a map that you've created.

Yeah. But I think a lot of your question really refers to the fact that other people are making really exciting or putting really great content about local places out on Proxi. And so like, how do others find that information? that someone else has created. Yeah. And so that's kind of where we're going next is like making it really easy to use like Discover platform.

Like think of Pinterest for example. Like when you go onto Pinterest and you scroll through, at least for me, I'm like, how are you in my brain? Like this is exactly what I want to see. And so that's how we plan to be as well. Like you. Maybe you don't have kids yet, and so when you land in Proxi and you're looking for a dinner spot and maybe, you know, surfacing things that are more appropriate for your lifestyle.

And then for me, I have two little toddlers, like, you know, it's surfacing things that are appropriate for my current lifestyle. And so it's going to be like a better way to discover yeah. What to do with.  

Julian: If that makes, yeah. What describe like the process about building no-code and you don't have to get too technical here, but I'm so fascinated into when you think about no-code, , obviously it's, you know, little interaction with the backend technology, but, you know, quick interaction to be able to get whatever you're working towards up and running, you know, as soon as possible.

What goes into the mechanics of building them? Is there existing technology out there? Is it kind of building a layer and then in, in plugging in a bunch of APIs underneath and then maybe making it interactive? What goes into making like an efficient no-code platform? .  

Chelsey: So I wouldn't call my expert on myself, an expert on no code.

In general, I will preface that, but I will say that what we set out to do as Proxi is transform the way that maps can be created before Proxi. One of the only options online was Google My Maps for someone who was not experienced in either being a, develop a software developer. Yeah. . Basically what I'm referring to is taking like Google Maps APIs or Mapbox APIs and creating custom maps out of that.

Yeah. Or using advanced GIS tools, which oftentimes you need to literally have a degree in understanding some of these tools. And so those were the two ways that people were. You know, usable maps, GIS tools, and yeah, you know, hiring developers. And so what we wanted to do for people was give them a no code, no non-technical way to build.

A really great solution for their customers and or just their families and friends. And so when you land on Proxi, you just go into like a map interface and we walk you through how to add to this map and make a really custom, beautiful. , you know, information set that you can then embed on your website?

You can, yeah. With just a simple copy and paste, you can, you know, get it out to your family, friends, followers with a a link or QR code. So basically the no code comes in and like we're making it so that you don't need any technical knowledge to produce a, be an exceptional looking output of like content on.

Julian: Yeah, it's incredible to think about. You know, in terms of the strategy a about getting it in front of people, I'm sure was the biggest, you know, hurdle, first , let's get as many users as possible onto it. Yeah. And start learning and iterating. But then from there, where do you go? Where do you think about in terms of.

You know, you have this free model, you said for people who want to use, interact with it. And then you have, if you have a huge team and you're using it, obviously you have to, you know, charge for, you know, upleveling the capacity. But you know, from a business standpoint and a strategy standpoint where does it go from here in terms of having this knowledge and then now getting it out to where you can kind of monetize on features.

Okay. Or Yeah, just kind of curious on where you go from here.  

Chelsey: Yeah. So, our main monetization strategy will eventually be around advertising, but we have a really different take on how we plan to build out our advertising, you know, capabilities and platform. Yeah. And, You know, we don't want it to match the experience of Google and Yelp or you, as a consumer, land an app and you search and everything that's returned to you is like, who paid the most?

Yeah. . And that's not what we need. That's not what we wanna see. That's not what we want to have happen. And so our whole, you know, shtick around advertising is that people will own, or businesses will only be able to advertise should they. placed on a map by someone in the first place. . And so we have a whole strategy on how we're going to tackle that.

But really it should result in a more trusted map experience Yeah. Or discovery experience for the consumer, because they'll know that, you know, random places aren't just appearing on their map like Yelp and just to elaborate a little bit more for business builders out there.

You know, really where we're excited about in the advertising space and marketing space is helping businesses and organizations understand how their viewers are moving down the marketing funnel. So, , we can do that because our maps create awareness and we can ta you know, ex Yeah. Provide analytics about viewership and then we can furthermore, you know, delve into consideration and conversion analytics as well with all of our map makers.

And that's like a huge draw for people is understanding how. viewers convert on their recommendations. So, yeah. That, that's also, as you can imagine, a huge play in terms of revenue.  

Julian: Yeah, no, it it's fascinating to also just the intelligence behind how people are interacting with your business you know, getting led to their helps you kind of reinvest in, in, you know, strategies that put more eyeballs on, on, you know, what you're doing and what you're servicing or what you're selling right.

How do you know, what was your go-to-market strategy? Obviously it sounded like the antithesis or the catalyst was you had this Facebook group getting people together, but making sure it was extremely. Comprehensive. I'm like, where you should go for, you know, the Halloween event in particular.

But outside of that, were you advertising on Facebook? Were you getting people involved? Was it word of mouth? How did you go about that process to actually, you know, get more and more users onto the platform using it and testing it and playing with them?  

Chelsey: Yeah, so I'll tell you about our top four channels are, organic search. So we work really hard on seo, you know, friendly content. And that's actually just now starting to pay off for us. But we have a really, anyway, we have a whole strategy around this. And then we have paid search naturally and then organic social and paid social as well as being in new. And the reason why we find newsletters to be such a winning channel for us is that people are on desktop.

And designing maps is the best done with a bigger screen, although you can do it on mobile. and a lot of times these mapping, you know, references reach people while they're at work Yeah. In reading their newsletters. And so they're already in the mindset of like, oh, how can I use this for my job? Or like, you know, how can I use this to visualize data or whatever the case may be. And so that's been really effective. Channel for us.  

Julian: That's amazing. Tell us a little bit about the traction. How many people are, do you see using Proxi day to day or month over month? And what's the growth look like and what are you excited about in terms of rolling out into the next year?  

Chelsey: Yeah, so we've been growing at a really nice pace. I guess since we officially went full-time last January. We are traction is somewhere north of. I don't know how much I wanna share about exact numbers, but over a thousand, I'll just say like over a thousand maps. Good maps created just this month and it's been kind of exponentially rising.

And then we have several thousand creators that return month over month to republish their maps and look at their maps again and share them. . And then as far as viewership in the mid hundreds of thousands in terms of viewership every month, and that's just on map creators audiences like they publish the maps to their audiences, and that's the viewership.

So we're not even. touching the capability of like us publishing these maps, which is kind of exciting. And then in terms of clicks, also in the hundreds of thousands which is really neat because people who actually view these maps they're about niche content, however you say that.

And they're really interested in clicking and viewing and they're really high intent view. So, yeah, it's been really fun and we're just continuing to grow. So every month it just kind of, yeah.  

Julian: Yeah. What are some of the biggest risks that Proxi faces today?

Chelsey: I think you know, I think I feel really positive about the take that we have on our product. , obviously competitors in the space and people who are trying to catch us and which is fun and exciting. That's the whole thrill building business and we're having a great time. But yeah. I think we have a really unique take, which is exciting.

I think a big risk is you know, you know, I don't, we have such a unique vision on where we're going. It's like hard to explain like the big break, like the risks are that other people, other businesses just copycat what we're doing and have a different audience size built in. And so that, that is a risk. But yeah, it's yeah, we're working hard on developing something totally new, so, yeah. we'll see what the risks are here Coming up. I think .  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. If everything goes well, what's the long term vision for Proxi?  

Chelsey: We wanna be the place that people choose to open on their phones, browser, desktop, wherever, to figure out where to go and what to do. So ideally people would be opening Proxi once, twice a day to make those decisions and if we had it our way, that's the big vision. So, yeah. Yeah. That's what we're aiming toward.  

Julian: I love that. I love that. Is there anything that you know, as a founder, we're maybe not so good at, you know, leading in that you're growing or continuing to be better at?

Chelsey: I'm working on two things personally one of which is getting better at public speaking and. being really concise with how I speak, and that's probably true. Isn't everyone working on that? Yeah. , but . Anyway, so that's one of my personal goals is just being a really great speaker. And then the other thing I am working on is, I don't know how to say this without insulting myself too much, but being more, more like detailed oriented, if that makes sense.

Yeah. I tend. Really tr because I'm a high performer and I'm sure a lot of your listeners are like, I just expect that other people are high performers and I expect that other people do the right thing and will surface risks. And will prevent risks and you know, dot their eyes and cross their Ts.

And when you're building out a team, , sometimes you need to be a little bit more vigilant about , what, how other people are representing your business or how they're taking action in their roles. And so I'm working on good ways to like, , you know, be a leader and monitor yeah. Monitor the business in everyone's different outputs. So, yeah.  

Julian: Yeah. No it's, so, it's like, you know, that's where I think the culture element comes in. It's like creating the expectation towards not only the vision of the company, but. How to perform, how to work, and how to be, how to communicate with you know, your coworkers. And is your team fully remote?

I know your co-founder lives in Seattle, but is your team fully dispersed right now?  

Chelsey: So we have one other full-time person in Seattle and then we, and so we have an office, the three of us, and we also had an intern and who's kind of off and on, but she comes into the office sometimes. Yeah. And then we have our director of engineering and our third co-founder in New York City.

And then we have two part-time devs who live in different parts of the world and a whole slew of contractors, maybe seven to. , yeah. Who are dispersed and doing different functions for us. So we do a lot of virtual work but we also do some in person like visioning, brainstorming. Yeah. And it's definitely important for me and my, you know, one of my co-founders to be in, in person.

Julian: Yeah. How do you maintain a strong, you know, culture or communication with the dis, with the dispersed team? Obviously I think the people in the office are easier to connect to or not Easier to connect to. Yeah. Easier to be in front of and kind of foster that relationship a little bit more cohesively.

Before fully remote team, what are some ways that you're just continuing to maintain a song.  

Chelsey: Yeah, that's a really good question. And one, we do that in two ways. I. One way is via discord and or Slack or whatever channel, and we talk all day long. We, even the person, people in the office talk mostly in our public channels on Discord about different issues.

So we talk about every different piece of, you know, analytics. We talk about marketing, we talk about every aspect of the business. In Discord. Yeah. In front of everyone. And so everyone chimes in and we have really active. participation on Discord because of this. And then the other thing I think is being pretty firm about, you're expected to be at the team meeting.

And so Yeah, virtually, at least, and with video on. Just for this one meeting. It's not like we're trying to like break people's back, so, right. But like, you know, we do expect attendance there with video and I think that really helps build team morale because we spend like five or 10 minutes just catching up with each other and and then we go into like updates and everyone, the other thing, we're at such a small size that everyone has to kind of give an update in the team meeting.

It's not like there's a representative for an entire team, so you're. Yeah. We're lucky enough that we get to hear from every person at this stage, and so that helps foster like engagement as well. Yeah.  

Julian: Yeah. If you weren't working on Proxi, what would you be doing?  

Chelsey: Building another business. Yeah.  

Julian: Awesome I love that. I love that. I always like to ask this next question as for my audience research purposes, but also selfishly so I can get some more you know, gems of knowledge from other founders. But whether it was early in your career or now, what books or people have influenced you the most?

Chelsey: Okay, let's see. That's a really good question. I think I'm looking at the name of a book real quick. I wanna make sure I have it right. . Okay. Crucial Conversations has to be my favorite book. It just gives like such chan, it's super short, takes like a couple hours to read and it gives you such tangible tactics to having great conversations with people.

And ever since reading. . I think like I've just been able to even have really, you know, like if I need to let someone go or whatever, this book has totally helped take away a lot of that fear of having really hard conversations, which is great. And then I think honestly, the book that transformed my thinking the most, , that was probably four hour work week.

But I know that's such like a basic answer. But you know, when you're a young kid reading this Yeah. And you're kind of in corporate America, it's like, what? My brain is on fire. I can build a business, I can, you know Yeah. Make my life exactly what I wanted to be. And even though I've never come close to working four hours in a week, How cool is it to have that like, revolutionary Yeah.

Process going on. But yeah, and I do read quite a bit and listen to a lot of podcasts. My fav, one of my favorites is my First Million. Yeah. Or how I built this. I love Jenna Kutcher's podcast for marketing. It's.  

Julian: Yeah. Always trying to be learning. Yeah. I love that and I love asking that question also cuz I think discusses kind of the how you kind of develop your thoughts, you know, like the four hour work week, you know, you probably read that early in a time and it really instilled that it.

I guess that maybe future that you might have. Obviously you seem like the type that would never just wanna work four hours unless you're working four hours on one thing and then another. But in terms of you know, how it instills those values in that type of structure, it's really cool to see.

and I know we're at the close to the end of the show, and I would love to chat so much more about no-code platforms in the future and also building, especially with your experience. But we do have to end. And I always like to ask my guests and give them time to give us your plugs. Let us know where we can find you.

If we're wanting to build a map, what are your what are your websites? What are your LinkedIns, what are your Twitters? Where can we get.

Chelsey: Yeah, so go ahead, find, we'd love to have you on Proxi. Anyone can create a map. It's free. You can just go, poke around at it. Add some points, see what's up. Share it with your friends.

You can find Proxi at P R O X i.co. We don't have the.com yet. But yeah, so that's that you can find us across all channels. That's some variation of that. And our Instagram is probably the best place to find us and see use cases and how really fun maps, like really great content out there. And then personally, you can find me across the internet at Chelsey Roney..

Julian: Amazing. Well, Chelsey, thank you so much for taking the time. I hope you enjoyed yourself and I can't wait to share this with our audience. But again, thank you for being on the show.

Chelsey: Thank you, julian.  

Julian: Of course.