How I Cloned Two Stupid Simple Apps to Make $30M⏐Ep. #256

Chris Koerner (0:03)

So, I just came across this guy on Twitter. His name is Will Cannon. You may remember him from my episode on cold emailing here recently. Will is an expert in scraping and selling leads, and he's also an expert in cloning other software businesses. He's a serial entrepreneur, but specifically, he's built two software businesses doing millions of dollars a year. He's a bootstrapper, he didn't grow up rich, he's very scrappy, and he has an amazing story. So, if you've ever been interested in starting a software business and you don't know how to code and you'd like to just copy what works, this is the episode for you.

Will Cannon (0:34)

So, my kind of story is, grew up poor, single parent household, mom and dad got divorced when I was one year old, dad left, never saw him again to this day. We grew up with little, just me and my mom, roof over the head, food in the mouth, but didn't have, weren't able to have a nice thing. So, ever since I was a kid, I was like, okay, lemonade stand. I remember in high school, it was like CD burners just first came out. So, I was like, oh my God, it was Napster and Limeware. So, I was like, my friend got a computer with a CD burner. I was like, you can make your own CD, this is amazing. So, I was like, I would sell CDs at school. I'd have a booklet and I'd say, hey, write down your 10 or 12 favorite songs. They'd write them down. I'd go, oh my, download all the songs off Napster. I'd burn them to a CD. I'd sell the CDs for 10, 20 bucks a CD and I'd make 100 bucks a week or whatever it was. At that time, I was like, this is amazing. So, I've always been an entrepreneur from the start. Had a couple of jobs, did work at Sears, selling warranties to people that bought appliances, worked in a collection agency. So, I started working at 16 full time. Right out of high school, me and my then girlfriend who's now my wife, I said, what are you going to do? She says, I'm going to get my real estate license, I'm going to get my real estate. I said, okay, I'll just get into real estate too. Let's do it. We didn't know, but timing was amazing because this was during subprime mortgage boom right before the crisis. Got into that, got a license, started working for a company. First month of work for a company selling mortgages, I made that company $100,000 and I got a $10,000. I thought I was the richest person on earth. My life has changed forever. This is amazing. I'm going to work here forever. One day, I'm sitting there. I get up to use the bathroom. I get back to my guest and he goes, hey, where were you? I said, I was using the bathroom. He said, no, no, no, no, no. You need to be on the phone. It was like, and I was like, I just made you $100,000 last month. I looked at the numbers, I made you so much and you're on me like that.

At that time, the owners, they were crazy. They had every Rolls Royce, every Lamborghini, every everything.

It was like, well, I want the 100k. I don't want the 10k. I was like, I called her up and she had her license. She was working for a different mortgage company. I said, hey, what if we just start our own mortgage company? She's like, let's do it. I had a broker license so actually I could take the next step. And so that was my last day. I called him and left him a voicemail and said, hey, I'm done. We started our own mortgage company. And at that time, we didn't have enough money for an apartment and an office because we were kind of just starting. So we got to pick. So we started the mortgage company out of the apartment to start. And then we started scaling it. We're like, hey, we need employees, but employees aren't going to come to our house. Like we got to get an office. So we got an office, but we didn't have, it was, we're struggling the first few months. It wasn't easy to build it up. So we got an office and didn't have enough money for both. And we said, you know what? We're going to just live in the office. So we're going to get an air mattress. When the employees leave for the day, we'll pop out the air mattress and we're going to sleep in this office. And so that was a really difficult time, but it was exciting though, because I'm young. I'm in my early twenties. I'm like, hey, let's build this. So I started building it up and eventually got enough money for, you know, but the story there, which is crazy is, showered in a bucket in the bathroom of our office. We had a bathroom in the office, stood in a bucket, jerry-rigged the hand-held shower device to the office bathroom. Like this was with my girlfriend at the time, who's now my wife, we built everything together. And so just crazy story coming from nothing. And then we started making so much money, we couldn't believe it. We were like, what would it be? This mortgage boom time.