Michael Mayer - Business Boss Battles - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 40]

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Founder's Field Guide. Founder's Field Guide is a series of conversations with founders, CEOs, and operators building great businesses.
I believe we are all builders in our own way and this series is dedicated to stories and lessons from builders of all types. Founder's Field Guide is part of the Colossus family of podcasts and you can access all of our podcasts including edited transcripts, show notes, and resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:46)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:10)
Our guest today, Michael Mayer, is the founder and CEO of Bottomless, a company that automatically replenishes your coffee supply where I'm both an excited investor and customer. Today's conversation is about tactical lessons Michael has learned while building the business.
We talk about identifying an addressable problem, how to avoid solving for bottlenecks that don't yet exist, and how to iterate through problems before scaling.
As yet another example of a self-taught entrepreneur, it's inspiring to hear Michael's mindset for problem solving. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Michael Mayer.
So Michael, this is going to be a pretty unique version of this series that we call Founder's Field Guide for two reasons. One, you've been on the show before, so we're going to make sure to cover ground that we didn't cover the first time and people can go listen to that episode if they want. It's awesome. And second, because I have the benefit of knowing you and Liana and the team at Bottomless really well. I'm an investor in the business. I've known you guys a long time. I'm a user, etc. So we thought brainstorming that the fun thing to do here is a new format that goes through five, maybe six major scaling challenges that you've had as a business. Sort of the absolute worst things that you've had to deal with.
What the problems were and how you overcame them, because I think my experience with businesses of your type is that that's all they ever are. It's just a series of these what seem like insurmountable challenges that then you figure out and you move on to the next one. So we just thought this would be a neat format to try out. Look forward to doing with you. I'll kick it off by asking about the most nascent problem, which was how you got into this problem space in the first place as a single founder and narrowed the scope of the problem that interested you into something that actually could be tackled.

**Michael Mayer** (3:53)
Yeah, I'm excited to be here, Patrick, and excited to do the episode. And I'm glad you asked about that first because it doesn't really seem on the surface like a problem, trying to come up with exactly what you're going to do. In reality, Leon and I came up with this idea totally independently from coffee, from smart subscriptions and totally independently from what we were actually doing. We sort of had realized that replenishment of consumables was broken broadly. And that would have been sort of an impossible space to tackle.