How a Toddler's Mishap Built a 30,000-Strong Business Community

Written by co-founder and CEO of Dubsado, Becca Berg

Life as a creative business owner

My journey in co-founding Dubsado started with how I grew up—in a family full of entrepreneurs. My mom and dad ran their own business, a modeling agency, and I carved out a path for myself in photography, a field that complemented their work. They sent out models for commercials and print jobs; I did photo shoots for childrens’ headshots so they could go out and get those jobs.

Once I started on that path, I loved being able to work for myself. I appreciated being able to control and have flexibility in my schedule, and I met so many great people in the process who taught me a lot about how to set up websites, which fascinated me.

My headshot business turned into wedding photography, and I found it so rewarding that I could scale my work up or down based on what was happening in my life (like getting married!), and I learned so much through that experience that has shaped what I do now: how to work with people, how to provide great customer service, and how to powerfully market the service you deliver. 

I also learned just how tough it can be to run a business on your own. Your income isn’t necessarily guaranteed, and every dollar you earn maps directly back to the hours you’re able to work. So, every minute counts.

Discovering the need for better tools

While I was running my photography business, my husband Jake was running his own business doing web design and web development. As a newly married couple with a child on the way, we found ourselves overwhelmed by all it took to navigate bills, jobs, a mortgage, and starting a family—all the while, trying to figure out how to elevate our service to clients. Because regardless of how much was on our plates, the last thing we wanted was to deliver our clients anything less than our best.

By the time we had our second child, everything was wild and crazy, and the moment came when we both knew we needed to get our business processes in order. I was relying on paper questionnaires and contracts, and one day, I discovered that our two-year-old had scribbled all over a contract I needed for my next shoot. Feeling frantic and unprofessional, I just wished I’d had this contract online. I went to Jake (who, in fairness, had proposed this idea a year prior), and said I think we should create a platform where we could keep everything we needed as business owners in one place.

Because of our experiences, we knew who we needed to serve: photographers, web designers, web developers—anyone running a service-based business, trying to deliver the best work for their clients. We wanted to focus on small business owners that were either just starting out, or, like Jake and me, had been in business for a while but really needed a great system to keep everything they needed and make it really feel like their brand.

We’d researched and tried a variety of tools. But we found that none of them allowed us to actually represent our brand to clients. When we used these tools to send out questionnaires or contracts, they were all labeled with the system's name, not ours. We knew we wanted to empower business owners to customize what they needed to create a cohesive client experience across every touchpoint.

Building Dubsado

This was me testing our very first newsletter.

We decided to make Dubsado (a name coined by our 2-year-old) the place where you can not only run your business, but also have your brand at the front and center of every single communication that you send out for your clients.

Jake and I had no experience running a software company. But when we came up with the idea, we knew instantly that it was something that we want to share with the world, and not just keep to ourselves. So, we got a website going, we sent out a newsletter, and soon after we had 300 people on our mailing list who were interested in Dubsado. Jake got to work building the platform with just a few months to go before our beta launch date.

We still needed to take care of two kids, work our day jobs, and make sure we put food on the table during those crazy first months. So, we’d wake up super early in the morning. Jake would take our newborn to Starbucks, where rock him in the stroller while he was coding. And while I was at home with our other child, I’d be answering Customer Care emails, posting on social media, and doing everything else that was required to get the word out. In doing that work, I saw that we had the beginnings of a community, and the people in it were excited.

Once the beta launched, our users were asking for a place to talk to other people. A feature we’d focused on was the ability to customize forms, questionnaires, and contracts to look beautiful and represent your brand—and users wanted to show off the work they created. A month after launching our platform, we launched our Facebook community, where people gathered to get excited and chat about their business processes, how they used Dubsado, and how it saved them time. Today, that Facebook community has more than 30,000 members, which we couldn’t be prouder about.

Prioritizing the Dubsado Community

Which bead are you? ❤️

From the very first Customer Care team members we hired, our mission was to treat every customer like they were our only customer. To prioritize above all else making them feel special, and letting them know they matter to us. That’s where our bead jar comes in.

By the door of our office, there’s a jar filled with beads. Each bead represents a paying Dubsado customer. We add beads to it as we grow, and each team member walks by it every day. It’s a reminder of the people we’re serving, and who we’re doing this for. Our users are why we do what we do. We wouldn’t be here now, celebrating nine years in business, without them and the amazing work they do.

As Dubsado, we’re self-funded. That means we don’t have any outside VCs or investment companies funding our operations and fueling our growth. Our growth has come from our users. The money that we make is the money that we're able to spend. And in a world of fast-paced tech growth, we’ve seen how tempting it can be to accept outside investments in the hopes that it will lead to fast results. But for us, giving in to that temptation would mean further distancing ourselves from our customers and their needs—the things we care about most. 

We’ve been grateful to have the freedom to shape our product around our customers’ needs, to the point of pivoting entire projects when we get feedback from customers that we're going in a direction that isn’t quite aligned. We wouldn't be able to listen as closely to our users if we had outside stakeholders to answer to in board meetings, and quotas to hit that they set for us. So, we stay self-funded to stay close to our users.

What’s next for Dubsado

A sneak peek at Dubsado 3.0

2025 is the year we lay the foundation for a whole host of exciting product updates designed to help our customers save even more time and reach greater heights in their businesses.

In the coming months, we’ll launch Dubsado 3.0, a platform redesign that will not only refresh the look of the place where our customers do so much of their day-to-day work; it’ll also lay the groundwork for us to be able to deliver quicker product updates, and features our users need—before they feel like they need them.

And at the heart of the updates we’ll be making is a simple but critical mission: we want to empower our customers to make more money. Our customers might start their businesses because they want to do what they love; but we know how important it is for them to be able to support their families while they do it.

So among the user-requested updates we expect to roll out, we’ll keep making it easier for our customers to send invoices and contracts, and easier for their clients to make payments—just what it takes to run a successful business.

Excited for what is ahead!

Becca
Co-Founder and CEO of Dubsado