How a Musician Turned Marketer Built Fomo and Exited for Seven Figures

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Ryan Kulp is a self-taught coder, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Fomo, a trend-setting social proof tool that helps e-commerce and digital businesses build trust and credibility. With an unconventional career journey, Ryan has a fascinating and inspiring story. Starting off with dreams of making it big as a musician, he shifted gears and achieved incredible success as an entrepreneur and business investor.

In this interview, Ryan shares his journey with Fomo, which grew from a side hustle into a thriving enterprise generating over $100,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Get an inside look at how Ryan transitioned from music to tech, the strategies that fueled Fomo’s success, and his philosophy on buying versus building businesses.

Ryan also offers insights into evaluating acquisition opportunities, the art of scaling, and how to decide when it’s time to exit.

Please tell us about your background and how Fomo came about.

I grew up with zero interest in technology or jobs generally. I wanted to be a touring musician with my screamo band, The Last Great Bridge Jumper. We played a lot of shows, produced a couple of EPs, and it really seemed feasible to 16, 17, and 18-year-old me.

So I didn’t apply to college. I moved out of my parents’ house on my 18th birthday without their knowledge, and I bounced around between friends’ basements and my grandparents’ home for about a year after high school before getting my life together.

I then went to a 4-year college and thought: “let’s do everything the opposite of how I’m used to.” I actually tried in school. I had a 4.3 GPA. I kept doing music too, but as a solo artist. I was connected to some big record labels and recording for free at nice studios in Atlanta. It seemed like I was back on track to be a musician.

Then I screwed it all up again. But I also graduated. And I needed a job. So after writing a horrible book that I launched on Kickstarter, I got in touch with a venture-backed startup in NYC. They hired me a week later. I drove up to Brooklyn with all my guitars in a U-Haul, and my career as a startup bro began on January 7, 2013.

Fast forward a few years I had learned to code in my spare time and was now living in San Francisco, working for a venture capital fund. My role was to help grow the companies we invested in, which basically made the job feel like working at a marketing agency.

One company we came across and wanted to invest in was called Notify, a growing Shopify app. After a few days of back and forth, it became apparent that the founder would rather sell than raise capital, so a buddy (Justin Mares) and I bought the company from him and rebuilt it into Fomo.

I hacked on Fomo during nights and weekends for almost 1.5 more years before quitting my full-time job and going all in on it. Throughout those early years, we grew primarily via word of mouth and by building integrations with platforms besides Shopify or e-commerce carts.

Why did you decide to acquire Notify rather than just starting Fomo from scratch?

It’s normal with smaller M&A deals to try and calculate a “buy vs. build” T chart because sometimes, there just isn’t enough significance to warrant adopting a technology and workflow for a few thousand dollars per month in revenue. Not profit! Just revenue.

But with Notify, to be honest, this wasn’t considered at all. I hadn’t acquired a company before. I wasn’t planning to quit my job, and I had some savings to help with the down payment. We got lucky enough to arrange seller-side financing terms with the founder as well, which further made it a no-brainer. All it really cost me was time. (To be clear all of my time, but still just time).

How did you identify the market need for a social proof tool, and what key strategies did you use to validate Fomo’s concept early on?

Although I’ve been in marketing roles for my entire “career,” I don’t drink most of the marketing Kool-Aid regarding how to spray mass messaging to audiences that don’t want to hear it. I credit Seth Godin’s writings with a lot of my general ideas on sales and marketing and recommend pretty much all of his books.

So when I discovered the term “social proof,” everything really clicked for me. We’re all intuitively aware of it… reviews, word of mouth, it’s a part of most folks’ decision-making process for everything from restaurants to the city they want to live in.

But seeing social proof manifest itself as a product line in the mid-2010s was what made me jump in feet first. It was like, “You mean to tell me I can build a business by letting my customers sell for me, instead of me?” It felt (and still feels) like a cheat code. It’s also an honest way to build a business. No clever copywriting necessary.

Since online stores now count in the millions, how are consumers supposed to differentiate between Keto Snacks A and Keto Snacks B? Sure, design plays a part, but both stores have access to the same themes for $99. It’s about social proof. So the need was validated before I got there, and I’m very lucky that Fomo was my first real foray into company building.

What key strategies did you implement to scale Fomo to more than $100,000 MRR?

First, it doesn’t really matter what your revenue is if your costs are even higher. And there was a period where we failed at this. In our highest revenue month, I think around $150,000, we also spent $135,000. Some of that was on a sailboat yacht rental for a team retreat where we placed 800 in the Barcolana 50. But a lot of that was just… bad choices. We had 3 full-time marketers and probably needed zero. We had a few full-time support engineers when we probably needed just 1.

But beyond keeping costs down we did 2 things to grow Fomo:

1. Build integrations, which opened up new market cohorts
2. Establish ourselves as the first, the best, the market leader (21 Immutable Laws)

I think strategy 2 is obvious when you look at the Fomo website and aura, and again here is where a book really helped me process who we want to be, and how we want to be it. Pepsi tastes fine but Coke is and will probably always be #1. We wanted that at Fomo.

But strategy 1 is more adaptable to other builders because only 1 company can be first. At Fomo this meant attracting new target audiences by building on top of their tools. We started as an e-commerce-only integration, right? Well, then we built a ClickFunnels integration. Suddenly 100s of info product creators were using Fomo.

We also built integrations with platforms like Mindbody. Now we had local gyms and spas using Fomo. Or brick & mortar booking tools… this scored us dentist offices. Our feature set remained the same, but through integrations, we multiplied our use cases. We did continue aggressively building new features too, of course.

Why did you decide to sell Fomo and can you describe your approach to valuing the business before selling it?

For nearly 2 years before selling Fomo, I was not involved in the day-to-day. We hired a CEO and I stepped down to take a sort of sabbatical slash pursue a different career in entertainment and media.

One day I decided to get out of city life, however, and go settle down Yellowstone style. I wanted land, guns, peace, and quite. I started looking at houses on Zillow.

I can’t remember the exact sequencing of events but essentially this made us open to acquisition offers. And a few months later, we got them. Our valuation was some single-digit multiple of revenue, more than 2 and less than 5. We worked with a PE fund called Relay Commerce who have taken great care of Fomo for the past couple years, and I myself have also jumped back into M&A as both an operator and investor.

How did you evaluate potential buyers, and what factors influenced your decision beyond the financial offer?

It’s difficult to codify this so I’ll say it plainly: vibes. Within a couple of hours of getting to know a potential buyer, you can start to sense if working with them will be a pain in the ass. A lot of this isn’t so much due to personality differences, in my opinion, but rather their background and relationship with tech, marketing, and startup culture.

If they don’t know how to code and have never answered a customer support ticket, for example, they really have no ability to add value to a tech startup. If they are more interested in our spreadsheets than our product, they have no ability to add value to a tech startup.

So in evaluating buyers, yes the valuation was super important. But this is also part of my legacy (for better or worse), and I wanted to know we would be handing over the company to people with similar backgrounds. Relay Commerce has built a team of 50+ folks who have that background.

Many entrepreneurs struggle with the “what’s next” after selling a business. How did you handle this transition, and what advice would you give to others in this position?

I’m blessed with not really having this experience. Fomo was definitely “my baby” in some respects and I did pour everything I had into it. But I also saw it for what it was – a business whose job is to create jobs and build wealth.

My first transition away from Fomo was before the acquisition, when I personally stepped away. This probably helped make the acquisition less of a shock because I already had to fill my day with other projects.

The advice I’d give folks in a similar, fortunate situation is to remember why you got into this business and not complain. I’m reminded of an interview between Zach Galifianakis and Jerry Seinfeld where Zach is complaining about fans and paparazzi. Seinfeld says something like, “You wanted to be famous, then you became famous, now you don’t like being famous?” 

Embrace your acquisition. For me it was one of the most important and life-changing moments in my life. I’m grateful to the whole team that made it possible and I do not pity anyone wondering “What’s next” from their high horse. What’s next? Relax.

Aside from Notify/Fomo, you’ve also acquired several other businesses. Please tell us about your approach to micro PE and what you look for in a possible acquisition. 

While operating Fomo, we noticed a lot of winning patterns in terms of low-budget growth tactics. Wanting to put these to the test I co-founded Fork Equity and we began using Fomo profits + personal funds to buy more small SaaS apps.

Eventually, we had enough of a track record that a few outside investors got involved. This let us scale the operation to larger projects and more projects. It’s been around 7 years now, and Fork has done around 15 deals, so far 100% of them with positive ROI for investors.

We look for founder-led, ideally first-to-market, niche solutions that don’t have venture-backed competitors. Some of our secondary preferences involve the tech stack, customer acquisition strategy (self-service vs. sales-driven), and tool type. For example, I’d rather buy a marketing tool than a developer tool. But we’ve done both, and both worked out fine.

As someone who has built some businesses from scratch and acquired others, how do you view the pros and cons of each approach?

Buying is less risky, building is more fun. Let’s invert that too to “buying is not fun, building is very risky.”

It might take you 10 tries to build something that works, but just 1 try to buy something that works. That’s because when you buy a working product, you have skipped the 9 failures made by entrepreneurs whose product wasn’t for sale. This is a simple math equation that I’ve attempted to articulate many times in the past, but not everyone gets it.

I think many folks have too much ego getting in the way of their well-being. They want to “be rich” but they don’t want to “do it that way.” They insist on being the captain of their own ship, even if that ship is sinking. I have no such disability.

How do you decide when to exit versus continue growing a project? What factors have been most important in your own decisions?

I’m sort of always ready for an exit. Marketplaces like Acquire.com have made it really easy over the last few years to convert just about any useful digital asset into liquidity within a matter of weeks, sometimes even days or hours. I personally hold the record for the fastest acquisition on that platform, for example.

So if I’m always ready to sell a company, the deciding factor is often related to my excitement level. And I think this is a good proxy, even if it’s hard to measure. It’s good because it ensures that the buyer of my company will not be taking over a stale dud. They will be buying something that still has tension, energy, and opportunity. I do not believe in driving a company the way we drive old cars… for 30 years until they barely work.

Since I want to buy companies with room to grow, it’s a moral obligation to sell companies that have room to grow.

What advice do you have for other online business owners who are interested in exiting?

Don’t overthink it. You can hire a broker to guide you through the process or find the right partner. But bottom line: do you want to change your life or not?

I wanted to change my life. I wanted to get out of my small apartment and become a homeowner. I wanted to get out of cities. I wanted to stop answering late-night support tickets. There was a time where I was stoked to do that, but Spring 2022 was no longer that season of my life. So we sold. Simple.

What are you working on now?

Thanks for asking. I’m still operating a couple of M&A projects including Fera and GetReviews.

But what I’m most excited about (am I allowed to say that?) is TRMNL, which I founded earlier this year. Remember what I said before? Founding is more fun. But also riskier. Do it after you’ve reduced your overall risk.

TRMNL is an e-ink display that helps you stay focused. It’s my first hardware startup and I’m learning a lot. We’ve sold 1,800+ devices since launching a few months ago and I’m thrilled to see our point of view and product spread all over the world.

I’m also now the proud owner and host of the Hacker House. This is a steel and glass cabin I built with friends that anyone can rent for work or relaxation. This, in addition to DIY projects with my wife around our new ranch, keep me busy and fulfilled.

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