Cody McLain

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Cody McLain is an American entrepreneur. Cody started SupportNinja in 2015 and is based in Austin.^[1]

Career

Early Career

No early career info added yet...

SupportNinja

Cody started SupportNinja in 2015. They detail the beginnings of their company in their Starter Story interview: ^[1]

Q: How did you get started on SupportNinja?

I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was 14. I was kind of forced into it as both my parents died when I was young. I started my first business because my friend wanted to get an Xbox but his parents grounded him so we worked together to get the money. Our first business was a web hosting company, but our partnership split up after only a week. For the first time, I found a passion, an interest, a calling. What I discovered through that process is the creativity involved in building a business appealed to me. Since I lived difficult life, it was something I naturally fell into. I created several more businesses over the years. In one of them, I was screwed over by a business partner. All of this is mentioned in my book From Foster care to Millionaire.

What led me to start SN was my feeling of imposter syndrome and in confidence. In the last hosting company I had (sold for just south of a million) I realized I had to put in the support hours and deal with the customers’ gripes for many years. This is a skill I did not initially see within myself. I always wanted to work for startups but didn’t necessarily want to be one, so I found a niche within an existing proven market in the industry which ended up being outsourcing.

A lot of startups need outsourcing but most of the outsourcing companies that exist today weren’t necessarily founded for startups. I saw that I could appeal to startups and I had a natural interest in technology and using all the latest and greatest apps and seeing this inherent divergence of my interest within the tech community and the interest in building several businesses online, even including the company I built in India for the agents who were initially providing support for my customers.

I found at least one company that was doing business with big-name clients and that validated the idea of going into the outsourcing industry for me. They happened to be in the Philippines and I discovered that the Philippines is a really great place to outsource because there are many shared values. Furthermore, the labor cost is pretty low and the only challenge was figuring out how to go to the Philippines and register an international business and deal with all the issues associated with learning the laws, and manage the business from the US. What I didn’t realize along the way is I would find the right people who sit in the right seats on the bus as Jim Rohn would say. I didn’t need to know every aspect of the business in order to get it started. Now I have a CEO who does a wonderful job managing the business. We have grown to be #86 on Inc 5000 for 2019 and we have seen tremendous growth. We have over 100 clients and over 500 agents and we are on track to grow another few thousand percents for 2020.

Source ^[1]

References

Contributors

Contributors to this article:

• Pat Walls, Founder @ Starter Story
• Wiki Updater