Lessons from a CPA Entrepreneur

Mike Pinkus: Over the last 10 years at ConnectCPA, we've had the privilege of witnessing the incredible journeys of over a thousand businesses. We've been there for the thrilling highs and daunting lows of entrepreneurship. We've celebrated wild successes and monumental exits, and we've also stood by businesses as they've navigated the stormy seas facing roadblocks and challenges that every entrepreneur encounters in their day-to-day grind. Join us as we dive deep into the stories of these resilient individuals who dared to dream, who persevered, and who were a testament to the power of entrepreneurship. This is their journey, their lessons, and their triumphs. Welcome to GrowthTales. I'm your host, Mike Pinkus, co-founder of ConnectCPA.

Mike Pinkus: Today we're diving into the world of accounting transparency with Dominic Piscopo, founder of Big 4 Transparency. For those that haven't heard of Big 4 Transparency, they're the largest crowdsource accounting salary database now boasting over 20,000 lines of data. Now, this was a really interesting conversation where Dominic shared how this business venture wasn't exactly planned. Rather, it was a weekend no-code project that went viral on Reddit. We also unpack what it's like leaving the stability of being a CPA at a Big 4 firm and then becoming an entrepreneur. Finally, we dove into how the Big 4 Transparency Podcast has led to new opportunities and relationships for Dominic. I hope you enjoy this episode. I know I did. Hey, Dominic, thank you so much for joining me today on GrowthTales.

Dominic Piscopo: Yeah, my pleasure. I've, uh, I've, I've been binging some of your, your old episodes. I love what you got going on with this.

Mike Pinkus: I appreciate it. And likewise. Um, thank you, Dominic. I've been following Big 4 Transparency for a little while. Uh, I've been a customer with Connect CPA, and so I know the value of getting reliable data, especially in the CPA world where there's so many of us running around as CPAs and we don't really know where things are at, especially when we join an organization. And so your company's been really helpful to us to get clarity over where our brackets are and where our team should be, because we obviously want people to be well compensated. We want to know where the market's at. I want to kick this off just by asking you. You, you're a CPA, you're out of Big 4. Um, tell me a little bit about Big 4 Transparency. What made you start it and what is it about?

Dominic Piscopo: Yeah. So at its core, what Big 4 Transparency is, is we're the largest crowdsource database of accounting salaries on the market. I think by the time this airs, we should have just hit our 20,000 rows of data milestone.

And, you know, I didn’t really start it intending for it to be any one thing. It was actually just my first crack at trying to learn no-code tools. So it was kind of a weekend project, and I launched it up on Reddit, and it went incredibly viral from that point on.

And I think that kind of conception of it—where it wasn’t a planned-out business and whatnot—is actually a key to what made it work and what makes it what it is today. So we do things very differently than most salary data providers who are just basically working with the firms directly and maybe doing an exchange of information via the firms.

This is entirely crowdsourced, but it’s also available for viewing to the open market. So in addition to having 20,000 rows of data, one of the other things I’m proudest of is we’ve had about 300,000 accounting professionals actually come to the website to view data and inform their own expectations on compensation.

And, you know, I’ve gotten a ton of testimonials from people about how this has helped them personally advocate for themselves when it comes to salary. So we’ve got this database, and a big purpose behind it is reducing the information asymmetry.

So, you know, you alluded to it—I used to work at a Big 4, I’m a CPA, and at the time I was incredibly frustrated with the lack of access to compensation data. Everything was kind of gated. You had to talk to an HR person and things like that.

And you’re never getting the straight answer of, like, “Listen, you’re gonna be making this much this many years into your career.” You just get the vague, “It gets better, don’t worry,” or things like that.

And I’m not a patient guy. And so when I actually started at Big 4, I was used to making pretty good money in university. I worked in nightlife. And when I got my first kind of starting job, I was kind of floored by how little it paid, honestly. Because I got the offer from Deloitte and I was like, “Oh my God, I made it.”

And then I realized, “Oh no, I didn’t.” And actually, maybe I’ve made a huge mistake. And like, am I ever even gonna be able to afford a home? Things like that.

Dominic Piscopo: So I started kind of spiraling from there and, you know, that had sent me on a hunt for some compensation data. And yeah, it was super unavailable. It was very difficult to find. And accounting specifically—like when you look it up on whatever kind of typical salary website—I think accounting will get very conflated with bookkeeping. Or, you know, you’re looking at tax roles and the average will be influenced by all these one-off QBO preparers or H&R Block tax people. And so, like, the comp ranges there are very non-reflective of what you can actually be making in public accounting.

And so, yeah, I got really freaked out about it. And yeah, I kind of kicked this off as a weekend project. At the time, I was like, “Wow, wouldn’t it be cool if we could get a thousand people to share their salary?” And fast forward to today, we’re over 20 times that. So yeah.

Mike Pinkus: That's incredible. And congrats on building it to that level.

Dominic Piscopo: Thank you.

Mike Pinkus: Dominic, I think you spoke on something that resonated with me as well, which is—Big 4 for sure, they have HR function brackets. They’re very, very defined in their HR policies and structure because they're huge companies. But when you go down to the mid-market and then a level below the mid-market, the data isn’t really accurate.

To your point, averages don’t reflect averages because they have actual outliers to the left and right. And that’s the exact situation we found ourselves in—like, where are people actually at? There’s just no transparency, which is why I love the name of the business, I guess.

My first question for you is: obviously once you go below the Big 4, there’s a lack of data. Have you found that to be your ICP, or is it the big firms? Like, who has been the type of customer that’s been gravitating toward you to get more information and clarity over data?

Dominic Piscopo: Yeah, it's hard to identify really, because—I mean, my first customer was like a 10-person firm based in Canada, very entrepreneurial firm. My second customer was a 50- or 100-person firm in the US. And then my third customer was a Big 4 firm.

So it is a little bit all over the place, and this serves very differently to different markets, right? So small firms—they're using this for the first time typically as their first resource of data, because they may have gone to some of the legacy providers and felt like they were kind of priced out of access to this data, because those legacy providers are really targeting very large enterprises.

And so for those small firms, this is usually kind of the first time they actually get access to anything like this. And they lean super heavily into everything we offer. There’s a dashboard to make browsing the data much easier. We have a talent pool to help make introductions—to help them with hiring as well.

Whereas the very large firms, like the Big 4 I work with—I think they were working with Mercer and Aon at the time, which are pretty similar in what they do—and so they were kind of like, “Well, this feels a little bit redundant, but we don’t feel good about only having one source of data, and so we’re going to go with something that’s drastically different from these salary survey-type data points.”

And so we’re going to go with this kind of crowdsourced thing. And that really filled in a lot of gaps for them, where the legacy providers were giving them a report once a year, which might come out five months after the data’s collected.

Dominic Piscopo: We are giving them quarterly updates within one month of the end of each quarter. So, you know, there's a lot of kind of nuance in the way different firms use this, but we're kind of able to work with all accounting firms—provided, again, that they're hiring CPAs and looking to be competitive. Or not even necessarily CPAs, but that they’re looking to be competitive in the market.

Because there are some firms that are like, “No, we’re gonna be a 1040 mill or a T1 mill, and we’re just gonna pay the least we can.” And, you know, that’s outside of my ICP. But other than that, it’s pretty much every firm that we’re able to support.

Mike Pinkus: Yeah, that’s incredible, 'cause it’s a wide market and there’s obviously many firms across North America that are seeking data.

You mentioned when you told me that you didn’t initially have this plan of like, “Hey, this is gonna be a business,” you went to Reddit. And I find that to be incredibly interesting because that’s where I went when I was an associate, a senior associate, to go, “Hey, let’s get on here and talk about this,” because no one knows where other Big 4 firms were benchmarked.

If you had multiple offers, it was this confidential thing nobody really spoke about. But if you went on Reddit and into this other world, people were starting to talk.

Do you think your ability to gather data has been because you’re younger, you’re in that space, you're doing a new-age way of data collection—rather than being like a big organization doing random surveys? What do you think the reason for your success in being able to gather that data has been? And also, you're a CPA—obviously from a trust perspective—but what do you think that special sauce has been for you to be able to gather this data?

Dominic Piscopo: I think the biggest thing is proof over time that I am respectful of the kind of unwritten social contract between myself and everyone who's used this and made this possible. There have been 20 copycats who’ve tried to do what I’ve done—or even companies who’ve done this before me as well. And pretty much every time, they basically grab the bag and try to either turn around and just sell this data, or block off access to individuals. Or suddenly it’s paywalled and people can no longer access this thing after they’ve shared their data.

And there’s been so many instances of people who’ve just kind of proven that. And I, from the get-go, communicated this—like, hey, for this to be sustainable, I’m gonna have to try to find a way to monetize it. But I do think that there’s kind of a minimum level of service that I believe I owe back to the accounting professionals who’ve shared their data, which is that they will be able to browse this.

Now, what I’ve done to create a monetizable product instead is I need to build something so far beyond just being able to scroll this database that people will become willing to pay for it. But that has become kind of my minimum standard. And as I roll out new features and views to paid users and accounting firms, the idea being—if I can maintain that level of separation, of monetizable services—I want to keep moving forward the free offering for individuals to be able to use this as well.

So I want to keep improving what I’m offering to people to be able to advocate for themselves and establish their own compensation. And again, I think it has been the trust that has built over time—where I’ve had opportunities, and I’ve had investors speak to me saying, “Oh, you just gotta paywall this. Easy peasy,” right?

And that has been kind of a hard line in the sand for me, where I’m just not really willing to do that. And I think over time, that’s what’s made this possible.

Mike Pinkus: Yeah, that's amazing. And I think besides the fact that you've obviously built a big set of data—and as you mentioned, probably the most granular database of information that’s out there right now—the value is huge to firms.

But I’m curious about—it's one thing to now have the data, it's another thing to turn this into a business and to build this into actionable insights. What have been some of the challenges now that you have all these rows of data? You've figured out how to monetize it, you're amazing at marketing—but building a business is difficult.

And so what have some of those challenges been in terms of getting this off the ground and figuring out how to give a valuable offering to these accounting firms?

Dominic Piscopo: I mean, it’s just absolutely—for me anyway—it’s been trial and error and throwing things at the wall until they stick. And that, in business, to me feels like the one thing I can do to differentiate myself from other people is mostly relentlessness.

Like, I’m not necessarily a product genius or a great developer or creator of things. I built this on a no-code tool. The website’s still kind of like—it’s fine, you know, it’s not that good. But I tried so many things.

Like, my first monetization I think was maybe LumiQ did a banner ad with me. And then I started talking to them about launching a job board. So I started collecting emails, had a job board there. I realized a job board’s a really hard business because if you’re doing a good job, your job posting should not be there for more than two months. And so your entire customer base churns out within a two-month period.

And that big realization actually came when my friend got married in the Dominican, and I got COVID and food poisoning and this and that—and I was out for like a month. And I was doing this on the side too, so when you’re pretty sick, it’s really hard to go do your side hustle after work.

And so I kind of let it sit. I had gone from, whatever, maybe it was $1,200 or $1,500 a month run rate to like $200. And I was like, “Wow, this is not good. I’m on a treadmill constantly.” And so I killed that off.

You know, I’ve tried 101 things. I tried to launch a community—community didn’t pick up. I don’t think I had the audience at the time. And so I just kind of kept trying things.

And I actually started getting a little bit of inbound—or people kind of hinting that they were HR individuals using this. And they were like, “Wow, this is useful if you’re someone who’s just looking to understand what one role is, but this is not great if you’re trying to set up a firm’s comp structure around that.” And I was like, “Oh, there it is. Cool. So we’ll try that.”

Initially, I was basically just selling a Google Doc sheet with a bunch of pivot tables that I would build for the firm in it. And then eventually I built it out from there—turned it into a dashboard, kept refining the dashboard, improved that. And now we’re actually about to launch an enterprise portal, which is going to make it feel a lot more official and a lot more legit.

And then the next step is going to be kind of like interactive AI that can sit on top of the dataset and answer questions for you.

Mike Pinkus: That’s amazing. And that’s a great evolution in features that I think would allow the product to, as you mentioned, cater to that larger market—especially with a big dataset in order to get that information.

Dominic, you have entrepreneurial spirit. I’m curious—for a CPA that’s coming out of Deloitte, and not to stereotype—obviously CPAs have changed quite a bit. You see a lot of them doing diverse things that are very entrepreneurial, but on average, the stereotype is still somewhat true.

So I’m curious—where does the entrepreneurial spirit come from with you? Where does this background come from? You start Big 4… Trying and failing and walking away from something stable is not easy. And iterating—you mentioned the job board, all these things—so where does that come from for you?

Dominic Piscopo: Honestly, like, it is so incredibly hard to trace it back to anything. My whole family was really like, “Oh, you gotta go into medicine,” and I was kind of a student where I was a strong student—but only when I cared. And that actually continued through university too. Like, I'd have tens or sixes in terms of GPA—it was one or the other. It was either you cared about this class or you didn’t.

And I was always really attracted to whatever the next thing was, but there was never a clear plan for me. And I don’t think I was ever exposed to entrepreneurship in any kind of real, serious way. I didn’t really have that in my family. I wasn’t pushed toward it. But there was always something where I felt like a square peg trying to cram myself into a round hole.

So, you know, where I excelled in school was—I’d pick up extracurriculars. Or I’d start things. Like, a buddy and I started doing comedy skits to replace the morning announcements at high school. We were just always kind of messing around, and I’d always chase something by thinking, “Oh, this sucks—this could be better.”

In high school, I was doing some DJing too. I would DJ some weddings. My dad did that on the side—he would do like two weddings a year. And then I was kind of like, “Oh, we have this gear—I might as well try it out.”

I've always been very financially driven, like very driven toward those outcomes. And yeah, I don’t exactly know where it came from, but something always felt off. And that made Deloitte really hard for me.

Like, I got put into the best position possible when I joined the firm. My coach was the wonderkind of Deloitte Canada—he’s in the National Tax Office now. He’s the one who comes up with the crazy tax plans and stuff. We had a great managing partner. I was surrounded by really good people, and yet—I just had so much trouble respecting the confines of the role a little bit, or what was expected of me.

I just wanted to go sell business—go meet people. As an analyst-level employee, I was driving genuine, legitimate business leads for our tax team. And so I was always like, “It wasn’t quite right.”

So when I finally got the opportunity—when I had something with traction here—I pretty quickly started making plans on how I could bridge that gap to be able to jump to doing this full time and really focus on it.

And again, I had tried things prior. Like, I launched a pocket square business on Shopify, because I was thinking about trying to get a job at Shopify. And I immediately thought, “Well, the best thing to do would be launching a Shopify store.”

That went terribly. I probably broke even on it or something like that. And I have like hundreds of silk pocket squares in my basement now.

Dominic Piscopo: But it was just always like an itch that I had. I think that got developed and refined greatly though, via podcasts. And I like to talk about that a lot for people—where if you're not surrounded by the type of people who are going to drive you toward what you're trying to do, I do think consuming a large amount of that content can help.

A) Normalize what you're trying to do, and

B) Inform you.

It’s kind of a proxy for having a bunch of really entrepreneurial friends. And you often see that in a group of people—when one person finds great success in business, often you’ll see their friends start to try things a little bit more and thrive and succeed.

So for me, podcasts—like My First Million, Indie Hackers, all these things—really normalized that idea for me. And I think that’s what got me wanting to learn no-code tools in the first place, which eventually kind of crumbled toward Big 4 Transparency existing. So, yeah—podcasts played a huge role for me.

Mike Pinkus: Let’s talk about that for a second. So you’ve gained a lot of traction, and I think you’ve gained a lot of connections and strength within the community because of the fact that you’ve brought on a lot of guests that are connected to the space.

And you’ve gained a lot of traction in the podcast—but the podcast is a marketing skill. You’re a CPA by background. How did you develop that muscle? Like how did you learn to become a marketer—for the podcast?

Dominic Piscopo: It’s funny because I really don’t consider myself a very savvy marketer. Like, I’ve tried so many things, and I’ve found little bits and areas that I understand. So like, I probably have 10 or 15 million impressions on Reddit, for example—but I couldn’t run a Facebook ad for the life of me that’ll get a single click, right?

So I definitely don’t consider myself a great marketer, but there are little things in little areas where I spend time where I’m like, “Oh, I understand this, and I understand the nuances of this.”

And podcasting—same thing. I’ve listened to more podcasting hours than anyone I can think of. And so, when you become so ingrained in that, you start to learn, right?

And my biggest challenge with Big 4 Transparency was that I think accounting firms are very trust-based. I don’t think they’re super quick to click on an ad and buy whatever it is that’s being showcased there. I think it’s a very, very long process of building trust. I think a referral goes a super long way—they want to understand that these things happen.

And I think some of that is because of the framing of accountants, where you’re kind of like the stewards of people’s financial information. People take that super seriously. And I think that’s a good thing. But because of that, there’s a level of professional skepticism in everything—in everything they do.

And I just felt like I—despite being an accountant myself—I really felt like I was kind of like an outsider trying to sell into these firms without necessarily understanding them, without being in the group, and things like that.

So, yeah, I spoke to a business coach about it. I was working with a business coach, Graham Barlow—I love to shout him out anytime I can because he really helped me strategize and figure out how to transform some of this into a real, legitimate business.

We were talking about podcasting, and I was like, “I’m not sure if this is just another shiny object that I’m wanting to chase,” because I do suffer from that, “or if this is like a real thing.” And so we really talked about it, and he was kind of like, “Listen, worst-case scenario—you get a lot of pretty legit people who are probably going to be following along on your journey once you’ve interviewed them.”

And I found podcasting to be a very linear game.

Dominic Piscopo: It’s like once I had Brandon Hall on—who was a huge supporter and one of my first customers—I was then able to talk to people of Brandon Hall’s tier in terms of influence in the accounting industry and say, “Hey, Brandon came on. This was a worthwhile thing for him—what do you think?”

And then from there, at one point, you’re like, “Well, I’m talking to 40 firm leaders—what do you think?” And now it’s gotten to a point where some of the people I’ve been able to have on—just by, again, meeting them at a conference and having this thing to invite them to—it’s a very easy way to go deeper in your relationships with people.

And not even from a cynical business perspective—just in general. Without it necessarily translating into a sale or something like that.

But like, you know, I met the former CEO of CohnReznick at a conference I was at, and we were chatting, and I was like, “Oh, you’re such an interesting guy. You should come on the pod.” And he loved it, right?

And it’s just because you’re having a great conversation with someone, and it’s kind of like, “I’d like to take this further.” And actually having a podcast—regardless of having any listenership—I think is such a key to being able to develop those relationships a little bit further.

And yeah, so the podcast just kind of took on a life of its own and built up a pretty solid following. Same with the newsletter—we’ve built up actually a pretty massive audience in the accounting space.

And it’s literally just finding out: what are people clicking on? What are people talking about? And you just try your best, and you get feedback. You get a lot of unsolicited feedback when you put yourself out there—some mean-spirited—but some of it is actually just like, “Oh hey, great job. What do you think about X, Y, and Z?”

And it kind of creates a flywheel where it becomes pretty easy to keep the momentum going once you’ve started.

Mike Pinkus: How do you get people onto the newsletter? Like, what's your call to action that gets— is it linked to your podcast? Like, I'm curious, how do you get subscribers on the actual newsletter?

Dominic Piscopo: It’s just on the website. And again, it’s because I have this database that’s pretty unique, and I just say like, “Hey, I’m doing deep dives on the analytics of this. If you want to check it out, check it out.”

And that was also a way for me to go a little bit further in sharing things beyond just the raw data. There are things that I think are really helpful to people that I come across and want to share out—but again, I can’t just go and release my dashboards all for free, because then I have no more product, right?

So it was actually kind of also a desire to be like, “Hey, I think this might help some people.” And so people started subscribing that way. It was just a simple email capture on the website, and it really picked up from there.

Mike Pinkus: I think something really cool about what you said with the podcast is—you’re like, “I’m not a great marketer.” And I think what’s interesting about our business at Connect CPA, as well as your business at Big 4 Transparency, is we are in the trust game.

The trust game is very different from “banner ad—click here.” You don’t make decisions over things that require a high degree of trust and authority off a Google ad, to that point.

And so I think you’ve done an amazing job on the podcast.

Dominic Piscopo: Oh, thank you.

Mike Pinkus: I think other people in the space, including me, we’re using it as a form of authority to go and say, “Hey, wait a minute, here’s a CPA building an audience, building traction, talking about interesting things with interesting people in our space.” It does show you that podcasts can go a long way.

I know we’re getting up on time here, Dominic. I wanted to ask you—building a business, especially coming out of a structured environment like Deloitte, obviously comes with risk, it comes with experimentation, as you had mentioned.

What have been some of the lessons you’ve learned that you wish you knew before you started?

Dominic Piscopo: Yeah, I mean, I’m gonna say probably two things, but they kind of boil down to the same thing—which is, you have to be in it for the long game.

So one of them is patience. Like I shared previously, I am incredibly impatient, just in general. I’ll do the thing and I’m like, “Alright, what’s the outcome? Give me the outcome now,” right? And I’ve definitely had to learn that in business.

This year, the way things have shaped up, for example—the business has not done super well over the first six months of the year. This was my first busy season working full time, where you’re doing all this outreach, and no firms are going to implement something new—even though this is like the lightest implementation—during busy season. Everyone’s kind of tired after busy season.

So I was doing all this outreach from January to March, and then I kind of paused it. And then from May to June I was like, “Oh my God, this is going nowhere.” And now, I wouldn’t be super surprised for the business to double over the next three or 4 months.

And that’s all from the work I’ve put in since January. And so I think in business—at least for me, and for this type of business, not every business—you need to be able to structure yourself to just keep doing the actions. Keep doing the things that you know are how a business is built, right?

And do refine those things. Talk to other people. Make sure that you’re not completely out to lunch doing completely useless activities. But like, you just gotta keep going. Even when you’re not seeing the results, you have to keep going no matter what.

And again, that has all kind of culminated now into me getting a couple very, very large opportunities. And a lot of people are like, “Oh yeah, sorry, I saw your email back in February and I put a reminder in my calendar for July.”

And it feels crazy, but that’s actually the reality of how this has played out for me. It’s these very, very long lulls. Just sticking to it, and being ready to keep doing the motion—you know it’s worked in the past, and so you just keep going at it, and then eventually it kind of pays off.

And the other thing is how that applies to the sales cycle too, where it just feels like I’m launching things into a void. Or with content—like, when I was doing the podcast, this felt like a nothing for 40 episodes. It was getting some viewers here and there, and it was doing fine.

And then all of a sudden I have people being like, “Oh yeah, this is, to me, a source of authority.” Or you have brands start coming to you and they’re like, “Oh, we’ve been wanting to work with you for the last three months.” And you’re like, “Well, where was all this in the past?” And it just kind of all of a sudden happened.

And it would’ve been very, very easy to give up 25 weeks in, 30 weeks in, 35 weeks in—and then all of a sudden it was like, “Oh my God, this is so worthwhile.”

So it’s really just patience and sticking to it—that’s been the name of the game for every aspect of this business, to be honest with you.

Dominic Piscopo: I mean, even Big 4 Transparency as a whole—like, I was not a single dollar positive until two and a half years in. And I didn’t even have a plan that would allow me to really make any real money, right?

And it was just kind of being like, “Well, this is important. This matters to people.” And I was getting—although not as much as I would like—but I was getting some feedback from people that this was having a huge impact on them. So just stick to it and see where that leads you.

And there are ways to do this that are de-risked. Like, had I gone full-time into Big 4 Transparency right away, it would’ve folded, right? I think it was necessary for me to have this as a side project for a number of years—for it to build up momentum and build up trust with the audience and things like that.

So for me, it’s really just been sticking to it, finding what works, but then—even if it slows down—you just gotta keep moving. For sure.

Mike Pinkus: That’s great advice. And how many episodes are you in right now? What has that cadence been? How often are you doing the podcast?

Dominic Piscopo: Like 74. Weekly. And I’ve skipped twice—so I skipped Christmas and July 4th weekend.

Christmas was actually because I was like, “This feels unfair to the guest—to air an episode when people should be off.” And then the July 4th weekend recently, I was like, “Yeah, I think people should go outside and just enjoy this.” I don’t want to be kind of creating noise for nothing.

But also, there’s something that’s unannounced regarding the podcast that’s pretty exciting, and I felt like maybe holding back an episode might’ve been worthwhile and kind of made sense with the release of that.

So that’ll be released probably a couple weeks after this airs. So, yeah.

Mike Pinkus: Okay. So I won't dive too deep on that. I'll wait for that—I'll wait for that big announcement. But Dominic, I really appreciate you joining me here. And I think that advice is amazing advice, 'cause most people don't realize that product-market fit is sometimes in the long tail. Meaning, it can be status quo or gradual, incremental growth, and then all of a sudden you hit some inflection point and everything changes.

I've seen that across our client base with businesses—that there's some magic number. It's different for every vertical and every business—where there's like a breakthrough, where you hit a certain level of scale and all of a sudden things just move faster. But most people give up way before that. And so that’s really good advice.

Dominic Piscopo: Yeah, thank you. And I mean, for accounting very specifically too, right? I think that the way that they do sales is—again, a referral is worth its weight in gold in accounting. And so you need to have worked with firms for a little while before they're even gonna refer you, right?

So there is that long kind of tail of patience. And then alliances are huge in the accounting world. If anyone’s listening and trying to sell to accounting firms, accounting alliances are super pivotal in terms of that. So yeah—even learning that, I was nine months into the sales process before I even was like, “Oh, this is how firms buy,” right?

So again, keep going through the motions, but also make sure you continue to learn and refine and understand what maybe you're doing wrong for sure as well.

Mike Pinkus: Yeah, that's important too. That being said, Dominic, now we are running out of time either way. But really appreciate you joining. I don't have much of a voice right now anyway, but thank you again. It's been really insightful.

Dominic Piscopo: And thank you, Mike. Thanks for having me.

Mike Pinkus: Thanks so much.

Mike Pinkus: That was Dominic Piscopo, founder of Big 4 Transparency. From the conversation, I took away three key takeaways.

The first: if you’ve ever read The Lean Startup, Dominic took that exact playbook and just launched a no-code version of his product on Reddit over a weekend. If it didn’t hit, he would’ve lost a weekend. And if it did, he knew he was onto something worth building. The key is to just take action and not overthink the first version of anything.

Number two: Dominic worked at Deloitte, a Big 4 accounting firm, and he had no idea what his salary was based on or what career progression would look like. That’s why solving your own problem normally leads to something people want.

Finally: Dominic’s podcast had very little traction over 40 episodes. It has only been recent that the viral nature of the podcast has shown up. This goes back to the lesson in entrepreneurship that you have to have patience and consistency because most of these benefits will show up in the long tail.

That's it for today. See you on the next episode.