December 09, 2025

Stop #21: Josh Haynam on Building a 100M-Lead Product, 12 Years of Bootstrapping, and Why Speed Beats Perfection

58 minutes

Every industry has one person quietly powering the success of thousands of brands—and in the quiz-funnel world, that person is Josh Haynam, Co-Founder & CEO of Interact, the quiz builder behind 100M+ leads, 1.3B quiz views, and some of the biggest brands and creators online.

Bootstrapped, profitable, and still founder-led after 12 years, Interact has survived four waves of VC-backed competitors—not because it had the most features, but because Josh bet everything on relationships, product clarity, and human psychology.

In this episode, Josh shares how he built a tech company that refuses to chase shiny objects… and still wins.

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In this episode, Josh walks us through:

⚡ How Interact survived—and outperformed—VC competitors for 12 years

⚡ The psychology behind quizzes (and why we’re now in the “Instagram Age”)

⚡ Why the best founders move fast—and why perfection is killing your results

⚡ How Interact scaled to $3.3M ARR with only 9 team members

⚡ What 8,000+ customer conversations taught him about modern marketing

⚡ What’s coming next for Interact’s design updates

⏰ TIMESTAMPS

3:38 – Competing with VC-backed copycats and why Interact chose relationships over features
8:23 – The real history of quizzes (yes, it starts in 1700s Irish pubs)
12:41 – Why agency partners, copywriters, and designers (“the Rich Pauls”) became Interact’s growth engine
16:11 – The shiny objects they did chase—and why they walked away
17:46 – What “ROI” actually looks like for quiz funnels
21:09 – What Josh is learning from today’s top creators generating 140K+ leads
27:18 – Building a no-ego team and the role of coaching inside the company
30:30 – Why quarterly offsites changed everything for their remote culture
33:06 – What’s coming in Interact’s design refresh
35:01 – Where quizzes are headed in the next 5 years
41:00 – Why founders over 30 struggle with speed—and how to fix it
48:29 – Josh’s 90-Day Marketing Playbook if he were starting Interact today
52:48 – HIGH / LOW / STOW