Bootstrapped Web

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Bootstrap Web. Brian, we have a very special agenda for today.

Yeah. And that we've got nothing, folks.

We got no agenda.

Yeah. So this will be interesting. I mean, we we talked about just making it like a random show. Maybe we'll just, I don't know, just because we we've been talking for the last twenty minutes. We're like, wait, let's stop.

Let's just hit record. Yes.

We we went to the Twitters and we asked people what we should talk about. So we've got a few ideas there. We started just talking and where we ended up that we started to say, we should just record this, was product management. And Brian, you were saying you have some like hurdles on the initial creation process. Let's get

Yeah. Just to be clear, this is not something that I'm like working on trying to solve right now. I'm just saying in general, I guess this sort of picks up from what I was talking about last week on on the show, about I do everything. I'm the solo founder slash maker slash marketer for process kit. Right?

And so I I do have a developer who I work with every every weekday or or so to to work on the product, but everything that I'm giving him, he's completely under my direction. I'm I'm specking out what I want him to do. He does it. And then I review his work and we work out the bugs and then we ship it. Just historically through all my businesses, I feel like I've become very good at delegating and building businesses that run without me in the day to day but only after we've figured out the process and only after we've figured out what works and only after we have you know, a healthy growing customer base and everything, that's when I put people in place to just run the processes that I know work.

And I give them the process to do and then they do it.

So you go first, lay down the tracks, then start to back out.

And then I and then I like strategically like remove myself from the things that I do every day. But we know plenty of entrepreneurs. Think you're probably very much one of them who I feel like are much better at the idea of hiring and delegating in the early days to move faster sometimes or to or because they don't have the in house skills or just like the the idea of of hiring someone or delegating to start something up, to create a new thing. Whether that's a new marketing channel or or just doing the very first marketing work or or designing and building product or doing customer research even. I mean, I frankly I think that a lot of the customer research very early days kinda needs to be the founder or founders.

Things like marketing for example, like I I see a lot of startups, especially bootstrapped start well just any startups who who especially if the founders are more product focused, maybe they're designers and developers, they go to outsource the marketing. And I want to outsource marketing but I don't want to outsource it when it's the very first marketing campaigns that we ever, you know, like outbound marketing campaigns. I I want at least have the experience of doing that myself before I start to delegate.

Right? So most of the concern and the friction you're identifying, with is is in those early stages where how how do you outsource the beginning when how do you do that? It's got to be you. I hear you. I I personally have a history with that.

In in my family business, the business that my dad created and then at some point, all of us worked at. So my dad plus the three brothers all worked in this business together. We called it like the family business curse. People will recognize it that have read Emyth where you do the work yourself And sometimes you can get to a point where that can be lucrative enough that you can convince yourself that you should keep doing it. That's like the position we got ourselves into.

So if you create a business where you do all the work, but you're making like hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, it's tough to figure out what to do next, but you can't get to making millions of dollars a year unless you have people working with you and doing more work. So it's almost like it's like a law it's like a lawyer curse. It's like if you make $500 an hour, that's amazing, but you can't ever make $5,000 an hour. Mean, you can, but it's it's rare.

I feel like I have the opposite challenge. Just general mean like So

don't you see yourself as having a similar e myth kind of curse right now? You just happen to

be No. Because I I think I think once the business makes, is is steadily making revenue, that's when I start my my process of removing myself. Like I did that in Restaurant Engine. I did that in Audience House.

That's right.

That's the thing is like when when the business is is when the business is already profitable and I've been doing things every single day repeatedly to keep the business running, that to me is an easier path to say like, okay, I've been doing that every day. I know that by doing that it makes the business money. Now who do I need to hire to do it instead of me doing it? But in startup mode, we have a little bit of traction but it's still super, super, very early, you know, with ProcessKit. It's not profitable.

It's just basically breaking even at this point. It's not paying me a salary. Like even if I had the funds and I I have some cash but but maybe like that's part of it is that I don't necessarily wanna just burn all my cash. I'm just hiring someone to do to do it.

It's like the willingness or the freedom to burn. I mean, that's what when I say that But

but that's but that's also the thing like if I ever thought about like taking investment, even if I had the the cash on hand, I I don't know that I'd feel totally comfortable with with just immediately going out and hiring like a head of marketing.

I I don't wanna say that that's wrong or right. That's up to you. But I don't know if that's how it would work out. When we started off bootstrapping and then we got into a thing where I call cheating at bootstrapping where we took some money, but effectively all the dynamics are very similar to bootstrapping. Yeah.

I mean like I would rather spend the money on marketing stuff like ads or or if I need to like outsource to hire writers but I'm I'm still running the strategy. That's what I mean.

Yes. Well you can run the strategy for a really long time but you do have to get to a point where you are comfortable with people executing on that strategy to a much higher degree. Like right now, we're building a lot of new stuff in the company and I am involved and I am running the strategy in the direction but I'm not doing any of the work. A lot of the work I can't do and and that's when I say cheating and bootstrapping, I like the word cheating to describe it because it gets really difficult when you start to make progress but you're not making enough money to hire people, but you can't go fast enough if you're doing everything yourself and you get stuck right in that position and that, you know, that initial 275 k that we raised, that's what allowed us to go over that lead so that we didn't have to look at the bank account when making this the decision of we need two people. If we don't have two people, then I'm gonna keep doing all the support.

If I keep doing all the support, I can't move forward on partnerships enough. I came with partnerships, then I won't make enough money to hire people and you get

So like like like support is a good example because that's the kind of thing where like, yeah, I do take support emails and stuff but it's not dominating my workday to the point where it's preventing me from from moving any other balls forward.

Yeah. Like Well that's

So so what because once it does, obviously that that would be a a key hire to make right away is is Yes. And and I've done that before, know.

You're talking about the creative process, the creation, product management, priorities.

Yeah. So I mean if we're talking about product, then we're talking about like, okay, then I would actually have to hire like a designer and then also a product manager. I guess that would maybe still be me but then I would be telling them like I don't know. I I feel like I'm the creative design force behind process kit right now. Like, it it seems hard to I could definitely see hiring for that role in the future once the businesses has grown and the team has grown and I'm onto other things within within ProcessKit.

But like right now I'm I'm designing and building that forms feature that we talked about last week. I'm the person who's talking to customers every day and I've and I've designed up everything up till now. Like why would I outsource that? You know what I mean?

If you assume that you will have to at some point then building up the muscle and willingness to do it, it's a muscle, the ability to trust other people with very very critical things. It's not an easy thing to get over. I I hear you. We we have a few roles that we're hiring for now that I'm like, how are we gonna find someone to do this? It's still unfathomable even when we have 20 people now, it's still hard for me to come to terms with we're gonna find someone amazing that can execute on this specific thing that I think isn't really executable but by someone other than me or someone who's already on the team.

But that belief or that resistance keeps getting run over by great people over and over and over again.

I mean marketing is the other one that I really wonder about because I hear so many people talking about like, I'm gonna go hire a head of marketing or hire a marketer, a generalist marketer to go do marketing for my business. That is like and I I get it for a company of your size, but for a brand new startup, I don't understand that hire. Like like to me, it makes so much more sense to already know what the strategy is and then just outsource the the creation of the assets that you need to do your strategy or pay for the marketing spend. But like getting somebody to say like, okay. Here's a brand new product.

We have no data except for our very early customer conversations. Have at it. Like, figure it out. Like

Really tough to do these days.

It's just really tough. Really tough. Know? Because because then it's you're you're paying for that person plus you're paying for all these different marketing tests because you don't have any data to work off of yet. Like that just seems like you could easily throw away so much money and time when really it's like you're talking about reaching your target market.

That seems like a founder's job in the very early days.

Or at least figuring out what those channels are that work and how to do it. I mean, you know, a few of the tweets coming in are about marketing and how are marketing efforts going these days right now and I don't I don't want to touch any of those questions. I feel zero expertise and zero ability to dispense advice on it because marketing these days is a puzzle. We see the brands we work with that sell physical products. It's almost like the marketing in e commerce these days is much more fully developed.

Advertising plays a huge role and then there's community around it and there's positioning and there's influencers. There's there's a lot going on in the ability to sell and market physical products where software's just much fuzzier. Look, we're doing things now with powered by search, the agency. I think they're doing a great job. It's not really working very well yet.

I think it's going to take time to figure it out.

By the way, Dev has been posting some stuff on Twitter and stuff like the content that they put out from powered by search is great.

That's what really drew me to them. When we were going through the decision process with them, they had the perfect content for me along the way. I mean, that's I totally agree with you, which is why, you know, we're we're we're gonna give it time. No. We're not just gonna look at, oh, the campaigns have been up for two weeks and it's not performing yet.

Like, no, it's it's gonna take some time.

Yep. Yep. You know, we're looking at some of the things that are coming in through Twitter. And by the way, obviously when you're listening to this, if you if you ever wanna send us any tweets, I'm at castjam at jordangal on Twitter. Shoot us anything that you want us to talk about in future episodes.

That's always the best way because we basically live on Twitter.

Yes. We were talking about that before. Sahil from Gumroad, I liked his tweet. He said, Instagram is check out my body. Twitter is check out my mind.

And I I think that sums it up right there. I don't look at Instagram very often at all but Twitter catches your imagination.

I am completely addicted.

Yep. I love it. I

deleted actively not trying to break that addiction right now.

No. No. No. I deleted the Twitter app off of my phone when things got very hot politically and around the country and there was a lot of very disturbing stuff going on. Their web experience on mobile is just horrible.

Yeah yeah So if you want it but but it's back on my home screen.

I actually have Twitter like baked into my development workflow.

So Uh-huh.

So like like I'll like I'll push something and then I'll and and I'll like I'll have to like run the test and then my next hand gesture is to like go pull up Twitter while I wait for the test to run. Or or am I pushing something to Roku? Go check Twitter. It's like in in the muscle memory there.

For me, it's email, Slack, Twitter. Yeah. There you go. Every once in a while, TikTok.

Yeah. Know. It's addicting. It is. It is.

So, yeah, like, some of these questions coming in through Twitter right now are a lot of them are very similar to each other. So a bunch of folks are asking about how, how you and I both manage product management. So taking requests from users and customer research, and then how do we actually plan the long term roadmaps based on that stuff?

Okay. Yeah. I'm sweating over product management right now. That's that's where where I am. We have a fantastic product lead.

She's been with us for a year. She's straighten out the boat, the the whole deal. I can't say enough good things. That's Jessica. But she's gone on on maternity leave and we have we have a really big project coming up over the next six months.

So the idea that we searched far and wide and got lucky, that's what it feels like that we found Jess, now to basically have to do that again. Like you must find someone amazing in the next sixty days. I'm concerned because what you talked about earlier, product management is something that I simply cannot do. What do

you see as product management? Because even the whole term, it's what I do every day but it still feels fuzzy to me in terms when you talk about like a job description for somebody that you would hire.

We look at it in two parts. One strategic and the other practical. The strategic part of it is interpretation. Looking at

feedback and figuring out what that map to actual features that we may or may not build.

Yes. And then how does that affect prioritization and let me make sure that it's still, you know, she checks in with myself and in Rock. Like so we have like a little mini group, the three of us. Right? Myself, Rock CTO and then Jess as product lead.

And and a lot happens within that triangle because that makes sure that not only are we listening to customer feedback which comes from the team, from Emily running success and support and from the individual contributors at the success and support level but also let's make sure that it jives with what Rock and Jordan looking at in the future. So it's a combination there and then that translation is like the strategic part of the PM.

To me the most important part of that is the customer feedback.

Okay. For us it's not necessarily

Well that's my question to you is like you said that the head of product is getting information from the customer support team or is the product lead actually talking to customers?

Both. I would say the majority of the time is speaking to the team and then around let's say we redid our analytics recently and launched it and it was a mostly successful launch. We had a few things that are missing but then we were able to add them in. So overall, the project was successful. Something like that, we you have to talk to customers.

It's okay. What's wrong with our existing analytics? Can I watch how you normally check our analytics? Why are you exporting this to CSV? Why is it not available?

So that comes down to customers. But day to day features that we already know we need, we do a lot in public in Slack. That's one of the things we've changed recently. Instead of having everything in HubSpot and Jira, we actually pull out these conversations into Slack, into a support channel. And so whenever the support team needs something that they can't answer themselves, instead of only happening inside HubSpot and Jira.

That's now happening publicly in Slack. I have had to learn to shut the heck up and not dive into that regardless of how I feel But watching people work it out, it means everyone's watching it, everyone's uncovering it and product is watching at the same time.

Mhmm. That's cool. I can imagine that like when you have, you know, volume of of day to day support tickets and sales conversations, then I guess that that product person can like, can mine data from those tickets. Like how many, how many times has this feature been mentioned in a support request or, or how many, how many times that are like when the sales team comes back and says like, we're having trouble answering this question that keeps coming up from prospects.

And there's also enough data for it to be dangerous in in if you only listen to what customers want, you can you can get lost. You can get lost in not following the strategic vision. So we have enough customers and enough revenue specifically profit at this point that we have to be okay saying, we know that hurts and we are just not gonna tackle it right now.

That's a good Hello. Hello there.

This is Marlo, the six year old. Hi, kid.

Hi, Marlo. Hi. We've got a special guest on Bootstrap Web today.

We do. You wanna show Brian what you made? She likes to make me these beautiful art pieces and then is like, Oh wow. You know, I'm gonna take this back. Okay daddy?

And I say, You got it kid.

That's very colorful. I like it. I'm gonna add something onto this.

Sounds good kiddo.

Very cool.

Yes. So then the practical part, that is the part that I have no idea how to do. The ability to run a process and get people the information they need ahead of time, specked out with it's like that is a rocket science to me.

I want to pick right up on that because it's a good question that James Sours sent through Twitter here. He says, Love to hear how you think about customer experience when building your products and services. So start with lots of customer research or just trust your gut? How often do you conduct audits or seek out feedback to make improvement? See, I really value the customer feedback to understand the problem but I am not looking to customers to solve it.

To me, that's the job of the designer, you know.

I like that split. Listen to the customer in their description of the problem and look to your gut in the solution that you think is right for

us. Yeah and then maybe if something is still off then you get feedback on what's still not working about the solution. But in terms of like the, how it looks on the page, but also the customer experience and things like that, like it, this is also where it really helps for me to, to be a user of my product, know, like how would I want it to work? I, I'm, I'm obsessed with customer experience. I'm obsessed with designing things on the web and, and, and user interface design.

And so I have pretty strong opinions and strong feelings about how interfaces should work. I'm not going to like run mockups or you know, early mock ups by customers to get their takes on it. I've actually tried that in the past and it's what I found is that most customers just don't give you a lot of feedback on a visual wireframe. They'd much rather describe their current workflow and that's really what's more important. It's like I'm always asking about how are you currently doing that?

What tools are you currently using for that? Why are you unhappy with those tools? Why are you even talking to me right now about process kit? Cause why, why don't you just keep using those tools? Yes.

I love that. I mean, I love asking those questions cause it's like they did book this call for a reason. Something is not right. I want to uncover that. And then in terms of the customer experience, my goal is generally just keep the friction down as much as possible.

Just help them achieve their actual goal as easy as possible. That that's number one, but also try to make it obvious. How would I expect it to work? You know, try to get as close to that as possible. Sometimes you're you're limited with functionality or whatever, but like, what would be the obvious way for this button to to appear on the page?

Don't try to be too cute or too

Like trendy or anything.

It's just like help them achieve the thing with as little friction as possible.

Yeah. We're a gut company a lot of the way. In many ways we are in a completely new category. There there are a handful, literally like three or four companies doing what we're doing. It's not a well understood category.

It's not fully developed. It's not highly competitive. For much of our history, we've we've gotten away with things not being great in terms of the customer experience. But just the fact and virtue that we allow them to do what we do is is the biggest value that we offer. And we have been improving slowly the whole way.

A lot of the attention we're putting toward this new project which is really like a revamp, right? Like how do we now go from that reality from, hey, this is amazing that we let you do this. Now how do we actually make it good the whole way through with the customer experience? And even then, I hesitate to say that we're not looking at the customer feedback so much because what we're doing now is we hired almost like a product project manager. We hired a freelancer to run the product research process And so I'm interested to see how he does it.

And I don't wanna impose, well look, I kind of have a gut feel and I know what's best. I'm I'm not doing that this time and we're just gonna invest in his version of the process. And my guess is it'll be more in-depth than mine for sure.

Yeah. I mean I like that because I I could imagine with a company like yours, there's just so much more data to work with. So like I said, like so many they can go to support tickets. They can go to what the developers are seeing. They can go to what the sales team is seeing.

You know, what marketing is seeing and collect all this information. Like it doesn't even have to be directly customer research interviews. It could just be, maybe even more valuable is to just observe like like, they they seem to be mentioning this keyword a lot in these support tickets.

Yeah. Yeah. We're we're challenging ourselves to look at what we currently have as a bit of a disconnected starting point. Like what do we allow the user to do that's valuable but let's ignore how we ask them to do it. Like we we took a stab at it and we didn't, you know, we didn't have the resources to really develop this stuff out.

So we we we kinda just put it together ourselves with what made sense, know, Ben and I and Rock and Jan and we we took a stab at it. But it doesn't mean we have to live with that forever. It's one one way to accomplish it. And when I look at it, I can very clearly identify things that we could have done better. So why would we use that as a starting point and just improve the design?

We we really should change the experience.

Yeah. Yeah. Should we shift gears a little bit?

Why not?

How about how about hobbies? I wanna hear I wanna hear about hobbies. This is something that that I've been trying to trying to do more hobbies And not not more hobbies, just actually have a hobby or so

I I see you with that guitar. You're a dangerous man on that guitar, Brian Castle.

Yeah, man. Like You you're smooth.

It's nice.

I've been playing I've been playing my whole life and I stopped playing for like almost not completely stopped but like for like ten years there I really wasn't playing much and only recently I picked it back up again and it's it's just felt great to play again you know and and this time very much as a hobby. Like when I was younger, was like, I'm serious Yeah. About

You're serious.

You know? But like now it's like, it's legit a hobby. And and so one question that I have is, I'm curious to know from anyone or from you, how much time, but also like how much money do you spend on on hobbies? Like, because I I tend to have That's

an interesting interesting way of looking.

I tend to have a hard time spending money on stuff, like, especially like on hobbies. Okay. Like we gladly we gladly spend on traveling and trips and which obviously we're not right now, but like Right.

And that's expensive. We

we do expensive trips every single year. We love doing Especially

with the family, you you drop thousands of dollars just like left and right. Travel, hotel, car.

And we don't have like a super luxury car or anything, but like, I'm also fine with spending a little bit more to get a more comfortable car because I'm in it every single day.

Yeah. I mean, we have three kids. We do minivan. When when we go to that Michigan trip that involves Chicago also, it's $1,500 for just just the minivan we rent. And it's you you can't really get away from it.

And we've got like a comfortable home here, like, you know, nice TV room and everything and and outdoor like things that we are literally living in every single day, I'm perfectly fine with spending what it takes to

But be things that are like ephemeral that just kind of go away.

Yeah, you know, like

A guitar you keep, but

Look, I've had my eye on, on, a $4,000 guitar. And, like Yeehaw. And, like, I'm not gonna play that every single day.

I don't need it. It's tough.

But, like, I'm not gonna, like, get, like, the budget version of that guitar. So it's, like, you know.

Yes. You you get stuck. I hear you. We've had some weird things like that come up where you know, we we just bought a house for the first time last summer. And everything costs a lot.

It's, you know, it's like the the house doesn't have air conditioning. A lot of houses in Portland don't have it. We have all the ducts but I'm like, air conditioning. It's like $8,000. A lot of after tax money to spend.

And I look at the yard, that's one of the things that we've been investing in. Like we've been gardening and having fun like making pretty basically. But I look over at some neighbor's yards, I'm like, damn, that's nice. Maybe I should just hire a landscaper and kinda trick it out. But it is something you live in and you experience

Look at yard on the lawn. Oh, man. So

one of the hobbies that I've gotten into and had You're cooking

up a storm in there, man.

I've seen. Been cooking up a storm. I bought a smoker and you know, Thursday comes around, Friday comes around and I find myself, I open up the laptop and I'm like, alright, what am I making this weekend? Do I need to order any rubs? Do I need to put an order into the butcher shop?

Like what what are my options? And ever since looking at it as a hobby, I'm less sensitive to the amount of money I spend on it. Because if I buy a brisket and it's $60 it sounds a little ridiculous to buy a piece of meat to have dinner for $60. But if it's like a hobby and I'm doing it once a week, that's like, hey, that's not that bad. It's a few $100 for the month but I'm having a great time with it and the satisfaction of people eating it and all that.

It's it's

Dude, mistakes that I'm seeing on Twitter look amazing.

I have been putting in my work on the stakes and I I I'm like there. I, you know, you make these little mistakes and these little adjustments and at literally as you're doing it, realize I'm making the mistake right now. Next time I won't make the same mistake.

Yeah. My wife, is a really fantastic cook and she's Filipino. So she, she, we do pretty regularly, we do these Filipino dishes. So good.

So good. Cooking, I think a lot of people in quarantine life have looked to cooking as more than just let me make a bite to eat. People get into it. You have time. It is is highly satisfying.

Yeah. You know, it it can be frustrating. And I mean,

the cost is it's nothing compared to like

Yes. Your guitar is is a year's worth of

No. But like even but even what what what what my family spent a month on just eating out before COVID. I took a glance at it maybe two months ago just to compare like our credit card or like the family credit card bill compared to like say January or December or whatever. I mean, we're we're saving at least 3 k a month on

Yeah. This is the only time we've ever we've ever kept with our budget. These few months because you you eliminate restaurants, you eliminate going out to lunch every day.

I a lot at Starbucks which I am not doing anymore.

Nope. Nope. Same. That part of it feels good. You know, pretty thin on hobbies, man.

The timing is difficult. If I can put my phone away and go run around with my kids in the yard for

an That's hour the hardest thing.

Yeah. That's that's a good way to spend my time. I'm I'm I'm happy.

Yeah. Well, part of it for me now is is that my both my kids but especially my older one is is taking piano lessons and she does have the natural feel for it. So she's really into that. She's super into like, I play like Metallica and stuff in the car. She loves that stuff.

She gets into it too.

Parenting's pretty wild. Yeah. Pretty wild. We're we're we're getting deeper in on on that front and it gets more complicated. I mean, our our oldest is eight, so it's still not complicated, but we are taking baby steps toward more competition.

I forgot you you had one because I I know that two of our kids are basically the same age.

Yeah. We have four, six, and eight.

Okay. So we have a four and a six. Yeah.

Yes. Yes.

Yeah. Wonder if they're gonna, reopen in in the fall school.

Yeah. We're we're we're baffled by what to do. Our youngest goes to a school that's in the children's museum here in Portland. And normally, it is a just the coolest environment ever to have school in. Right?

It's like these two classrooms in the back of the museum. So what you have access to is incredible. The yards, the outdoor space, the park that it's inside. But in COVID world, that is the worst petri dish in the city. Everyone bringing their kids there.

So it's we're hesitating whether or not to send her back there but then it feels bad not allowing her to go back and it feels like it was pretty straightforward. Schools closed. Cool. Let's go homeschooling. But now as we get closer to the fall, you're really starting to realize, oh, we're gonna have to make some decisions that we really don't wanna make and we don't know what it looks like.

And my wife is the president of the PTA so there's just a lot of questions and a lot of ambiguity and a lot of pressure.

Wow. We know a lot of homeschoolers here in our communities online and everything, but we are not homeschoolers. Same. Doesn't come natural for us and we do it and my wife has been doing most of it. It's been fantastic.

And the kids get a kick out of it, but like we we don't want this to go on

in the fall. Yeah. No no one else gets a kick out of it. What else? I I have enjoyed some of the debates recently on Twitter about financing, funding, what are the alternatives, how come there isn't, how come there aren't more alternatives?

And Einar that we know from Tiny Seed wrote a tweet about the fact that there should be a TSX for The US. So TSX is a Toronto Stock Exchange and it is effectively a stock exchange for small cap. If you look at the IPO market, it is it isn't just out of reach. It's out of reach for huge companies. It is mega cap at this point.

And that's not really the way it was intended to be but all of these regulations that got layered on top due to very real scandals and maybe some overreaction, they've just removed going public as an option. And so right now, companies either stay private or they get acquired. That's that's really the option set is super narrow and it has changed the nature of investing, changed the nature of running an early stage company. So think about where I am right now. Right?

Think about process kit in a few years from today. Right now, the only thing I can really look forward to in an exit is if another company buys the company and then I lose my company. That's currently my ideal, which doesn't actually sound that great. The money sounds cool, when it actually comes down to it and I feel like we're not even close to done, I don't want to give it up. I don't want to stop doing what I'm doing.

I I love it.

Yeah. You your your ideal scenario really is like a a big IPO and then keep growing it.

Right. Now big big for us, not big in in the larger economy, but the ability to raise money shouldn't be exclusively the arena of VC or nothing or maybe some angels. There's Regulation A plus there's Republic, an interesting company that helps companies go public through Reg A plus but there isn't anything like the TSX and the ASX. ASX is the Australian stock market. So an integration partner of ours.

This is all foreign to me. What size companies are traded on there?

So the beautiful thing is that it's public. So you can see what's happening. An integration partner of ours called Sezzle. Sezzle is a split payment provider. So it allows you it allows a merchant, let's say on Shopify, to offer the shopper the ability to pay in four payments without any interest.

So instead of paying a $100 now, pay $25 over the next four months. It's really over the next three months because it's today and then three more payments. But it has really taken off that concept. There's a company called Afterpay, It's an Australian company. That's currently valued at $12,000,000,000 on the Australian Stock Exchange so it's not limited to small cap.

But a company like Sezzle, they were not much bigger than we are right now and raised $30,000,000 by going public and then were able to secure a $100,000,000 debt facility because now they're in the public markets. They have access to capital and their market cap currently is $335,000,000. And two major things there. Three major things, access to capital for the company, liquidity for the founders and employees to a reasonable extent. If you're the founder, you don't want to sell all of your shares because that'll tank confidence and then you'll basically screw your company.

The last thing on it is that they still get to run their company. They didn't sell.

They get to keep growing.

Yes. Yes. So that's you can do that at you know, 10,000,000 ARR, 12,000,000, 15,000,000. That is that is completely different from what everyone sees as the norm And the other interesting part about it is from the investor point of view

Yeah. There there's more opportunity for investors.

Absolute I'm gonna guess if I published all of our financials and said we're raising money for it and you can invest as little as, you know, a $100, my guess is that some people would be interested investing in in Cardhook because they would see, hey, this is a gigantic growing market. I bet if I get in when the valuation is, call it 50,000,000 when we go public, I bet that's gonna go up. Maybe that'll go up 10 x over the next few years, up with $2,000 down on that. And it shouldn't be a hurdle. It shouldn't be this illegal thing because you're not an accredited investor because of all these arbitrary reasons that you're locked out of it.

Moving to Canada gets more and more attractive every day.

But I mean Canada Canada's looking real good right now. But but the TSX and ASX, they have a lot of American companies. Yeah. So it is becoming more real soon. Well that

was my question. Was like can you, how do you get access to that?

You can do it. You can absolutely do it. It's not an easy thing and usually people do raise around in anticipation of it because it is increased burden of accounting and statements and all these requirements rightfully so. So you do properly not to fraud people. But, you know, in my conversations to explore all financing options as we've discussed, one firm, this is what they do.

They make an investment and then the goal is twelve to twenty four months later to go public on on one of these exchanges. And so they're basically saying, Alright, we like where this is headed and we know the market well enough that we know we can successfully shop this around to the institutions that are required to get that boost of institutional support so you get a conglomeration of five to 10 investment banks that all put in money effectively at the IPO stage. And if we put in money at this valuation, we're pretty comfortable that within twenty four months they can get to this and then it's a great bet for them. It's not a 100 x bet as if, hey, hopefully, Square acquires Kartok for, you know, $500,000,000 in a few years. It's not that type of bet, but it's it's less risky also.

Yeah. You know, what what does your job day to day look like right now?

So it's moved around. I would say that right now that

Obviously not talking about any anything that you're actually doing on that front but like

Right. Yeah. Right now that is a lot of my day to day but where I'm focused on the company and product, it's a lot of hiring, annual reviews, you know, conspiring with Rock on how we're gonna accomplish these things that are gonna be difficult.

Like how many meetings are you in internally at Cardiff with with people on the team?

Five to 10 per week. So we have a few standing ones. Right? Every Tuesday, customer facing team stand up 10AM on Tuesdays. Demo download.

Katie runs a weekly meeting about here's the demand, here are how many demos got requested, here's who got approved, here's who's signing up. These are the big losses, these are the big wins, here are the unfortunate cancellations and why they canceled. So we just do a download of like what's happening in the pipeline. Yeah. That's a good That's Great.

A good

My favorite. Customer research one right there.

Absolutely. And you've really you can dig in. You can say, well, what did they say about this and why that and how come this is a blocker and all that's interesting that they actually want it want only wanna only use our product for a new product that's launching or they wanna use it for showing new lines of products as opposed to up actually upselling.

On that note, I guess kinda circling back to the whole product discussion, like how do you feel right now about cart Cardhook the product in terms are of like are there things in your mind that like you you know still today that you know like, oh, we have not built that yet. We know that we have requests for it. We will build it in the future. Or or are there other things where it's just not as competitive as you want it to be product wise or feature wise? Or or do you just do you feel like it's it's product market fit, we've we've nailed it, we're just optimizing it at this point?

It's a combination. At different times I'm very confident about it and other times I you know, I'm embarrassed about it. I think that's a normal range to to move back and forth in. I do feel like I've gotten a little bit too far away from the product at times. You know, when I'll notice, oh, I haven't logged in in a few weeks.

That that that type of thing. I just brought this up actually to the leadership, the team leads. I asked them how do we inject the product more deeply into our culture? So when we have an all hands meeting, we're not showing the product. We're not showing here's this new feature, here's what it looks like, here's how it behaves.

And so I worry about that.

Why don't you start a small ecommerce business or buy one?

We have considered that and it just it's harder than it looks.

Yeah, but like not super serious but just enough to be able to use the product for real.

We've created like a test store from scratch. Anyone can see that Meet Canopy, meetcanopy.co. That's our testing store. That's where we get images to show things off. That's where we create videos of of the product being demoed, that type of thing.

But actually launching look, we've talked about it multiple times. It's just that everyone's too busy. Everyone's focused on what everyone's already doing too much work and everyone needs help. So to ask the company to do could

be a fun thing for like junior employees to do or interns.

I agree. And I've thought about them like, we could kind of split the revenue equally among the entire team. And that could be kind of fun. I don't know. We might end up doing that.

I can see that being an amazing content project. Yeah. Yeah, too. So so when we have the resources to do that, I could see how it reminds me of Jungle Scout. Jungle Scout's a product software product run by Greg Mercer.

How am have no idea how I'm remembering any of this stuff. So it's very, very successful. Fully remote team, him and his wife traveling the world. It's cool coolest thing ever. They have a big team and what their software does is it helps find niches in Amazon that allow you to do that research before you launch a product.

So what they did is they just used their product from start to finish to launch. I think they launched a s'mores kit. You and I, we're going camping this weekend. Let me just buy a s'mores kit so I could have fun with the kids. And it's like, you know, the sticks and all that stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. I I think that was it. I think they were called jungle sticks actually. I have an amazing memory right now and I don't understand why.

Normally, I remember nothing. Because when you said hobbies, I started chuckling to myself because my real hobbies is edibles but we shouldn't talk about that. So they they that was like one of the best versions of content created out of using your own product that I've seen in long time.

Very cool. Very cool. Oh, I'm out of ideas.

Yeah. That's it. We went from Toronto Stock Exchange to content to edibles so

To sports.

That's that's pretty good.

Yeah. I think we've I think we covered a lot of ground

Yeah.

Good stuff. Why don't we wrap it?

Let's wrap it. Everyone, thanks for going on this little mini journey with us.

Yeah. This was this was fun. Again, if anyone has anything you want us to hear about in the future, that would be good because there are gonna be more days like this where we're just like, we've got nothing.

Yes. Yes, there will be. And next week, I'm out. I'm taking a day off. My six year old came up to me and said, but that's Marlo who we just saw earlier.

He said, daddy, when can you take a day off and hang out with us? That's not the weekend. I said, honey, I'm gonna find a day as soon as I can. So take it next Friday off. Yep.

Yep.

Cool. Alright, folks.

I'll see you, man. See you later.