Bootstrapped Web

Hello, folks. It is bootstrap bootstrap web? Bootstrap web. Yeah. I think this is too much coffee for me at this point.

I'm a little out of balance.

You're skipping letters? Just Yeah. Unnecessary letters are

More efficient.

Yep. What's up, Brian? How we doing?

Doing alright. Doing alright. Yeah, it's Friday. Wrapping up, you know, another week grinding away. How's it going by you?

Same. You know, I've this pattern of being relatively stressy and angsty and frustrated early in the week. And then as it gets later in the week, I kind of calm down and get toward equilibrium. So it's Friday, feeling pretty good, going camping in a few hours, Take the fam out, get out into nature, hopefully the phone doesn't work. So it's good.

It's a good week overall. Yeah.

That sounds awesome. Yeah, we actually took a little road trip last week. My wife and I, we got away from the kids for a couple of days and know, socially distanced little road trip to We went to this place, Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania, and then we went down to the Jersey Shore, like the Southern tip of Jersey there. And it was a good break for me because like I was doing a little bit of work in the hotel, but it was kind of a good thinking break, away strategy, especially as I'm really diving more into the marketing side of things with ProcessKit and I've made some recent decisions and moves and kind of initiating some strategies there. A lot to think about.

And now this past week, I'm back in the office and trying to actually execute on stuff.

All right, very nice. I have been feeling guilty about the experience that we are providing our new employees. I want to do a better job on that and I'm I'm bummed that we don't do a better job on it at this point. At the same time, we don't have anyone on the team that's focused on it and so it really shouldn't be surprising that it's not good. So we're gonna continue to work on that.

We brought on, I think I think six people started over the past two weeks and we have another two starting on Monday.

What are you seeing? Where where does it what's the breakdown? What what's the problem in in your eyes?

So what I'm seeing is that someone will will come in and the analogy I made was like, imagine it's

a real

office. Imagine someone walked into the office and was was like there for the first day of work. Can you imagine just like not getting up out of your desk and saying hi? Like, that would be ridiculous. You'd go up and say hi and introduce yourself.

Well, I think what we missed, it's obvious in hindsight, but your entry into Slack is you walking through the door of the office for the first time. And we need to know that, acknowledge it and then behave appropriately for that, especially the leadership people, people in management positions. We looked at the entry into slack as one of the things you need to do to get set up, right? You need your computer, you need your, Jira, you need your, all the stuff, all the systems and software that we use, you need to get all set up and we treated Slack like one of those.

Because it's like the worst thing is like hopping into a Slack community or whatever but where it's like you just dropped in and now you see all this conversation happening. You don't even know who these people are and and you're the stranger in the room.

Yes. And you see some jokes happening and you see some, you see what is normal for us and the nomenclature and the way we use emojis, all that stuff, but you're not in it yet. And if you come in and people are busy, then they're going to focus on what they need to focus on and they look over. We also didn't do a great job of making sure people knew ahead of time who the person was, what they do, what their role is, and how they relate to you if at all. That's just not good enough.

So so we want to do a better job on that and we have two people starting on Monday and we're going to try to do a better job at it. It's like the within the team, right? If you're joining the back end team, like you get to know them quickly and it feels there's some camaraderie there. But not with the rest of the company and the lead in marketing and the product lead and like they're not coming in and welcoming you and forming a relationship early on and setting up a time to talk like it's happening. It happens over the first like two, three weeks.

But it's not planned out and executed according to the way we would want to be treated if we just walked in the door. There's work to do on it.

Yeah, very cool. Yeah. Yeah. Seems like a hard, a hard problem to work on.

We talked about on the podcast a few weeks ago around the need for that people person for someone who really thinks about employee experience. And I pushed that off. And I said, I don't think that's necessary right now.

And used to do a much better job of that in audience ops than we do now. I kind of feel the same as you, although, you know, with I always make this excuse, but it's it's really probably a bad excuse that that the team is mostly contractors, but they are in there every day.

Yep. That's a legal classification. That doesn't have anything to do with life experience.

No. Exactly. Exactly. Like we used to do more sharing of what are we doing this week? Of course, we're probably doing more when it wasn't pandemic time, but there's still a little bit of that, but we did also bring on some recently, you know, add some people at audience ops and it's been kind of quiet for them and it's, you know, it's not ideal.

Yeah. Yeah. I hear you. We want to set rituals just the way we do things. Like after this podcast on my list of things to do before I go camping is to make a like a Friday video.

So I make a loom video. I make it a little silly and fun. And I basically just congratulate everyone on good week. I highlight some people and I punt out a few things that people are doing well and I welcome the new people and it's just like have a great weekend. And at least it's like a ritual that you get used to.

We have work to do on that front.

Just yesterday I sent an email to the, to the whole team on audience ops. We had been using process kit in some of our operations, but now we're going to start expanding it into into more. Basically, you know, covering all of our ops using ProcessKit now. So I basically made an announcement that just to give everyone that that heads up. And I thought about doing, like, one of those, like, video messages about it, but I just ended up doing an email and yeah.

Not much risk. I didn't really ask for responses but it's like it doesn't feel like a team atmosphere, you know?

Yes. Yes. I'll do that on Slack and it gets like emojis and it gets other fun stuff. When I say great week, here's what looks, try to find something impressive that we accomplished or something. And you get the emoji love and that type of thing.

We have three classification of employees. We have full time employees of the American company. We have full time employees of the European company, and then we have contractors in Europe that are contractors of the American company. And it's like, how do you standardize the experience? Because those those are legal classifications and it's like, no one really cares.

If everybody's in Slack every day, they're

on the team. It's all that matters. Yeah. Of course. You you don't want someone to not feel like they're part of the team.

You you know who has this pretty good and done pretty well? I was talking to Dev, my boy from Powered by Search And they run new employees through like an online course. I think they use software that's like like literally core software.

Like a learning management thing.

Yes. Yes. And you'll watch videos about how they do things and like company history and then very, very simple like questions on it to like kind of make sure that you followed it. And it really feels like a training like you come in and your first few days like you're meeting people and then you do something about the company history. You do other things and then you like, here's how we onboard new customers to our agency.

That sounds like a good place to be. So maybe I'll kinda dig in with Dev to see how how he does that.

Yeah. We have a version of that. It's probably not as robust but it's only for our managers, our our account managers at Audience Ops. They, their first two weeks or so is is going through a lot of stuff and they're working with our with our team manager on like, here's here's how we onboard clients. Here's here's your weekly routine that you'd go through with all of all the clients that you manage and and all that.

And then also we we do a lot of like, for those managers, they spend a good amount of time like, just hop into our help scout and just watch. Just poke into conversations and poke into Slack and just observe how things happen before they start like actually working on stuff,

you know? Yes. Yes. Well, I'm gonna try to do a reset. And yes, you don't get the chance to have someone come in their first day ever again.

But I think we can if we do a better job over the next month, it will make up for the fact that we didn't do a great job on the first few days. And it's not like I think maybe it's more paranoid than anything. It's not like they're unhappy and are disappointed, but you want to give a better experience.

Yeah, of course. Very cool.

So what's happening on process kit, my man?

Let's see. So, increased the hours for my developer that I've been working with. So we're almost basically like a full time week with him now and we've been, you know, still just cranking on features just about to launch. So by by next week, will be launched. I'm focusing on the features that just get requested the most.

And this one is recurring projects and and recurring tasks, basically. So like, you know, the ability to when you when you create a new project that has to happen once a week or once a month or, you know, every day at five, then process kit you you can actually program in your own schedule for that. And then every time it just fires up a new process, delegates the tasks, automates all that stuff, all the dates and everything. And you could even say like, yeah, every day except for weekends or except for these days and stuff like that. So it's pretty slick.

You can do some powerful stuff with it. That's coming soon. Then on the product front, it's still this sort of a battle of feature requests and prioritization.

Is this what you tweeted about on the chicken egg? Part

of it. Yeah. On the feature request stuff, I'm trying to still think through like It's just an ongoing challenge really for the past many months where I know that all of these are common frequently requested features and I don't have a good system to prioritize them. In my mind, I know like, all right, this is a key important feature to build. I want to do that one next.

And then this one is also important. I've had a bunch of requests for that. You you mix that in with the sales side of things. So like, there are a lot of customers who come to Processkit, check it out, start a trial, maybe do a demo with me, and decide it's not right for them yet. They go away.

They come back three months later or four months later or five months later. And cause they've been keeping tabs on the new feature announcements and, and now, now they think it's, it's almost ready for them and then they, and then they convert. Like that's a really common pattern. The other day, a guy, one of those, like I did a demo call with him probably five months ago. He had asked about a very specific feature request that that actually wasn't super common, but it was it was the type of feature that, like, we're obviously gonna build that at some point.

It's it's one of these, like, standard user interface features that will be needed at some point, but I've been pushing it off because people have not been banging down my door to get this feature built. But this one guy was like, that's super important to me to have that. I was like, okay. Like five months ago, was like, alright, I hear you. Cool.

It's definitely on the road map. Don't worry. You know, I hope you can try it out without that for a little while. He ended up not converting back then. He emails me three days ago.

So he's been keeping tabs. And he's like, how are we doing on that on that notification? And it's like, I like, we have not even cracked into it even in the slightest bit yet, you know, because we've had these other big features and I'm not going to stop everything for this one guy, but I'm just saying like, it's, it's this mix and match that there's at any given time there's like, there could be 20 or 30 of different people who are waiting for certain features and it's hard to keep track, you know?

Oh, that's, that's hard.

I do think that this recurring projects, this is the kind of thing that gets asked about on almost every demo call and like we're, finally got up to it. Now that'll be rolled out on Monday.

Yeah. And I'm curious if you know how people are keeping tabs. Is it email or Twitter? Because you do a nice job on Twitter of showing what you're working on. Does that get pushed through email as well?

You would be on the process kit email list if you have ever started a trial or ever did a demo call with me. So a couple thousand people on that and every big feature that we release, not the small improvements but like, so once or twice a month I send a newsletter blast to that list to say here's the next biggest feature we just launched. So people watch that. And then I also have a private Slack and a private Facebook group. Facebook's not as active as the Slack, but there's a few 100 people who've joined the private Slack and and there's a forgot exactly where it is.

And one of the e one of the automated email sequences, it it gives them the link to join that. So so people are continuously joining that private Slack community. There I announce every new feature, even the small ones. And then there's Twitter. And and I try to be, you know, work as in public as much as I can on that.

Yeah, you do a good job of that. Because I'm familiar with what you're talking about on the recurring because I just saw the GIF. I'm just scrolling through and I see you announce something and then it just lodges itself in my head so that that's effective. I sympathize because I feel like we were just there in that struggle of well, people want this feature, but they're not yelling for it and paying customers want these other features. And we should probably make sure they stay happy, but no one's leaving because it doesn't exist.

It's it's really muddled on the prioritization. Now it's much easier to be, you know, brave about it and be like, well, whatever, we're just not going to build it for you. Because because you need each new customer less than you used to. And it puts you in a position of power and it can cross over into arrogance and you can kind of lose your step by by not listening to people the same way. Maybe that's the danger.

You know, it's not the more common issue that you might think of where it's like, I get all these requests and I have to decide whether or not they make sense for the product. The truth is most of these requests were already in our roadmap. Like, already decided. It's definitely going to be in the product. Here and there, there might be something more like, I'm not sure about that one.

Maybe, maybe not. But most of them are obvious needs, and I totally understand their need. It's just a matter of bandwidth and time. And I actually don't even think that even if I doubled up, tripled up the developers, theoretically of course we can move faster through the roadmap with more developers, but it's just more to manage. Because I'm I'm deep into designing each and every feature.

So I can't design three at the same time, you know?

Yeah. I I think you're you're starting to bump up again. So I I do a monthly coaching call with a software entrepreneur that we we all know. And she's in the same boat where at some point your product is providing value and people are paying for it. And now you look around and realize the power of distribution and how it doesn't really matter how good your product is at some point.

If your products terrible yet, you're not going to get anyone is really not going to work out at all. But when you get to a few thousand in MRR, then you start to realize, oh, it doesn't matter how good I make this. If I don't get distribution, not going to go anywhere.

No, exactly. And that's primarily what I'm focused on right now is marketing. Because we have customers. We do have a few thousand MRR and it's like because what I've learned is that even with all these feature requests, there's a percentage of customers who are ready to convert even knowing that they have feature requests that we have not built yet.

Yes. The assumption, a very safe assumption, is that will literally never end.

Right.

Right. You will never get there and there will not be a moment in time the way all of us fall into the trap of when I release this feature, it's going to change things like it is rare.

Yeah. And I don't I don't expect that's going to happen with process kit.

It's just continuous on that side, but the distribution channels

I I do know that there are leads in the pipeline that that are waiting for features before they could even commit to trying it. But then there there have been there continue to be leads who it, it does enough for them to pay for it now and they use it and knowing that like other features are coming later. And some of them it's, it already has everything that they need now. So that'll just be a continuous thing. So the tweet that I put out, I think yesterday was that SaaS is an ongoing chicken or egg problem and it happens on both the product side and maybe even more so the marketing side.

The reason why I put that out there is because there's something We've all heard the best practice or the general advice about, Oh, you've to validate an idea with customers before you build anything or all this stuff. And like, okay, I agree and that's a good directional way to validate that you're on the right track. So talking about the product side of things now. I've seen time and time again, like no matter how many conversations you have with people who tell you, yes, I will pay for that, things are different when they're faced with the prospect of paying for it. And then there's like, okay, well then why don't you do presells?

I've seen that happen too. I've done presells before and I've actually seen only a small percentage of the people who pre bought end up being recurring subscribers. The rest just sort of drift away.

Yeah, not a silver bullet.

Nope. Not a silver bullet. So the chicken or egg on the product side is like you need customers, you need paying customers in order to really know what paying customers truly are ready to pay for and actually use. But you can't get paying customers without a product for them ready to use. It's like that's just an ongoing thing, like what we're talking about here.

Yes. And I think a lot of the best practice view is really more applicable to the venture version of things. Like, you know, don't hit the gas until you hit product market fit is like, not really as applicable to everyone to bootstrap into people who aren't trying to go.

But even that like, so like the chase for product market fit. The only way you get there is to keep trying to sell it to customers until you find the channel that's, you know, the customers that are buying the thing, you know, or that you'd make the thing that customers want to buy. And so, you know, there's there's no easy answer to that. That that was sort of the point of the tweet is that it that is what it is. It's a chicken or egg.

You just gotta keep going through that cycle, you know?

Yeah. Sometimes you get lucky and they kind of it works out or you just struggle That's why it takes so long to figure out what you need to do and how you need to get it to people.

For me, the more frustrating part is the marketing side. I'll say frustrating just because I'm an impatient person, but it's a problem that can be solved. It just takes time I think. And that's on the marketing. It's like, okay, like you said, like you don't really want to step on the gas with traffic and top of funnel until you know that you don't have a leaky bucket and that you have a high enough conversion rate in your onboarding and trial to paid conversion and retention rate and all that kind of stuff.

But you can't optimize for conversion unless you have, even if you have some traffic, maybe an audience or whatever, like that could be the completely wrong traffic for you that's not likely to convert, but there is other traffic that is likely to convert. And so chicken or egg, man. It's like you can't optimize until you have the traffic. Maybe you shouldn't get the traffic until it's optimized.

I hear you but I do think you are past the point of that early stage where you are so deep in the chicken and egg, it's hard to even know what to build, it's hard to know who it's for. I think

Yeah, no, know who it's for and we've built most of the product by now.

It's right. I've definitely heard the saying before that like first time founders focus on product and second time founders focus on distribution. When you focus on the product, come to realize that it's not that it doesn't matter how good your product is, because a great product is the best thing you can possibly do for yourself. But that the world does not care how awesome your product is until you find a way to tell them about it. And so you know that that's kind of where my conversation went with with the the mentee yesterday and that's kind of where my mind is going.

You know, we are gearing up to bring our product and our solution to other platforms. The only thing on my mind, not the only thing, but the dominant thing on my mind is how am I gonna hack the distribution? How am I gonna get in with the platform? How am I gonna make inroads into the agency ecosystem? How am I gonna, you know, make sure that our App Store listing is unique and it's just about how do more people find out about this in an efficient way?

How do we use our existing credibility to hack that? It's

No, you're still right about that. And and I'm I'm glad you're saying that because I I still think that we we tend to hear a lot of people with, people who just share all this knowledge like, look, the product has to be right. You have to solve a problem so perfectly that demand is just going to overwhelm your door. You can perfectly solve a problem but people just don't know about it. It's a huge world.

It's a huge internet. Like you gotta get the exposure and sometimes that like it's not just gonna like magically happen by launching a website that says you built a thing, know?

Nope, nope. Even if it is non traditional, you have to still help it happen. So if it's if it's word-of-mouth, you need to put the systems in place to promote word-of-mouth. I'm going to keep thinking about this. In in some ways, I have the luxury of other people worrying about the product much more so.

Right? And and that is a chicken egg problem that that you're in where you're like, but how do I focus on this? And how do I make enough money so that I can hire someone here? But I need this first and that that's just that's just difficult. There's there's no there's no hack around that.

Some people hack that by raising money. But if you don't want to do that and change the trajectory, then it's just difficult kind of valley to get through.

Yeah, I guess I'll just talk real quick about like some marketing stuff because that's what I've been working on lately.

And I want to talk about raising money stuff. Yeah, yeah.

Yes. I think I talked about this last time. I've been looking for a marketing person to work with me on stuff. So I did I did find someone we're, we're doing some content development, but it's also sort of paired with promotion and like outreach and link building and things like that and SEO optimization. So I'm excited to like, like I have pulled the trigger on that and we're starting, but that that's going to be a long term, like, you know, we're going to start rolling out these, these big content pieces and whatnot, like over the next few months.

So that's a long term development. I'm starting to do some more like podcasts and co hosting of webinars and Facebook Lives and stuff like that. Some of those are booked out, but I'm still looking for that thing where it's like, look, I know who the ideal customers are, their agencies and I know even specifically what types of agencies and indicators of good fits and things like that. I'm like, how can I just like send those people an email and say, hi, process kit exists, just so you know? Of course, we get a thousand of those in our inbox every day.

So how do you do that without just getting marked as spam every single day?

Not not an easy thing. Could be worth the experiments to go direct. I like identifying where audiences exist and then and then dipping into other people's audience as my preferred ideal. Maybe that's partly from shying away from direct and also going toward my personal strength of being able to form relationships. So it's like if someone manages a group or an organization that works with hundreds of agencies, like that's who I'm going for.

I think I need to do more of that. I have a few of those things in the works right now that are sort of getting we're in conversations, booking them out over the next couple of weeks, but I but those sort of naturally came to me. I need to actually make an effort to, reach out to people about doing stuff like that. Even integrations, was it you I was chatting about this? I think it was.

I'm always talking about integrations, it's We

actually don't have direct integrations, but we focus a lot on Zapier. But that's because people actually don't request direct integrations with ProcessKit. Only We request put a lot of effort into that, but we could just do integration marketing because we have the Zapier integration.

It was me. That sounds that sounds cynical. And that sounds like me. That sounds like if it works through Zapier, you have an integration. Just promote it.

Exactly. And it's not and like Zapier, honestly, I've been saying this for a while now that like, there are still too many SaaS apps that like treat Zapier as like a nice to have. Maybe we'll get to that later. No, like you gotta do that.

Just do it first.

Okay. Not every single SaaS, but a lot of them. Every single business is using Zapier right now. Like it was it was one of the first things we built and we continuously up upgrade it. It's just so important, you know?

Yeah. Very cool.

Yeah, man. Let's, let's talk about raising money.

Okay. So there is something extremely exciting happening in startup finance right now and it's coming in the form of something called a rolling fund. Okay? I don't know if you've seen some of this on Twitter. The person who kind of cracked it open and brought attention to it was Sahil, the founder of Gumroad.

So Sahil, as far as I understand, had zero interest in becoming a VC. And then like two weeks later announced that he had raised the fund and and everyone was a little right. People were like, hold on a second. What just happened? You just you just raised the fund.

You like went away for two weeks and said you don't want to be VC and then you come back and all of sudden like, alright, I have a fund. Here's my he did in his own style as he as he does. And he had a notion doc that basically talked about here's who I am and here's why it makes sense for me to invest your money and here's the kind of stuff I've done in the past, here's the access I have, here's the audience, here are the other people who have already committed as LPs and basically let me know if you want get involved. So normally speaking in the venture world, the process looks very different. A few people either very well connected, very successful, hustler, whatever, some combination of ability to find money, they go bye bye.

They go fundraise for twelve to eighteen months. They talk to institutions, high net worth individuals, pension plans, all the typical LP demographics. And then they wrangle up a sum of money $10.20 $5,105,100, whatever it is million dollars. And then they announce we now have like it happened today, initialized capital Gary Tan, Right? We now have a fresh $230,000,000 fund to invest in seed.

Here's our thesis, get in touch. And then they will invest out of that fund. And it depends on how they want to construct the portfolio. They might invest all of it and not keep any for follow on. They might invest a quarter of it and then keep 75% or 50.

It's like that's part of the strategy. And then as they start to run through that money investing, they then look at their investments, and they see who has raised money or been acquired, and they mark up the investment value. So if you invested at the seed, and it was worth $10,000,000 the valuation cap was at $10,000,000 when you invested, And then that same company eighteen months later raised a series A at a $75,000,000 valuation, you're going to go and mark that up, you're to say our investment, our initial $100,000 investment is now worth $750,000 right because it went up 7.5 x. And then you take that to your LPs and you say, look how great we're doing. Our portfolio is now worth even more.

So maybe you should give us another $200,000,000 And like, that's how that looks in the background. What AngelList recently did is they took something that was that has been legal since the Jobs Act. Right? So Obama enacted the Jobs Act and has it has unbelievably important and powerful provisions in there around financing outside of public markets. It created a bunch of exemptions.

And like the like the crowdfunding thing. Crowdfunding is exactly what crowdfunding is a regulation CF crowdfunding. That's one of the exemptions to to all of these things are exemptions to the full requirements of being a public company. Like those requirements, that bar is extremely high. And so these things come in the form of exemptions.

Like you're exempt from that if you only raise a million dollars, then you can fall under this category. Or if you're willing to only work with accredited investors, then you have like this other thing. And the two that are most interesting, at least from my point of view are five zero six B and five zero six C.

Getting into the weeds here.

Oh, I love this stuff. I love it. Okay. So a company like Cardhook, like our last funding round, we used exemption five zero six B. That's like super typical.

And what it allows for is raising money from accredited investors and the limitation is that you cannot solicit generally. I can't go on Twitter and say, I'm raising money, anyone who's interested to get in touch with me. Like that is solicitation and that requires a higher bar. Like you need to do more stuff. Really where it ends up falling is around who is responsible for making sure that the person is accredited.

Under five zero six B, it's not on the company. It's on the investor. If the investor says I'm accredited, the company is like, cool. You said it, so we're good with it. Under five zero six c, once you are soliciting generally and publicly, all of a sudden it falls on the company.

Like you better make sure that they're accredited because now you're the one advertising your your investment opportunity and therefore you should have a higher bar. So startups, excuse me, let's let's focus on VCs for now. VCs traditionally have not have not solicited generally. They they go talk to LPs in closed doors. What AngelList recently did is they took that five zero six requirement and all the stuff that goes with it, the company needs to make sure that the person is genuinely credited, all this other stuff, and AngelList like automated it as a service.

And what that did is it changed the nature of fundraising for a venture fund. And so Sahil used this new thing called a rolling fund and that allowed him to generally solicit. So he literally put a Notion doc on Twitter and was like, I'm raising money. And a lot of people were like, I want to be involved. And all of a sudden he raised money.

And what the rolling part of it is, you don't actually need some giant institution to say here's $30,000,000. All you need is for people to subscribe. It is like a sass, man. It is wild. It is like I am committing $25,000 to Sahil's fund quarterly.

And when I give $25,000 and that is used for next quarter, any companies that he invests in in that quarter, I get a piece of. But if I say, you know what? I'm turning my subscription off. I'm not giving you $25. Nothing happens.

I just don't get involved in those companies. And so now all of sudden you have this rolling fund where people could say, hey, I'm in for $50 a month, $50 per quarter. And then all of a sudden so that's what Sahil did. He has a $5,000,000 fund. What it really means is he has $5,000,000 divided by quarters and he has that he has commitments at that level on a quarterly basis.

Yeah, I've started to see this, this this ongoing investment model rather than like the big raise, you know?

Yes.

So you're saying like if it's a quarterly basis, it's the companies that they initiate the funding during the quarter that you have contributed, you're in on those. But

if you unsubscribe, you're just not involved in the future companies. And all that paperwork.

Say, say you're, say you, you, you put in for all four quarters in a year. You say you put it in quarter one, but somebody else put it in quarter three. Okay. So, so like somebody putting it in quarter three, can't be investing into companies that came in during quarter one or they can

Correct. At like a They lower just missed out on ownership of those.

So it's both on the investment side and the funding side. Like they're getting quarterly investors, they're also, they would also need to be funding companies, new companies on a quarterly basis. It's not like you could just decide on 10 companies in January then raise money throughout the rest of the year for those.

No. And that's the fund manager. That's their job. Their job is to find investments. And if they come back and say, didn't find any good investments, so I'm not just going to spread money out there, then that's what it is.

My assumption is that the money then just rolls over into the next quarter. So all of the background paperwork, all that stuff AngelList is doing And that is what allows so here's this is like wild west territory. What that means is we we always knew that audience was power. Audience is now a new form of power. It is now investing power.

It's deal flow. So if you have an audience and you take a stance and people believe in what you believe in, you can just raise your hand and now you're you're a VC yourself. You're a solo fund. I mean, I'm super excited by that. But the next step is the part that that I think all of us like listening to this podcast should be interested in.

Because if a fund can raise money that way, why can't startups? Why can't a startup say I'm going under $5.00 6 c, AngelList is gonna do all my work for me and I'm just gonna raise my hand on Twitter and say, yo, CardHooks raise money, here's the information and just be completely public about it

and have You're funding other companies, you're just saying you're investing in just my company.

Yes, yes. And so you have the opportunity for

Well, was my question about the I don't know how the rules work with this. Like When the investment is made, say at the beginning of a quarter, can that contribute to companies that are already funded by that fund or only to companies that are not yet funded?

Companies that are not yet funded because a deal happens at at one point in time.

But if if I'm a startup, then then it's more like a one time raise. Yeah. Because it's like my startup is already funded. So it's like it's already exists. And so so how do you how do you add fund investors into an existing funding?

It's definitely different from the fund point of view and the company point of view, right? The fund wants subscriptions, and people continuously putting money in so that they continuously making investments. A company doesn't want, I assume a company doesn't want continuous investment every quarter, they want to be able to just raise their hand publicly and raise money much more easily. Right now, like this is decentralization of venture financing. That's what it is.

It is attacking the gatekeeper, the I'm gonna bow down to whatever you ask of me and whatever you need because you're the one with the money. This this helps change that. And if you and I could go on to this podcast and say we have decided to raise money, and the minimum check size is $10,000 And here's all the information. And if you are interested, basically get in touch, and I'll provide you with the financials and all the other stuff like that that removes the middleman, it removes that authority figure of a VC that says why I mean, one of things that drove me out of my mind when talking to VCs like two months ago is why am I trying to prove myself to them when they're not investing their own money? Like why do you have the power in this conversation?

I don't understand. I'm the person in the arena with blood on my face. Why do you have the power and I'm being nice nice to you and not sending you my Calendly link because I think it's rude. Like I'm the goddamn warrior. You're investing someone else's money.

Look, it's not like you've done nothing. Some of these people are accomplishing whatever else, but in this scenario, I deserve the respect, not you. And and and that drove me nuts and to remove that barrier is really, really exciting.

I love it.

It is exciting. You can see like the glimpses like the the audience as a new form of power is interesting. Also working publicly and honestly and transparently like the value of that goes up significantly because you're effectively a public company. If you can just raise your hand at any point in time say, I think I'm raising a million dollars and everyone sees your financials and it's like, holy shit, this company is a rocket ship. I want to be involved.

Now all of a sudden you can be involved. You don't have to have go through all these layers.

I know and like I know nothing about this news with with angels and everything. So like how does it work with like equity and and and terms and everything? Like, is that still, like, on the on on the on the person who who launches the fund, like, to to kind of figure out and manage with their with their lawyers and everything? That's not part of what AngelList service is.

It is to a degree. So I've done an AngelList syndicate in the past. And so I worked with one individual, one of our investors was like, would you let me run a syndicate for you? So I said, sure. So he went on to AngelList and said, this is a company I'm raising money for.

Here's the information. Here's the founder, they'll do like a q and a. Okay, then once it actually gets to investment, AngelList does everything else. So like, I'm not like my lawyers are not talking to the individual's lawyers. They're talking to AngelList lawyers.

AngelList is sending money to my bank account. And the documents are being signed and managed by AngelList. And when I send my my quarterly investor updates, I'm sending it to an AngelList email address. So like they really manage the whole

They're actually distributing all that communication.

The communication, the funding, the legal, all that stuff. Now they're going, they're following instructions, they're not negotiating. They're not saying well, we think this term isn't good enough. Like that's up to the fund manager, but the execution is handled by AngelList entirely.

Wow. Yes. Yeah, pretty, pretty exciting.

Yes, because it's getting it's getting closer to startups not having to go through VC and not having to go for venture outcomes. And all this stuff is being eroded like like tiny seed earnest in the all these things were like the beginning, it's just going to keep evolving. It's just, it's awesome because it will give us better access to capital at better valuations under better terms. And we'll be able to kind of control the companies and control our destiny to a much higher degree than if you raised a series A from injuries and horowitz.

Yeah. Excited. I

know. It makes me wanna start writing about this stuff and raise my own freaking funds. I know, man.

Just a matter

of weeks at this point. Seriously. Hey. You're you're one good blog post away from changing your life always.

If you want in, start following Jordan on Twitter now.

Yes. Hold on. I to change my categorization to a five zero six c that we can talk publicly. Great.

Man.

Alright, cool. I think it's time. I gotta go pack up. Yes. It'll only take three or four hours to pack the car for camping for forty eight hours.

Of course. It's all worth it. Alright man, well have fun out there in the woods. And Thanks we will hopefully be back in the air next week.

Yeah. Thanks for listening, everybody.