Bootstrapped Web

Hello, everybody. Welcome back. Another episode of Bootstrap Web. Brian, it's 95 degrees in Portland again. How are you?

Doing good, man. We are, we're back here and so you just got back from vacation yesterday. I went on vacation like two or three weeks ago.

Yes. We left the house on June 30 and today is July 30 and we got back last night so I am in complete chaos. This podcast is going to be a mess. I'm in that mode where everything is overwhelming. I just got back to my desk for the first time.

I messed up my calendar link, so I had calls on East Coast time today, so I've been doing calls at seven 07:38 08:30. I got to go pick up the dog, nothing's unpacked. That's where I am right now. That's where you got me.

This is like your summer vacation that you always do, right? Michigan, right?

Yes, it's just that this year because my family hasn't seen my kids in almost two years that we tacked on a big trip to New York as well. We did Michigan for two weeks, then we stopped by Chicago to see some friends there from college. Then we went to New York where we stayed out in the Hamptons at my brother's place. Luckily, were able to avoid the city entirely. Then we took a little quick one day trip up to your neck of the woods in Westport in Connecticut to

see Oh, dude. Friends We were close by.

We were close by.

We stopped by Ridgefield real quick, which is actually getting pretty close to you. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. And we had a great time.

We got all the cousins together and woah. One of the biggest issues for me this time was there's something happened with my back. So I sleep with a CPAP machine because I have sleep apnea and that means you have to sleep on your back and I can't sleep on my back on a soft bed. And so I ended up going on my side and I like messed up my shoulder and inflamed it. So I had, I had crazy issues throughout the entire thing.

I'm so happy to be back in my own bed.

I mean, this is my life. I wake up to pain head to toe.

Oh no.

Just back, joints, shoulders, neck, all of it. The last couple of years, age starts to kick in on that kind of stuff.

Yeah, I don't generally. It was a pretty new experience and I just started playing lacrosse again I think we talked about. I'm playing very physical sport and getting hit which kind of feels very odd but good at the same time. But man, this one thing, it was excruciating. I couldn't do anything with my right shoulder.

Fortunately, I just signed up for this service called One Medical and it's like a pseudo concierge type doctor thing. It's not expensive. It's actually great. It's like $150 for the year. It's awesome.

It saved me because I was able to FaceTime with a doctor while in Michigan and get it wasn't even prescription. It was just like, Hey buddy, don't take one Advil, take four Advil three times a day because you're inflamed, and that solved the whole issue.

So you know how I do big snow tiny comp, one in Vermont and one in Colorado. The Colorado crew were doing that trip coming up in September instead because we skipped last winter and everything. We're going do like biking and hiking and stuff in Colorado. You know, starting from like two months away, Brett Colombo and the group started a Strava group for us. So it made like a so a bunch of us are in there with our local, like whatever we're doing, biking, mountain biking, running, walking, and trying to like log a bunch of miles to hit this goal before we before we show up to Colorado.

So it's like this competition thing, there's like a leaderboard and you know, I'm having fun with it and there's some competition so I'm trying to push myself and man, I really like messed up my knees and my back from like, you know, trying to like double up on the miles I usually do on the bike. Not used to it, but it's and those guys like Brecht and Harry and Ted, I mean they're out there like on a Tuesday doing like 20 miles like four hours a day. I'm like, I got to work. I could fit in maybe five miles in the morning. That's all I got right now.

Yeah. That's pretty cool. Good man. Well now we're back at it. I'm very happy to be back and focused on work.

I thanked my team for dealing with me and the disruption. It was a bit too long, but I wanted to be able to do it. Yep.

All right. What are we coming home to from these vacations here? What do we got on the plate on the business?

Big thing on my plate is hiring. One of the VCs that came into our seed round, he and I have this great relationship and from the beginning we talked about the relationship between founder and VC and the version of it that we wanted to have. Where we ended up was him as cheerleader but also a little skeptical and a little bit of devil's advocate. What we do is we have this cadence where I send out investor update in the first few days of the month and then a few days later he and I have a standing meeting to basically talk about how things are going. That was the most impactful conversation I had in the entire month that I was away.

I sent out an investor update at the July and a few days later he and I had a conversation. He pushed back on some of my thinking around growth and hiring and spending. It really helped solidify in my head that I was being too conservative in that spectrum between being fully bootstrapped and looking at the money in the bank and saying, I'm going to get profitable on whatever we have in the bank right now, to wild spending, don't care about revenue, ignore it, just look for the next round. In that arc, I have moved off of the bootstrap, but I haven't moved quite far enough. I need to keep pushing myself in that direction.

This relates specifically to hiring. He's saying grow the team faster.

Yes. It made me think of this conversation that we're going to have now because before the venture track version of things, I would see a lot of companies talking about growth and they were really talking about headcount, like we're growing as in we're adding people to the team. I would look at that and I'd say, Well, you're growing expenses, but how is that growth? If you're growing your team from 20 to 40 people, you just significantly grew your expense base. I don't see that as growth.

I look at revenue as growth.

That makes profitability further away.

Yes. This experience over the past few weeks helped me understand for the first time the growth as headcount as an acceptable growth metric. The reason for that is if you're not shooting for profitability and you're shooting for milestones, then let's think about it. Let's work backwards on the milestone. Let's just say for example, you want to raise a series A in twelve months.

Well, when you have those conversations in nine, ten months because you want to raise money in twelve months, where do you want to be? What do you want your metrics to look like? What do you want revenue to look like? What kind of momentum do you want to bring into those conversations? And then you start working backwards.

And when I did that for our situation, I just wasn't being nearly as aggressive enough. I have too much runway and I was setting us up for a situation where those conversations for that next milestone, that next raise, I was taking a chance. I was leaving it too much to probability, to chance that we would hit those metrics if things go just right. Whereas people activity in different areas can have such an enormous impact, even if it's not efficient, it still can grow the momentum and to get those metrics toward the next round and toward the next fundraising, those conversations that I start to realize, what am I doing here? Why am I sitting on all this runway when really the runway isn't toward profitability, the runway is to the next milestone.

I really took that in for a few days and looked at our plans and I just said to myself, I am not being nearly aggressive enough. On top of that, hiring a year ago was much easier than it is now.

We need to step up the significance

of the market. Absolutely. Absolutely. Everyone's raising more money than ever. There are more options than ever.

A lot of things are remote. It's really, really hard to find talented people and to convince them to leave their job for something new. That's engineering, that's marketing, that's content, that's whatever, everything. We are still pushing on hiring, but we are relooking not just at the funnel like we talked about last time, but I think we're going to hire a full time recruiter because this is the thing. When I set the JP, this VC, he asked me what the plan was.

I said, Well, we're at 14 people now. In the next few months we'll probably get to 25. He was like, Got to tell you, I don't think that's aggressive enough. If you told me 40, I wouldn't have blinked. And that's not a few off, that's an order of magnitude off.

Yeah. It's a completely different line of thinking. What I try to understand about that is, okay, if if profitability is not the goal on this path, which which makes sense, right, what are the metrics that you're looking at over the next twelve months or eighteen months? By growing the team to 40 to 50 to 60 people over the next year, are the milestones? Like is it product like we've shipped x y and z in the product before the end of the year or we're able to do a big public launch by Q1 or like I guess you're looking more at like progress lags rather

than like

revenue or profitability.

Right, so I would say there's a micro view and a macro view. The micro view is X number of millions of dollars in GMV monthly that we're processing. What results from that is revenue and merchant growth and number of integrations. That's the micro view. But the macro view is really proving to the capital markets that we can compete in this Our main direct competitor, Bolt, six months ago raised $200,000,000 Series C and today is in the market looking to raise another $333,000,000 at a $4,000,000,000 valuation.

Yeah, exactly. Okay. What we really have to do if we want to command capital from the market and say, You should invest your dollars here, we have to be able to point to that and say, We can compete with them. Here's how, here's why. Here's what we've been able to accomplish on X number of little single digit millions of dollars, which is why we want to ask you for another $20.30, $40.50, dollars 100,000,000 because there's this giant market to go after and we are proving ourselves able to capture a piece of that market with our unique product.

This is one of those things where I get it conceptually in the VC path like throw money at it, grow the headcount very quickly. But when I try to translate it at all to to my world here, so I just like hired like two people on on the marketing side and I have my one developer, him and me shipping product every day. Like, I've been thinking about this a lot. Like, what if I just hired a second or third developer? What if I grew my product team to six people instead of just the two of us?

We would go faster on some things, but we would not go six times faster. I think a lot of it would actually go slower even because the process of hiring, the process of ramping them up and then but even then once they are ramped up, let's say we get through a two month slog of ramping up a bunch of new people, It's still a whole new man product management.

Yeah. Complexity.

Yeah. Like right now the product management is me and him and we ship fast. And so, and, and I know that this wouldn't be it forever. And then I think about like these huge teams. You think about Stripe who's hiring 50 engineers a week and it's like, how does that even like literally what are all those heads actually working on day to day?

I really struggle to understand that. Like who, what projects are they given? What, under whose direction? Who's deciding their priority of what to work on? To me like, yeah, it's super, super, super powerful.

A lot of firepower but I don't see how it actually moves faster and I think in a lot of ways it, to me it looks like that probably moves a lot slower just because of the sheer size of it all. I don't know. Does that make sense?

Yeah, absolutely. And I like you don't have that experience at a large software company to really understand what the hell all those people are doing, but it is a very big difference between a 2,000 or 3,000 person company and a ten, twenty, 5,100 person company. I'm with you conceptually, okay, be more aggressive, cool, but practically like, all right, what does it actually mean? I am 100% with you that throwing more people at engineering does not equal speed. It does not equal quality, it doesn't equal anything, it's just a different approach, a different way to do it and you might need it, you might not and so on.

For us that might mean integration teams and growing the QA team. Yeah, it's good

in that you can get a lot of specialists like a front end specialist. Yes,

infrastructure. That's right. Our product requires that, so we have those teams early on. We have front end, back end, QA, products, DevOps, all that stuff. But really where the muscle of pure money just spend is on the front.

That's on marketing, biz dev, sales, advertising, content. If we are where we are right now and if I was doing the sales and that's it, then just multiply the things, look at the things that you dismiss that you won't do because you simply don't have the time to do. For us, practically speaking, it's okay. We're building an integration with a platform called Swell. Great.

Swell has a number of agencies that work with them. We should know every one of those agencies, show them a demo of our product, send them our materials, and stay in touch with them every few weeks. I'm just not going to do that.

Who's doing Exactly

right. Then when those leads start to come in, yes, that person can do the demos for now, but what if that increases more? Then you look at content, then you look at advertising, you look at all this stuff. I think that's where it becomes really easy and that's actually great. The whole point of a software company is to build one thing and then be able to sell it over and over and over and over and over and over again.

Right now we are like 90% on the engineering and product side and it makes sense that we need to even that up and then surpass it on the marketing and sales front. That's when we get to right now we're building the thing that we can sell over and over. Now we gotta go spend money to actually sell it over and over again.

It's like not building the engine anymore. You're you're like building the ship.

Yes. Building the ocean liner.

The conveyor belt or whatever you want to call it to like, yes.

Very cool, man.

Yeah. I'm excited. We're looking for a full time recruiter and we just hired the first biz dev person. So this is the first post other than myself.

You said you're at 14 right now, people?

14. Number 15 just signed and he'll be starting in August.

What's the breakdown between so engineers, marketing people, and other?

Okay. I'm gonna do this off the top of head. I might get the numbers a little bit wrong. It's just myself and the chief of staff on the call it offense and business side. And then it's two product people and then everyone else engineers.

Oh, okay.

So it's all engineering and product. It's all that, exactly right. And so we're just about there on the product to be able to start bringing people in. It feels like we're already behind on the hiring because it's okay. If those people came on board three months ago, it would have been a waste because they didn't really have anything to sell.

So the timing is working out more or less, but it it feels very much like everything's behind and we need to hurry and we need figure out how to hire people and find them and that's just gonna require a lot more work on the recruiting front.

Very cool. Very cool, man.

Yeah. Alright. How about you?

Yeah. Over here, I have a lot on my plate this month. Stuff I'll talk about is mostly the product on Zip Message has been real the growth keeps going. Now has more customers than Process Kit has like by a whole bunch which is kind of crazy because literally seven months ago I was writing first line of code on Zip Message. And it's technically still invite only.

My goal actually for today or this weekend is to get it open it up on on the homepage to anybody who can sign up for a trial. You know, I wanted to get that done by August 1 so that I could have the the the full month of August as like a metrics baseline of this is how many natural trials we get and we need to work on marketing to grow that number. Right? Because we get a bunch of trials just from the invites that I send every week. We're wrapping that up now and now we're going to open it up.

The last several weeks, you know, a bit while I was gone with my developer and then the last two or three weeks we've been shipping features like crazy. So we we just shipped automatic transcriptions. So now when you, when you record a message in Zip Message, two minutes later, it'll be a transcription of what you said.

Oh, is that, is that

an API integration?

API integration. Yep. We're, we're using a, we're using a service and it works pretty well. It's pretty cool. Message templates.

We, we might've talked about this a few weeks back. So like you can, you record it. It's kind of like canned responses. You can have a

message Yeah, I saw that on Twitter. I don't think we talked about it though.

Yeah, so that's in there now. And then like a lot of little things like we added the ability to pause and resume your recording. We've been improving reliability across the board but also the mobile recording experience is much better now. So little things like that. You know, we improved a lot of bugs but also like when the user's browser, if they deny permission or whatever, we have a better handling for that and gets them right back on the good path and stuff like that.

And is a lot of this stuff request driven or is it still a combination of what you want on the roadmap and fitting things in as people request?

Yeah. Think so like the message templates and transcriptions were were two very popular requests. But I also prioritized those because those are big features that I could go talk about. I could I could promote them heavily, like look at this new thing you can do with ZipMessage, you know?

Yep. That's right.

There are a lot of little things inside the ad that have that have been pushed back because it's it's just improvements to UX, but it's not big marketable features. I'm still leaning towards the bigger splashier features right now, but that's sort of the next phase. Like, so right now from a product standpoint, it's still a constant battle of figuring out where the most high leverage thing to build next is. Today we're starting work on a browser extension so that you can install it and get easier, more frequent access to record things in zip message. Just trying to promote usage of the thing because it has a viral component to it too.

The other thing that I've been working on is onboarding and just cleaning up the brand new user experience when they land in the app for the first time. I'm gonna add a couple of like video guides to get them set up, trying to clean up that experience especially once I open up the trial sign ups. You know, because it's still the default of what I had from the very beginning which is basically nothing. You're you're dropped in, you you figure it out. Most people have been figuring it out because it's a pretty simple product, but there's little things like, you know, I just want to try to fill any gaps that where trialers might fall off.

So that's what's happened on the product side. Then, you know, I've got some other updates on like the hired a media creator and that kind of stuff that start the ball rolling on that too.

Can you talk about, you said you hired two people? Yeah. What are those roles?

One, I've started working with the other will begin in August. So I think I talked about it earlier, you know, investing in brand, investing in in media creation. Hired a guy out of The UK, James McKinnon and, and so he's he's really great. He's got his own business podcast, called called IndieBytes which I found very impressive. And so he and I have started working on a podcast from from this new company.

We've gone back and forth over the last couple of weeks about different ideas for shows and we thought about doing multiple shows, but now we're focusing in on just doing what I think is the most important one. So it's a new show. We're still a few several weeks away from publishing it, but it's a new kind of podcast. We're calling it Shipt, and it's all about and it's gonna have guests on it. We're gonna focus on one thing that you've shipped.

So you know, if you've recently launched a product or launched a feature or recently hired a key person or launched a new marketing campaign. We wanna invite you on to take us through why that thing happened, how you built it, how you shipped it, the results. Tell us that story, right? The spin is that we're recording this podcast asynchronously using zip message.

Okay. Cool.

So gonna send the way that we're and we're still working out the logistics on this but the idea is we're going to send you our first question over zip message. You respond back. We go back and forth asynchronously over a couple days. We'll do our interview that way with you, maybe eight questions back and forth. And then we've got a good conversation on a zip message page.

We'll share that out with your audience, with our audience, ask the audience to submit their follow-up questions on this topic. That's a solid content in itself. We're going to share that out and it exposes zip message, all that. Then we're going to take it back, export out all the recordings. James and I are going to really produce it into like a high quality podcast episode that we'll release like a few months later.

So that's, that's the idea. So, so we have a list of, of people that we, you know, we have a 12 episode season that we're trying to, to, to map out and produce and start releasing hopefully later this year. So I'm pretty excited about that.

Nice. That's, I like the concept.

Yeah.

So that's, that's the first hire.

That's the first hire. The other guy is what I'm calling like a technical marketer. He'll begin in August. So he's gonna just help to execute on the little things, product marketing things mainly focused on audience targeting and testing messaging, testing campaigns. We'll run some pay per click tests.

We'll run targeted landing pages, targeted use cases, following the analytics week to week, run it, know, again like running tests and reporting back. I'm involved in both sides of that. I'm I'm I'm in that podcast with James. I'll be working directly with the marketer on on, giving feedback and and helping to run these tests, but he'll be like executing a lot of that work of of analyzing the the funnels, analyzing the the results, running the pay per click campaigns and stuff. Like I'm giving my input there with him, but my main work is is the product and talking to customers and converting them, working on onboarding and stuff like that.

So that's like the crew that I see over the So it's really the four of us, right? It's media creator, technical marketer, developer, myself. That's the four people working on Zip Message for the foreseeable future. Would say maybe sometime in the next year we'll add another developer but I think that's going to take us through the rest of the year at least. And,

Yeah.

You might end up hiring where it hurts over time. See how much support you need. I don't know what your Interestingly, support load is

this is where it's very different from what process kit was like. Because as the customer base grew on process kit, support became a pretty big burden. I I still do the the support and and I've built things into that product that that improved that, that like reduced the support burden. But with Zip Message, we don't even have that much like knowledge based documentation or anything like that yet. I'm not getting inundated with support requests.

I I get a lot of like feature requests and I get a lot of less so now, but in the last few months I had a lot of like bug reports and stuff, but we've we've fixed a lot of those. So support is not the pain point right now. I could see development actually being the next bottleneck, because there are things like, you know, like like my developer and I both push on new features, but then he gets distracted with having to fix these small bugs or smooth this thing out or this customer just reported that, let's make you know, so that takes a half a day or a day of him to go fix. Be good to get another guy probably from the same team over there in India to just be like our bug fixer guy so that me and him can just push on features, you know?

So I have a question that's maybe related to who to hire next. When you look at each of these, whether it's the technical marketing or the content marketing or just the business overall, do you run that through a spreadsheet? Do you set specific expectations around month one of this effort, month two, month three and

I need to get better at that but I have started using Matt Wensing's tool called Summit. It's really impressive if you haven't seen it. As as he describes it, it's a it's a whiteboard that can do math. And it it's really pretty slick. He he's pivoted a few times and and the the current thing is bay it's basically a spreadsheet and then you have a visual builder.

We've got this cost, this cost, this revenue source, this revenue source and it sort of flows in. And you can dynamically, like if it grows at 5% per month, then it's going to map out to this and that. You can what I like about it too is you could delay like if I'm planning to hire in December, I could put that into the plan and it calculates the runway based off of that. So I like that. I'm starting to use that to visualize the plan.

In terms of deciding to hire or not, it's still really early that these are just needs that I know have to happen. So it's not like a decision of like, oh, should we hire the marketer? Right.

Will it be worth it? You're just saying it has to happen.

It has to happen. Like I can't just not work on marketing and I'm also at a point now where I understand my strength and weakness much clearer now than I did in the last few years and that's basically I really am much stronger on the product and we move much faster when it's me and the developer working on the product day to day. And I also like to talk to customers and just be that person but there's a lot of technical marketing work that have just never had as my strength so that's why I'm hiring that person to like just make sure that we are executing on that. I'm not the type of person that should just hire it and delegate it completely and not ever touch it again. I'm going to be collaborating, but the execution he's going to be doing.

And the same thing with the media creator, James. I mean, know, again, as I talked about, media and content has just been the thing that has worked for me my whole career, so I want to continue investing in that, but I'm also at a point now where it's not about my personal brand, I just want my company to be investing in that. I am gonna be in the podcast and on it but I'm not gonna create it. Yes. I'm just giving my input.

That's a

good distinction. I like how you said that. I wanna keep doing it, but I want my company to do it. Not necessarily you do everything and create it. Have to give credit to the Cardhook team.

I obviously still follow on Twitter and everything and I'm aware of things, but I have some space so I don't know what they're doing day to day, but their product marketing is now doing what I kind of always wanted to do. They're doing such a good job. They have a new agency and a new marketer on the team and it's this constant drumbeat of positive interesting stuff that just shows off the product, shows off the feature, shows off this new thing, why you would want to do it, how it's useful. It's visual, it's like, yeah, it's Yeah, I hope we can do the same thing at Rally. You kind of need to if you want people to visualize themselves using your product.

You kind of have to show them what it's like to use the product.

Yeah man. Yeah totally. I mean that's actually the next thing. One thing I did by the way is I started collecting testimonials from Zip Message users. So I have a whole bunch of them now and there's a bunch of tweets out there.

People you know, basically tweet testimonials about Zip Message. So I've a list of them saved, I just have not put them up on the website anywhere yet. That's another thing on my to do list is like update the site and get actual social proof on there And I'd like to also I'm also now at a point where I need to do another round of customer research because I did a lot early on and then we built a lot on the product and just onboarded a lot of users. But I feel like in the last month or two, especially now that we've shipped a lot of features and there's a whole bunch we haven't done yet, I need to get a clearer roadmap on what's the most important thing for us to build next. I know that we have a lot of users who are using it a lot.

I'm not extremely clear on the most common use cases. I have a sense, but I but I wanna talk directly to them. So so that's another thing on my list for like next week is to is to look at like the like the 10 or 15 most active accounts on Zip Message and maybe send them a Zip Message and say like, hey, like, how are you using it? What's what's the most common need or or common way you're already using it today so I could find 50 more people just like you.

Yeah. Reminds me of the conversation we had a few months ago where you were debating how wide to position it versus very vertical. What you said was, I'm going keep it wide and as I learn more then we'll start to build out those pages for customer service and for team interactions. It sounds like this is now a step in that process to understand how it's being used and then start to maybe not narrow down, but at least highlight.

Yeah. It's also been interesting for me to see, again, I need to do more learning on this, but I'm noticing that ZipMessage is being used in ways that I did not expect it to be used from the very beginning. Like at the very beginning, was really customer support. That was the first use case that I thought about. And we do get people signing up to use it in a customer support context, but the more common thing is conversations.

That's why async conversations became the big focus with Zip Message. And where are those conversations happening? It's with remote teams but it's also with teams talking externally to clients and they have a lot of back and forth with the same client over ZipMessage without having a Zoom call and there's also like internally to communities or internally like between like investor founder and having those conversations asynchronously. So there's these like colleague if you will conversations but they're not necessarily two people in the same company. There's a lot of that sort of thing.

Oh and hiring. So like those two guys, the media creator and the technical marketer, I had a brief zoom call with them and then we had a deep zip message conversation follow-up like over a week with 20 more questions and the thing that I keep trying to message out that absolutely love is that Zip Message conversations are better than Zoom calls. Like yes, it replaces a Zoom call, like yes, you don't have to pack your calendar, yes, it's better for time zones, great, but that's not even the best benefit. To me the best benefit is you're literally having a higher, a more valuable conversation because think about it, you're in a live Zoom call with like a client or with a sales prospect or something like that, every back and forth you have to blurt out your response. You have to say whatever's on your mind in the moment.

You don't want to have awkward silence. But if you're in async, you have space to consider your response. You could think it over. You could sleep on it, get back in the morning. And then you can prepare the best response.

You edit it. You can rerecord it before you post it. Right? So that means if you're in a conversation with someone, they're contributing the best that they have to offer. So you're moving the ball forward.

Right. The time pressure is in there allows for more thoughtfulness.

More thoughtfulness and more attentiveness too if you're with a team meeting instead of having team members or just zoning out and listening for their name to be mentioned, now like they're actually contributing something meaningful because it's their turn to post something,

you know?

Yeah. It's very And

so like there are all places in this like remote ecosystem that that stuff comes into play So I just need to learn more about where most of that action is happening.

It's cool. We talk a lot at the business level, but the concepts you're talking about there, they're just interesting on their own. Around communication and distributed, this hive mind that we're trying to all achieve globally and what it does for that, it feels like it moves the ball forward in that whole effort.

I think the idea of a company and a team is becoming fuzzier because people are hiring contractors or hiring agencies all the time in place of hiring full time employees, right? I you know, like, like early on with Rally, like you, instead of hiring a full time designer, you outsource the design, right? To some, to, to an agency?

Yeah. Yeah. The UI, it just, it just happens everywhere and it's amazing that these, these tools that enable it, that like we're we're not even close to done building all those tools.

The other another funny experience sort of sort of related to this, I was I I was hanging out with with some family like two weeks ago and my brother-in-law is an architect in New York City. You know, works on like big hotels and buildings in New York City. So like super technical, professional, you know, we were talking about how he's been remote throughout this whole time during COVID and I was asking about like what kind of tools do you and your company work with? Like do you guys use something like, do you guys use Notion? Do you guys use Basecamp?

Do you guys use GitHub for checking in, work?

Right.

He's never heard of these tools.

I I was about to I was about to say, never heard them.

And this and this is a younger younger guy, tech technical, but these are tools that we we think everybody knows about them. The world does not know about all these different tools. You know, like like things that are everyday for us, whether it's Notion, even Slack, believe it or not, like, you know, Zoom, almost everyone in the world now knows about.

Right. Because of education. Right?

Yeah. It

it became part of our lives.

But but Zoom was new to most of the world like a year ago.

Right. Education and work. That's right. Yeah. I I do a lot of introduction of technology because my wife is the president of the PTA and they have so many needs and they don't know about the tools.

Yeah. There's gonna be niche tools but the tools that we think are massive, they're not even that big yet. You know?

Yeah. It's just just starting which is why those some of the kooky valuations can potentially make sense if you look at it long enough timeframe. Yeah, we have this biz dev hire, Sam, that's starting in a few weeks. It happens to be that he's in Europe for the first three months and He's had this planned for a long time and he's going out with a friend and doing one month in three different cities. I refuse to be the type of company that looks at that and says, Well, we don't want to hire you because we can't, we don't know what to do for those first three months.

Like no, we, I demand that we figure it out. And if you think about those conversations and you know, Sam's going be my direct report because it's going be on the biz dev front. And yeah, and a tool like Zip Message just, it's very interesting man.

Yeah. Very cool.

Yeah man. Yeah, you got anything else? That's about all I got right now.

No, that's it. Besides that, I'm just going to try to tame the chaos with lists. That's my plan. Big lists, one thing at a time. Go pick up the dog, get my life back in order, make it through this heat wave, catch up on email.

Right, man.

Back to work.

That's it. That's it. All right. We're back to it.

We're we're back on it. Great to be back. Alright.

Ryan, take it easy. See you.