Bootstrapped Web

Hello, folks. It is Bootstrapped Web. It's hot as hell out there, but we're we're trying to stay cool in here and, and and hop on the mics for a bit. Jordan, what's up, buddy?

What's happening, man? It is hot. I just got that, you know, text. I don't even know what kind of alert to call it. It would have made that insane sound on everyone's phone all at the same time.

They're like, if you're not inside, get inside.

Yeah, it is. It has been hot. My kids been going to camp. My wife's away for the weekend. I got them up to myself.

I just got blood drawn TDAP vaccine. I'm like, not at a 100%, but we're ready to go.

Yeah. Yeah. My, today is my kid's last day of camp. They, we had them in camp for the past four weeks. So it's been, and I just got back from a, from a, like a lunch date with my wife, which we like to do when the kids are out.

Now we've got two more, at least two more weeks of them hanging around before they go back to school. So I think we're going to sneak a, a Cape Cod road trip in there somewhere next week.

So nice. Yeah. We feel like we're like done. We just want to hang and get ready for school. Oh, but the past week, two weeks, I've had the pleasure of having Claire, our chief of staff in town in Portland.

So she and I and Jessica, the VP product who's also in town, have been getting together both professionally. We're doing our planning sessions in person and also on the personal side, getting our significant others together, went out to dinner, went out to someone's like backyard for drinks.

Felt mixing the professional people with the family, friends.

Yeah. Having fun, you know, it's easily forgotten these days in a remote world, especially, you know, we used to have an office and that was just by default, always there, that social element.

You know, we were talking about things to talk about today on the show and something just occurred to me now. I was thinking about you with your chief of staff person today, because I had some things to do this week in the business that were like administrative, that just drive me up the wall that I do not want to be doing. And I'm curious, I know your chief of staff obviously does a lot more than this sort of thing. You know, there are some things I can talk about right now. So like one is like with Zip Message, I am forming a new corporation for it.

Separating it out?

Yeah. And so I did that. I used Stripe Atlas, but like, that's not the only thing that needs to happen here. Like I'm, I'm, I'm also in touch with my lawyer. I'm also in touch with my accountant and basically reworking my entire setup of how, how we manage revenue and income and paying taxes.

That's right. New bank account.

Yeah. Bank account taxes, getting registered, filing all the paperwork through Stripe Atlas, but then also filing like there, there are certain things got to file with the state of Connecticut and like, and just all this random stuff. You know, my accountant is very helpful, really like them, but it's not a fully done for you service. It's like, he'll point me in the right direction. You got to file this, you got to go do that thing.

And then we're, and he'll give me tax advice and stuff like that. But like, I'm thinking like, wow, I spent a lot of hours this week, like clicking around little rabbit holes through government websites and trying to understand the cryptic instructions that they're giving me and Oh, you need not that number, you need this code number, which you got to get from this other department and Oh, that's not registered. Obviously

don't you already know that? Makes you feel stupid the whole way.

Yeah. And I'm like, Oh my God, I have so many other things to do in my business. I don't want to do this right now. And in the, in years past there have been plenty of times when it's like, Oh yeah, you were supposed to be filing that thing a year ago and you didn't? Okay.

Then you got to pay this penalty. It's like, what are we talking about? You know, so it's like, I was just thinking like, there's got to be a person or a service that is just Actually full service? Yeah, actually full service. Like take it completely off my plate.

I know that there are some things that I'm going to need to sign so like send me, okay, looks like we need your signature on this thing. Okay, I'll sign it. Then they carry on. Just somebody to take care of all the little things because you know you could send a few questions to your accountant, you can send a few questions to your lawyer, but it's not completely done for you. I'm I'm wondering in your case with Rally, like the administrative like setting it up and all that crap.

Is that stuff that you personally handled or did you have other people doing it for you?

Very little. It's it's pretty stark. Right? When I do this stuff for my own LLC, the way the conversation goes with the accountant is, okay, Jordan, all you have to do is take this piece of paper and sign it and send it here. And then you have to do this other thing.

And then this other thing.

I go like, you're describing literally this week, my accountant is like, oh, you gotta just do this form with Connecticut. Yes.

I'm like, Okay, I don't I don't want to do any

of it. I don't do any of that.

But on the personal side, you kind of just stuck. Look on the rally side, it's really just like, well, that sounds nice. Why don't you just do that for $350 an hour? And then they go, Okay, fine. That's so the difference is pretty straightforward between the personal and the corporate.

And the reason for that is it's just not enough money. We just don't have enough money. You know, you and I are just we haven't glossed over that that part of the friction that lawyers and accountants can can entirely do. And at Rally, it is almost entirely accountants and lawyers. So look, when Carter comes up and there's a new employee and they're getting stock options, It's like, okay, Jordy, you just have to go into Carta and click this button.

And I'm like, that's cool. You can do that. And I don't, I don't, I don't want to know what that looks like. And now the truth is Claire's like, well, that's not smart, Jordan. So I'll just learn how to do it and then I'll be able to do

There are done for you services out there. Of course, there's like accounting services and bookkeeping services and even like streamlined like legal services and stuff like that. But all of that, all that productized stuff is good if you need exactly what they offer, but, but each person, especially with that sort of stuff is very different, you know? So it's like somebody to like understand my personal situation and then just go do all the legwork so I can get back to work. Like, yeah,

it's, it's tricky. And this is also where, you know, I was kind of laughing about it, but in reality, this is where that company that I've worked with for many years called office engine comes into play because a lot of the stuff that still goes through the cracks between lawyers and accountants that does fall down to the corporate level that you actually have to do. Office Engine does a lot of that also. So when we're hiring a new employee in Maine, you know, I don't even think about what needs to happen, but between Gusto and OfficeEngine, they just take care

of it. And I've used Gusto for years, which is great for once you're already up and running, they will file everything for you. But the initial setup, like, especially if you're hiring an employee in a certain state that you've never hired in before, oh, you got to go to that government website and get all registered and all that crap.

I've done it a bunch. I've started a lot of different corporate entities. I always have the same thought. I go, all right. All right, Noni.

He knows Noni is like, my friends and family calling. I just think to myself, all right, Noni, this better be the one.

Me too, man. And, yeah, it's funny. Too many things, too, too many things in the long list of projects over the years, but hopefully that that's winnowing down now. We'll see.

Yeah. Rally Commerce Incorporated. This is the one, Brian. Oh yes.

So let's talk about much more interesting things like, like product and marketing.

Yeah. Look, whoever's listening out to this right now, we're just gonna go on a little adventure on this episode. We'll see where it goes.

I've got a couple of friends who, who are starting a new, a new Bootstrapper podcast. Right. A few people have asked me this like, Hey, on Bootstrapped Web, like how much like planning and structure do you guys do? And like which professional recording tools are you guys using? And I'm just like, Hey, like Jordan and I, we don't care.

We just do it for fun. And there is no planning. We just get on a call. At

times I will just go and Slack myself. Like I just write the word podcast and then do bullet points. And as the week's going on and I come across them that I do want to talk about, I just throw it in there. That's the most

that I'm you're even more organized than I am because I show up here on Friday. I'm like, shit, what are we talking

Right. And the real work happens when you and I show up, start the zoom and then like go back and forth for ten minutes on like, okay, what are you working on? And then we're able to pull out from the week what we're actually working on. And I have one main thing

to talk about. How about you?

Yeah, I've got basically two. It's like the product side and the marketing side on ZipMessage.

Why don't you kick it off?

What do you got?

Sure. Okay. So this week we went through a planning exercise. So this is myself and the rest of the leadership team, right? CTO, VP, product, chief of staff, four of us getting together and saying we are about to turn the corner from building quietly and not doing any sales and marketing and focus completely on product and engineering.

We're about to turn the corner into more marketing, more sales, beta merchants, you know, like more objective things that we can look at. And so we felt like it was time to set down some more concrete goals and then use those goals as our marker to look at and effectively say to ourselves, does everyone have what they need in order to accomplish these goals? So we've talked about the difference between Cardhook and Rally being that at Cardhook, the goals were very much focused on profitability. So it was how much money do we have in the bank? How much are we burning?

What what does it look like when we get to profitability? Do we have what we need? Do we have enough money? Do we have the resources? Do we have the people to get to this point, to this profitability?

And at Rally, it's different. At Rally, it's do we have, what do we want to be ready with when we raise money? So what type of traction, what type of proof points, do we want the product to be? Where do we want the GMV to be? The revenue, all these things so that when we go and have series A conversations, we feel very confident in our ability to successfully raise on good terms.

And so that is our marker instead of profitability, but it works very much the same way. So what do we need? X number of clients, X number of people in the pipeline, X amount of GMV product here features there and so on. So we looked at that and we said, okay, we want to do that in X number of months. And now let's work backwards.

Jess, do you have what you need on product to achieve those goals? Rock, do you have an engineering, what you need? And then Claire and I looked at, okay, what do we need to build out on the sales and marketing content, the offensive side of the business, and then mapping that to can we achieve these goals? What do we need to do to achieve them? So we spent about two days together and went through different parts of the company and different initiatives.

We looked at this coming quarter and the end of the year. So what, what do we want to do in this quarter? What features we want to launch? How much progress do we want to make on numbers? And then looking at the end of the year as well.

I'm curious about the, the numbers. Like how do you project numbers at this stage when it's like you don't have users yet, right? Or you

No, not yet. So no one, no one's live with the product yet.

So it's like based on certain assumptions, like if we know that if we're having this many conversations, we should expect some, some users before the end of the year and then that, that turns in like, yeah, it was a just to set some targets of like once the ball starts rolling, we have something

to Now, compare look, we do have the benefit that we, we operated a similar product at Kartok. So so it's not a complete mystery to us around what it takes to onboard a merchant. And because of that, we approached it pretty realistically. Not pessimistically, but realistically, as in like this isn't just going to fly to a thousand customers in six months. It's just not how it works.

There's more to get done and more to build and more around onboarding and everything else. Now, it was a pretty interesting experience. I'll tell you what happened. I don't know if this makes me look bad, but I'm just going to say it because this is the truth. What happened was we got together internally, the four of us, and we set our metrics.

Here's where we want to be. Here's what we think is possible. All that combination of things. And then we settled on it and then we wanted to finish that planning session and then use that to communicate with our investors in this month's investor update to say, okay, we're about to turn the corner into this beta with live merchants. And so here are our goals so we can be held accountable to you and we can kind of map our efforts toward achieving these things because this is what we think gets us to a successful series day.

And then we were going to use that in the all hands as well to communicate to employees. Right? So it's communicate to all the stakeholders, both shareholders, employees, and investors. And then what happened was I took those numbers and I wrote them up into the investor update, and then I didn't have the balls to send it because it felt too pessimistic. It felt not ambitious enough.

I felt shame around it.

I'm guessing the way that you came to those numbers is like, let's not be overly optimistic. Right? Yes. Like, like that's, that's our default. Like let's think about like the right, like not the worst case scenario, but like you said, the more realistic scenario.

Realistic. That's right. But yeah,

like when you're, when you're talking to investors, you don't want us to take that.

That's right. Now you don't want to set it too high because then if you don't hit it, it looks bad. You know, you better over performing and setting expectations lower, but something didn't sit right. That it just wasn't ambitious enough. I went back to the leadership team and I said, guys, this doesn't feel right.

I think we have to challenge ourselves to do more than this. Now, so here's here's what happened. In that scenario, it's not like I sent them to the investors and then changed my mind. I just didn't send them anything. So they don't know any different.

They just know what I actually sent them a day later. But internally, when I go back to the leadership team and I say, I know we just agreed on this, but something isn't sitting right with me. I want us to be more ambitious. The danger there is that the other people on leadership team are looking at me as the CEO and saying, Oh, he's starting to play to the investors instead of to the company and to the customers. Right.

That's the danger in which we talk about regularly around it changes the nature of things. You take VC, you starting to, they become your audience. I was aware of that danger. And so I, I brought that up alongside changing my mind. I said, I know it might look or feel like I'm making these changes based on investor expectations.

But I need our leadership team to be, for lack of a better term, a safe space for me to screw up, make mistakes, change my mind. So I'm going to ignore what your opinion might be of me because I'm going to change my mind. And you have to give me that. I have to have one place in the company where I can mess that

up. I think that's healthy. I think that every good move involves a couple, take a step back, consider this, consider that.

I can't flip flop publicly. I can't flip flop to the larger team. I can't say we're going do this and change from it. We're going do this, but I do need one place where I don't have to worry so much about a making mistake and be sticking with a mistake just to save face.

And you need people around you that'll push back and say, yeah, that sounds dumb.

Yes. So, so we did adjust it and I navigated that and I think maybe I, I lost some political points and then gained some back in a different way around changing my mind. But I think, I think, I think we did it in a way that made sense.

Yeah, but I, that sounds like a lot of it is in your, in your own head. Yeah. I, the same shit happens to me all the time and people that I deal with without getting too into the, into the details here. I noticed about myself this month, there's a lot on my plate this month that, that is rattling mentally with me. And I noticed that I just always have this is sort of along the lines of what you're saying.

I just always default to the worst case scenario and there are some days where I just, I have convinced myself that the worst case scenario is playing out when there is no evidence that that is just the case. Right. And it's partly like impatience. It's like, I haven't, haven't heard back in eight hours from this person or I haven't whatever. Like I haven't seen the results that I was expecting to see, but they just came the next day and it was totally fine.

Know, like, right.

You filled, you filled the gaps with your own assumptions.

Yeah. Yeah. And I'm trying to be aware of that and keep it in check. Like, look, everything is fine. Everything is going according to plan.

And I did make very difficult decisions a few weeks ago. Let's not second guess those decisions just because I'm mentally rattled right now.

Yes, yes, yes. It's tough to be aware of what, what is just emotional fluctuation and what is actually something you should change your mind on. But there is, there is the myth, the myth of being decisive as this amazing positive thing. And it is good to be decisive at times, but I don't know, it doesn't always work out that easily.

This is something that I've sort of learned. I feel like I've gotten better over the years, but it doesn't get any easier is making these big decisions. Some, maybe lots of small decisions too. I used to struggle with like taking way too long to just decide. And now I just get so annoyed at the, at the length of time of deciding that I, that I just make decisions very, very quickly.

Cause I'm like, alright, just you gotta go left or right and then just go.

Yeah. I have, I have mostly enough information

to make it Cause you'll never have enough information. You just got, you know.

Yes. Yes. So overall, we feel we feel great about coming together, setting things and then really almost like like shaking hands on it. Like, okay, we're all good. We're all agree.

We're going to try to meet and beat these expectations and these goals. All of us are equally responsible for the goals that we set. So if we write, if we don't succeed, if we do succeed, we get the credit together, we get the blame together. We're all kind of like, all right, holding hands and jumping together.

Yeah. And I wanted to also touch on what you were talking about with, okay, you had put a plan together and then you were about to press send on the email to the investors, but you didn't because something in your gut was like, this doesn't feel right. That too has been something that I've been thinking about in informing this new company with Zip Message and trying to, you know, really moving on into the next phase of building a business completely starting from scratch. Really. I'm trying to think about like the strategies that I choose to work on.

Like, like I've got a bunch of marketing ideas that I plan to talk about here today. Right? And product work and stuff. And it's like, I think that there have been times in the past where I would work on a certain thing or like choose a certain strategy because that's a known strategy that has worked for other people and I'm trying to adapt it to my situation. But I don't fully believe that this is going to work.

Like I'm trying to take more of the approach of like, all right, I am only doing things that I have made the case to myself that this is, that I believe that this has a very good chance of success because we're executing the thing that my gut is pointing to saying like, like I can logically make an argument to myself why this is going to work and so we're going to do that. Whereas in other times there've been times where I would just work on something because I feel like that's what I'm supposed to be doing, but I'm not fully in belief that, that this is definitely going to work. Don't know. Yeah. Getting very theoretical here, but

not look, it's a sure it's theoretical often, but it does end up making an enormous impact on your day to day strategy and your day to day execution. If you are able to listen to yourself and believe in your own gut on, okay, no one's done this before. Okay, but I think it's the right thing to do. So I'm going to do it.

Look, that path is going to be, it's just always going to be different for each individual person. Cause they come from a different background, different strengths and weaknesses, different assets and liabilities on in front of you right now that you can, that you can work with to put these directions together. And it's just different for every person. So it's like, I'm, I'm, the more I learn about it, it's like the more important it is to follow, you know, your gut. That's not necessarily to do things that are fun, you know, or, or like creatively stimulating, but like you've got to be able to make the case to yourself.

Honestly, big part of why we do this podcast in my opinion for, for at least my side of the mic here is I listened back to this podcast now. I didn't know it, but I do now. And a lot of it is to, is to try to hear my own bullshit, you know like

You can see through it pretty quickly.

Yeah and I could hear like, I actually think it's a good exercise to have a podcast. I think more people should be more you know working in public like this because it forces you to to make the case for what you're doing. There's there's logic to what we're doing. I'm telling the world about it and if it completely doesn't make sense to the people listening, then you know, I I think it I think it helps to sharpen our our gut a little bit. That that's what I found with working in public, you know?

Yeah. No, I agree. And look, a lot of it, we hold back, right? I'm not sharing everything. Often I'd probably be better off if I did share it if for no other reason than to self analyze and, you know, almost be held accountable.

Like, that's a you think that's a good idea. Are you willing to stand

by a bad idea?

Are you willing to put it out there for everyone here and for you to basically hear yourself saying out loud as opposed to just it's easier to think about it on your own.

And for the record, there are lots and lots of things that I have talked about on the podcast that like I probably was starting to work on at the time I talked about it. But then like two weeks later, I was like, oh, no. We're gonna we're gonna go a different direction on that. Yes. What are you doing?

Anyway, on that note, let me throw out a bunch of random marketing ideas.

Okay. Okay.

That that I so I've started to I'm starting to mentally make that shift of like, alright, the product is in a pretty good place with Zip Message. There are lots of things that we're still working on every week, but a lot of the big feature requests from users have been shipped now. So I I am starting to think through like, alright, we've we've got to get some some marketing channels. Basically first is just to learn about them. Like we've got to get, gather real objective data of what's a good direction to keep going down.

I have hired a technical marketer who he's gonna officially start next week and help out with some of the legwork of this stuff. But, but I'm doing a lot of work on it too. So I have a short list of, of strategies that I think are worth trying in these in, in, and you got to keep in mind that like Zip Message is still in a very very early stage. We're in the stage of clawing our way up to hundreds of customers, right? So it's a little bit of like do things that don't scale.

It's a little bit of you know, taking a bootstrapper mentality to what we're able to spend on things. Although I am spending on on some things and I'm planning on spending more. And it's also ZipMessage is the type of product that, you know, doesn't necessarily get searched for every single day with like buyer intent, but it's also the type of product that is very easy to pick up and start using. That's one of the things I love about this as a business is that it's a fast once you start using it, it's fast to activation, it's even faster conversion I've seen. So my thing is like, how can I get more and more exposure for, hey, Zip Message exists, here's why it's different?

You already do things like this, but this is a little bit better in these ways. You should know that this tool exists. So next time you want to have an asynchronous conversation or next time you want to record a video for someone, you got to remember that zip message is out here and, and take a look at it. So how do I get it out there? How do I get exposure for it that like you should know about it and you should care about this thing existing?

So, so I've got a couple of ideas.

Okay.

One of them I've, I've already talked about is, is, this new podcast that we've started production on. It's called Shipt, but it's not even so much the podcast part of it. We're recording it using zip message. And so, the idea is we're gonna publicize these interviews with guests in the making. Right?

So so next week we're interviewing Chris Lema on ZIP message. We're gonna have an asynchronous conversation with him, ask him to share it out with his audience. So so it's like him on ZIP message and his audience gets to see ZIP message in a We share it with our audience. Following week, we're gonna have Adee Panar on, you know, talking about Cogsy and Laura Elizabeth who just took over double your freelancing you know from from her husband Brennan Dunn like she's gonna come on the show and talk about that. You know we've got a long lineup of guests I think and so the idea is to is to invite guests who are doing real shipping really interesting things and they have a decent sized audience that they could share their zip message conversation out to.

Like that's, so that's like idea number one and we're already in production on that sort of stuff. So the other ones that we haven't really started, but my marketing person is going to help run just straight like paid traffic to a couple of landing pages. We're going to test out testing different use cases, different messaging, different audiences, different segments. I don't, I'm not that confident that like Facebook ads is necessarily going to be a profitable channel like anytime soon, but we have to start testing it and learn what's what in in that channel. Even if it doesn't end up being in paid traffic channels, at least we were learning more about messaging and target target audiences and things like that.

So that that'll be getting up and running pretty soon. All right. Podcast sponsorships is an interesting one. Think I want to try this. I don't, I don't know if this is going to work or not, but okay.

So I think that podcast sponsorships in general could be a good way to let listeners know about Zip Message, that it exists, why it's interesting, hearing hearing their favorite podcasters talk about it for a minute, but obviously podcasts to get on the big ones it's extremely expensive. You don't want to just do like one show, you'd want to have like several episodes on several podcasts. The other problem with podcast sponsorships is everybody fast forwards through the ads. Nobody even pays attention to them. Right?

You listen to Tim Ferriss show, nobody starts at zero. You start at like minute eight because you know he's talking about like 10 ads upfront. So so then it's like a huge waste of money. Right? Alright.

So here's the idea. Target lots of small podcasts. Not brand new ones, but ones that have small growing audiences and ones that have never had a sponsorship before. So if I reach out to them and pitch Zip Message as their very first sponsor that they've ever had on the show, number one, it should be cheaper. I can get a better package of episodes from a bunch of podcasts.

Number two, their listeners have never heard an ad on that show before, so they will listen to the very first sponsorship. Yes. So that's

an idea. You and I get approached about sponsorships, but we just don't do it. But if we did, you know, people wouldn't even know what to expect it. So they wouldn't be in the mindset of fast forwarding it. I think for me, the ideal is that it feels as native as possible to the audience and to talk about it in a natural way.

I think the first circle of that would be like, you know, the podcast that we know, like our friends doing Bootstrapper podcasts, but I think that there's also an opportunity. ZipMessage is sort of turning out to be a horizontal product. So there are all these other industries, whatever, real estate, education, community building, memberships, WordPress, that they have little pockets of these tiny podcasts out there. So if this starts to work, know, I mean it's not, it doesn't cost nothing, but it, but it could be an effective way to at least seed the idea of, of zip message into these little niche communities.

Is that a one off basis? You have to negotiate every single one?

I have not started it yet. You know, my thought is to, is to make a long list and maybe narrow it down to like, like try to get placed on like five to 10 different shows, a handful of episodes on each and, and offer some amount of money to, you know, and the other nice thing about it is like you're building links. Usually it's an evergreen thing. Like once you sponsorship, it's, it's, it's there for the lifetime of the episode. So like, you know, that's kind of interesting.

Yeah, it is interesting. I think you just have to hope that not everyone is as lazy as you and I are and don't want to do sponsorships because we're too lazy. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. All right, cool.

Another one is, I think YouTube advertising will be something that I would like to try at some point. And there, there are ways of, hacking together like a crappy video for just to test YouTube ads and maybe, maybe we'll do that at some point. But I also think that there's an opportunity to spend a little money on a really well done video, like think of it like a commercial, like promo video for a zip message. And there could be a few of these but one idea is make a funny video about Zoom fatigue. You know, everybody hates Zoom fatigue.

Everyone hates packing their calendars with a ton of Zoom calls. I think if I can work with somebody who's like really funny, who can write an awesome script for that sort of thing, work with a video producer to produce something awesome, know, it could work for YouTube ads, but it could just be a general promotional video that we use in other places too.

Yeah. And I like using Zoom as something that everyone understands. Everyone gets the reference and then using that to show I

don't know what it is, but there there are all sorts of like funny angles on like how terrible it is to deal with Zoom fatigue with you and your and your teammates and your customers and your clients. It's a it's a total pain and you could think about all these stupid scenarios that people run into and we can make fun of that and then present the messages as the solution.

Okay. I like it. Some creative stuff.

The last one that I have here is basically a referral program, but I want to find a creative way to do this because another thing that I want to try to optimize is getting people to share zip message. One low hanging fruit that I've already implemented is, and I'll credit Derek, Reimer with with SavvyCal for this, I became a SavvyCal customer. A few days later, he sent me an email asking me to tweet about it, you know? So now I have that email in my sequences.

Just a straightforward ask.

Yeah. Like, it's like two lines. The only thing I'm asking you to do is tweet about zip message, please. You know, if you've, if you've just started paying a few days ago, you get that email like five days later.

Right. I see a very high number of tweets about Savical. I see them all the time, every day, you know, finally made the switch from Calendly that like that type of a message. And it's now it's less surprising knowing that he's just asking for it. And if people are happy with the product, a lot of them will do it.

Yeah. And I'm, and I'm also in the product itself, I'm looking for, I'm trying to prioritize the features that will get people using it and sharing it more, you know, like we're working on one that, that will, let them more easily share over email, new conversations. And we have a Chrome extension coming out soon. And, but anyway, the, the other idea there with the referral program is I haven't fully formed how this is going to work, but somehow build it into the actual pricing model, maybe like the free trial model. So we're not going freemium.

Right now we have a standard two week free trial, but maybe I could like present it on the pricing page. It's two week trial, but you could get up to five weeks free. Like with every tweet or with every referral that you make, you get an extra week free or something along those lines. Right. Just, yeah.

Like something to like incentivize,

like you can earn more time or, or free months. Mean,

yeah. But, but maybe like message it or present it not so much as like a referral program, but message it more like, look, this is our free trial and it's up to you how long you want your free trial to be.

Yeah. And like get an extra week of free trial for every new user that signs up.

Yeah. Something that. Don't know. I'm, I'm trying to think through ideas. You know, affiliate referral programs have never been something that, that have ever really worked for me too well, but this is the type of product where I, where I feel like that's something that I could try to finally make work in some form because it is such a viral product.

Right. It's, it's more going along the nature of the products as opposed to you wanting a referral program to work.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's what I got so far. That's the list so far.

That's it. That's a good list. Our, our marketing approach is, is, is almost like a, it's almost like simpler in some ways. Yeah. We've, we've been thinking a lot about it and I have to go in a minute because I have a final interview with a potential head of content role, which is very exciting.

So hopefully by next week, I can talk about that and I can talk a little bit more about what we're aiming to do around our funding announcement, you know, in a few weeks and how we're looking at that for marketing to three real constituencies, right? It's prospects and it is partners and it is also for recruiting.

When you say the funding announcement, you mean like, like the funding that you've already taken? Yes. Like already done. It's just, you haven't coordinated a big public announcement of it yet.

That's right. That's right. There's, there's a lot of benefit to be had from the funding announcement because in, in, you know, in this environment funding gets news.

Yep.

It's one of things that we, you know, have kind of like talked bad about in the past, but now may as well use it to our advantage. Right. And so the timing of it

and what are we, what kinds of things like, like a, like a press announcement, like, like reaching out to outlets to let them know about it?

Yeah, I think it's relatively straightforward. What we're trying to do is make an announcement, but I'll, as we get deeper and deeper into the planning around it, I'll share our like larger strategy with it. How are we maximizing it? How are we coming up with the right angle for the story? What are like the hooks in the story that will get attention?

How much are we using the previous experience at Cardoc and what happened there? You know, how much are we saying what we do now versus what we're stating on what we're going to do in the future, which is always more exciting than what you do now. How are we coordinating with our investor network to maximize the attention? Like all that stuff we're trying to, you know, you get one shot at it at least for now. So we're trying to make the most of it.

Yeah. Very cool.

All right. I got to boogie to this interview. All right, dude.

See, we worked it out. We came up with stuff to talk about.

Yeah. Perfect.

Thanks, everybody. Alright. Later. See you.