Bootstrapped Web

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Bootstrap Web, mister Brian Castle. We got a quick one today. How's it going?

Yeah, Jordan. How's it going buddy? Yeah, we're back second week in a row. So that usually means we don't have much new to talk about from last week.

Don't know. I had a big week of new stuff though.

Got a lot You did. That's what I wanna get into. I'm seeing more activity from you on Twitter, like showing some of the work, some of the things coming out from Rally. So let's hear about that.

Yes. This week has felt so good. It felt like real momentum And it's amazing what showing more stuff does like underneath, like out of sight. It gets the team excited. It gets people replying to emails.

It gets the DMs. It gets these new conversations going. It felt really good. We like broke the ice on a few things. We got some people going live this week for the first time.

So merchants like with the checkout out in the wild processing revenue, it launched a demo store.

I'm I'm waiting for my stickers.

Nice. I'm kind of excited about

the stickers.

Not gonna lie.

Yeah. And you saw what we did there around NFTs. So it was it was fun and it felt like I felt like I took the opportunity to to be thoughtful about this week. And so I didn't just like put up a link, right? The day before, the first day, I think on Monday, I started to like allude to things, right?

So we made a marketing site Yeah.

Let's, let's, let's like back up a little bit. Sure, sure, sure. Folks who haven't caught all this stuff. The two things that I noticed from from you this week. One was like you you kinda updated the marketing site with a new section that talked a little bit about the crypto space.

I think we wanna hear more about that and then and then you launched that demo store which is like an actual functioning store where you're selling stickers to kinda demonstrate that the rally checkout and which is super slick. Placed an order from my mobile phone and yeah, it was great.

Cool. Thank you. Yeah. And hopefully we give you good reason to come back in the future because that's when like the magic hits. Right?

When you go through the checkout once

registered with Rally Pay on the way through. So

Yes. You can actually you can use it without buying. So if you just go back to the same checkout from a different device, put your email address in. As soon as you type in your email address, you'll get an SMS and then you authenticate and that'll put you to the last page with all of your saved info. And then it starts to behave like a wallet.

So you could add addresses, you could add payment methods, you could add billing addresses, shipping addresses, and then like set a default. And so, right, the whole the whole thing is to build a network. So now now we now we got some work to do.

Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

Okay. So if we're going to back up a little bit, what, what we did at first was we made a marketing site change and that marketing site change, it put some polishes on the page itself and updated the headline and some like nicer outlines around some images, whatever else. But we added a new section and that section was specifically around crypto features. And so over the last few months, we've been talking to different types of merchants and hearing some really interesting feature requests. And so what we wanted to do was take those feature requests, the one that were the ones that we're actually starting to work on.

And we figured, let's just put them on the marketing site. Some of them aren't done, but we're working on them actively. They're on the roadmap, right? We're not like making them up completely. And we kind of want the marketing credit for working on them and going in this direction.

And so that's what that's what that was. And that's really meant to highlight the direction the product is going and also bring out those merchants that see that and identify with it.

I think that's really important. Like, like the, the very earliest, version of the zip message site had like most of the features on there were not built, you know? And what was also interesting about that, cause that's, that's really good because it helps, you know, you gotta put something out there and then gauge reaction to it or lack of a reaction, right? Like there were some features that I put prominently on the V one of the marketing side on Zip Message that like nobody cared about so I ended up just not even building them and now they're not on the site anymore. Know like and then other ones became way more interesting to folks and that became the big feature, you know?

Yeah. They like bubble up to the headlines and the bullet points. Yeah, this was a good, a really good example for us internally to understand how these things are all connected between product and tech and marketing. And so the argument that I was making and that we got to show ourselves was that we get a lot of credit for showing things visually. And so and so there's this element we have in our DNA this pretty slow, careful approach because of the nature of the product.

So it's a checkout. So you don't just like throw a feature out there. You you got to be careful. And so the dangerous thing about that is that you can go slow and the market. It gives credit to speed, it gives credit to visual, to new stuff.

And so I I'm trying to show the product and tech teams like how to work in coordination with marketing where I understand if the feature is not going to be ready for months, that's fine. But give me some visual aids so marketing can make sure that the company is getting credit now and generating interest now so that people come on board sooner and get value out of the feature. If you wait until the feature is totally done and launched on production before marketing it, you're behind a month or two, which didn't make any sense.

Yeah. So like visual mock ups of how it will look and feel, even if it's not too, again, like on the website, I've put kind of fake screenshots or very rough like illustrations of what the product does or will do and the actual feature ends up being worked out in different way but at least we're showing, we're sending that message of like, this is a thing that you can do with it.

That's right. So it's sending that message, but visually. And you do a pretty good job of it because you do screenshots, you create zip message videos. So people get to see your product and the features and how they work and what you're doing. And I want to do more of that.

So those aren't fake though. That would take forever.

That's right. This is the thing. Just because you built something doesn't mean people know about it. So when you build it, if you want credit for building it and you want to not just show your existing customers, you also want to use it as marketing, then you need to figure out a way to show it. So that's what we wanted to do with the demo store.

That's kind of, you know, pretty obvious for a checkout company, especially a new one that you should build something that people can just experience the product. So when we thought about how to do that, I wanted to do it in an interesting way. Our, I even know what to call them, competitor or water, somewhere in the same space in Fast did a great job on building like a swag store. And so they built this swag store that has like hoodies and stuff like that. So we were like, all right, we don't want to do that.

That's kind of their thing. Fine. So what do we want to do? We thought about do something with charity. What we came up with was a mash up of Web three with Web two, which is kind of like what our company is doing.

So we bought these NFTs that we really liked. And the important thing about this NFT project is that they give you commercial rights with ownership, which means you can take it and do whatever you want with it. Right. So if we wanted to like really start a store selling these things, could. So what we did is we took the NFTs that we bought in the company's behalf, which was

a process. These were like visual artwork.

Yes. It's called Superlative Secret Society and I love the art literally. Like, I I like the way it looks. And so we bought a few of these. It's a few thousand bucks, which was like with company money was an interesting process.

Does the company have a wallet?

It does. Interesting. It does. Alright. So the company has a wallet and the company has a, you know, it has a centralized exchange account and has a hardware wallet and I'm taking very careful records.

Right? There's a whole there's there's a lot of different options where we can get into another time. So we took these NFTs and we put we turned them into rally stickers. And so what we have now is the ability to go out and buy $2 stickers. But very soon, we'll be able to layer in a lot of the features that we want to highlight.

Like you'll have to have an NFT in your wallet in order to access the checkout. Right. That's a feature request that we're getting from people. You'll be able to pay with crypto. Then the post purchase offer, maybe you buy a set of stickers and the post purchase offer will be, I don't know, t shirt with the same artwork, but on the t shirt.

So we want to just keep building features into this demo store to show what we're doing.

Yeah. You know, we were talking about this offline after last week's episode, Web three crypto NFTs, you know, you're you're deep in it obviously. I I'm like fascinated by it but I have this like FOMO when it comes to Web three point and I'm in that crowd of like, I'm not a skeptic. Like I believe that there's a and I do invest in crypto but like I'm not actively working on anything in the Web three zero space. But my FOMO is like there's a lot more activity happening here.

Things seem to be heating up that they always are but now more than ever. And I don't have the time or energy to invest into going deep into the rabbit hole. Like I I I am learning more and listening in on on more stuff now but like hearing you talk about an actual use case like application of like commerce happening in web three, I think that's what starts to bring it down to earth for for folks like me who are like, I'm eager to see real world applications of businesses that can leverage Web three. It's like people talk about the potential, the the future.

Right, what you could do, what it theoretically means.

Theoretically, yeah. And okay, that's interesting, but like, it's not real to me until like folks in our bootstrapper communities start building businesses Right, different

tech incorporating it in and in many ways, if you just stayed exactly where you are, it's coming to you. It's making its way up out of these little societies online, these little communities that are really hard to penetrate. And I get the same FOMO and I'm like, I don't understand what's going on over there. It looks cool, but like maybe I'm not cool enough to be there or I don't know what I don't know the language or I don't know how to get in or it passed me by or I'm late or whatever that those feelings are. And I think a lot of those feelings are at the root of a lot of the skepticism.

And what I don't like to see, especially in our communities and our peers, is the reflexive negativity. I don't see what the benefit is of that. It's kind of like you can be cynical and right or whatever that saying is. Like, easy to be cynical. It's easy to be a critic, but like, give it a chance.

You know where I saw this? I saw Tom Colicchio launch a set of NFTs. I love Tom Colicchio. He has a lot of trust built up in my like, you know, trust gauge because I've seen him for so long. He seems like a genuinely good person, does a lot of charity work, all this other stuff.

He launches an NFT project. I'm like, Oh, I'm interested. I want in because they want to add real utility. Meaning if you own, I think there's slices like different slices of pizza. Cool.

Whatever the format is. But then that gives you access to communities and like things online and things in person, different parties. I'm like, okay, I'm in. And then if you read the responses to the tweets, it is horribly negative. Horrible.

So I don't know. I hope we can kind of shake out of this because I see a lot of it on Twitter, a lot of it from our peers too. It's very reactionary, like immediately negative. Don't understand.

Yeah, no, I don't understand that either. And if you're an entrepreneur, you have to be listening to any and all trends and movements. And this is one of those things that is definitely moving faster and seems to be getting wider every day. The thing that I think is so, is really interesting and this is again one of those things where I feel like I wish I had more time to get into this aspect of it. So when you talk about NFTs, the the royalty model with NFTs, like that to me is one of the most fascinating, interesting opportunities that I feel like doesn't get talked about enough.

And I think about it like from the standpoint of music, right? Like bands, artists, traditionally they would get signed by like a record label and they, they sell something once and they make almost and even today, like bands are making almost nothing on Spotify, you know, even if they're pretty well known. And the idea that if you're selling a piece of art, whether it's a visual artwork or a piece of music and it gets resold, the original creator through that smart contract can get a piece, a royalty of every resale of the music track or the piece of artwork. And that's a really interesting model. Mean, you know, people in our communities are so interested in building businesses that generate recurring revenue or passive scalable growth, right?

Like that to me is like one of the big economic opportunities in in NFTs. That that's different from the way the world, like pre Web three sort of works.

That's an interesting, like, connection that you made there between, like, recurring revenue, royalties, like, you know, where the value goes after the initial creation. Chris Dixon, who's a great thinker on this stuff, wrote a tweet the other day that speaks directly to this. He talks about different business models and the line he used was that ads monetize attention, right? Eyeballs and time and NFTs monetize enthusiasm. So if you're an artist and you have 10,000 fans or a thousand fans, Spotify, you're just you're not going to make any money.

But if you can work directly with your audience to monetize the people who are crazy about you, you can make more money in a different model. And everyone's actually happy because the people who are most enthusiastic are the ones that are going to buy the most rare stuff and the things that come with meeting you and whatever else that means for your version of art.

Yeah, exactly. A couple of years back or several years back, Radiohead came out with one of their albums like they went off of their record label, they're like, we're just gonna go direct to our audience because we're already huge, right? These days like in the world of music, the way you make money is to have the publishing rights to a piece of music and get it played on television, get it played on ads and TV shows. And that's how you just generate, you know, recurring royalties from that. And like the idea of like music artists being able to release that like that, that seems really interesting to me.

I wish I had more time to mess around in my in my home studio and release some Yeah. Music, but, like

I think you'll like a lot of the stuff happening in music that what's happening now in music is people are coming together and forming DAOs to invest in the artist, in the production of an album, and then you can participate in the revenue generated by the album as a funder. So it's like

It you're really incentivizes it's not just economic it incentivizes the spread of the product, of the the of the thing, right? Because like That's

right. You participate.

Yeah. Like I want other people to to know about this band. That's awesome. But it but I'm also monetizing, you know, the incentive to do that, you know?

Yes. Yes. So yeah, a lot of the stuff's interesting and it does feel like a moment right now where it is chaotic and no one really knows what to do with it. And Congress is trying to figure it out and there's skepticism. I think within a year or two, it just starts to normalize more and there's less.

I hope there's less friction around all of it. It's just new business model, new software, new service, new this and just more options. Anyway, to bring this all the way back around to this week, what I tried to do and what we talked about internally is to look at these events and think about how we can use basically my Twitter profile to get marketing activity. And so when we look at it, we say, okay, for example, this week was, well, Monday, let's just launch a screenshot of the new marketing site and link to it. And that'll cause a little bit of attention.

And then Tuesday, let's put a post out of the demo store. And then Wednesday, let's put out a screenshot of the checkout. And then Thursday, let's put out a video of me checking out because the overwhelming majority of people won't actually go and check out, but we still want them to see it. So instead of asking them again to see it, let's just make a video and post it. So that was like the perfect week.

I didn't actually get all of it done, but it was really important to look at it and say, okay, this is what the perfect marketing week would look like based around one event of launching this new store.

In the, in the early customers, said there's some live shops with that. I mean, that does that actually mean like first revenue is is in the door?

Yes. Hell yeah, dude. Yes. Alright. So exciting.

Nice. Nice. So so are you seeing like variations in the type of customers who are getting set up, who are interested in different features or is it still like a pretty wide variety right now?

So we have two different types of customers, traditional platform and headless. And so I really like the fact that the first dollar through a Rally checkout was on a totally headless custom stack. So this guy, Chris, I got to know, Chris, shout out. I love you first dollar in. He built using Gatsby with builder.

With the rally checkout and a swell back end. And like, that's what we want to show the e commerce market is possible that you don't need a giant monolithic platform that tells you what you can and can't do on the front end and the checkout and the back end, that there are now services that you can put together relatively easily. And so on Thursday, one of the tweets that I did get out the door was here's the GitHub for the starter theme for in this case, was Next. Js and builder and rally and swell. And so that's one type of customer that's going to grab the checkout and do whatever they want on the front end of the back end.

And it's our job to make that as easy as possible. And the other types of merchants are on like big commerce and they're just upgrading their checkout. Call it. That's where the next customers are coming from. And that's like where the pipeline is biggest.

And we are almost done with our WooCommerce integration. So I've been doing a lot of work in the WooCommerce world on partnerships and podcasts and that sort of thing. And that's like, we hired a WooCommerce developer and that's like the big push in January.

Yeah. Like anything WordPress is like, it's such a great community. And obviously it's so widespread at this point that like, you know, I'm thinking a lot about that. I mean, the big update for me on my front this week is launching the embeds feature for Zip Message. Today I'm finishing that up so this should be shipped by the time this episode comes out.

It's been a pretty popular request. Basically people want the ability to embed a zip message on their own website. And we have multiple things that you could embed. So you could take a whole conversation and so you're embedding it as an iframe on your own website, right? So you could take an entire ZipMessage conversation, put it on your website or within your membership area.

Okay.

So up until now it's been hosted by you entirely.

Yeah. You always go to zipmessage.com currently. Now you'll be able to take your Zip Message stuff and actually place it on your public website or within your private area on your website. So a

little more white labeled, little more owned by you if you want.

Yeah. With us, you have multiple things. One, embed an entire conversation so all the different messages like scrolling down the page and within that you could actually like create and record and reply to that conversation all within the embed. The other one is you like break out a single message from a conversation. So it's just a single video player like a YouTube that you could just embed anywhere.

And then the other one that's really cool is that, so we have this concept of intake pages, right? So, you you would have like zipmessage.com slash your name, your brand name, that's your intake page. And one of our plans, can create multiple intake pages. Now you can embed one of those on your own website. So that's a really good thing to like drop into like your customer support portal.

This feature is pretty popular with like people who run private communities or memberships or they do some private coaching.

They want the functionality, but inside of their experience.

Yeah, inside their experience. So, I mean, it's all put together. It's pretty cool. It's pretty seamless. I'm pretty excited about it.

How complex was it?

It was a bit complex. My developer worked on it a bit and now I'm like finishing it up and making it basically shippable.

Yeah. I'm sure you'll hear weird things about different devices, different versions. I mean, that's just the deal on the web these days.

Yeah. Yeah. That's one of my worries about it, you know, before getting it out. Like when when everything is on our own website, we can basically control the whole experience. So I'm trying to do a lot of testing with it, but it's all it's all working.

There's a whole bunch of stuff in our roadmap, but like one of the things that I would like to get to pretty soon is also creating a a WordPress plugin that basically is just a wrapper for these iframes that we're that we're giving you. So that's sort of like another like integration point with like the WordPress community where like, you know, that enables us to go out to WordPress, you know, communities to, to kind of talk about how you could use the embedding feature and we make it easy with the plugins. That would be kind of like the next step on that.

Nice. Is that a premium feature or everybody get it?

I'm a little bit on the fence about it. I think most of it is gonna be free to use because it's part of like spreading the zip message. And, you know, we do put powered by zip message on the embed and you really can't remove it unless you're on the premium plan and then you can remove it. One aspect of it is gonna be premium only. So like right now we have the ability to have like private or public conversations.

If you make it private, you know, private means like the other people have to be logged in users to see it. We did build like a token system so that you could embed like a private conversation on your own website. That ability is gonna be premium. Because that sort of implies like it's really for like a private membership sort of situation.

Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting that a lot of your, what's helping you make that type of decision is, does it help the virality? If it does, should probably be free.

Yeah. I'm actually watching Twitter right now because we've got a bunch of requests of, like, things to talk about.

Yes. I like Justin Jackson's reply about traction, and he's linking to a tweet conversation that he had with Ryan Delk around like phases of product market fit. I'd like to talk about that. So what Ryan Delick originally said was like there are three phases of product market fit, building something people want. Then the second is retaining those users.

And then three, really scaling to sustainably acquire a lot more of those users. And I think he's right to point out that a lot of people think number one, like how much do people love the product? Is product market fit? And he's really saying it's more like number three, like the ability to really scale that up. I don't really know how I feel about that.

When I think about Cardhook's experience, we never really got to number three. Not like on a massive scale, the way we measured it. And we still talk about it now at Rally, is I tell the team to be aware of what people are willing to do to get the product. Because that feels objective. Like people are like, you only work with Stripe and Braintree and I can't use my old school payment processor that I get really good rates from.

Fine. I'll ditch my payment processor. Like that to me is like, okay, that's an important thing to know. If a business is willing to change how they process payments and how they receive their revenue, that's a big hurdle to get over. We just call it running through walls.

Like what walls are they willing to run through to get our product? How do we build a set of features so compelling that people are willing to run through walls as big as, for example, leaving Shopify?

Yeah.

So that's kind of how we think of product market fit around like, will kill things in my way to get your product is like our sense of it. But we haven't gotten to the massive acquisition of users.

Yeah. I think that's interesting. I'm looking at Ryan Delk's tweet here. It is a good one. Again, like number one is like building something people want to try.

Two, retaining users that stick around. And three is scale sustainably acquiring, you know, 100x more of those users, right? So I definitely hear what you're saying. I see some of that with, like, I'm trying to think about like, what does traction feel like, right? That's Justin's question here.

Don't think Zip Message is in product market fit necessarily yet. We're still somewhere between one and two. Like we have, we definitely have something that customers have been trying. We definitely have customers who've stuck around and we have quite a few customers now, but I'm still in this point. I'm curious how you think about this.

Like the way that I think about traction or the way that I would envision traction with, or I think about a company that's very successful with many thousands of customers, I'm picturing new customers are paying every single day on a consistent basis, that level of volume. Like looking back to like audience ops, like we never really got to a point where we were getting consistently new paying customers every day or necessarily every week. We certainly had weeks where we brought on several new customers, some days where we brought on multiple customers, but then we would also still have full weeks where we have no new paying customers this week and maybe even no leads this week. That still happened years into the business. With Zip Message right now, we're definitely getting new customers every week.

We have some days where like yesterday we had six new conversions, but today we have none, you know, and tomorrow we might have none. So like we're still having like day to day and I'm mentally feeling this like day to day where like a day where we have five signups. I'm like awesome. Like is like we're on the way to product market fit. And then the next day, next two days, three days might go by with, yeah, have some, I have free trial signups every day but not conversions every day.

So in my mind it's a lot about like frequency of purchases and the volume of purchases and how much that's sustaining. And I'm not seeing it sustainable yet. It comes in waves and and that's still kind of choppy.

Yeah. It's it's tough to put numbers on it because every business is so different. Right? What what Justin said in his response to Ryan was that reliably and consistently getting hundreds, if not thousands of new customers every month. But not every business needs a thousand new customers a month.

If it's a consumer product, yes, you do need you need hundreds of thousands of customers, if not millions of customers. So you do the numbers kind of make more sense. But B2B, high ticket B2B enterprise, you don't need numbers, but there's something around the consistency and the It's almost like going beyond your own efforts, like that the market is starting to come to you. It's tough because even that, if you're really successful at outbound sales, does that mean that you don't have real product market fit? But if people keep saying yes, what's the problem with that?

So there's some combination around hitting the market in the right time, people making their way to you, the sale being relatively easy, people being willing to ditch their old solution for your solution, sticking around longer, expanding revenue and usage once they're in, tell right, net negative churn, like all these different things that make it together.

Yeah. And like, well, what you were saying is like there are people who are willing to run through walls to use your product willing to change the way they do things or they're willing to, you know, be okay with certain parts of the product half built, right? I mean, I definitely see that with Zip Message and I really saw that with Process Kit as well and Audience Ops where like we would have multiple paying customers who really changed the way that their operation works just so that they can make use of our product or service. Like in AudienceOps we do things a certain way and if they didn't like that then either they didn't become a customer or they adapted and we had plenty of customers that adapted. With ProcessKit we definitely had a lot of customers and we still have customers who really adopt it and expand with their team but it's the inconsistency of that that makes me feel like, well, we didn't quite cross into the scale.

Yeah, it's whatever the terminology is, It's like initial traction, but not product market fit or whatever you wanna. It's different for every business, but there are these individual markers. I do like to look at what people are willing to change, given what they're currently doing. How much are they willing to change to come over to your version of things, whether it's how you do things, how you do your product management, how you do your asynchronous conversation, how you do your payment processing, whatever it is.

I'm not going to be super public about numbers in general with my business. I usually am not, but we did cross into the hundreds of customers this week. We crossed a 100 customers basically. That's one of those like little markers that it doesn't really mean a whole lot, it's a little marker that like Absolutely. I mean like 100 currently active.

We've had more than a 100 conversions but like, you know, they're still subscribed, right? That was like a marker for me that like, I mean, this is like the first subscription business that reached that number of customers. I've had other businesses that had higher revenue, but like, so that's another marker in terms of like traction that I'm trying to figure out. And the other thing that I'm seeing is definitely more referrals, customers referring other customers, You know, because I I have an onboarding survey question thing where I ask, like, how'd you hear about ZipMessage? And in the earlier months, it was, you know, a small handful of of sources that people are referencing.

And now that pool of sources is expanding. Like people are mentioning different people that referred them to ZipMessage and many of them I don't even know who they are. That's a cool I mean, you know, those are a lot of just free accounts. So I'm trying to track the conversion rate, but that's an interesting thing. Like, I still feel like somewhere in between that one and two range because it it is still pretty inconsistent in terms of converting customers.

Yeah. I I think it's gonna take time to to find the rest of the equation. That Andrew Chen interview on Tim Ferriss, I cannot remember the example because my brain I got a booster shot this week. My brain was destroyed. I couldn't find the words for two days and it's still kind of happening.

Yeah. So in that interview, he talks about a company. I think it might have been Uber. I'm I'm really blanking, but that they were surprised by the metric that really told them that they were onto the right thing and that they should do more of it. And I think all of us should be on the lookout for that.

Like, is it right? Is it strangers recommending others as like, okay, I need to encourage that because that seems to be the thing that brings in the best quality customers or whatever it is.

Yeah. I mean, that's, that's something I'm trying to focus a lot on right now. I talked about it last time. I'm trying to spur the flywheel of influencers talking about it. I'm getting myself on more podcasts right now, but that's still a challenge.

I mean, someone reached out to me with the question of like, okay, I hear you, you kind of actively trying to pitch people to check out Zip Message or talk about it or book you on the podcast and like, how do you approach cold outreach like that? And I still have a hard time with that. Like I don't have a problem sending the message. I could do that. I think I craft pretty short, well researched, well personalized messages, but it does still feel like an uphill battle when it's a completely cold outreach and they have no idea who I am.

They've never heard of me before. I just always see such a lower response rate. Like if I send a cold Twitter DM to someone, yeah, it's Twitter, so it's not email, but the chances of them even checking, you know how like the Twitter DMs like separate you into like this is a cold outreach, like the chances of them even checking those cold outreaches is pretty low. So it's like, I really think like the best way is to get like an introduction from someone that you know or someone mentions you or refers you and then you reach out, but then it's like, how do you get more of those to happen, right?

It's tough. I look at it as social timing and maybe it's like my DNA from like being an immigrant that didn't speak the language and was like, I got to get some friends, man.

I don't know what I'm

going do, but I got to get some friends. I feel like it's still that same DNA. So when you introduced me to Corey Miller and he's a connected person, right? Then I joined his Slack group and then you get an introduction inside of there and it's so much easier. And then you get another introduction to someone who wants to have you on the podcast because they talk with your friends.

So it's it's like these network webs that you need to come into in an authentic way and like make friends and then kind of work your way in by adding value to people, whether it's through their podcast or a partnership or something. Yo, Brian, I got to go, man. I lunch got with a bunch of MicroCon people, which is just about the most exciting thing ever. And it's at my office.

Sweet. Yeah. That's awesome. And I was telling you, I'm so jealous of you folks who live out there in Portland. Like whoever's in the Northeast, we got to get some more meetups happening on this side of the country.

You heard it here.

Alright.

Well, good, quick, energetic, short podcast episode. Thanks everyone for listening.

Alright. Later, bro.