Bootstrapped Web

Hey, it is Bootstrapped Web. We are, back at it here. We've had a couple weeks off, and, it was a quite an eventful couple of weeks, especially on your end, Jordan.

Yes, that's right. It's been a great few weeks. Went away on vacation. Excited for MicroConf next week. But we do have we're going to be together?

Hell yes, we get to hang. Yes, that's very exciting.

I'm psyched. I have that like pre micro comp mindset where it's like, I just finished up some work, just shipped some stuff today. You know, my experience going to micro comp for many years now, it's like, I don't know where I'm going to be at like five or six days from now when I'm like post microconf and my mindset has shifted and I've got all new energy going on.

Well, I want to talk about that. I was at a conference earlier this week and just like what conferences do to your mindset, your confidence, your worldview. But first, Brian, we have a little news. Yes. My turn.

You've had like three or four in a row here. All right. Well,

let's hear it.

Yeah, I'm very happy to say that two weeks ago, Cardhook was officially acquired. Woo. Woo, woo, hell yeah. So some people listening in the audience, even if you've been listening for years, know that I left some ambiguity around Cardhook and around what was happening there. And that was for a reason that I can't get into all the reasons.

When I decided to start Rally and left Cardhook and put a new CEO in place, I didn't sell the company. I didn't sell anything. I left it as is, and it's been running as a profitable company since then. And now what we did is we sold the supported Shopify app. So what does that mean?

We used to have this checkout app that did payment processing, and that's the product that Shopify shut down the API access for. Now, when they did that, they shut down API access in such a way that it prevented anyone else from adding the app, but it allowed people who currently had it to continue using it. And over the past, call it eighteen months or so, we've worked with the Shopify team to bring a lot of those merchants over to the supported Shopify app that enables post purchase upsells inside of the Shopify checkout. To be as transparent as I can be, a lot of those merchants didn't want to move. So a lot of them stayed on and it's processed a lot since then.

So now what we're doing is we we are officially shutting it down completely. Like we're removing the database, you know, we're kind of fully shutting it down And we sold the supported Shopify app, the one that was built eighteen months ago in the App Store. We sold it to a great company called Fantastic. That's in the Shopify ecosystem. And they took it over and they took they brought the team over that runs that app.

And, you know, I'm happy. It was my guess is you can attest also you get, it's a mixture of feelings when you, when you saw something like that. And it's something I built for seven years.

It's a, it's a whirlwind of feelings and just, you're a total stress ball for the couple of months that you're you know going through the deal process for sure. I knew about it but we didn't really talk about what what you can share publicly here. So what can you share publicly? So in terms of you talked about the acquirer. Think you mentioned like they sort of have like a portfolio of Shopify apps and that's why this made sense.

They have their own service where Shopify merchants can sell their products through Pantastix marketplace. I think I'm saying that properly, you know, and now they just raise money. Funny enough, they raise money from some investors who are investors at Rally. So I had a good laugh with someone in Las Vegas that they were on both sides of the deal. So they were very happy.

I'm assuming you can't get into numbers or size or

can't do numbers. It was fine. No matter what the number was, it's not what it could have been because Cardhook got to 6,000,000 in ARR. And we know with multiples even now, let alone six months ago, that 6,000,000 ARR would have been a spectacular outcome for a bootstrap company with just friends and family investors.

I mean, you know, look, we like, you know, I think we talked a bit about this offline, but you spent like several years on this business. It took up a very significant chunk of your career and to see this is a, this is a huge win exit, in my view.

It's, it's a win and it has like an asterisk emotionally.

You know, it just like the business itself, as you sort of just described earlier, had its sort of a rollercoaster ride of, of challenges, but, but also some huge successes. And then to have this sort of closure, this is a win.

It's a win. It made me equal parts happy and relieved. It was a, the whole thing was a challenge, right? The building the company with limited resources was a challenge. Building a checkout product with limited resources was a very big challenge.

Scaling the company in such a way that we were never allowed in the app store and we're always like in danger with Shopify. That was a crazy challenge in itself. You know, the triumphs, you know, is the way I look at it of overcoming that processing billions of dollars, getting really profitable. That to me is the really the big win. It's all the hurdles to get there.

What happened after that with the whole Shopify API thing limitations, their business model, like that's I don't think I'm going to focus on that too much because that directly led to what I'm doing now at Rally that I love and feel like I can do for a very long time. So overall, you know, Kartik was a phenomenal experience. It helped me mature as like a business person, you know, before then I really had never led a team. I worked in my family business and I worked in small businesses and freelance and like, you know, these

like- Yeah. Also learning software, right? Building Yeah. A software

So it was great.

And

it happened right before going to Maui with the family. So I got that. I got that. I got the satisfaction. You know what I mean?

I had that too with with audience ops. I I had two trips, two vacations, like pre already booked before the deal was even happening and like so and it almost didn't didn't work out this way, but it I'm so glad that that we were able to close like a week before these vacations because it made it so so much better to take a trip afterwards.

The transaction with Pantastiq was pretty smooth. I had someone, a counterpart on their side that led the deal and she was phenomenal. She was fantastic to work with.

Was this like a direct to them? Did you go through a marketplace? Did you work with a broker? What did that look like?

I did it myself. I had enough inbound interest that I knew if I basically just reached out to the people who had reached out over the last six months, that I would get somewhere in the area of five to 10 people to get into conversations with. It ended up being a handful that were kind of right for us. And then we chose one, just felt great. Every conversation with them felt great.

The meeting with the lawyer went great. It just felt good. They made a good offer. They wanted to bring the team over. That's huge.

You know, a little more transparency around the difficulty there. We had two products but we sold one. What that meant was letting go of the team that was running the product that was no longer going to continue on. So that's no fun for anyone. And we tried to do the best we could and we give as generous severance as we could.

And we, you know, we just tried to try to do everything right, but it is impossible to do everything optimally. And looking back, you always want to do things a little different, a little better timing, different communication, different. So I definitely learned a lot through the process. Some of that came through my mistakes. And then of course, no matter how smooth the transaction gets, when it gets to the end, it is stress.

And it was, it was that. And then it was basically that and then go to Hawaii like three days later. So I was like, I really do not want to be on vacation with the fam, with it in the back of my mind, doing emails and phone calls. I just really wanted to avoid that. And I did.

We closed it right before.

Yeah. I was going to ask, you able to like fully disconnect while you're out there?

I was. I was. And so much of this stuff in what we do is emotional and it's like where it crosses over from professional into family is like where the rubber meets the road. You know, that's and I got it. I, you know, I got some satisfaction.

I sat in a fancy hotel at a pool with a Mai Tai in a cabana with my kids playing in the pool. I was like, all right, I'm just going enjoy this moment, you know, for a few days. Yep.

That's awesome, man. Well well, congratulations. I mean, it's a, you know, again, it's a huge win and it's just it's it's a great way to sort of like cap off that chapter of your career. It it brings a whole, you know, bucket of energy into Rally, you know, full focus. You don't have this thing hanging in your on your plate, you know?

So that's awesome.

Yeah. It felt it felt great. And the timing on the Rally front was really good because we're about to, you know, go into a process with Rally. And it so it really is work all working out at the at the same time. Of course, I still have to, like, finish selling my house and then finding a house in Chicago and whatever else.

But but at least at least that chapter is kind of done. And we the way I look at or describe it is that we we landed the plane in one piece. Yes, it wasn't the outcome that it should have been. But we made some money. You know, investors had a positive outcome, as did I.

We move forward. The opportunity effectively continues with Rally and, you know, got to be happy with that.

Yep. That's awesome, man. Well, you were on vacation. You went away like a week or two after me. So I've been home now for like three weeks, three or four weeks now since I got back and like I feel like that it took an unusually long longer time to unwind all the all the crap, all the post vacation.

The rest and relaxation and one of those was a big snow. I had all this like ideas and energy that I wanted to execute on, especially marketing wise coming coming back from those trips. But I had like literally like four or five features that were like 90% to being shipped but I was waiting until after vacation to get them shipped. And and like, you know, a lot of that was like pretty complex code things that needed to be worked out and I'm dealing with slower than usual developers right now and I just kept getting sucked into these little things that are preventing me from marketing. And I feel like I finally have cleared that whole backlog in in the past week or so.

So right literally today, I'm like clean slate, ready to head to microconf and then ready to really hit it when when I get back. I'm pretty excited. So Okay.

Cool. So can we talk about, let's talk about microconf, but let's talk about conferences.

I feel like it's been forever. I've been to a bunch of smaller, you know, tiny comps since the pandemic, but this is the ticket from 2020, right? So we haven't actually been to micro comps since 2019. Is that right?

I think so. I think that's right. Think two years. It's so exciting, right? To just the prospect of like seeing so many people, friends.

And it's funny. I just called it the big show. But earlier this week I was at Chop Talk, which was, I don't know, 5,000 attendees. And that is so different. It's just different.

It doesn't feel like anything like MicroConf. Yes. So that that feels really exciting. Both Jessica and I are coming in from Portland and Claire and Sam. So it's four people on her team are going to be in Minneapolis next week.

So we'll get some dinners and everything. It's going to be great.

Yeah. Yeah. Little surprise, like half of the group that I, you know, talk to all the time, there's a lot of friends who are not going to micro comp this year for whatever reason.

Yeah. I think that's what we'll find. It'll be a bit like quieter than as if nothing had happened. I know at least one friend that basically likes Vegas and would like to go if it was in Vegas. I know everyone was sort

of down on the, you know, like ending the run-in Vegas, but I I actually kind of enjoyed it because it was like the the one time I ever really go to Vegas. You know?

Yeah. I I don't like Vegas. It's no. And I was just there and it confirmed I don't like it. And I'm going back there in two weeks for a different conference.

So exactly. So I'm looking forward

to Minneapolis. I've never been to Minneapolis. I'm gonna be there for the day on Sunday. I wanna see a lake. That's all I know.

Yes. Yes. So let's talk about conferences. Like I'm looking forward to learning. I'm looking forward to seeing people.

I'm going to try not to censor myself because I'm worried about sounding like an ego, like narcissist about conferences. But the thing that I want out of a conference, one of the things and the thing that I feel the most is this, this huge boost of confidence. And I leave there just pumped up for weeks. Right? I mean, it's only been a few days, but I did this panel.

I don't know what it is about it, especially microcom. There's something very energizing about it. I was a little younger, it was probably a little bit more tactical like, oh, I learned some new tactic or skill or idea that I didn't know but now it's not so much that. Like I'm going to just hang out with people and do dinners and stuff like that. But what they call the hallway track is like,

Yes, that energy.

It's the energy. I I I literally remember, you know, when I started audience ops, literally the idea for audience ops happened while I was in

You ran upstairs and like wrote it down.

It was the day after. Yeah. I remember, so it was MicroComp in Vegas in 2015 and that year my wife came out to Vegas and we were gonna hang we did some shows after MicroComp. So so the Wednesday after MicroComp, I was hanging out in the hotel waiting for her to arrive and I had like you know six hours to to spare and and I was just jotting down. No so like but the thing was at the time I had just sold Restaurant Engine and I was considering three or four different ideas for my next business.

I went into MicroConf thinking I was doing one or two of these ideas. I came out of MicroConf completely ditching those ideas and and it smacked me over the head like I gotta do this idea for AudienceOps.

Yeah. And I don't know. I don't remember if you said this before we started recording or after, but you mentioned that you're, you're not overloading your plate ahead of microconf because you, you know, that leaving microconf, you're going have all this new stuff that you want to work on or think about. Yes.

I know that I'm pushing into marketing in terms of like spending and hiring some people and getting the ball rolling on some things. One of these things is going to be like probably hiring like an SEO consultant and, and, and ramping up, you know, content and all this different stuff. But before I even start to talk to these agencies, let me do the week at microconf and then do it after.

See, see where you're there.

Where you're at. Like I'm going to be doing a bunch of different work on different channels. Integrations are something that I've already begun getting going like the first 5% of the way to, you know, talking to people. I'm in active talks with some people, but like, I just don't wanna be at MicroConf while I'm in conversations with people.

That makes sense. Maybe the reason I emphasize like the confidence side of things so much is because I'm, you know, we all have our skill sets. For me, one of the things I'm strongest that is in person connection And to just not have it for months, in this case, years, and then get in person with other people and be able to say, Oh, that's right. That's one of my strengths. I feel like I come out of that like, Oh, I finally was able to use my strength.

Right. So at ShopTalk, I met some of our investors for the first time in person. And then that connection leads into good things because they kind of they get the impression from you that you want to give them, that you're only able to give them in person. And they started making connections. And, you know, we can talk a little bit later about like what's happening in our checkout space with our big competitors.

But in that context, in person, I came away with so much like clarity around our position in the market and how we're going in the right direction. I just left there like on fire. And I just want more. I want to go to microconfron with that same feeling. Then for microconfron, I'm flying directly to Miami for Solana events.

That's the blockchain we're building on. And I almost like thinking in my head, I should just go straight from Minneapolis because I will be high. I will be at a confidence high and I should take that into Miami. And then I should take that into a meeting on Friday with like an ideal investor for us here in Portland in person. So it's like, I'm fully Yeah.

It's all about like the flow of your personal energy, right?

Yes, that's right. It's a weird thing, relatively weird thing to think about energy as like this key indicator.

It sounds like you, you get all this energy on like the relationship building and talking to people and, and I get that too but I think for me it's about breaking myself away from the computer and just working on stuff and the relationships and talking to like friends and fellow founders and what you know, what what they're doing in their businesses get energizes me to Yes. Do things but like I get the same thing when I go on vacation or any trip really. It's like a chance to I can't, I literally can't do any actual work that week. It's just about listening, taking it all in, talking to people and somehow ideas like in the back of my mind start to take form because I have that space and separation.

And some added perspectives.

You sort of unpack it when you're on the flight and it's like, that's what starts to really give me more energy when I come back and get home. Yeah.

It's a combination for me. I, you know, I have to admit I'm, I'm more vain than you are and seeing people that listen to the podcast and kind of like being looked up to by younger people, I can't help with that. Just energizes me. It does.

No, me too.

Me too. Does. Part of it's a big factor for me if I'm being totally honest.

You know, for folks who listen to this podcast, you know, this is partly why I love like what you're saying. Like partly why I love going to MicroConf because I always joke around thinking like literally all of our listeners are in this room at MicroConf. Mean that's like literally true for Rob, let's start with the rest of us. But for us, I feel like a lot, like we don't have a very large audience but most of our You're audience all there. Are Yes.

You know, so like that's always like a fun thing and it's still after these years, it's still super weird to like meet people who have I have never met, but they've been listening to us. It does make these like conversations easier to get into as like I'm in real life, like I'm a pretty shy person. I don't talk to strangers, know. I don't start conversations.

You just publish it all on the internet.

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. But but don't know, talking to fellow founders, especially who who have actually heard or followed along with what we've been doing, it does make that all very easy, you know?

Yeah. This past week at Shop Talk, I was on a panel and let my opinions fly. I didn't hold back too much because I thought that was the right thing to do in that setting. You know, you get off stage and then there are people waiting to talk to you. That ego stuff I cannot help, but have that have a really big impact on my confidence level and all that.

Yeah, man. So you want to talk about big competitors?

Yeah, let's do it. Yeah. Because, oh dude, I mean, the news this week in your space is like-

Yes, the news in our space over the last three months is a little crazy. It's kind of like, what the hell is happening in the checkout space? Right? This wasn't even a space a year ago or maybe eighteen months ago. And Cardhook was quietly doing it.

And we felt like we had to stay quiet because we had a guillotine over our head. And then a few competitors kind of came out on the scene. We have two big competitors. So let's talk about this from like, quote, my point of view from like the fastball rally, whatever thing. And then let's get into something like Meteor that I think more people will identify with, which is how does it feel to be the anonymous no name company in a space where there are really big competitors that everyone knows, thinks about, talks about, admires, looks up to?

And how does that how does that make us feel?

And I mean, I totally relate to this. I've been talking about it on the podcast too with with Loom is is the big obvious elephant in the room in my space.

Right, can't escape it.

You're right. I can't escape it and it does have like an emotional toll to it when Yes,

they launch a feature, people start sending it to you.

It has an emotional impact. I get that too. Like people send me newsletters that are coming from, from looms team and I'm, and I'm like, I don't want to see this right now. I just don't want to look at you, but I do need to know about it. So it's like, I appreciate it.

But at the same time, it's like, I don't need to feel shitty for ten minutes.

So this happened. I had to, so powered by search our marketing agency, the person we work with there, this guy, Mark, he's great. And he and I have a good relationship and

talk Deb, was going to be at a micro conflict.

I'm really excited to meet him in first. So Mark and I talk on Twitter DM and he sent me a link about one of our competitors, like a feature or a partnership or something basically like a, did you see this? You're a totally innocent thing. And my response to him might've been surprised by it. I was like, so here's the thing that makes me feel emotionally bad.

And I, I don't, I've learned, I've learned that I am better off and the business is better off when I pay a lot less attention to competitors. So in the future, please don't send me links like that. He was like, Oh, okay. Okay.

I mean, you're, you're a lot more direct than I am. I'm just like, Oh, I'm more direct, you know,

because at Cardhook, it was overwhelming. It was everyone's doing something. Shopify space is so noisy. Did you see this? Did you see what they're doing?

And at some point I was like, look, we're adding 50 ks a month in MRR, so I don't care what anyone's doing. I don't care what we're doing is fine. So leave me the hell alone. But it only it took the financial success of the company for me to finally be able to say, maybe we're doing stuff right. And maybe I need, I can just stop, just stop obsessing with what other people are doing.

I mean, at the, at the beginning of like, at the outset, you know, starting a company, deciding to do something like zip message or in your case, you know, like I like to see a big competitor or two or three. I like that to me is like a positive signal that there is activity in the space. It's growing, it's going in the right, like the market is going in the right direction. A lot of people are excited about that tool but that to me presents an opportunity to offer, to sort of ride that wave but offer something different in some meaningful way, right? Like that's what I look for.

See what they're doing, you get to choose. You're probably not gonna copy everything they're doing exactly.

Not gonna go into this expecting to overtake them or anything like that or, but you know, the truth is, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this. Now that I'm like in this space, right, we have customers. They obviously have way more customers than we do. Much more established, way more wealthy people.

Money all the whole thing, yep.

But the thing that I deal with day to day is the the battle of the product, right? Because I don't know how much you see of this but like we have a lot of our customers have left Loom to go to Zip Message. A lot of our customers continue to use Loom side by side with with Zip Message. They literally pay for both tools.

Yeah. We're we're one. Rip Riley pays for both.

Yeah. I mean that that's the case with a lot of people. And on the one hand, I'm not I'm not trying to just copy what Loom is and does and just, know, but we, you know, we, we do things that are fundamentally different from Loom, especially on the intake side of things. That's a constant thing. Like when we see churn, like usually part of the churn is them deciding to go back to Loom or something like that.

Right. So you're competitive, whether you like it or not, whether you want to pay attention.

Whether I like it or not. And I see it front and center every day. It's not like a thing that's sort of hanging out in the periphery. What I struggle with still is the decision of what to build in which order, which features to prioritize, which use cases as I'm pushing into marketing, I'm pushing into key use cases that I could see which, which types of users and use cases are the most valuable for us and that's what we're going be focusing on. You know, I was having a conversation the other day like what do you, prioritize?

Is it, is it the features that will help you win over more brand new users? You know, because that that could help your top of funnel. I can get more trials. I can get more, you know, conversions off of that. Or we have, power users who who love the tool but they want more from it.

They they want these unique capabilities and and I and I wanna build certain things. I have a thousand things on the roadmap that I wanna build but is it worth prioritizing and you know it's and and like I think now more than a little bit before, know, there there's always the the factor, know, factoring in like does it get me more customers? Does it reduce churn? Is this a marketable feature? Am I getting a lot of feature requests for this?

Like those are the things that go into what to build, but there's this fifth factor of like, does it differentiate us from Loom or does it give us a reason? Does it give customers a reason to choose us instead of Loom if we choose to build this feature instead of that Yeah.

Very challenging. What features should you be okay with them having and you not having? Which features are unacceptable and you need parity? And so thinking about it as you said it, thinking about a few of the conversations, one in particular I had with another founder in Vegas. I think the biggest factor in all of it, which is really hard to keep in mind, but it's answering the question of where you want it to go three, four, five years now.

Maintaining that because that is more likely to lead to the unique solution that you have in mind for the market and your specific insight, your view on things. Now we operate day to day, week to week, sprint to sprint. So that the decisions are kind of being made there, but you don't want to lose the focus of where you want it to go because there are too many opportunities in the market, too many features to build, too many different things to do, add work with, integrate, whatever. So maintaining that larger vision for where the product wants to go and what you think is happening in the market. It like is hard to keep in mind, but that's actually the right guiding light.

Right? That's what helps you avoid the recency bias of emotion of, I just saw this on Twitter. Someone just sent it to me. I can't believe they launched this. It looks so good.

Like it's impossible to be inundated with those real time things and go in the right direction if you don't also have in mind where you actually want it to go. And that's challenging.

How about like when it comes to sales or converting new users, do you see or like in your conversations or from your team, like does like fast and bolt, do they come into those conversations? Like when you're talking to a new customer, are they, are they like sort of comparing you like, like, and maybe trialing both of you at the same time? Like, do you deal with any

of So everyone, I think your situation is more directly competitive where someone's using both, considering both using one, then the other going back and forth. For us, that's what people assume is happening, but it's actually not. And that's all, that's our idiosyncrasy of people assigning that to us, just assuming, hey, fast and bolter, check our product, check our product, therefore you're competing with them. And in reality, we'd never compete with them. Almost never.

We learn a lot from merchants that we talk to in the sales process that have used one of them in the past or considering using them, but it's still a minority of the people that we're speaking with. So that's just a weird thing where everyone's like, have an additional factor. It's not like it's totally different, but there's an additional factor in VC backed companies that you are expected to actually take them on. That big giant competitor. It's not cool to just

say, Oh, we'll have our have

our piece. The market is so big. We can do a 100,000,000 ARR, no problem. And, and it's fine. Like, that's actually Like, they want to know how you're to win.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So And you have to keep in mind the fact that you do want to win, but you know that you don't actually necessarily have to kill them or anything, you know? Yeah. Now what's happened in our market, Let's talk a little gossip, little news. It's a little fun here, Brian.

What happened is when we raise money and when we talk to investors, we talk to people in the space. That's the question. What are you going do about fast and bolt fast as a one click checkout company? That's in many ways like a modern PayPal, where it's a button that you add to your store as an express payment option. And then when you go through it once, you can then buy anywhere that there's a fast button with one click like PayPal.

So sounds interesting. Got a lot more interesting when Stripe led their series A for $20,000,000 and then a few months later led their series B for another $100,000,000 And the CEO was really good at Twitter, just out there ego, skydiving, pink shirts, know, the whole, the whole thing. And he did it really well and caught an enormous amount of attention. And so, you know, this, this is when we start to get into like, well, how does it actually feel to be the smaller company? And me sitting here like, you know, I've done like billions of dollars and homie just started the company, but everyone's looking at him like he's the checkout expert.

And like, how does that make you feel?

Right.

It makes you feel weird. It makes you feel like, Oh, that's bullshit. And then at the same time, like, no, I'm not a child. I can, I don't care? It doesn't matter.

It's not going make a difference to my success in my family and my business and so on, but then you can't help it. So it's like this weird thing. I'm like, should I mute them on Twitter or not? I don't know.

Yeah.

Okay. So that's

I have like historically like tried to mute or shut or get it out of my purview. Like there's no getting Loom out of my of my view Yes. But like in previous things like I remember, back in the day, restaurant engine, there was another WordPress based, restaurant solution, happening and and I just like unfollowed the guy like, just

Right. Didn't want to

see it. Don't want to hear about it. I just don't want to with it.

Yeah. Yes. I know everyone in this audience is identifying with some of these feelings. I'm like, you know, what do you, what do you do with that? You don't want to be obsessed with them.

You don't want to, you don't want to be oblivious to what they're doing. I convinced myself that especially people who like to talk a lot on Twitter, especially when they like to boast, you learn a lot, they give away too much. So I want to listen, you know, because they give away things that they shouldn't. And I keep quiet. I feel like I don't give away some of those things.

So I'm like, yeah, it's also at least what it convinced yourself is that it's an advantage to keep listening. So what happens-

So, so do you, so in that, okay. So you're in this like VC world where it's like, you play to win the market, you don't play to carve out. So like are you at all concerned with differentiation between like like choose Rally because we're different from Bolt and Fast in these ways? Like is that a focus or is it just more about like, can grab more of the market than they can?

No, it's gotta be, it's gotta be part of the focus, especially because we have less money. So fast comes out and raises $125,000,000 within like eighteen months. And then, so you have a problem. What are you gonna do about that? Right.

The right way to do the right way to answer that question, not just to the investor, but also to yourselves is not, well, we're going to raise as much money and compete. That's not the right answer. The right answer is we're to take a unique view on the market and on the product and we're going to win over customers that way. That's, that's how we're to do it.

I look at it like I'm definitely not going the VC route and I could still have a huge win out of zip message by being, by being much smaller than Loom, you know?

Right. And you never know what happens. They might acquire you. Who knows? You just keep your unique view on the market.

You keep acquiring customers. You keep satisfying that core group of customers. Then you grow that core like, okay, all of us know.

And I think that like, since day one, have a fundamental difference of what ZipMessage is with the intake ability. And I see people who are well aware of Loom, probably existing Loom users, they sign up for us because we have intake forms that you can embed on your website. That's not,

that the vision that you had when you started building in that direction, the challenge is maintaining that vision, regardless of the noise that you get day to day and the emotional spikes. That's right. That's the whole, that's the challenge of like maintaining the vision. Otherwise you're just going to slowly veer in the direction of Loom and then lose your differentiation.

Yeah. I mean, the other big, big one is just the conversational aspect. And that's where we get into like the best customers for us. Like our best high usage customers are teams and client services who are going back and forth with a client on design feedback or you know remote stand ups without having to have a meeting. Like we're a calendar meeting replacement, right?

So then I get all these like little requests, like feature requests to like make the conversation experience a little bit better in this or that way. But I'm still looking for things that I can announce publicly and grab more free users.

Right. That's kind of your that's a challenge but

because I'm still in that early phase of just clawing to get as many new users and customers as as possible.

Get the ball rolling.

It's like painful to to like deprioritize like the power features that do differentiate us, but don't necessarily help us get more free users this month, you know? Yeah.

Yeah. And the the chess match of the differentiation is interesting. And then inside of that chess match, still have to make decisions on, well, I I need something marketable that I can talk to people about in this next sprint so I can keep the marketing going. And this is where, like, the the community of bootstrappers is so important because it can keep your head level, keep your head straight and maintain that confidence of, I know there's a lot of attraction and going the other way, but I'm going to maintain what I'm doing because I know it's a smart, thing, long term thing to do.

My next few sprints in terms of what I'm really pushing on like, yes, we're we have a large roadmap of features we're building but really the more important thing is to highlight these like how to use cases like look at look at this hiring workflow that you could do and incorporate zip message into that.

Right. That's you've seen And just like

really just go go to market with like, and there's five to eight of these things that like we could have content and videos on and you know, all all built around this stuff that people can and that gives people a reason to talk about it like this is a tool and here's what I can do with it and what you should do with it and that's why influencers would talk

about Yeah. And the reason that feels so right from like an outside point of view is because that's you speaking directly to the core group that is looking for that in your product. And that's also what the differentiation is and it's also unique and that's so you're like pushing in that direction. All right. So let me, I'll finish the gossip.

Right. So over the last eighteen months, I have, I have been affected by fasts, ridiculous success and funding. Of course, of course I have. How could you not? When we speak internally, we're kind of like, and when we speak to merchants, our sense is they don't really get merchants.

And I don't know how that's going work out for them if they don't get merchants quite the same way. And then this week it all, all happened. So there's a story on they're not doing well. They're having trouble fundraising. Then the next day, there are more details.

They're burning $10,000,000 a month and the revenue 600 ks last year. So 50 ks in monthly revenue, dollars 10,000,000 in monthly burn. Right. I mean, is operating on acid. That is wild.

It almost sounds like funding so much money. It's wild. It sucks to say that it was satisfying to see. You know what I mean? It sucks to say that.

If I'm being honest, it's a little satisfying to be like, see, it's all freaking smoke and mirrors. But then if you, if you put on your adult hat and you look one level deeper, that's 500 employees because the reason they're spending so much money, they have 500 employees and those people are just going to all lose their jobs. That that's, that's, that's not fun. And you can't be satisfied about that. That sucks.

I still have never really understood what how does that even happen? And like what does how does that literally even work? Like 500 employees working at a startup. How are 400 of them not looking for things to do all day? Like what can you literally task all those people with?

You can, and I can sympathize with, you know, that's maybe an extreme version of it, but when you are looking at the next funding round and you are assuming that it's going to happen, that it's going to be better than your last funding round, if you start to make those kinds of assumptions, you really rationally go toward growth over caution.

Growth in people, but

like the- but you're rewarded for growth. Yes, you're right. You're rewarded for growth in revenue, but you buy growth through spending money. That's how these companies do it. But this is how a company operates when they have more money in the bank than the revenue says they should have in the bank.

Right. You get, you get a few million bucks in the bank. And then it says, if you want the bigger, the next level, then just grow. And therefore it's worth spending money on.

Maybe this sounds naive, but like, all right, a team of 500 people, is it that they literally run out of things to spend money on? So like they've already bought all the advertising and sponsorships that they could possibly buy and like they filled out the team that they would need to run all that stuff and product team and all that stuff and then you just multiply those people. And then it's just redundancies because we have the cash and we have to show that we're spending the cash. Is that?

No, no, no. I would give them more credit than that. I would say that if you have the money, you can come up with initiatives to pursue on all fronts, engineering, product design, marketing partnerships that you can pursue things in a lot of different areas. When when you're more limited on money, you dismiss the things that don't seem obvious with ROI because it doesn't make sense for you to pursue. But I can 100% go from where we are right now at Rally with 22 employees.

You can do it all with 80 people. I think as a startup, you know, that

part is like the extreme that they went to, right? Cause that, that it is extreme. Yeah. I can definitely no problem go from 22 people right now to 50 people at Rally. And we wouldn't even be doing that much different stuff.

It's like DevOps wants more, QA wants more, product, wants another, another person. We don't have an in house designer. And it's

like a, it's also, it's like a B2B product, which means like, like they could do like a super bowl ad, but would that make sense? Cause they're

not, that's kind of what they're doing. They sponsored like a car racing thing in Florida. It's like, Oh, you know, you can come up with stuff to do. So there's like, you know, there's a race car with the fast logo on it. And when I went to shop talk, they spent easy 200 ks and you know, one of those big exhibit things, because that's, that's what that conference is like.

That's what people are spending. And then, course, you send eight or 10 people to the to the show. So you drop in $2,300 ks on one conference. Multiply that by two or three a quarter. It's like it's easy to spend money.

Let's let's say that. So, so that happened this, this week. And then today the story came out that, all right, they're looking for a buyer because no one wants to invest in their series C and $125,000,000 is a of money. But if you're burning 10,000,000 a month, that's actually not that much time. So at the same time, BALT, our other competitor has raised $900,000,000 even more.

Now, they have a more substantial business. My understanding is that, you know, they're in the tens of millions of ARR. But then their CEO came out, you know, and just did a bang up job on Twitter. Killer threads controversy flew past 100,000 followers from effectively nothing. The guy killed it.

Young kid absolutely killed the Twitter game and was so much more legit than Fassi, like overtook that whole thing. So here I'm watching that again, okay, another checkout product that's coming on the scene. Like, am I supposed to be able this? Should I be trying to get type of attention? Like what is this?

With the, with the Twitter following thing. I like, you know, if you just have this like rocket ship Twitter following based on your crazy threads that you're doing, do you think that your market, like the potential customers, e commerce merchants are the bulk of that following or is it like other like startup people and like,

you know, it definitely has an impact in terms of awareness. Right. The reason he didn't, I don't know what the, what the reasons he did, those are his reasons, but that coincided with their company raising money at a billion dollar valuation. And then twelve months later, dollars 11,000,000,000 valuation. So in the span of one year, the company went from a billion to $11,000,000,000 in valuation.

So that is if you do that and you get the attention from Twitter, then you start to be known. And then that trickles down to merchants and it trickles into agencies and it does make a difference in the business too. It's not just vanity. It makes a difference.

I only caught some of these headlines this week. I didn't really get into the details, but like, what do you think it is with Fast? Like why was it such a surprise? Not why was it a surprise, but why do you think they haven't grown? Like what do you think it is?

Okay, like put on my e commerce hat?

Yeah. Just like, like lack of execution or like, like just doing it in the wrong ways. Like it's wrong product.

I would identify two things and I'm not going to get all the way into my full analysis of it that I kind of give an investor because that, I don't know if that's rude or inappropriate or whatever else. So two things, one payments is relatively easy on the internet. You can accept credit cards, right? The infrastructure is there. They did build some good tech around the ability to recognize people.

They did take an innovative approach on the way you purchase. It's not like click on it, review, confirm, hit another click, then you bought. Their button is when you click it, you just bought it. Like, that's it. So you go to a thank you page and then you can reverse that decision.

So they also took a relatively unique approach to it. But that same, the other side of that unique approach speaks to the issue around e commerce merchants. That's a great way to buy as quickly as possible. That's not necessarily the best way to buy a physical product with shipping and taxes and fulfillment and the normal path of conversion and the ability to review before you buy and like the way people are used to buying. And then there's all these downstream impacts that we learned at CartHook through pain.

And if you just raise money, built a product and went go, you wouldn't you wouldn't know about the pain of the downstream impacts after someone purchases. Again, that's the easy part. Did it go into their inventory properly? Does it flow all the way through to their order management system the right way? Did the email get added to the email list properly?

Is the conversion tracking appropriate? It's like, it's a whole- origin

of those people are customer support.

Right. So it is a universe of that. And then the second issue is, is one of business model. The way fast works is it has a partnership with Stripe that funded it. And when you joined fast, you have no choice, not only to use Stripe, but you're using fast Stripe account, not your own Stripe account.

And that's how they're able to give it effectively for free because they're making money on the processing with Stripe. Not every merchant likes that. A lot of merchants want to bring in their existing relationships because maybe PayPal can get away with the fact that you use their processing and they hold onto your money for week and then give it to you, but fast as in PayPal. So they had these, these fundamental issues around the product. And the last thing is when you add a checkout button, that's not a full checkout, only a small portion of the revenue of the store goes to that button.

So if you, if you notice in the articles, have 700 merchants. It's not bad. It's definitely not bad, but because such a small percentage of revenue goes to the actual fast button that in-

You mean they like, like they use fast for some parts of their store, but not everything.

That's right. A shopper that wants to use, I don't know, the regular checkout flow or PayPal or Affirm or Apple Pay, they're not touching fast. So that might've, that might've dissatisfied their assumptions in the model based on how much revenue they would get per merchant. So, you know, I think all this stuff, it puts us, let's, let's categorize us as the not behemoths, right? 99.9% of people listening to this don't have the one or two recognizable VC backed hotshot magazine cover, you know, companies in their space and how to deal with that emotionally and strategically is this, is a, is a big challenge.

It's probably underlies a lot of the things that we talk about regularly.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, for me it's like speed. It's speed to get through this roadmap because there's so much that needs to be done and I think for me it's just like I need to get better at deploying cash and I guess like hiring and just getting the right people in place to move faster on the stuff you know on both product and marketing.

It's been a big challenge. It's not necessarily from competition like Loom has been around a while they're gonna be around a while. It's impatience on my end and just needing to go faster you know. Every day.

For me, the two questions right between strategic and emotional for strategic, it's the vision. It's where's this thing going in three to five years, that version of things is unique. If we stick with that and for right on that, we're going to win our version of winning. And that trickles down into the features and the direction and who to integrate with and who not. And emotionally, I almost got into like this mantra of like, it doesn't matter what any competitor does.

There are certain things that they can't take away from me. I'm happy with my family. Happy with my kids. You know, I'm happy with myself. I'm proud of the things I've done in the way I've done them.

Like, right. Like if you look at that, the real stuff, not what's on the internet or Twitter or in your mind or whatever, the real stuff, they can't look at your house, man. Live this beautiful life that you accomplished. Like no one can take that away from you. That should be the concrete, the grounding, the floor of maybe there's this swirling thing happening in my head.

You know, that's so true.

But this is the truth. When I look around, that's the truth.

I'm glad you brought that up. A habit that I have finally come around to just here in this year in '22. I exercise most mornings and forever my, like almost anything that I do, I'm listening to something. Usually podcasts or music, but you know, if I'm doing the dishes, I'm listening to podcasts. If I'm driving, I'm listening to podcasts, right?

If I'm working out, I'm listening to a book or I'm listening to podcasts. This recently I like, it occurred to me like I need time to quiet my mind, you know. So so when I'm biking like I'm going nothing. I'm like I'm trying to and this is really hard for me. It's really really hard to do thirty minutes or forty minutes and have no information entering my brain.

Like that is

hard. So and so I I'm trying to get better at that by by literally doing what you're just saying like I spend that time kind of cycling through the things that I'm grateful for. My family, excitement around things we're doing, vacations, things that are just like thinking about my kids most of the time and like Right, to gratitude. Yeah, yeah man. And it's just like, it's a great reminder because I'm physically occupied, like I'm exercising so it's not, I yeah.

Like like I can't

I'm gonna catch myself.

Yeah. And I'm, you know, I can't work because I'm working out. It's alright. So it's like a time to just, you know, so that that's been really helpful.

Cool. I think that's a great place to end things. Great episode. Can't wait to see you in person, my friends.

Looking forward to Alright. Later, folks. See you.