Bootstrapped Web

Alright. Bootstrapped web. We are, back on the mics. Mister Jordan, what's up, buddy?

We're back. Good to see you, Brian. Look forward to hearing about your your travel, what you learned, what you did.

Today's Friday. I finished the first full week of work back after two back to back weeks on vacation. My my wife and I went to Hawaii. We we spent a week in Kauai which was amazing. Then I flew home twenty four hours at home with with with my kids and then I went back to Colorado to hang out with with the crew.

We do big snow tiny conf out there. Good mastermind session. Got some good snowboarding in.

Well, I have a very similar setup coming up. I go to Maui a week from today with the fam for eight days or something. I land in the morning and then later on that night go to shop talk to be on a panel at a conference. So it's very similar setup in terms of like, how about your family vacation? I'm curious to hear how you how you did in your attempts to unplug from work while you were away?

Yeah, let's see. I mean, I was pretty much unplugged. I didn't try to get any real work done.

Little Slack, little email kind of thing.

My developers were active during my two weeks away. And I probably mentioned this earlier, I have two basically brand new developers and they're sort of junior, they're sort of being overseen by a senior guy over there, but I have to actively give them issues to work on. I actively direct every issue they work on. I have to review their code. And since they're sort of new, that's more work on my end than it used to be.

I gave them like a bunch of like small things that like I piled up their queue of issues to work on before I went away. And that mostly filled up the time, you know, there was stuff that I had to get in there and review. There wasn't a ton, like there was some like typical customer support which you know, I'm the customer support person. So I did have to, you know, check email daily to stay on top of that. Sign ups continued to stay steady.

That felt good to be on vacation and see people signing up and converting.

That's right.

Good for you. Still needed to check-in. I mean, other than that, I didn't really do a ton of work. And I think I, especially in Hawaii, I really was actually able to like disconnect and just enjoy the time there. I mean, did some awesome stuff.

We were on the beaches. We were, we did some

hiking So helicopter.

We hiked down Waimea Canyon and then we

Oh yeah.

We took a helicopter ride around the the island of Kauai which was amazing. Yes. I had a good time.

Very much looking forward to it. And then you came back and went to

Yeah, Big Snow is more of a mastermind founder retreat. You know, we've done it like, I don't know, like eight or nine years now and I do two of them every year. So this was the one in Colorado. Same group of guys that we've been getting together with for a long time. So it was really, really good, really, really energizing.

I got some good feedback on on where I'm at with ZipMessage. Yeah. Just kind of came back energized. I I like I came back with I'll get into it today, but like one of the big things like is understanding what's actually going on in in my business.

I'm curious what what you mean by that.

You know, like I I guess the big question that I kept asking guys at at that group, in the group is like, here are my current numbers. Here's what I can see. Is this good?

I don't know. I can't What am I missing? Yeah. It's a very, very fair question. It's very odd to think about something that you are engaged in every single day, think about constantly, but then go to other people and say, what am I missing?

I think it's actually very healthy to do.

I'm not saying like, oh, is this too good to be true? Because there's it's definitely I know that there's work to be done. I know that the top line, the bottom line is not where it ultimately needs to be. I I need to grow, but it is growing. And there's a bunch of different metrics and a bunch of different levers that are at play here.

And I need to get a better under like I know the top line stuff like the MRR and the customers and the churn, but I don't yet have a good visualization on like what's happening inside those numbers. So like activation and frequency of engagement and referrals to, and like viral signups and then cohorts and segmentation of like which use cases are the most valuable and you know, that's one of these things where it's like it requires a lot of work, like actual dev work to pull out those, that data and get them into like reporting dashboards that I can actually take action on and make decisions on Cause we're collecting a lot of that data through the database and through the different things. But I I still don't have a good dashboard. So one of my projects that I'm working on this week, now that I'm back is is like I'm diving deep into using a Mixpanel. Trying to get that up and running.

So that's what you'll use for event tracking?

Yeah. Like I've had ProfitWell in place for a long time to get just the overall SaaS metrics, but like, that's not enough. Need

Right. Need usage statistics. So just to play devil's advocate for a second, the devil's advocate point of view would be, it's too early to try to instrument That's the

the tension. That's definitely the tension because it's every single day, it's constantly like, all right, I could work on that, this Mixpanel project, which is literally days of my work wiring it up, or I could ship the next feature that customers are asking for. And that's the tension.

Right. There's clearly some benefit to understanding at a much deeper level, but is that benefit outweighed by, well, I'm just going to brute force whatever I'm doing is working. I'll just do more of it.

Well, that's what I've been doing for the past years. I just keep shipping features essentially. And, and, and you know, trying to do marketing stuff, getting on podcasts and, and getting out there. I tend to just default to that. Just keep the activity going and keep pushing.

But I am at a point now where we've shipped a lot of stuff already. And I know that there are like not every number in our metrics is looking that great. So like there are things that need to be improved. I also probably need to just keep talking to more customers. Another sort of takeaway that I'm realizing now like is I'm in touch with customers when they reach out with customer support questions or feature requests or if people churn, I see their reasons, but all the best paying customers are usually pretty quiet.

They don't actually reach out. They're just using it. So I feel like I need to be talking to more of those people and get a clearer picture on like what are the best use cases right now? Because there's a bunch of them. So that's another, another sort of blind spot I feel like.

So it's like, and the other thing about like reporting and data is that like the more that I push off this project of getting Mixpanel up and running, the more weeks go by where we're not collecting data. So we need I need that historic.

Right. Even if it's used three to six months from now, you'll be happy that you wired things up to start collecting and start to understand trends. Cause just because what you wired up doesn't actually mean you get insight from it.

Right. Yeah, exactly.

That's that's a that's a tricky dilemma to kind of to to figure out. And that, you know, I almost like chuckled mostly out of fear when you said the word blind spot because I I feel a bit surrounded by blind spots or at least at least like there's a lot of danger of because because we're early stage but have 20 people. And what that really means is if I want to eliminate blind spots, I am really reaching into a lot of people's like plates and their areas of responsibility and I want them to feel trusted. So I don't want to do that very often. And I'm trying to let go of a lot of things and not be in the way.

So things like, right, we have a partner event and normally I'd be like, well, I'm gonna present because, you know, I'm the best person to present and I'm consciously not doing that and giving Matt the opportunity to do that because he's good at it, getting better at it and should be better than me at it. And so I'll forego that opportunity. We'll let him do it. So there's a lot of that, like throughout the company. What that turns into is a lot of fear around blind spots on like, okay, we don't have a success team yet because it doesn't make sense to hire a success team for this many merchants.

And it's better to understand and be really close with them through process and then the success process, almost like as the same people, same relationship before we understand where should the handoff be, what does the handoff entail and what area of responsibilities are clearly on the success sides and not the sales side. But I'm so worried we have the beginnings of traction. We are now doing, you know, we're we're starting the numbers are starting to become more significant and we'll be like getting through like the, you know, millions in GMV soon. And what that means is we've got a bunch of customers that are actively using the product. The emphasis that I'm putting on everything is more customers, more merchants, let's go, let's fill the pipeline, let's crank.

But in reality, just because you win a customer doesn't mean that they're just happy and everything's great. You need to talk to them. And that feels like a very, very scary blind spot because to get that traction and then have some of them leave because we weren't really aware of everything that they needed and wanted and why and in what way. That's very, very scary. So it feels like we're gonna pull the trigger on success soon to fill that blind spot.

What does that look like for you? So you brought on some first merchants, they're they're act they have live stores processing revenue. Yes. That is awesome.

Yes. Hell yeah.

So you guys like have closed them, you got you got their their checkout like all wired up and and up and running and live. What, what does your success process look like before you even hire your success people? Like what do you, what's that look like for you right now?

Yeah. So, so it actually starts before they launch. So the sales process entails, here's what we do. Here's the demo, here's screenshots, here's the deck. Basically, here's the information that we need to convey to you in order for you to understand what we do and what the benefits are.

Then they cross over when they make a decision. Yes, I want to sign up for an account. And it's really like the success starts there because from that point on, we're not even close to that. We actually haven't started. We then work with them to understand their tech stack, make sure that we are thinking through how our checkout is going to impact their business, ideally minimally.

But we still we need to understand, do you use Afterpay? We don't have an integration with Afterpay yet. Do you use Amazon Pay? You can't use Amazon Pay. So these certain things that have to match.

Then we keep really high level people involved because I want the VP of product and the CTO to be on that onboarding call when it's time to create their account and wired up to their store. So Rock right now is doing all of the implementation of, okay, now we are going to get the Rally checkout button code onto your store so that when people click on this button, it goes to the Rally checkout instead of your default checkout. So we're close in that way. And the salesperson who brought them in is staying in touch with them and basically shepherding them through the process. Like, okay, the next step is we'll set up a call for onboarding.

The next step is we'll set up a call for account creation. And then once they're live, that I guess would be the post launch part of the success relationship. And so that is checking in. As soon as they get started processing real orders, that's when we really understand and they really understand, are there any implications that we missed? Is your fraud protection system still working?

Is your fulfillment seeing things the right way? Are discounts working properly? Are your refunds working properly? All the stuff that is involved in our checkout. And so it's that first week of really, just really making sure, do you have everything you need?

Have you checked this? I would recommend that. Do you want to call? Here's my info. So it's very, very proactive, but then it starts to fade, Right.

And what a success team would do is get that handoff and say, I am now your primary point of contact. Here's all my information right around, right before launching. And then at the time of launch, and then the baton gets handed over so that the success person is doing that first week check-in. And then they start to lay out a plan. In your first thirty days, this is what it's going to look like.

So let's set up a call for thirty days after launch to check up, see how your numbers are doing. Then we'll start making recommendations. This is the ninety day plan. This is the six month plan. So that, you know, we can't ask salespeople to do.

Do you find with that success role, whether it's you or or or somebody you hire in in success, like how receptive are customers to that sort of like outreach? Right? Like I mean just for example, I this this past week, another thing that I've been tweeting a lot about is like my own work habits which translated to I think I need a project management solution. So I've been doing like this round robin for several weeks now on like basically all the major PM tools that you know about. So like I've been bouncing between, you know, Notion, ClickUp, Asana, basically those three, a few other small ones.

And everyone sort of sucks in its own way and has its little features that I do need in its own way and I sort of ended up landing on for my personal to do list using things, by Culture Code which is a long time little app that I really like.

Yeah. It's funny. The team uses Asana. I used Todoist.

Yeah. It's a similar do it similar to Todoist. I I tried out I I noticed this especially with ClickUp, but I guess Asana probably has their own thing too where, like, I signed up on a free account and I'm the type of person who, like, I'll I'll just get in there and play around with it and and see what it does, what what I can do with it. If I run into something that is really confusing, I'll send a a support email. But like, you know, then I'm getting bombarded with their customer success person.

Hey, just checking in.

Yes.

Yes. Like, I always just ignore those emails. Can't be annoying. No. I'm not gonna hop on a call with you to walk through.

Like, I'm not gonna do that. You know?

Well, why why not? You you know what? What ends up happening a lot is that you are a special breed and you are a special snowflake, and it happens a lot to founders. But when the founder sends an email to their head of customer success that says, this looks interesting. Set up a demo with them.

That's who gets on the call. Right? That's what happens a lot. And it really matters to that person. It's not bothering them because that's their job.

Their job is to make sure that this thing works really well. And then they're going to need to communicate with the people that they manage and how the tool works.

It really

so It depends on the

tool and the and the customer. Right? I mean, in in my case, I'm a I'm a solo founder who's just sort of setting this up for myself.

You're a

nightmare, Martin. I'm sure. Yeah. I'm sure.

You're a great customer on one end because you don't really tax the company very much, but the company would prefer that you got in touch with them, built a relationship because you're a lot less likely to cancel if you have a relationship that you can ask someone when you have a question and you have a relationship with someone that you don't want to cancel on this combo. Our customers end up being pretty receptive to it because of the nature of our product. It is so critical. It's where the payments happen. Literally all you do all day.

The whole point of what you do all day as an e commerce merchant is to get the transaction. And our software is what does that for you. And so they're more open than they would be to other products to say, I want to know about that feature. Yes, I have a question. Yes, I wanna make, I wanna intro to someone that can help us do this.

Yeah. And like, that's a good place to be is when you're in that, it's a really essential piece of their flow and their business depends on it. And the nice thing that you have going is like, there's basically only one way to use Rally, right? Like it's your checkout. Like that's Yeah.

How people check

It's been interesting seeing people come up with alternative uses for it already. It's been pretty interesting. Like we have a software company that wants to be able to sell merch, so physical products to their customer base and they want to use our checkout for it. We have other people who kept their Shopify store, but are now running a second channel with Swell and Rally and a landing page to test things out because they don't, Shopify can't do what they want. So there's definitely some things that are moving around, but-

Well, those are different sort of, they're still selling products in a flow.

And payment and processing.

And so for your customer success people, they're able to like technically set them up in more or less the same way, maybe shapes and sizes, but like in

Yeah, that's right.

Like in Zip Message, everyone is different. But I also ran into this when I was doing Process Kit. Like, Process Kit was more like that, like they did need more hand holding and a lot of people did ask for it, but every solution was different. Every businesses processes were very different and their integrations were different.

Yeah, which is complicated for a team to kind of get get really good at doing over and over again.

Right, right. And with Zip Message, it's like not, it's not the kind of thing that somebody needs handholding with. Just use it or they don't use it. They're using it in different ways. So it's like,

I like what you said before about the checkout. It is great to be in that spot. It does also come with a price. It is hotly contested. The actual payments, you're fighting everyone from your direct competitor in BOLT and FAST to your somewhat competitors and slash partners in Stripe because everybody wants that payment flow.

And when we were moving from the abandoned card app, this is years ago to the check originally, what I told the team, which at that point consisted of four of us, was we are flying closer to the sun now. There is more danger. We are we are going closer to where the value is and we're going be able to charge more, but it is more danger. That ended up being prescient, unfortunately. But now, you know, there's a lot of things happening in the checkout space and there's a lot of like angst about like bullying and that sort of thing, including from us also.

But really, the bottom line is everybody wants that. So be prepared to fight. And it does get a little tricky. One of the good things that happened last week, which was a very stressful week for me, and I'm very happy to be out of it, was that we signed a partnership agreement with BigCommerce. And that moves us away from being in direct competition with BigCommerce for their check on their payment flow and moves us over to being more cooperative with them, which is good because we saw what happened if we were purely adversarial with the platforms.

We saw what happened

with Shopify and we're doing our best to make sure that does not get repeated.

What does the partnership agreement look like with BigCommerce? Like is is Rally like an like an alternate checkout that they can swap in into their?

There are different levels to it. And the level that we are participating at right now is like rev share, which is very important. Right. So we are not seen as taking money away from their platform, which is, you know, that that makes sense. And then some cooperation around deal flow.

One of the things that we are particularly well situated for is to bring on unhappy Shopify merchants and direct them toward BigCommerce. And they are very interested in that, as are we. So that's one thing. And then like you said, BigCommerce merchants can decide to effectively upgrade from their default checkout to the rally checkout for benefits X, Y, and Z. We have to think that way because it's so adversarial and competitive in nature, the payment flow.

Do you have any dynamic like that on your end in terms of like direct competition? Like, you replacing something like

Loom is the obvious big

one. Okay.

It comes up every single day.

Crashed my computer yesterday. Shout out to Loom. There you go.

Loom is is so the elephant in the room in this space that like I actually I take them head on when I introduce what ZipMessage is. Like when I go I I've been going on a lot of podcasts lately and so usually when they're like, is Zip Message? I usually introduce it like, well it's a video messaging tool for async conversations. You've probably seen tools like Loom where you can send a video message to someone else. I'll say like, you know, Zip Message can do that but the difference is you can easily get a reply back from someone and that person doesn't need to sign up or install or

It's two way as opposed to Two way and you can have

a conversation and and that's how I position it and how I explain it. Like it's like Loom but it's different if you do back and forth conversations because with looms, you're just sending a 100 different Loom links back and forth.

That's right. I think that is using those points of like shared assumptions and shared understanding is great.

Yeah. And compared to like, when I was working on ProcessKit, it ended up playing in the project management space. So there wasn't a single competitor to point to. It was just a whole ocean of PM tools.

And then they're looking to you for those features even if that's not really what Yeah, you're trying

trying to to fight for feature parity with a 100 different tools and people use them in a 100 different ways and it's like, well, we're sort of nichey different in this way and that was a huge uphill battle. In this space I like it because it's like, there's this one big elephant in the room that they've sucked up a lot of activity in this space. There's a lot of smaller little tools, but like, we can just be like, look, we're like them, but we're different.

So Yeah. It's it's almost like Loom users are good potential for you because if you use A them regularly

lot of our paying customers switch right over from Loom or they use them side by side and then they ditch Loom.

Do you have a Chrome extension?

We do.

That might be the only reason I use Loom.

Yeah. We have a Chrome extension. Yeah. But the difference is we're we're built right into the browser too. So like, so the person you send a ZipMessage link to, your client, your customer,

your Oh, teammate that's right. It's right. Your your

new hire, your freelancer, they they don't have to have the extension installed. They don't have to register. They could just click go to the page and click record. Yeah.

Cool. Yeah. We hired a freelance writer this week and her onboarding was with Zip Message.

Oh, sweet.

Yeah. Yeah. Hell yeah. What else, man? What else?

You wanna talk about partners?

Yeah, partners. This was something that my developers well, one of my developers was working on this actually before my trips and he mostly, he built a lot of what what we had to build in terms of preparing for integration partnerships. We didn't ship it. I went on vacation. I put that on hold until I came back.

Now this week it turned out to be you know more more work to get that all shaped up and ready to launch. We're gonna

You talk about what it means? What are you building?

Okay. So this is more of an under the hood change. It took a lot of hours to build. So it's not gonna be like a very public launchable thing, but all right. So we've already built and shipped a public API.

So we already, like you can go to api.zipessage.com and see our docs that that that's available with what you can do with our API. But that is only usable for direct customers of Zip Message. Like, you're a if you're a Zip Message customer and you are a developer, you can build your own custom integration that connects to our but in terms of bringing on partners, we need the ability to let a customer of Zip Message and a customer of partner x y z to plug in their API key and then use our tools together. And we need the ability to offer different partner integrations at different plan levels. So we needed to technically build the ability to offer like if this call to our API endpoint is coming from partner X, then we need to check to make sure that that zip message customers on the premium plan.

But if it's coming from partner Y, then then that one, then then we allow that integration on basic plan partner, you know, customers.

I see the underlying work that needed to happen.

Yeah. So so we did build all that logic. It's gonna be launching to our app next week kind of quietly But now that we have that, we we are set up to go out and bring on integration partners, you know. And I've started talking to a few but I really need to start pushing on that more because a goal of mine, I'll state it publicly, know, on the podcast, something I want to achieve for 2022 is is I don't know, like 10 of these because there's a whole list of categories of apps that would be great partners for Zip Message. I think membership platforms are a big one.

Right, like a coach coaching type of a environment?

Coaching, private membership community. There's a lot of those who are using Zip Message to communicate with their members and form small groups and things like that. So that's, so there's like 20 plus membership platforms, whether they're WordPress plugins, just membership SaaS, whatever it is. Some podcasts hosts I've been talking to because podcasters like to interact with their audience or even use the message to record podcast material. Hiring.

So like that could be like, candidate management or some of these like Workflowy, I think is one. But also like integrating with job boards directly. So if you're a job board, can you can have ZipMessage handle your your video applications. Websites like like having a WordPress plugin and maybe do something with like Webflow or something like that where cause we already have the ability to embed a zip message on a page or embed your intake, your zip message intake form. So these are all different use cases.

What I would like to do is is form these partnerships, have direct integrations where like if a new member signs up then let's fire up a zip message with them and put it on their their personal page or something like that. But like then then if I can do a partnership, we can co promote it so like have a whatever it is like a webinar, an email blast to their list. I'll include it in my list. And, and, and so I need to think through how, how to pitch that to partners, how to develop that. What should the expectations be on both ends?

How to get the most out of each partnership and make it a win win and, you know,

That might be my favorite version of marketing. It's, yes, it's the best. It's like, it just aligns mutual interest in the best possible way. It's like, you're doing something, we're doing something that's complimentary. It's not competitive.

We have the same clients. We have the same interest in mind. Let's work together. And it like yeah. It helps introduce to each other's audiences.

So when I'm curious how you think about how to choose those partners. Is it something that you decide on and you say it would, it would be great if we could do an integration with X or is it reach out to the customer base and ask what people want integrations with.

I definitely just see in the usage and see in the feature requests that we get, like what people are trying to do. And a lot of those have involved, like, you know, like I said, like website embeds and membership integrations, you know, coaching community, that sort of stuff.

That version of it is the ideal in my opinion, because it gives you the best possible pitch to the partner, especially if they're much larger than you are. Cause if you, if they're much larger, it's hard to get attention. But if you come to them, ideally like from an intro, from a paying customer, it's, it's taken much more seriously.

I mean, I tend to think of integrations in a few, there's a few different buckets of like why an integration should exist. Right? Like we've already launched a direct Slack integration. Like we're not expecting Slack to go promote us, although we are listed in their in their directory. But that was to sort of satisfy a common request.

Like people are using Slack, they need Zip Message to integrate with it. So so so we launched that to solve that common feature request. We also launched a Zapier integration again just to have it so that anybody can integrate Zip Message with anything that they ever want to do. I think it's a given. I think every SaaS should should do that, the Zapier one.

The partnerships that I would like to get into are, I would say relatively smaller apps, the ones that are more likely to be able to do a co promotional thing. I wouldn't expect to be able to do that with any massive big name company.

Right, they're just not gonna care the same way.

But there's a ton of SaaS companies and products out there that are like, you know, medium size, which are still way ahead of where I'm at.

Right. If you have a thousand customers, it's a big deal to get in front of them.

Yeah, exactly. Even if you only want to put me in front of like a segment of your customers, like Right. It's still a big deal. Yeah. Because like, again, thinking about like like the membership platforms, right?

We we definitely have a lot of people who have some form of a membership platform and they're using Zip Message with their members. But I would love to get in front of more membership owners because clearly membership owners have found something interesting in Zip Message. So like, yes, our integration should help our current customers, but that that's a that's a segment that we should be getting in front of. And and if we can present them with like not only here's an integration but let's teach you about a a use case that you can do with video messaging with your customers. Here's a whole event or or an email all about it.

You know, that that's something that get because like everything and you know, again, Zip Messages is viral products. So like anything that can get people talking about it and recommending a way that they use it, I'm interested in getting that out there, you know.

Yeah. Our normal process is customer, mutual customer, right? Between ourselves and the integrate and the integration partner, then the integration and then on the co marketing, we like identify what's the ideal, like what's our fantasy, right? Like, so let's just, for example, BigCommerce, like our ideal is like build it into the admin so that every single BigCommerce merchant sees it. And if that's the ideal, then how do we like work down from there?

Okay, maybe we won't get the ideal right now. We'll work on that. But what's right below that? Okay. Sometimes the case study on their blog, what's below that.

Okay. Case study on our blog. So you're right. You just kind of, what's the ideal, like shoot for absolutely everything. And then we like identify what else we can do beneath that and just see what we can get.

Yeah. And like, and and some of my early conversations with with partners, like it's kinda cool because Zip Message, it like we do video recording in the browser and like that's a big enough piece of functionality that like most partners are not gonna build their own video Right. Recording video playback interfaces. It gets it's it's it's big and hairy enough for someone not to wanna build it themselves but if they can present that sort of new feature, new ability to their product set through this integration, I think that's a, it could be a win win. But that's my sales pitch to everyone out there like, I don't know.

I like it. We are early in that journey, but we already are bumping into limitations based on our capacity. So we now have partners that want to build and we don't have the capacity to build the integration. And if we had a public partners API, they would be able to build it. So we are have already arrived at the point of frustration.

And so now, you know, we'll wait until it really needs to get done. But Rock, who really, you know, this is like a CTO type of a project, an issue, not to build it, but this is what he should be doing. How do I unlock growth through the engineering? And this this is something that will come up.

I mean, is a constant battle for me. I'm curious, like how do you prioritize right now? So you're, you're, you're now at the point where you have active customers on board. You're, you're ramping up the, the lead flow and everything. So like, I mean, you have a much larger team so you can do a lot of things simultaneously, but like, how how do you decide like we're gonna push on these levers and these other levers will can can wait?

Because I'm constantly like I said, like like this whole integrations thing that I'm talking about, that's sort of like theoretical because day to day I have other feature requests and also like people saying like this experience could be better. So there's features we also need to build and it's come up into every day. It's like, what do we do? Right now,

customer is, I guess the other way to say it would be the present is the decider, not the future. Meaning if we think it's going to impact the very short term, this will help us get more customers on board, will help us prevent a customer from leaving, will help us close a customer that's in the pipeline like the short term. That's what's driving those decisions right now. And we look forward to being able to think further out into the future and think strategically and build stuff ahead of time. And we're just not really there right now.

The funny thing is that we were more forward thinking six months ago when we were still building the product and it wasn't fully out yet. And now that it's out, it's like the customers, man. So I think that matters. Customers will doing this work, add new customers, more revenue, more GMV. If yes, do it.

If not, hold it off.

You know that that thing about six months ago, it's so true. Like, I mean, in, in the earliest days of Zip Message, it was clearly obvious, like what, what do we need to build first, second and third? Cause these core pieces have to be built. Let's just get them all built. It'll take a few months.

Yeah. But now a year in, it's like most of that stuff has been built and now now it's like a barrage of 20 different priorities that That's reality. For resources.

Yeah. Well, look, we made a ton of progress on NFTs and NFT gating and crypto payments. And then as soon as we launched and started bringing on real customers with real revenue, the focus just moved away from that stuff, which is like more future focused and had to just be like, well, look, the people in front of us right now are processing revenue on BigCommerce and WooCommerce as well. And let's just get them on board and start growing and start generating revenue. It's tough because I think the bit there are bigger opportunities.

That are a few steps away from where the product is right now. Like I want us to get to a point where we can sell to much, much larger merchants because a lot of those really big brands want to sell in the metaverse, right? They want to sell in decentraland and sandbox and gaming environments, and they have no idea how to do it. And that's what our checkout does. It's basically doesn't care what the front end is.

So we can do an integration with Sandbox, which is like a virtual world in Web three, and then allow merchants to build stores there and then take the payments from shoppers and then route the order back into the order management system so they can actually ship out product based on that purchase. That to me feels like we can work with huge brands because they don't know how to do it. And our checkout is perfect for it. And it does bother me that we can't pursue that, but it's like, you want, you want to race series day? You got to get that traction.

You want that traction service, the people that are right in front of you right now. But I do have a lot of like intentions and plans on like second, I get more money in the coffers on the next round. Some of it will go toward the future while the majority of it goes toward the present. Yeah. Yeah, man.

Tough bounce.

It's a constant battle. You have to wrap up?

I do kinda need to wrap up. I have lunch with my lawyer, who's now my good friend, Eric.

Yeah. There you go. We've done so much work

and seen so much pain together. And I highly recommend working with a lawyer that you both trust and like because there's there's some there's some moments out there.

You'll go to battle for sure.

You go to battle and you kinda you need someone willing to give you advice at the right moment from the right point of view and, like, building up a relationship of trust over time. You're very receptive to to that person's advice.

Yep. Well, good stuff. You are going on vacation. Right? Or you're be around next week?

I won't be around next week. My flight is Friday morning. Hell, yeah. And I will be still on the beach the following Friday. So we'll we'll we'll we'll talk in a few weeks.

It was a good episode. It's good to see you. Thanks, everybody, for listening.

Alright. Later, folks. See you.