Bootstrapped Web

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Bootstrap Web. Brian, it's been a little while.

Been a little while. You know, I think you and I have both have had a lot of things going on over the last, what, four or five, six weeks where it's like, it kind of felt good not to podcast for a couple of weeks there.

Yeah. Some weeks I was like jubilant and other weeks I was like gloomy and it was almost like I almost prefer not to record in in like that. Yeah. That yo yo and

Same here. And you know, there's still always a lot kind of going on and swirling around and up in the air. I do feel like I have turned a corner in the past week with some clarity, which hopefully will be good for the podcast.

I feel in a similar way. And really it's comparing to where I was a few weeks ago. I mean, right, let's, let's just, let's just get out there and talk about it. Since the last time we recorded, a lot has changed in the market and it's both macro, right? It's it's like what you see in the markets and in the news and on the Twitter timeline.

And it has definitely made its way into the micro, into our companies and our revenue and everything. I had very interesting timing with my fundraising process, which kicked off like two days before the crash.

You were like kind of just getting started with this and it was like a week or two before.

That's right. And so it went from, well, this can be a piece of cake. Like, because historically speaking, you, you go out there, you raise your hand, you get a few term sheets and you kind of like move on with your life. Like that is no longer the case. That is not, Of course, there are exceptions.

Hallelujah to the exceptions. But generally speaking, that's not what's going on in the market. And we had this we had this double whammy where our space, our two big competitors fast and bolt like so that all at the same time with the market just spooked a lot of people. You would prefer that your competitors, the big ones that you're dealing with aren't amazing and everyone loves them. Right.

That's kind of tough. But if they go so sour and so bad, all of a sudden starts to bring questions about the space and the industry and the product said all that stuff like, so you kind of stuck, right? One of our competitors fast went out of business and the other one Bolt got sued by their biggest customer. And then like all of this drama on top of the other drama, which culminated in layoffs last week. So there's just a lot to kind of like explain.

You know, I I feel like the theme of of what I've been thinking about and this is just a general thing, there's always this dual track. You know, like in entrepreneurship, I feel like the game really is the mid to long term, like where are we headed? What do we need to do or change or learn? And and where where's this going in the future? And then there's the right now, you know.

We we've gotta keep shipping. And and I feel like that was really the theme for me in the last month. Because you know, right around the time that you were starting with that and so like, what sort of set off alarm bells in my world was, you know, a slowdown in growth on on MRR and and what was really difficult about it and I can get into what I've been doing about it and how it turned a corner. But so I started to notice in, I guess it was really April was like the big month where the MRR graph really kind of stalled. It started to slow down a little bit in in March, but then April was when the alarm bells sort of like, this trend is not really stopping.

And then May, it got a little bit better. But the challenging thing for me was like, we're still seeing steady and even growing free sign ups and we're seeing steady and growing customer sign ups. And the thing that's that was obviously, you know, dragging it down was was some churn and like a consistent, you know, just a consistency of of the churn numbers which I I didn't like to see. You know, there's always gonna be some, especially in in a young product, I think. But I started to see a lot of the same churn reasons come up again and again.

And that started to, you know, raise alarm bells in terms of like, you know, product market fit and everything. And but then it it it also happened at the same time that the market and and the economy is start especially in this software space is starting to, everyone's starting to report like, April and and May are not, are historically down. We see like industry wide trends. I still am convinced that there's, in my case, there's more to it than just the macro trends. There is definitely a product product issue that I have to work through that I've been working through.

That's what the big thing that I wanna talk about is this. I've been doing jobs to be done interviews. I've done 20 of them. I learned a ton. And right now I'm like wrapping those up and pivoting to, okay, now taking what I've learned and making the necessary changes, you know?

Like the long term and short term thing is like, while I have a ton of these customer interviews going on, that's all research and learning for the future. And but we still have

As opposed to the immediate.

Mhmm. We still have features to ship every single week. And and I and I also got a little bit frustrated with like, we have all these like features that were way overdue for shipping. And and like just hearing the requests again and again, it's like, I can't believe I've been promising this feature for like eight months and I still haven't even shipped it, you know. So You've

been hard on yourself for it.

So so so you know, I I started to hustle more. My my developers shipped some good stuff, but I I went in and and built a couple of these features myself and we and we did finally get out the door like a much better recorder. We got unseen notifications now. We've got this this cool feature where you could like stitch together multiple messages in a in a recording thread into one single download, you know, custom message limits. So like, all all these like little things that it's like, finally, we can like, I can like stop promising this feature and be like, yes, we have it.

That is a relief. I'm sure you have the challenge of the short term and then like the medium and long term and trying to do both at same time.

And I'm like literally working on both at the same time. That's the, it's like my job on both.

Yes. Which is, which is a different version of the challenge. My challenge has been that this fundraising environment is so intense that I can't even I'm barely aware of the short term. I'm doing like checkups with the team to make sure that I stay aware because I'm not in Slack reading all the stuff that I normally would read and seeing how customers are asking things and support requests and features that are going live. I can barely even wrap my head around that.

My true north, my mantra has been pay more attention to my inbox than to my Twitter timeline. That was like my guiding post because those first few weeks reading the Twitter timeline was so doom and gloom and so depressing and so scary that it was like, Oh, clearly that's that's just no longer helpful. Okay, I can acknowledge that things went sour. But if I look at my inbox, it's like amazing opportunities, incredible people, new people who want to join the company. So I basically started to just talk to myself, like check Twitter less, keep focused on what's actually happening almost like that.

That day to day that you're talking about the short term is much more optimistic than, than what's happening in the market. Right. We, our companies don't have the scale that the economy impacts us the same way. Right. If you look at Shopify, like they have like this index of e commerce because there's such huge scale that when e commerce is down and spending is down, Shopify is down.

Like you and I cannot blame the market on like our issues and our demand and our churn and all these other things. So it's really tempting to get caught up in the macro, but you you can't lose sight of what you need to do and what actually matters.

So what can you talk about with your fundraising here? What I'm kind of curious is like, how do investors look at what's happening here in terms of like making new investments, right? Because like, it does seem like everything that's happening in the economy, I mean, knows what, what the hell is gonna happen, but it seems like even if we're heading into a recession, it's not gonna, it's not gonna be forever. It's gonna be a short, probably a short term thing or I don't know, year or two, who knows? Like, but like investors are investing for the long term.

So why do we see all that carefulness come coming from the VC world?

There are several and sometimes conflicting things happening at the same time in like the venture startup world. It is definitely true that the public markets and the multiples that got restricted so severely. Right. I mean, companies like Shopify, they're down 80%. Right.

It's like, well, it will be like a crypto shitcoin at this point. But it's really a matter of like the multiples were insane. And now they're like coming back down to reality because people don't think the growth is going to be there. And so that definitely impacts later stage. Right.

So if you're investing in series BCDE, you're aiming toward going public. And then, of course, the price you go public at is now much, much lower than what it looked like it was going to be a year ago. So that immediately impacts the later like growth stage rounds. It starts to have an impact on like series A and C, definitely less of an impact. But VCs are nothing if not like great arbiters of like what others are doing and what others are thinking and feeling.

Right. They have a very good sense of where things are and they take a lot of cues in that. It's very rare for investors to really genuinely completely think on their own and ignore everything. Like you'll see some of it, right? You'll see like the Warren Buffett style, like be greedy when others are scared type of a thing.

Right. So Andreessen Horowitz announcing a $4,500,000,000 crypto fund last week is like not an accident. Right. They could have announced it whenever they announced it right at the most gloomy period for crypto because they're like, everyone, everyone's scared. We're going to go so over the top big.

So it is also true that a lot of funds raised enormous amounts of money over the last six months. So there is an incredible amount of money that still needs to find a home. It needs to be deployed. That's literally what they do for a living is make investments. So they're not just going to sit back for a year and do nothing.

But it just it just changes the environment. And changed overnight. So in previous like encounters with investors, if you were raising around, they expected very, very aggressive behavior from other investors. And what that meant for Much more competitive. Much more competitive.

And what meant for them, it's less due diligence, less time to get to know the team and you better make an offer or you're to lose out on every single deal. So it was this very, very FOMO driven environment.

And so now there's like more scrutiny.

That's right. It's just kind of, woah, everyone's stepping back. Like no one's driven by FOMO and no one's driven. I mean, people are still driven by FOMO, but they're not driven to the same degree by, oh my God, we need to make an offer or we're going to lose this opportunity. So the way I've been explaining it to like my team and to myself is that it will make for a healthier relationship with our investors.

It's just it's just a lot of stress to chew on for a while, Right? If you look at our competitors fast and bolt, the extreme frothiness of that environment that they raised money didn't actually help them. Right. Fast got drunk on money and started spending $10,000,000 a month before they even had any traction. Right.

They were making $50 a month in revenue, which is a cool amount of money, but not for a company spending $10,000,000 a month. And BALT raised at a billion valuation. And then later on in the same year raised at 11,000,000,000. Like, you know, that is astronomical. And now they're in this crazy situation where they encourage a lot of their employees to take out loans to exercise stock options.

And now they're doing layoffs. And now, like, there's a different CEO. So like that didn't actually do that good for them. They have money in the bank. That's good.

But it's not a healthy situation to be in. So for us to go through this now with additional diligence, with really like multiple conversations and really getting to know people, it will, I think it will lead to a healthier place.

What does this look like for you?

What do you mean for me?

Like just day to day. Is your day and calendar just consumed with these meetings? Also like who else on your team is involved or is it really like this is what you're doing and then they're just working on everything else?

Yes. Yes. It's that 99% of the time. And then part of the later conversations with funds that are like, you have this initial conversation and it's like a funnel, it's like a sales funnel, right? You talk to 50 people and out of those 30 are like, you know what, this is awesome.

You're great. Good luck with everything, but it's not right for us. And then only a certain amount go to the next stage in the funnel. So it's like that. And in the later stages of the funnel, people want to get to know your co founder.

They want to meet your VP of products, right? Basically the people that you're telling them about that make your team special. They're like, great, let's meet them. Let's kind of have those conversations and kind of get to know each other. So the biggest difference is that in many ways it feels like it's going back to normal, right?

Normal fundraising was a six to eight week process of getting to know people, going through that funnel, identifying the best fits, getting term sheets, negotiating and closing a deal. Was happening over the last two years was barely even mentioning that you're consider investing. Then you get a term sheet from the people who have been following you. Then you tell all the other investors that you already have a term sheet. Then you get more term sheets and then you're kind of like done three weeks later in this very competitive environment with the valuation going through the roof.

Like that was awesome for a while, but it was real.

Was going to say like, man, that sounds nice. Just so quick. So like, so quick and done and get back to work, you know?

Yes. Yes. And now it's kind of like not going to be like that. It's more of a six to eight week grind. And it is extremely, extremely distracting because you are not focused on the day to day.

And what that means is you want to protect your team as much as possible and take as much of the brunt of that distraction as possible. And that is like, I remember the first two weeks in my mind, I was like complaining. I was like, God damn it. I wish it was easier. You know, was doing all that.

And then at some point I was like, this is your job. This is literally what your role is, is to make sure that we have money in the bank and can do what we need to do. And everyone else,

you know, I think we've

talked about it before in this podcast, the fire, the heat in a startup moves around. Sometimes it's in marketing, sometimes it's in product, sometimes it's in, you know, somewhere else right now, spotlights on me. So, you know, get, get to work.

There are so many like lessons in in entrepreneurship that I constantly relearn the hard the hard way. It's like, I I make the same mistakes and then and then I have to relearn the same lessons over and over again, you know.

Where are you now on on what what, what's driving that?

I feel like I've really gone through a a pretty big evolution just in the last thirty days or so. I started raising the alarm bells when I when I noticed, I would say like multiple weeks of of steady churn that wasn't there in months prior. But also what what is what was frustrating about it and I and this I haven't fully experienced in my previous businesses where like we see a steady, again, like the top of funnel and the customer growth has been steady. Usually the the challenge is like, I just can't get customers to to buy my thing. But like that's that's not the the the challenge here.

The challenge is like like figuring out who are the best customers who are staying and using it and find the tool essential and who are the customers who just sign up and pay for a couple of months. Maybe maybe aspirationally, maybe they plan to use it more, maybe they try it a little while, but it's just not essential enough for them to stick with it.

Okay. Which is different from the from the the people that the product ideally wants. So can I ask you like what what that like lesson that you feel like you relearned is?

And then I and then I think it would

be helpful to hear some detail around how you're doing these interviews and like

Okay. I have so much to share. I feel like this might go kinda long.

That's good. That's good.

All right. The first one though, before I even started the interviews is that I would say a big mistake or a trap that I almost really fell into is identifying this big problem and coming up with a solution right now. Like I see this big problem and okay, my gut tells me we need to change the product and go in this new direction because I think that'll be much better and it would and and we'll and we'll do much better if we just go ahead and do that. Right? And I came and I started thinking through a whole new direction for the product and the marketing and the positioning and and I got kind of excited about it and I started researching it.

Was like, oh, this could really work. And I I got some good advice from from, you know, friends and advisers and and it it became it became suddenly clear like, woah, woah, woah. Hold on. Like, let's not get let let's not jump to conclusions here. Let's not jump to a solution before you've fully vetted it, before you've even done any any research, you know, other than just Googling and looking at other products and stuff.

So that that's when it was like the moments like, no. I need to slow down and do a a a full process of customer interviews. So then it was like, okay. Okay, dumbass. You you actually need to go talk to your customers for once, you know.

I've done customer interviews for all all my businesses all, you know, through the years and and this was that one of those lessons that I have to I had to relearn again. It's like, oh, when you actually talk to them especially at a deep level, you not only learn a ton and I did learn a ton but like I get it it also helps me like emotionally and mentally because because I could see these churn things happening and then I talked to a really happy customer or I talked to a customer who churned and it's like, oh, well of course, of course they churned. They weren't a good fit. Yes. Know, it's

like Instead of all the assumptions you're making in your head.

Yeah, yeah. And and it just starts to clarify the path forward, right? That that was sort of like big big lesson number one. You know, again, I've I've done customer interviews for many years on all my products. This time around, I went for a much more structured and deeper approach using the jobs to be done framework.

It's not a framework. It's it's just really a an approach to how how you interview and and and gather insights. I sort of relearned a lot about jobs to be done. You know, I've been familiar with it, but I I did a lot more reading up on it and and listening to examples and stuff like that. And the other thing is that with ZipMessage, I a lot of my previous interactions with customers happened via ZipMessage asynchronously which was always always helpful.

You know, I can get good good feedback that way. I still do. But this time I wanted to actually do live calls and do like forty five minute plus deep dives with each person. Right?

So so you emailed?

Yes. I I well first I I went through the customer database and I did some work into figuring out who are the best people to invite. Yep.

Makes sense.

I think I booked. I invited like 20 or 25 and I booked like 16 or 17. Most of them were paying customers. I tried to invite the people who are most actively using it. And I also, for that first batch, I tried to avoid folks who I'm personally friends with, who I know use the product, you know.

I wanted to talk to more strangers, you know. So I did that and I and I did invite a bunch of people who churned and not surprisingly that that was like a lower response rate but I did get on on a couple of calls with some of those folks. So that was like the first batch. Was like, I would say 16 recorded interviews and then there was a batch two. But the first batch was like more of like a wide mix of of use cases, right?

I did a lot of analysis on like okay, these five seem to be SaaS companies. These four seem to be consultants. These these five are agencies. These are coaches and they're all using it in different capacities. Right?

So I got on calls and I started to the big headline takeaway is if I had to really simplify it into two big groups, there's there's one group that I call coaches and consultants. And then there's the other group which is sort of like everyone else. So coaches and consultants seem to be turning out to be like the best customers for Zip Message. In in terms of what I'm what I'm seeing and what I'm learning. And I can go into the reasons for that.

The folks who are who don't consider themselves to be a coach or a consultant. And and I would I would throw in some agencies into the consultants because they're basically a a team of consultants. Right? But the other folks are using it more for like team messaging and some are using it for like sales. Some are using it for trying out asynchronous podcasting and, you know, or like intakes for like job applications or, you know, social media stuff like and and all of that is the really challenging thing is that there are good customers in in all groups, but most of the churn comes from that group of of the of the miscellaneous.

Right? And the top reason, of course, that I hear again and again is I sent zip message links to other people and I didn't get as as many responses as I expected I would.

Yep. Yep. That makes sense. You you have two customers in in that way.

Yeah. Two. And they're like very different customers. Like they they intend to use Zip Message in a very different way. And then once I started talking to those coaches and consultants, it started to become more and more obvious.

I mean, first of all, their relationship with their clients that like their clients are paying them. The thing that they sell is their conversations. They sell their time and their communication with clients. Like they don't have a software product, they have themselves and they sell them speaking to clients. That's what clients buy.

So clients are incentivized to talk with them and so they turn to ZipMessage to be that async messaging tool to keep in constant contact in between their live Zoom call sessions with with their clients. Whether it's one to one clients or coaching clients or or I mean group coaching or or consulting in some way. And then there and then there's like so many different types of coaches and consultants. Some are like one to one sort of like mentor, like, let's let's let me work with you directly. Some are like team coaches where they'll work with a whole sales team and they coach individual people within a company.

Some are like dog trainers, some are music teachers, you know, life health coach, business coaches, all of it.

How do you interpret that? Is it allowing them to create more value like with the same resources or on their own time or or right? It's it's like a magnifier?

The the value happens. And here's like another moment for me. I thought that ZipMessage was a way for people to like reduce the amount of communication they need to do. Right? Like save time, get more get more freedom.

Right? But in a way the opposite is what they want. They want to communicate more. They want to give their clients more communication access to them because that's good for their business. Their whole business is built on these relationships.

Right?

And if it's done asynchronously and on the consultant's time, they can just decide to send out messages whenever they need to. They don't need to schedule. Yes. Okay.

Like it enables them to actually do more communication. Otherwise, would it would be prohibitive, right? Like they already do some Zoom calls with clients. That's always gonna be there, right? But the additional communication that happens in between the Zoom calls, which is still not just like scheduling emails or this or that.

It's it's more like actual consulting that are like quick questions or hey, I need feedback on this thing from my coach, but it's but the alternative for them would be to hop on on on an additional Zoom call. And that's that would cost too much to to offer that for their clients. It would cost too much in their time.

You have to schedule it all that.

Yeah. And and and they've tried to use other tool like I I learned through these interviews because I've I've never really been like a coach as my business. I I've dabbled in it through product ties and stuff but I but I've never made that like my business. Right? And I learned about all the commonalities that coaches see and deal with in terms of how they engage with clients.

A lot of them have used things like Voxer or WhatsApp to do that job of of handling the async in between sessions, you know, asynchronously. But you know, they complain about how like, well, that just gives my clients too much access to me. They can message me anytime even after our engagement ends and and things like that and and it's like an app that gets lost. And so really what they need and what I learned that they're using zip message for is like they're using it, they're making it like the official line of communication that they establish with with a client for like that important back and forth communication and they and they install it into their business in that way, right? And that's what I was looking for in in these in in this research project was like I I need Zip Message to be more essential.

That's right. That's right. Oh, wow.

The other thing that I'm seeing coaches and consultants do and this was not apparent to me until I started talking to them, a lot of them take the extra steps to onboard their clients into Zip Message. Like they create

As a user inside of their own Zip Message account?

Yeah. Like a coach or a consultant signs up a new client. One of their first steps during onboarding the client is like, okay, client, I use this tool called zip message. I'm gonna send it to you and you're going to see this red button and you can click that button to record and send me a response. Now send me back the first response and now now we're in like they create their own how to videos for their clients on how to use Zip Message.

This is how we communicate during our engagements.

Yes. Yeah. And then there and when I ask them the question, again, like two halves of the segments, right? One half is telling me, you know, when I sent Zip Message links out, they get confused or they don't reply, this and that. I ask the same question to the coaches and consultants.

What happens when you send it? Like how's the uptake? They're like, Oh, it's been no issues. It's been amazing. You know, they just do it.

Right, because they're motivated by the fact that they're literally paying for the service. And this is part of the service, this part of the value that they're getting. Yeah. This is very interesting stuff, right?

Yeah, man. And like, and the the other big was like, okay, across the spectrum of the people that I spoke to, a lot of them did come from my audience even if I like when I invited them, I didn't realize, like I didn't I didn't recognize their names or whatever. Either they listened to this podcast, you know, thank you folks or they heard about it on Twitter, which is sort of a derivative off of my audience and stuff. The coaches, most of them found it through Googling or seeing it through the viral loop. Like they they received a zip message from someone and then they signed up and started paying and they and and and it's like actively being like no idea who I am.

They don't even know that the message is like new. They just started.

There's demand that already exists that's out looking for a solution.

Yep. Yep. Wow.

I don't know about anyone else listening. It makes me wanna go talk to my customers. Right? Incredible is incredible that that

I tweeted, I saw, I've been doing this really long Twitter thread throughout this whole process over literally like a month long now and I just keep adding to it with the with the learnings. The first tweet in this thread is like a screenshot of my calendar. It shows all the bookings of these customer interviews which I usually I look at that calendar, I'm like, I hate that. Like I I need an open calendar. I'm all about async.

But now and I still have like a couple more interviews scheduled for next week. Like I'm psyched. I can't wait to talk to more customers, know, because it's like, look, saw another churn come in this morning and it never feels good when you see that notification like somebody stopped paying, right? But but now as I'm going through this process, it's like, again, I don't feel good about it but I feel okay with it because it's like I I see them turning

Yes.

And they are not the best customers that I spoke to. I know why, and now I know why they churn.

And it confirms like, the lessons I'm learning are not misleading. And that makes sense. That makes sense with my new understanding of the world. That churn makes perfect sense.

Now, what I learned is that, all right, again, these people I Googled or they found it organically and they signed up and started paying. And when I look at our current homepage, it doesn't speak to coaches or consultants like at all. It's like, it's kind of amazing to me that coaches or consultants even were convinced enough to even sign up for the product because we don't speak to them at all right now.

That's the running through the wall need.

Yeah, I think so. I

know what my problem is. This product says what it does and I can figure out through, you know, and interpret in my own way that

this Yeah, I'm gonna like adapt it to my own use case.

Yep, exactly. Okay. So now, so like what do you do?

And this is really hard and in all my research about jobs to be done, I have yet to find real good case studies on what people did at the end of the jobs to be done process. Did they do about it? After they get all these amazing learnings, what changes did they make and how did that impact? I haven't found any good case studies on that. So this is where it got difficult for me to but this is what I'm in now.

So so basically now that I've learned and I laid out everything I just did here, today I I rewrote, this is not live yet but I rewrote the homepage and you know, writing all really, I think drastically different copy in terms of like how we're positioning and speaking to the audience and I'm a little bit nervous to to launch these copy changes on on the homepage. Yeah. But given everything that I've learned, it's like, this is the obvious.

Right. Worth a shot for sure. I've seen your use case pages. I use it in a conversation with a friend last week actually, because they were trying to figure out how to aim toward different use cases and learn more. And I I showed that menu.

Do do you have a page there that's for this use case more specifically?

I do. There is a coaching one there. One one of the things that I'm going to do is cut a couple, several of those use case pages. Just remove. Just remove them.

They're they're attracting the wrong customers, you know. I do have a client's page and then a more specific coaching page. And I think the new homepage, once I launch it, is going to speak to coaches and consultants. The other difficult thing I is I'm not a coach or even a consultant anymore. I've been a consultant earlier in my career.

I've dabbled in coaching but I've never did what a professional coach does and says, I'm going to start a coaching business. Right? That's never been me and I've never personally been interested in doing that. You know, I have to market and position and speak to this audience that that is not me anymore, you know. It's sort of both challenging and like exciting at the same time, you know, because it's like that's where these interviews become even more valuable because like now now in this second batch of interviews, I'm only speaking to coaches and consultants, you know, like now that I know like that's the best use case, now I'm trying to invite more of them.

And and I'm digging more into like the pain and and how they're using ZipMessage but I'm also trying to just learn like why are you a coach? Like what Like what what drives you to do that for a living, you know? And so like, I'm just trying to learn their whole worldview because it's not necessarily mine, you know?

Yeah. I think that's a understandable to be a bit like worried about like, can I sell to people that are not like me? And B, I mean, this what people do every day, right? You're going to be you're to be totally fine. You just need to keep doing what you're doing, which is like learning what motivates them and how they think.

And yeah. I mean, right. I haven't sold products online in, I don't know, ten years, but you talk to enough people, you make enough friends that do it and you kind of absorb all of it and then you can be empathetic toward that, that worldview.

Yep. Yeah. And I, and I feel like it's still broad enough that it's not like too hyper niche down. I am a little nervous with the new copy on the homepage. I feel good about it, but it's much more narrow than than what it currently is.

You know, it is broad enough that it's like if client conversations, client communications are the core of your business, there's so many different types and flavors of that, you know. So just people who call themselves a coach, there's so many flavors of that and I see them in our customer base. Like there's business coaches, there's like health life coaches, there's there's team coaches, there you know. And then people who don't necessarily call themselves a coach, but they call themselves a consultant. But what they logistically do is very similar.

They do calls with clients and they give them advice.

Yeah. I see that world as like a very raw version of entrepreneurship. It's if you I have expertise, you pay me and I will help you achieve the goals that I know how it would help people achieve. It's like almost straightforward in that way. The delivery of it and the selling of it, not so much straightforward.

Yep.

But it is, I have valuable information and experience and I'm willing to sell it to you because that'll help you achieve your goals. Well, that can be for weight loss or growing a business or I don't even know anything else.

Yeah. The nice thing is that our product is already there. Like in terms of what it is, how it's designed, it's it is a perfect tool for that use case. We're gonna continue to ship our our features that are in the road map. But like, it this this new direction and positioning does not require a big change in the product, you

know. Hallelujah.

And it's it's really just a marketing change. And you know, I in the past month I started kicking off some new marketing investments. So now I know where to focus that energy in terms of target customer and stuff.

Very cool. Pretty incredible. I mean, nice work, you know, so far. It's it's

I don't know, you know, it's like it's still still feels like a gamble but I but I feel just having this clarity now because I I almost made a big mistake a month ago in not doing these customer interviews and just going full speed ahead on some new positioning direction, which was not this.

That would have been a gamble.

That would have been a gamble. Yep. I don't know about that, but it, but this is like, there's already evidence that it's working and just need to.

We're all rooting for you and in like the fact that it's right and wanna watch.

You know what's been really, really weird about this business, Message, is like how many times it has evolved in in just the first year. This whole exercise in in working through this problem is like I have to sort of personally like rediscover fundamentally what what business am I in? What what is my product? Because it's a completely different thing than what the original idea was.

It's it's a lot closer to like that lean startup, like like being very objective of I don't know where this is gonna go And let let's let the information lead me in that direction, which most people don't naturally go that way. They have something that they wanna do. Yeah. We we have had to shift a lot based on based on our market, which which has been unexpected. We went out and called ourselves a one click checkout because that was the the most powerful version of the tech.

That's where a ton of the work went in. That's where I think the biggest potential is in building a shopper network. Right. What we're calling these days, the third network, right? The Amazon network that was really easy to buy in.

And that gave Amazon this huge advantage. It was the only place on the web that you could just make a purchase immediately with no effort. And now there's a second network in shop pay, and now it's an advantage to be in that network. So like what we call like what we're building is the third network. Everyone outside of the Amazon, the Shopify network that needs to be able to buy things very easily.

That's like the biggest version of the opportunity. Cool. But what happened is that Fast went out to try to build the same thing and not only crashed and burned in a very like public way, but their product wasn't good. So a lot of merchants that tried it got burned out on the idea of one click checkout. Then Bolt came along kind of claiming the same thing.

And people have had really bad experience of dealing with Bolt. No, you're not making enough money. We don't want to talk to you. Although you're ranging to ranging from that to let's sign an agreement and a deal and oh, after you sign and pay us, then you find out we actually don't have the integration for you yet. So you'll have to wait three months before you can get like all these experiences.

And now, now we're kind of more toward like, Hey, you can get new revenue with your post purchase offers. And that in order to achieve that, you have to use our checkout and, there's this additional value in the checkout. That's this one click like, like network thing. I really, really did not think that was going to be the case. And it's also positive in that one of the things that fast got the most traction for was being able to put the fast button, the buy button on the product page.

So people didn't have to add to cart and go to the checkout. They could just buy from the product page. I don't like that as a shopper.

Yeah. It's like too little lack of.

It's like, it's like you can't add new things to the cart. You kind of end your journey right then. So I don't like it. But all the people that used fast, that was their favorite feature. So now we built it in as a feature.

So it's not all negative what what the competitors did. It also like brought us into this new world. Now we're all, all of a sudden we're claiming

They sort of like educated the market or trained the market on wanting that feature and now

Yes, Now you

guys can they deliver it.

Yes, yes. So all this stuff requires flexibility.

I wanted to ask, I mean, I know you talked a lot about how you're focused on the fundraising side of the business, but like what is happening on the product and like, what are you able to see?

It is an enormous privilege and relief to be so distracted. And then whenever I like look inward, things have just gotten a little bit better.

I'm also curious about Rock. I mean, don't know him well, but like this is your second business kind of partnering up with him. What's he doing differently this time around? Or what, what looks different in the rally team and product shipping atmosphere?

So yeah, Rock Rock isn't shipping features. He's not really writing code. And that is completely, completely different from when Rock was the main like writer of code, the lead on the most important features and also the key person for every single deployment. So that none of those are true anymore. So that was like a very conscious choice on, we need some layers.

We need to build a team. We need to build very capable managers and you cannot be the bottleneck on deployments. You can't be the bottleneck on features. So it's, it's like a lot of like strategic planning around like, okay, you know what, something so critical, like moving our conversion tracking server side for both Facebook and Google analytics now that they're both available. He led that.

So he's doing the investigation, talking to the customers and like maybe not writing all the code, but making sure things get built the right way. It's been a challenging period for the two of us because usually we are at our best when we are really connected and we're talking about our kids and we're talking once or twice a day. And this has kind of like pulled us apart. We have to have like more deliberate check ins and it is also stressful. And that stress sometimes comes out in these weird ways.

And we have to like, hash that out very quickly. Like the other day I said something in a way that he didn't like, and he was like, yo, I didn't like that. This is what it made me feel like. Like, I know you didn't mean it, but that way, but this is how I took it. And I would just want you to know right away.

I mean, I think that's a sign of a great, of a great relationship. Just like, Hey, that, that was a little off. We got to talk about it.

Yes. And then I go back and I read my Slack messages and I was, you know, in LA on the street typing something out and I'm frustrated and I'm just typing something on my phone, hitting send. And I read it. I'm like, that that's not okay how I communicated that. So it's been it's been a lot of work on on that front because, you know, if that relationship doesn't work, it's kind of like unlikely that other things work.

Mhmm. Yep. Yeah. Good stuff, man.

Great. Good to be back on the pod. Good to record. Thanks everyone for listening and bearing with us while we didn't make some first recording.

Figure it out. Yep. Alright. Alright. Later, folks.

Thanks, everyone.