Bootstrapped Web

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Bootstrapped Web, middle of the summer edition. That means it's been a few weeks. Brian, how the hell are you?

I'm alive.

I was going to say I'm sober. That's that's how I feel right now. We'll get into all that. Well, what do you mean you're alive?

Well, I don't know if you can hear in voice today. I'm I am over it now but I I had COVID as did all four members of my family. Wow. We all got it while on vacation.

Oh, that's fun. Yeah. Driving vacation or flying vacation?

Both actually. It was like a a really fun, awesome summer vacation slash the the vacation from hell. The vacation as planned was we fly out to Utah, Salt Lake City, rent a car, drive for it's supposed to be like a ten day vacation from Utah through Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota. Right?

Yeah. Cool.

Dude, was it was cool. Like we we did a bunch of nights like glamping in these pretty cool sites and then we went through Yellowstone and Grand Teton and then Montana which was amazing and then South Dakota, Badlands, all all that. It was a lot of fun. Our flight out there got cancelled, delayed a day.

Yeah. Airline situations are nutty.

Ridiculous. Right? We finally get out there a day late. We we do the glamping stuff. About three days in, I get knocked on my ass with COVID.

I got it the worst out of my family and I got it first. So most of the vacation, like right in the middle of the vacation was when I had it, I had a fever. I was in we were in a hotel at the time. I I was like for twenty four hours, was really like not leaving the bed. I got myself out of that and then right near the end, the the last day or two of the vacation, my wife started feeling symptoms and my and my kids picked it up.

But they they had it very mild, so we all made it home and everyone's over it now. But I'm sorry to hear that. Yeah. It's tough. And our flight home got canceled too, delayed a day.

So both ways, our flight like just flat out canceled, not Yeah.

Yeah. That's that's the thing that happened to us. We went to DC two weeks ago and the flight out just the day before just got canceled. Like, okay.

Ridiculous, you know? Yeah. So that was was shitty and and and pretty fun at the same time.

Alright. Hence hence the alive description.

Yep. It was a good break though. And it and it came at a good time. I mean, I I talked about, we'll get into the business updates and stuff. What's been happening on your end?

Well, I guess I say sober as my descriptor because I feel like I got smacked in the face by business reality over the last few months, stretching back to, I don't know when it was in May that the market crashed, but I started fundraising exactly two days before the crash. And so we, I was in a mindset, the company was on a footing, everything was going in a direction that made a lot of sense in the world before the crash. And it very, very quickly did not make sense as soon as the market correction happened. And that happened everywhere quickly, all at the same time in all sectors. And then we also had this added element of our checkout space being a very big question mark.

It went from super hot with fast and bolt to super questionable with fast going out of business and bolt having real issues. So we had that double whammy all at the same time. And that turned fundraising from a, you know, what felt like a formality for a lot of companies in the e commerce space, which is like, go out, you know, effectively raise your hand and raise a $20,000,000 rate and move on. Like that was no longer the case.

Yeah. I remember you kind of given us that, that basically the update in the last episode from a few weeks back. So like, what's the update now? I guess we're about like a month since since then, right?

Yeah. So I can't, I can't go into like details just yet, but things are good. Right? And you can make a bunch of assumptions from from me saying that. But that doesn't mean things are the same.

Things are actually very, very different coming out the other side. And that's that that's that sober feeling. That's just like this. I think everyone's dealing with it to some extent. I have looked very fondly on certain Twitter timelines of people in the bootstrapping world.

And it's made me very happy that it doesn't feel like the bootstrapping world is quite as affected as the venture funded world. Right. The venture funded world got it was a seismic. It was all at once. Everything that you thought made sense had to be questioned.

So even my peers in the e commerce space that had that $20,000,000 a you get a little bit of traction, you get some amazing investors on board, you put $20,000,000 in the bank and you move forward. Even they had a similar experience where if they raise a $20,000,000 in Q4 of of twenty twenty one, which was, you know, peak frothy times, they ramped up their spend in Q1 and Q2 up to what, 600, 700, $100,000 a month. And that made sense at that time because it was all about growth. And now all a sudden it doesn't make sense. And so even the companies that successfully raised, they also had to relook at everything and in a very sober way and start looking at existing expenses, planned expenses, growth, assumptions, everything.

It's tough to take your medicine. It's tough to hire 20 amazing people and say, oops, got to cut 10 of them as they're still ramping up in your company and what that does to the company culture and feeling. So everything just went from like, you know, easy mode. Everyone's growing. There's plenty of money to fund what you want to do.

Plenty of

time To all of a sudden, figure yo, yep. The water, the water went back out and turns out a lot of people don't have any pants on. Other than that, like the family's great. We're certainly in a bit of a whirlwind right now. My house is like 75% packed, but we have movers coming next week.

We sold the house. We're closing on the house in Chicago next week. We got movers, we got goodbye parties, we've got emotional kids saying goodbye to their friends. There's just a lot going on at the same time. But at the end of the day, I'm feeling very, very fortunate about being able to continue things the way I want to on the business front.

But it has certainly focused my mind around like, yo, let's get real, real and and much more aggressive. And I think ruthless is kind of a bad word, but just like, you know, realistic, less sentimental about a lot of things.

I think we find ourselves in the same sort of mindset a lot with slightly different circumstances, but the same sort of urgency. I'm definitely in it right now. I have been in like, you know, focusing I'll I'll get more into this more specifically today. You know, just focusing on well, I'll I'll give you the rundown on what I got. Like, I'll give you an update on our repositioning since doing the jobs to be done and focusing on coaches and consultants.

It's it's been about a month and a half since I made some changes there. So I have some some trends that I'm noticing. And then the the main focus is pipeline. And and it's it's really having refocused the positioning, it has definitely give me a lot of direction and and like this is what we need to build and focus on and there's a lot of machinery that needs to be built out in order for the positioning to have the the intended effect. What you're talking about here, like the I was just writing my newsletter for Sunday and the headline is like anxiety driven growth.

I like that. I have been using that word a lot more over the last few weeks than I normally do in my life.

I'll just get into this part of it right now, I guess. Which is like, there's this anxiety that I that I like whether we're not growing fast enough or we are growing but like I feel like any growth spikes we see, we're just getting lucky. Where like where are we getting where are we going to get the next growth punch from? I don't know the answer to that. We don't have a gas pedal that I could step on and spend more on.

Like, these are things that stress me out. So so that is where I need to focus. It's like finding those those stress points, what's giving me anxiety and building systems, processes, putting people in place, building the engine to make those things more controllable, more predictable, and and that essentially comes down to building out a pipeline.

Right. Investing ahead of the pipeline showing up. Right? That's like

Yeah. Well, the what I mean is the product is always gonna be what it is. We're gonna keep making it better. I feel like it's as it's great as it's as it's ever been. We're continuing to ship pretty cool stuff.

We just shipped this this feature this week, for internal messages. So if you're familiar with like Help Scout, you can have like yellow, like, private messages that aren't shown to your clients. So now you can basically do that in Zip Message. The next thing that we're gonna be shipping is editing. Being able to like edit your videos before you post them, which would be pretty cool.

The product is is gonna continue to keep getting better. I'm talking to customers, get that fit of like delivering an ideal solution to them. So that's gonna that drives conversions and hopefully better and better conversions over time as we target better people. But there's not much I can control on on that front other than building the right thing and making the product great. What I can and should control which and what I'm working on building is is the pipeline.

Like I need to get it to a point and it's not here yet. I needed to get to a point where every single day I wake up, I open my computer and I see a batch of fresh leads.

Yes, more opportunities.

More opportunities, right? For us, that's a number of different types of opportunities and it's number one, there's users. So we we now know who our ideal customers are. We should have a CRM filled with these are people who run coaching business. These are consultants.

They should be at the very least they should know about the message, but they should be using the message. We need a CRM full of those and methods and systems for telling them about the message.

Right? Engagement one way or another.

Yeah. But then the other pipeline that I'm building is, I hate this term, but it is what it is. It's it's influencers. There are people, especially in this space, there's a lot of influencers who reach a lot of coaches and consultants and a lot of them sort of blend into what people call creators.

Yeah. They're like your platforms. Like you can get distribution to them.

Exactly. And we've had we've had organic success with this already. Like we there are quite a few influence people who have our audiences of coaches and consultants who have used Zip Messages themselves. They recommend it. They drive our viral loop.

Like we need to have, we need to stop getting lucky with those influencers and have a pipeline of Make it happen. Reaching out for we're launching an affiliate program soon. We're be doing like promotions, content partnerships with them, even paying for sponsorships on some of them, which I've been doing some of that. That's another pipeline. And then the other one sort of related is is integrations.

Like, we should have products that we should be integrating with and reaching out on a regular basis and building out integrations with them. I was in a call with some other some other founders and they're and they were much further along on on their like sales driven approach and they were showing their pipeline and all the systems and like custom. I'm not gonna get into all all of it, but like, just custom built stuff around every morning. We we have hundreds of leads that we can click a button and start prospecting. That's a big area of focus for me.

So like, literally what that turns into is I am building out a CRM. I've jumped around to different tools on that. As of today, I've I've landed on actually Airtable as as the CRM for like kinda storing like the database of of leads and tracking where they're at in in our pipelines.

Cool. You know, we use we use Pipedrive but

Yeah. I've I've used Pipedrive a lot in the past. Looked at that, looked at Close, looked at a few others. You know, what it comes down to for me is like, just need very simple, like Kanban is important, custom fields on each person is important and then integrations with all the stuff that we're doing to feed contacts into our CRM. Right?

I'm interviewing and hiring a VA pretty soon to help gather contact and and clean contact information and fill up our our CRM, building out processes and tooling and automations for that, setting up some outreach campaigns, things of that nature. And then the other hire that is starting on Monday is Claire Emerson. You know, she's a really great writer and project manager and and just, you know, really great creative and and marketing marketing force, I I think. So she's actually coming on board as what what we're calling like a marketing coordinator for Zip Message. Pretty pretty excited about this.

It was it was kind of funny and perfect timing. So this happened just before I went away on vacation. I was mapping out all this all this pipeline stuff, thinking through like, okay, what are all the things, all the types of activities that we need to be happening? Like not just outreach, but also like social media engagement, like part partnering up and doing content and guest articles with these people, especially the influencer stuff, webinars, educational stuff. Plus I have like an SEO team on board and there's a lot of work for me to manage and edit them.

I would love to get that off my plate. We're doing link building stuff that I would love to get off my plate. A marketing coordinator, somebody who who is who's great at like execution on all this stuff, but also a a really solid writer. Plus Claire happens to be like really well she is a coach herself. She's she's been a consultant.

She's well connected to coaches and consultants. It's just sort of a perfect fit on on multiple fronts. So so I had started promoting that job posting before I went away and start and been collecting applications and she happened to and she was on a short list of people that I was planning on reaching out to her to see if she was interested in this. I had worked with her before as a freelancer and she reached out to me before I did before I she was like, you know, I'm I'm thinking about kinda ramping down the freelance stuff, looking for one company to work with long term. Zip Message seems like a perfect fit.

She gave me like a document of like like she's looking to do in that sort of role and it it's almost like she wrote my job description for what I was looking for. I was like, alright. This is amazing. So so she started on Monday. Through my vacation, through through COVID, we basically did our interviewing and and discussing what this role looks like and and all that.

All asynchronous, all through zip message for the last two weeks. Had a quick live call the other day. The so the only challenge with her is that she's in Australia, which is a really tough time zone. We're async man. I'm I'm I'm async all the way and so is she and and it's that's that's the plan.

Yeah. That's a yeah. That time zone really forces async which is not not a bad thing for you.

Yeah. We're gonna see how it goes. I think it'll take a lot of intentional, you know, because this is the type of role where it's not like I'm just hiring someone to like offload and outsource and let them run. This is much this is to me, it's a much more important collaborator type of role, which is generally where you would want someone in your in your time zone to be able to hop on calls throughout the day.

That that'll be the challenge there.

What I was telling her was like, look, all things being equal with other candidates, if someone with the same fit and skill set was in the North American time zone, I would probably favor them. But the truth is all of her other benefits outweigh

That's right.

Sometimes. The the time zone thing. And I've never been one to do a lot of live live Zoom calls anyway. So, you know, it kinda

And I I like the way that she effectively wrote out the job description because lately, how I've been feeling, you know, and we'll be hiring someone in the marketing, like like a senior marketing role. And oftentimes when we think about a specific role, you know, the next key question is, well, what's this person going to do? And my gut lately has been like, well, I want the person to tell me what we should be doing, as I have my ideas, but I really want this person to be much better than I am at running, let's say, for our type of company in our phase, in our market. Like I I don't want to hire someone that I tell them what they should be doing.

Yeah. I I think I'm thinking about that actually slightly differently now. I think of this much more of a collaboration and like I I will be very active in directing

But get in here. We'll figure out what we need to do.

And in shaping the direction with her. Right? I already have a lot of ideas. As I was planning out this whole marketing and and and the pipeline stuff and the marketing side and and the priorities on how how and where we're using SEO and link building and brand building and then the pipeline stuff like, then I started to think through like, well, are the tasks and activities that need to be happening, but I'm not gonna be doing them myself. And and so so then bringing in someone like Claire, it's like we can talk through that stuff.

She can come up with the execution and and the and the game plan stuff. And and and then also kinda layer in these larger projects, longer term projects which which is really where I think she brings a lot of value. It's the kind of thing where where before having this role filled up until now, still it's like, that's me. Like I I do all the marketing and and systems and outreach and hustle and activity and stuff. But anytime I'm doing that, which I usually go through these like sprints where I I'll spend a couple of weeks focused completely on marketing, then the product takes the backseat.

Right? I and I I've got two developers but like I I'm head I consider myself head of product. Like that's really where I need to be and I work directly with them. I direct them. I I shape their direction and then I build a lot of features myself.

I do all the design and UI stuff. So if I'm focused on marketing, which I have been, like our product roadmap clearly slows down. Like it's noticeable. Mhmm. You know?

Right. But but it sounds like right now you're rebalancing toward sales and opportunities and pipeline and a bit away from products and features and roadmap.

Yeah. I mean, it's tough because there is so much we still wanna, I still wanna build. Yeah. You know, and not just for fun, but like really important roadmap stuff that that will drive conversions.

Yeah. That's the crossover. The crossover. And this is so I'll describe a little bit about our situation because you and I, like you said before, we're actually we're actually after the same thing. We're after pipeline and opportunities.

And I think it'll be good for us over the next few months to kind of talk through what we're learning on that. But the other side of the analogy is on that, like where the focus is, product or sales. And we've, you know, I made my own set of mistakes, so happy to dive into the many mistakes I've made. The biggest one, my analysis right now and like the conclusions I'm coming to that are based on this analysis is that we we have been too too much led by product and features and roadmap. And in some ways we had to, we had to get out a checkout with backend integration into an e commerce platform that had the RallyPay functionality of a returning shopper being recognized easily.

That was like absolute table stakes in our space. And then we built our post purchase offers, which is then the differentiator in our space. So that really did feel like we got to get that out or like, why would someone choose our product over something else? So that was the focus. And then as we started going to market, we weren't fully done.

We didn't wait to go to market until all of that was done. We appropriately went to market before that was all done. But what that also meant was that we got into a situation where the company culture was sales go out and sell what we have right now. And unfortunately, product and engineering don't have the capacity to accommodate feature requests and sales blockers because we're still building the core. And then as right as we started getting to a point where the core feature set was built out and then we could be more accommodating toward sales requests.

That's right when I went into fundraising. And my biggest mistake was that when I went into fundraising, we didn't already have a marketing leader and the sales department in a place where it could just go completely on its own without me. And and so it felt feels like what's happened over the last like two months or so is that our company culture didn't shift enough. It stayed very product focused and very protective of our roadmap, which is great because you end up with an organized process, a happy set of developers, no chaos, a nice release cadence. Like you get all these positive benefits, but you end up a bit too rigid towards sales opportunities.

So we have merchants that are like, we love your product, but we need X. And now it feels like we need to course correct and say to ourselves, okay, now it's not that sales now drives everything. It's just that there's got to be more room in every sprint for development of features that are not really our choosing. It's prospects are saying, if you build X, I will join. And then before we were saying, that's great.

We'll get to you, but we got to get our core product out. Now we need to switch pretty abruptly.

It's always kind of interesting to me how, you know, we release a lot of features pretty rapidly. Like I would say almost every week we're releasing something new. Maybe every two or three weeks we have something that we'll actually like send an email blast about. And it's always interesting to me like how some features that I think are awesome and super significant kinda fall flat in terms of like maybe a lot of users actually use it but they don't like tweet about it and give a lot of feedback or give a lot of email replies. But then the tiny features that that I that almost we do as like an afterthought are the things that that kinda like blow up.

This week, this this internal messages feature, internal notes thing, I thought was pretty significant. I think it will still will be. But along with that, we shipped a little thing that detects your audio. So like if your mic is off or too low Okay. We'll let you know now.

Like before before you you record a five minute silent message Oh wow. Accidentally like, now we have a little alert that says like, is your mic on? Because we didn't detect audio yet. And so that that got some traction when I showed that around and it is super useful, know. So it's like little things like that.

Like you never know.

Yeah. The the prioritization becomes like where the

focus And that one came out of something that's like, that's not a feature request. That's like people complaining like, hey, I just recorded this silent message. Know, like hear that enough times. It's like, okay, that's getting into the road map.

Yes. Yes. And and those are those are existing users. Right? So not not aimed at new users and

Yeah. But then people like are tweeting it and all that, you know.

Right. Which turns into marketing itself. Yeah. I yeah. You know, overall, my take on things is we went to London and I met up in London with Rock and Jess, right?

So CTO and VP of product. And we just had one of those like get togethers that that's like basically a rolling conversation about the business, like throughout the restaurants of London is effectively what happens. We we did get a WeWork for two days and kind of like went into a conference room and did a bunch of hiring, planning and budgeting and all that. But just as important in that is like the personal connection and trust building. And that lends itself to to being able to have harder conversations that are more honest and more straightforward.

And that that leads into progress. It really does. So a lot of our conversations in London were around that and around how how we'll be handling and behaving ourselves over the next few months. And I have felt a very, very, very big shift in my mindset and the way I'm talking and the way I'm behaving and the way my expectations are since coming back from London and really feeling like, alright, the way I should behave is that I should feel fortunate that that we're able to continue on with the business the right way. Right.

Without getting too much into details, everyone who relies on venture investment in order to operate their business and had not raised around before May, everyone had an existential crisis. Everyone. Because it was very, very uncertain whether or not you were going to get funded, us included. And I looked at that and I, that what I came out of it was I don't ever want to be in that position again. There's no one to blame more for being in that position than me.

And I have zero intention of doing that again. And so it made it, it kind of brought it all home on like, Hey buddy, this is not easy mode. You're not in card hook. You're not profitable. You don't have the product market fit.

You got to go out and grind again. And not only that, you may as well enjoy it, too. Because what the other existential issues that all of us are having coming out of quarantine and then coming into this, like what looks like a recession is like, Oh shit, we better find some joy in all of this. Otherwise, what is the point in all of it? Yeah.

What are we doing here? So it's like this, this double whammy of like take work real seriously, take off work real seriously also. Again,

I feel that that urgency too. I was just really kind of mapping it out this morning and last night where it's like, what are we like about sixteen, seventeen months? No. More than that. Like eight eighteen months now into zip message, which is really not all that long, but to me it feels like a like a while and it never feels like we're growing fast enough and even at the MRR level that we're at now, when at when we were at half of this, I was like, oh, when we get to that number, we'll be golden.

It'll just start to naturally grow and yeah, no. There's a lot more work that needs to happen here. And but the the thing that I feel like I'm hard on myself on this, like that it took me this long to come around to, oh, this is the type of pipeline we need to build and the the systems and processes and machinery that that we need to have in place and and marketing activity, like specific marketing activity, like debt, like this is what needs to happen on a day to day basis. Like, why am I putting this into place right now?

Mhmm. Yeah. It's frustrating. I hear you. I hear

And yeah, we had some of that like like the product was way too young. Let's just get early traction back then. So I'll I'll give you update on like the repositioning. That I feel like has unlocked a lot of this. For me mentally at least, but also like literally what what we're building now.

So I talked about last time how I I did a lot of jobs to be done, interviews, a lot of research and out of that came the came the the decision to really focus on coaches and consultants who are using Zip Message to communicate with clients asynchronously. That turns out to be our best use case. We have a bunch of other use cases, but we we we were seeing some churn with with the with the random set of use cases. But the ones we're using it for client comms tend to stay and tend to really install it into into their business. Right?

So now about a month and a half ago, couple weeks before vacation, I updated the whole website, the copy and stuff. So now the homepage really speaks more to coaches and consultants and we have a dedicated page for coaches, a dedicated page for consultants. We still have a page for like team communication, but then I killed off a bunch of pages around like customer support messaging.

Individual use case pages?

And say yeah. Used to have like eight different use cases.

I know a lot of my friends here in Portland used your site as an example because a lot of people going through the same type of like positioning work and they were like, how do you do that? And you know, you're broken out individual pages as like.

That's, that's an example of like, don't just look at somebody else's website and assume they have it all figured out because we definitely did not.

Yeah. But what that showed was a way to remove the excuse of, but I don't want to change my homepage if I don't, if I'm not sure, Like just create a new page. It's kind of like a homepage and see how it goes.

I would say that we went halfway in on on going on going all in or niching down, if you will. So so our homepage has changed a lot from from what it was. So now, I feel like our homepage more than before speaks to coaches and consultants. And then we still have three sub pages. One all about coaches, one all about consultants, one for team meetings.

But before we had like eight. We had like one for podcasters. We had one for sales. We had one for customer support. We had one for like all this different stuff.

Right? What that effectively does is and this was expected and this is confirmed in the last month and a half of metrics, our free sign ups decreased, you know, because we're speaking to less people, you know. We're expecting that it it was it was more broad before, so people just signed up and maybe some chat some traffic channels had something to do with that. But still, like, now we see it fewer free sign ups from the homepage and the the goal of marketing would be to grow that again. Right?

And the churn is, I would say continuing. I I did not expect that to fall off a cliff right away because we still have lots of users who signed up before this big change. And we still see some of those people churn out. But what I look for in every sign up and every paying conversion and every churn is who is this person? Are they a coach or consultant or are they not that?

And and it's good to see more and more new paying customers being coaches and consultants. Very few, if any of the churn people are coaches or consultants. And and then we see trial to paid increasing in the last two months. Actually by a lot like that, like even though we're seeing fewer signups, we're definitely seeing more of them convert to paying customers. So that's all of that added together means we're not seeing a massive, we are growing but it's not a massive growth yet.

Like we still have so much more work to do but I feel like the expected immediate effects are there. And so now now that we have this focus of coaches and consultants that unlocks like this is what we need to build. This is who we need to go after. This is who we need to fill in our pipeline. Now let's figure out the systems and processes.

Right. But keep the marketing and sales rolling.

That's what I mean. Like that's what I'm working on is like how do we build sales processes and systems and get that

the capacity to do both at the same time or you Yeah. Just cannot make the progress.

Yeah. And and then it even like justifies the work on product. Right? Because like, it doesn't make sense to to focus on product unless we have a daily pipeline that is ready to present our product to. And if we don't have that that pipeline, then nothing else matters.

And that and that's and that's where I'm at now. And that's what we're building is like and and it's actually like a lot of like technical work. Like what is like the actual like automation systems and the processes of like taking leads, filling into the cleaning their data, getting them into the CRM, setting up outreach campaigns, writing that stuff, engaging with them on social media, you know, all that. Like, figuring all that out is a lot of work, but then then the work on the product is converting them. And I'm continuing to talk to customers every day and all that kind of stuff to kind of have that loop going.

You know, but, but now it's like, I, having this focus makes me more comfortable with the idea of investing into the business, like literally spending a lot more money on salaries and tooling and and work even ahead of revenue growth because I know exactly the machinery that we need to build out now. And and the machinery that we don't yet have. And so it's like, you know, you you've had like like kind of the team like fully stocked for a year, right? And, and have, and being able to kind of fire on all cylinders. And I'm still operating in like the pure bootstrapper mindset where it was like, well, I, every, everything that I spend on, I need to justify with some sort of traction that I hustled myself.

But now, now I feel like, all right, we have some traction. I don't call it even product market fit yet. We still need to grow faster before that happens. But I feel a lot more like, I'm more comfortable like spending and even even modeling out like, look, I can continue to spend for x number of months and we'll be fine even with just a modest growth, growth rate. But we do need to bump up that growth rate.

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, we're you know, we we have the the additional resources, but it it's still constrained no matter what. One of our biggest challenges over the next six months is going to be how much to stay focused on what's working but not working great yet and how much time to focus on new potential areas. So the scenario I'm trying to set up is to build the sales and marketing machine toward what's working, right? These platform traditional e commerce merchants doing 10 to $20,000,000 a year in revenue that it's starting to work like we have those people on board and we're processing revenue every day. So we should do more of that.

Now at the same time, how do we go out and prospect and dig for gold? Because we haven't found the gold yet, right? Gold being product market fit, like where else can you prospect? And we have some breadcrumbs around different approaches with our product. So we've been in touch with like very large merchants, right?

Like billion dollar plus annual revenue merchants. And they want they want something similar to what we have in our product, but a little different because they're very large and they have their own different set of requirements. And that might be the spot that allows us to grow a 100 X over the next year. But you can't, you can't, you can't put all your eggs and you can't put that bet. So how do you keep those bets going, but also focusing the majority of resources on, okay, what's working?

Maybe it's not working fast enough, but let's get better at it and keep adding on because you know, it feels too risky to not continue to add on.

There's always that tension. I wasn't even going to talk about this today, but it is very much on my mind.

And what I'm thinking about a

lot is this next wave of focus and growth which is like an enterprise plan. And like you're saying like it's the product but it's a different shape and a different form of the product. It's more of platform play and a white label and an embeddable, maybe even like a self hosted. These are like

Right, API driven.

API driven, yeah and like, and I have conversations I've had already paying customers trying to use it in this way And and so there's there's definitely something there. I've started to think through like pricing structure and what the product needs to look like, but it it in in that scenario, I feel like that will definitely drive a ton of growth in the business but there's a lot more to build product wise, sales and marketing wise that that's a much more long longer term play. I don't mean like years but just just months but like right now, I'm it's that tension of like we have pipeline and marketing and a product that people pay for today. We need to be be growing that. Right.

Respect that. Yeah. Yep. But that's also why I'm hiring and putting people and systems in place so that hopefully, two or three months from now, we were starting to things are in motion on that front. Now I have a little bit of space to start to think longer term like let's get this

Right.

Let's get this bigger bigger play going, you know.

Yeah. For for me, the most important part of that was looking over at Rock and Jessica in their product and engineering roles and just saying, get your mindset and the mindset of your team to be such that we all acknowledge and have to confront very directly that we have not found our goal yet. It's not clicking and just coming our way because we've kind of got it right. It's just not. And so be willing to look and adjust and do extra work and scramble your sprint and whatever it takes, because if something comes along and presents itself as a good bet toward that gold, then we we have to be willing to to do it.

We got a lot of good feedback from this podcast and I hope people get get value from it. I think I'm probably speaking for both of us where it's like we we've both become pretty comfortable with talking publicly and openly about these, the struggle of figuring it out and getting to that product market fit because a big part of it for me, especially being friends with a lot of folks who run very successful SaaS is like you can't help but look at somebody else's SaaS business and say like, man, they they just clicked and it grew. And it's never that easy for anyone but but look there there's also a reality here where there's a lot of successful SaaS businesses that take a little bit longer. You gotta you gotta figure things out, maybe circle back around to things that that maybe you should have seen a little bit earlier but that's the reality and it doesn't matter how many rodeos you've you've been through. It's harder every time, you know.

Yep. That's it. That's it. I assume the vast majority of people are going through similar struggles that we're talking about right now. There are people that things have clicked and they have found it and that's fantastic.

And now they're dealing with a different set of issues. Not like it's easy then either.

Yeah. Yeah.

But I think most of us are in this boat around like, all right, something's working, but not enough. And what do I need to do to go from where I am right now to the position that I want to be in? And it is not a clear road to go on. So that's just fraught with like different gambles and risk and finding yourself being too risk averse and looking back and saying, Oh my God, I can't let it start this three months earlier. And it's just yeah, it requires this constant adjustment and like not to fall too deep into self loathing or despair.

It requires constant optimism that you will find it and the next thing can be the right thing. And yes. So, Coz, this the game. This is the game.

But we're lucky to play it. Well, it's Friday afternoon. I'm gonna try to wrap up some work pretty quick and then take my daughter to the Mets game tonight.

Cool. Well, someone I'm just gonna hand over the keys to my car to someone and hope it shows up in Chicago in, like,

seven I I guess that's

a thing. Alright. Great to talk. Always a pleasure. Thanks for listening, everyone.

Alright.