CartHook

“And he added this like crazy amount of friction up front by having an application that people would have to apply. And that helped reduce the amount of people that weren't a good fit, but it also had this side effect. It was like a exclusivity sort of thing, y…”

“So there was a point in time where it was adding 30, 40, 50 K in MRR every month. No advertising, word of mouth, just flying. It went from a million ARR to two-ish and then six.”

“And then it ran into a wall named Shopify. So they did not want checkouts to take Payment processing off of their platform, and they ended Carthook's run.”

“At Cardhook, we found the wall because we were churning at 15 15% a month.”

“You hear Jordan Gall talk about Shopify coming after Cart Hook, and that's not the first nor the last time that Shopify will do that.”

“In addition to his vision, or his intuition is like, does it have asymmetric upside if it works? Is the downside if it fails not catastrophic? And how quickly can you test this? How quick, or how quickly will you know? Because usually, yeah, another product is…”

“I pointed out customer.io. I'm an investor in, angel investor, churn buster, right message, cart hook, lead fuse, all of these folks who are like, yeah, we're not looking at IPO.”

“I always give the advice to skew toward the transparency, because then you don't need to keep up the charade about behaving as a customer support person and then a success person and using different names and, I mean, I've heard some crazy things from people. …”

“Our product at that point was 300 dollars a month plus a transaction fee, and we said to them, if you can commit to us for a year at 10,000 dollars a month, then we will make all these changes that are necessary for you and change the infrastructure and all th…”

“And how do you slow down demand? We did it two ways. We first said, you have to do a demo. You got to talk to me. I want to understand who you are, what you're trying to do and build a relationship. And the second thing we did was we tripled the price. We went…”

“I just went like zero to five in one year, five to 20 in another year, and then 20 to 80 in like four months.”

“Because if you had done it a year later, the window was over. You couldn't do it.”

“You limit your option set when you take money early. So I, I've always thought about that, and what we've always looked at is how do we raise just enough to get going, but to then keep those relatively low acquisition offers in play, because it's just much mor…”

“We got stuck at 80 for months and churn was wild. Churn was like 15% per month. So just growing and losing like 20 K in both directions every month.”

“They pulled it off, and as soon as we released version two, the thing just popped, and we went from 80 to 200 again in, like, just a handful of months.”

“So right now, if an amazing acquisition offer came through something that I just could not say no to, I am 100% certain that I would regret selling because it's, we're just starting.”

“Rock and I had a moment the other day. Rock's my CTO and really like my co-founder at this point. We're really partners. He runs the tech team. I run the rest. And we had a moment because we hit a hundred X from the time he joined.”

“So recently, this week, I had a new milestone. We closed our biggest deal ever, and I never talked to the prospect at all.”

“What's a trip is that's when, at least the way I have it in my Google spreadsheet that I track my angel investments, I have September, 2015 of writing the first check, and my memory is you were around five K MRR at that time, so did you raise around that?”

“So right around five K is when we raised some money and we raised friends and family money. It was like 275 grand, and that allowed us to go full time Focus on it and hire two engineers.”

“So we're somewhere around a hundred paying customers.”

“We shoot for an MRR of around a 120 bucks a month.”

“Raised about let's say, 300.”