The Exchanges

Q How much did you spend to get the, to, to make it work until like it was a sellable product? Uh, I don't remember, but it was quite a million or 10,500,000. Do you remember?

A Uh, I think it was close to a million. Um, but it was a product that worked only for very small audience, very, very small use case. And it was not real time. So basically what happened was you write a book, a chapter of a book, because it couldn't check the whole book at once, uh, or you write a research paper. You submit it to, uh, the initial, like the old Grammarly, Uh, and then you go make a cup of coffee and then you drink the cup of coffee and then you wait a little bit more and then it spits out the result. Uh, and the result was probably half of it was real issues and half of it was false positives. But at the time, the audience, the, the target market was fine with that because if you spent like two months writing a book, like what's extra half an hour to review all the potential issues, right? Even if they're not real. But that wouldn't fly with, uh, with business writers, for example, if you're writing a business email that you need to send in 20 seconds, you're not going to deal with false positives.

AI assessment note: “Uh, I think it was close to a million.”

Q A, this is just a Chrome plugin. B, this is just spell check. Like, there's no way that either of those things are interesting. And then I learned about it and I was like, oh, this is like way bigger than, it just looks like that. It's way more than that. Did most people Were like, there's no, were most people dismissive of like it just being a Chrome plugin?

A Some people are dismissive, uh, quite a lot. And, uh, I wouldn't say dismissive. It's not like completely, oh, there's nothing. Uh, but, uh, underestimate the impact and the importance of it. And that's, that's an interesting, uh, conversation always, always very similar because, um, they kind of think, oh, this is a good product. This is a cool product, but not for me because I know what I'm doing. Uh, and then, uh, they try it, and, uh, it helps. It helps in material ways, and, uh, especially when you measure results. Because, you know, when you're, don't measure things, uh, and, and just, you know, typing away, uh, it saves you from an embarrassment, or helps you phrase something more clearly. Kind of, yeah, that's cool, but what's the impact of that? Show me the money. But when it's done on the business scale, uh, and it's measured and it's, uh, kind of assessed, uh, you can see like percentages, improvements in, in different metrics, productivity, satisfaction, and so on. And that adds up. That adds up.

AI assessment note: “Some people are dismissive, uh, quite a lot. And, uh, I wouldn't say dismissive.”

Q like your money. How did you, How did you not micromanage Brad? Um, because I did the same thing and not micromanaging is tough because you're like, oh my God, if you make a mistake, you're going to lose money. And that's like my money. And so it's like really stressful to like let someone fail sometimes and learn. Were you micromanaging or were you pretty emotionally healthy about it?

A I'd like to think we were emotionally healthy. Uh, maybe Brad would disagree. I don't know. I wish he, I actually will ask him. But, um, I think part of it was out of necessity. There was just so much to do that if you micromanage, you get stuck. You don't, you don't make progress. So there was just no time or resources or energy to micromanage anybody. Uh, we had to divide and conquer to, to actually keep making progress. Uh, cause that's, that's a lot of work. So just, just from the volume of things to do, everybody had to do their own thing. So that, that happened naturally. And part of it is a, is a philosophy that again, Alex and I share that basically if you bring in smart people on board, like not listening to them or not letting them think independently is a waste basically. There is no point in bringing smart people on board. Uh, so that's, uh, that's, that made it easy to kind of, uh, give freedom and give space to, to Brad and, and other, um, leadership team members.

AI assessment note: “I'd like to think we were emotionally healthy... part of it was out of necessity.”

Q Actually, I don't know what those costs are. So how much does it cost to host? Like what percentage of your revenue do you spend on? Or maybe like, how does the payroll compare the payroll costs compared to like your hosting costs?

A I would say it's comparable. Uh, hosting costs are like, even though we don't host much of the data, like we're not like Dropbox where we store files, uh, but the processing, the processing is quite expensive, especially if you consider that we have, uh, tens of millions of free users who are not paying us anything. Uh, and we're not, we don't monetize them in any way at all. Um, cause we don't, we don't sell user data. We don't show ads. We don't do any of that. Uh, so basically all the free users are not monetized until they subscribe. Um, so that, that makes it, uh, that makes us be conscious of processing costs, especially for regions where, uh, not many people can upgrade to premium, uh, like developing countries.

AI assessment note: “I would say it's comparable.”

Q Um, did you, uh, why'd you hire a CEO? And when did you do that?

A Uh, it's kind of jumping topics, but, uh, yeah, we, um, we brought in a CEO, I think in. Uh, and, um, one reason, one big reason for that was that, um, both, uh, Alex, Mike, the founder and I, we have a philosophy that everybody should be doing, should be in their zone of genius, doing what they like and what, what they're good at. Uh, and nobody, no one of us was really, Experienced or, or even that passionate about scaling organizations. Uh, and that's what we were kind of the biggest thing we were looking for from, uh, from a CEO, um, teaching us and, and doing that basically scaling the company. Cause we realized that to do what we need to do, we need a lot of people. We need a big company. It's, uh, Kind of a number of people and size is not a kind of a desired outcome in itself. It is a necessity because the goals are so big that you can't do it with, uh, 20 people or 30.

AI assessment note: “one big reason for that was that... no one of us was really, Experienced”

Q How did the people hear about it? The first users?

A Uh, so that was interesting because we launched two parallel streams. One to consumers and one to, uh, businesses, uh, educational institutions, publishers, uh, basic companies, consulting companies, and, um, the consumer channel took off. Like, it grew exponentially from basically week one. Uh, and enterprise or B to B, um, it took a longer to build. So once we kind of pushed both of them in parallel for about half a year, uh, we saw that, well, kind of makes sense to focus on consumer for now because it's just growing like wildfire. Uh, but, uh, B to B requires much more pushing, much more hiring, more people intensive, cause you need sales team and all that. So we kind of decided to slow roll it a little bit, um, and focus on consumer for first few years.

AI assessment note: “we launched two parallel streams. One to consumers and one to, uh, businesses”