The Exchanges

Q Well, yeah. Dirk, give me an example of that. So a power plant, how long does it take them to solve one of their big, what's the, what's the problem a power plant has and how long does that typically take them without you?

A Yeah. For example, in Germany, uh, all the energy is traded within windows of 15 minutes. So a big, Energy companies, they make every 15 minutes a decision. Should we buy energy? Should we produce energy? Do we get enough solar energy for the next 15 minutes or wind energy? And so they have a time window of these 15 minutes is five minutes data in, five minutes making the next, the right decision, and then five minutes data out. And if they could develop, if they could solve in these five minutes a more complex problem, that's a huge business impact for them, because then it's like a trading in finance, yeah? And so that's the benchmark. How much could we calculate in these five minutes? If we could do it faster, if we could calculate it in three minutes, then they could put more.

AI assessment note: “all the energy is traded within windows of 15 minutes.”

Q so for example, job change alerts, right? You credit a lot of, I mean, that was one of your experiments, right? Um, some of these things, like they, one helped you learn how to basically get to where you are today, but also I think a lot of them were also potentially lead gen. So Tell me about one or two of those early experiments between 2011 and 20 14.

A We had all kinds of things. We had the job change alerts product, which would link up with your CRM, see all the contacts that people cared about, look on LinkedIn to see when they change jobs and alert you about it. We had news alert system. We had this stream. It was like Twitter and you'd open it up and it'd be all the news articles on the companies that you cared about that you were selling to. We had the data product, which was the easiest way to build the most accurate and targeted list of prospects in the marketplace. But really none of those aligned with the vision of what I wanted to do for the purpose of this company. And they generated revenue. They generated leads. They learned, they taught us a lot in terms of product management, in terms of culture, in terms of what customers need. Uh, but at the end of the day, we started looking at what the best sellers were doing and they were communicating with their customers in an authentic, sincere, but repeatable and scalable way. So we decided to build an entire platform for that. When you look at sales.

AI assessment note: “We had the job change alerts product, which would link up with your CRM”

Q Yep. Yep. Okay. And I see nine employees on the LinkedIn profile, two and 13 followers. Is that right? Nine, nine folks full time.

A Um, no, it's a little deceiving. So we have a little unique company here in that, uh, we're in nine different countries around the world. We have about a 110 people that are part of the company. Um, we have a lot of, uh, contractor and contractor firms that we've hired for specialty areas, feeling that we do not need direct employees just to start a traditional company. So obviously we've had about 90 Developers working for almost three years to build the core platform that was released last month. So the core of the company is on the development side. And then we're just beginning to, uh, you know, bring in sales, marketing, PR, uh, product support, those types of folks.

AI assessment note: “no, it's a little deceiving... We have about a 110 people”

Q Huh? Wow. And, and how did you know, I mean, it's, you know, picking up from beautiful California and going over to Kiev to do diligence on this firm is a lot of your time and energy. How did you know it was going to be worth your time or energy? Like, how did you find these guys?

A Of all places, I found them on the internet, just searching for, uh, development shops. I probably looked at 50 or 60, um, kind of, and I started in the U.S. I just couldn't find what I needed, uh, or people were too busy to, to bring on a project like this, so I turned it more international. I looked on, posted some stuff on Upwork to try to get sources coming in, so I probably narrowed it down to five folks, and, um, I just kept coming back to this one gentleman, um, in, Kyiv. And I finally decided I just need to go spend two or three days with them, get to know them, get to know the people, see if we had a connection. And the connection was immediate. Like I, I just enjoyed them as people. And then technically they were as good or better than anyone I've worked with before.

AI assessment note: “Of all places, I found them on the internet, just searching for, uh, development shops.”

Q a lot to learn about how folks like Sid and others, there's many others that have leveraged an open source community. It's the closest comparable we have to web three. Where everything's on blockchain, right? Where like you actually vote with the number of tokens you own of the fig product, but this is a different structure, but it's, it's like the closest bridge, if you know what I mean?

A Yeah. Yeah. There are a lot of different styles of open source. So there is what Sid is doing at GitLab where it is sort of the, it's company led. Anyone can contribute, but at the end of the day, the company sort of has the call as to what's the direction we're going. And that, uh, it's sort of known as the Benevolent dictator for life. If you've ever heard of that term. So big open source projects, specifically languages like Python have a benevolent, benevolent dictator for life. Uh, whereas a lot of other open source projects, similar to web three, they have some sort of set of rules, which says, okay, with the community has to vote. And then based on the community votes, something is going to happen or something is not going to happen. There are lots of different methodologies. I think the most important thing is for you to say upfront, Here is, you know, who makes the final decision at the end of the day. Here are the rules. Cause we don't say that it just turns into chaos.

AI assessment note: “whereas a lot of other open source projects, similar to web three”

Q Okay. Okay. So is, is the best equivalent here is like when I launch or anyone listening launches a SaaS company, they have 10,000 shares they issue of which 9000 are going to the core founder and a thousand are reserved for the team. It's sort of the same thing, right? Except you're talking about token values instead of exercise prices.

A It's a little different actually. Like imagine, so what you just said is like a typical kind of SaaS cap table seed round or pre-seed. With, with tokens, you actually want the majority of the tokens to go to your community because the community is going to do the majority of the work, right? There's no ESOP, right? So in, in, and there's a fixed supply in our token economy, you can't make any more, like you can't issue new tokens, right? It's, it's locked into our smart contract that we have a fixed supply, two hundred fifty million tokens, which is interesting, right? Because you can never be diluted, right? It's dilution proof. And so Um, we actually said like, okay, well, like investors will probably own eventually like up to 25% of that, that, that token cap table, and then founders will get, you know, ten-ish, and then, and then maybe another 10 for like core team contributors, and then the rest go to community.

AI assessment note: “It's a little different actually. Like imagine, so what you just said is”

Q 26. Okay. And what was the original idea behind Crashlytics?

A Yeah. So it turns out mobile apps crashed. So if you think in 20 11, uh, you're, we're two years after the, the sort of launch of iOS apps, right? Those came in 2009. Everyone's building apps. The app store is flooded with reviews. 10% of them mentioned the word crash. It was a very unstable, very early platform. And I became obsessed with crash reporting through my work at box because we were facing our own internal issues with our mobile work and our Mac OS work and ended up building a prototype on the side. And I asked box, Hey, can I work on this nights and weekends? Would that be cool? And to their complete credit, they were like, yep, great. Go for it. It's totally unrelated to box. And if it's good, maybe we'll use it.

AI assessment note: “I became obsessed with crash reporting through my work at box”

Q And for those folks that don't know NAC or Mr. First Interviewed Together, what are these customers paying you for? Describe your product a bit.

A Yeah, so Knack is a, a, a, a codeless enterprise, uh, campaign creation platform, and so for everyone out there, you know, you all receive these beautiful marketing emails with the banners and buttons. Well, somebody is coding those most of the time, and an average marketing email is like, 800 lines of code, and so marketers, well, they're not developers, they're marketers, And so what that means is that historically they've had to work with developers or, uh, really expensive and slow agencies to get this done. And with knack, well, we're giving them the power back to be able to do all of this themselves and really unlock the creativity that they got into marketing to do in the first place.

AI assessment note: “Knack is a codeless enterprise campaign creation platform”

Q So Ryan, did you guys, have you guys bootstrapped this or have you raised capital?

A So we actually bootstrapped for the first two years of it. Um, in the very early days, it was just me doing all of our development, uh, and mainly doing our sales and the two of us, honestly, handling all of the chats that would come in. Um, we were, anytime you messaged in on RentReady in those first couple of years, it was literally us on our phone or computer messaging back. Um, in 2019, we raised our first venture round and that was really when we brought on the core team to RentReady. We grew to about eight as a team. And then we raised a venture round earlier this year. So we've raised about five million dollars to date.

AI assessment note: “we actually bootstrapped for the first two years... raised about five million dollars to date”

Q Figma. They design these like one pagers with all of our fonts and colors. And then we've basically modulized all of the different chunks of the landing page design. It looks like if we import all that to Knapsack, I can have someone that has no idea how to design or code, create their own new landing pages using old elements we've already done. Is that basically how it works?

A Yeah, exactly. So you take, uh, uh, and you rally around patterns. So patterns can be any solution to a commonly recurring problem. So that, that can be a color system. It can be a spacing system. It can be all those styling elements that, that exist inside of Figma, or it can actually be like bits of UI, things like, like buttons or cards or navigation. Um, and then what you can do in Knapsack is you can define what variables you can send to these things and create different variations. So The whole point of this is you should eliminate a bunch of wasteful rework. Instead of maintaining hundreds of different possible buttons, maintain one bit of button code and one bit of button design, and then define a set of allowable variations from there.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, exactly. So you take, uh, uh, and you rally around patterns.”

Q Okay, got it. Three. So this is great. So how did you guys survive COVID? I mean, that's all you have to deal with cutting expenses. I mean, that's a big deal.

A So we were actually really early on. So we only incorporated in October, 2019. So we were a team of two, myself and my co-founder, Erin Morris. So we kept ourselves really lean. We bootstrapped the company. We sort of took trains, um, slept on very dubious Airbnbs when we went to trade shows in London, the works, but really we then managed to secure our first seed round of a quarter of a million pounds. And that's when it changed. And we did that during COVID. And the real reason for that was we secured our first paying client during then. But actually, more importantly, there was actually a big need. People suddenly realized they need to understand where their visitors are on site, knowing that they've just sold a million tickets for a day isn't enough. They need to know actually where are people on site, and that's where we can really help. So we managed to get backing from the European Space Agency for our seed round. Also another organization in aerospace and some fantastic angel investors. And that enabled us to grow our team from two to six and very shortly becoming seven, which really has ramped up our sales pipeline and our sort of development capabilities, which has been hugely exciting.

AI assessment note: “we kept ourselves really lean. We bootstrapped the company.”

Q I see. Interesting. Okay, so six people now today, um, what do the six people do?

A So we have a variety. So myself, I take sort of the business and financial side of things. My co-founder is an awarding film director. So she actually takes the lead on the product design and the UI and UX. We have a sort of lead developer based in the Philippines, which is fantastic, a full stack developer. We also have two on the ground developers at the moment, um, here in Cornwall, one sort of a mid-level developer sort of taking charge on the backend side of things. And then we also have more on the app side, front end development, a junior developer. And we have a sales and marketing lead. And the new team member hopefully joining us later this month is a junior marketing assistant, willing to ramp up that sales cycle.

AI assessment note: “myself, I take sort of the business and financial side of things.”

Q them get leads. Give me the copy. Let's say I was one of the target audiences. I was a head of HR at a big company that Sendoso wants to get me to send gifts out right to my employees. Right. So I'm a target customer. What might you put, like, what's the actual text of that combo ad that you might send me? And what's the gift card size?

A Yeah. So we've tested millions of dollars of gift cards. Um, the most effective price point is a hundred bucks. I don't use a hundred dollars cause it doesn't, I like everything we do to be shockingly memorable. So the copy would go like this. Hi, Nathan, 29 minutes, a 105 dollar gift cards and gift giving technology. You've never dreamed as possible. That's the hook. And then we help brands like X, Y, and Z deliver gifts and delight in a new modern era. Take 29 minutes. Hop on a call with one of our team members. At the end of the call, we're going to send you a 105 dollar gift card. Sound good? And then it goes into conditional logic. And so the way a combo ad works, it uses like, yes, no. And so let's say, and so we can qualify them still. So we'll say, Hey, do you manage gift giving at your organization? Let's say yes or no. And if they say yes, we can put them into our sales funnel. If they say no, we can put them into like a Slack community or some type of bridge where they can still interact with the brand, even though they're not ready to buy.

AI assessment note: “So the copy would go like this. Hi, Nathan, 29 minutes, a 105 dollar”

Q SaaS business is to build a media brand. And you already had that. And I had no idea there was a SaaS brand behind that. And so you reached out and I said, I reached out and I said, please, please come on. This is great. So let's dive into this. Um, what, so how would you describe today freight waves to the market? Cause you don't lead with SaaS.

A No, I think Bloomberg is the, is really Bloomberg of freight or the Bloomberg of the supply chain is really the best description for freightways. If you think of our business versus Bloomberg, Bloomberg is in many ways, uh, what they do in the financial markets we do in the physical economy. And so what I mean by that is we are focused on the intersection of how product, uh, moves, physical product moves to the global economy. And Bluebird tends to focus on how money moves through the global economy. And so we have a media business, uh, that has journalists. We have about 40 folks that are in our editorial media side bringing Original content and context to what's happening around the global economy, but using our data data to inform that. And then we have a subscription SAS business, uh, which we sell to our industry that provides real time, uh, fundamental data to help them manage their business more effectively. So pricing data. Go ahead.

AI assessment note: “Bloomberg of freight or the Bloomberg of the supply chain is really the best description”

Q Congratulations. Okay. So help me understand. Give me a customer example. Why are they paying you and how much they pay?

A Um, example is, uh, this company called Zomato from India and, uh, they are paying us because we are helping them streamline the entire tech hiring process, helping them filter a lot of candidates before they actually line them up for interviews. And we are also, you know, saving a lot of, a lot of their engineering bandwidth because our software is very optimized to take interviews. Now, typically an engineer would spend around an hour, one and a half hour to take an interview, to complete an interview in our software. It is so convenient that you can wrap up the same interview in about 45 minutes without having, uh, to give any trouble to the candidate, and the candidate experience is also top notch. So this company is paying us around, uh, uh, close to 1800 dollars a month.

AI assessment note: “this company called Zomato... paying us around, uh, uh, close to 1800 dollars a month.”

Q can be, you know, harmful to, uh, pathogens, uh, and things of that nature, uh, harmful to humans. You chose to go with, I think, a polycarbonate, uh, filter, uh, plus, uh, nano alumina and polypropylene. I, I'm saying all those things like I know what I'm talking about. I have no idea what I'm talking about. I'm just reading off your website, but why are those the right materials?

A Well, it, it's, uh, there's a million directions to go here and keep in mind, this is freshwater, not desalination. Um, and ultimately it's able to maintain a low head pressure. So we can, we can still push the water at a fairly quick rate, uh, using that tiny pump. Um, and then it's, uh, it's long lasting and, um, doesn't require any And maintenance. So like the, the life straws, which are beautiful, uh, ceramic filters, they require a back flush after just about every use where the back flush is really challenging. Most people don't do it. It requires distilled water and therefore the pump or the filters get clogged pretty quickly. And ours, ours, we're not designing people to have to maintain, uh, after it's usable life, which is about a thousand liters. You just replace that filter element.

AI assessment note: “ultimately it's able to maintain a low head pressure.”

Q I see. I see. Okay. What's the backstory here? When'd you launch?

A Uh, well, we started the company in 2015. My background is in, uh, public safety. I formerly worked as a, a paramedic and also police officer on the east and west coast. So I had a better understanding of what it was like to be a police officer and how to provide that type of customer service. I also had the technology background, having a startup in high school that kind of helped pay my way through college. So I combined my love for technology and public safety in 2015 with two co-founders, one who was also in policing and another one who was on the technical side of things. Uh, and we launched for our first customer in 2016. And ever since then, we've been growing considerably.

AI assessment note: “we started the company in 2015... launched for our first customer in 2016.”

Q Interesting. Okay, uh, what's the next step? You leave and then what?

A I left, I was consulting with QuickBooks on the side and I had built out, uh, I had helped build out their, uh, content marketing function within their resource center at the time. It was really kind of a repository for the long tail SEO phrases. Um, and, and, you know, the, you know, the type right where it's just every long tail phrase, every permutation of a keyword. And what I came in there and did was really helped them build out a branded asset. Um, Um, and it became a destination that people wanted to go to, wanted to return to. Return visitors is always my true North metric. Um, and the person that I had installed at the time, Jimmy Daly was actually, uh, the person who I had brought in to run it. Uh, he had decided that he wanted to go do animals and go more agency side, uh, at, at the time. So I was in Berlin, uh, shooting some videos for Oberlo and The, the idea of, Hey, like they needed somebody to take this thing over. I had helped build it in the beginning. Um, and it just kind of clicked for me at that time where I was like, well, why don't I go over there and run it? So we scaled that, uh, from five, five to 10 freelance contributors to 40 plus contributors across SEO, social, Um, email like most of your customer facing channels across 16 markets. Um, and then Intuit had a massive layoff where they laid off seven percent of their entire portfolio. I was one of t…

AI assessment note: “I left, I was consulting with QuickBooks on the side”

Q Customer cloud. I think there's four key things here. There's success, engagement, experience, and expansion, right?

A Yep. So customer success, which is where we started, scale your CS team. How do you not have to throw people at it? There's customer experience. Measure how your customers feel about you in terms of surveys, NPS, in application through email, and then really deep and natural language processing to understand what are the themes that are coming up? Are people upset about your pricing model? Are they really happy with the sales experience? Number three, revenue optimization. That's all about now that you have these great successful clients, how do you get them to spend more money? So forecasting your renewals, driving expansion, identifying the cross-sell opportunity accounts, and then finally product experience, which says, okay, the most important thing is to make your product awesome because everything else doesn't matter if your product isn't awesome. So in the app, you drop in a small amount of code, onboard your users more easily. Get them to try out new features, get feedback from the user in the application, and give them in-app support to guide them to the right experience to get them the most value out of your product.

AI assessment note: “Yep. So customer success, which is where we started, scale your CS team.”

Q What's the best tech stack MVP? Like, are you talking like HubSpot, Sierra? I'm like, what's Tell us the cheapest, quickest tech stack for your first three SDR hires.

A Oh, I'm going to get in trouble because I use so many different ones, but you said best and then you said cheapest. I'm going to give you two different answers. If you're looking for the quickest out of the gate, easiest adoption, SDRs don't have a learning curve and they use it within three days and know what they're doing. I would hands down say Usher Connect for, uh, social selling for like automation on LinkedIn. Uh, Apollo is great. It has the data and the enablement packed into one. And then CRM. I like free agent CRM because their price point, there's also, you know, Salesforce, HubSpot, all of the, all the other ones. Uh, That, that would be the cheapest, quickest, easiest learning curve for an SDR. If you had to say best, and you are sophisticated, like you physically aren't going to overpay for a Ferrari that you can't take out a second gear, I would boringly say, uh, you know, sales loft, outreach, parlayed in with a couple other, you know, data inputters, give you notifications, zoom info, et cetera.

AI assessment note: “I would hands down say Usher Connect for, uh, social selling... Apollo is great”

Q That's incredible. So, so your database is really, what is it like a rich list of like wealthy LPs that are writing angel checks or LP checks?

A No, it's actually different than that. It's like big state pension funds, foundations, endowments, banks, broker dealers. There's a whole ecosystem of investors that will invest in professional money managers. In your world, you can think kind of venture capital. It can be growth equity, private equity, but they're calling on Harvard and Yale and the state of California and those pension funds because they have a ton of money they need to invest in funds just like that. And so our data set is about 4500 different accounts. And about 13,000 contacts. And we have a ton of more data as well, focused on serving one avatar, which is somebody who gets up every morning and has to raise money for their venture fund or private equity fund.

AI assessment note: “No, it's actually different than that. It's like big state pension funds, foundations, endowments”

Q Great. Tell me more about the fund. Did you come as an, you know, were you an operator you sold and then you, you launched the fund or you have always been in sort of on the fund side?

A Uh, no, it's been, it's been an interesting journey to this point, Nathan. Um, so I grew up in India. My dad's a first time entrepreneur. He's a real estate developer back in India. So kind of grew up in that environment, uh, came stateside for college. And then my first job out of college was at Blackstone real estate. Um, so I made a bunch of real estate, right? Equity investments there across different asset classes, uh, went to business school after that. At that point, I got more interested in product and tech, uh, then helped out a couple of friends with their prop tech companies. And then eventually, um, by happenstance, I, I got a call by a Japanese real estate developer to help them run their corporate venture capital arm based off Tokyo. They were looking to do more things in the U.S. Uh, this was in 2019. Um, so I went, visited Tokyo, spoke to this company, and kind of got connected with two more institutions, and they wanted me to do the same thing, which is help their CVCs gain more exposure to U.S.-based prop tech. Uh, so at that point, I kind of built out this Uh, consulting business, which is the first iteration of Akia Ventures. Um, as the business kind of kept growing, um, at that point, I convinced my now co-founder, uh, and GP in the fund, Nobu, who was my classmate, uh, in business school to join the team. Uh, so we kept on building the consulting side of t…

AI assessment note: “built out this Uh, consulting business, which is the first iteration of Akia Ventures.”

Q And if we look at the economics on a hundred dollar, a hundred dollar cleaning job, breakdown, how it works, how much does the cleaner get?

A Sure. So it does depend on the cleaner, but you're going to, you're looking at, uh, roughly 50 to 55%, maybe up to 60%. Uh, if we're outsourcing to a company, it could be even more, but like, let's say 50 to 60% is typically what you're pushing out to the cleaner. Um, marketing costs are, um, Nathan, as you know, at the beginning, you're doing a lot of marketing afterwards is mostly word of mouth referrals. So we spend maybe, I'd say five to 10% on, let's say five percent of revenue on marketing per month. Yep. Um, then we have some overhead expenses. Um, so overhead expenses, probably 10 to 15%. Um, other large expense I could think about would be, um, credit card transaction fees, which are pain in the butt, but that takes off three percent immediately. Uh, then other minor software expenses here and there, just, you know, Zapier, things like that, just to connect everything, active campaign, um, things like that. So that'll add, uh, some fixed amount as well.

AI assessment note: “roughly 50 to 55%, maybe up to 60%”

Q Like literally right now you're telling me some fun stories and I'm taking notes in my Apple notes app on the left side of my screen right now. Where would I do that? Where it gets integrated with grant? Like literally if I was using it now, how would I do that?

A So you download grain onto your desktop and you can actually use it on the web here in a couple of weeks. And we hook into zoom to where, when you are recording either through zoom or through our native recorder, um, there is a notepad that is live for the time that you are recording. As soon as you stop recording, the notepad goes away and it goes and it takes the content that you identified or flagged as important. And it brings it Into your web app where it synchronizes it with the transcript, with the full recording, and it becomes this like iMovie for the web where you can create and edit the video itself and create highlight clips using just the transcript. So you select the text you want from the transcript and you pull that out and it becomes like a loom like link where you can embed it. You can share it anywhere you want, or you can turn any of your notes into a highlight with With a single click.

AI assessment note: “there is a notepad that is live for the time that you are recording”

Q All right, so tell us what you do and how you make money. Is it a pure play SaaS model?

A Yeah, so we're an enterprise SaaS company, and the idea that we came up with is that the market is moving to the cloud, and so companies do business with other cloud companies. You might store your files in Dropbox, you might store your sales leads in Salesforce, and when companies do all these relationships, how do you know that your cloud providers are being as diligent as you are when it comes to protecting your data? And we came up with a way of how to, non-intrusively from outside, measure a security posture of any company in the world, and give them a scorecard, a rating, or a letter grade, A, B, C, D, F, representing how secure they are.

AI assessment note: “we're an enterprise SaaS company, and the idea that we came up with”

Q All right, so tell us what you do and how you make money. Is it a pure play SaaS model?

A Yeah, so we're an enterprise SaaS company, and the idea that we came up with is that the market is moving to the cloud, and so companies do business with other cloud companies. You might store your files in Dropbox, you might store your sales leads in Salesforce, and when companies do all these relationships, how do you know that your cloud providers are being as diligent as you are when it comes to protecting your data? And we came up with a way of how to, non-intrusively from outside, measure a security posture of any company in the world, and give them a scorecard, a rating, or a letter grade, A, B, C, D, F, representing how secure they are.

AI assessment note: “we're an enterprise SaaS company, and the idea that we came up with”

Q How are you growing? Where are you finding new customers?

A Lots of different areas. Um, so some of it's new verticals like the retail and, uh, B to B stuff that we just talked about. So they've been two really good successes for us. We're also expanding geographically, so a Japanese business is starting to really take off. We're in 16 countries now, so it's been good. We also only a few months ago launched our first SMB product, which is a Shopify app, which gives them a really slimmed down version of our product, just gives them the advertising product and the confirmation page at this time. But we're going to roll out a few more versions of that over the next sort of six to 12 months and expand it beyond Shopify. Uh, so client type is another one. Vertical geography and product is the other one. So as we get, um, you know, into distributed commerce and we start selling more product and we go further up into the ecosystem, we start handling more of the volume of the e-commerce or more value of the e-commerce transaction through our platform. We also drive more revenue.

AI assessment note: “some of it's new verticals like the retail and, uh, B to B stuff”

Q go-to-motion should include quota carrying reps at all, and a lot of that is tied to price point, and is there margin in the price point to pay out a commission? What's the minimum ACV that these B to B SaaS companies need to be selling at to say, okay, yes, we can start to afford us to put touch on these sales and have a sales rep with quota?

A Yeah. I mean, we usually talk about 10 K a year, like a thousand a month, kind of as a benchmark. Cause that's, that's where you're, you're going to have some multiple calls with at least a couple of decision makers in an organization. So there's needs to be some real meat to the sales process. It's not just like go to webpage, click to sign up. Cause the middle one is the best plan type of thing. There's going to be some real decisions that need to be made. So, and that also allows you to have a pipeline, manage that pipeline to get like a three to one pipeline coverage ratio. That allows you to kind of manage your conversion rates.

AI assessment note: “we usually talk about 10 K a year, like a thousand a month”

Q SAS founder with five million bucks in ARR saying, I want to expand to the United States and the way we're going to do that is to hire an outsourced SDR firm to help us scale up this outsource team so that we don't have fixed expense on our, on our profit and loss statement yet. Have you seen outsourced SDR teams work for this sort of thing, international expansion?

A Yeah, I think it can. I think it can if you have a baseline of success. If you know your ICP, if you know the messaging that tends to work pretty well in one market, you can transfer that. You're going to have to calibrate it a little bit and change it a bit. Um, I think the mistake in outsourcing is I don't have any leads and I don't have any customers and I don't have time to do the SDR work, so I'm going to outsource. That's just shoveling your problems off on somebody else. So outsourcing, I think, should be used strategically to either test markets Or to use that as a stepping stone to prove that you can move into, say, a new geography or a new vertical.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, I think it can. I think it can if you have a baseline”

Q So you, through all this experience, you've now built Flock Freight. Let's start with a tease there and then get more of your history. What's Flock Freight doing today?

A We do, uh, we create, we call shared truckloads or algorithmic carpooling. So it's a little complicated thing to think of, but if you have four pallets of commercially manufactured goods and you're in LA and you want to ship them out to Chicago, you would otherwise move them through the LTL industry, less than truckload industry or hub and spoke model. So just think terminal, terminal, terminal UPS without the aircraft. What we do is we come in and we use some really sophisticated algorithms to match your palletized freight with our other customers' palletized freight. And instead create a carpool, um, or a shared truckload. So we just book a big truck out of the full truckload industry, have them make multiple pickups, picking up our various customers, loads and shipments and have them drive direct to destination. The reason the customer cares is that, um, by making a hubless offering, no terminals, no warehouses, it picks up on time, delivers on time. It's faster. There's zero damage, no loss, no theft. It's just a much, much higher quality offering. Um, and it's a much greener offering, about a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas as the only certified B Corp in the freight industry, uh, because our model effectively, um, you know, negates or disintermediates the use of terminals. It's, we like to say, algorithms instead of warehouses.

AI assessment note: “We do, uh, we create, we call shared truckloads or algorithmic carpooling.”