The Exchanges

Q Um, uh, and so walk your venture back. When did you raise capital?

A We raised it right smack dab in the middle of, uh, COVID, and it was quite a rollercoaster because we actually had a signed term sheet on February 27th, and then, you know, a couple short weeks later, the world went crazy, and, uh, our investor raises from high net worth individuals into special purpose vehicles, so it's not a traditional fund model. So there was a couple weeks there where we thought there's no way this is going through because all of these high net worths are, You know, their liquidity is being, uh, compromised and, uh, really at the same time that that investment was jeopardized, we saw our sales and traffic go through the roof because unfortunately the pandemic made people think about their own mortality and contemplate and prioritize emergency planning. So it just so happened that we were able to say, Hey, look, we are actually a pandemic proof business and a business that has actually seen our numbers go up. And so they were able to rally the investors and we closed in the end of May.

AI assessment note: “We raised it right smack dab in the middle of, uh, COVID”

Q All right. So, uh, let's jump into the business model for people that haven't used shift, uh, explain exactly how they use it. Is this for renting cars or buying cars or all the above?

A It's for both selling and buying cars. So there's two parts of the business. If you have a car to sell, you come to our website, we price the car for you, and then we'll buy it from you. Um, we'll pick it up from you at your location. We can drop it off at our location, whichever one you want to do. Um, that's available in all of California and all of Oregon. And then if you want to buy a car, you have three ways to buy a car. You can either, um, have a test drive be brought to you at your house or your office, um, or you can come to our warehouse to look around, kind of like you would go to a Costco, or you can buy a car site unseen online, and then it'll be shipped to you, um, anywhere in the country. Um, and you know, we sell a very broad range of cars, all used, but anywhere from one to, you know, 12 years in age.

AI assessment note: “It's for both selling and buying cars. So there's two parts of the business.”

Q And, and, uh, did, was this an internal need you saw? Like, how did you know this was a problem?

A So we had experience planning at Microsoft, which was a six month process, and Bala and myself, we were part of the sales planning customer for life team at Salesforce, dealing with 1500 sheets being sent to 400 managers August to February, and so we started looking at solutions internally to start streamlining the process, and we looked at tools like Anaplan out there, And, uh, none of them could meet the need of what we ended up doing. Then Bala and his team built a prototype version internally for Salesforce. And we felt that, you know, I think there's a need for this in the mid market, um, that we could, we should go out and build a platform dedicated to this function.

AI assessment note: “we were part of the sales planning customer for life team at Salesforce”

Q Take us back to that 80,000 person Canadian town, I believe it was, uh, where were you born?

A Yeah, so I grew up on the east coast of Canada, cities called Moncton, New Brunswick, right on the ocean, pretty much about 20, 20 kilometers or 14 miles away from my American friends. Um, I had a pretty interesting upbringing. I, I grew up in a family of four kids, second oldest, um, My mom was an alcoholic and my dad was in sale, so he's on the road and, you know, short version, um, I got in a lot of trouble and got diagnosed with ADHD at 11, got put into group homes and foster homes due to my behavior. When I was 1213, uh, eventually things spiraled out of control to the point where when I was 16, I had a, um, backpack with a handgun Um, because the police were looking for me and I decided to steal a car. And while I was making my way out of the province, I figured I'd go to Montreal. Um, I pulled off the highway to get gas and a routine roadblock and, uh, got into a high speed chase with the police. And You know, I didn't get too far. I came around this neighborhood, um, to try to get away. I saw an open garage door and figured if I hide out, maybe the police will kind of go past. And as I came into the driveway, I was carrying way too much speed, ended up smashing into the house and went for the handgun.

AI assessment note: “I grew up on the east coast of Canada, cities called Moncton, New Brunswick”

Q You bet. Thanks for coming on. So the obvious question is anyone that sells into the events world is going through a lot of change right now. What is spot me selling right now and how you've been impacted by COVID?

A Yeah. So we are a, what most people would call us, um, they would think of a vote press for events, right? So we are an end to end platform for launching, managing, running, Your events. And of course it happens today that most of these events are actually online, right? So we provide all the tools to create a website, a mobile app, a social network, live stream, And a community, and you can do this in few clicks without having to code. Now, what you're saying is, yeah, of course, COVID, huge change, and a lot of people in the industry were focused on in-person. They were doing a lot of stuff on reg, on checking people in, on payments, and none of these things happened, right? And all the focus now is on engaging online, is on streaming, and that's actually something we had. We had a product before because one of our clients actually asked A few years ago. And so we were quite ready to pivot extremely quickly. Uh, so yeah, business was pretty tough. Uh, the first, uh, two months from, uh, March to, uh, to, um, I think May, uh, and, and starting June, we went up very, very strong.

AI assessment note: “we are an end to end platform for launching, managing, running, Your events.”

Q That's incredible. Okay. Take me back to day one. When'd you launch the company?

A Yeah, so, uh, rewinding my first company was a traditional landscaping company that I grew from just myself and a push mower to over a 125 people. So I spent 15 years in the landscaping business understanding how that business worked and growing from zero revenue to ten million in revenue. So when I sold that business in 2013, I saw what Uber was doing for ride sharing, what Lyft was doing for ride sharing, and so then I decided, ok, GreenPowl needs to exist. Recruited two co-founders, and we just started hacking on the project. Passed out, like, a 100,000 door hangers, and got the thing going in the summer of 2013, and just kept grinding and hustling on it to now where we have hundreds of thousands of people using it.

AI assessment note: “got the thing going in the summer of 2013”

Q So then we can just multiply by 12 to get to that 48% number. Do you guys have a sort of a clear path to expanding a customer? In other words, upselling them from one product line to another or upgrading them on a feature set or things like that?

A Uh, yes and no. Uh, it depends on what the customer is. So there are some of our customers where up Upselling them to our other products makes perfect sense. So for example, if you are a WP Simple Pay or an Easy Digital Downloads, or prior to the sale, a Restricted Content Pro customer, all of these are customers where you are running a business of some kind, you are taking money in, and it probably, at least for many of them, makes sense for you to have an affiliate program. And so we'll upsell you to Affiliate WP. If, however, you are an Affiliate WP customer, and you are already running your store on, say, something like WooCommerce, upgrading you to Easy Digital Downloads doesn't make any sense. Because you already have the payment processing side of your business taken care of. Um, and then, so if we're going from any of our products besides the affiliate program, we'll upsell to affiliate WP. If they are an affiliate WP customer, then we upsell them to the payout service.

AI assessment note: “yes and no. Uh, it depends on what the customer is.”

Q Can you name one of those pieces of content that sort of does really well for you that you run ads to?

A Yeah. Uh, the newest one that we, uh, one of the newer ones, I mean, the big book of funnels, for example, is one of the ones that we have, or the, the, you know, the definitive guide to abandoned car, uh, the segmentation book that we just released. So we're, we're releasing a lot of these very core focus, actionable, uh, books that we're putting out there. And then essentially what it's doing is we're driving leads at about two, three dollars a lead. That's what we're holding up leads at. And then from there, we're getting about one in 10 as a sales qualified lead. And then, uh, naturally we're bringing one in 10 of those people, uh, 10% of those people are actually signing up for a trial to over, over the 30 day period. And then we're naturally converting about eight and a half percent of those people.

AI assessment note: “the big book of funnels, for example, is one of the ones that we have”

Q So which of the, so let's, let's sort of break down each quickly. So what does Wingman do?

A Yeah. So, uh, as I said in the intro, Wingman helps option traders track their trades. And so the best way I can sort of give an analogy is if you could imagine a CFO at a startup, um, if they had to manually track every single expense in the company in a spreadsheet, you know, versus just having something like QuickBooks. Right. That's the level of difference where these options traders who are individuals, um, they're given no data from their brokerage firms about their trading and their performance and analysis besides a single PNL number year to date. So it's like if a CFO is operating an entire business with a single profit number. So what wingman does is it imports your trades directly from your brokerage. So that way it handles all the organization, all the analysis, all the tracking, the cost basis, your P and L on every trade. Uh, so you don't have to spend any time doing it in a spreadsheet.

AI assessment note: “Wingman helps option traders track their trades”

Q So, so what came first? It's, I mean, it sounds like you're trying to help, you said podcasters specific and video creators specifically. Did you start out, start out as a podcaster?

A No, we fell into it. We actually tried to build back in 2015. We tried to build a social audio network. It was think of like Reddit based on audio. So like these forums, um, and threads all based on audio messages. And it was a failed startup. We worked on it for two years, tried to raise money, really did all the things incorrectly. Um, and at the end of that project, we had this little internal tool that took a lot of these audio clips from the startup that didn't work out and shared them on social media. We use that as an internal marketing tool. We actually built it internally, use it ourselves. And when that company folded, uh, we started selling it and that was January, 2017. And, um, we've been running with that ever since.

AI assessment note: “No, we fell into it. We actually tried to build back in 2015.”

Q over a million dollar run rate bootstrap is impressive. So like, let me dig here for a second, right? So when you say, when you say your first hundred customers, it really was just pure outreach and brute force. Actually take me through like what your days look like back then. Was it a LinkedIn search for podcast host and then a LinkedIn message or like, how'd you do it?

A It was a lot of, uh, my technical, uh, Nick is my technical co-founder and he built me this, um, we use the, um, iTunes API to give me a little search dashboard. So I'd go on Twitter and I would try and find people that are promoting their new episode, ideally like their first or second episode. I'd look for their podcast in our little search tool and then their RSS feed always had their email in it. So I'd grab the email and then I had a little template that, um, I was just sending cold emails to people and probably sent in between 30 and 50 every day or two, I would say. And, um, that's how we probably got our first 50 to a hundred customers. And then, um, we started doing some work on social outreach on social media really worked hitting up podcasters on Instagram. They would share an image of their episode and I'd send them a direct message and say, Hey, why don't you turn this image and try it with the video instead with that audio included? So, um, that was probably the first hundred and After that, content marketing really started picking up for us. Um, and then it's kind of just been slow, linear growth every month since then.

AI assessment note: “I'd look for their podcast in our little search tool and then their RSS feed”

Q They're almost have like their own persona, superhero personas, you know, the, the business lady or the business guy. And then you have like the developer, then you have like the person that's like, we'll just growth hack like crazy and has very high empathy levels. Right. So when you look at your, your three on wave, how would you sort of typecast the three of you? What are you?

A Um, marketing and support. So I'm listening to the customer. My goal is to understand what our customers are looking for, asking about what's frustrating them. My job is to take in all that information and relay it to my other partners who are both more technical, um, but also still very, uh, good at a lot of other things too. Uh, but, uh, Nick Fogel, who's my original co-founder, um, he's a former lawyer turned software developer, so he can wear a lot of different hats. Um, and he really, he plays more, um, CFO basically. He's like really high level. He's doing software development, but in the company standpoint, he's really thinking high level about finances and, um, allocating resources, things like that. And then, um, Rob, our third partner, he is front end feature development. He can really take all of this and put it into the product. Um, so that's kind of how us three kind of all work together.

AI assessment note: “marketing and support. So I'm listening to the customer.”

Q Yep. Okay. And what does that mean for an agency back then to have a net income of twenty five million? I just have no context. Was it good, bad, ugly?

A It's, it's, it's great. You just don't get any of it. Um, when you're a growing business and you're self-funded, um, you get, you get the taxes on it. You just often don't get to take it home because you need that working capital in order to hire more people. Agencies are a really shitty business model. Um, it's the easiest business to get into and the hardest business to get out of because once you're in it, And once you have that much infrastructure, we had ten million dollars a month worth of payroll. Think of what it takes to keep that beast alive. Every month, every year, the chains reset, and you have to start all over again, pitching new clients. You're going to lose some, some clients. You're going to gain some clients, but you constantly have to feed that beast.

AI assessment note: “It's, it's, it's great. You just don't get any of it.”

Q I see. Interesting. Okay. And then, and then, so walk us through, let's sort of fast forward today, because there's a lot of stuff. You're testing a ton during these next 10 years. Testing new ideas, throwing stuff against the wall. Let's, let's fast forward now to like, what's stuck. So what, what are the brands under startups.com today?

A Okay, so startups.com, um, as I mentioned, just kind of give it context, uh, carries people from the idea stage all the way through launch. So there's a lot of part, uh, points people get stuck. Um, so right now we've got startups.com, but within that we've got, uh, bizplan.com, which is a business planning tool, as you might imagine. We've got fundable.com, which allows people to, uh, raise capital. We've got, um, Uh, launchrock.com, which allows people to kind of acquire their early customers. We've got clarity.fm, which is a community of over 20,000 mentors that we use to connect people and, uh, kind of help them through the process and coach them. And we've got virtual.com, which allows people to get an extra pair of hands on their team for a few hundred dollars to get all the stuff done that they can't possibly get done.

AI assessment note: “within that we've got, uh, bizplan.com... fundable.com... launchrock.com”

Q Ok, 10 per user per month. Now you sat on a lot of data at Facebook. I'm sure you were in maybe pricing conversations or you've at least studied it. You know, how do you come up with 10 bucks a month?

A Uh, one, you look at the market, and you, uh, that which gives you a very good understanding of what's the general willingness to pay, but also, uh, we survey our users, so we have, uh, you know, a large number of users that have tried Woven that are retained, that are using the product every single day, and we put, uh, um, a Van Westendorp survey in front of them, um, to get feedback on, um, You know, how much is too much? How little is too little? Uh, what do you think is fair? What would feel like a good, uh, value for you? And, uh, the union of those four questions helps to, uh, get you right to what the sweet spot is for the product.

AI assessment note: “we put a Van Westendorp survey in front of them”

Q Well, how did you actually build that audience? So let's say a year before launch, you were speaking at an event. What would you do at the event to start building that waitlist for, for right?

A Yeah. So we did have a, we had a very simple sales page that was basically just a explainer of what we're building with an email opt-in. And what I would do is whenever I'd go on, whether it be on a stage or on a podcast or whatever, I would just Point as many people to there. We didn't really have an incentive. I didn't have like an email course or a lead magnet of any sort. It was basically just a, if you like what, if you like what you just heard and you want to follow along with what we're building, go here. So we built up a few, I think we were at 2000 or so when we launched.

AI assessment note: “whenever I'd go on, whether it be on a stage... I would just Point as many people”

Q All right. So talk to us. What is true face doing? And is it a pure place, at least a SAS model in terms of how you're making money?

A It was, and we've transitioned out of that into a couple of different ways of making money. One is through proof of concepts or just general proof that the technology works in the environments in which we're seeing demand for. The second then is production licensing, and a third is professional services. So one of the interesting things to note about computer vision right now is it's still very early on in the industry's adoption, and so a lot of these Fortune 500 companies or governments that we work with don't have the capacity or engineering talent To take this technology, implement it quickly and, and show ROI. And so, you know, we are having to do a lot of that handholding and it's becoming helpful for us because then we can dictate our, it helps us dictate how we build our products based on the demands of the actual customers.

AI assessment note: “It was, and we've transitioned out of that into a couple of different ways”

Q Yeah. Okay. So let me, let me, let me make this like super real for a second. I'm on masterworks.io. I see a piece by Monet. It says purchase price, 310,000 dollars sale price, sixteen million total return, 51 X over 41 years. Have you or masterworks you've, you bought this piece It's 41 years ago for 300 and like, how does it actually work? Who holds inventory?

A Yeah. So, so you're actually looking at, um, what we call our price database. So we have a research team of 25 interns that have went out and collected over 80,000 paintings that have been bought and sold at public auction. And then what the returns have been on those, those particular artworks for collectors. So it's really, that's, that's a unique way of trying to understand what returns have been in the art market, uh, over the past several decades. So those aren't offerings that we've currently done, but, um, you know, we've done, I think now we've done 14 to 15 different offerings between one and ten million dollars per painting. Uh, we're launching about one offering every two weeks now. So that's, that's roughly the cadence of, of the platform.

AI assessment note: “So those aren't offerings that we've currently done”

Q And explain to us, maybe give us a customer story. How's the customer using you?

A Sure. Absolutely. So, um, an example would be one of our customers is a large multinational brewer, um, and they face huge climate pressures on several fronts. First, uh, grain requires a lot of water. It's very intensive. And then their transportation processes require, uh, shipping on, for example, the Rhine River. Which is highly influx on predictable things happening as a result of climate change. So in the case of this brewer, they would, uh, look at all of their various complex supply chain elements, evaluate them in the context of various hazards, drought, sea level rise, Uh, unpredictable flooding and then make a plan within the application about what they could do to reduce that risk and then evaluate in real time if those strategies are meeting their revenue targets, their emissions targets, their service targets, whatever those might be.

AI assessment note: “an example would be one of our customers is a large multinational brewer”

Q Yeah. Uh, okay. Interesting. Um, I'm trying to think about how your model scales, right? I mean, can you build this into a company that's going to do five million this year?

A It's tough. Um, our five million goal is in three years from now. Um, we, we've been growing at a hundred percent a year, but that's because we've been small. Um, we expect to grow about 75% for the next three years. Um, it's not, like I said, series code is not a SAS operation. Um, it's tough to, uh, grow because the, the team captains, right? The person who runs a team of developers, um, is the architect, is the project manager, is the client contact. They kind of are the glue that hold this thing together. And we have to find that person each time we need, you know, each time we bring in three or four clients, there's a new team captain that goes in there. And that's a, that's a tough job. It takes us a while to vet and find the right people.

AI assessment note: “our five million goal is in three years from now.”

Q Okay. So put, you know, help us flesh out your timeline. So when did you leave VC and did you go directly into select software from Bessemer?

A No, so I worked at Bessemer until 2012, went to HBS, taught myself how to program, graduated in 2014, started a business called Next Wave Hire, which is a small HR tech SaaS business, um, you know, really bootstrapped, high retention, profitable, but super small company. Hired a GM to run that business about a year ago. Uh, and so I had a lot of extra time, had the startup itch, I love to learn, I love to teach, and A gap in the market that I saw is that most HR teams are not super well equipped to buy software. And if you look at the current online resources, like the sort of Yelp for software businesses, there's not a lot of signal there. Um, and I kind of first learned that actually investing and trying to use those online reviews to due diligence and just realize there's, there's nothing there that's of value.

AI assessment note: “No, so I worked at Bessemer until 2012, went to HBS”

Q And they, I mean, is this modeled out like a SAS platform? Is it pretty consistent what they pay you every month?

A It is fairly consistent. Uh, it's not straight SAS cause it's per click. And so my business is a little bit dependent upon the three to four Google updates that happen every single day. Um, just one of the bad things, like Halloween night, like my traffic sort of like dropped off a cliff. Right. And there, there's nothing really you can do about that. Um, and if I have less traffic, that means less clicks and therefore less revenue. However, if you look at it over longer stretches of time, it is very consistent and What's really nice is that the churn is very, very negative. Um, and that's mostly a function of it being sort of a new marketplace where your CPC, your CPA is much lower relative to AdWords, LinkedIn, Capterra, G two, sort of all the best alternatives.

AI assessment note: “It is fairly consistent. Uh, it's not straight SAS cause it's per click.”

Q Okay, fair enough. So, so you raise the capital, you do the acquisition summer of 2017, you bring on a co-founder, uh, let's keep going forward here up to the acquisition. So, did the brisk.io acquisition just not work? What happened?

A No, no, no. So that, that worked well, and we, and we were building and growing quite well during the accelerator. At the same time as we were sort of, uh, going towards a demo day for the accelerator, we were approached by Outbound Works. So during Dreamforce, I had a beer with, um, Outbound Works founder, or one of the, one of the founders, Ben, and we were talking about our different strategies and goals for our companies, uh, and we realized that we were Essentially trying to achieve the same thing, which is automating sales development. They had taken a, a slightly different approach from this where they were attacking it from a, a services perspective and we attacked it from a technology perspective. So there and then we decided that, okay, let's try and make a, a acquisition work.

AI assessment note: “No, no, no. So that, that worked well”

Q Interesting. So when I, so when I put Convertree into Ahrefs to look more about, like, your SEO strategy, I mean, you're ranking for pretty high, the first position for keywords like webinar, JEO, uh, and WP commission machine. Uh, was this intentional or those accidental rankings?

A Uh, so, uh, those rankings are Uh, you'll probably notice it's not us ranking for it. It's like a Convertory subdomain. So it'd be like webinargeo.convertory.com. And, uh, so Convertory, uh, Convertory just gets tons of link juice from the fact that by default, we have a powered by badge, which is easy to turn off. But if you don't turn it off, every page published on Convertory has that link to our homepage, um, or the affiliates link link to our homepage. And then we seem to pick up, uh, like, The SEO theory, right, is that subdomains don't get any benefit from that main domain. That doesn't entirely seem to be true in our case, because we've got, we get those rankings for people to just register like productname.convertory.com. We've seen that outrank their, their own domain some of the time.

AI assessment note: “you'll probably notice it's not us ranking for it. It's like a Convertory subdomain.”

Q and the problem is everyone is doing webinars, everyone's doing big Zoom calls, so it's very noisy, and people don't understand how to keep people's eyeballs through a live session when I can easily walk away from my computer to go to my kids or go out, you know, whatever. So, so how did you go, let's start with a registered. How did you get 7004 and 37 people registered?

A Yeah, so about a third of them came through our email list. We have a pretty engaged community, about 40,000 subscribers currently. Then, uh, majority of them came through partnerships. So we build relationships with, uh, growth hackers, with SEMrush, with, uh, MobileMonkey and Larry Kim. So, uh, Pretty big amount of them came through partner promotions, and we also implemented, uh, a viral, a few viral incentives. We use the software called early parrot and P A R R O T T double. Yes. And, uh, as soon as, uh, uh, someone signs up for the summit, uh, as soon as they register, they get an, uh, incentive to share it with their network about That referral. And as an incentive, we had, um, uh, opportunity to get a complimentary all access pass for which we usually charge anywhere between 150 to 250, which include access to recording as well as executive networking.

AI assessment note: “about a third of them came through our email list. We have a pretty engaged community”

Q Mark, by the way, I get the value of the product. I'm just trying to understand the economics behind it. So who is, who is paying the flat fee per month, which is the SAS model?

A So the SAS model flat fee are other fundraising companies. So if you are a nursery and you do about a million dollars a year in fundraising, it's going to take you three to four people to run that business, but you can run it on our platform with one person and a distribution center. So we move all of the logistics out of your fundraising business onto our platform and all you have to do is fulfillment. So all your fundraising business turns into a giant wholesale account. The, or a series of accounts that you do fulfillment for and all the other parts of the fundraising come to farm raiser and we manage it for you using our technology.

AI assessment note: “So the SAS model flat fee are other fundraising companies.”

Q Got it. Okay. Fair enough. That's really helpful. Thanks for that. Take me back to your backstory here. So, so you launched the company where were, I think you said you launched in 2018. Where was your head at that point? Were you quitting a corporate job or, or why start the company?

A So I was actually hired by Sodexo in 2015. Uh, to, uh, create a new business, uh, to, uh, because Sodexo was interested to, uh, expand into the mobility, uh, industry. And, uh, so we, you know, we, the first year we took some time in order to meet some, uh, some potential clients to understand what, what the market rationals, what were the end user pain points. And after this year, uh, we set our strategy, which consisted in Creating an end-to-end solution in the travel and expense industry covering the full value proposition before the trip, during the trip, and after the trip. And then we build this value proposition, and to do it, we actually acquired two companies. One was named Expenditure, specialized in expense management, and the other was Ayal Batros, specialized in travel booking. We merged these two companies, we integrated them into one single entity, And we launched, uh, in June this year, a new entity, a new name, a new brand, which was Raidu.

AI assessment note: “I was actually hired by Sodexo in 2015. Uh, to, uh, create a new business”

Q And what were you doing? I mean, did you, were you in film and you quit and said, I'm sick of editing with things all over the place in hard drives. I'm making a cloud solution.

A That's an excellent question. I was at the other side of the table. Um, I was lead engineer, uh, of the research and development department at Verte. Uh, so I was personally responsible for the digitization of their newsroom, um, procuring, uh, a piece of software, uh, That we, we spent millions, uh, in, in topics, um, at 18 months in implementation, and I said to my fellow colleagues, whom co-founded the company, hey guys, if they give us, um, just a fraction of that cost, we build it from scratch, and that's because the world of media production is, has been completely disrupted and has fundamentally changed And, uh, our customers, uh, that sometimes still try to tackle it with a software that has been designed 20 years ago to manage a tape archive. That's not suitable for a file-based workflow.

AI assessment note: “I was lead engineer, uh, of the research and development department at Verte.”

Q that. Why not? So there's a couple of firms right now, like Wistie and things that have raised like a million. They've gotten kind of good scale. And instead of going out and raising the twenty million like you just did, they said, you know what? It's really nice to be in full control. And they go buy out the early investors. Did that ever cross your mind or no?

A Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things, what we've done is we've The majority of the company is still owned by myself and the employees. So we've kind of made a pledge to each other that we will, we'll always maintain full ownership and full control. Cause sometimes you can own the majority of the shares, but an investor will have rights in their, the ability to force a sale or something like that. You know, they're not used that often, but they have that. So we don't have that in our agreement so that the firm that we took in this year, They're not actually a fund. It's, it's evergreen capital as well, so there's no timeline on when they need a return.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things, what we've done is”

Q How do you get the partner to take the time to write the guest blog post for your blog? That's where a lot of people get stuck in this whole process. They can't convince other people to take the time to write for them.

A Um, well in the beginning it was a lot of personal relationships. I, uh, built the channel program, the agency partner program at HubSpot, uh, and so I tapped a lot of, uh, agencies, uh, To do that. Um, at this point we have a pretty refined process, which would take me like 20 minutes to explain. We have people that are constantly reaching out on social. We have a list of past contributors that we ask to contribute to new posts. Uh, we always give a link, uh, back to them when they contribute. Uh, and a lot of it is just very short stuff, so we're only asking them to take, like, Five minutes, um, to contribute to a post, which then becomes, you know, a post with 50 contributions.

AI assessment note: “we're only asking them to take, like, Five minutes, um, to contribute”