The Exchanges

Q Yeah, talk, talk, before we talk about the economics of that business, tell us what was, what was that business? You launched it in 2010.

A Sure. So that business was Zombie Orpheus Entertainment, and, uh, the entire idea, uh, when I went to the, uh, private equity for that was, We're going to make films. We're going to release them online for free. We're going to encourage piracy. We're going to tell people to share them, pirate them, remix them. We're going to put it under a Creative Commons license. We're just going to get it out there everywhere it can go, because kind of the realization I had was each of these films, each of these episodes is its own advertisement for the next product, and we're no longer the business of selling units. We're in the business of building A sustaining fan base. Essentially using the internet for what it does best, making perfect, infinite copies of our work at no cost to us.

AI assessment note: “that business was Zombie Orpheus Entertainment, and, uh, the entire idea”

Q Okay. And so what happened? How'd you get some money raking in?

A So, basically, the message was so crafted to the audience, we'd watched for 10 years as fandom had tried to save shows that they loved, and we'd watched Hollywood and the studios and the networks not care, kind of, with, uh, with Farscape, with, uh, Veronica Mars, with, uh, Firefly, with, uh, Jericho. Uh, you can kind of go down the list where fans put immense effort into saving these shows, and the metrics didn't make Since for Hollywood. So what we did was kind of go straight to that sense of disempowerment and provide a message to the fans that said, you are empowered now to keep this show going if you love it. And luckily we made a good enough show that people loved that they took that empowerment and ran with it. So based purely on fan contributions via a PayPal button on our site, we made back our entire production budget in a year. We paid our investors back.

AI assessment note: “based purely on fan contributions via a PayPal button on our site”

Q Okay, good. So we'll, we'll give a nice big range to keep it vague. Um, help, help us understand, uh, help us understand more about how you're getting your customers. So you said salespeople and recruiters are like a big thing for you. Now your technology, ironically, it sounds like does this, it probably finds recruiters and you probably do some outreach cold. Is that the case?

A Um, you know, we did do that. So initially, so around the, you know, between January, 2016 to maybe March, 2016, we were doing a lot of outbound, uh, user acquisition. So we'd send, you know, sort of emails to people, try to acquire them. But since March, um, you know, we got featured, featured in product hunt and we built a bunch of, uh, uh, SEO, um, operations. And so most of our, in fact, like a hundred percent of our user acquisition now, Is through, uh, completely through SEO and it's free. So people will, you know, so the way that this will work is let's say that I'm interested in talking to Nathan, right? So I'll type in Nathan's name and Rocket Reach's page, um, will show up as usually one of the top five results if you type in Nathan email, Nathan email. Um, so that's how people find out about us. They sign up for an account. There's a freemium model and they end up Paying, um, you know, buying one of our subscriptions. Um, that usually leads to then us talking to them to try and get them to sign up for team deals or APIs.

AI assessment note: “we did do that. So initially... like a hundred percent of our user acquisition now, Is through... SEO”

Q kind of balance here because as people consume, um, Different video blocks they buy from you right in their footage and things are putting together. They can either pay like per usage or a lot of people are trying to go kind of the model of monthly subscription for revenue predictability. I imagine that was a big debate for you. What's your model and how'd you come to the model?

A Totally. So when we started way back in the day, we were selling a la carte, right? So we were selling it by the clip, by the collection. And I started looking at this little company called Netflix and thinking, dude, I like their model, which is They don't have everything, but they've got a lot of good stuff and they charge a monthly price. That's low enough that every subscriber says I'm getting a good deal. And so when we launched video blocks.com, it was really, and we launched it in 2010. Uh, it was a test to see if that subscription based approach would work for stock media and fast forward to today. And it has worked. We've got 150,000 paying members. Okay.

AI assessment note: “when we launched video blocks.com... it was a test to see if that subscription based approach would work”

Q Yeah, so tell us that. Yeah, tell us, so how do you make money? Well, it's a, it looks like a SaaS business, right?

A Yeah, yeah. Um, you, you might even call it freemium too. Um, we have, we have a couple of plans, and they're all pretty darn cheap. Um, starting from free, and then the very max is 34 dollars per month. Um, so we have a surprisingly large numbers of users who, who pay. Um, about 85% of our active users are actually on paid accounts. Okay. Um, and only 15% on free ones. Um, so a lot of the people, we apparently have the, the right features and the paid ones to drive people over. And also the audience is mostly our customers are mostly businesses. So it's very easy for them to justify spending a couple bucks a month on something that is so core to their business too.

AI assessment note: “freemium too. Um, we have, we have a couple of plans”

Q You bet. Yeah. So tell me what's more of your focus right now, uh, Segmetrics or Delphinet?

A Oh man, that's a, that's a hard question because they're both near and dear to me. The, I will say right now that Delphinet probably takes up the lion's share of the time. Um, So DelphiNet is the consulting side. We work with some of the big names in the info product industry, um, building out evergreen funnels, supporting their launches, and doing all that fun stuff. Segmetrics is a tool we started about a year and some change ago, and we built it because we make, we work mainly in Infusionsoft and other CRMs like that, and it's so freaking hard to get the data we needed to be able to, to prove to our clients that, hey, we're doing a great job. Look at this, right?

AI assessment note: “Delphinet probably takes up the lion's share of the time”

Q Okay. And so then you, okay, so you launched the business, you pay yourself in the thirties. And how did, I mean, how did you kind of fund yourself those first years? Did you, have you raised capital?

A I just, so we initially from 2008 through 2014, we were an outsource service business, um, purely bootstrapped, um, did not raise any capital as myself and built it to a nice business. Um, you know, doing seven figures over, over seven figures and doing okay to really scale and grow at the kind of rate we wanted. We had to switch models and become a SAS business. So we went from a service business to a SAS business in, in 2015. Um, and growth kind of took off since then. We actually just closed a series A back in May. So we have taken capital, but we kind of went this strange, I'm like the oldest startup in the world.

AI assessment note: “purely bootstrapped, um, did not raise any capital”

Q So what's the, you said, and you, I did the research before even reading your bio just now, you guys are ranked extremely high in the Salesforce app exchange. For other people and other business lines looking to rank higher in the Salesforce AppExchange, what's the secret? How do you rank so well?

A I mean, the algorithm, I think, has changed slightly over time. But one of the things that helps us the most is that we are an end user based application. So you don't install Serious Insight just once for your org. Instead, if you've got a thousand salespeople, they will all use Serious Insight. And we benefit from that because those thousand people can come in and write nice reviews. About the app, tell the world how they use it, why it was valuable in their daily workflow. Uh, and that's been really, really good for us. So we've got, you know, over 1100 reviews on the app exchange, which, you know, puts us behind some pretty famous apps like DocuSign and EchoSign.

AI assessment note: “those thousand people can come in and write nice reviews”

Q That's great. And so how do you generate revenue?

A Absolutely. So we, we keep true will completely free for users. And that opens up a couple of new channels for us in the form of intelligent recommendations. Uh, when a user signs up for true bill, they connect their bank account or credit card, and that lets us see all their transactions, which we then scan with an algorithm to find the subscriptions. Uh, we use those transactions also to make recommendations. For instance, we might see user has Netflix and say, hey, you know what? Spotify wants to give you a free trial. Click yes to turn on Spotify. Free for 90 days. Or, hey, you're paying in the top 20% for car insurance for people in your zip code. Click here to get a quote from Metromile. And obviously, depending on the partner, we get paid maybe on the click, sometimes on the, if the user gets a quote, like for a student loan or car insurance, or sometimes if a sign up occurs from it.

AI assessment note: “depending on the partner, we get paid maybe on the click”

Q Yeah. Uh, fascinating. Do you have, and, and what's the process, what's the manufacturing process like for these things? Is it the plant in the U S or what?

A So we have multiple partners in China as well as a 10,000 square foot facility in Atlanta. What we're building out in Atlanta is, um, if you can imagine what an Amazon fulfillment center looks like, except in Atlanta, we're going to have finished components. So when an order comes in, our team there just picks the finished components and builds the guitar as if it's a puzzle. So we'll source most of these finished goods, uh, finished components from a variety of suppliers around the U S and Asia, and then do most of the assembly here. But we are also, um, We do have the capacity to go up to about 10,000 units a month in our China facility.

AI assessment note: “we have multiple partners in China as well as a 10,000 square foot facility”

Q Okay, so this is, if I'm just looking at costs, and maybe you can rebuke this in a second, this really isn't competitive until I'm getting a monthly kind of rent of somewhere around 790 bucks per month, because you have typical property managers charging about 10%. Is that accurate or am I wrong?

A Uh, that's not exactly right. So a typical property manager does charge an average of 10% a month. They also charge one month's rent to place a tenant. Uh, they also, uh, usually charge a fee to get started, a fee to renew a lease, and a markup on maintenance. Uh, so generally we find that the average customer is actually paying closer to 12 or 13% a month when you factor in, uh, all those other fees. Uh, the other thing I would mention is that, you know, the vast majority of rental properties in the United States The units rent for more than 790 dollars a month. So even if you're just looking at that 10% number, ah, that's 79 dollars a month. It's still pretty competitive with the standard property management.

AI assessment note: “that's not exactly right. So a typical property manager does charge an average of 10%”

Q Max, you're CEO of TigerProp.com, right? So how do you make money from this? It sounds like you're, the rev, is that revenue actually yours or is there a company that it belongs to first?

A No, so I own TigerProp and so we, you know, we make 30%, all of our agents are on the same split, right? So Let's say there's a commission. It's 15,000 bucks. You give 3000 bucks to your buyer instead of a fruit basket. There's still 12 grand left, right? We're going to take 30% of that. So we would get paid 3600 bucks as the broker. The agent would get the 70%. Granted, it's a smaller cut for the agent, so they have to buy into this that, hey, I'm going to make less per transaction, but if I can do 36 deals a year instead of four, You know, because I'm providing professional photography, I'm saving people a crap ton of money. And then they get tons and tons of referrals from their friends and family because they're actually helping people.

AI assessment note: “I own TigerProp and so we, you know, we make 30%”

Q So, uh, you know, when you guys started this thing, I believe you did an Indiegogo campaign. Tell us about that. What was your goal and did you raise what you wanted?

A We did, yup. So going into it, you know, we wanted to make sure it's not just as that us and our friends wanted, but a product that people really could put their money towards, and if we're gonna commit our careers to this, then let's make sure it's something that people want. So we had a crowdfunding campaign through Indiegogo. We were pre-selling our everyday shirt, that casual button down that we launched, and our goal was 10,000 dollars. That's the point where we said, alright, if we raise 10,000, we know we can submit an order and get this thing off the ground, there's enough traction. We ended up raising 26,000 dollars in pre-orders. And fortunately, guys love their clothes. We delivered them in November when we launched, and we're excited to keep that going.

AI assessment note: “our goal was 10,000 dollars... We ended up raising 26,000 dollars”

Q Ok, so what, what do I get? What do I pay you for the done for you service and what do I get?

A So we have different tiers depending on what people want. So our first level, we call it Facebook, um, marketing pro, which is where we just do online lead generation. Um, no, no, we don't work on content or anything like that. And all the prices I'll give, uh, Aussie dollars, Australian dollars. So that's 4400 USD, sorry USD, AUD, 4400 AUD. And with that, we, we just focus on lead generation. So driving traffic to a landing page, webinar, event, whatever the offer is for the client. Then we have a package called Facebook Legion Pro, which is where we do content retargeting. Uh, we go a lot deeper and then we have a mark that's 6600. And then we have a marketing partner package, which is 11 K, which is basically where your partner in marketing, where we treat your business as if it's our business.

AI assessment note: “So that's 4400 USD, sorry USD, AUD, 4400 AUD.”

Q So can you, and can you give a real life example just to really bring it home? A real life customer?

A Sure. So we've got a company who is right now using LeadGenius to map out, um, every director of IT, um, at a Brazilian company. Telecom company with the interest of selling them IT products and services. Um, so they were interested in companies that were between a 100,000 in revenue and about ten million in revenue. So there's a finite number of those companies. That information is always changing. We use a combination of crowdsourcing and crawling to go out and find this information from a combination of public databases, company websites, as well as, uh, social networks, uh, personal profiles and so on. So the end result was, uh, A set of companies that they wanted to sell to and an effective way for them to reach out and talk to them.

AI assessment note: “we've got a company who is right now using LeadGenius to map out”

Q Okay. 2000 per month. And, and what do they get from that? Is it like live coaching or four meetups per year or what?

A Yeah. It's a combination of they get our, all of our courses are in there. So courses on building businesses, scaling businesses, and we're adding to it all the time. So our, our training platform, then we do a coaching call every week with either myself or one of our, you know, one of our team members or one of our coaches. And then we do a yearly summit or Where they fly to Austin, we bring in some people who are doing really well, some people who are investing or buying businesses, and we also incubate that deal flow. So if somebody wants to get funding, if somebody wants to sell their business, if someone needs a strategic introduction, they can fill out an application, put it on their desk, and we'll make that introduction if we have that.

AI assessment note: “It's a combination of they get our, all of our courses are in there.”

Q So you paid a hundred grand for capitalism.com. You have enough money to buy a Tesla. You have a kid, you have a wife, you have, you know, you put on a conference that costs money, had big name speakers. You're obviously generating revenue. How are you generating revenue?

A Yeah. So when I was on the show in December, I think our revenues were about half a million dollars a month. And now they're about, now they're about a million dollars a month. We generate our revenues in a couple of ways. One, I have some physical products businesses, mostly that are based on amazon.com. And, uh, I, I sell quite a bit on Amazon. The other piece is, I, I guess the, the, you might call it a coaching business or Our incubator really. I have a, a, a coaching program, an incubator that we call the, the tribe where we bring in people who own businesses and connect them with people who fund businesses, people who have audiences and we kind of bake and incubate them together. And we've got a few hundred members in there and that's how we pay for the operations of freedom.

AI assessment note: “We generate our revenues in a couple of ways. One, I have some physical products”

Q Okay, so about three people. Yep. So what does the, it sounds like your lines of business, break them out for me, you've got this, this, the portraits, then what else?

A Sure. So, um, I have my portrait studio, which is called Molly Marie Photography. Um, then I have, what I did was I actually, people were asking me, you know, how did you start making six figures with your, uh, boudoir photography studio? Um, and so I started a company called booty shorts.com and there I create info products essentially where I share all of my knowledge, um, what it took for me to get to, you know, Grossing six figures annually. Um, and then from there, that business booty shorts really took off. I started that in 2012. Um, and we started grossing multiple six figures with that business as well. And so other entrepreneurs were asking how I did that with a niche and with info products. Um, and that's how recently venture shorts.com was born.

AI assessment note: “I have my portrait studio... then I have... I started a company called booty shorts.com”

Q Got it. Okay. So break, break this down how it works. What will the price of the book be? You said it's free, but shipping. So maybe what's the average shipping?

A So the shipping, well, on average, the shipping for the actual shipping cost of the book will be about three bucks. But what we're doing is the book costs, 17 dollars and 99 cents retail. Amazon will sell it for about 15 bucks. And we want to get the book into as many hands as possible and sell as many copies as possible in a short period of time, because it's no surprise. We want to get placement on the book sales lists. So what we do is we offer it for free. You pay the shipping charge and the seven dollar charge. People think, well, you're making a fortune on the seven dollars. No, I'm not. I'm losing money every time I do that because the book costs me about 18 dollars by the time I pay the fulfillment house, the shipping, the labeling, the postage, and all that, and buying the actual book, but what happens is we are able then to offer people more of our products and services after they've ordered the free book from us, and so it's all based on a calculation. We know that about 10% of people who take the free book offer will buy other things from us, and that will liquidate the cost of the promotion of the book, And it gives us an opportunity to sell our copywriting course come April, which is, it's a thousand dollar course. And obviously that's very profitable for us.

AI assessment note: “on average, the shipping for the actual shipping cost of the book will be about three bucks.”

Q ago, back in episode one, 67, where, you know, you talked about, you know, valuations and how to actually sell a business for ninety million bucks with no revenue and how people think about, again, valuing companies and the team and the revenue and the product. Today, though, what we want to focus on is your, is your business, your current business, which is what and what does it do?

A So my current business is a company called Springleap, and we have a marketplace of 180,000 advertising agency experts for the world's best insights and copy testing. So instead of doing consumer testing on all your marketing and your advertising or doing research with consumers, you would use advertising agency experts. And the thought process behind that is that these people already have the latest consumer data and give you incredibly sophisticated insights based on wisdom from their market. And going beyond just telling you what your, what your strength or your weaknesses are, or telling you about markets, they will tell you what to do to fix or improve your creative marketing and advertising assets. And we're around, we're literally around between 10 to 30 times faster than any of the big market research companies in the world.

AI assessment note: “my current business is a company called Springleap, and we have a marketplace”

Q Yep. And I, and I love that. So walk us through price point. You've done over three million. Obviously they can do the math and divide into 2500, but what is the price point on Podcasters Paradise?

A Yeah, they could do the math, but then they would be wrong just because I've done, um, an interesting pricing. You know, when, when we launched, there wasn't a ton in Podcasters Paradise. There were some great tutorials. There was a Facebook group, but you know, there wasn't a lot of content within and we were still freaking out ourselves. So we launched, um, we pre-launched at actually one 97, 197 dollars. And then 45 days later, we actually did our real launch and At four 97. And then since then, about every quarter, Nathan, we've bumped the price up about a hundred dollars approximately, give or take sometimes more. And now our price point as it sits today is 1297 or 15 payments of 99 dollars.

AI assessment note: “And now our price point as it sits today is 1297”

Q was around, like, what's this one word? And you had built up so much curiosity around, what's the, what's the one word? And I saw Andrew Warner commenting on a Facebook comment thread below a video you guys had, and I'm like, okay, this thing's, like, rocking and rolling. So, You launched four years ago. Walk me through what people pay and, uh, to get in for the six months.

A Our, our first price was 3000 dollars when I was just doing this by myself, and I wanted 10 people to join, and 88 people ended up joining, uh, and it was 500 bucks a month for six months. Second time around was 800 bucks a month for six months. And then the, uh, third time around was another 800 bucks a month for six months. And then the, finally, in the final years, we're now a 5000 dollar program with more, with even more value that we're able to offer at that to give people more of what they were wanting, their end result they're wanting. And it's a thousand dollars a month for six months or five grand now.

AI assessment note: “Our, our first price was 3000 dollars when I was just doing this by myself”

Q Okay, and one of the, one of the questions a lot of the top tribe folks listening always ask me, a lot of them are in SaaS, Matthew, and they're trying to figure out, like, do I as a CEO have to perfect the sales process, you know, the scripts and all that, and then, and then hire someone and hand it off? What's your recommendation?

A My recommendation is, uh, that the founding team, whether that's If the engineer is the sort of CEO person, the, the partner, sell about a million dollars worth of product before you go out and sell and hire your first or second salesperson. You want to get to about a million dollars a year on your own, and the reason why that is, is twofold. One is, before that, it's very, very hard for a buyer to take a risk on a new product, but if the CEO or the, one of the founders is in the room, you know, telling you about the passion behind the idea and where they're going to take it, that carries a lot of weight. The converse of that is that the CEO or the founder has a tremendous built-in advantage to selling, so you're not really sure this will scale, Until you can bring in about a million dollars in revenue yourself. And at that point then you go to the salespeople and you say, Hey, here are the logos I brought in. Like, and the, the, the salesperson's thinking to themselves, Oh my gosh, if that guy can bring in a million bucks with these good logos, I'm going to kill it. And that's exactly the kind of dynamic you want.

AI assessment note: “sell about a million dollars worth of product before you go out and sell”

Q Why would a traditional bank need your software technology? They already are a bank. They already have consumer deposits to lend out. Why don't they just do it themselves?

A As any business, banks, banks need to focus, right? So considering the ticket sizes that our typical customer would, would Ask for, which is around 20,000 dollars. That's the average loan size. So it's, it's quite the small ticket size. We also get requests for all the way down to 500 dollars to do like small, small investments or just bridge working capital challenges from these small businesses for a bank to onboard such a customer is just as costly as onboarding a large corporation that's requiring several million. So It makes sense for them to focus on that group, right? And, and not build for these small micro businesses. Also, I think that what the bank or any traditional lender does is they look for some kind of collateral, uh, for, for the loan. And most of these small businesses lack that they don't own property. They don't own anything that, that could work as collateral. So we have a different approach looking much more at cashflow to, to, Make sure that this business actually can repay the loan.

AI assessment note: “for a bank to onboard such a customer is just as costly”

Q So how many, like I pulled up on my phone, your, your mobile app, How many people are sending sort of one-offs like realtors through the app versus using your API you've got on the site?

A It's all about, honestly, the, um, iPhone app and Android app are very, very small portion of our business. I'd say maybe 30 to 40 notes a day go through that. By and large, most of our notes go through our automations or bulk upload. So on the website, you can upload an Excel sheet or you can tie us into HubSpot, Salesforce, Claude. We have a really cool MCP now, and where you can send notes directly from all that. You know, a lot of people use Zapier. A lot of people use make.com for automations. Uh, but quite frankly, in Shopify, we have a plugin for Shopify where you could go in and define rules and say, after the first purchase, send a handwritten note. After they spend a certain amount of money, send a handwritten note. After they, um, have been a client for a year, send a handwritten note. So you can set up all those rules in Shopify. And we're going to be coming out with a Klaviyo integration shortly as well.

AI assessment note: “I'd say maybe 30 to 40 notes a day go through that.”

Q So where does that get installed? Does it get installed on a truck? Like turn it around a little bit? Ok, so is there a camera on there?

A Yeah, so what we do, what we do, what customers do is they take this, they press the button right there, this turns on, they peel the sticker on the back, most of the time they peel the sticker, and they open the trailer. Or the container, when it's open already, it's at the dock. They loaded up the trailer and the container with, let's say, pallets of servers, pallets of electronics, pallets of gaming console, pallets of vacuum cleaners, whatever it is. They take this tracker and they place it usually on the last pallet. Sometimes they hide it because they don't want anybody to see it. Then they close the trailer. This thing is on. It's transmitting in real time using cellular connectivity. So, two G, four G, five G connectivity all over the world. So it tells customers where the shipment is in real time, but also it's still, it's telling its condition. Is it hot? Is it wet? Is it cold? Did somebody open the trailer? There's a little light sensor right there. Uh, did this get dropped? There's a shock sensor. There's also an orientation sensor to see if something's tilted. So all of that data on top of location is being fed into our platform and then customers log in and see and monitor their shipments. So now they know, are those berries above 40 degrees Fahrenheit for more than an hour? Or those vaccines on a tarmac somewhere sitting at 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and they were ab…

AI assessment note: “They take this tracker and they place it usually on the last pallet.”

Q Give me the backstory here. How do you go from MIT professor to golf guy?

A Well, I always loved software. I think my happiest days were programming. They're still my happiest days, but I don't do it anymore. I love coding. I, it just, it's magical for me. I think when some people appreciate a great poem, I appreciate great code. So I've always loved program, very technical. As soon as I got to MIT, I realized I did not, I did not want to be an academic. I wanted to be an entrepreneur. So I was there for two years, moved back to Philadelphia, where I was from. I went to graduate school, started the first company, Softswitch, which was in the communication software business. It was very low level communication software to Sold to, you know, Fortune, 500 companies. That was acquired by Lotus Development in 1994, and then lo and behold, 11 months later, IBM came along and acquired Lotus. So in 11 months, I went from a company of 450 people, my company, to Lotus, which was 6000, to IBM, which was a quarter million. They were different. Trust me, they were different. Not good versus bad, because it's amazing what you can accomplish when you have a quarter million people, you know, Trying to do something. And I stayed at IBM for a while. I worked with Lou Gershner, who was a just fantastic CEO. Turned, he turned around IBM. Absolutely. And then that kind of ran its course, uh, and left IBM in oh seven. You know, I really don't want to retire. I love what I d…

AI assessment note: “As soon as I got to MIT, I realized I did not want to be an academic.”

Q Okay. And what, maybe the right question is to ask is on average per door, what are you billing on a monthly basis? Is it, you know, like 10 bucks a door, a dollar a door, you know, a thousand a door, or how do you think about that? Yeah,

A So by door, ultimately, it ranges from anywhere from five dollar plans all the way up to a 29 dollar plan, and really the way that it works is it's very much, very similar to kind of a warranty basis, and so we have a coverage-based system, so we'll have certain pest types. A lot of those pest types are going to be the most intrusive pest types, so like your cockroaches, your bedbugs, you know, mice, fleas, ticks, but ultimately, a lot of that is what When it enters the space, it's what decreases kind of that resident experience. So for us to be able to have quick solution to the resident, and then quick delivery of service, ultimately that helps improve the resident's quality of living during their residency. And so it, again, ranging from five to 29, kind of embedded into the lease if it's a e-based program versus a landlord-based program.

AI assessment note: “ranges from anywhere from five dollar plans all the way up to a 29 dollar plan”

Q Are these companies that need at least, you know, a hundred million of revenue before they feel this problem and pay you, or is it bigger, five hundred million revenue or more?

A Totally. When I'd like to think that companies that starts to exceed like two, Two, three hundred million dollars in revenues would significantly feel the pain because they would have to cope with multiple offerings, multiple products, data structure, which is very different between one system to another, and a lot of transactional volume in their day-to-day business. So on a monthly, quarterly, actually on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly basis, they have to check, verify their revenue data. The reason they need to do it If for three or four very critical reasons, it's customer facing data, right? If you're wrong in your billing, it's not a pleasant experience with your customer. You need to check it for compliance purposes. Then you have to deploy people. Now the industry is facing an accountant shortage. It's not happening in real time. People can make mistakes. Even if you offshore this work, we see significant amount of mistakes in each company we're working with, and it's all natural in you.

AI assessment note: “companies that starts to exceed like two, Two, three hundred million dollars in revenues”

Q not because, um, I, you know, I won't necessarily brag about it, or I'm interested in your personal finances, but I think what you did is something that other founders should have Aspire to in terms of, you know, not always raising at the highest valuation, managing dilution, taking care of your team and employees at the end. Are you comfortable sharing at exit? How many millionaires did you make?

A I'd like to, you know, we, we were not like a super large team or probably about 80 people at a time, but I'd like to think at least 10, at least 10, like the founding team members became, it was like a life, definitely a life-changing event. By the way, one, uh, One thing to keep in mind, when you sell a company, smart buyers, and Intuit is definitely a smart buyer, and I have all the appreciation in the world for this company, uh, for many, many reasons. And, you know, the way they build products and the way they execute is second to none in the B to C and the B to SMB market. But, um, the, the, the acquirer will, um, appropriate, let's say, 90% of the fund to the shareholders of the company. Founders and employees included. And then typically, 10% for retention. And we also took that retention shot, which at the time was an additional twenty-five million dollars, and we fully, uh, deployed it across the board to people, telling them the following, listen, we can actually, we have an opportunity now to remediate you, so we will feel, if you, even if you are not part of the founding team, but you've done a great job over the last year because you only joined a year ago, We give you that money, that allocation of the retention because of the future work you're going to do for the combined business. So we were able to actually make additional, uh, team members very positively im…

AI assessment note: “I'd like to think at least 10, at least 10”