The Exchanges

Q on podcast. I see one called Email Einstein by Vera Sadlik and Andre. The 194 episodes since July of 2020. Uh, regardless if you've been on this one or not, if you did want to get on this one, it said, ListenNotes is saying it's a top 1.5% show for this topical category. What's the next step? What are you emailing the, the, the, the host? What are you saying?

A Yeah, great, great question. So I, I divide it into three parts. So the first part is the hook. So you want to watch at least one episode of the show and have something topical and relevant to the actual show because I've done a lot of podcasts. My process is I almost always would recognize at least one of the guests and I would use that personal relationship as a hook. If you don't have that breadth of kind of experience or knowledge, I would just watch an episode and that looks topically interesting and try to pull out something in that hook. So that's stage one. I also recommend that everyone leaves a five-star review for the podcast. It's a great way to lead with an actual value add. Every podcast host wants more quality reviews. So attach a screenshot of, of a five-star review you left them. That never hurts. The second middle section is the authority of like, why you, why are you relevant to their audience? And so I think thinking very intentionally about why you're helpful to their audience, not just like your credentials is important. So the middle part is you build authority. The third part, this is very important. Suggest very specific topics. Don't come in and just give something general. Like I'd love to talk about email marketing, right? That that's going to be boring. No, one's going to pick that up. But if I say something like, you know, newsletters are broken. 9…

AI assessment note: “I divide it into three parts. So the first part is the hook.”

Q Alright, let's wrap up here. Influencers. What should we know about influencers? How you were doing it?

A Yeah, for sure. So it's a much, it's a large conversation. I know we don't have a ton of time. So what I'll say is at a very high level, there's kind of like three buckets. There's performance oriented deals. That's what we started with. With performance oriented deals, you have a certain amount of target accounts. So I would sit down with a brand and I would say, Hey, we, in the next quarter, our target accounts is 20 paid accounts. I would then take the average amount that a customer would pay through one year. And that would be the cash That I would split 50 50. So let's just say the average customer pays 2000 dollars a year, right? And they have a target account of 10. So that's 20,000 dollars. So I would pay that influencer 10,000 dollars up front. They would get the remaining 10,000 dollars if they hit that specific target. And they'd have a whole set of deliverables, social posts, videos they'd made mentioning us at conferences, all these different kind of activatables would be in that contract. And what I liked about that model specifically is you're very much in the trenches and you have You know, you both have the same incentives, because they want to get the renewal, they want to get their second 50%, and they also want to get it renewed for next quarter, and it's very tangible, the outcome. The challenge with influencer marketing is often someone does a post, it get…

AI assessment note: “There's performance oriented deals. That's what we started with.”

Q I've heard from attorneys and counsel is you can't direct the corporate trustee on where to use that money. In other words, I couldn't tell you to go buy the house. So what's the point of having you control? How will you know? Like, what are you going to do to go buy random stuff with it? How do I give you guidance on what to use that money on?

A So when you create your local trust, you create, you can create a very specific instructions, or you can make it very generic. Your specific instructions can say upon liquidity event, buy houses in these locations, and to find out which houses like you want to purchase, work with this advisor. And so you can appoint like your brother, for example. And so it's a very indirect way of controlling trust. Uh, the other way you can do is you can make it super generic and you can just say, you know, all the decisions are going to be made by my advisor that I appoint and whoever that advisor is has Full discretion on anything that happens in the trust. So you just want, it's just creating that, that, uh, layer of separation. Like you're not going to be able to get the tax benefits if you're directly connected to it. Right. You're not going to be able to get the asset protection. Like if you get divorced and they see that you're the one sticking your hands in the cookie jar, like you're going to be able to lose those cookies. If you want to create that layer of separation, it has to be somebody else that's making the decisions.

AI assessment note: “you can create a very specific instructions, or you can make it very generic”

Q Very cool. Okay. We get it. It's for, uh, 2000 free signups at the top of the funnel each month coming mainly from Instagram and TikTok, uh, short form videos. Take us down the funnel. What happens next? How do you get to paid?

A So they come in, they get in for the free trust, um, and then they, they want some advanced options or they have some questions. They get on the phone with one of our customer support reps. Um, and then we upsell them until we have two paid products. We have the, uh, more advanced feature revocable trust product for nine dollars a year. So we're not necessarily, we say we're pre-revenue, but we actually have about 50,000 dollars ARR, and that's coming from the 99 dollar a year product. The irrevocable trust product Like that's in the very earliest stages right now where we get licensed. We can help people create these irrevocable trusts, but we're not really putting a lot of emphasis on that until we become licensed because the trustee services, that's where the big revenue opportunity is.

AI assessment note: “They get on the phone with one of our customer support reps. Um, and then we upsell them”

Q Okay. And what makes this, I mean, that's a lot of dilution, right? So you must have a good reason to give up that equity, right? What makes this so expensive to build? Why do you need five million bucks?

A Yeah, we don't actually. We have a lot of, we have like three plus years of runway. We're keeping expenses super low. I think the most, the most important reason why we wanted to raise money is because we're becoming a licensed trust company in South Dakota, and that's going to require us to have a minimum of a million dollars on reserves. It filed via a bond. Um, in addition to that, there's just, there's, you have to get some insurance. And so it's really just for getting the, Through the trust company application process. And it's very specific. We're doing it in South Dakota. South Dakota is the number one place for trust. There's different kinds of trust. There's revocable trust, which we offer for free. That's kind of our top of funnel. Lead gen engine. We help, you know, that's what 99% of Americans need. A revocable trust protects you from probate court. You know, because most Americans don't have a trust, hundreds of billions of dollars every single year gets seized by the state governments and placed into probate court. Uh, it's the biggest tax on non generationally rich Americans that exist. Um, and so we want to solve that problem for them. And that's our free product. Our paid product is the irrevocable trust. That's the South Dakota trust product. Um, and so we have to become a licensed trust company in South Dakota so that, uh, we can serve as a trustee and actua…

AI assessment note: “the most important reason why we wanted to raise money is because we're becoming a licensed trust company”

Q second thing, the biggest thing I hear from entrepreneurs when we're talking about this kind of thing is they say, Nathan, I don't want to give up control to some random person or my younger brother or my mom or my dad, right? So I guess help people get comfortable with that. What does it mean to actually give up control so you can take advantage of any irrevocable trust?

A Yeah. And so there's two ways you can do it. You can turn over the trustee services to a family member, to a friend or family member. They can be the trustee of your trust, which means they're the ones that are actually assigned for any investments or any distributions. Um, the other way you can do it is you can assign a corporate trustee company. That's what we're becoming licensed to be a corporate trustee. And so when you assign a corporate trustee, then you're, you work with them directly and they custody your assets. Um, and they actually make the trades for you and the investments for you. It's kind of a similar situation for the public markets when you're an insider and you're involved in insider trading, like you can't make the direct trades on your, on your shares. And so you have this like 10 B five, one plan, which allows you to place orders to make the trades. It's the same kind of thing. You set up all the instructions for the irrevocable trust and the corporate trustee is the one who's actually going to make the transactions happen.

AI assessment note: “You set up all the instructions for the irrevocable trust and the corporate trustee”

Q in that trust, I could show that to Some bank and they might give me 40% leverage on the ten million and give me a four million dollar loan at a four percent rate. Personally, I can then control where I spend that money and it is backed up by the trust. Is this something you see entrepreneurs do a lot? And am I thinking about this the right way?

A A hundred percent always. And the other way that they do it is they don't take a loan from the trust, but if the trust buys real estate, they can rent, they can rent to live in that real estate. So they're not directly connected. So for example, like, let's say I have my daughter, uh, I'll create an irrevocable trust for my daughter. I'll use the proceeds of sale to buy a house. I'll live in the house. I'll pay rent. That rent goes back to my daughter and the trust that I created for her. And so it's a way of, you know, you get around the taxes and the money just goes back to my daughter for the rent.

AI assessment note: “A hundred percent always. And the other way that they do it”

Q Can you name an example of a partner that's driven you leads?

A Uh, yeah. One of the largest mortgage lenders in the U S a guaranteed rate. And so we're partnering with mortgage lenders because we really were circling in homeowners because homeowners are the widest base of mass market customers that have a single problem to solve, right? They have to put their home in their trust. That's the only way they can avoid probate court. And so putting a home in a trust is actually complex. Like you can go to legalism, you can create a trust online, but actually putting your home in it, you're going to need to see an attorney because they're going to have to draft a new deed for you. So the way that we're, uh, approaching the homeowner problem, helping homeowners put their home in trust is we're, we're circling the home buying process with mortgage companies, with title companies, with prop tech companies. So the next time you buy a home and you go to guaranteed rate, you get a mortgage guarantee rates. It's going to say, do you want to put this home in a trust for free? And that's, that it gets embedded directly into the buying process. And they tell you exactly why you want to do it. Your home goes straight into the trust or doesn't have to be any deed transfer.

AI assessment note: “One of the largest mortgage lenders in the U S a guaranteed rate.”

Q Like what? Like what? What was the biggest expense early on?

A Like, for example, we are built on top of SendGrid, which is like an email engine to actually send and distribute the emails. And to get the attention that we needed from them, we needed like an annual contract with some sort of like volume lock-in, which is like, I don't know, between the 40 and 75,000 dollars up front for the year, of which like my two co-founders were 24, I was 27, like we're not sitting on a ton of money to just be able to pay that. Um, so I, I do think the timing of entrepreneurship is always like fairly interesting where, you know, if we had a successful exit previously and had a bit more capital, Could we have done this bootstrap growing a little bit slower and been able to use existing capital rather than being venture back? It's interesting. Um, but I think it also is worth considering just how competitive of an industry it is and something to be said about not having to overanalyze every expense while we're trying to win market share.

AI assessment note: “built on top of SendGrid... between the 40 and 75,000 dollars up front”

Q This is very powerful. Now, some people say we can't do this because we don't have a software tool that is like one to many, right? They don't have a Natalie. Right, where it's one to many. What would your advice be to them, and can you quantify the impact of your Powered By? How many new trials do you get today from click-throughs on your freemium Powered By product?

A Well, um, that one, we get over 30% of our total inbound traffic from the viral loop, and from word of mouth referrals, which are sort of interlinked, because our, we have a really strong affiliate program, and Martha made sure that we launched with that, which is, we can touch on that in a second, because that's a big recommendation of mine, but, uh, we had, um, a give 50% off to your audience, so the coupon code would be distributed through the people that used in love float us through our affiliates, Um, and you would also get 19 dollars a month. So you basically give 19 dollars a month to your audience because the full price is 38 and get 19 dollars. So it's a super simple messaging. Give 19, get 19. And then, um, the viral footer isn't just taking people to sign up for Flowdesk. It's taking people to sign up for Flowdesk for the affiliate page of the person who sent the email. So that it provides a strong incentive for people to keep that footer turned on. Um, and also an incentive to keep sharing about Floda. So I would say for people who don't have a huge one to many audience, I think partnerships and affiliate programs can be huge because even if you yourself haven't built a large audience, you want to tap into and leverage people that do. And you can do that by offering them a lot of incentives. And I mean, everybody wants to make money, right? Like I think that's, tha…

AI assessment note: “we get over 30% of our total inbound traffic from the viral loop”

Q By the way, both of these were announced just two weeks ago, so you guys are getting it fresh off the presses. How'd this happen?

A Yeah, so we, um, are, as I mentioned, restaurants are growing really fast within convenience stores and fuel stores. Um, you know, there's a Great example, there's a, a chain called Casey's. Casey's is a large public company, sells convenience stores all across the country. They're also the fourth largest pizza company in the world. Um, and so these C-stores wanted loyalty software. They wanted you to come in and say, hey, I got points for my, my, my order. I want you to stay loyal to my C-store. And so our, our, our loyalty, we have the largest loyalty product in restaurants. We're in 48 of the top hundred restaurants in the world. So if you have the Taco Bell app, that's us. Uh, and so those, that was kind of happening with C-stores. And so they started pulling us into the C-store market. We got in there and realized, holy crap, we have no idea what we're doing. Convenience stores have gas, they have EV charging, car washes, like, just everything is different, and we're trying to bastardize our product for this market, and it was working. Like, we were winning tons of business here. But we realized that if we, we had to make a decision, which is, do we want to go all in on this market, or do we want to get out of it? And so I went to our leader of this business and I said, you've got three options. You can shut this business down and say, I'm just going to focus on restaurant…

AI assessment note: “And so we went and found Stuzo, who's by far the best in this market.”

Q But Rasmus, so these, these founders of that launched the company in three, I mean, it sounds like they were bootstrapped. They were, it sounds like over ten million of ARR at the point when they brought you in. I mean, they have all options on the table. Why'd they make the decision to replace themselves? Why'd they bring you in?

A Uh, the original founder was a dentist in northern part of Jordan. He said for a long time, not been associated with the company. Um, so essentially it was a bunch of, or a group of, of highly wealthy individuals who ran the company, nothing to do with SaaS industries, actually they're bakers and one is a shipping and shipping and all kinds of stuff. Uh, but they, we did have some, uh, our chairman was from Navision. Um, which is the first ever Danish unicorn at 2.5 billion exit to Microsoft, who went back and said, This does not belong in a slow, steady growth phase. We can actually give it the burst. And therefore I was brought back from Silicon Valley to come here and give that, that burst. So that ties a little bit back to our storytelling here. And that's what we've done. We've given it a bit of injection of this. Hey, we can do stuff. We can be world-class. We can be category leading. We can be category creation. We can do all of the things you believe you can do in Silicon Valley because we have the financial underpinning of it. We have distribution that was world-class. And then we can essentially build that burst of energy that it needs to, to get up into, to world elite.

AI assessment note: “our chairman was from Navision... and therefore I was brought back from Silicon Valley”

Q This real time data is obviously really important. I think my audience will be wondering, okay, I use like ramp or Brex and they build some of this inside of their tools. Your pure play, I think doing expense management like this, how would you compare and contrast yourself to some of these card providers?

A So we're not doing expense management. We are on the customer invoicing side. So it's more on, they, you know, selling and, uh, getting paid for the software. So, or their things. So that's more on the side where we're in, but definitely we are pure, you know, that's the only thing we do. We typically sit between like a Salesforce and a HubSpot and a backend like a NetSuite or a QuickBooks and perhaps your own service and how to get that orchestrated and done in a good way, all the way from, you know, quoting, Dealing with the subscription over its lifetime. Maybe you're doing upsells. You're doing indices. You're doing things with that. Maybe it's a customer success team. Maybe you do self-service. How to get that all in one place, have one source of truth, and then make sure everything is correct when it turns to like revenue recognition, when you have your, you know, your ARs to report to the board, et cetera. So that's how we fit in.

AI assessment note: “So we're not doing expense management. We are on the customer invoicing side.”

Q Talk to me a little bit more about how you're going to market. Pricing is a key piece of go to market, right? So how do you package this? What's the average customer paying you per month to use Unium?

A So typically, uh, I would say like an average price point is around 30,000 dollars a year, uh, a year that is, right? So, um, so that's some average, but, but you know, quite, quite a big spread from, from small companies to big companies as well. Uh, we try to align it with value and then, you know, we try to find some sort of proxy that you also can measure, right? So we typically find, you know, a number of legal entities and some sort of AR tier being the best proxy so far. So that's how we do it. So if you have 10 companies in 10 countries and you're making, you know, a hundred million dollars, the value will be something different from, you know, one company in one country and one million dollars, right? So, so we try to proxy that as much as possible. Yeah.

AI assessment note: “average price point is around 30,000 dollars a year”

Q And so how do you charge it? Don't tell me what Samsung specific pricing is, but what do you charge brands like Samsung to access your, your student base?

A So, um, the charge is basically, um, cost per application, so it's a result-based cost depending on how precise it is, how targeted it is, and, um, you know, like, what are the actions that, uh, the consumers need to do in order to, uh, to apply. So it kind of ranges roughly between, like, um, dollar 20 to 30 dollars per application, depends on, on various, uh, metrics and so on. And part of that, uh, of that budget goes towards promoting the campaign itself. And part of it goes toward a scholarship that goes to the students. So kind of that, that is split. Um, and we take care of like the whole process of earning the scholarship. Like we have, um, our own kind of five, one, two, three entity that helps make it tax deductible. I mean, when was the last time you heard of a marketing campaign that actually gives you tax benefits?

AI assessment note: “the charge is basically, um, cost per application... dollar 20 to 30 dollars”

Q And what do students pay to use your subscription tools?

A So on the, on the consumer side, on the student side, we basically offer many tools that help them, um, Kind of highlight where the highest chance of winning a scholarship is like, uh, uh, optimizing the application process, adding a bunch of transparency into that. They pay 15 dollars a month, um, for the usage of the overall premium, uh, features. So like things like, uh, they know that like an applicant count, they know exactly how many other people apply to a specific scholarship. So they know to invest the time where they have the highest chance of winning. Uh, we give them a lot more, um, kind of tracking over the application post itself. So they know that the brand on the other side actually reviewed the application and actually, you know, uh, accepted it or who, who is the winner. We make sure they know that there is a winner, right? Like in the scholarship space, there's quite a bit of like scams and lack of transparency and all of that. So we kind of, our premium product takes away all of that. You know exactly what happens. What are your chances? You have predictable, like we make the whole process predictable transplant.

AI assessment note: “They pay 15 dollars a month, um, for the usage”

Q And what do students pay to use your subscription tools?

A So on the, on the consumer side, on the student side, we basically offer many tools that help them, um, Kind of highlight where the highest chance of winning a scholarship is like, uh, uh, optimizing the application process, adding a bunch of transparency into that. They pay 15 dollars a month, um, for the usage of the overall premium, uh, features. So like things like, uh, they know that like an applicant count, they know exactly how many other people apply to a specific scholarship. So they know to invest the time where they have the highest chance of winning. Uh, we give them a lot more, um, kind of tracking over the application post itself. So they know that the brand on the other side actually reviewed the application and actually, you know, uh, accepted it or who, who is the winner. We make sure they know that there is a winner, right? Like in the scholarship space, there's quite a bit of like scams and lack of transparency and all of that. So we kind of, our premium product takes away all of that. You know exactly what happens. What are your chances? You have predictable, like we make the whole process predictable transplant.

AI assessment note: “They pay 15 dollars a month, um, for the usage of the overall premium”

Q I mean, Jay, I go to my primary care, uh, doctor once a year, and they don't remember the stuff I told them 12 months ago. How do you sit on enough data to be able to tell the doctor, focus on these three things about Nathan, because we learned about these four years ago from this other data set we sit on?

A Yeah, well, so the thing that, you know, you've probably experienced this, um, something pops up for you, and you'll go to an urgent care setting. You might have a prescription filled from CVS. You might have it fulfilled from a local small pharmacy. You may then go see a doctor out of network, and you have a lab done, and so that data does not, is not consolidated in an easy format. We're able to sweep Uh, we, we identify like a geography based upon where you are, how many miles we're going to sweep all the care set settings that exist, pull that data in. We're really successful. We can capture, uh, incremental data by 90% of the patients that kind of run through our platform. But the challenge is when you get all that data, you better be really good at mining it because you can have thousands of pages of data. So we take that thousands of pages of data and we synthesize it down to the top two or three things. And if the doctor is curious and doesn't understand what we're suggesting, they can click in and go exactly to the precise spot in one of those records where we're drawing that conclusion.

AI assessment note: “We're able to sweep... pull that data in... synthesize it down”

Q Okay. To do desk. It says your complete repair workshop and manufacturing solution. You help folks estimate invoice job managing, et cetera. Do you do this for a specific niche or is it really anyone that has a manufacturing shop?

A Generally speaking, it's for any kind of manufacturing or repair business, but then in niches, we'd be talking about like powder coating shops, fabrication shops, even watch repair centers, music shops, any kind of business that takes something from a customer, does something to it, and gives it back, our platform will help them take the customer from initial inquiry right through to checking in the goods, giving an estimate, collecting payment, running it through the workshops, or even handle all of the workshop process, And then finally giving the item back. And within all of that, we help them keep their customers updated on what's happening. And also we help them manage their workflow, right? It's quite a complex business model.

AI assessment note: “Generally speaking, it's for any kind of manufacturing or repair business, but then in niches”

Q Oh, twenty-twenty. Mm-hmm. Okay. And how do you, what are the metrics that each person making a call? What, how do you motivate them? Is it number of calls per day, number of answers? I mean, what are the metrics there?

A Yeah. So, I mean, there's, there's all kinds of levers, uh, that you look at. I mean, certainly number of calls, uh, for the greener SDRs is, is crucial so that you get enough reps under your belt. Uh, but as you get better at asking questions and having conversations, then you can have a lower number of calls because you're going to convert more of those calls into good conversations and then good conversations into actual demos booked. And then as you get better, your show rate improves. So, I mean, early on, you know, it was like, you got to do a hundred, a 150 calls a day. Uh, now we have technology and auto dialer stuff, so our new guys, you know, up to 200 calls, uh, you know, early on, but, you know, once they get good, it can come down to, you know, a hundred calls a day in order to, you know, hit their, hit their OTE.

AI assessment note: “our new guys, you know, up to 200 calls, uh, you know, early on”

Q Okay, got it. So what does that mean? You finished 20, 23 with something like 70 ish, 75?

A A little lower than that, in the mid, in the mid sixties. Um, what we made a conscious decision to do is redefine what we call ARR, uh, because our business changed. When we first started, we were selling things that were kind of borderline project slash recurring. And we took a hard look at our business and said, what is truly occurring? What is it? And kind of, because AR is not a gap Terminology. And it needs a lot of room for manipulation if companies want to manipulate. We never were trying to manipulate it, but we didn't really understand what was truly recurring or not when we started the business. So we took a step back at the end of 20, 22 and said, this revenue is really just more ad hoc project revenue, which reduced our AOR, but in turn increased our, our, um, our retention, which is really what we're focused on. But ultimately it's about having a clear view of what the business was so we can make decisions accordingly.

AI assessment note: “A little lower than that, in the mid, in the mid sixties.”

Q of the things that I think a lot of founders, um, Don't spend enough time thinking about. Everyone has a product vision, but they don't think about order of operations, sequencing, like what should come first and then second and then third. Did you guys ever debate this internally? I'm sure you have a million projects. How'd you decide what to do next and then after that and for after?

A Uh, we debated internally. We have this thing called decision memo where, uh, we list the options of how we should do things and everybody contributes their, their data and their, uh, evidence that they have supporting one way or the other. Um, so that, that's how we do it and we try to be very strategic about it, but, um, we don't always get it right. So little known is the fact that in 2020 we launched a product called inbox. Uh, because we thought, okay, we need to help people engage with their buyer, and there is a lot of things happening in the inbox, so let's do an inbox, an email inbox, which came out like a replacement for Gmail, an email client, and we pulled it out after a couple of months for that very reason. It's a problem with sequencing. We're not ready to bring this product to market. We are still, we still have too much work to do targeting marketers, targeting ops, And it was too early for us to go after the end users and helping the end users. Uh, even though I love the product, we pull it out because, you know, one thing is to have a good product. Another one is to be able to bring it to market. And I, I, most entrepreneurs are, Misunderstand the, uh, the challenge of bringing your product to markets, you know, you, uh, take so much energy. And so at the time we felt that we didn't have the energy to bring this product. So to, to your question, now we think …

AI assessment note: “We have this thing called decision memo where, uh, we list the options”

Q So that was gonna be my question. Do you negotiate your take rate with each lawn care company cutting the 300,000 homeowners lawns that are on your platform? Or is it just you set one thing and it's the same for everybody?

A No, there, there's benchmarks. So if, if they, uh, if they're doing a lot of volume through the platform that goes down and if they just are just getting started on the platform, only do one or two yards a week, it's, it's higher. And so we, we started off with just a flat take rate of, of eight percent. And as time went on, we noticed a weird phenomenon of, of, uh, what they call a graduation rate, a graduation issue where, where vendors will grow with the platform and they're doing, you know, three, 400,000 dollars a year on the platform. And they say, well, now I want my own system. So I don't want GreenPow anymore. And so we've had to, to, to negotiate with that and deal with that by lowering the take rate where it just becomes a no brainer. It's like, well, by the time I buy all of these systems and I pay somebody to run them, I might as well just pay GreenPow.

AI assessment note: “No, there, there's benchmarks. So if, if they're doing a lot of volume”

Q Well, what, I was gonna say, what do those 35,000 lawn care entrepreneurs do in the winter? Don't, maybe you can help them get some other kind of business like snow removal, right?

A That's what we do. We, we, we try to, which, so that's the reason why we built it. It's like, okay, we got to help these guys and gals stay in business. We got to help them, you know, stay afloat so they'll be there in March when the grass starts growing again. So we offered, we built this snow removal, and then we also have a, a system where we, we offer discounts to homeowners to say, okay, you know, you can hire your contractor for leaf removal, for gutter cleaning, for For tree limb service, for garage cleaning, all sorts of things to, to help keep the lights on in the wintertime. And, and we're always looking for, for ways to do that. Christmas lights and things like that. So while, while lawn mowing is 90% of the, of the, uh, the sales, we're always looking for ways to expand kind of the, the cart size.

AI assessment note: “That's what we do. We, we, we try to, which, so that's the reason why we built it.”

Q Are you just only the U.S. or have you expanded to other countries?

A Just the United States for now. Um, We, the, the, the nut we're trying to crack now is how do we get more saturation and density in every major city? So a weird thing that happens with marketplaces like ours is once you get the flywheel going like the red hot center, it tends to kind of reinforce itself. But if there's no, if you don't get that flywheel spinning, it never takes off. And so one problem we face is, uh, we do more transactions in a Knoxville, Tennessee, or a Huntsville, Alabama than we do in a Seattle, Washington. And so we're trying to figure that out. How do we, how do we look at these markets where quite frankly, we don't have the liquidity and we, how do we jumpstart them? And so we have to figure that out before we go international.

AI assessment note: “Just the United States for now.”

Q Well, what, I was gonna say, what do those 35,000 lawn care entrepreneurs do in the winter? Don't, maybe you can help them get some other kind of business like snow removal, right?

A That's what we do. We, we, we try to, which, so that's the reason why we built it. It's like, okay, we got to help these guys and gals stay in business. We got to help them, you know, stay afloat so they'll be there in March when the grass starts growing again. So we offered, we built this snow removal, and then we also have a, a system where we, we offer discounts to homeowners to say, okay, you know, you can hire your contractor for leaf removal, for gutter cleaning, for For tree limb service, for garage cleaning, all sorts of things to, to help keep the lights on in the wintertime. And, and we're always looking for, for ways to do that. Christmas lights and things like that. So while, while lawn mowing is 90% of the, of the, uh, the sales, we're always looking for ways to expand kind of the, the cart size.

AI assessment note: “That's what we do... we built this snow removal”

Q So that was gonna be my question. Do you negotiate your take rate with each lawn care company cutting the 300,000 homeowners lawns that are on your platform? Or is it just you set one thing and it's the same for everybody?

A No, there, there's benchmarks. So if, if they, uh, if they're doing a lot of volume through the platform that goes down and if they just are just getting started on the platform, only do one or two yards a week, it's, it's higher. And so we, we started off with just a flat take rate of, of eight percent. And as time went on, we noticed a weird phenomenon of, of, uh, what they call a graduation rate, a graduation issue where, where vendors will grow with the platform and they're doing, you know, three, 400,000 dollars a year on the platform. And they say, well, now I want my own system. So I don't want GreenPow anymore. And so we've had to, to, to negotiate with that and deal with that by lowering the take rate where it just becomes a no brainer. It's like, well, by the time I buy all of these systems and I pay somebody to run them, I might as well just pay GreenPow.

AI assessment note: “No, there, there's benchmarks. So if, if they, uh, if they're doing a lot of volume”

Q Are you just only the U.S. or have you expanded to other countries?

A Just the United States for now. Um, We, the, the, the nut we're trying to crack now is how do we get more saturation and density in every major city? So a weird thing that happens with marketplaces like ours is once you get the flywheel going like the red hot center, it tends to kind of reinforce itself. But if there's no, if you don't get that flywheel spinning, it never takes off. And so one problem we face is, uh, we do more transactions in a Knoxville, Tennessee, or a Huntsville, Alabama than we do in a Seattle, Washington. And so we're trying to figure that out. How do we, how do we look at these markets where quite frankly, we don't have the liquidity and we, how do we jumpstart them? And so we have to figure that out before we go international.

AI assessment note: “Just the United States for now.”

Q We actually talked in 2018 and 20 21 and now today, but for folks that missed those first two episodes, I feel like, I feel like our 20 18 conversation was, I can't really say this, but back when you were a baby at only, quote, only ten million dollars of ARR. But, um, for folks that misses episodes, who is Cloudbed selling to today? What do you guys do?

A Yes, absolutely. So the best way to think about it is hoteliers around the world run their entire businesses on software and that tech stack Predominantly has been 18 different systems that are inter to joined, uh, back in the day with serialized cables on premise. Now it's all in the cloud, but it's still disjointed and too many different systems connecting to one another. Cloudbed slides a box across the table and say, Hey, everything in that runs your business more effectively. And so we take the day to day operational side of running a hotel, uh, in a much more modern, uh, capability. We do it in a 157 markets across two and a half million beds in this world. Now we're the category leader for independent hoteliers and man, uh, that's been a long time ago when we were at ten million in ARR and we've definitely grown since we're 757 people, uh, in 41 countries around the world now. And, and it's been quite the journey.

AI assessment note: “we're the category leader for independent hoteliers”

Q And what's the opportunity that you see there? You know, if you process five billion of GMV, you're keeping one percent or what's the revenue upside or potential?

A You know, it's really hard to look at the take rate because every jurisdiction is, is governed by different rules. But it's a big market. Nevertheless, it's one of those things where if you look at toast as a publicly traded company or Shopify as another, you know, 50% of their revenue is coming from fintech solutions. I look at it as probably something similar right now. It's less than 20% of our overall revenue, but it's fast growing. It's multiple hundred percent year over year growth rates in that sector. Uh, the thing that I like about it is it's incredibly sticky, right? Every hotel in the world needs to capture revenue. On behalf of their, uh, guest. And if we can do that in a much more efficient way, pre-arrival, during stay, create micro transaction opportunities, it actually drives more revenue for our hotel. Increase a lot of opportunity for them. And so we're, we're just pleased that we're part of that storyline. And the more and more we do, the more and more we're going to get back to the hotel over time. But yeah, we are, we, we do over ten billion dollars in GMV. Just in reservations within the, the key markets that we serve. Obviously it's a much bigger number as you think about all the markets we serve, but you know, that's a big opportunity for us to take a little, little sliver of value.

AI assessment note: “50% of their revenue is coming from fintech solutions. I look at it as probably something similar”