The Exchanges

Q Interesting. Tell me the, the weirdest kind of strategy that you use to acquire customers. So don't tell me paid spend or inbound market or content marketing. What's the weirdest thing you did?

A Um, I don't know if it's like, weird. Let's see. I've got a bunch of them. I mean, we're like, maybe other people have the same concept. I'll give you an example, but we've just found that literally you have to do everything, everything that you can possibly think of, you do it. And like, it's just, uh, you know, as an example, um, very early on, uh, we, you know, we realized that what we had built solved a problem that developers had. And so we went to Stack Overflow and we found a bunch of Um, questions that people had about kind of like what we were doing, and we started answering with like, here's how you would build branch, but we built it ourselves if you want to just go to this link, and then we started upvoting that, and then unfortunately, Stack Overflow detected that upvote ring and then deleted all of our posts, which is really shitty, but then we found a more organic way to do it, uh, later on.

AI assessment note: “we went to Stack Overflow and we found a bunch of Um, questions”

Q What was it like profitable to have customers?

A Um, it would have been profitable if we weren't trying to buy, you know, buy a lot of advertising. It was a subscription model and You know, basically, I think we got it to be around 500 K a year in revenue, but we were investing most of it back into the business, um, but it wasn't growing. It was growing at like one percent a month or something terrible like that, um, which was why we built the linking product to, you know, solve that problem. Um, so we didn't see a billion dollar company there, and honestly, we felt like we had banged our head against the wall for long enough that when we saw this thing that we had worked on as a part of our Previous business. Other people literally inbounding to us asking if they could use it. We knew there was something there. So that's when we decided to sell it off and focus on branch. So a little bit back to the story of like, you know, why we decided to build it in the first place. Discovery is broken. Discovery is broken in the app ecosystem. And what we wanted to do was build a way for people to find apps based on the content inside. Almost like a search that would allow people to search through apps and find those pages and discover.

AI assessment note: “it would have been profitable if we weren't trying to buy, you know, buy”

Q Interesting. So, so you're What are you now? Your, uh, 2012 was, was, or 20 14 was launched, so you're three, four years in. What do you got now in terms of total customers you're serving?

A So we are now at, I think in terms of folks using the SDK, we're about over 26,000. Um, and which, like, when we first started, uh, we had worked on so many series of ideas, and like none of them really worked, and we, um, you know, we tried to set this goal of let's try to, like, close one customer in month one, two customers in month two, three customers in month three, and just like Something that would prove that there's actually a market need. And month one, it was like two customers closed. Month two, it was like four customers closed. Month three, it was like 10 customers. And it just felt like we'd never been a part of something that just had so much momentum in our lives. And you could just feel it in the way that like people would ask you questions and, um.

AI assessment note: “in terms of folks using the SDK, we're about over 26,000.”

Q Do you see the hell out of them?

A They threw, I don't think you can, our SDK is open source, um, but we, so, wait, it gets better. Then they threw 300 sales and marketing people at this product with the sole objective of pushing Firebase, deep linking, and replacing branch. So every single one of our customers got an email from somebody at Google. All of our pipeline got it. Like they went, they went so far as there were a number of accounts that we saw that we were working on where they literally bought them like box seat tickets to Yankees game. Um, just ridiculous stuff. And it was a free product. They weren't even making money off of it. And, um, fast forward to today, the PM that built that product just quit Google. All of those salespeople that we were tracking have left Google or moved to different groups. And we haven't heard about that product in the last like four months. That's just their deep linking attack. It's going to get so much worse when we move into discovery. So.

AI assessment note: “I don't think you can, our SDK is open source”

Q What takes you from NASA to kind of like a deep, a deep linking platform?

A I think I've always been challenged, I've always really appreciated, like, the hardest possible thing that I could be working on, and when I was selecting my major, I, I got some exposure to all various aspects of engineering, and electrical engineering, specifically a certain type of physics around semiconductors was incredibly hard for me to grasp. It was a really challenging subject, and like, one of the only things that didn't feel like You know, almost like intuition to me, and so, uh, it led me down this path of almost like material science that led me to do a lot of research at NASA, and started down actually the PhD track, almost geared towards a professorship, uh, later on. I, I quickly realized that I actually hated school, and that I really liked building things instead, um, and that's sort of like how I saved myself from Eternal, you know, um, professorship.

AI assessment note: “I quickly realized that I actually hated school, and that I really liked building things”

Q So, okay. So tell us what branch does and how you make money. What's the revenue model?

A Yeah, so a little bit of background, um, we started off when we were working on this app called Kindred. Um, long, long story about, like, how I got into, involved in entrepreneurship, and I'll, I'll save you for this, for this piece, but the, um, uh, working on this app, the primary issue that we faced while building it was discovery. It was incredibly hard to get people to find the app, and, um, I looked at the web, and I looked at the model of the web, and the way people find things in the web is they search. You search, and maybe you find, like, a particular web page that answers that, you know, find, is the answer to their question, or, you know, the thing that you're looking for, and, um, hang on 1:02.

AI assessment note: “a little bit of background, um, we started off when we were working on”