The Wisdom Wall

“This is the counterpoint guys, the VC argument that you shouldn't sell services inside of your SAS. I would always argue the opposite, which is if you touch a SAS sale with a big upfront fee, like five K, they're just not going to turn your net dollar retention. It's going to be through the roof.”

“A bootstrapper who only spends what his customers pay him or her is sustainable. They will outlast the VC back competitor every time, and they will probably win every time.”

“Raising capital does not validate an idea. It means you're a good salesperson.”

“I have a big issue when people sell lifetime plans. I think it's cheap. I think it's a marketing tactic, and I think it's totally disingenuous and hurts your personal brand if and when you have to shut the company down or sell it.”

“The most successful software companies we see that are most underwritable, bankable, they usually launch an agency.”

“it's almost a problem that you have revenue because then people want to harp on you about how low the revenue is when really you should just eliminate the revenue and just focus on user and engagement growth”

“You're going to raise two million out of 10 pre. Whatever your buddies that you, but you take your buddy, your old boss's money, whatever. Great. Great for you. Then you're going to keep growing revenue and you're going to get a six million dollar acquisition offer and you still own 70% of the business. You'd love to…”

“a lot of founders make the first sales hire, they make the assumption that that first sales hire should sell more than the founder, and it's almost never the case, because the founder knows the product, the founder has an unfair advantage, because customers always want to talk to the founder, there's a little bit of a…”

“There's a lot of founders like you that get blinded by the initial, hey, here's a hundred grand or 200 grand, right, that an AppSumo can drive you, but it actually really hurts your ability to build a long-term sustainable business because you then have to go hunt for more cash flow after you use up that cash because…”

“Email a few of your competitors and say, I really need to sell the business to take care of some personal stuff. Want to chat? Leave it at that. This sounds desperate, but that's the point. Your desperate vibes will get prospective buyers to engage in conversations that otherwise wouldn't have happened.”

“If investors are sinking all that money into one industry, they're growing the industry and making it easier for you to find new customers. You turn their resources into your resources when you join the space that they're pouring money into.”

“Like it doesn't, my point is it doesn't matter how many patents you have. You have to out execute in the market to get users.”

“So another good example, like you look at matter mark or a H refs, all these companies that provide data, especially the ones that offer an export option. You see this all the time. Login, sign up for the premium plan. They export all the data they need, then they quit. And, and that's like, and they get great value…”

“I believe in copying like hell. Anyone who has an ego that thinks they're going to create something new is never going to be successful, in my opinion, right? Especially, I'll take that, especially in the early phases. Once you're an Elon Musk, you can start thinking about creating whole new categories. But early on,…”

“my hunch tells me people always make more money teaching the software than usually what the software actually makes.”

“What I actually am saying is, if you're going to go give up control, get, take, Cash as well. Don't give up control and cash.”

“But a lot of, in my opinion, raising money, the reason, especially first time founders do it, is it's actually just, it makes them feel better. It makes them feel like they're doing the right thing if they can convince people to give them money. And then they sometimes stick in a bad idea for too much time.”

“I would tell most people, if you can't do it in three or four, just quit, give up, and start something new.”

“I always tell them you got to get secondary, even on your first round.”

“That's the best clue you can look in a SaaS company to Do they have the ability to drive net dollar attention above one 50 is how many customers are paying more than a million bucks a year.”

“Significantly more risk, the more money you raise. Significantly more risk. You have to grow faster. Everyone burns more. You lose your creativity because everyone wants to throw money at problems. I would argue it's way riskier to raise a lot of money.”

“I mean, the flip side of all this is if you're going to let people do unlimited tracking of applicants, you also effectively cut off your ability to ever reach a 140, a 150% net dollar retention, because you have no way to expand customers if, unless they're really aggressively driving up what you're pricing against,…”

“the most successful software founders that I've interviewed, I'm talking to ones doing, you know, going from zero to whatever, you know, a 100,000,200 million in revenue fairly rapidly. They almost all start off as an agency, just like you're doing.”

“Guys, if you want to build a ten million dollar SaaS company, you have to have a clear path to an engine that allows you to close 50,060 thousand a year deals.”

“If you have a small advance under 50 K, no one works hard to promote you because if it flops, no one loses their job. It's more than a 200 K advance. Somebody's getting fired.”

“Someone to me is bootstrapped if they're very capital efficient, which means the way I measure that is you've raised less than one X your ARR.”

“just splitting equity equally is rarely the right answer. It's lazy. It just means you didn't have tough conversations.”

“the second you raise, you go on an accelerator, and you go on the VC path, I mean, it is on. It is growth at all costs. It's like, you've got to hit it, and if you don't, your, your optionality is like nil. It's very small.”

“You know, you can have someone on doing a hundred million bucks in revenue or publicly traded SaaS founder, and that might be inspirational, but it gets way less listens because it's not actionable.”

“Five percent monthly churn in SaaS would mean you're turning over 60% of your user base annually. That's unacceptable. You wouldn't be able to raise any capital. Your growth would stall very, very quickly.”

“that is not the success indicator of a business. It's, can you go execute?”

“you're never going to have more data than QuickBooks. Right? Like you, you, you're never going to have all these other people have a flywheel here already. So it's like you, you either have to have a genius arbitrage mousetrap to get data faster than any incumbents so that you can train your models better than them.…”

“This is like by far the number one theme from successful SaaS founders is starting as an agency.”

“Anytime I see someone split fifty-fifty, I go, you probably don't have great communication with your co-founder. You avoided the conversation basically is what happened.”

“A lot of founders use is they'll just move their start date to more recently. So the growth sounds way more impressive, but, but nothing wrong with that.”

“A lot of people, in my opinion, founders at the beginning, they're lazy. They don't want to have tough conversations. So they split it evenly, right? If you have a tough conversation, usually someone ends up with a little more, a little less.”

“I would say distribution is way more important. There's a lot of subpar products that have better distribution that are winning.”

“Tyler's, it's way easier and less risky to build a five million dollar SaaS company than it is to go try and raise five hundred million and build a billion dollar business that you own like one percent of at the time you try an IPO.”

“the folks that are getting the highest multiples on their series A rounds are not the ones going revenue the fastest. It's the ones that have the highest net dollar retention, you know, one, 21, 30%.”

“a lot of people go, I want to get into YC, I want to get into YC, but they don't realize the negative, very real negative signaling risk, where if you leave YC and you do not raise on demo day, there's like a black mark on you effectively, right?”

“And unfortunately in today's world, people don't give a shit about facts. What they care about are polarized opinions.”

“Like if you try and be everything for everyone in the company, you just get diluted. But if you build specifically for a product manager, you can go really deep and just dominate and charge more.”

“If you do a lifetime fee, you're ruining all your SaaS economics. You can't make hiring decisions. You can't do this full-time when you graduate because you have to do new revenue every single month.”

“the companies right now, they're in the highest valuations. They, they all have net dollar retention above 150%. Right. So like, that's one of the key, that plus just overall growth rate are really the key drivers I'm seeing today of SAS valuations.”

“if you put out there that you want to sell and you can create a bidding war, that is how you get your rational offers.”

“the best products don't win. The best storytellers win.”

“And sometimes they go and try and recruit somebody from outside the community. That almost always fails.”

“even like I could be the dumbest person on earth, but if I can create entertaining content, I'm going to get the eyeballs over a PhD covering the same topic matter.”

“I mean, early stage SAS, the best way to calculate CAC is to take everyone who's not an engineer. So anyone focused on marketing, product sales, take all your salaries monthly, and then divide that by number of new customers you're getting each month.”

“The largest SaaS companies today, they usually start as some form of agency and they slowly morph into a more predictable software oriented solution.”

“I think selling lifetime plans in a SaaS business is potentially the dumbest thing you can do unless you're just totally broke and you're trying to fund some development.”

“Very rarely do companies get their first customers from inbound marketing because you have to have a team of writers and you have to be putting out content.”

“ultimately the U S the election cycle is four years. You can print and print money to get re even reelected for a second term. The second four years, give out UBI, like that pattern you just articulated where prices keep increasing so much. You can't write enough UBI checks to keep up for consumers paying for a bottle…”

“I mean, most people, if they're doing less than a million bucks in ARR, the founder is the one And until the founder can prove that they can sell, how can you expect someone else you hire to come in and figure out how to sell?”

“So like, see, the thing is with a marketplace is it gets cheaper on one side, but more expensive on the other, right? So that trade-off has to exist. You can't have both sides doing better.”

“in a world where the person that can pay the most wins the customer, you actually want to see people that have proved that they can afford a two dollar dollar based CAC to get a new dollar in ARR. That's actually where you want to put your money.”

“the most successful SaaS companies though, you're right, that I've interviewed have all started for a year or two as an agency, and then they were ruthless in either selling the agency or shutting it down. And going all in on the software, even if revenue took a hit for a year or two.”

“Nobody puts parameters in place for when to kill something, right? And this is like, the rationale you just used, I think is just dangerous for, especially people that haven't had your success, right? If their logic is, if it's profitable, if it's making a dollar a month, I'm going to keep doing it. I've seen so many…”

“There is no big, there is no hugely successful SaaS company with no churn.”

“I think the only way to make freemium work though is people have, you have to be at the tip of their tongue when they talk about a space.”

“If you have zero churn, you know what that means, right? ... It's too cheap. Triple your price points.”

“That's how you get filthy rich. You build a company that you own all of, you drive revenues, and you start paying yourself more and more every month in dividends and reinvest in the company or elsewhere.”

“Forget the tired thinking that you can only get a great offer for your business if buyers woo you into selling. You need to make it known that you want to sell with the reason people will believe to get conversations going.”

“Look in a second, it doesn't matter if you raise a dollar or a hundred million. The second you've raised was someone else's money. They can tell you they're patient. They can tell you they love you, but ultimately when their LPs come knocking and saying a decade later and say, where's the return? And they need that,…”

“Brand new ideas almost always lose and cost boatloads of money.”

“Winners don't have new ideas. Rather, they copy the heck out of their competitors, then add their own flavor or unique angle to win.”

“I avoid five to 10 grand in legal fees here, but it will hold up in court. If they do reply, I agree, and it's quickly laid out.”

“You don't need a million dollars to buy a million dollar company. You legitimately don't need any cash at all to buy a company.”

“Once you start raising capital, you either better be raising capital every 18 months, or something or it sends off bad, bad, bad signals.”

“the most successful CEOs I've interviewed are not the ones that have monopolized a space, and they don't even have the best product. What they have done is they've, they have monopolized a single distribution channel, and maybe that's the number one ranking in an app exchange somewhere. It's the number one ranking when…”

“If you have zero churn, it might mean your price point's too low. Nobody's churning. Churn can be a good thing.”

“I'm always a fan of hit the singles, hit the doubles because it requires way too much luck to go be the next Mark Zuckerberg.”

“If there's one predicator in college on who's going to be a successful entrepreneur, it's the RA. Cause you got to deal with all the bull crap. You have to be a disciplinary at some times, but you also want to like try and be friends too. So everyone gets along and you get free rent. You minimize expenses.”

“the most successful ones are the ones that understand not revenue expansion, but expense limitation, right? Keep your expenses low. That's the key.”

“I think the person that's going to win this space is the ones that are better at distribution.”

“I just tell people copy like hell, find something working, copy it and out execute.”

“I think it's totally wrong for SAS founders to focus so exclusively on LTV to CAC ratio. What's more important is the speed of LTV. In other words, if your lifetime value in terms of months is seven years, you can't spend one third of LTV on CAC because it takes you too long to get the money back.”

“when I'm valuing companies, what I do is I typically take, especially SAS monthly recurring revenue, assuming churn is below three percent monthly. That's a, that's a, that's kind of good economics. I'll take the five grand multiplied times 12. So you annualize it and then you're going to get a multiple anywhere…”

“If nobody knows what I'm doing, I can't be attacked. I mean, it's that simple.”

“You need to be unpredictable, people pay attention, and they're going to follow.”

“Any smart person in business, and I think I'm pretty smart, has to manage their personal life and know when you're trying to get people to root for you and when you want people to root against you. I want everybody rooting against me right now because the lower I drive everybody else's expectations, if I just do…”

“look, my job is not to make the guests happy. My job is to make the audience learn, right? And many times those things are not aligned.”

“you see a trend with a lot of like very successful entrepreneurs where almost always something very traumatic happened to them when they, when they were young.”

“When I say, Hey, book a time. It costs 97 bucks for 30 minutes with me. Everybody does it. So it's like, almost like you're getting paid to do market research.”

“Copy the hell out of your competitors and then beat them on execution.”

“most successful people, when they tell their stories, they lie. And they don't do it on purpose. They just forget, right? They only remember necessarily the good times.”

“I feel like a lot of smart business minds get attracted to the dopamine hit, which is refreshing your sales back end after a webinar. I do this too, by the way, and seeing like 10 grand or a hundred grand or a million dollars in sales come in really fast, but they're not building anything that's ever going to sell for…”

“I just think it makes no sense to build so many products before you were doing at least like a million or two million in sales annually on one product.”

“You're seeing the world of AI. Anyone that has a data moat really wins. And one way to build an impressive data moat is to have a SAS plus business model. We have IOT plus SAS.”

“A lot of people consider a good trial to paid conversion rate, especially like in consumer of like four or five percent, even some B to B, it's hard to get above like five percent.”

“They'll see that a Chrome extension has 500,000 downloads, but there's a thing that says when the developers push the last update. If it's more than a year ago, it's probably sitting there doing nothing. You buy that for cheap. It's a 500,000 email list.”

“When you sit on so much data, the hard problem is not, like, I didn't just give you some brand new idea you never thought of, you know about that idea, but the hard part and who wins marketplace is it's actually what do you decide to launch first, second, third.”

“You don't want to charge for what's driving your viral coefficient. It's why Zapier doesn't charge by number, like they charge by number of zaps. For a reason, not by number of things you've connected.”

“The flip side to this is the largest QR code companies in the world. Their number one moat is SEO. Like they have free QR code builder. Like they just fricking dominate.”

“they will always look at the prior term sheet. So if you've, if you've already set precedents that you did a small secondary already, it's way easier to get a bigger one the next time. So like, I would argue as soon as you can ask for, even if you're only raising a million bucks, just get a hundred KFs, create the…”

“the trick is you have to understand what your software what with the activation metric is. So if it's number of leads reached out to per month, the lifetime deal closes down once they hit a hundred and then you upsell once they break a hundred. But if you've got a bunch of people buying a lifetime deal that then sit on…”

“you shouldn't be signing any debt deals where the U as the founder for signing personal grant. We obviously don't ask about a founder path, but if anyone asks that you should run, there's too many other good options.”

“That is the mistake most people make is they give the project out and they go and try and find someone in the middle or the bottom price point, just hire the most expensive, but it's still way cheaper than a 300,000 dollars San Francisco engineer.”

“that's what I always tell people when you're doing M&A stuff, I don't care if the deal price is a hundred million. If only a dollar is paid cash up front, that's the deal price. It's a dollar.”

“I think it's really important when you look at cohort analysis in terms of net dollar retention on folks that have done and paid you for services. It's always higher, almost always higher than folks that don't pay that setup fee or don't pay the service fee as well.”

“This is why I try and get founders all the time. I say, guys, just get your first exit done. It doesn't have to be 10 X. It doesn't have to be a Christian Patrick deal. Just get your first deal done. So you have some money so you can go double down on yourself the next thing.”

“if most customers or employees are in the U S they do about 250,000 bucks of revenue per employee.”

“if you're going to go build a hundred million dollar revenue business, it's not going to be probably from selling today, five dollar per month plans to students in India.”

“The thing is though, it's a very storyboarding is a very interesting wedge to upsell a lot of other stuff to those same animators and design teams, et cetera, which is why, you know, Canva, You know, ranks number one for this keyword right now.”

“I mean, I think what, where I do think there's a big gap here is what people never quantify with pricing is what you miss out on when you put up a paywall in terms of engagement and what the opportunity cost is.”

“this is a great way to find great talent, because you put up the same project, so you have a design spec, To 30 people on Upwork, , you pay them all their rate, you collect all the designs, then you pick the best one.”

“If you, if you work with sort of a reputable development shop, like the one you work with, then you get back in bad product. It's usually because you gave terrible specs. Uh, it's very rarely the developers, you know, it's very rarely the shop's fault in my opinion.”

“one of the pattern, like things that I see from doing over 3500 of these interviews now, the most successful SaaS founders come out of building software for their own other business.”

“I mean, you can't run an outbound sales playbook at 200 bucks a month. There's not enough margin to play with the cover sales expenses.”

“I think there's a ton of founders that undervalue, the majority of founders undervalue what they've built. And they're so nervous to ask For the contract value that they deserve.”

“I think a very smart move to arbitrage CAC in any SaaS business is to build a media brand.”

“Every dollar of MRR you add to your business is effectively worth 60 dollars in equity because you multiply times 12 to annualize it and a minimum five X multiple.”

“Generally speaking, with most early stage runners I talk to, they always devalue their own tool. They always think it's worth less than what the market actually thinks it is worth”

“once you're on the VC track, especially in the DTC space, you, you sort of want to see a raise happening every 18 months or so, otherwise sort of red flags start to go up.”

“You can have super healthy CAC to LTV ratios, but if your payback period is really long, you get stuck in a cash gap and it kills the business.”

“Social capital is a direct precursor to financial capital and social capital is attention.”

“ultimately with unlimited money, the economics will get worse because you're plowing more money.”

“If you want to raise 200 grand, what you do is you say, We're raising 300 grand. You go get soft commits of 200 grand, so that you hit 200 grand on day one, and so you're definitely gonna hit your target, and then other people who you don't know coming into the second, the last hundred grand, and then the momentum and…”

“from what I've seen, at least a glaring pattern is a successful agency spins out successful tech because they've got a built-in base.”

“I think the core, like the best MVP today is community. Even if you're like for SaaS platforms or anything”

“very successful SaaS companies come out of agencies, because you already know the problem, and you already have a built-in customer base.”

“is this is why a lot of these companies, these providers can't be helpful to bootstrap SaaS or even marketplace founders is you just don't have historical economics built out.”

“it's very hard to have an event software company be a recurring revenue platform because they only use the technology when the event is happening.”

“What I mean by that is only if you would know how to take, so let's say Forex, your current MRR. So let's say you knew how to take a 120 grand today and land more than like 10 K a month in new revenue sometime over the next six months with that 120 K. Only if you knew you could do that, would you do venture debt? Cause…”

“If, if data was perfect, and the world knew that this exact tool, if you build it, it was a billion dollar tool, everyone would do it. And, and the competition would erode all profits. The mere function of what you just described will never exist because if it, if perfect data existed and a perfect plan existed,…”

“And usually the founder has the leverage. If one of two things are true, the company's cashflow positive, Or the ARR to funding ratio is above one, meaning ARR is more than what they raised.”

“it's unrealistic to expect 90, a hundred, a 110% year over your growth bootstrapped. In fact, 30, 40% year over your growth is great for bootstrapped company.”

“You're seeing a lot of ag tech products taking off right now, which have this kind of model where it's hardware up front, and then there's software on the back end, and the retention rates are typically through the roof because the farmer actually has to install the thing in the farm. They never churn.”

“there's so many founders that I talked to that are like in the million to four or five million range, and they're trying to figure out like expansion and pricing. And like the biggest issue I always see is They can't identify, like, a single, like, the single value metric that their customers, like, value the most.”

“one of the patterns I see whenever I see kind of an IoT device paired with a SaaS product on the back end is retention tends to be way higher because there's actually a physical piece of hardware installed.”

“I can share with you guys listening, other, other webinar platforms I interviewed, I mean, you're typically seeing monthly logo churn in the, like, seven, eight, nine, 10% range, which obviously is too high to get the valuations that most SaaS companies get. You've got to get below kind of two, three percent to be a,…”

“I mean, that's actually concerning how much revenue you typically don't see expansion revenue making up 30% of a company's growth until years Maybe three or four when they're in the five or ten million dollar AR rate.”

“A lot of people overlook this, but I think the most effective thing you can do in a crowded market is find one channel and monopolize the heck out of it.”

“average churn in a space like this, at this price point should be somewhere like around call it between like two and five percent per month. And usually 60 to 70% of that churn is credit card failure at this kind of price point.”

“The thing I found with marketplace is even when you look at like a fiver or like these guys is like once, once somebody finds someone they like working with in terms of a company like working with, they typically end up taking it out of your marketplace. So you have to worry about one, making it all the difficulty and…”

“When I'm looking at buying companies, I know that once I issue an LOI, I'm significantly more invested. I've learned more about the CEO, the company financials, and the systems the team uses. I can still walk away, but it hurts more to walk away at that point.”

“If you're paying someone a cut and they're driving a lot of volume, you might offer to sell them your whole company.”

“Free apps and web extensions are perfect buys for beginners. They hit all of these criteria, and you can usually get them for little money because the owners aren't making substantial income on them.”

“By buying two tools that do the same thing, I can run them on the same code base and save half the developer costs.”

“Anytime someone launches a content site or membership site, the hardest thing is churn is through the roof, especially to real SaaS companies that are software based.”

“you don't include one time payments in a run rate, because there's not, they're not gonna run. Those payments aren't running anywhere. They're dead. They, they pay once and it's done.”

“small businesses go out of business, right? Which you have no control over, which usually puts churn at at least two percent per month.”

“everyone thinks you find a growth channel where the CAC is one third of the LTV, and it's just going to exist forever. The fact of the matter is, they don't. These are all honeypots, and you can milk the honeypot for a while, but eventually competitors move and increase the price, or you exhaust the whole cohort, and…”

“if you start thinking about an exit, having channel partners is a great place to start in terms of trying to drum up demand for your company, because you're already built on their API, hopefully adding value”

“I think it's such a good piece of advice for folks listening right now, thinking about trying to get, build their own software company to start up in an agency, because I have talked to so many agencies where they have all these clients and they start realizing the clients all have the same problem. Then they use their…”

“I'm talking about Clipfolio, Grow.com, Data Hero, Dasharoo, their number, all of them, the number one issue is the onboarding and actually getting users to connect data streams. If they can get them to do that, lifetime value almost always increases by 10 X.”

“you can have the most amazing content, but you're really in the business of convincing people to consume your content. And that is a tough freaking business because you're competing, trying to take time from them to get them to go through your courses.”

“the smartest pricing structures I've seen in SaaS from the fastest growing companies, they always have multiple value metrics that would, that are used, that are tied to usage that encourage people to basically increase their ARPU or pay you more and more every month.”

“Many times, SaaS businesses that go and become very big, their infancy is from an agency, which is the cash cow. The agency gets to see into clients' problems, and they realize every client has the same problem.”

“I love confrontation. I love it because It allows me to never have like a filter. It just, if I, if something, if I don't like something or I disagree with somebody, I just go after it. No matter how big of a person or a list or how rich or whatever they are, I just go after it. And people love that, I think, because…”

“nine out of 10 small businesses fail in the first two years, so it makes churn extremely, extremely difficult in the SMB space, which is why usually typically people decide to move up market into mid-market or enterprise space.”

“any SaaS business that has a monthly churn higher than, you know, call it four or five percent. You might just sell a one-time subscription.”

“I interview a lot of people that do membership sites, and you'll typically see a lifetime value of two to three months.”

“Uh, and so that could be psychologically for a founder that has other founders that have left the business that have equity. It's a psychological war. That's very difficult to fight and manage.”

“I just feel like it tries to teach, because they have to sell more books, it tries to tell anyone they can be an entrepreneur if they have a blank canvas and some post-it notes, and everyone can't be an entrepreneur. It just doesn't work.”

“Due diligence is a pain in the butt, but look, you have to keep leverage when you're doing these deals, and I had a hundred percent confidence that if it fell through, we could very easily go back to one of the other companies who made an offer in one of their LOIs and start right up like nothing ever happened.”

“Some of them were cash and earn out, which means, you know, we get money over a period of time if we hit certain metrics, which I really don't like because I have no control over the business if we sell it.”

“And the fact of the matter is, deals, if we do one, they end up taking way longer than we expect. And we want that last month before the deal is signed to be One of the best months ever, because it gives us leverage.”

“The best way to do it, I have found, Nehal, I did this, is I would just go and put things on Craigslist, for example, or buy things on Craigslist and go through the whole negotiation asking for the, in this case, the cheapest price possible. That is to the point where it felt uncomfortable. I was asking for stuff for…”

“you should have a kill sheet for every competitor that basically lists on the left side all the different features, and then how you win or how you lose, and that kill sheet should be in with all your sales reps, so they can talk about positioning, edit the kill sheet every week, and keep making the kill sheet better.”

“A lot of founders, when they're raising capital, they've never asked this question, and I think it's really important to know the money behind the, behind the money.”

“It's a good thing for anyone to do that's just like the self-serve folks is go look at all your thousands of self-serve users paying 29 bucks a month. Look at the domain name of signups, sort, you know, alphabetize them and then highlight conditional formatting in Excel where there's duplicates. And when you see…”

“Many times they convert way worse than the ugliest websites you've ever seen.”

“In order to beat a competitor, you have to understand where they get their food from, their fuel, then slowly siphon their food supply. If you can't figure out where they eat, don't attack.”

“Usually it's like 1.3 to 1.8 over like three to five ish years. And then you're paying back as a percentage of gross receipt each month, usually between caught three percent and like nine percent.”

“You can learn about the risk tolerance because they'll say, well, we're hovering like plus or minus five grand black or red, or someone say plus or -200 grand or 500 grand. You get a sense of the risk level of the CEO by getting what that plus or minus is around the line.”

“The issue is not driving downloads because usually they're built by very smart marketers like yourself. The issue is utility in that most apps you download, you don't open. I mean, I may be on my phone open maybe five apps on a daily basis, uh, and everything else just kind of sits in this graveyard.”

“If I know someone's a big supporter of me, and I'm with them, the last thing I want to do is promote myself when I could tee up a question where I know it's going to be a positive response.”

“People learn so much more from folks that are where you are. It's one thing for me to get a billion. I have billionaires on here all the time. They tell their stories. The problem is they don't remember what they were doing when they were just starting out.”

“between the LOI signing and the actual money being exchanged when the deal potentially closes, there's this big period of due diligence, and guys, this is like the graveyard. This is where deals fall apart.”