Latest / 1 to 100 / E48: From Service to SaaS with Aaron Schwartz & Daniel Brady

Transcript

E48: From Service to SaaS with Aaron Schwartz & Daniel Brady · 1 to 100

• 0:00
  Jack, why are you the happiest guy in e-commerce?
• 0:03
  Why am I happy? Oh, life's good, man.
• 0:05
  Life is so good, isn't it? You an e-commerce.
• 0:09
  I'm sorry, just. Yes, I'm an e-commerce.
• 0:11
  Yeah, I have a brand. I got my start in e-commerce
• 0:14
  with my my first brand. I haven't done anything apart
• 0:17
  from e-commerce my whole life. I just want to say good to meet
• 0:20
  you guys. I am aware of who you are and
• 0:23
  what you do, but I don't think I've ever actually connected.
• 0:25
  If we have either, I was just how's how's Robin?
• 0:29
  Robin, Robin, just join you guys.
• 0:32
  Oh, OK, OK, yes. So you're talking about Lunar
• 0:35
  Solar Group. Yes, So we are we this is yeah,
• 0:40
  this interesting context. So no commerce was incubated as
• 0:46
  part of Lunar Solar Group years and years ago.
• 0:48
  So we're no longer part of that though.
• 0:49
  So we sold to tiny and holding company in Canada back in 2022.
• 0:54
  So separate, but yes, I am aware of Robin joining Lunar Solar
• 0:58
  Group, which I'm sure is a big one for them.
• 1:00
  So I do. I do know that team pretty well.
• 1:05
  Cool. Well it's good to connect man.
• 1:09
  Rishab, you, you drive. OK, I mean, yeah, dude, I love.
• 1:14
  I guess one thing I've been really curious about DB just to
• 1:19
  like really drive dive right in is at least my understanding of
• 1:23
  the story is like you were sort of already working on Arita and
• 1:28
  then you brought Aaron in as a Co founder, Is that correct?
• 1:31
  That's correct. Amazing.
• 1:33
  Yeah. What what led you to that
• 1:35
  decision? Like a big part of company
• 1:37
  building outside of the lanky body and the not as nice hair?
• 1:43
  Yeah, Yeah. What?
• 1:45
  What led to? Well, what led to people?
• 1:49
  People said that first of all, to, you know, Zach and I were
• 1:53
  too handsome, so we needed to lower the average no though.
• 1:57
  So what really happened was that like, so Zach and I are both
• 2:01
  machine learning engineers, you know, and so like we know how to
• 2:04
  solve problems with data expertise, all that kind of
• 2:06
  stuff like that. But like in terms of selling and
• 2:10
  positioning and everything go to market, all that kind of stuff,
• 2:13
  we have no, we have very little experience.
• 2:16
  And like this is how bad it was. We would send emails out to when
• 2:20
  we first got like our first set of pilot customers and things
• 2:22
  were going really well. They told all their, all their
• 2:24
  friend brands about us and stuff like that.
• 2:26
  And we would do this little audit and be like, Hey, this is
• 2:28
  how we think we read it could help.
• 2:29
  This is our pricing. Here's a stripe link get
• 2:33
  started. And our close rate was 93%.
• 2:36
  And we were like, oh, we, we solve sales.
• 2:40
  And then what happened was that Matt from enquire like, you
• 2:44
  know, from fairing put us in touch with Aaron.
• 2:47
  It was like, you should talk to this guy because he knows a lot
• 2:49
  about go to market stuff. He can help you out.
• 2:50
  And he said, you guys are too cheap.
• 2:52
  Your close rate that high from an engineering, an engineer's
• 2:55
  mind is like, oh, we've solved this problem.
• 2:57
  It is 100% solved. It's like, no, you just haven't
• 3:00
  done price discovered to actually understand the value
• 3:02
  that you're generating because everyone is just like like
• 3:04
  immediately saying yes to what we're doing.
• 3:06
  And that was like a huge, like, light bulb moment for the two of
• 3:10
  us. We're just like, Oh yeah,
• 3:11
  there's like expertise in this entire aspect of sales and
• 3:16
  positioning and partnerships. And like, we don't know anything
• 3:18
  about it. We just know how to like, help
• 3:20
  solve problems. And then like, sometimes those
• 3:22
  people are like, oh, this is cool.
• 3:23
  Like I'm going to tell my friends about you.
• 3:25
  And so when we thought about like, how can we actually, like,
• 3:27
  formalize that and see all that we've, you know, we're
• 3:30
  introduced, Aaron, just like as an advisor at first.
• 3:32
  But then we very quickly realized it was like, why are we
• 3:35
  going to try and learn all this on our own, you know, and build
• 3:38
  everything and improve the algorithms and do all that kind
• 3:40
  of stuff. It's just like, and we really
• 3:42
  enjoyed working with Aaron and like he has so much experience
• 3:44
  in the space. We mostly enjoyed working with
• 3:47
  Aaron and he kind of experienced in the space.
• 3:50
  And so then we just like, it felt like this no brainer.
• 3:52
  It's like we, we realized that we really did have like this
• 3:55
  missing part of the team. We didn't even think about that
• 3:57
  initially. We're just like, Oh, instead of
• 4:00
  hiring this, we should like have this be a core part of, of who
• 4:02
  we are. And that should be like another
• 4:04
  existing member. So it wasn't even like, I don't
• 4:07
  even think that Zach and I thought for a second like, oh,
• 4:09
  Aaron to be our first employee, we didn't think about in that
• 4:12
  context at all. We was like, no, this is so core
• 4:14
  to like how we want to be. Like he should just be a part of
• 4:16
  our founding team, even though like, yeah, he joined a little
• 4:19
  bit later than us. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 4:21
  And I mean like the joy, it turns out like the join dates
• 4:25
  don't matter for like these sorts of things.
• 4:28
  Like what matters is what is the DNA of the company.
• 4:31
  I want to talk more about that for sure.
• 4:33
  But I guess like, OK, so let's imagine there's some other like
• 4:38
  founders out there who are both who are like technical and
• 4:41
  they're thinking about this question.
• 4:44
  Did you think having him as an advisor first was helpful in
• 4:49
  framing the thinking and the company build it?
• 4:51
  Like, I guess I'm more curious about the insight around company
• 4:55
  building and the company building trajectory.
• 4:59
  And then I want to hear it from the other side too, because
• 5:01
  getting someone like Aaron is not easy.
• 5:04
  So I don't want like someone listening to this who's just
• 5:06
  like, you know, 2 engineers being like, Oh yeah, of course
• 5:08
  we should just like go find totally the CEO of another
• 5:11
  company to be our CEO. It's like this is just like not
• 5:14
  how it works so. Yeah, I know.
• 5:16
  I, I, it's a, it's a great question.
• 5:17
  And like I, I've definitely, I've, I've got in those emails,
• 5:20
  I mean like, hey, could you put us in touch with like person
• 5:23
  preferably they had like 2 successful exits.
• 5:25
  I'm just like, what are you like, what are you smoking?
• 5:26
  Like, why are you asking me to like randomly connect you with
• 5:30
  someone who's made so it's a billionaire that you know that
• 5:32
  like is willing to, to join us and like, And so it was critical
• 5:37
  that that there was an advisory relationship first, just because
• 5:41
  like we, we needed to learn his, the expertise and experience
• 5:47
  that he had in general, just to even like frame the problem
• 5:50
  space that we were like entering.
• 5:51
  And, and then it was like, does he understand what we're doing
• 5:56
  and our viewpoint? And there's lots of people who
• 5:59
  say they have lots of data and all this kind of stuff.
• 6:00
  But like this, you actually kind of believe in, in what we're
• 6:02
  doing in, in, in our backgrounds.
• 6:04
  And then do we actually like generally enjoy working
• 6:06
  together? And as the three of us, you
• 6:09
  know, finding together, to your point, it's like the DNA of the
• 6:11
  company, like it's the, it's the all of us together is going to
• 6:15
  be how we hire, how we are perceived, the messages that
• 6:20
  we'll be out. And it's, it's like a, it's a
• 6:22
  very equal thing. And so you can't like casually
• 6:24
  date to get there, you know what I mean?
• 6:26
  You have to like really spend the time and the effort.
• 6:29
  And I think that doing it as an advisory capacity and advisory
• 6:33
  capacity be like, listen, if this is great, maybe I'll be an
• 6:36
  even more involved advisor and then maybe even more involved
• 6:40
  and maybe you'll do some consultant work and we'll pay
• 6:42
  you out. Like like we were talking about
• 6:44
  all these sorts of steps and then it just basically collapsed
• 6:46
  very quickly to be like, no, we've done enough of this stuff.
• 6:49
  Like, let's actually have the conversations about about being
• 6:53
  another founding member of the team.
• 6:55
  So Aaron, just help me understand what made you want to
• 6:58
  join like a small company like because you were leading loop?
• 7:02
  Right. I'd actually stepped away a year
• 7:05
  before that. I was leading a very joyful life
• 7:08
  where everything was good and I was hanging with my kids and my
• 7:11
  wife had a very intense job and I was like advising some,
• 7:15
  consulting some. So I was actually stepping away
• 7:18
  from that. That was harder.
• 7:20
  I'll do this pretty briefly, but like Matt Barr from it was, I
• 7:25
  think Enquirer labs at the time, but from Farah and he's the one
• 7:27
  who connected us. Amazing tool, amazing founder.
• 7:30
  I'm I'm actually an advisor to his company and he knew DB and
• 7:33
  Zach and they almost started something with Kirk and I
• 7:36
  distinctly remember he's like, Oh, I want you to meet these two
• 7:39
  guys. And like, sorry for language,
• 7:41
  but his quote was like, they have no idea how fucking good
• 7:43
  they are. And I was like, dude, happy to
• 7:45
  like, you know, I hit a point in my career where I stopped trying
• 7:50
  to be an advisor and I was like, I'd rather spend three or five
• 7:52
  hours with the founding team over time and not have any
• 7:56
  future commitment because I was like, it's as much I, I assume
• 8:00
  all equity is going to 0, right? I've like had four startups, 2
• 8:04
  or 01 took a decade and was a 0, right?
• 8:06
  One is doing very well in passport shipping, But like,
• 8:10
  I've seen enough. And so to me, it was like a
• 8:12
  point of my career where I just want to spend time with very
• 8:15
  smart people who I like spending time with, building something
• 8:17
  big. And my framework for choosing an
• 8:20
  advisee is like, is it somebody who at some point in my career I
• 8:23
  would have worked for? That's it.
• 8:25
  Like, they might be 26. And like, I'm not going to go
• 8:27
  join this random company that I'm not interested in, but I'm
• 8:30
  like, wow, she's got a spark or she's brilliant or like, my
• 8:33
  goodness, like I'm so lucky to be in the room with this person.
• 8:36
  And so ADB, like I remember our first meeting was in Central
• 8:39
  Park at Star Bryant Park and we talked on the phone or whatever
• 8:44
  and it was very quick where I was like, OK, Matt's right.
• 8:47
  These guys are brilliant. I think the part of the story
• 8:50
  that is interesting to me is like they actually asked, it was
• 8:53
  like a couple months and hey, do you want to be a Co founder?
• 8:55
  And it was a shift from the consulting phase of the business
• 8:58
  to like the software phase, Like they'd already started it.
• 9:01
  And that was I think like late September and actually worked
• 9:04
  all of October as if I were a Co founder because I was like, I'd
• 9:07
  rather commit a month of feeling stress and calling you every day
• 9:13
  and then not have an obligation beyond it.
• 9:15
  And like, I'll still be an advisor and like and then opt
• 9:18
  out. And so I actually, I don't know
• 9:19
  if DB remembers this, but I was like, I'm trying them out.
• 9:23
  Being a Co founder is brutal. Starting a company is brutal.
• 9:27
  You want to find people who are like perfect for you, as defined
• 9:30
  by you. And within that month of like,
• 9:32
  OK, this is like absolutely a no brainer.
• 9:35
  And then I think I was formally a Co founder come November, but
• 9:37
  in my mind I was already like wearing that hat.
• 9:40
  Wow, yeah. Wish I'm sorry, The one thing I
• 9:44
  should say is like I was in a very fortunate part of my life
• 9:48
  where I could like basically like invest in something for a
• 9:51
  month without any like guaranteed anything, let alone
• 9:53
  my salary. It was like, oh, they paid me
• 9:55
  6000 bucks like I was still with just an advisor, but it was like
• 10:00
  a mutual understanding. We're like, if we mutually opt
• 10:02
  in, we're going to do this and I was able to take that
• 10:06
  opportunity. DB how?
• 10:08
  How were you guys in your journey I go what did it look
• 10:12
  like in terms of you know your cut base revenue and things like
• 10:15
  that when you got to the point to?
• 10:18
  So, so early. So you know, the story for us
• 10:20
  was that like, so you know, Zach and I, you know, we've, we were
• 10:24
  at some startups, we're at these things.
• 10:26
  We decided to go do something on our own and we were consultants
• 10:29
  for a while. I mean, we had like our own
• 10:30
  companies and LLC all this kind of stuff like that with the idea
• 10:32
  of like, Hey, we're just going to help brands help some tools
• 10:36
  out and like if something is repeatable, then we'll try and
• 10:38
  make a product out of it. And the, the story, you know,
• 10:42
  the, and this is like, it's true.
• 10:43
  What happened is like we were doing all this work, a lot of
• 10:46
  data engineering, a lot of CDPS, things like, you know, this all
• 10:50
  back in the day, like early high touch days and stuff like that.
• 10:53
  So like a lot of these things that are common now weren't that
• 10:55
  common back then. And we had, we're doing all of
• 10:59
  this work. And actually, Matt, Matt, Matt's
• 11:01
  going to come up so much in our funny story.
• 11:02
  He was like, you're doing all this stuff and he's just like,
• 11:05
  there's this one part of like these reports that you're
• 11:07
  generating for these brands that you're helping out.
• 11:08
  That's about like marketing waste.
• 11:11
  And he's just like pretend like he's like, why don't you pretend
• 11:13
  that like this whole big thing that you're giving that all the
• 11:16
  economics things like that really is helpful for the team
• 11:18
  that you're like contracted in. But it's like you can't sell
• 11:22
  this whole giant report like a McKenzie ask report unless
• 11:25
  you're already in that organization.
• 11:26
  But just like pretend that like maybe that is just what you do.
• 11:30
  And so we condense this whole big thing into just like 1
• 11:32
  number essentially. And we went out to an agency and
• 11:37
  a friend of ours, I was like, hey, send, send to a handful of
• 11:40
  your brands that will use machine learning to help them be
• 11:43
  smarter about the marketing in Clavio.
• 11:45
  And he sent that out to six brands and five of them booked
• 11:48
  us meetings within 30 minutes. And the 6th 1 didn't, wasn't on
• 11:52
  Clavio. And then all of them agreed to
• 11:55
  become pilot customers. And then, you know, we didn't
• 11:58
  have results for a month and then we're gonna have the
• 12:00
  results for a month. It, it turned out that like it
• 12:02
  was way better than all of our expectations for what we could
• 12:05
  do to deliver. And then they told all their
• 12:07
  friends and, and we, we charge them nothing, 50 bucks a month,
• 12:11
  $2500 a month. It was something like that.
• 12:15
  But we were actually like controlling a huge part of their
• 12:17
  list. And I think that's also like it
• 12:18
  caught errands I was at like, yeah, technically this brand was
• 12:21
  paying us $100 a month, but we were like telling them to not
• 12:24
  e-mail like a million people. So if we are wrong, they're on
• 12:27
  the hook for like $10 million, you know what I mean?
• 12:29
  And so like the leverage of what we were doing was enormous, even
• 12:32
  though the price of the price of caption was really small.
• 12:34
  And so I think by the time that we actually got introduced to
• 12:36
  Aaron, I think we had like 12 paying customers, basically no
• 12:43
  revenue. But like something it wasn't
• 12:44
  weren't free or anything like that.
• 12:46
  And it was basically the summer before.
• 12:48
  So like June, we sent out that e-mail.
• 12:51
  Those six brands, those five brands became our customers.
• 12:53
  We literally changed our website overnight.
• 12:55
  We, we're at a conference in Toronto.
• 12:58
  We went to our website, we said we do this marketing.
• 13:02
  We don't, we're not, we're not general consultants anymore.
• 13:05
  This is what we do. We had to cover up the
• 13:08
  conference like we had like a booth at a conference, like a
• 13:10
  little tiny start booth thing. We cover it up with post report
• 13:13
  because they wouldn't let us change the sign.
• 13:14
  We taped over the sign and this is what we do now.
• 13:18
  And we're like, this is this is now a Rita.
• 13:21
  We're now like, this is what we formally do.
• 13:23
  And then as soon as that first month hit and we shared the
• 13:26
  results back with our brands. And it was the first one was was
• 13:30
  Jason from from Dole Ashes, who I don't know if you guys know.
• 13:32
  He's very great about starting, starting stuff up.
• 13:35
  He's like, whoa, this is huge. And I was like, yeah.
• 13:37
  And he's like, I was like, can you help us out here?
• 13:38
  And he's like, I told every brand I know about you.
• 13:41
  And then that's then then Caraway came and then like all
• 13:43
  these like bigger brands started reaching out for the other
• 13:45
  woodwork. And it was at that point when
• 13:49
  Matt was like you guys, I think you guys have found something
• 13:53
  you don't know anything else about how to do anything else
• 13:55
  here except for making an algorithm that's Mark.
• 13:58
  So you need to you need to go talk to Aaron right away at that
• 14:00
  point. So it was like handful of brands
• 14:02
  paying us a little bit of money, but like the promise was there.
• 14:06
  That's interesting. Do you think that like if you
• 14:11
  know, if I'm trying to start up a company that sells to like the
• 14:14
  Shopify ecosystem, do you do you think that the right way to do
• 14:20
  it is sort of this way, like get that initial like wave of people
• 14:26
  to get really excited and hungry?
• 14:28
  Potentially? Like, I mean, I'm not saying you
• 14:30
  guys intentionally priced it low, but potentially like
• 14:34
  actually intentionally price it very low to like give this like
• 14:37
  ridiculous skew of like value to cost and then inch up over time.
• 14:43
  Like what, what do you think was like the ingredients to the
• 14:49
  early belief for Yeah, for, for, for both of you guys.
• 14:54
  And then and then how do you think about pricing over time?
• 14:57
  Because I think if you come out of the gates with how you charge
• 15:00
  today, I don't think the story gets written this way.
• 15:04
  That's just like, I mean one person's opinion.
• 15:06
  Like no, I think that's I think that's a great and and Aaron
• 15:08
  thinks a a lot of about price. We could talk about that.
• 15:11
  I think the, the signal for us was, was, was the responsibility
• 15:15
  to, to those emails that were being sent.
• 15:17
  Like, you know, we've been talking, we've been doing
• 15:19
  consultant work, like we kind of knew how busy everyone was.
• 15:23
  And to just like, literally once we got that, we, and this is
• 15:27
  like the crazy truth about is that like everything that we had
• 15:29
  was half built, We had half our connection.
• 15:32
  But like we're, we're, I mean, we've been machine learning
• 15:34
  engineers for a decade. We were fully confident that
• 15:36
  like we could integrate into Clavio over the next couple days
• 15:40
  and build them. That fully works.
• 15:41
  But it wasn't like 100% baked in and working out.
• 15:43
  We were just like confident, like if there's, if there's
• 15:45
  something there, we can build it.
• 15:47
  And so as soon as we got that response rate, we're just like,
• 15:49
  oh, oh man, this is like, this is what we have to do.
• 15:52
  Like we, I've, we've never, ever reached out and anything pulled
• 15:57
  us in this world. And we haven't talked about
• 15:59
  price. We didn't talk about any of
• 16:00
  that, but it was just like, wow, they're like these people are
• 16:02
  busy, they're probably getting picked.
• 16:04
  They probably have 50 cold inbox things in their thing right now.
• 16:07
  And then all of a sudden the, I mean, it was through an agency
• 16:11
  friend of theirs, but it was just like they immediately just
• 16:13
  responded to that when they don't have to.
• 16:15
  And that was like such a strong sign.
• 16:17
  But I, yeah, I, I need to think a little bit more about the
• 16:20
  pricing and I'm really curious about what you think about about
• 16:22
  that in terms of the pricing aspect about it.
• 16:25
  I mean, I think there's a couple different factors and Richard
• 16:28
  View and I've talked enough about the Shopify ecosystem.
• 16:30
  And so I think there's a question of what is the business
• 16:32
  you're building? Are you, are you building a
• 16:35
  business that needs 20,000 brands and you're going to
• 16:37
  charge 20 bucks a month? And like that could be a really
• 16:39
  healthy business if you can build that lean.
• 16:41
  Is that like a Trojan horse or something else?
• 16:43
  So, so I do think there's a question of like, is your
• 16:45
  ambition to build a public company, a cash flowing company,
• 16:48
  something in between, right? So I, I, you know, as a founder,
• 16:52
  you'd never want to delude yourself about what you're
• 16:53
  building. I definitely did with my first
• 16:55
  two companies. I think I'm right on the 3rd and
• 16:58
  4th company, right? The goal is market validation.
• 17:02
  We should have a customer right now.
• 17:03
  So we're building our ads product and we have a customer
• 17:06
  right now that is a beta in the ads product and they're churning
• 17:09
  from our e-mail product, which is like what Areda is known for
• 17:12
  today. But like we're going channel to
• 17:13
  channel. We have SMS now, we do direct
• 17:15
  mail, we're doing ads and like we will, we will keep going.
• 17:18
  And it is very self-evident to DB and I that we're just going
• 17:21
  to keep giving them the ads product for free because we
• 17:23
  don't actually care about the money, we care about the
• 17:24
  learning. And so I think you want to get
• 17:27
  as many at bats to learn and to build a better product and to do
• 17:31
  customer discovery as needed. I think on a pricing
• 17:34
  perspective, my thinking has definitely evolved over the
• 17:37
  years, even evolved in the last six months.
• 17:40
  Forget like pricing model, right?
• 17:44
  But like in general for a startup founder, your pricing
• 17:47
  for your first 10 customers can be different from the pricing
• 17:49
  for the next 10. So like the first thing that I
• 17:52
  did with DB and Zach is I think their accounts were like, and I
• 17:55
  can go back and look and I'll try to do it in real time, but
• 17:57
  it's like 50 bucks a month for wine, 20 bucks a month for
• 17:59
  another 100 bucks. And I was like just double your
• 18:01
  price for your next three pitches.
• 18:03
  And they immediately had three out of three for 200 bucks a
• 18:05
  month. I think I think that's right.
• 18:07
  I can I. Think.
• 18:10
  That's exactly it. And so like you want to do price
• 18:13
  discovery. The first thing I did at Loop, I
• 18:17
  was like a 1099 called Chief Business Officer or whatever my
• 18:21
  title was, but I ran sales marketing partnerships until we
• 18:23
  found better people for sales marketing partnerships.
• 18:25
  This is like after the series BI raised price by like 10 or 15% I
• 18:30
  think in August of 2021 and then I raised price by like 10 or 15%
• 18:35
  more in like October. And we had our first quarter in
• 18:39
  a long time already beat our numbers and then you start doing
• 18:42
  discovery and it was like, look, we are creating this much.
• 18:44
  It wasn't Willy nilly. It was like we are creating so
• 18:46
  much value and the retention rate is so high.
• 18:49
  What I've definitely been feeling at a Rita is we create
• 18:54
  an insane amount of value, but we are fighting for a SAS
• 18:57
  budget. And so if we create Infinity
• 19:00
  dollars, we are still capped on how much we can charge because
• 19:03
  retention budgets aren't performance marketing budgets.
• 19:06
  And some CF OS going to be like, hey, the line item is too big,
• 19:08
  cut it. And they're like, sorry guys, we
• 19:11
  have a budget. And my comment is like there are
• 19:13
  dollars on the ground that we can pick up from your existing
• 19:17
  list and we will hand you those dollars for way cheaper than
• 19:21
  what you would spend on Meta to go acquire the net new customer.
• 19:25
  Like the opportunity cost of not using US is all the spend and
• 19:27
  performance marketing. And what has happened is we've
• 19:30
  had a handful of like extremely painful churn where it's like,
• 19:33
  it is undeniable, even in their like, not us telling you, Hey,
• 19:37
  we're good, but like they're like, Hey, here's your ROI,
• 19:40
  here's this, it's 17 X, It's whatever.
• 19:43
  We just don't have budget. And so the framing that I've
• 19:46
  been thinking about a lot recently is like when the
• 19:48
  renewal I, I, I don't know, I heard something podcast,
• 19:51
  whatever, right? Richard, you and I talked about
• 19:52
  pricing separately and like, and it's just like, we just need to
• 19:57
  live with brands long enough for us to become electricity in
• 19:59
  their system. And when they work with Rita,
• 20:02
  they get the most out of their list.
• 20:03
  It could be their e-mail list sooner, SMS list, whatever.
• 20:06
  And so I think with pricing you, you start well, you learn, you
• 20:09
  do price discovery, but like at no point like you, you really
• 20:13
  need to know what your buyers constraints are.
• 20:15
  And I think we've done a mediocre best job of that.
• 20:18
  I think we're getting better and I, you know, we, we already have
• 20:21
  some like boomerangs who are coming back.
• 20:22
  We're like, Yep, we actually, we want that rough shoe pack that
• 20:25
  we've given up. Jeremiah, do you, do you think
• 20:28
  that that's true in the economy ecosystem, out of curiosity?
• 20:32
  Talking about like the SAS budget versus something else or
• 20:35
  which part of that? Retention versus acquisition.
• 20:38
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I do, I think yeah, I mean we
• 20:43
  work with. So obviously you guys know
• 20:45
  Faring well. We're, you know, very similar
• 20:47
  product with no my estimate, it's hard to see exact numbers,
• 20:52
  but my estimate is that our customers spends north of 10
• 20:56
  billion a year on paid ads and we are helping them like for
• 21:00
  most of them at least the the primary use case is helping them
• 21:02
  understand the impact of those paid ads and the amount that we
• 21:06
  generate. It's a very, very, very, very
• 21:08
  small fraction of that. So I think about that a lot.
• 21:11
  I think like if if you could actually, because it's looked at
• 21:14
  it as a SAS product and I think even within that there's even
• 21:18
  like subcategories and SAS that people have expectations around
• 21:20
  price. So when you call it survey,
• 21:23
  there's a upper limit on what somebody's willing to pay for
• 21:26
  that. And so we think about that a
• 21:28
  lot. We and I would say like a lot of
• 21:31
  our, a lot of the things we've been working on over the years
• 21:34
  has been trying to move out of that.
• 21:36
  And in some regards in terms of like the framing and how people
• 21:40
  think about it. But I completely agree.
• 21:41
  Like if you can actually attach yourself to the acquisition side
• 21:43
  of things, which like you've, you've been doing that, I think
• 21:48
  it sounds like or you've at least been thinking that way.
• 21:50
  I'd be curious about your thoughts on that too.
• 21:52
  But you can attach yourself to the acquisition side.
• 21:54
  There's a totally different price that somebody is willing
• 21:58
  to pay in that context. I wish Austell's guy was here
• 22:02
  because he would have so many thoughts on this.
• 22:05
  Obviously at Foreplay, we have over 15,000 paying customers and
• 22:08
  most of them come to us for opportunity.
• 22:10
  They're coming to us for the benefit as opposed to
• 22:14
  opportunity cost. The the cost that they're
• 22:16
  incurring, there's some amount of people who want to reduce
• 22:19
  their creative costs because creative production is so high
• 22:22
  that it's expensive and it's extremely expensive to produce
• 22:25
  bad ads that don't work, right. So some amount of people are
• 22:28
  coming, like our creative budget is large and some of it is
• 22:31
  getting wasted. There's a sort of, you know,
• 22:33
  the, the larger customers, the more operational customers, but
• 22:38
  most people come to us for opportunity, they're coming for
• 22:40
  benefit, right? And we're selling the benefit,
• 22:42
  right, which is that, well, if you could launch better ads, the
• 22:45
  opportunity might be better. Yeah, I think our sales guy
• 22:48
  would have a lot of thoughts on this, but I'm keen to hear what
• 22:51
  you guys think. I think that maybe part of it is
• 22:54
  selling opportunity cost, selling pain to somebody who
• 22:57
  might not actually be experiencing that pain or might
• 22:59
  not be looking to buy to resolve that pain as opposed to they're
• 23:03
  looking to buy for opportunity because we already know that
• 23:06
  they're looking to buy for opportunity and the acquisition
• 23:08
  side of things, right? Rachel, if I can jump in on this
• 23:12
  point and then head off on like the performance side of things.
• 23:15
  Jack, the first product that DB and Zach felt was actually a
• 23:18
  cost savings tool. It was you're sending a million
• 23:20
  emails. We will with statistical
• 23:23
  significance prove to you that you could send 600,000 emails,
• 23:27
  get the same revenue. You're going to save money
• 23:29
  because every e-mail is maybe a ton of a petty, but 400,000
• 23:32
  emails twice a week adds up. We're going to take half the
• 23:34
  savings is kind of the framing. And what we learned literally
• 23:38
  within the first couple months is like, oh, actually there's
• 23:41
  this thing called e-mail deliverability and there's a
• 23:44
  thing called don't annoy Jeremiah.
• 23:45
  So he doesn't unsubscribe today. So the list is healthier in a
• 23:48
  month whenever he's ready. And oh, we're actually a growth
• 23:50
  factor. We are not a cost savings.
• 23:52
  And so for truly almost two years, we've not talked about
• 23:55
  cost savings at all. I, I just rolled off another
• 23:57
  like a podcast with one of our investors who mentioned that we
• 24:00
  are cost savings tool. And I was like, we're not.
• 24:02
  And it's so funny because it's like 2 years ago.
• 24:05
  So we are a growth tool and I've offered so many brands a Rev
• 24:11
  share on growth. Nobody actually wants to do it.
• 24:15
  And again, it's like, whoa, whoa, proof performance.
• 24:19
  But they think about us as a retention budget and retention
• 24:23
  budget is capped. And so it's like even when we
• 24:26
  position that way, by the way, This is why we're moving into
• 24:28
  performance marketing. We do track mail, we do ads.
• 24:31
  I'd love to figure out a way to break out of that.
• 24:33
  So open to any and all advice but we we keep finding ourselves
• 24:37
  being capped because of where the budget is.
• 24:40
  Yeah. I just wonder if the reason I
• 24:43
  asked Jeremiah, Yeah. And Jack's input is I just
• 24:48
  wonder if it's structural to the market as opposed to to the
• 24:51
  function. Not that I know any better, but
• 24:56
  I just wonder if you'd see the same thing if you like went to
• 24:58
  consumer SAS or if you went to like some other market
• 25:03
  basically? It's, it's interesting though,
• 25:05
  because, and I guess Aaron, I don't know what this will look
• 25:08
  like when you get into, you know, the ad side of things.
• 25:12
  But I know companies out there that operate in that space and
• 25:19
  are basically taking a cut of the ad spend.
• 25:21
  And I think that's probably an upper limit on that too.
• 25:23
  There's a point at which somebody says, no, I'm not going
• 25:26
  to pay you $1,000,000 a month, but there is like a, there's a,
• 25:30
  a much, that number is much bigger before somebody starts to
• 25:33
  say, yeah, I'm not comfortable with that.
• 25:36
  And because if you can show that the incremental value that
• 25:39
  you're driving is bigger than whatever the additional cost
• 25:42
  that you're putting on there, it's just a, it's a totally
• 25:45
  different way of thinking about it.
• 25:46
  And so I do think like the whatever you charge for
• 25:49
  retention, you can probably charge 1020 times as much on the
• 25:52
  acquisition side for the same effective output.
• 25:55
  Yeah. I'm not going to name this
• 25:57
  customer, but I'm going to tell you guys a story because it
• 25:59
  might be helpful. There was a customer who we
• 26:03
  worked with, who has, who has since turned, who they they grew
• 26:12
  from. And I'm also going to purposely
• 26:14
  obfuscate numbers because otherwise it becomes easy to
• 26:17
  guess, but everything is in ballpark.
• 26:19
  OK. So let's just say they grew from
• 26:21
  a $20 million brand to $100 million brand.
• 26:24
  So they were spending millions a month and in working with us or
• 26:28
  CPA was a was like 40% of what it was before they started
• 26:36
  working with us or in a comparison because like we
• 26:40
  always do, always on hold outs and things like that.
• 26:43
  So anyways, it's like a 2 1/2 X difference, OK, between when
• 26:47
  they were used for mod versus when they didn't.
• 26:49
  They did all the things that you would expect a DDC brand to do.
• 26:53
  They tried to like replicate the pages on their own, like all of
• 26:55
  these things. But like the UI is not what we
• 26:58
  sell. There's like a bunch of stuff
• 27:00
  happening under the hood, right? So even like A to them, they
• 27:05
  were like, we perfectly copied it.
• 27:06
  Why is it not performing the same?
• 27:07
  I was like, we've tried to tell you this 100 times, like the UI
• 27:11
  is only a part of it, but it doesn't matter.
• 27:14
  And they were, let's just say that they were paying us again,
• 27:17
  these numbers are not correct, but let's just say they were
• 27:20
  paying us a quarter, $1,000,000 a year.
• 27:22
  OK, all in territory. So then they asked to come back
• 27:30
  because they stopped working with us and their Cpas actually
• 27:33
  quadrupled, right? Because what ends up happening
• 27:37
  when you stop using The thing is not just that the comparison
• 27:40
  difference happens, but then the rest of your systems all get
• 27:42
  screwed up. And so it actually becomes even
• 27:45
  worse. And, and it they're like then
• 27:49
  they asked to come back like roughly 2 months later and we
• 27:53
  basically said no just to be for like just to cut a Long story
• 27:58
  short, for a variety of reasons, we were like, hey, here are all
• 28:02
  the conditions that if you can meet them, then you can come
• 28:05
  back. But we're like other like it's
• 28:08
  up to you and pass that. Like we, we just, we just don't
• 28:12
  care, right? Not, not because we don't care
• 28:14
  to help brands. Like that is like literally the
• 28:17
  purpose of the company. But it's because I think that
• 28:22
  like there is a reality of like at some point there's a reality
• 28:26
  of opportunity cost for the company or the vendor who is
• 28:30
  like serving a customer and like the customer type and persona
• 28:35
  and things like that, where no matter how much value you are
• 28:38
  giving and no matter what the fair, by the way, like the ROI
• 28:43
  on this for them was probably like somewhere between 25 and
• 28:47
  50X. And it was like the difference
• 28:49
  between their business growing super fast and not.
• 28:53
  And so I, I think there's like there are deeper, harder
• 28:59
  structural questions that every company needs to ask about how
• 29:03
  they think about what, what customer deserve, what audience
• 29:07
  deserve, how to serve it, Do they want to participate in that
• 29:10
  market or not? And I think that's just like a
• 29:13
  reality. Like I, I, on the one hand,
• 29:16
  there's like a part of me that's like, hey, this rhetoric of
• 29:19
  like, yes, on the one hand, like I want to do things that are
• 29:23
  deeply customer centric and the company's deeply customer
• 29:26
  centric. And at the same time, companies
• 29:29
  like ours also do have opportunity cost, right?
• 29:32
  And so who I do that for actually matters a lot.
• 29:35
  Yeah. In this case, could you have
• 29:38
  like added a zero and gone? You know what?
• 29:40
  It's worth it now. So like instead of 250 it was
• 29:43
  like 2 and a half million. Yeah, yeah, just 10X their bill
• 29:47
  and said, hey, you know what guys, we'll do it for you, but
• 29:50
  it's going to cost more. Yeah, like I said, there were,
• 29:53
  there were a set of criteria that we outlined under which
• 29:56
  they. Were.
• 29:58
  Like, hey, and and so like there was a set of things that if were
• 30:03
  fulfilled, it was like, great, you guys should just use it now.
• 30:06
  Yeah. I'm following you crazy.
• 30:10
  We've talked about commerce being a fickle place, right?
• 30:13
  And like one of the pushes that you've given us, which like
• 30:15
  we're doing because we are an ML team as we are just moving out
• 30:18
  market, right? Like the bigger the brand, the
• 30:21
  better. And it's not like even if we're
• 30:23
  charging exactly the same for every brand, we will be more
• 30:26
  performant for larger brands because they have more data for
• 30:29
  our models to work against. But I think part of what you've
• 30:33
  heard from us is like commerce's are vertical today, but commerce
• 30:37
  is not our whole business. When you look at companies in
• 30:41
  this space, do you do you think that you can still go build a
• 30:46
  public company in the Shopify ecosystem or is it immediately
• 30:49
  need to move out? I think there's no chance.
• 30:52
  Yeah, Yeah. I think it's like not possible,
• 30:56
  not because I don't think that there are like great brands and
• 30:59
  great companies to work with in the Shopify ecosystem.
• 31:02
  I just think that the structure of the Shopify ecosystem is set
• 31:06
  up to make it extraordinarily difficult for a vendor that
• 31:11
  operate. You're saying like if you
• 31:13
  operate only in the Shopify ecosystem, right?
• 31:15
  Like the specific constraint is like I don't serve sales force,
• 31:18
  I don't serve. You might you might like HTC
• 31:21
  over time, but. Yeah, I, I think if the way you
• 31:25
  set up the question is we only serve this one ecosystem.
• 31:30
  I think you're setting yourself up for, for like an impossible
• 31:35
  task. And, and, and the principal
• 31:38
  reason that that I think that is again, not because there aren't
• 31:41
  like great brands and like people are highly experimental
• 31:45
  things like that. I think that one of the
• 31:49
  structural insights that I had, which I don't know why it took
• 31:52
  me so long to realize this, is the cost of Shopify is put into
• 31:59
  their payment processing fee. And this one single thing
• 32:06
  actually shapes the entire SAS ecosystem that's built around
• 32:09
  it. And I don't know how it took me
• 32:11
  so long to like realize this, but the appearance of how much
• 32:16
  Shopify costs shifts the structure of the rest of the
• 32:20
  market. At least that's my opinion.
• 32:22
  And, and I don't know, Jeremiah, you're nodding along.
• 32:27
  I'd be very curious what your take is.
• 32:29
  But I do think that that matters a lot.
• 32:32
  And I think that it is not, I'm not saying that Shopify is being
• 32:35
  malicious or anything like that in in this design, but I think
• 32:39
  that there's a massive education component that is like an very
• 32:43
  difficult and until it gets rectified, makes it impossibly
• 32:47
  difficult. Yeah.
• 32:49
  I think there's the that's exactly right because if you're,
• 32:51
  you know, Shopify Plus is what 2000 a month, I think it may be
• 32:54
  a little bit higher depending on what is for the software fee,
• 32:58
  but the bigger stores on Shopify Plus are actually paying 40,000.
• 33:02
  I think it's. That's the cap, right, I think.
• 33:04
  The cap, yeah, like that's what you're actually if you're $100
• 33:08
  million a year brand selling on Shopify, that's what you're
• 33:10
  actually paying for Shopify, but your subscription fee and that's
• 33:14
  why that's the payment fees, right.
• 33:16
  So that doesn't include the, the subscription, but you're
• 33:19
  actually paying, you know, over half a million a year for that
• 33:22
  piece of software. But when it, when it, you look
• 33:25
  at it as $2000 a month, it feels hard to pay more than a few $100
• 33:29
  for a, an app that plugs into that.
• 33:31
  I, I completely agree with that. And then if we look at the
• 33:34
  question of public companies, it's really just Clavio that's
• 33:38
  been able to start like really gain their foothold in this
• 33:41
  ecosystem and move out. And if you look at Clavio,
• 33:43
  they're actually not even that big in the e-mail space.
• 33:46
  That's not kind of unfair. They're, they're big, but
• 33:48
  they're not like, like MailChimp is actually twice the size of
• 33:51
  Clavio when they exited a couple of years ago.
• 33:54
  So it's just that that mark is so massive that there's enough
• 33:58
  there that I think you can start there.
• 34:00
  And I don't know what Clavio's numbers are now, but I would
• 34:02
  assume that most of their revenues actually not coming
• 34:04
  from the ecosystem anymore. So yeah, I just don't think
• 34:08
  it's, I don't think you could actually build a public company
• 34:12
  off of Shopify. What did?
• 34:14
  What do you guys think? Yeah, I mean, I think it's
• 34:16
  fascinating. I think that's, I think that's
• 34:18
  incredibly insightful. It's that structural argument
• 34:21
  that you, that you made is very similar to the one that Aaron
• 34:24
  was making about like just the how at least in this market too,
• 34:29
  people think about retention, right?
• 34:31
  Which is like they'll if they'll take a, if something is
• 34:36
  performance, 20% put in a dollar, you get $1.20, they'll
• 34:40
  do that in e-mail. You got to put in one penny and
• 34:44
  get $1000. Otherwise it's like not worth
• 34:47
  it. Even though it's, it's, it's
• 34:48
  like same conceptually. And so you know what, what we've
• 34:52
  always, what we've noticed when we've talked to other, other,
• 34:55
  other companies because we have like just had conversations
• 34:59
  because as Aaron mentioned, like our, our goal is like, we
• 35:01
  started this ecosystem because everything's so connected.
• 35:03
  So it's really easy to like get the data that's all formatted in
• 35:06
  a way we don't have to do like unique things for every CDP that
• 35:10
  we're integrating with because we're now it's Nike this time
• 35:12
  and now it's lift this time and it's like different data
• 35:15
  structure. And so that allowed us to make
• 35:17
  things that were very performant very quickly.
• 35:20
  But then you run into like the, the conversation gap on like the
• 35:24
  value prop is, is, is this huge ceiling that that we hid and we
• 35:29
  are finding ways around and stuff like that.
• 35:30
  But it's also something that we noticed is like is markedly less
• 35:35
  apparent when we go talk to other other players in the
• 35:39
  space, big companies that sell financial services or they, you
• 35:43
  know, the grocery delivery. It's just like, that's not the
• 35:46
  their conversation is like, oh, 3% on $1 billion budget.
• 35:50
  Great. And then here's what you can
• 35:52
  charge. Fine, it's a multiple of that.
• 35:55
  That's fine, Go let's do it. Like let's go right away.
• 35:57
  Even though it is e-mail or even though it is SMS, it's just to
• 36:01
  your point, it's just like people cannot imagine spending
• 36:06
  more on the SAS tool that is higher than either Shopify or
• 36:11
  Clavio. They're like, Nope, that's the
• 36:12
  top. And it's like, yeah, but yeah,
• 36:15
  it's really the bottom actually, to take the foundation.
• 36:17
  Everything else can like drive performance on top of those
• 36:19
  things that you could pay a lot of money for, yeah.
• 36:21
  Yeah, my hunch is that there's like, so there's, there's like
• 36:24
  this one structural thing related to price.
• 36:27
  I think the other one that is like not spoken about as much is
• 36:29
  that the E com Tam in the US has been shrinking for the last
• 36:34
  three years, which is like a really bad thing.
• 36:36
  And when you're living in a shrinking Tam, like willingness
• 36:41
  to spend is just really bad, right?
• 36:44
  So like you should look at E cotton growth rates before the
• 36:50
  pandemic and after the pandemic. But before the pandemic, it was
• 36:53
  like double digit growth rates. Ignore the pandemic because it
• 36:56
  like went straight up like and then it went straight down,
• 36:59
  right? But since then it's been at 4%.
• 37:03
  So it's like barely keeping up with inflation.
• 37:05
  And so, so it's like actually shrinking, like the behavior in
• 37:11
  in some ways is rational to the macro, right?
• 37:16
  Like, like I don't say any of this to say to like, like, like
• 37:20
  none of what I say is intended by, by any stretch of
• 37:23
  imagination to be like saying like, hey, this person is not
• 37:26
  acting rationally or this person is, or this person is being
• 37:28
  malicious. It's just like I think that the
• 37:30
  structural ramifications of this market are, are very are very
• 37:36
  different than other markets, right.
• 37:39
  So it's just something to think about.
• 37:41
  One more quick thing too, I think the, the thing that you
• 37:44
  highlighted DB that makes us such a good space to build in
• 37:47
  initially, the access to data, the cleanliness of it all that
• 37:50
  kind of stuff is also the thing that makes it so hard because
• 37:53
  it's so easy and for more competitors to come in, it's
• 37:56
  easy to switch to something else.
• 37:57
  Like there's, I've seen, I mean, looking at some of the logos on
• 38:02
  your site and work with some of those brands and know that they
• 38:05
  use everything like anything that you could possibly plug in,
• 38:09
  they're turning it on, they're trying it out.
• 38:10
  They're trying to see what works, what doesn't work.
• 38:12
  They're trying something new like that.
• 38:14
  And that's, I think that makes sense.
• 38:16
  I'm not saying they shouldn't do that, but it's easy to do that
• 38:19
  in a way that it's not in other industries.
• 38:21
  Yeah, liquid market are are liquid, you know.
• 38:24
  We've had a very interesting period for last month.
• 38:28
  We're like, we actually think we've an end of 1 product.
• 38:31
  Like yes, the data is available, but like TB and Zach should not
• 38:35
  be in e-commerce. They're just idiots who happen
• 38:37
  to be here. They should be running pricing
• 38:39
  teams at Uber. You know what I mean?
• 38:40
  Like they are like exceptional ML engineers and humans,
• 38:44
  whatever who happen to be in e-commerce, right?
• 38:48
  And happen to have found a problem and have like been
• 38:50
  tinkering on that problem for years.
• 38:52
  And the output of our modeling, which is super duper complex is
• 38:56
  very simple. And that's why I'm able to sell
• 38:57
  it, which is like, hey, guys, we're going to give you a list
• 39:00
  of people who want to hear from you.
• 39:02
  And our segments will be better and like we'll do a run off
• 39:06
  against anybody. But there are a lot of companies
• 39:08
  right now who are saying, ah, we also give segments and here's
• 39:11
  your top decile. Here's the next.
• 39:13
  And DB in a delightful way will be like anybody can put like
• 39:19
  numbers on like profiles, right? And so the problem that we fight
• 39:24
  with is like there's actually a lot of noise where it's not
• 39:28
  totally mind your point. It's not like, Oh yeah, this is
• 39:30
  like a competitor that does the same thing.
• 39:31
  It's like just people saying they do what we do.
• 39:34
  And so that is, you know, the natural issue of being in any
• 39:37
  ecosystem. And so like we are waiting a lot
• 39:41
  of these guys out and we're like, great.
• 39:42
  We'll just keep creating a lot of value and then growing.
• 39:46
  I think in terms of the like rich of the market dynamic, I
• 39:50
  will just say whatever I believe doesn't matter because we have
• 39:53
  been told by every VC I'm like old enough and I live in the Bay
• 39:57
  Area where I know like a lot of like amazing investors and
• 40:01
  they're like, yeah, I don't do commerce tech.
• 40:03
  And so like, it doesn't matter what I want to believe.
• 40:05
  Like they're a handful, right? But it's a reason not like what
• 40:09
  we're building is actually like very specifically.
• 40:11
  It is like this is our first vertical and in this vertical.
• 40:14
  You have an insane amount of divergent strategies.
• 40:17
  You have brands that send one e-mail a week and 15 emails a
• 40:20
  week and brands that have done well, Gmail brands that.
• 40:22
  And so the whole strategy is go build amazing products, build a
• 40:27
  global model and then port it to your point, consumer SAS or B to
• 40:31
  B or whatever, which is like higher willingness to pay,
• 40:35
  actually understands that budgets are fungible and that if
• 40:38
  I can get more dollars in retention than I can in
• 40:40
  performance, I will put more dollars in retention.
• 40:43
  We just need to do the work to live long enough, right, and
• 40:46
  build better products and better products and better products to
• 40:48
  get there. The one thing that I think is
• 40:51
  like really interesting is I suspect that you guys probably
• 40:57
  have like a lot of growth to be had at like as people catch on
• 41:05
  to the first wave of AI products that they start to use.
• 41:08
  And then what happens after that for, for, for two reasons. 1 is
• 41:15
  like AI product usage adoption rates are ridiculously high.
• 41:20
  And, and the second reason is that every one of those
• 41:24
  products, the rate at which they change in order to like retain
• 41:27
  their customers and or expand within them is also ridiculously
• 41:30
  high. And so I think like, you know,
• 41:34
  while consumer products is like a great vertical and was a great
• 41:38
  vertical and always will be for getting good data.
• 41:42
  I just think we happen to be in an era where there may be
• 41:44
  another vertical out there that is equally rich, equally
• 41:49
  interesting because, yeah, because like the, the, the like
• 41:53
  allure and the seductiveness of e-commerce is like the data is
• 41:57
  really good. I'm curious too for for you guys
• 42:01
  like what are what are your ambitions from here?
• 42:03
  I know we haven't really touched on that yet, but Aaron, you're
• 42:07
  talking about investors and stuff, so and I have no idea how
• 42:10
  you're capitalized all that. But I try to take over the world
• 42:14
  DVI think before we get into that.
• 42:16
  I you have a pretty good just in terms of the velocity of AI and
• 42:20
  Jeremiah will tell you where we're going and brazing and
• 42:22
  everything. But DV maybe like the thought
• 42:24
  are on the way back machine and like how companies are just like
• 42:27
  changing so quickly. Yeah, I mean, there's definitely
• 42:31
  a lot of companies that whose websites have changed very
• 42:35
  quickly and who now do a lot of agentic stuff.
• 42:41
  And I think there's lots of teams that are have built very
• 42:45
  successful looking rappers for LLMS and things like that.
• 42:49
  And so you know what, what I what I feel, what I feel is
• 42:55
  tough is if you, if you do something right now that
• 42:59
  delivers some value, but you could quad code it, vibe code it
• 43:04
  and get something that's like decent enough and it doesn't
• 43:06
  need to be accurate enough that it, that it matters.
• 43:08
  Then that's, that's, that's tough.
• 43:12
  But there's, you know, and so like, I think if I would think
• 43:14
  about this in like terms like the medical field, the medical
• 43:16
  space, it's like, I think it's hard right now to be like a
• 43:19
  nurse practitioner or AGP or something like that, like
• 43:22
  someone you is important to see. But like, there's lots of that.
• 43:25
  I don't think there is a fear of like AI replacing neurosurgeons
• 43:30
  and so and it. Isn't it?
• 43:33
  It already is. Most neurosurgery doesn't happen
• 43:35
  by hand, it happens from machine learning machines.
• 43:39
  There are surgical OK, I actually know we talked about.
• 43:43
  I don't know much about it. I'm the I'm the one out of the
• 43:46
  depth booga booga monkey brain Jack.
• 43:48
  But. So DVDV has a yeah.
• 43:50
  So yeah, DV has a PhD guys, just to.
• 43:53
  Like. As a point out.
• 43:55
  The the Yeah from medical school in the neurobiology department.
• 43:59
  The, the, and so the thing too is that like, I think that, that
• 44:05
  what we don't know about a lot of AI tooling and like 5 counts
• 44:08
  like that. It's like, what is the total
• 44:09
  cost to serve? I think that's something that's
• 44:10
  like not spoken about, which is like, if you now Claude cuts
• 44:13
  something in house, like you now are responsible for that thing.
• 44:16
  So what will really matter is like where do things need to
• 44:19
  have like reliability, scalability, you know,
• 44:21
  predictability? I think it's like really, really
• 44:23
  critical in theory. It's never been easier for our
• 44:26
  engineering team to have all the infrastructure around us to
• 44:31
  build our stuff. But we still use GCP, right?
• 44:34
  Because of scalability, reliability.
• 44:36
  And so I think there's like a lot of software aspects around
• 44:39
  those components that are like really, really critical.
• 44:41
  And I do think that a lot of like the the AI tools and AI
• 44:44
  inject tools, like it's like, what are they actually being
• 44:46
  used for? If they're like ways to bounce
• 44:48
  an idea off of something really quick and that required like a
• 44:51
  whole business intelligence dashboard thing and now you can
• 44:54
  kind of like make that on your own.
• 44:55
  I think that yeah, that stuff can be replaced.
• 44:57
  But like were things where huge amounts of expertise, huge
• 45:00
  amounts of strategy, huge amounts of all this sort of
• 45:02
  stuff that I really specialize. I think like that's actually
• 45:06
  what is what will kind of win out from this.
• 45:10
  And I'm going to take a real academic thing.
• 45:12
  There was a paper published in Science about Agenta coding
• 45:15
  tools from from developers a few weeks ago.
• 45:18
  And what they showed was that like, the adoption is huge
• 45:21
  amongst all these developers that are like looking at GitHub
• 45:23
  commits and stuff like that. And what they learned from the
• 45:26
  paper was that everyone's using it a lot more.
• 45:29
  It's only making senior devs more productive.
• 45:32
  Yes, that is for. Sure.
• 45:34
  So like it's it's, it's like junior devs are using it, the
• 45:37
  commits that have stuff with their clearly agenda stuff same,
• 45:41
  but like their output is not different.
• 45:44
  The output of the senior devs are like 2X of what it was
• 45:48
  before. And so to me that what I think
• 45:50
  about this whole space is like where where are the spaces where
• 45:53
  that specialty is key? Where are the neurosurgeons?
• 45:56
  Because the neurosurgeons will be two X Those are twice as
• 45:58
  many. They'll do 2 brains at the same
• 46:00
  time. You know what I mean?
• 46:00
  Like that's that's like the kind of world where it's going.
• 46:03
  And then where are the things where it's like, yeah, this is
• 46:05
  pretty good. Like I need to know this
• 46:06
  generally. Like I can probably vibe code
• 46:08
  this on my own and get itself because I don't need accurate
• 46:11
  enough a reliable scalable if that I can like just this.
• 46:13
  I can look at this once a month and it's good enough that I
• 46:15
  think is the place where like those things will be
• 46:18
  commoditized very quickly or replaced in house by their own
• 46:21
  teams. Yeah, DB, one thing I'm curious
• 46:26
  what your take on it is, is I think that that's correct.
• 46:29
  I also think that these adoption cycles are going to happen in
• 46:32
  very different time horizons by industry and by department,
• 46:36
  100%. So like one thing that I've been
• 46:40
  trying to tell my team without instilling the fear of God in
• 46:44
  them is like, because we're in cohort 1 and we're like adopting
• 46:48
  these very fast. And like in like this first
• 46:51
  cohort of companies, our company is going to change the fastest.
• 46:55
  But then I was in New York last week talking to a bunch of our
• 46:58
  customers and partners, things like that.
• 47:00
  They haven't even downloaded Clod.
• 47:02
  OK, So not that they won't, but the speed is like very
• 47:08
  different. And then within a given company
• 47:11
  across departments, the speed is very.
• 47:13
  Different. Like even within my own company,
• 47:18
  different departments are adopting at very different
• 47:19
  rates, right? I, I think that has to be
• 47:23
  somehow because like ultimately, like we are participating in
• 47:26
  capitalism, right? And so it's like, like the
• 47:29
  pragmatic thing here is like, we can all say like, hey, in the
• 47:33
  long term horizon, like everything is going to be done
• 47:36
  by anthropic, but it kind of doesn't matter because in the
• 47:38
  long term we're all dead anyway, right?
• 47:41
  So like that's like a not useful thing to say.
• 47:47
  And so I, I just wonder, given what you're describing, you
• 47:51
  marry like this idea of where do you need the depth of expertise
• 47:54
  with the fact that it's sort of like kinetics versus
• 47:58
  thermodynamics, right? It's like there's a
• 48:01
  thermodynamic problem, which is like, hey, this is like the
• 48:03
  state, but then the rate at which it happens is very is
• 48:05
  variable. Like how do you think about that
• 48:08
  for, for, for where we where you guys want to go to market?
• 48:12
  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's really great insight.
• 48:15
  And and I think that this, so, you know, Aaron mentioned that
• 48:20
  like we're thinking about, we are marching more and more
• 48:22
  upmarket and naively we thought about that purely from like a
• 48:26
  data perspective. And like he says like, oh, they
• 48:28
  have lots of data. From my perspective of machine
• 48:31
  learning engineer, it's, it's, it's because there's more
• 48:33
  variance in their customer base and because there's more
• 48:35
  variance in their customer base and how those customers are,
• 48:37
  they need to have a variety of outreach strategies and this
• 48:39
  that, you know, they have someone who signed up 10 seconds
• 48:41
  ago, someone signed up 10 years ago.
• 48:43
  But dynamics are very different versus if a company started one
• 48:46
  month ago, Everyone's basically the same.
• 48:49
  But to, to your point too, is that like when you have go up
• 48:53
  that scale, not only is there more variance in the data and
• 48:56
  stuff like that, but then like all the stakes are a lot higher.
• 48:59
  And to your point, which I'd like the, the penetration is
• 49:01
  going to be a lot slower. Like shop brands are very
• 49:04
  willing to connect data and to share it and to put AI tooling
• 49:08
  on it And have Claude read half of that stuff like Nike's not
• 49:12
  going to do that, let alone like a bank, let alone, you know, a
• 49:17
  government entity, right? And so like, like, I think that
• 49:20
  as you being in the two point, that cohort, one of like where
• 49:24
  we can adopt it, where we can find that sort of leverage.
• 49:26
  And then it's like figure out what are the pockets even in a,
• 49:29
  in a quote, UN quote faster moving space, which is like
• 49:31
  first, like a lot of these tech companies and stuff like that,
• 49:33
  smaller brands and it's like larger brands, even larger
• 49:36
  organizations, even different markets.
• 49:39
  We eventually want to help serve communication across channels
• 49:42
  for all sorts of companies. The last to move will probably
• 49:45
  be the medical system, as I because I've experienced in that
• 49:48
  space. It's just like super cake for
• 49:51
  lots and lots of excellent reasons.
• 49:53
  And so they're adopting of like intelligence for communication
• 49:56
  is going to be the last frontier.
• 49:58
  And so The thing is like, how can we position ourselves with?
• 50:01
  And it's not just because of like it's a slow moving thing.
• 50:04
  They need them. They need that they have the
• 50:05
  highest level security trust. The stakes are so high.
• 50:08
  So you have to build up that case, which isn't just like
• 50:11
  performance, it's also like it's also the reputation.
• 50:14
  It's also the stability. Like all of that has to proceed,
• 50:17
  you know, to get a contract with Mount Sinai, you, you can't just
• 50:20
  be like, yeah, we did this for this brand, all right, Mount
• 50:24
  Sinai, like hop on board. And it's like, no, they're going
• 50:26
  to be like Nike. Then it was Bank of America.
• 50:28
  Then it was like, and then all of a sudden, like the hospital
• 50:30
  like, OK, that's interesting. You're serving all these sorts
• 50:32
  of things. So that's another way that I
• 50:33
  think about it too. Richard, from a much less smart
• 50:38
  perspective, I feel like at the end of the day, like what is the
• 50:41
  job to be done that you're building your company around?
• 50:43
  And if our products are around, sometimes we're building
• 50:45
  products that should disappear in in a month or in a year,
• 50:48
  right? It's like, I just heard a great
• 50:49
  podcast with Brett Taylor from Sierra, and I think it was Jack
• 50:53
  Altman's and it was like, Hey, how do you get a team to be
• 50:55
  motivated knowing that in two years everything they're
• 50:58
  building is going to disappear, right?
• 51:00
  And so we will build stuff to make it easier for our customers
• 51:03
  today, brands to drive a ton of value.
• 51:07
  But what is the durable thing we're building?
• 51:10
  And at the end of the day, it's like, are we building?
• 51:12
  Are we the best in the world at helping you stack, rank your
• 51:15
  audience in a channel? And if we are good things will
• 51:18
  happen. And what tools we use and what
• 51:20
  pace people adopt it over time, we will continue to win because
• 51:23
  it is like a very, very hard problem to solve.
• 51:26
  And it is like the only problem we are solving.
• 51:30
  And then like, we'll turn people, but we should just
• 51:33
  continue to be ticking up and growing.
• 51:34
  I was. Just going to say, I think it's
• 51:35
  really interesting. If you look at like just how
• 51:37
  fast Anthropic is shipping, they're solving a new problem
• 51:41
  all the time and sort of like the small startups kind of need
• 51:45
  to too. Whether it's because Gorgeous
• 51:47
  Anthropic just shipped something that does what you do natively,
• 51:51
  or it's just being adaptive to what the market's actually
• 51:55
  asking for what the job to be done is, right?
• 51:58
  I remember with my first brand, I used to I hated this when I
• 52:02
  was running my first brand, this was like the bane of of my
• 52:05
  existence. It was.
• 52:06
  Horrible our products. Could be illegally downloaded.
• 52:09
  So as soon as we had like 500 to 1000 customers on anyone
• 52:12
  product, it was super abundant and it was available for free
• 52:16
  online and we had to make something else right.
• 52:19
  And I think that that was kind of good because it forced us to
• 52:23
  adapt all the time. We had to be doing something
• 52:25
  new. I have an e-commerce brand now,
• 52:27
  our best selling product. We have a little bit of
• 52:29
  distribution, but you know, we have a hair product like
• 52:32
  everyone else has been our best selling product for over a year,
• 52:35
  right. I don't really want too many
• 52:38
  people to know about it because it's not particularly special or
• 52:40
  unique. But you know, that's a luxury,
• 52:44
  right? To have a problem that you're
• 52:45
  solving for your customers that you can continue to solve and
• 52:49
  not have to update or that. But yeah, I wonder if that's
• 52:53
  sort of the the muscle here that that needs to be worked, being
• 52:58
  adaptive and solving the problem that's in front of you, getting
• 53:00
  the job done as opposed to building something that's going
• 53:05
  to last, what, three years, five years?
• 53:07
  And you're going to have some incredible foresight, a crystal
• 53:10
  ball to figure out what that problem is, right?
• 53:13
  Yeah, I think Sierra is taking the position that we're not, we
• 53:17
  don't, we don't need to know because we have a team of
• 53:19
  forward deployed people and they'll just keep asking.
• 53:25
  That's like one way to do that, right?
• 53:29
  But yeah, I, I, yeah, the market's evolving in like a, in
• 53:32
  like a very, in like a very special way right now.
• 53:35
  So wait, hold on, There was someone asked like Jeremiah, did
• 53:40
  you ask about the capitalization plans over time?
• 53:42
  Yeah, just look at what the yeah, what you guys are aiming
• 53:44
  towards. I mean is it the bootstrap to
• 53:48
  you know, 10 million a year profit?
• 53:50
  Is it going public? What is it?
• 53:51
  Yeah, I'll give you the TLDR's like, and this is dumb, but we
• 53:55
  want to go public and it's not because like how cool to be on a
• 53:58
  magazine or make more money. It's like we should think we are
• 54:00
  solving an extraordinarily important problem that is very
• 54:03
  hard. And so like if you're not aiming
• 54:06
  that way, it's like we can do a hackneyed B plus version that
• 54:10
  will like make some cash. But so like we've raised from
• 54:13
  awesome investors who got Sugar Capital, Javelin Venture
• 54:16
  Partner, Super Angel, like we, we've got B partners, like a
• 54:19
  bunch of good investors. We are raising more like we need
• 54:23
  to. We're like, we've actually cut
• 54:24
  into our burn very meaningfully. And like we're building.
• 54:26
  We, we, we basically invested a bunch to find the machine.
• 54:29
  And we're not like officially throwing gas on the fire, but
• 54:33
  like we're pretty close right now.
• 54:34
  And so now it's like really time to scale, scale channels, right?
• 54:39
  And then over time scaling the different verticals.
• 54:42
  So the, the ambition is there. Yeah, like pretty excited about
• 54:48
  this journey. Guys, I'm dying to ask because
• 54:52
  this is somewhat consistent across all of the conversations
• 54:55
  we have. No one, no one is bullish on
• 54:58
  ECOM. And I get it like there, ECOM is
• 55:01
  suffering. If you think about the numbers
• 55:02
  that Rashad was talking about, it makes sense.
• 55:05
  But what are your thoughts on why we're all building here
• 55:09
  apart from just, it's easy, right?
• 55:12
  Because like, don't get me wrong, it being easy, it being
• 55:15
  like somewhere where there are early adopters is, is definitely
• 55:18
  a good reason to build here. But I don't know, I feel like
• 55:21
  I'm just seeing different news to you guys sometimes.
• 55:24
  I just saw this recently. Quince is a superstar, unique
• 55:29
  business that's been out for a while.
• 55:32
  And then as they load her with all their brands, yeah.
• 55:36
  I just wonder. Why we do it?
• 55:38
  I ran a brand for a decade, so I'm not pathetic to how painful
• 55:41
  is to run a brand. And I'm just like now an old
• 55:43
  person in e-commerce. Like I don't know anything else.
• 55:46
  Once we move outside of e-commerce, Stevie and Zach are
• 55:48
  going to fire me and I'm going to be happy again.
• 55:51
  I don't know if it's cool. It's like there is such joy in
• 55:54
  like actually that like interaction with the consumer.
• 55:57
  That's candidly it for me. Like the BDB side.
• 56:00
  I could take her leave. I've missed the like brand side.
• 56:02
  It is so much fun to run a brand.
• 56:04
  It's exhausting. It's all the things like
• 56:06
  actually getting in touch with people and building something
• 56:09
  that somebody wants. It's like, it's pretty awesome.
• 56:12
  Yeah, I think, I think to me, you know, there there was the
• 56:15
  ease of, of integration, the ease of, of getting the data,
• 56:20
  all that kind of stuff. But you know, as a machine
• 56:24
  learning company, ultimately Rishab, you're going to
• 56:28
  understand because this is some nerdy reinforce of learning
• 56:30
  talk. It's like what we're doing is
• 56:31
  we're like really understanding and evaluating tons of
• 56:34
  strategies, collecting policies for reinforcement learning.
• 56:37
  What are the policies of brands are doing for a marketing
• 56:39
  perspective? As Aaron said, like that's like
• 56:42
  I e-mail once a week, I e-mail 10 times a week.
• 56:44
  It's like the diversity of strategies in the space for
• 56:48
  communication is enormous. It's much, there's much more
• 56:53
  variance there than in any other market.
• 56:57
  And that allows you to vary not quickly.
• 57:02
  It's, it's not quick and it's not easy.
• 57:03
  It allows you to understand the bit like people's behaviors on
• 57:08
  these channels much faster. And so like, imagine if we did
• 57:12
  this from a a very sticky, I'll do the medical thing.
• 57:15
  If if we're handling hospital communications, it's like how
• 57:19
  they don't have variants in this.
• 57:21
  They've done this thing. And it's because some IT person
• 57:23
  said that this is the way to do it.
• 57:24
  Like you've learned so slowly in that case, I mean, you could
• 57:27
  build a great business and you could have every hospital in the
• 57:29
  country using your stuff like that.
• 57:30
  But like you're not going to understand that that space, that
• 57:33
  policy space at all. And that that to me is, is, is
• 57:36
  what it is. It's now what's challenging is
• 57:38
  that you have investors who are like, we don't invest in that
• 57:40
  space and all this kind of stuff like smart tech and but I'm just
• 57:43
  like, yeah, but like you, you can understand the state of this
• 57:46
  system so much faster here, so much faster than in any other
• 57:50
  possible 1. And so I think from our
• 57:53
  perspective, it's just like to do that to serve to make a
• 57:56
  difference, to help our brands, but like to always know that
• 57:58
  like that all of that learning is going to is going to help
• 58:03
  transfer, right? It's just like, imagine if
• 58:05
  you're building a big foundation model, it's like, where do you
• 58:08
  start? Where do you first start sucking
• 58:10
  up data from? Probably Wikipedia or something
• 58:12
  like that, right? And it, and they're just like,
• 58:13
  that's the place that you first start to then go, knowing that
• 58:16
  eventually you're going to have to like scrape redhead and
• 58:19
  scrape all these other places. But it's just like, might as
• 58:21
  well start at this place that is like centralized human knowledge
• 58:24
  and then build out from there to get all the hard corners.
• 58:27
  And like, this is kind of one of those places, at least in like
• 58:29
  where we play, where this is, there's like there's so much
• 58:32
  information. Yeah, and Jack, I want to be
• 58:34
  very clear about this because I don't want to be
• 58:36
  mischaracterized. I'm not negative on econ, OK?
• 58:39
  I want to be like super duper clear about this because I
• 58:42
  actually, I, I love ads. I love like there are very few
• 58:46
  things that like literally run the economy of the world, right?
• 58:50
  It's like compute ads, payments, OK and commerce has all of
• 58:55
  those. So and then everything else is
• 58:57
  like a derivative of that, right?
• 58:59
  And so the, the I want to be very clear, the problem is not
• 59:04
  the problem is it is hard to make A to build a big B2B
• 59:09
  company serving ecom purchase, which is not the same thing as
• 59:14
  being negative on ecom. Those are not the same thing.
• 59:17
  And and it's not for anyone's. And the single most important
• 59:20
  thing I want to emphasize is not anyone's fault.
• 59:22
  It's not be any malicious intent, none of that.
• 59:25
  It is just like there are structural things, the way they
• 59:27
  are set up that leads to that outcome, which is why investors
• 59:31
  don't like it, right? Because an investor's job is not
• 59:33
  to say they like or don't like ECOM.
• 59:35
  An investor's job is to return capital on the capital they give
• 59:39
  you, which means you've got to accrue an incredible amount of
• 59:43
  revenue. And so like I, I want to be
• 59:47
  careful about the language because I get in trouble anyway.
• 59:52
  And and like this is like a great way to get in trouble, but
• 59:54
  it like, I would never say that I'm negative on ECOM.
• 59:58
  Now I do think and I don't I don't want to over share
• 1:00:01
  anything, but I think like given it is hard to make money selling
• 1:00:05
  to merchants, I think that one of the principal questions that
• 1:00:08
  it begets the great founder is what business models are there
• 1:00:13
  that don't require that in order to make a lot of money while
• 1:00:16
  still serving all of the different types of people who
• 1:00:19
  you want to serve? Right.
• 1:00:21
  And that is actually. The job of a founder is to
• 1:00:24
  figure that out. Just to be clear.
• 1:00:27
  So it is not the merge, like it is not the E Comm merchants
• 1:00:29
  problem that we need to solve that problem, right?
• 1:00:33
  Like that is actually our problem as as like as like
• 1:00:36
  founders in the B2B space. So like, yeah, I just want to be
• 1:00:40
  clear about the fact that I'm not negative on E Comm.
• 1:00:43
  Where should we? We had a call this morning where
• 1:00:46
  the investor was a dream because her immediate reaction was like,
• 1:00:49
  oh, you guys should just lower your prices, serve more brands
• 1:00:53
  and then cover more service area more like yeah, the problem is
• 1:00:57
  you need to have enough capital to be able to do that versus
• 1:01:01
  getting to a self funding motion.
• 1:01:03
  And so it is, I think whether you're and you're not down on E
• 1:01:06
  com, it still goes back to like you can go build an awesome cash
• 1:01:11
  flowing business in this ecosystem.
• 1:01:14
  The trick is figuring out a venture scalable business.
• 1:01:16
  And one's not better or worse, but it's like you got to be very
• 1:01:20
  careful before you go down that path without having thought
• 1:01:22
  through the next step and the next step and the next step.
• 1:01:25
  Yeah. And I, I think I've said this, I
• 1:01:27
  know I've said this before. I, I have no plans of getting
• 1:01:30
  out of the space at all. I love it.
• 1:01:32
  I'm also not trying to build a venture scale business.
• 1:01:34
  So I I think it's a different. You seem very happy.
• 1:01:38
  To. I mean, I love what I do.
• 1:01:41
  I love who I work with, but I yeah, I'm not trying to.
• 1:01:45
  If I was trying to go build a billion dollar company, I would.
• 1:01:48
  I'd be thinking of it very differently.
• 1:01:50
  How do you guys see these public companies that are acquiring a
• 1:01:53
  bunch of, I think we just saw another one, Alia get snatched
• 1:01:57
  up for 30 to 60 million or something.
• 1:02:00
  How do you guys like what's the Strat here?
• 1:02:03
  Why are they? Why are these acquisitions
• 1:02:05
  happening? My my sense from Alia is what
• 1:02:08
  amazing team like truly building in public.
• 1:02:10
  So you think about like the 15 year old like lines, not dots
• 1:02:14
  posts from Mark Suster about investing is like you could
• 1:02:17
  literally see every you could see the line of Alea So great
• 1:02:20
  team building a private people like you talk to any customer or
• 1:02:23
  any agency who work with them and they're like, Oh yeah.
• 1:02:25
  What I love about these guys is they just go the extra mile.
• 1:02:29
  So like, I think that's as much about like getting an amazing
• 1:02:32
  group would be. My guess is like the product is
• 1:02:35
  good. I'm sure the cash flow, I'm sure
• 1:02:36
  you can make a good business case for AY Alia.
• 1:02:39
  What we're hearing more just Aqua hires left and right.
• 1:02:43
  Like we've had companies approach us and like not with
• 1:02:46
  anything super firm, but like really, really good businesses
• 1:02:49
  and our answers like look, we're not looking for a job, we're not
• 1:02:51
  looking to be Aqua hire. We we're going to keep building
• 1:02:53
  and we'll do that. I think it's like with very, I
• 1:02:57
  think it's a buyer's market if you want to go get like tools
• 1:02:59
  and talent, but it's a buyer's market because everybody's
• 1:03:01
  afraid that even in all that I could get disrupted immediately
• 1:03:04
  by some, what if somebody put a wrapper on, right?
• 1:03:07
  Like isn't it just easy to do that?
• 1:03:08
  And so I think the like hard part for an entrepreneur for
• 1:03:12
  like a not the entrepreneur, but like for the team of the
• 1:03:15
  business is to go build something that's actually
• 1:03:17
  durable, that is not a wrapper on, that is not easily
• 1:03:22
  replaceable, right? And like that has some level of
• 1:03:26
  network effects or some level differentiated, just you have to
• 1:03:30
  build something that's more durable.
• 1:03:31
  I think, and this is like, I honestly view it as as my
• 1:03:36
  primary job at the company is, is, you know, helping, you know,
• 1:03:41
  besides leading with Aaron, it's like helping serve vision and
• 1:03:44
  then knowing like my expertise in machine learning, stuff like
• 1:03:46
  that of like knowing very quickly what can become
• 1:03:49
  commoditized and what can't, because I think the assumption
• 1:03:51
  right now is that everything can be commoditized.
• 1:03:53
  And that's not true, but a large part of it is.
• 1:03:55
  And we don't know which parts of it are.
• 1:03:57
  And I think that's the big thing that makes all this big scary
• 1:04:01
  thing like, and I think that what you have to do as a
• 1:04:06
  founders like really understand given the space where it is.
• 1:04:09
  And like that's honestly what I think a lot like we've I've
• 1:04:11
  actively said, no, we're not building these features even
• 1:04:14
  though I know that we would have near universal adoption amongst
• 1:04:17
  your customers because I am convinced they'll be fully
• 1:04:19
  commoditized within three to six months.
• 1:04:22
  You know, those brands build it, clayberry releases it like
• 1:04:23
  whatever and they're like they're really shiny and maybe
• 1:04:26
  they do deliver some value. But I'm just like, we're not
• 1:04:28
  going to spend all of our engineering effort on these like
• 1:04:31
  commoditized things when our brands suffer big problems that
• 1:04:34
  need big help on that are really, really, really hard to
• 1:04:36
  do that requires and ML expertise and domain expertise.
• 1:04:40
  And I'm just like, yeah, this sucks.
• 1:04:42
  They're yelling at us, they're churning, but like we're slowly
• 1:04:45
  cracking, you know, building the foundations over here, even
• 1:04:50
  though like, yeah, people are signing up for this and they're
• 1:04:52
  like doing that. But I'm like, it's all going to
• 1:04:53
  happen. There's going to be 500 hundred
• 1:04:56
  dollar a month options for that, those feature sets like we can't
• 1:04:58
  build over there. And there's a great business for
• 1:05:01
  somebody to go out there and build those commoditized things,
• 1:05:04
  make some money. 100%. And do well.
• 1:05:07
  And then just rinse and repeat. Yeah, awesome guys.
• 1:05:11
  All right, I gotta run. Actually.
• 1:05:13
  This was amazing. Thank you guys for joining.
• 1:05:15
  Great. Thank you guys for fun.
• 1:05:17
  Yeah.