Two Years in the SaaS Trenches – Jordan Gal – MicroConf Starter 2017

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0:14thank you guys welcome to micro conch for the first timers welcome to the family for the people returning welcome back it's nice to see all of our internet friends outside of like a zoom screen alright so here's what we're gonna do we are gonna look at the past two years of my company's experience we're gonna look at effectively going from starter to growth right two years ago things were just getting started little bit of revenue and we've gone through the past two years and kind of gotten to a you know a more self-sustaining place but instead of just showing you my highlight reel I mean trust me I would like to stand up

0:58here and tell you about how amazingly things have gone and how it's just a rocket ship up into the right and it's all due to my towering intellect and skill but it's a not true be it's also not useful right you guys didn't come here to listen to someone's highlight reel you wanted to learn so we're gonna look at some of the things that didn't go well some failures and some successes and how oftentimes they were intertwined and one led to the other and then back again and back again so before we do that let me say hi I am Jordan ghoul I live in Portland Oregon

1:35with my wife and three kids any portlanders here there we go that's always a good contingent very nice and during the week and oftentimes more standard just you know my clock hasn't started so I don't know if everyone wants me to be the entire day for just you know I run a company called kart hook so it's a software company that helps ecommerce companies that sell physical products make more money we have two products our first product that we launched a little over two years ago is a cart abandonment app so what that does is the checkout page of an e-commerce store we have a little bit of code on that page and when

2:15a visitor types in their email address it captures the email address right away and if they don't complete the purchase that we considered abandoned we trigger email campaign designed to bring them back so what we're doing effectively is recovering abandoned carts we're making more money for the ecommerce store owner that was our first product our second product is what you see on the left it's a Shopify checkout funnel what is it's a customizable one page checkout with post purchase upsells for Shopify stores so all of our products are aimed very specifically trying to make our customers more money I also host the podcast with my very good friend Brian

2:50castle any listeners hmm there we go sweet yeah check that out that's where we like cry to one another once a week about what's you know how things are going and what's going well what we're learning and what what you're doing what you're facing and so on so check that out if you want and there's a tradition in micro Conniff of showing your kids the first time I gave a talk I was not aware of this tradition and I felt like a horrible person I will not make that mistake again and the truth is a lot of what I want to talk about today relates to perseverance

3:23grit kind of going through fire and a lot of the ability to do that comes from your purpose while you're doing this you're why for lack of a better term I have it easy my why like throws food at me at the table and like poops and diapers so that's my motivation I don't have to work very hard to get it because it's right in front of me all day all right here's a funny word when we see this word we a lot happens we project onto it our own ideas values burgundy Porsche Cayenne SUVs with tinted windows whatever you you know whatever you have you project it onto that and it's a good

4:06thing to strive for it's the American Way but the other thing this word does is it it can blind us and what I mean by that is we often we listen interviews we read blog posts we watch videos and we look at people that we admire that we consider successful literally full of success and it blinds us to what they went through to get it we look at them as how could I ever possibly do that I'm just not that as good as they are at what what they're doing and I don't think that's very healthy I don't think it's very helpful either so this is another word we also look at and

4:46this we see very negatively and what I want to talk about today is not just failure but how it coordinates with success it's really just what does the real story look like what's the actual what's happening behind what people see so instead of the highlight reel let's look at what really happens and what we're gonna do is we're gonna look at our journey in MRR our monthly recurring revenue as we've experienced these successes and failures and I'm not showing the real number because I don't see any advantage it so you're just gonna have to project but the the growth trajectory is the important part okay you're ready for the first fail alright

5:29cool first fail finding a co-founder doesn't sound like a fail Ben our CTO like my technical other half a lot of this talk really wouldn't be possible without him but how we connected that was a total fail what really happened is that my first co-founder left me I failed to grow the business to a sufficiently interesting place fast enough so that when he got a great job offer he took it and I couldn't really blame him just wasn't there so out of that that's how I originally found Ben and it here's how it happened right so you got a failure someone leaves you sucks but then

6:17there's always something else around the corner this is an email from drip letting me know that someone with the email been at skinny and bald com signed up for the lead magnet that I had on the site at the time so first of all the email address gets your attention right so back then man I didn't have that much to work with so what something else came in like a lead like this I didn't just say oh cool another email subscriber no I I looked into it so when I looked into that email address and that blog and who that person was I a real person named van Fisher he's in

6:52New York he's looking at ecommerce I hit him up on Twitter I email him we get him on the phone so turns out he's kind of looking to reverse-engineer my product but it really is doing research yeah I wish I appreciated a respect that so within a week I'm in LA I'm meeting with Ben Ben happened to be there renting a house for the month of his friends or something to basically like hacker pat it out we meet in person we go out for drinks we have coffee we just talk for a few days in LA and we hit it off and by the end of those few days we

7:29have a plan for Ben to come up to Portland Oregon to work with me for a month to see if maybe maybe we give us thing a go that's how I met my co-founder right one guy leaves me another person signs up with a funny email address and the lesson here that I take out of it is man in the beginning be aggressive if you're trying to get something to go from basically nothing to something any little bread crumb you find you jump on so that was that was an example that kind of you know the rest this talk really wouldn't be possible without that and I could have just let

8:03it go by as lead and instead I kind of went after it co-founder joins all right a little bit of progress okay ready for the next fail the ultimate microcon fail so we raise money which sounds cool but what's the truth behind raising money at least in our situation usually raising money comes along with like a press release and like you know feeling super cool at dinner parties and talking too loudly in coffee shops about your investor so everyone else can hear though but what's the truth the truth is we failed to grow the business sufficiently quickly and therefore needed to raise money I see that as a

8:48fail now not really sorry we did what we had to do but the lesson is here and this is a nice email to wake up to I hope everyone gets emails like this I want more demos that's two it says hi Jordan I'm interested in discussing a potential acquisition of Carter for our strategic roadmap would you like to discuss yeah I do I do want to discuss so that email didn't then lead to anything right the price tag wasn't sufficient if it was I'd be having a very different talk right now right Rob what what it did do is it gave me the equivalent of this guy

9:33right maybe bigger maybe for work often it may be more excited and the the coincidence was right around this time I went to New York to visit my friends and my family and I go hang out with my buddies from college who mostly in finance and have done pretty well for themselves and I'm having lunch with one of them and I'm telling how are things going well how's the family Pablo has this software business you got going on so I start talking about oh it's okay it's you know if Emma's co-founder things are kind of coming along and well slow but we got this acquisition offer

10:06and that kind of you know pique his interest effectively what he said was man don't sell it's too early like go for maybe raise some money if you do I'm in alright that's interesting then I met with some other friends for dinner and then the next day and then the same thing kept coming up like yeah that'd be cool I'd throw in so what's a good bootstrapper to do but betray everything that you obviously just so look the fail is that we didn't grow fast enough the the success is that this this email and this interest in this this energy around the potential acquisition was at least

10:45someone being interested led to an opportunity and I took that opportunity we did raise money and ever since then it's been so easy it has not been easy but there's a lesson here this is probably my fate my favorite lesson that I have learned over the past two years and that is when you see a little opportunity you can turn that into a bigger opportunity and this has happened repeated it's happened so many times that I'm Nishant to look for it if I'm talking to a customer and they're telling me about oh yeah I have this great Facebook Ads person I imagine the Facebook Ads I do

11:26not let that go by I dig in on that and I say can you introduce me to them because I see maybe there's a larger opportunity partnering with that person find the customers to them doing content something so these little tiny things you can parlay especially in the early days you get a little tidbit and you can turn to something bigger so I think not enough people are aggressive enough about these opportunities that come along they see it out it's okay one person or it's one thing or one deal another example is in the beginning when we didn't have many integrations and I'll talk about iterations in a bit

12:00a customer would come to us and say I want to work with your platform but you guys don't integrate with EDD we'll commerce something and we'd say well if you have a contact over at that company maybe connect us and then all of a sudden I'd be talking to the owner of EDD who happens to be an awesome guy and that we would do an integration and then a case study so it would just come from this little tiny thing of someone cake saying you don't have an integration can you help me and then parlaying that into something bigger all right little bit more starting to go in the right

12:30direction ready fit ready for the next bill okay our next fail this is how we built a flywheel if you guys listen to the podcast you've heard Rob and Mike talked previously about a flywheel something that kind of runs on its own and helps you acquire customers ideally at an accelerating rate and starts to just kind of have a life of its own and it kicks out customers this is what we built but how we built it was a complete failure so here is a little humble pie for me right now this is me talking at microcon two years ago about how we built an outbound sales process and at the time I

13:09was filmed pretty damn good about our process I had this whole thing worked out we'd go to built with it gives you sites and the technologies they use we'd find websites that we could integrate with we'd send it over to a VA who would get contact info and qualify the site we'd send it over to another VA who would load that up into outbound sales email software like lead fuse or something like in and then at first I would do the demos and eventually hand it off the demo so I had this beautifully orchestrated thing and it wasn't expensive I didn't need to hire full-time it was like five dollars an

13:42hour here and then seven dollars an hour here in like $15 an hour for the demos and it was working I was like wow I figured something out I talked about it feeling pretty good go home stops working completely sucks I thought I was like oh this is part of the part of why we raise the money I was like look I have this thing I know I know how to acquire customers unfortunately we were talking to customers of one platform Volusion who are usually smaller businesses so we were talking directly to the owner the decision maker and we got them on the phone and then

14:11you know you give me a decision-making on the phone um sell the hell out of that thing and that worked the second we went up market to Magento stores and larger stores couldn't get to the decision maker stopped working basically what we needed was a much more expensive sales person and then that falls apart when your average revenue per user is 80 bucks total failure what are you gonna do at this point we're like okay what what's next so what came out of this was this innovations not just integrations deep integrations so what you're looking at here is the is the account of a recharge apps customer recharge is a

14:54very popular Shopify app for recurring billing they have their own checkout page and I met the founder through one of these you don't integrate can you please integrate and then connect it to the founder and they they were looking for something like this to offer their customers because their customers have wanted it so the deal we made was let's do a full integration let's pre build our JavaScript into all of your checkout pages by default and all the user the recharge customer has to do is create a Karthik account copy paste their Karthik ID into that little field and hit activate and they're done they're on

15:26board so easy to use more importantly every single recharge customer sees that when they log into their accounts it's the only card abandonment option so what do you think that does that just just sends this leads every day over and over we've done this with recharge we've done this enough a company called crate joy that has taken off big time in the subscription space so this is our ideal what this does is it created a flywheel where we didn't really have to do that much work to gain customers and what I'll talk about in a little a little bit is our second product and we would not have

16:07been able to undertake that second product if it wasn't for this because that allowed us to focus on another product while the first one just kept growing so the lesson here sorry you just gave a talk about how awesome you are a tap on sales stops working what do you do you just find another way I mean you sit down maybe walk around the block have a beer take a deep breath and then you find another way all right here we go right we got we got integrations we had some of the outbound sales now the integrations starting to work so things are starting to move faster in the right

16:44direction ready for the next fail our next fail was was uncovering and creating a really hot new product the way that came about was extremely painful so that's a diamond but you know do you know what I'm alluding to as a shiny shiny object so we got I don't want to say distracted our attention was pulled toward this other product what happened was we had enough people asking for an integration with Shopify for a cart abandonment app but first we kind of held off on it we thought it's too crowded to price-sensitive eventually we just capitulated cuz we just kept having people asking for it in our experience

17:32integrating with Shopify we bumped up against something what we bumped up against was that Shopify this amazing platform they just IPO they're worth five billion dollars they're like the hottest thing in e-commerce but they have this have a quirk in their system where the checkout page is locked down you can't customize your checkout page it's just is what it is the way shopsite presents it to you you might add your logo but that's it and in my time running my e-commerce business that's what I did before cart hook my two brothers and I we built up and sold any cars coming that sold physical products that's kind of how I

18:06got into the software side of things to be in with in that experience we had three roles my younger brother was excuse me my older brother responsible for bringing traffic I was responsible for converting traffic my younger brother was responsible for everything that happened after the sale fulfillment customer service and so on so in my time focused on optimizing conversions I spent an enormous amount of time learning and taking action on the checkout process so when I saw this it kind of didn't make sense me this super popular platform can't do anything I bet if you could optimize the checkout process you could make people more money

18:44and that was the kind of genesis of the of the product idea so we said you know it was not an easy decision we talked internally should we take this on are we gonna you know split our attention is like you know it's like very dangerous proposition right we're not quite profitable yet we're growing nicely should we really take our eye off the ball yes and it's not a black screen that is those are the dark times the process of creating and launching this product was a Greek tragedy and comedy wrapped up into pain and like fire how else to say this would look like those

19:32six months hurt so much this was the most challenging six months of my career ever I just sat there I'm not technical right so I I'm cheerleading and I'm helping with the product and what you know what should happen and why and the jobs to be done so I'm giving my perspective but I'm kind of watching not only that after we built the whole thing four months right at the time of launch Shopify basically let us know that we were using the wrong API and we needed to rewrite the whole thing again to adjust use a different API so right when we finally got to the point where okay

20:08finally we're finally here just had to start over again so it was seriously painful but what we did is we were convinced that this was the right product and if you go to car TOCOM slash checkout what you will see is this checkout product live on our site and being offered to the public and this thing's hot I mean I you know that it's not many times in your career that you build something and you don't even need to tell anyone the fact that it exists just creates this momentum and I haven't really I think I've done it once and one other time in my career in 15 years and

20:50now this it's happening again and it took a long time to get there but man it feels good to deal with all that failure and then finally get to a good place the lesson here is at some point and I'll speak specifically to people who are CEOs there was a lot of tension internally in the company between myself my co-founder our tech team is you know we're just dealing with things and working really hard and just not making progress and that creates tension it required for me to just stick with it and cheerlead and the reason I did that is because my gut says this is the right

21:34thing yes a lot of that came from talking to customers and potential customers that we were on the right track but the lesson is if you really believe if your gut says go then stick with it man do not do not quit on it all right finally out in the market finally pick and momentum back up so that is March 2017 at the end that's last month so pain and then okay finally we're getting somewhere you ready for the next fail the next fail is how we became the premium market the premium product in the market sounds awesome it is awesome now but how we got there

22:17was not on purpose here's what happened we offer this product several month to go for 97 bucks a month and what happened was we got flooded with signups and that sounds cool the problem was we ran really fast into that just ba-bang rough anyone knows the story last year I ran into a glass wall in micro cough during dinner very painful people won't let me live it down this was the business equivalent man we just walked right into this wall and what that means is our product wasn't ready we didn't have the documentation wouldn't have the onboarding a checkout product has zero room for error you if there's anything

22:58wrong if the email validation shipping validation not perfect on mobile if there's anything wrong you cost people money and they go back so we had all these sign ups and then the way I put it is people would come in sign up and we would place them on a conveyor belt and just chop them up and just torture and skin them and they would come out bleeding and begging for mercy and saying I am done I'm cancelling I can't I can't do it and that's sucked because on the front end you're like oh my god we finally hit it this is it and then as it happened it

23:35was not nearly as pretty so what did we do what we needed to do is we needed to slow everything down we could not handle the Sun so we needed personal relationships we needed to work more closely with people understand what's wrong help them not just you know have our intercom chat explode and not be able to handle it and make everyone unhappy so what we did I thought it was logical we rate we tripled our prices to 300 bucks a month and for the shop Shopify market that is genuinely expensive and we put up another barrier you can't sign up without talking to me so on the site there was no sign up for

24:13your free trial there was only scheduled a demo so we figured raise prices require a lot more friction in the signup process what's that going to do it's going to slow everything down right nope didn't slow anything down what it did was it made people see us as oh you must be 10x better because your competitors ten a tenth the price so people just started projecting onto us and and this is where we are now this is our pricing grid and people look at our site and they look at our price and they and what we've done is we started attracting higher end more quality customers better

24:53people to work with and the signups didn't I mean I did fit 10 to 15 demos for the past four months every week 10 to 15 demos so so from the conveyor belt of torture what what came out of it was now we're like now we're at you know we've staked out our position and now if you are a higher end customer who wants higher end service and product you go to us oops the lesson here first charge more always charge more almost charge more but always charge more and I don't know what else you can take from that that's just one of those things that

25:29just kind of happened and yeah okay cool we'll be Premium sure right our intention was to lower prices after we got things settled out do you think I'm lowering prices now nope nope alright so we're gonna start wrapping things up here let's look at what we've learned first in the beginning stages and someone gives you an inch you you go for the mile be aggressive the second the parler little opportunities you can parlay them into bigger opportunities whether that's raising money or forming a partnership or an integration or finding a co-founder whatever it is oh excuse me [Laughter] the other lesson is find another way right if you have one channel right my

26:21advice here is don't try to do Facebook Instagram Pinterest outbound email webinars don't try to do all those at once find a channel if it works go all the way in on it if it stopped working then find another way the next lesson is if you believe if your gut says go don't quit man keep going and finally charge more and some weirdness is gonna happen that you just got to go with so here's where we are today that is this month and I want to thank the Micro Kampf gods for letting me finish on a slide like this thank you this has just been so much hard to work and now

27:00finally starting to pay off so what you see there is a few weeks ago we opened up we stopped requiring a demo we allowed people to sign up we're finally more ready we're not 100% ready but we're more ready and it popped and it feels so goddamn good after all that work but here's what you know now right this is cool where is it then this is real so what I really want to say in this talk is that I would suggest there's a very small percentage of the people in this room that are gonna have a nice easy time going from this room to the growth conference

27:41more likely you are going to go through things and experience good and bad and what you need to do if you want this if you want to be champ if you want to feel like a champ if you want glory you're gonna go through this that's the champ get his butt kicked the chances are you two will get your butt kicked like I have had my butt kicked repeatedly and there's this quote that I like and think about often success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm it gets misattributed to Winston Churchill but we'll go with it Churchill sure and the point of this

28:25talk is to make sure you know that the people in that growth conference they're no better no smarter they're no more anything than anyone else in this room all they've done is stuck with it seen more failure and didn't quit from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm thank you quick question about the integrations when you set up those integrations with other companies did you have some sort of philly 't deal or was it out of the goodness of their heart or what was kind of the setup there for the quid pro quo of you getting all those extra customers so we have never done any affiliate and it's

29:15not out of the goodness of their heart what they're trying to do is provide value to their customers so when we talk it is framed in that way it's not I would like a channel to acquire customers could you hook it up that's not gonna work what it is it's we are successful at making our customers more money and I believe that your recharge customers will get a lot of value out of it and we're willing to go all-in with you to make sure we make this integration work really well that there are no tech issues and it's super easy for people to use and then that allows

29:48them to use it as a value add to their customers right so the guy's a recharge are like well that's amazing because and then and then there's back and forth right what they asked us was okay so you are more expensive than we are which is weird we're the platform that you are integrating into and you want us to offer something cheaper so we have a special recharge plan that we set up for anyone who comes in as a recharge customer gets a special pricing plan it's not necessarily lower it's just different their model is different they had like low plus a percentage so we do

30:19that and what that allowed them to do was send out an email to their audience and all their customers build this in and say now as a recharge customer you have exclusive access to this amazing software that makes you more money so it's not self interest it is in their interest to partner with us when you guys tripled your your cost up to $300 a month how did you handle the customers that came in at a lower price point we kept them so I mean you just grandfathered them in and kept them at that same price yep and even people who who came to us it was like a transition

30:57was like a month a transition people who would say I was just on your site it was 97 now it's 300 we would say it's 97 for you go we're just you know the friction wasn't necessary the point wasn't more money the point right then was to slow things down so someone's sufficiently interested to be like I came back could you hook me up we said yes thank you for come back after the conveyor belt you're still you still want in sure yep hi Ben hey nice John so you tripled your prices and signups didn't slow down so when are you tripling them again so if you look

31:34at our pricing on the site what you'll find is that we we it's for both products our products make people more money and so what we try to tie is our price to how much money we make them and so it doesn't necessarily require a tripling of price in order to to have a larger average revenue per user because it's 300 bucks a month for up to 50 grand in revenue and then it's 500 for up to 100 K so all of our interest is making them more money so they move up so I don't see it I see the floor as super important in order to work with us you must pay at

32:12least 300 but above that we have customers that are many times that and because we've established the floor they understand okay but I make two million bucks a month what are you gonna do for me and then it's a negotiation so I don't feel what we have discussed is moving the floor right and there's other stuff like if we end up in the App Store we might lower floor and open another tier which I don't want to do but it might be the right thing to do so we have to kind of play with it but I think we're good where we are for for at least

32:44the foreseeable future hey so co-founding I understand is a lot like dating how do you know when you found the one there is no way to tell there's no way to tell you have some you have time if you want to I know you and been basically dated for a couple months song yeah yeah what what we try to reduce the risk around that because you don't know especially someone you just met there's kind of the equivalent of moving in together first so what we did was we just spent it's about a month six weeks or so of no commitment of look let's just work together let's just see if we

33:25like working together and the real right a few tests in there are the skills complimentary and and that was an interesting time because it it motivated both of us to kind of show our best so he when he was in Portland man I was on the phone making deals closing deals good I know it's something that he's not gonna do so he's looking over me saying oh I might have a partner that does this day that I can't do and then he went crazy on like all the internal dashboards and reporting and setting up all this stuff and I'd look at that I have no idea what he's even doing so we

33:57start to start to understand who this is this is a good partnership and then the other stuff is it's just as important if not more important do you get along is this fun do you enjoy each other's company because it is definitely it is a rollercoaster you go up and down Ben and I have been through some really stressful times and it required it required communication and we're all so remote so he's in New York and I'm in Portland so it requires make sure we get together every month or two so right now after my current Ben is coming to Portland for a week before we go to the Shopify

34:34conference so we kind of make sure there's always that connection our dev team is in Slovenia so we kind of have to learn how to do that thing also yeah I don't I don't know if you can tell but the that moving in period was hugely helpful the other thing that's helpful is just talking to people you know about their previous experience working with that person ideally there's there's some breadcrumbs there that you can kind of pick up so um did the idea for card hook come from working on other similar product product in the space or like how did you kind of decide on that this was a war

35:09idea worth poor seeing I apologize I just do not see who was talking so that's why you're not looking okay cool the idea for the cart abandonment app came from my experience running an e-commerce store so I used a car to vanaman app while running that store and it was an absolutely hard piece of software and it still just made its money and so when you're looking at your numbers at the end of the month and you're saying okay where are we spending our money that line was a no-brainer it was oh I don't like that software at all but it made just 2 grand this month and

35:39we pay 49 bucks a month never gonna cancel it so after selling the store I basically said to myself I want to be that guy I want to be the never gonna cancel that thing so we basically set out to create a better version of that that kind of worked the way I would want it to work yeah that was the original genesis all right congratulations first thanks you did mention that you are not technical I find it pretty hard to believe in fact I don't believe that I leave a baby so I want to know how much technical is enough to become a founder provided if

36:19you can find somebody who you think's a technical enough so I do not write code I don't know how to do anything on that front so what what I can do is understand conceptually what's happening and you become more fluent in the vocabulary so I can explain that our JavaScript picks up an email you know on a blur event and then that sends it over to our API and we have a countdown time for 60 minutes and that triggers this so I can explain it understand what's happening even if I don't know how to possibly do anything with or change it or anything like that I know Ben has had some frustration with

37:02my lack of fluency just the fact you just kind of have to you know talk to like a third grader and explain things and that can be a little annoying I'm the boss so it's okay it is a disadvantage well you know no I don't think it's a disadvantage it can be a disadvantage but our company even though we have four people on the technical side and one person on the marketing and sales side our culture is a marketing and sales culture we don't want to create we want to sell so everything is in service to that so if I were super technical to like Ben I don't think we

37:48would have that same balance so I don't not only do I not see it as disadvantage I just do not see any logic and me trying to learn that now what's the point I think you just go with your strengths I'm already far along on one trajectory of Education why start at zero at least that's my that's my take on it would you spend any time thinking about how to prevent failure or do you just plow ahead knowing it's gonna be terrible at some point I was worried about coming off like that yeah yeah definitely try to avoid it I think the ideal is a smooth path and you go for

38:30that but don't be surprised and discouraged if something doesn't go as planned that part of it is completely expected it would be unexpected to just have one thing work out after another after another right that's there's there's luck involved there and then there's a very very small percentage of people who just kind of all that stuff works for them most of us not so with the stress of starting starting a new business and a new company how did you find the right balance between your work and your life because that's a thing that's gonna come up for most of us yeah yeah you know the truth is I launched

39:14cart hook with the original co-founder while in Berlin for a month so my wife and I took our one-year-old and we traveled around to different cities like a different city every two three months we want figure out where we want to live we were in New York and then we ended up in Porter than I was our favorite place so I would go to a city and go to a co-working space and work there for a month so it felt it felt silly to work 80 hours a week while Berlin's just right out there right with my wife and my daughter like so there was a natural

39:48tendency to toward bounce and now now it's the same kind of thing I try not to work so much on weekends and if I do need to work I wait for the kids to go to sleep yeah I would there's always guilt involved if you have kids but there's always guilt involved and you kind of manage it and come to terms with what is acceptable to you and your family but it's Fe not easy the first stage it's kind of brute force you just have 200 just lift something from nothing to something and the balance part is hard so I don't think I'm qualified to to tell you how to do

40:27that I just know I tried really hard to make sure that I didn't lose touch with with those priorities and we also have a talk this afternoon by Sherry walling on you know related topics work-life balance and such you want to know more about that we have time for maybe one or two more any other questions on Jordans talk

40:51what point did you make the jump to going full-time and how did you decide that that was the right move yeah that was hard at some point after the first co-founder left I said okay this this might just be a little side thing and that's that's fine and I started doing some consulting work and the I made the decision that I wanted to go full-time but didn't actually pull the trigger and then as as that like little acquisition offer started to turn more serious I saw that as my opportunity to go full-time I said okay I failed the growing it fast enough that I could go full-time on my

41:30own but this thing started and now it'll there's a little bit of heat and now if I raise money I can go full-time and that was the decision okay do I want to do this do I want you know that was a it was not an easy decision I took money from friends college friends my dad people in Ben's network I had Rob's money hashtag humblebrag so it was it was really stressful and it wasn't clear yes it was okay if I'm gonna do this that I'm gonna go all-in and then I'll go full-time yeah so that was just my particular version of that I wish I had grown it fast enough to make

42:08that decision and be full time when that came along that would have opened up the option set yep but in my case that was the option set it was keep going a little half half sort of thing or or go all in and raise money and go full-time so this is a somewhat related question and that is after having taking taking funding do you now feel pressure from all those people to have some sort of liquidity event the liquidity event is my own pressure know what what we call it is cheating up with strapping is is our version of it so we took money from people who don't put any pressure on us

42:48to raise more go to a Series A or do anything really and we talked to them upfront about that we don't want that pressure this might turn into like a restaurant model where once we're profitable we start kicking out dividends to everyone so we kind of set that up front so yeah fective li it's like bootstrapping but with someone else's money the bank hits the cheating part yes that's my ideal I would like to not raise any more money and not do anything institutional so that there isn't that pressure and then yeah basically just goal it's effectively the same thing is not raising money right so it's there

43:28and there's some more legal stuff and other things to deal with but if there's no pressure on what comes next hey so you mentioned that you you have a co-founder but you've also mentioned that you're the boss so I guess I'm sort of wondering how you I'm assuming it's sort of a asymmetrical partnership and how you all came to terms of something like that that you're both happy with yeah it's it's really much more symmetrical I there needs to be someone who has the final decision and yes I shouldn't be shy about the fact that that's me but it is very much a symmetrical partnership and it's it is

44:03not like you guys are gonna do what I say it's not even close it's a lot of advice and consultation and what should we do it is what we do and we've also given a piece of the company to our lead developer so it is a partnership it just so happens that in the situation like we recently had a situation with an employee and there's a lot of consultation what should we do should we keep them should we let them go and so on and at the end of the day I have to make the decision so that's kind of the only time that it actually turns

44:33into anything other than on equal ground but other than that yes it's very much partnership alright thanks again Jordan thank you

44:48you