Growing Tito to €1Mil in Revenue in 7 Years: What We Did & Didn't Do – Paul Campbell

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0:09all right here we go so I just want to say thank you so much for having me today I've been very nervous and very freaked out I've done a couple of talks this year and I didn't feel this nervous there's something about speaking to peers who are doing something similar that really heightens expectations so please bear with me it's it's it's extremely a great privilege to be here and we'll see we'll see how it goes inspirational talks aren't cool here so I'll just get that piece over with over and done with I guess the TLD or if you want to leave now is stick with it be

0:44true to your values and mark look after yourself folks so like any good story and micro conf it begins in Vegas I'm lying Abed basically pretty hungover over here we have des trainer who you may know as the co-founder of intercom and on the floor is a co-founder of the company we'd started together Dave rice in the next room is Owen McCabe the now CEO of intercom and he had kicked Dave out during the night for whatever he wants to use the room for so we're in Vegas for railsconf great conference oh wait really good conference we were shipping a product that we had built for the

1:36rails market and we had gotten there through a grant from a company or an organization called Enterprise Ireland which provides money for startups to do cool things so they had sent us there so we're in Vegas were selling the product and it's my last day there's a snoring Dave is passed out I don't know what one is doing and I'm like what am I gonna do with my life so I checked Twitter and a guy called John lark have ski who is working on hash rocket who which is a pretty kind of renowned rails company at the time he's doing a thing called lark conf which is basically the lobby the hallway

2:14track of rails come and he's put it out there he's seen on the O'Reilly the some people want to meet him so he tweeted everybody and he says meet at 9 a.m. in the lobby for lark conf so go along to lark on when I meet a whole bunch of really interesting people even some pretty long-term friendships but one in particular was a guy called Randall Thomas who was working at Engine Yard at the time engineer at the time coolest rails company so I was like this is amazing Randall and I chat about food we're getting on really well and he says hey strike up a friendship will end up in a

2:44bar that night he says Paul what are you doing for the next few days so it's my last day in contrast the plan was for them to plan the future of the company without me in it what I was supposed to be doing for those few days maybe going to Alcatraz or something so Randall says what do you do for the next few days well I say nothing and he says well I'm gonna upstate with a few friends in the next few days to do some cooking and I think jeez okay that's good I mean I'm not doing anything all right okay and I say listen around I'm gonna square with

3:15you I don't do drugs so Randall says no nope all you got you could cut around we're literally going to be cooking food and so I said well that sounds cool so the next day I'm in a bmw m3 driving up the Sonoma Coast with Rob me the CEO of then pivotal lives Randall and the woman that Randall was looking to entertain that weekend it's just me and Rob basically I Reynold brought me to look after Rob and so it was the start of my journey and it was the Sun the reason I want to draw attention to this prequel story and I'm gonna spend a bit of time in the prequel

3:51is exactly what Rob said yesterday three years before I even wrote a line of code in teto I was sort of accidentally but also intentionally going in and meeting people meaning extraordinary people and within two degrees of going coming to a conference as you all have a meeting literally the son of the guy that invented magnetic tape at IBM so that was cool work in so few years later I go to another conference it was Jay s confit you the JavaScript community was pretty nascent but I was pretty lucky I got on a rising wave going to the first conference there were superstars of the JavaScript community in the world in the

4:36world I hadn't met the likes of Thomas Fuchs and Amy hoi they were there I got to meet them in person Douglas Crockford was there John Resig was there and I did something pretty simple I put out a tweet or maybe I said it to somebody I said hey if there are any folks who do Ruby programming you want to go for dinner tonight and I expected maybe I'll name Ian Thomas and one others to come 18 people came for pizza that night including John Rzeznik who I had the most awkward conversation with about TV shows like what do I sound was just a little nerdy Irish guy from art and this

5:05guy's thinking jQuery but it happened and it sort of gave me a little bit of a insight that like if you it doesn't take a whole lot to invite people to dinner and one of the organizers of the conference yeah I'm Leonard who I had met in Dublin the previous year I guess he saw something in that because at the after-party of the event it comes to me and say hey Paul the github guys are coming I'm exhausted Paul could you look after them I like the whole my whole opens up around me the github it launched in 2008 this is 2009 I'm like this is the

5:39coolest thing you could possibly imagine and the founders are coming are gonna be here not 45 minutes later I'm trying to Scott Chacon one of the cofounders of get up over beer Tom press and Warren and CEO and PJ Hyatt is standing there we're chatting away we're getting on because we do Ruby programming we're getting on because we share similar interest it was extraordinary so I we go to another bar we're shootin pool together it's just extraordinary and it's totally normal how is this normal is what I'm thinking we stay at all night drinking and we get back to bed clock it was amazing friends with the github folks a couple months

6:18later I'm at rubyconf and I gave a talk and I was feeling pretty lonely and it was in San Francisco and I didn't really know what I was doing and Tom was there and I walk up to Tom's like hey Tom and he looks at me like I'm a piece of dirt in the floor and I'm like okay maybe it's not that easy but I kept at it one of the things that I said to Scott when we first met was an idea that I had with a friend who had been to Jay s conf to organize a conference to bring people to Ireland to bring web people

6:44interesting people that we've met at all these conferences to Ireland and Scott said I'd love to come on I said I go to a fun car we're thinking of doing a phone conference and he'd say I'd love to come to a fun conference in Ireland and so a couple weeks later I was sitting with Eamon and I was describing the experience that I had after meeting Tom at rubyconf basically a coach arrived outside of rubyconf and brought all of us around startup offices in San Francisco and it was a really cool idea so I said this to a my I said I don't want a conference that it's just cloth

7:16back seat cloth back seats in a conference centre somewhere I want something remarkable memorable different exciting and he said well white based on the salon the boss things that's right hire the party bus the party bus is like a stupid bus that you can hire for stag do's and bachelor parties and things like that it's got a stage up the front limousine seating and you can put beers into it but we put out a website saying the first-ever technology conference on a bus where we would trail through the Irish countryside and stop off and the people we're into where people came and people people came Tom agreed to come

7:52and speak that Michael lop who was that Apple and then went on to become lots of different things and he's now the VP of engineering at slack he came and then through Twitter and through the grapevine Verna Vogel's he's the CTO at amazon.com he decided to come and drink Guinness in the Irish countryside because why not so it was extraordinary and the reason I want to spend so much time on that is that I'm well this was about when I was starting Tina but the first one cheedo didn't exist and I'd already spent so much time getting to know conferences and getting to know people so random at the same time I was

8:26consulting I was building web apps for people for money I like pretty sure everyone here has donor is still doing and I was going through another founder separation so things didn't work out with the contrast folks and that's why I'm not an intercom billionaire and things again weren't working out with my co-founder at hyper tiny we had been approached by a firm for an acquisition so we kind of waited a night it took a long time when the acquisition offer came in it came in over Skype and it was games all through the conference Network and the offer came in is like we want to pay you 800 thousand euros and I'm like

9:02woo over the next two years okay what's interesting split as salaries between the two of you okay 400 K each two hundred salary with a base salary and then a bonus system based on performance and I'm like okay requisition 800 K okay interesting wait hold on this is a job offer I don't want a job so I turned it down and the other guy took it but for the second fun conf I had been to a conference and it was billed it was basically the same kind of thing and one of the reasons I started fun comfort was could build existed it was an anemic male of the guy who now

9:39runs XOXO fast they create a festival in Port in Portland he basically said to me we didn't say anything to me although we had met he did the buying tickets for Bill the second time second year ran was he clicked on a link and it said buy tickets then you paid on PayPal and then you had tickets for all the other conferences that I'd gone to you sort of had to share your life story before you even saw a credit card form and I was like this build conference purchasing process every conference ought to be like that and so that was why I started jido at the very start Tina was just a

10:13simple API wrapper between our website and PayPal all right you protect on buy tickets you went to PayPal you came back you had tickets it was a Ruby on Rails API app on Heroku there was no admin dashboard there was no you why there was no check or check out you UI and in order to see who was coming to the conference I had to check the rails console bit of a nerdy nerdy story and then I'll keep coming back to find count because odd phone conf was a guy called Horace daddy he runs a tsimko comm which is a consultancy blog mobile web consultancy blog and he came to me after

10:48a phone conference said hey Paul I want to run my own conference can you help I was like well we've got this piece of software do you want to use and he said yes so that we built our first check ad experience for him Horace was friends with Michael Rogers he was also at fun con Michael Caine because of Harris and Michael was running note conf Michael basically said hey I'll use Tito he used Tito and then promptly we oversold his event and then of course we had to implement overselling logic Michael was friends with Chris he was also at phone conf and Chris was friends with Jana and

11:18the guy who were also at fun Cove so all of doing all of this was how we got our national customers no you zero that all happened before we actually launched the product through that little Network we processed over a million euros in ticket sales we didn't make anything because stupidly I didn't think that the product was actually valuable to anybody and we had to be quite we got about 75 initial users literally through that people knowing people knowing people who knew the interesting people who came to fun Cove and so that's really the main theme where the grand 0 the baseline takeaway if you learn nothing else and I think

11:54that's pretty much the we all agree that that's why we're here is that relationships are everything everything good that I've done since is is about relationship that's why I think it's so important to one consider and to talk about it for so much of a foundation story because nothing else after that really mattered so the next part of what I want to talk about is just the story of how we got from 2013 all the way to where we are now with a bit of a bit of money in a real business so at the end of 2012 inspired by Travis CI they had raised 120 thousand euro in a

12:29crowdfunding campaign people don't make that money much money sometimes in seed ran so a crowdfunding campaign seemed like a really good way to get independent money we said we wanted to get 60 K 5 K 12 customers we put on our website and they would get free service for a year and then 1% or 1 euro rates thereafter it worked we made about 50 grand which is great we didn't have to implement a billing system or anything the problem was we weren't explicit about that year cliff and so to my knowledge of the 12 customers some of them don't run their events anymore but of the 12 customers none of them paid us

13:06a red cent since and I don't know how much money we've left on the tables because of that that was kind of just like whatever it's a bit of a mistake so we really should have been explicit about that up front one of those customers was the Web Summit and not being explicit about that you can imagine how many potential hundreds of thousands have been left on the table out of that it led to years of arguing years of arguing that only got resolved last summer I'll come back to that so the crowdfunding campaign was was great but we really gave too much away another interesting thing at the time

13:44was that we didn't have a building engine bit built but we wanted to onboard some non founding customers so we had a checkout build that had a stripe integration so we just put up an event called Tito introductory customers that allowed us to accept money from people and in order to join Tito at the start and be a paying customer you have to buy a ticket to the introductory customers event and we were able to envoy customers that way so that was cool I thought that was quite creative so 2013 we didn't make much money through any kind of formal billing process but we did the crowdfunding we

14:12had a few introductory customers but we processed a hefty chunk of money on behalf of other people but we definitely we gave too much away and that was because I really still thought about it as a toy at the time I really just I didn't take it seriously as a business and I feel like I ought to have so the next year things started to get a little bit serious so we started we had our billing engine built and we started to take on real revenue and to be perfectly honest and it's a bit of a weird feeling as a developer a lot of the code that we

14:44wrote in 2014 forms the basis of what we're still serving to customers now six years later I'm still hit already embarrassed to admit that and we've made a few mistakes we hired this guy Killian or kilvo as I affectionately refer to him and I started another conference it's not I want to say too much of it that it was called it was a conference for Apple enthusiasts but by starting that conference it created the same network spiral that fun cuff did and if you go to WWE see which is Apple's official conference if you go to any of the sidelines of us they're six or seven

15:17there's all con from daring fireball in these pieces they all do their ticketing 30 no because of that conference so it can happen it really works and people want to use tools that are built by people they know as long as they go like you have to get the tech right this year we made our first mistake which was to the branch was called dock is away it was a little joke dock is my co-founder he's his Twitter handle is DRB Parsons and when he used to go to conferences people thought he was dr. B Parsons but no like he's a business analyst from from Bournemouth or somewhere so doc went on

15:53holiday and we said let's let's change from bootstrap to the bootstrap 3 because it was gonna make building the app so much easier in these uh in the three weeks that he was away the dock is away when he came back we changed it to dock his in it's funny whatever and I didn't ship until 12 months later in March of 2015 we also started making more money because the the organic kind of treadmill continued on and we started transitioning from a side project I hired Killian full-time and he was able to work in the design and he was based a full-time and I think that's part of the

16:28reason why we have so much code after that year because there was a certain amount of focus well so I hired him full time but transitioning dock was much harder because he was older he was starting a family he was married he had a mortgage and that just led to a lot of inner tension because doc was doing work but he wasn't necessarily charging for it and we would say oh we'll just sort that out we can just shareholding arrangement later I'm interested and taking something such a bad idea such a bad idea we should have sorted all of that ID upfront and it wasn't until the

17:02following year that we we managed to do it so it was really really hard transition the other part of transitioning from consulting to a product work is that you really just want to work on the product and so you're not doing the best job you can for your your clients I sort of feel maybe if I was to go back and do it again I wouldn't make that mistake and I just do a bunch of work put a bunch of money in the bank and then go at it with focus full time so there's all the 2015 money so 2015 was the year that the year that Guilbeau left us and I'll

17:40remember him fondly he basically got sick of the tension between doc and me and the story the story goes wordy anecdote that I'll finally remember was one night we were all working late in the office and we were ordering dinner in and I said you want to get sushi and doc said doc doesn't really like fish but he says I only eat sushi off the backs of naked virgins like I took a moment to sink in and then kalbi elbow just kind of did a wry smile and he says I'll just take my clothes off then but 2015 we shipped doc is in the the long-running branch that took him a year

18:17when it was only supposed to take three weeks and we shipped that and it sort of came to a sense of calm we saw our biggest quarter growth ever 150 percent in the second quarter we had that ship so we didn't have all these branches running we were was operating on a single codebase still only four of us in the company and things just felt like they were coming to a head we hit 20 K 20 K in em or or so that was the time that I kind of the target that I had internally set for okay it's night time to get serious and time to grow up in

18:44time to assign shares and divvy up the company it just led to a summer of total tension arguments nastiness between doc and me and we'd left it way too late to have those awkward conversations there was there was conversations about who brings more value to the business which have no place in divvying a shareholding because shareholding has no relation to the value you bring to the business it's just a number we should have sorted that I from day one on the other hand what we did get right was the incorporation process I hired a big legal firm they took care of it for me I brought in a friend from

19:23school who was accounting background and he managed he agreed to manage all the books so the books were squeaky clean like we started off on an absolutely blank slate we had a great set of legal documents we hired a secretarial firm to file legal filings for us so we've never missed an annual return and everything has been really aboveboard and all of the shareholding to got done really well so that was something that I came out of the ashes of the complete disaster of not dealing with things upfront we got the the boring bits right despite everything else week we doubled revenue roughly and started to process a bunch

19:56of a whole bunch more quite skewed by the web somewhat but not just kind of rolled on so 2016 ought to have been like the hockey stick great success after such a good year in 2015 but actually for a number of reasons it was a brick wall year my wife was pregnant we were buying a house a couple of months after the baby was born I decided I don't know what kind of crazy and I decided to go and do doc is in again so I was like I'm just gonna re implement and then it was it was literally bootstrap for again I decided we implement our whole admin dashboard but

20:37even worse I decided to reimplementation again and I swear to God I promise you and I hate myself for it it's 2019 and the two projects I started back in 2016 they haven't shipped yet so Pell D I know exactly what you mean when they say things slip it's such a cause of embarrassment and it was a huge mistake to do that so naively without even just thinking about it but a couple of other interesting things did I think had these things not happened we'd be dead by now at the end of 2015 a random twitter user called assure the app that didn't even have a name on it said hey guys I really

21:13like your stuff I'd love to meet for a chat so we I think he left maybe his mobile number is something we gave it a call or an email and it's this guy called Karl Karl had built uh sure which was a kind of an invitation up and been acquired by a competitor he was there Dublin office and he was interested in coming to work at IDO he basically said I'm about to renew my contract with this company and I need to make a decision in a week what can you offer me to come and join as a commercial guy and I'm thinking I really want to hire this guy

21:45now and if there's a great sense of urgency you think he could be a good sales and marketing hire for our company so we did hire him we didn't go through any hiring process as I've learned now we probably should have but they Carl got himself a good job but around about the same time one of our biggest customers who was about to be acquired said we're about to come into money and we want to buy some shares and Tito all that stuff in my life was happening doc was also having a kid getting mortgaged even though we were making money we just didn't have enough cash to pay the bills

22:16the taxman was starting to sniff and there was a sheriff's letter it was like really really stressful and this guy came along and said basically the deal was three hundred thousand four at a 10 million valuation so 300k for three percent of the business and I'm thinking that's an offer I can't refuse however the the check the final checks Enterprise R&R basically are an Irish company that will match funding so I have my 300k they will do up to 250 K in the first round they basically have said yes this is the summer of 2016 the cheque arrived the day before Christmas Eve 2017 it took 21 months from the

23:00initial commitment of 300 K to get what amounted to basically at one point I had a million commitment and the the end result was 565 K the initial guy he basically at the end of the process he said he could only do 40 K because he wasn't able to write it off against tax because we were an Irish company not a UK company there was another person who said they could give us 250 thousand if they had three months and we were like no we need to close in June 2016 even though it didn't close until there so 250 K for here or 50 K now we said well

23:30take 50 K now I email him in September he's like oh sorry no we don't have that anymore it was just a total total total Shh oh and it was a distraction it was a huge distraction and basically for all for that whole time um stuff got in the way but the beauty of having Carl around was the car had a pedigree so he was able to fill in the forms he was able to kind of do the spreadsheets and all the documents required to get the enterprise Arland money so it was a real asset so and it also allowed doc and me to focus on the ridiculously long running

24:01projects so despite everything despite the mast despite life getting in the way and it really did we still continued to grow grew about 40% that year and we're still increasing the amount of revenue or processing so 2017 and 2018 are a bit of a blur for me and I'm not really sure what happened I guess anyone who is a parents of potato of kids who don't sleep might understand what I'm talking about and it felt like we shipped nothing it felt like we did nothing but we did have a bunch of money in the bank because we'd sell these shares so I started looking toward balancing the team as both on I felt

24:44that we were to engineering heavy and I felt that we should be focusing on sales and marketing commercial activities so we hired a person out of HubSpot because for the first six months of that year we didn't publish a single blog post that's how distracted me where we couldn't even publish a single blog post so she came in and our blog has been really really active and alive since so to the outside world feels like we're alive even though we haven't shipped everything in two years we also hired somebody from Eventbrite which seemed like a really good idea she was a community manager at Eventbrite and she has just to build an

25:15events strategy which i think is gonna be really really important for us I just can't think of any anything else that happened of you which is so sucky so we had all these opportunities and I just can't think of it but we still continue to grow so the numbers the process number is going up our revenue it's going up 30% again and and the only thing I can think of is that as soon as we took our gas off the shipping pedal Carl annamaria they were out there just doing marketing stuff and it's it's a it's a message that you've heard over and over again at this conference and it really

25:47did work for us we continue to grow despite it being ridiculously crazy and unorganized in the background so 2018 rolled around and because we needed another distraction JDP or hit and we had to be super ready so we turned it into an opportunity we produced a really beautifully illustrated guide and he did the research and that and that got us a huge amount of credit as a kind of an expert in the space and we sort of unraveled the gene pure mystery for a lot of people and we ran a bunch of events meetups customer dinners those kind of things so the benefits of those kind of things were that

26:23we got to meet the customers that we haven't been paying attention on whilst we were distracted by these two long-running projects we got to show them some of the behind the scenes and people were getting excited in giving us real feedback that we were on the right track so running the events was was really really empowering for me also we got a nice new office and we did murals and we did a lot of things that were kind of investing in the team I guess but again the year just slipped away from us one thing we did was decide to run a conference because I felt that I

26:50knew how to wrote a conference from all the all the experience years gone by to cut a long story short we announced the conference in June of last year and it was maybe gonna be on in November we found ourselves run this time the start of October conference was on in three weeks we had booked at a beautiful 300 capacity artisan venue in in Chicago we sold 20 tickets so it was an impending embarrassment let alone a disaster so the choice was whether we cancel it or fess up and try and make something good of it so we felt that cancelling it would basically diminish all any money

27:31that we'd spent already on deposits and things so we tried to we could add all the deposits we'd sent we email the speakers and said listen business happened one pull down so that was fine we still had a speaker line up and we mailed all the attendees and we said this is what we're gonna do we're gonna do a mystery tour we're gonna change the venue we haven't sold enough tickets for that venue we're gonna send a car to your hotel in the morning and we're gonna do a mystery tour I think we said something like do you like coffee and do you like boats and that was the only

27:55teaser that we gave of the day and the cars showed up at their hotel brought them to any private coffee morning at intelligentsia coffee roasters and a private tour of the Roasterie it was tea to actually interesting no sorry I was just gonna say that she too reminded me that the actual official pronunciation of tea I was supposed to be T 2 because it's tickets to get it anyway by to admission and there was T 2 we bust everybody to lofted apartment that was that served as the venue and it was a big screen and it was even too big for the tiny numbers but it was really

28:34intimate Co like being in someone literally it was someone the living room we hosted the conference after the event we bust everybody to the Chicago River and we had a beautiful scenic architectural cruise down the river and then we brought everybody back where we had reset the room into a private dining room with a personal chef and a five-course meal and it really was it was we tried to turn a disaster into something extraordinary it cost us a lot of money it was basically cutting the lost cost basically the last of our of the investment money so it was an expensive mistake for us but I think

29:06what it did was it really kind of set aside and it really showed people what we're about as a company that we really care about getting things right we care about quality and excellence we care about bringing a smile and fun and and whimsy in what we do so it sent a strong message and we were able to use the videos for marketing collateral and so maybe it wasn't completely a sunk cost but I feel like we definitely saved it and I think that we've the next time we do what we will be able to learn from the mistakes we didn't market it earlier we didn't set the value prop right maybe

29:35we didn't get the pricing right maybe we didn't build up enough of a community ahead of time there's so many things that we can do better and despite all of the craziness we still managed to grow by about 30% that year I haven't doubt that I want to share I guess I'm your might be anecdote at night but just before I go into the the last year thank you do you remember do you remember back when when we did fun count for the first time and Vernor came to fajn cove the bit that i miss was that fun conf was it had to be delayed so just like the

30:16admission story the week that we had planned funk off the vote the volcano in iceland errupted the a AFA called volcano and so it was it was this was Monday and fun come for supposed to be on Friday and we had to make a decision whether to postpone on the Tuesday and we did we had to postpone but some people we flew in anyway we had a little meet up in Dublin and then Vernor who's the CTO at Amazon he you come and you if you want to spend I got the Queen's day on my boat in Amsterdam and we're like ooh what would you do if the CTO of the one of the

30:52biggest companies in the world invited you to spend a day in his personal boat on his on the national holiday of his country so we went and and this is how you built build a network so we found ourselves in Amsterdam the Queen's Day is on the canals in Amsterdam but we were stay we were staying across the water and so we had to go on this boat over to the canal and in the boat were a couple of Vernors friends and Tom pressed some werner from from github and his wife and i must have had a lot to drink that morning because about half way across the bay maybe were 30 minutes

31:24into the journey and it was another thirty minutes to go I really needed to pee so I'm kind of sitting there it's a bit awkward and I'm like I don't already know these people very well and we finally get to a lock and I'm like yes yes so I wrote a hoofer to the edge and so Verner and Tom and his wife and these people are all laughing at me and I'm like okay I'm just gotta go it's got I got stage fright so I had to crawl back into the boat sit down beside these basic heroes of mine and I didn't get to pee until much later but we all became

31:57friends and both Verner and ultimately were part of the investment right so this year 2019 toward the end of the year we've brought in what I think is our best customer ever it's C to Montreal which is a creative and commercial conference in Canada and I really like them as a customer because they're not directly related to any of the people from the front come for the all or the the network they're they they sort of feel to me like they came to us for the product we are I think it was a effectively a marketing play they didn't know anything about us but they liked

32:34what we do they liked our philosophy and they believed that we were going to deliver for them and to me that feels like a real success filthy thing then the came out of admission was one of the last speakers was a woman called Kim Creighton she's an activist and a blogger and a podcaster from Atlanta on the back of what we did at admission basically created a space that she felt safe in she wanted to work with us to be a model company to try and improve tech her goal in tech is to redefine capitalism without white supremacy so it's quite a lofty goal but she wanted

33:08to work with us to at least become to lay the groundwork for being a model company for for that kind of ambition so we worked with Kim and we've been working with her as a business coach and she's helped us establish our core values of integrity of excellence and of delight and so it's given us a framework through which to make decisions objectively rather than subjectively and it's been really interesting for me to learn and one of the challenges she gave to me last week was essentially how can I use my network to improve the lives of marginalized people and it's a question that I'm really struggling with and I

33:46know that I can make a difference and I'm really I really feel that I need to have a good answer for that question and so it's it's one that I want to share with you is like how can we use the network that we all have to to help marginalize people have the opportunities that we all have the final thing that we're doing this year is at the start of the year I was asking Tom a question about hi ring when you're bootstrap and you've run out of money and he said if you're ever interested in raising more money then I would be interested so a couple

34:16weeks later I was meeting with our rep from enterprise and I said would you be interested he said yes we'd be very interested because I think something like only 20% of enterprise darling customers make it to a million in revenue we did it a year early so we're gonna do we're gonna do it again Tom asked me this time which you didn't ask me the first time was how am I gonna get my money out and I was like no but I had seen in dvc and independent venture couple it's Tom Tim O'Reilly's venture fund where there's an escape hatch there's an escape clause after three

34:45years you can get your money back after 2x or five years you can get it back at 3x so in DC I contacted those folks and they weren't they weren't gonna take us on because we weren't a good fit for a number of reasons but I went to our legal firm and they drew up a set of terms loosely modeled on Indy VC and simply what it allows us to do is defer the decision-making of whether we want to sell or however we want to exit down the line and there's an escape escape hatch for both investors and finders about whether we want to pursue profitability in the future so I'm

35:21really excited about that and that's all happening at the moment and I'm kind of working through that so there's my my summary of lessons I guess if you want to look at those and if you've any questions about them and then just I have a little lightning talk just to to wrap up about what I want to do next based on what I've learned and first of all I literally want to shape up I want to read the book shape up the Basecamp book shape up and I want to get rid of this stupid three-year release cycle or or 12 months release like let me accidentally got it our selves into I

35:53want to release things every every two months I want to do six weeks like girls in two weeks off I want to do all that I want to get us into a pattern where we're shipping cupcakes rather than giant releases that kill us I also in terms of shaping up I read April done for its book through Jane Jane's basically everyone should talk to Jane before the today is I and we did a whole positioning project with her and I think that was amazing I want to be more values-driven I've learned the power of values and the the power of being able to make decisions through the lens of

36:24values and not just good feeling and we did all these five six years based that are good that we wanted to be good but actually we've had these core values that all we needed to do was pin down and at the same token we want to be more intentional in the sense that intentional defined as what we want versus what we get we want to try and align those as closely as possible and then last thing in this little bit I want to continuously check myself in the sense that every day for the last seven years I've asked myself is this what I want to do Tom asked me what would you

36:52be doing if he wasn't Tito and I'd be like something probably looking exactly like Tito and until I have a until I have the wrong answer for that I intend to keep keep going we care so much about our values and living our values we take things personally maybe less so now than we did at the start but it still sucks equipped when someone leaves like a zero or NPS and at the same token and though we've made so many mistakes I'm really quite proud of what we've done it's been so hard some of it has been so hard but ultimately like we just decided to go we

37:25wanted to build an independent sustainable profitable business and we've taken a roundabout course but we got there and my family always comes first and we've designed our business to put family first we have kind of if you're feeling days or if you need to look after your kid days that's just that's just a given and we know that not everybody has a family or wants a family and we need to respect that too but we do and this is what we're optimizing for that I'm just looking after ourselves I go to the gym twice a week I want to live a little as long a healthy life as

37:50I possibly can and I want to have an independent company that backs me to leave that kind of life and there really is nothing I'd rather be doing although there is one I'd like to get to two million and I hope it doesn't take seven years [Music] [Applause] [Music]