Bootstrapping for Badasses – Bridget Harris – MicroConf Growth 2017

0:00[Music] thank you very much Robin thank you very much for being here really really excited to be have already met tons of people who co-running amazing companies and so I'm really excited to be able to share some of our story and hope that you know we can have some good questions afterwards so yeah the title of my talk is bootstrapping for badasses and just to in case you don't know we've never heard of you can put me we do online scheduling it's the kind of thing where you know you you make your calendar available for book of all slots that kind of thing and we've been running

0:39since 2000 and well actually me and Keith have been building products since 2003 so were one of those sort of veteran kind of companies that have been been doing this for a long time but making a lot of mistakes along the way but this is the team as we as we are now Keith standing at the top I think there is my husband he's the CTO he's the one that's been building all these products causing all the problems and I came in in 2012 to start running the company to sort of put it all together into something that that made sense for us and I'm sure you're going to recognize

1:07some of the stories that I've got to tell in that and you can book me is we're bootstrapped and right now we're doing around 900,000 bookings a month I've got a very steady after one hundred percent growth rate annually and so we've got some very big infrastructure engineering challenges in terms of the turnover of what we're doing for scheduling but also how we're growing ourselves as a company what we're learning along the way and so and Ben bootstraps you know like everybody else has said already you know it's it it it's the way we've run our business but it's not necessarily you know a total ideology but I sort of wanted to

1:45quote hit and Cha who's who spoke at this conference a couple of years ago and he said that he thought we shouldn't call ourselves bootstrapped that somehow you know sounded a bit too amateur and he he was telling us that we should call ourselves Revenue Fund it yes it sounded better revenue funded but for me to me revenue funded kind of sounds a bit like this it sounds a bit like sort of privately educated or independently wealthy there's just something kinda quite privileged to me this for revenue funding it's basically it's just not badass enough so this is where I felt like I wanted to you know raise

2:20the flag for for--why of how to bootstrap so if you're interested and I know you guys are all doing it or partially doing it or interested in it or worrying about it I want to tell you how we bootstrapped what was actually quite a tough proposition you can look me as a freemium tool so we have thousands and thousands of people who sign up and use us for free and all of the things that come with that and I think that you know if you'd asked me 10 years ago would it be sensible to bootstrap basically a free tool I'd have said no I would say no now we didn't

2:51know what we were getting into so the story really for us was how do we bootstrap from freemium into profitable into you know revenue and cash positive so um in this talk I got so in thinking about that question I sort of wanted to break it down into three themes you know how do you bootstrap like a badass what's the kind of the broader learning we can get from this story so I'm gonna tell you how to think more like so long Solon was a sixth century Athenian political statesman and political philosopher he's one of the people I've studied and loved some of the stories that came out of his experience of being

3:29a scribe in 6th century Athens I'm gonna talk about how to be more like the shoemaker and the elves and the shoemaker and what you do with your money and I'm going to talk about how to be more like the wizard their wizard of oz so those are my three my three sections so back to Solon well as I said so long was a this sort of you know incredibly well traveled and experienced guy that went round and everybody wanted to talk to him including this guy Croesus who is the king of Lydia and because Croesus was as you've probably heard the phrase rich as Croesus

4:02credibly wealthy and successful monarch he said to soul on one day you know tell me who do you think is the happiest wealthiest you know who is the happiest person you know fully expecting you to sort of say oh it's going to be you Croesus obviously you know look at you you're super rich Lydia's a great place but actually create and Solon went well let me think oh that would probably be tellus of the he was great guy had sons he had children he lived a long life and then at the end of the day he he fought in a battle for his country and he died and

4:39creases were sort of like hmm okay so seriously so who's your second guy thinking well that guy fine must be me is this is the second guy and solan went um all that would be clear bliss and beat oh yeah they're brothers they needed to take their mom to a festival in in Athens five sort of five miles away and their ox died so they dragged their mom on a cart to the festival and they got so exhausted they died and and Cleveland Croesus was just like what what's your point who are these people why you're not talking about me and Solon was just like look it's you can't judge happiness

5:19until you die until you know what your life is about until you get through it don't call it out halfway through and say hey I've made it because you just don't know what the ending would look like now actually at the end of Croesus was life he found himself on top of a funeral pyre because meanwhile Cyrus of Persia had basically invaded Lydia and had put creases on the fire so you know creases suddenly realized what Solon was talking about which you know was was bad for him and I'll leave you to sort of google google the rest of the story to find out what happens but but the point

5:53is it's always stayed with me this idea that you've got to think about the big picture but you've also got to think about the journey and I think that especially in the kind of culture that we all work and and run our companies within you know there's a lot of that kind of Quickfire turn around you know convert let's let's move on let's sort of hold our breath and hyperventilate for a couple of months and see what we can achieve and we're not seeing necessarily you know the journey and whether we're going to end our days feeling pleased that this is what we did and I think this is

6:22something from a bootstrapping point of view it forces you to do and I'm I realize has actually been a very positive thing for us and I've kind of found this other people say this as well so this is a quote from another so famous badass bootstrap and lots of entrepreneurs just don't have any patience they say I want to have a fancy office the big crew the most comfy chairs right now this is from David Hyneman Hansel if you don't recognize it growing things from a seed being a little bit patient opens up a whole lot of other doors down the road so that was of the message that's what

6:51the message from so long so what did we do in practical terms in terms of running you can book me well the first thing was I as I said I started running you can put me in 2012 but we've been building product since 2003 and as soon as we realize that the traction and the revenue you can block me was taking on something that we could afford to run full-time that's what I did so I had this kind of I had to give up my previous career as working politics for my sins and when I was leaving my job and somebody said to me you know well

7:26actually what are you gonna go and do this was five years ago and I said I'm gonna go and run a software company and it sounded to me ridiculous because actually what I meant was I'm gonna go and sit in a coffee shop with Keith my laptop and we're gonna you know you can put me but in my mind I had already decided you've got a caller out you've got to say what you're gonna do you got to believe it you've got to actually put yourself down that journey and say this is what it's going to be I'm going to run a software company because if I

7:51don't commit to that idea it won't happen it's you know obvious an obvious thing we stopped building products there's a lot of a lot of synergy here with a lot of people because you're gonna recognize this you know especially software developers use you guys are so good at just spinning out products you know do building features let's buy domain let's find a logo let's start solving the problem we can do it we did that Keith did that we had low so I'm a few of them are still going but I mean my god like there was just so many opportunity I this was just because friends of ours got married but like

8:22yeah you know we could do so even give people some money for their honeymoon it'd be great look if we can build a product look there's a logo and it was just insane and and we just couldn't we couldn't sustain it and none of these products made any money so we stopped doing that and we started building a business because you can book me was the product that actually made money we could see where it was going it had the traction it had all of the ticked all the boxes so we we committed to you can book me we stopped trying to spread our bets across loads of products

8:49and we said we are going to make this one work much you know in the end of the day it might not but we are we are telling ourselves this is the product we're going to we're going to build we stopped hiring friends we started hiring colleagues and again another classic thing and we did this at the very early days when we realized we needed to hire people we felt insecure about who would possibly want to work for us we didn't have a proper process we just hired people that we knew and some of that's worked out we we have got a great colleague of ours who started

9:20off as you know one of our best friends but actually that's not the best way to manage your a labor force or your you know because if you hire your friends what happens if you have to fire them nobody wants a fire friends and that's where you get a real sort of problem but also I think it's a good indicator that you've professionalized that you have proper processes and this is Dolly Parton from Straight Talk get off the cross honey somebody else needs the word and this refers to me and Keith as co-founders that when you're bootstrapping one of the things that you do or at least we did is hold ourselves

9:53back in terms of paying ourselves so we were doing you know full-time jobs elsewhere and other things consultancy all the usual stuff then you start to realize Mira you've got a you've got to commit to your product but then you'd never pay yourself enough because you were always paying all the other people you're hiring and then I realized after a while actually I started to present that this company that we'd spent years building wasn't giving me or keep any kind of proper financial return so as soon as we could you know the next sort of growth spirit that we that we went through where we you know got a little

10:23bit of ahead in terms of our revenue we're paying ourselves and now we're the highest-paid people in the company whereas literally a year ago we were the the least way you know paid and I just thought I felt that that was building in resentment to us by building the company for all these other people to get mortgages all these other people you know to get financial security and love their jobs and me and Keith are still slogging away and I know we own the company but still it's made a tremendous difference for us to realize by running this by thinking about so long and thinking about the long you know the

10:55long view this company has to pay back to us personally as well as you know everybody else that we're doing it for and then the other thing which is you know again at the beginning you're building products you're solving problems you're playing with new technologies it's fun it's exciting and then it's what NASA said earlier you know that's that's one thing but building a business is a totally different thing and actually fundamentally you're talking about money you've got to make money you can make a profit and you know Keith is a technologist I have a background working in the public sector and neither of us were geared up to making a profit you

11:33know you feel like that's what you know that's what Donald Trump does you know there's a sort of a kind of an odd association with with making profit and money and being a businessman but actually this is it's completely acceptable I know that this conference is focused on it and it's something that we have to be unapologetic about that our businesses have to succeed and they have to succeed by an easy measure which is are you making money so so non you know is is is about saying you call it at the end of the you know at the end of your life and whatever you're choosing

12:06to do whatever products you're building whatever work you're doing it is about the long term and what you can say has you've achieved with that and I think you've got nothing to lose by doing that I don't think you know even if tomorrow you then wanted to sell your company do something else you'll have anything to lose by saying I committed to it today because any commitment you can give to your company today means you're building a more robust a more resilient company for whatever you choose to do with it next week I know that some of you know some companies especially have talked to some here you know who believe that

12:39they're gonna be running their companies for the rest of their life that's great but there's also people who say well I want to do this but I might want to you know do something completely different next year which is also fine night neither outcome should actually stop you from thinking about building robust confident systems so how to bootstrap like the shoe maker know this I'm sure all of you are going to be experts in the first thing you have to do when you want to bootstrap is understand the difference between cash and credit revenue and profit and it's something that we had to learn when you have very

13:18little you know the money in your bank like you can spend on anything but actually of course there is a lot more to do with you know the money as it flows in than just saying it's you know I've got X amount in my bank account and right at the you know the very very beginning when you start off that's this is your income this is what you've got to play with there's really very little and of course these are your costs so you have this sort of enormous pressure on building a business up to a point where you're no longer trying to live off you know six P's so the first thing

13:50that we did as it's sort of as a shoe maker when I took on running the business I sort of had to gin up basically on my return account so this is one of our office meetings that we have this is me learning about spreadsheets and P&L and balance sheets and stuff and we always have our meetings in a line like that and you know it's just very exciting to be able to explain you know tricky numbers to people but it worked out I mean it was a sort of a certain amount of you know boring classes and courses that I had to do but essentially you got to understand

14:22the difference between revenue and cash because you can make some monumentally big mistakes if you don't know what you're actually earning as a company cash upfront I had she spoken to a few people who said that they really learnt from Jason Cohen's presentation a couple of years ago when we first launched you can book me the minimum upgrades you could buy with six months you know we didn't even do monthly billing for the first two years I think and although we weren't charging very much was a different point but the point is is that we've always given this sort of incentive to people to give us money

14:57upfront and it's what we've it's one of the main reasons how we've managed to finance and bootstrap our company is because we have been funding it through borrowing from ourselves from the future so I thought I would share this with you just so you can give a sort of a sense of how we've done that for the last couple of years we're bringing in ten to fifteen and you know in February 25,000 pounds of our income in one month is is upfront so we have to put that into our management accounts that all gets journaled out it's kind of bit of a faff but I'm sure you all know how to do it

15:29and so you can't you can't you know live off that in terms of income but you can spend and that's made a massive difference to us and you can see that it doesn't grow you know it can be we can incentivize it so in February getting better than incentivizing it you can do all sorts of things which will suddenly give you 15 20 grand you know in a month but certainly it's made a big difference we've also messed around with our pricing which is obviously critical to try to make money and to understand how you're going to get people to pay you we had one of those traditional free

16:01premium professional you know business style tiers with you know the people the CRO people who say you put the most expensive plan on the on the Left and what's your proxy and blah blah blah we did all of that and we did we changed it as well so we did we did mess about with how many features we made a big mistake on a free tool which is that every time we did a new feature we actually put it into the free tool which made no sense so one point eighteen months ago we just took them all out of the free tool and put them into the paid tool and what do

16:26you know suddenly we made another ten thousand quid in that month but we also were very unhappy with the pricing as we'd set it up because we just haven't really thought it through we just did what everybody does and we realized it didn't work for us so instead last year we changed the price just to a simple you know unit thing so one person one calendar ten dollars ten people ten calendar is one hundred dollars really easy to understand everybody gets the features you know wrapped in it's made a massive difference we've simplified a lot of the way we talk to our customers we've stopped having to explain

16:59complicated features and why this features in the premium thing and not in the professional we ourselves had forgotten why such as redirect to URL was in the profession that what you know this is it's suddenly like narrow how many calendars are you linking to well that's what you pay super-easy but also importantly that we are managing to capture higher spend companies much more easily and the professionals we have with professionals and in I've hired a couple of super you know competent ops people who come and do a lot of stuff but also all your systems you know so you bootstrap you have to look after your money you can't

17:34afford to basically you know it's just as flail about in terms of your system so we have incredibly watertight systems and about because we're a very low touch self-service app we handle thousands of transactions a day so we can't afford to do a lot of bookkeeping basically so everything and we're actually at now right now if anybody's interested we are now implementing Kill Bill which is the open source billing and subscription software that's used by Groupon I think and so you know we are we're basically looking to how do we scale up our app without scaling up the number of people we have to mess about with bits of paper

18:14and invoicing RS and again it's been something we did from the very very beginning like two or three years ago we did a really tight integration between zero and stripe just allowing people to come in upgrade you know renewed all of the stuff they want to do without as really ever talking to them everything gets automatically journals you know we we have a very small team essentially managing quite a lot of high volume of transactions managing expectations this is one of the things that we've done in terms of our hiring so again you will recognize this if you're bootstrapped or if you have no intention of getting on

18:47these taking on VC then it's it's a different conversation to hire people who are usually expecting with share options and the sort of the incentives that they normally get so I have this sort of theory which is is called Jam today you know that expression which is you know why we have Jam yesterday no Jam tomorrow but never Jam today and I believe though this had Jam today you know you've got money in the bank and we've our intuition it's good let's pay ourselves let's pay out I mean profit share is the kind of thing that's going to come in for us this year and but we

19:16also you know people know that we don't have a endless run of cash that we're not actually trying to grow our company through you know sort of expenditure on brand and marketing without you know sort of feeling like it's all going to be Jam tomorrow so let's just push push out and the expenditure today is to get the Jam tomorrow we say no it's we've got Jam today and this is how much we have it's a limited budget so that our staff you know everybody who works for you can book me is signed up to that they know what that's about and they know we're very open and transparent

19:47inside the company everybody knows what what we all get paid everybody knows what we earn everybody knows what we spend our money on it's our choice it's our Jam so you know I think that's been very healthy for us because it's allowed us to be honest about the way we have built the business I said to people in the past we're not trying to secretly build a profitable company not tell anybody about it you know there's there's no questions in our inside the team about how we how we run things but we have had to borrow money it's one of the things that we've done as well as

20:17sort of cash upfront and keeping an eye on expenses we've also borrowed money so you know you you'll know it's very tricky with banks because you go to them say can we borrow some money because we haven't any money and they go well we don't lend loss-making companies you haven't got any money it's not our problem and you go okay and then they go you know you say well you know we're going to do something about that look at our plan and they go well we don't fund what looks like a risky business speculation and you go okay so then you sort of reshuffle and you tell them what your

20:46costs are and then they go well we don't fund director salaries so you're okay fine so you come back to them with a sort of a presentation which is minimizing how much you're paying yourself minimizing what it looks like you're going to lose but giving you this of a reasonable amount of what you're going to earn and then they go well if you're going to make a profit well how will we know you're going to use our facility our overdraft or whatever so you know what's in it for us we're not going to put that liability or knows and then you not actually use it so it's

21:09incredibly tricky and then they finally say your business model is very unusual if you're considered a venture capital so I sort of found myself realizing that stop talking to the banks there's just there's no point because they don't seem to understand what we're doing which is a great shame because I think that actually banks should be there to help companies like ours that do need a bit of upfront cash support because we can demonstrate that we can grow we can build on that revenue but you need you need something to get going and that was our revenue mean that's what I was show at the bank I was saying look yeah this

21:39is a couple of years ago we're at two hundred and fifty thousand dollars ARR and then just sort of couple months ago we hit the 1.5 million AR mark you know we're going to carry on growing to about 2 million an annual recurring revenue sort of later on this year so the bank just didn't believe it fine but I mean you know this is this is one story about how much you know we've grown in terms of our revenue with a much more interesting story from my perspective of what I've been doing with you can book me is this which is our P&L and then that is that that shows you something

22:15which is trickier to pull off basically so here I could use this pointer but you can see on the left there April 15 so two years ago we were just bumping along sometimes some months were making a profit two other times we were making a loss and so is at this point that you know started to hire people and basically increase our work flow and get get some people in and and you know you hire all those people and then you end up sort of 30,000 pounds in the red and so nobody wants to be there and you started to panic a little bit more but

22:47actually you're still you know play carry on hiring people that's what we did knowing that I revenue was going up and it was a bit of a bet but at the same time it's also something where as I was saying before if you're if you're all-in if you've committed if you're going to take the bait you're going to do it you're going to run the company this is what you need to do essentially and then at some point you know you it works out and you get to a point where your profit margins and you can see profit coming in and then you can see actually we've done that and there's

23:17nothing really now to stop us from carrying on doing that you know that's something which I hear from companies all the time coming to these conferences they talk about their profits and their margins it sounds absolutely brilliant because coming from our point of view where it took a long time for us to make profits doesn't mean to say that we didn't have cash in the bank but we weren't making profits now that we realized this year is going to be profitable it feels great you know I think that there's a lot to be said so in terms of the shoe maker and how to be more like the shoe maker I

23:46would say it's very simple spend less make more money you know don't hire people don't spend money on stuff that everybody tells you you know you think you ought to be spending money on and I'll tell a little bit about that in my next section and you know keep an eye on your cost and as a result of that grow more slowly but then grow more profitably and grow more sustainably the the you know the only thing I would say about VC investment type stuff is that that is not income that's not revenue that's just more debt you just take on more debt and I think

24:19it's ironic that we here in Las Vegas you know in the sort of capital of gambling that no I bet nobody in this room really liked gambling you know nobody wants to really actually say let's take on a million quid two million quid and see if we can gamble it away on an idea like me and he didn't want to do that we had all those products and most of them failed so this one didn't and this is the one that we've invested in but it wasn't exactly a gamble because we measured it you know pair of shoes buy pair of shoes I should say didn't explain the elves and the

24:51shoemaker does everybody know about the awesome machine maker is it just me my childhood favorite story does everybody know that well you have to google it if you have no idea what I'm talking about then google it it's a great it's a great story finally my last section how to be more like the wizard the wizard of odds so this is this is the Emerald City this is a sort of a you know AM analogy for for what we're doing these are this is your startup you know the the Promised Land this is what you're trying to achieve and these are your users and you know everything can be kind of set in

25:26that context of you're just trying to get a whole bunch of people over here to start using your product and feel happy and fulfilled over here and all their questions are answered that's kind of kind of thing that you know we're fervently talking about how do we get our users to our startup so that we can solve their problems but more often than not when you start up when you have that first idea and you've got the domain and you've got the website this is actually how you feel you know people are turning up at your door and you're like no I'm not ready for you right now you know I'm

25:55actually I'm a bit of a fraud Here I am there's just one of us you know it's it's not actually what what you were expecting or they are expect or or you think their expectations of you are going to be something more than that so I also give you a chance to read these as I let me know if anybody recognizes these quotes I've substituted product getting it Natalie's getting it so anyway this is this is essentially what you would we feel like we should do this is the traditional sales model you just basically brag and brag and brag about who you are you you make yourself

26:31look bigger than you are you know you sort of um you tell everybody you're going to you're going to solve all their problems and then hope they don't find out the you're not gonna be able to do that and I think that one of the lessons I've had I've learned that bragging isn't selling you know in the end of the day it's stressful because you're kind of pretending to be somebody or not so at the very beginning I felt that we ought to kind of give the impression that we were we were this of a big company and you know we were going to corporately solve everybody's problems and instead

27:01now I'll tell you what we what we did instead or the mistakes that we've made which I now feel much better about because a company that we don't do any longer so this is this is from our front page our team page and I say very very simply we even though the product has grown over the years we're still a small and dedicated team who loves solving scheduling products problems all over the world we're proud to remain a privately owned company solvent stable and a safe pair of hands the thing about that that we're not trying to brag we're not trying to say we're the best we're

27:34not trying to say you know all your answer all your questions would be answered here but it means that if anybody meets me in the street and they use you can book me I am who I say I am you know we are who we say we are or not we're not trying to be anything other than what we're trying to do and it makes it from in terms of the stress it makes it so much easier when you know you're being truthful and authentic about about your product so even though there's only ten of us we actually do work with some of the biggest companies

28:01in the world you know some huge tech companies use you can book me we interact with people who are running much bigger companies than us and sometimes we have to say look we're just a small team or this is how we manage things or this is the process or we haven't done this before or we're working hard at this and what we are hoping and relying on is our reputation for reliability and for credibility and authenticity is what's taking us through because we have a lot of customer referrals and people who've used us who are basically vouching for us so we don't have to say something

28:35that we're not but I think at the very beginning when I first took on the role I felt like I needed to be more you know I needed to look and invest into solutions which really somebody should have told me at the time look you're not ready for that yet you know that's that's five years down the line so you know here I am on the left hand side sort of feeling very kind of you know I have a confession sometimes I avoid learning new things because I'm so afraid of acknowledging how little I really know that this would feeling of like oh god I've got a I've got a sort

29:05of reach out and and you you know find other people to solve my problems and over here I hate also have a confession I'm super awesome and I couldn't be less awesome if I tried and those tend to be consultants and so I think that my my early experience of when we did have some cash in the bank was spend money on consultants because they're going to come in they've promised me loads of stuff I feel insecure that we haven't done we don't have all of these things in-house we're gonna buy you know all this experience and at the end of the day to the best of their abilities you

29:35know we wasted a lot of money we didn't make any money and actually again in terms of the shoemaker philosophy we started to make a profit when we stopped spending money on stuff that we just couldn't see was giving us any ROI at all and we were only doing it for our own kind of cosmetic satisfaction so these are two examples so I was really pleased to hear rustling on content market was absolutely great because we did we were like we are exactly the kind of person he was saying people who do this it's wrong we did that people do this so here's an example we had a blog

30:06we kind of a blog with this blog six smart way this is the it was this blog that made me think are what are we doing six smart ways to make social media marketing work for your small business we I had somebody write this I did it wasn't my idea to write the post she decided to write and she put up there so what is that I said we're a small business we don't know how to use social media we've got no idea what we're doing why are we blogging about it and pretending to these other people but you know it's just like this is like like I don't recognize this and I

30:37don't want to do it anymore so so so we had somebody else actually she was a consultant but she was very good just two summers ago she just said why don't we just close the blog down I mean Keith were like really we can we could do that we don't have to we don't have to have a blog because we hadn't thought very you know analytically about the intent and the levels that we were just randomly writing on the internet just you know well wasn't doing anything so actually it's just like yeah let's just let's just let's just cancel the block brilliant along mr. Facebook and again

31:11we have a faith we did have a Facebook page let everybody else have a Facebook page and actually it small businesses who tend to use Facebook you know really actively who find us on Facebook and again it's just like well we don't really have very much for you our content is we haven't got you know what are we what are we posting for you all it all it is is people who kind of give us shitty reviews because they can't find us somewhere else with whatever else and I just thought do you know what I am going I'm just gonna simply delete the Facebook group page

31:39thing I'm just not gonna do it I mean I might do it when we become like 150 strong and we can have a whole social media team who can do it but I wanted your Facebook every day I mean God bless them I just want to do it so I just thought that's all gone and made me feel so much better um so back to the kind of the journey so what I decided what I what we do do what I have been doing what I have been learning from and getting confidence about the way we run the company is that is the community and these are obviously

32:08three three big ones but it's it's it's reading from it's talking to you guys it's reading about what these people are doing and saying right yeah look they said exactly the same thing that's the way I feel that's good I can't be really wrong here if my community is saying the same thing as how I feel so being like the wizard means you know you obviously can be as big as you want to be you could be male to him you could be a billion dollar company but you can still be true you can still be authentic you have to be yourself because otherwise who are you

32:38if you're just trying to pretend to be you know something that you think everybody else wants when it's not really you so my last words it's just really a repetition to bootstrap like a badass be like so long think about the long-term commit to the long term you've got to be in it to win it as they say be like the the shoe maker you know be patient with what you can make on a day-by-day basis and profit will come and be like the wizard you know start feeling authentic and enjoying yourself and see where this last one

33:17thank you briefly mentioned profit sharing is an alternative to stock options incentivizing employees could you talk to us a little bit about how that's set up well it we haven't because we've only just started to make a profit so what we did was last year just before Christmas is kind of as a as a gesture of goodwill we gave everybody like a cash bonus to say look money's in the bank we're gonna start paying but you know people like naturally been talking about profit share and what she does boss I might do it there's a sort of well-established models of taking a percentage of your profit and then you

33:49know on some form of of offer formula everybody gets it and I think we're going to I mean I it hasn't been formulated but it would be something along the bottom it kind of lines and it is it is important because I know that and we're a remote team as well so that I think one of the things I haven't totally figured out in our processes is that kind of asymmetry in terms of cost of living and what we should be paying out and longevity but I think my it goes back to the kind of thinking about long term it could be you know that we have you come at me for the

34:24rest of our lives and if that's the case and we create quite a lot of wealth and that company then I do want people who feel like they're at they've invest and we have some people who've worked for us for you know sort of five years now they they invested in us and I think it is only right that they also feel the benefits of creating a profitable company alongside me and Keith because of course we couldn't do it without them and I want them to feel that you know they see what that is and and also as an incentive for people to join us when

34:49we're hiring so it I haven't got the the figures to hand but it'll be it'll be something that'll make everybody happy I think Pelle Dee has written that up he has yeah all the balsamic profit sharing he's gone into pretty much detail about it and if he hasn't emailed him and asked him to write it up because he's pretty good at that stuff either you mentioned killing the blog in the Facebook page what are you doing for marketing in the small place nothing yeah it has it has worked somewhat I should explain I mean you know so I was sort of I was dissing our free tool

35:27before but actually that is our one referral channel so we have on the free version of you can book me you've got a powerful free button so half of our or actually more than that of our new new account creations are coming from people who are basically being driven to the to the page from our from our powered for button but also we've been around for such a long time now we are coming up much more naturally in terms of the research returns and reviews and all that kind of thing and and actually there's been a sort of what happened with you can put me is it

36:01one person will start using it in a particular sector and then it will you know it will snowball and other people will see that that's the you know that's the the tool for them to use we've been very very lucky and I'm not being complacent about it at all and actually it's something which as we've moved you know we what we've been focusing on in the last couple of years has been the infrastructure challenges of growing so quickly in terms of the actual use of the tool era to devour or a stack our product which is quite old so we've been reengineering our product and then

36:31growing and identifying what kind of company culture and team we we have and then getting that to a sustainable business so we're now in the point where like okay right how are we going to push this forward which I believe that you know next year will be up I'll come back in a couple years time and I'll tell you the story of how we managed to do some marketing Bridgette thank you very much everybody [Applause]