Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:08 Welcome to the rogue startups podcast. We're to startup founders are sharing lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid in their online businesses. And now here's Dave and Craig. All right. Welcome to another episode of rogue startups. Number two 43. Craig, how are you this week?
Speaker 1 00:00:26 I'm good, man. I'm good. I did spend a couple of weeks since we've recorded. I think we've, we've gotten on the phone the last couple of weeks and kind of said, Ooh, there's a lot going on, but not a whole lot that we can talk about publicly on the podcast. So we, uh, we we've been, we've been doing a lot and I think this week kind of catching up on, on a few of those things that have been going on that we hadn't been able to talk about publicly in the last couple of weeks, but yep. Pretty good. Overall, I have to say how about you?
Speaker 2 00:00:50 Same, same. Yeah, there's been a, there's been some frustrating developments with recapture in my content marketing effort, but we can talk about that during the updates here. Otherwise, you know, the spring is springing around here and you know, it's the funny thing about seasonal affective disorders that you're never a hundred percent sure that you actually have it. You know, things just feel a little off, but all of a sudden one day, and there was a great quote on Twitter that said, you know, I walked outside today into the sunshine and it felt like I popped a Molly
Speaker 2 00:01:27 And I realized that's exactly what it feels like. That is exactly what it feels like. I went out and we've had some, you know, really warm weather and I haven't, you know, this year has been really good for seasonal affective disorder for me. I haven't needed my desk light. You know, the exercise has been helping a lot. I take St. John's ward as well to sort of, um, stab that off. All of that's been okay. Like it's, it's made me get through it and I haven't felt like really low, but when I went outside, when it was super warm with that sunshine, it felt like I popped them off.
Speaker 1 00:02:00 That's hilarious. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's been all things considered. It's been pretty good for me. Like for me, the fall is worse than the winter. And like, interestingly, like haven't been able to enjoy any of the like winter time stuff. Cause all the skiing is closed here. And so everyone is cross-country skiing, which is, uh, something we did more than like Alpine skiing in the last couple of years, but everyone is doing cross country skiing here. And so we haven't done it just because it's so fucking busy. So we've not done any kind of skiing sports this year at all, which is usually like my, my escape. But I'll tell you no, it's not something like that. I've been like super affected by, I guess, like, I think I've just kind of like retreated my ex, but like my, my expectations have withdrawn a fair amount and just said like I'm alive, my family's healthy. We have enough money to live. Everything else is gravy. Like, and I think I've honestly kind of just settled as that is, is kinda my when and yeah, I think, I think lowering your expectations is not like a terrible thing these days. So I know that's not super uplifting, but then that's the reality for a lot of us right now.
Speaker 2 00:03:05 Oh, that's funny. Uh, you know, it's weird to me that they've closed off scheme over there because you know, here in Colorado and I would not say that we're, you know, we are not the Texas and Mississippi of the, the mountain West here. We have been very cautious in terms of trying to balance, you know, economic activity with health and safety, but the ski areas are all open and you know, they've all had reservations and you know, they require masks around the lift. And generally speaking, I'd say that's working. You know, I, you know, I don't feel I've gone out three times already and we've got two more on the docket, this coming weekend, and I've not felt unsafe about doing it. In fact, if anything, the scheme has probably helped quite a bit. Cause you know, not getting out during the winter and not having that, you know, athletic outlet is definitely a bad thing. And you know, I really enjoy that. Like this year it's been a true joy to do that with my kids. They're finally at a place where, you know, they're all keeping up with me and I'm not like having to wait or having to downgrade what I would ski on just so they can ski with me. You know, it's been, it's been really awesome. So yeah, I haven't, uh, I, I'm just surprised that they've shut it down completely there, but maybe the crowds are so much different there in Europe. I have no idea.
Speaker 1 00:04:20 Yeah. I don't, I mean, it's been a long time since I skied in the U S so I don't know, but, uh, yeah, I mean, I think that what, we're just, we're screwing the pooch royally here with, with, you know, the, like the vaccine rollout and our numbers, haven't gone down significantly in the last month, even. And I know like in the U S and the UK, the numbers just plummeting, like the number of cases, because the vaccine role has been so successful and it's just terrible here. It's just like, so I think because of that, they just, you know, we can't do anything fun. We're getting penalized for the ineptitude of the government, but I think everybody is, um, take
Speaker 2 00:04:54 Away all your toys. You don't get any nice things anyway.
Speaker 1 00:04:56 Exactly, exactly. Yeah, man, I had a couple of updates to kind of a couple of rounds, you know, like how we're working these days, just to kind of share the, I think what is like an evolution, you know, the first one of like how we're, how we're doing EOS. Right. So like, we've talked about EOS a few times, uh, in past episodes. And like, I think one of the things that we definitely said is it's like up for interpretation, how you implement these things in small remote tech-focused companies. I think, um, it's like if you're an in, in office shipping kind of focus to store, you know, store or business or something like that, like I imagine the, the kind of example, businesses from the traction book then, like, I think it all works perfectly for us. I think some of the things like metrics on employees or like groups don't work exactly.
Speaker 1 00:05:49 Right. And for us kind of, because of that, like we found the level 10 meeting didn't really translate great. And specifically like the place that I thought it fell down and the change we made was like, we followed it with like, you know, the good news came first and then like a customer story that, so that, that all went good. And then we reviewed like our scorecard that was like, okay. But it only tells really like the marketing side of the business, you know, like marketing and revenue, not like support and product and development and things like that. And then, and then like issues and, and like the to-do list kind of just ended up being that, like I was doing all the talking, you know, and like I was the only one bringing issues and that's just not like what I want, because I think that, especially as like our companies grow, like the goal should be for other people to bring issues to the meetings and all of us talk about things that other people are, are, are kind of experiencing and contributing.
Speaker 1 00:06:50 And so, as a result, we, we are experimenting with, with really just having like highlight and the low light from the last week. And then the, the single biggest thing that you are kind of focused on or concerned about. And, and, and the thing that, I guess, like after our first iteration of this, that, that I realized is this, this should, this thing that you're kind of focused or concerned about should be in the lens of your quarterly rock, you know? And like, if we make that slight tweak that I think like, okay, this is the thing that everybody should be working towards every week. What are you concerned about or thinking about as it relates to kind of your progress towards that rock?
Speaker 2 00:07:28 Does everybody in your company have quarterly rocks? Or is it just the company as a whole, like, do you have individual departments say development, quarterly rock as this support quarterly rock? Is this marketing quarterly rock cause this,
Speaker 1 00:07:39 Yeah, it's, it's both. Yeah. The company has quarterly rocks and each, you know, kind of division or group has. And some of those are just one person that's me. But, but yeah, the idea is for each division to have a rock and really like, within that, like, think about development, there's like three or four developers. If we have three or four rocks, each person owns a rock within that group. Okay. And that staying consistent. So like one of ours is uptime, right. Like I think that that's a fair, you know, rock one person owns that. Well, another one is like a net decrease in outstanding issues. Someone owns that, you know? So, yeah. So, so that's, I don't know, that's, that's just been our experience and kind of how I felt about the meetings as I was doing a lot of talking and that's not right. You know, and so trying to make this to where we just go around and everybody talks about the good stuff and the bad stuff from the last week that in and of itself spur some discussion. And then like, as I'm thinking about this week, cause we do a Monday, like for the folks on the East coast, it's nine o'clock in the morning. So they're really thinking like, what is this week? Hold for me? What am I thinking and concerned about? But hopefully like, that's the goal.
Speaker 2 00:08:52 So it was the, I wasn't on the issue with the metrics that it sounds like you have some metrics, but they're all marketing metrics. So why do developers and support and whatever, not have metrics to pay attention to them.
Speaker 1 00:09:06 They, so they do, I think support has metrics and those are, those are like pretty appropriate. I think, you know, like average response time and happiness score and, you know, new reviews and wordpress.org and things like that. But like reviewing those on a weekly basis is a little, is it myopic Dave that like you're looking too closely at things. Yeah. So I felt like reviewing like people's individual metrics and even like the com like the marketing metrics, like what was our trial to paid conversion ratio last week, even me for like, I love the data around marketing is like, you know, whatever it was down 11% last week, but, you know, that's, that's a really small difference really. And it was up 23% the week before. So like who, you know, like I think it's looking at some of these too often is I felt was bad for us. And so we're moving to looking at all of those kind of SAS metrics on a monthly basis now, which is what we did before.
Speaker 2 00:10:07 Yeah. I was going to suggest that maybe there's too much variation on the week timeframe, so you go, but you know, you don't want it to go too long because like, if something's really going to shit, then you know, you've got an entire month to execute on before you see whether you've made an improvement or not. So.
Speaker 1 00:10:24 Yep. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I look at it all the time, you know, and if I saw something really going sideways, I'd probably kind of intervene, but, but as a group, we, we look at them, you know, in the first week, the first Monday meeting, uh, after the first of the month. So cool. Yeah. So I guess stay tuned, but that's the, that's the latest there and kind of, I dunno, be, be interested to hear of other folks in kind of small companies, small distributed companies have seen the same thing with level 10 meeting, or if I'm just screwing it up, it was very helpful.
Speaker 2 00:10:53 I wonder if level 10 meetings just are, they're basically designed for companies of a certain size and you know, that you're just not there yet. I know I'm not there yet. Like having a level 10 meeting with me and my developer doesn't make any sense. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's adding process to where process actually becomes an impediment. Yeah. So, uh, you know, at what point is a level 10 meeting effective, you know, is it a company size of 10? Is it company size of 20? Is it when you have a meeting size of five? You know, I don't know. It's very vague in the book and you know, the examples that they gave in get a grip made it seem like you had to have a decent size company to do this, like as something in the 30 to 40 range. Right?
Speaker 1 00:11:44 Yeah. I can see we're not there, but I can see when we have like a lead for development, a lead for being a support and success, a lead for sales and a lead for marketing, and then me that we could have that meeting, but, but that's not a whole team meeting, which is what I like our Monday meeting to be. Um, so, so maybe that's a whole separate meeting. It is like to have a whatever leadership meeting where we really talk about rocks and strategy. And then from there it can kind of flow down to the rest of the team within those, within those groups. But, but I think part of it is like, not everybody cares about, about like some of the metrics and like what our weekly progress towards our trial to paid conversion ratio is, you know, like I think, I think that's reasonable, but yeah, at some level that's not, everybody's kind of thing to worry about, you know?
Speaker 2 00:12:36 Yeah. But at the same time, like understanding how pieces fit together, uh, you know, I, I think you're right. I think when you're, you're dealing with the leads, they have to look at the bigger picture. But when you're talking about somebody who's down in the trenches, who's digging the ditch and, you know, handling the muck, this stuff becomes a little less relevant.
Speaker 1 00:12:56 Yeah. It's good to be aware
Speaker 2 00:12:57 Of it, but at the same time, like I don't need to be involved in the minutia that I just want to know. Is it going up? Is it going down? Is everything okay? Like, you know, general health metric.
Speaker 1 00:13:07 Yup, yup. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Dunno man. Yeah, no, I mean, it's a level five meeting. We need another five minutes. There you go. There you go. But it's been, you know, I, I think it's nice that we're able to obviously like able to pivot do you know how those meetings go and, you know, so everybody's happier and contributes more and feels better about their time spent in those meetings. So, yeah, it's, it's on a good path so far, I think. Good. Good, good. Now, did you want to kind of dig into what is, uh, what's going on in the content world? Uh, sure, sure. So would be a stretch.
Speaker 2 00:13:47 Just say that I've been struggling a little bit over the last couple of months with my, um, my content guy. So at first I thought things were going fairly well. And then, you know, I got my initial blog post series written and out, and it was to my liking eventually, but it took us a long time to get there. And I thought maybe that was just initial content. You know, we got to get on the same page. We got to figure out what's the various styles going on, et cetera. But you know, at this point I'm continuing to see degenerating behavior as time goes on. So, you know, originally I was promised that I was going to get a certain level of content for the price and I would get this on a monthly basis and, you know, I'm getting less than a quarter or a third of what it is that was promised to me and it on that, you know, and that price isn't cheap either. So, and then I'm finding out that he's kind of, he's subcontracting this stuff, which wouldn't really bother me if the quality was where it was supposed to be. And unfortunately it's not. So I'm having to send it back, which is taking more time, which means we're getting less delivery, which means it's not really working. So I feel like I've now burned a fair amount of time and I'm going to have to revamp my strategy and probably get somebody who is, um, different to do this because where I'm at right now, it's not working.
Speaker 1 00:15:23 Yeah. Yeah. I know it's a lot of time that you've spent, have you kind of sunk money into this that you feel like you're not getting anything back on or,
Speaker 2 00:15:32 You know, he, he hasn't charged me for every month that we've been working and that in and of itself probably ought to be a little bit of a red flag on its own here because I would expect that somebody wants to deliver and wants to get paid. Right. I'm a freelancer. I'm going to, you give me a list of things that you need to get done. I'm going to plow through those so I can bill you for them. That's my, that's my motivation here. And he's not doing that like, okay. But why, you know, and you know, at first it was, Oh, I had some other things, you know, some, some things came up, Oh, I had some hiring problems, you know, there's always some excuse in there somewhere. And I'm like, you know, I'm a tolerant guy, I'm a reasonable, flexible guy, but at some point I'm like, yeah, this isn't, this isn't working for me. And I, you know, now I've wasted a lot of time, so now I'm mad. And, uh, yeah, you know, now I'm under even more of a gun than I was before. So
Speaker 1 00:16:38 I think that, uh, you know, being able to kind of pull, pull out of that engagement and go into another one, if you have all the briefs and you've done the keyword research and you know, what the outline should be like, that should be pretty easy to plug a new writer into, into that. And it might be the kind of thing where you go and you, you kind of trial a couple of different writers with that. I mean, if you've done all the work to get those kind of packages upfront, then that might be a nice way to kind of spread your risk around to Lynn and kind of exposure around a little bit to say like, Hey, I'm going to put this job posting out or whatever, and I'm gonna hire like two or three writers, get them all done, you know, in the next two weeks, uh, to try to catch up on some of that time. And then you're available to evaluate several people at one time, instead of just like all in on one person, you know?
Speaker 2 00:17:21 Yeah. And I might even like have 'em all right against the same set of keywords and see who comes out with the best product, because yeah. I mean, I, I can't, I can't have another one where they go and they come back a week later and you know, they're using old British terminology in, in their language. I'm like, nobody says, hence not here in the United States, but yeah, that's tough, man. That's tough. Even
Speaker 1 00:17:50 With that, you know, kind of set back on the marketing front is business going well though,
Speaker 2 00:17:54 Businesses okay. With recapture, uh, you know, the, the month of January was a little rough February. Uh, we recovered at the end and we were starting to head in a positive trend and March is continuing in that same direction. Not as fast as it was last year, but it's still up. And, uh, you know, I can't complain about that. I had hoped that I would have some paid campaigns in place to be, you know, pushing down on that a little bit more, but it's definitely good. Yeah. I mean, I have, so there's been some news on the partner front. One of my, uh, partnerships that I had started with, they basically have now sort of doubled down and are now going to do me as their exclusive provider. And so we've come up with an affiliate agreement and, you know, they're basically going to get credit for all the people that they're sending to me and they're going to prominently feature me on their site and, you know, so they're basically replacing somebody who's one of my competitors on there now, so that's good. You know, that's coming together here in March. I expect it to probably release April-ish. So yeah, that's definitely going to push things forward and generate some more business with that. It's been a slow trickle with that particular integration, but you know, any little push there starts to just compound at this point.
Speaker 1 00:19:18 Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. That's awesome. Uh, with the, with this kind of partnership, do you guys have like co marketing, like structure all set up and stuff? Or is it, is it kind of just like a, a product thing or like, what's the extent of the, of the partnership? Like, if you can talk about that.
Speaker 2 00:19:35 So it is a co-marketing thing, you know, um, uh, we've talked about doing some joint webinars and we'll set those up probably in may and August. And you know, we're going to try to aim them at different audiences. One where we have more entry-level stores and more advanced stores later on. So we can prepare two different levels here for, you know, how do you maximize the stuff? How do you get the most out of your store, that kind of thing. And then they're going to, you know, like I said, they're putting me on their site. So, you know, there's a dedicated page to it. I'm going to be in their little app store kind of thing. Nice. Um, and I'm going to be on their main page of integrations, not the partner page or the third party page. So that's a little bit different, cause everybody tends to go to the first page, not the second page. You have a big drop off in traffic there and see what else do we have on tap there? I think, Oh, they're going to add me into their, a welcome sequence for the, uh, the main
Speaker 1 00:20:36 Massive that's a, that's a really deep integration man. That's awesome.
Speaker 2 00:20:40 Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, this is, this is big and you know, I, for this, I'm not paying any more than I'm paying Shopify or big commerce. So yeah, those, those funds are certainly totally reasonable. So if that works out well, then, you know, it's going to be mutually beneficial to both of us. Cause they, they get something value about valuable out of it by making their customers more successful. I get something valuable out of it. Cause I have paying customers that I can take care of.
Speaker 1 00:21:08 Yup. So that's awesome. Win-win relationship. I'm excited. Yeah. I'll be interested to hear how it goes, like once it's live and once you start to see some of the, the kind of results of, of that, that'll be cool to see like, you know, if you're able to share kind of metrics around that, that'd be cool.
Speaker 2 00:21:24 Yeah. I suspect like, I mean, you know, I've done enough integrations at this point that I just know the integration, the results from integrations tend to be delayed anywhere from six to 12 months. You know, we saw that with Shopify, we saw it with Wu, we saw it with EDD, big commerce. You know, this change is probably going to be no different in that regard. It might be a little bit faster, but it's hard to say.
Speaker 1 00:21:50 Yeah. Yeah. So Dave, did you see, uh, indie VC shutting down its fund or not taking any more, not making any more new investments I guess is technically what, what happened?
Speaker 2 00:22:03 I did. I did. And this, this was a surprise. I did not see this one coming, considering that this thing is only six years old. Cause they started in 2015 and you know, I went back and sort of read their statistics and you know, who originally funded them, uh, cause they're O'Reilly SoftBank something, something, and yeah, it it's definitely seems we'll call it premature. I would have expected a little bit longer time, but it seems like the investors lost patients and um, yeah, that's a bummer.
Speaker 1 00:22:42 Yeah. I think it's interesting. Like they, you know, I look at them as, you know, they're the first ones of the, this kind of like alternative fund for non true VC track companies. Right. And, and I think that they, they really tried to like pave the road for, for this track, you know, for other companies to do similar things. And I think that, I don't know, like Bryce wrote a nice blog post about it. And I think that what it ended up being to me was like, yeah, this misalignment of expectations between investors. And I wanna say like the kind of company Bryce wanted to run, but, but basically that, you know, that like he wanted to invest in cool indie kind of companies. And at the beginning, maybe the, the, the investors are like, cool. Yeah. You know, that's great. Maybe some of them will unicorns and the returns can be solid. And, and I think what it sounds like is they basically haven't had the like liquidity events or, or like the, the kind of returning cashflow that, that investors were looking for. Yeah. To where they, you know, they probably can't raise more money in than the existing investors, you know, want it out. Um, I don't know if they can request their money back or if they just like, aren't going to raise any more money. So they're, they're kind of putting it maintenance mode. I don't know which of those options it is at this point.
Speaker 2 00:23:59 Yeah. I don't, I don't really know, but it seems like, it seems like there was a fundamental mismatch in that chain of money where you had Bryce that pitched SoftBank O'Reilly, et cetera. And they got excited about this thinking that this was sort of an underdog play that they could get in and maybe get unicorn returns. But that right there is already the mismatch because they're still going to continue to get standard institutional money investing in this standard partners that, you know, have this notion of, Oh, you're a VC fund. Oh. So you're going to get X percent, especially when they're comparing themselves to other VC funds, you know, they're going to look and say, Oh, well, you know, Andreessen Horowitz is getting an entirely different return than you are. And uh, how come we're not getting those returns? You know, like it doesn't matter that they're totally different investment thesis.
Speaker 2 00:24:56 There's just that natural comparison that's going on. That those investors are probably looking at going, why am I not getting that? And you know, it was cool that SoftBank and, and Bryce were able to sort of work that out. But you know, the expectation should have been managed from the fund on down to the investors, say, this is what it is. And if you don't want to be in this, this is a long-term play. This is not going to be like a short-term pop and we're going to get an Airbnb every other year. And it's going to see that kind of return. No, not at all, which, you know, I have no idea how to manage those sorts of things there, but it would be a big concern for something like tiny seed or earnest capital, because are they going to run into the same problems?
Speaker 2 00:25:49 Because at some point, you know, you're going to be going out and trying to raise this money and get these bigger funds, the bigger the fund, the bigger the source. And eventually somebody's going to be thinking that they're investing in a kind of VC like fund and, you know, you might pitch it as a well, we're like this, but we're not like a real VC fund, but now the person investing is only hearing the word VC and therefore they expect VC, you know, is this a ticking time bomb for tiny seed? I don't think it was like for the early part and the early investors, the people that I know have invested in tiny seed and the conversations that are being had about tiny seed don't seem to reflect that. But at what point will that happen? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:26:37 I think there's, there's two pretty big differences between, and of course I know everything, but, but kind of seeing what I see, there's two pretty big differences between tiny seed and earnest capital slash indie VC, because for, and, uh, you know, folks please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think they basically have the same terms. I think Ernest kind of just adopted much of the terms of, of Indies VC, where companies can pay back the vast majority of the equity stake that, that indie VC earnest took in, in the company up to like a three or four times return on equity to pay down or a Fort three to four times return on the investment made to pay down to like 1% or something. You know, some very small percentage of, of equity that's retained by, by the investment firm that I thin. And so I think that's one big difference with tiny seed. You cannot do that. It's this is your money, here's your money. We always have this kind of stake in your company. I'm sure there's a way that, you know, I could buy tiny seed out of their investment, but that would be like, uh, you know, jump big amount of money, I would think
Speaker 2 00:27:47 Right. There would have to be evaluation and then a number would have to be decided upon and you would have to pay that somehow, et cetera. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1 00:27:53 Yeah. But it's not like expected. Right. And I think that's the thing is the expectation of the types of companies that want to come into. And again, this is my kind of conjecture, the types of companies that want to come into an indie VC or an earnest potentially are more like people that want to take, like what is ultimately like a really big loan, you know, to say, like, I think they're the companies and the founders expectations on, on kind of growth. And the ultimate outcome of their business might be different than someone like that wants. That goes into tiny seed where we're going to take this money. We're going to give up the psycho D so that we can grow as big as possible, as fast as possible. Whereas I, I, my mindset, if I was able to pay back the investment and reduce the amount of equity I had to give up, I would want to do that, you know, as, as, as kind of quickly as possible.
Speaker 1 00:28:50 So that I end up with a big chunk of the pie and the end, whereas, you know, with tiny seed, that's just not an option. So I don't even think about that and like slowing down my cash burn and things like that. So we can continue to grow as much as possible. So I don't know if like the terms dictate the type of company comes under the mindset of the founding team as how they're, how they're looking at growth. And, and then, you know, I think it leads to that, to that outcome in the end that maybe is not happening as much with, with IndieVC, you know?
Speaker 2 00:29:19 Yeah. That's, that's an excellent point. And I forgot that earnest basically was, uh, mirroring their terms off of IndieVC and that they could buy you out, or you could buy yourself out of that loan. So that would very much change the returns as an investor because, you know, I'm sure that there's some interest rate payback, but those are not going to be like 30, 40, 50, a hundred percent gains on your invested capital. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:29:45 So it's four times, you know, over five years or eight years or whatever, and then that's it basically, and then you have 1% that they retain, you know? Right,
Speaker 2 00:29:53 Right. So, you know, maybe the, and obviously Bryce is not sharing these numbers on which ones it, I mean, there's so many variables, right. It could be that they invested in a bunch of companies that are still trucking along, but none of them had, you know, none of them had really big exit events or equity events. Right. Yeah. Or it could be that those that did have those events bought themselves back along the way. And so Indy didn't get a lot of profit out of that. So, or it could be that, you know, that they're just have a bunch of struggling companies, you know, I don't even know all the ones that are, that indie VC is invested in. So, you know, there's definitely a lot of questions there and tiny seed is obviously doing this very differently in that regard probably, you know, so that they can make those bets. And if something goes big and pays off, then they get a big payday out of that. And there's no way for the founders to sort of pull that back.
Speaker 1 00:30:51 So, yeah. Yeah. I think it's super interesting. I mean, I think there's a lot going on in this space right now of, you know, revenue based financing, alternative funding. It's, I mean, it's dizzying almost too to kind of go through it. We're exploring a bunch of different options as far as, you know, adding more research to the company right now. And I can tell you, it's like the number of options out there is, I mean, it's endless, you know, it it's, it's like you got at some point, just say, fuck it, we're going to do this. I don't know if this is right or wrong, but we're doing this. And I know there's other options out there. And maybe we can address those later or look at them later as, as potential opportunities. But, but you could, I mean, you could, and I have in the last couple months, just like waste a ton of PR you know, what would be productive time looking at all these and having calls and doing prospectuses and all this bullshit that like, I'm, I'm much more back into the, let's build a business and, you know, get money as, as easily as we can kind of path, uh, to do that.
Speaker 1 00:31:47 So that's interesting. Yup.
Speaker 2 00:31:49 Yup. I agree. I mean, we are definitely in a vastly different space than we were 10 years ago where, you know, it was your credit cards or nothing, your credit cards and a prayer. That was it. Yeah. Maybe, maybe some, you know, mom and dad, grandma and grandpa kind of funding if you were very lucky, but yeah, that's, uh, it's, it's a different world today and think of this for that.
Speaker 1 00:32:14 Yeah, for sure. For sure. So yeah, I mean, folks, you know, have thoughts or comments or clarifications of shit that Dave and I have messed up with respect to kind of NDVC and alternative funding. Please shoot us a message podcast at rugs, startups.com. And as always, if you're enjoying the show, please share it with someone who you think would enjoy it as well. And we'll see you next week. Thanks
Speaker 2 00:32:37 Of startups. If you haven't already head over
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Speaker 3 00:32:50 <inaudible>.
