How to Bootstrap a Startup from $0 to $1 million in ARR

Colin and Brent discuss how to self-fund / bootstrap the perfect startup from $0 to $1m in ARR and whether you need a technical co-founder.

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Sell your SaaS at VerneHQ.com

Hello and welcome back. This is Colin Keeley here, and I'm Brent Sanders. We are two guys buying and building wonderful internet companies. Indeed. And, in this episode we're gonna, we're gonna go through Colin's tweets, , because lack of a better topic. You've been keeping busy on your content generation for what, last time we, we podcast maybe two, three weeks ago.

Yeah. Oh, you're out for a week. But I, I try to post it. . And so this was an interesting one. This was just my notes. So Jason Cohen, he's built four software companies, bootstrapped all of 'em. In the initial stages, he's taken four from zero to a million plus in revenue, and two of 'em are worth a billion plus now.

And he wow. In 2013 at, I think his micro comp has this awesome talk on designing the ideal bootstrap business or the perfect one. Mm-hmm. So highly recommend it. Go check it out on. . But I just distilled all his, , learnings into, , my own. So we go run through it. So the goal is to get, , predictable $10,000 per month per founder in cash flow.

And you, so you're not trying to change the world, you're just trying to, , fund your lifestyle and have something fun to work on. And so he breaks it down into revenue model, market model, and acquisition model. And some of his stuff is pretty counterintuitive. So I'm gonna talk through. , you know what's interesting?

What should we steal? So this first one is on the revenue side. You just does a quick math to get to 10,000 per month. It's about 150 customers each paying you on average, $67 a month. And it's all recurring revenue. It's way easier to just acquire a customer once and then you don't have to acquire them again cuz it's always hard to acquire customers.

It's kind of his concept. And so for the first 50, this is how we did it for WP. He goes on LinkedIn and he reached out to all the WordPress consultants, which you could target mm-hmm. based on, searching them on LinkedIn. And then he offered to pay them whatever their usual hourly rate is, just to take a look at his, product and tell 'em , what they thought.

And so actually no one asked to be paid and many of them put money down on the product pre-product before it was actually built. And so that was like, he's ready, he's all good. And he should. And then after that, the next a hundred customers, he says, this is pretty unique, ignore social media and blogging.

So he had this very popular blog, 40,000 readers. He only converted two customers from it. So he is like, don't do that. Just focus on ads. And ads are repeatable. You spend X dollars, you make Y back and revenue. And his big thing is to prepaid. So you want to push people to annual plans, like as hard as you can, and that way they give you the money, cash up front, and then you, have a lot more money to spend on ads.

So on like day one, things can be very profitable. Yeah. His other thing. So be a boutique. You should. You aren't a huge company. We're not huge companies. So lean into that. Be expensive, be special. He says it works in every profession. Like there's boutique of everything. And customers like supporting one person businesses, like trying to make a go of it.

So this is something I definitely adopted. I try to fill out our about beaches more and tell our stories a little bit more. Make it clear it's like an indie SaaS and we actually care, unlike a big company. Yeah, I, I've been emailing a lot of customers, like on the automatic side, new signups and just saying, Hey, I'm the owner of automatic, like, effectively, like I'm running visibility on support, running a product.

Like it feels like that, and it's, it's been interesting. I get a lot more responses. I get a lot of developer conversations cuz I'm working with other developers and people throwing me like what they're working on and. , it definitely helps. It definitely helps like to convert and like say, Hey, just so you know what's kind of going on.

Cause it, it is a cold exterior with any sort of, you're just come to a website using piece technology, but it makes it a little special when you know, or even get to connect with people across the globe that you know are using it or are building it. . Yeah. And tactically, so we have intercom on all our sites and so it's very easy to start a chat with us and we have dedicated customer support person that replies all the time.

And then, yeah, Brent jumps in and we'll answer. So it's other stuff. Cash is king, so do annual prepay, two months free so you can spend the money right away. I'm growing your business, which is what we do in pretty standard. Yeah, you can also make annual even more enticing. So you could give like 50% off monthly or you wildly jack up the monthly rate and keep the annual the same, just to make annual looking at more.

Mm-hmm. , , compelling. And then he is big on affiliate, so he gives bloggers coupons. So if you're standard on your website is like two months free, he gives like three months free. So pushes a lot of traffic through, blog. . Let's talk about that for a second. Try more coupons. Yeah, like coupons for a second.

Like, are you attracting the wrong customers with coupons? Because that was one thing we ran into at the, the Venture Studio that like, don't, don't start couponing. Cause then you end up with all these customers that are like, they sign up and they're waiting for the next, I mean, it, it kind of depends. B2b, b2c, but like, but if I look at Scout, I don't know if you guys, if you've looked through our role of existing customers, a lot of 'em came in on coupons.

Hmm. So it's. I don't know. You bring people in, you get 'em exposure, you add value, and you also get some, you just needed, they needed that little hook, that little nudge ahead. But yeah, I remember fighting about this a lot of, like myself pushing back and saying, Hey, let's not open up coupon.

And this was, again, this was a B2C product, so that was my stance was like, these are coupon clippers. They're gonna quit and sign back up. They're gonna just to try to save, like, a couple bucks. And, and that was definitely true at the time. I guess the question I posed to you is like, do you think in the B2B world there are coupon clippers?

Are these sort of like super penny wise customer? So I think you want to just do whatever you can to get these people in the door, right? The LTV is so high that if you gave people, three months free, it doesn't really matter. In, in his case, it's kind of arbitrary. So you're giving away these coupons, but it's also like you're playing around with the price.

So you could jack up the price and then say it's, three months free for the annual plan. But effectively you're getting paid the same amount and it's just like psychology that people like seeing that they're getting a deal of sorts. Mm-hmm. . But along with that, his big thing and was kind of mind blowing to me is he does no free trials.

And he has this crazy chart where, if you're just listening, it's basically flat or like slight growth and then it rockets upward. And where it rockets upward is where he shifted from the traditional 14 day free trial where there's no credit card on file. It's really easy to get in the door. Those just don't convert.

What he switched to is a 60 day money back guarantee. So you take, whatever it is, a hundred bucks a month up front for the month, and then these customers feel like they have, four times as long to get their money back. And he says very, very few people ever ask for that money back and they just feel way more comfortable taking the leap.

So I looked at all his like, hold on, conversion buttons and it's all, it's beneath all of 'em, 60 day money back guarantee. So I love it. And I think we, we should totally. But before that, like walk me through. Exactly. So before, it's a two weeks free, so 14 day free trial. Now you sign up and you pay day one.

Does it charge your card right away? Yeah, up front charges your card up front. Okay. So like month, you do 14 day free trial. It'd be you 14 days, nothing. Enter your credit card and then you get charged on conversion. It's a, this is counterintuitive and not what other folks are doing. Interesting. I mean, I think.

Ah, that's a scary one. Like, I'd love to try it and it may, I'm wondering if things like, okay, let's go through each company. In each case, blink sale, where at $19 a month, it's a commoditized product, right? You can get invoicing for free. Other places you might be able to get QuickBooks is more right.

That's the, the biggest competitor that we run into is like, oh, I'm just gonna use QuickBooks and I already use it for my bookkeeping. So, yeah. . What we do now is we, we ask for a credit card, give you a couple weeks free, and you have to come back and remember. And we actually don't see a lot of people that come back and are like, oh, I forgot to turn it off.

They either use it or they don't and they, they don't convert. So like, do you think we should try it there, I guess is the first question. I, I get the sense that we should, it's just, I think we should try it everywhere. Yeah. I think this is the play , and just cashflow. It's so much nicer. Right? So even if it converts exactly the same, you're getting the money 14 days faster, which is a, a big, impact.

Yeah. And then scout. Cool. I think if, so I'm the customer. I just think psychologically it's like, well, I have 60 days to really try this and, they already said it. I trust them, they're gonna refund me. So that's better than 14 days, which is otherwise what you're looking at. Yeah, I mean, it clearly, it works for them.

I don't see why it wouldn't work as well for us. So I, yeah, I'd love to move to it across everything. Yeah. Yeah. I guess, let's talk about what they were, they were doing this on WP Engine, so for those of you who don't know what WP Engine, it's a hosting platform for WordPress and it's, it's now, it's a.

A big boy company, like it's, it's serious. But back in the day, I remember when it just got started, I, I started using it, hosting WordPress sites or whatever, and it was, it was great. Nobody was really doing what they were doing, like specific, I mean, there were a couple players out there, but they were really successful with it.

So I'm just trying to think of like, was there something unique to that product that was in here and now that I think what, not really, like you could get cheaper hosting elsewhere. You could do it yourself elsewhere for less, I guess if you got on there and realized you couldn't use it, you'd know pretty quickly.

like, oh, I, I'm not on word. I mean, it was very specific. You have to be on WordPress beyond that, like, you should be fine. And just thinking of like, okay, scout, somebody's like, oh, I'm a mobile dog walker, and I, for some reason your product doesn't work for me, you'll know pretty quickly as well.

So I get the sense that like, yeah, we should try this every. Yeah, that one was exciting. It's WP Engine he did end up raising money for, and it's like a, a multi-billion dollar company now. I think they're a R is, well, yeah, north of a hundred million. At this point, WordPress, I mean, it, it's a, it's a wild, just from one perspective, it's like I wanted to go after that with automatic cause.

It's just, I think even to this day, it powers the majority of the, the internet are like 60 something percent of the websites on the internet are still WordPress based. , it's, it's a drug or. . So the other thing he talked about at length, so he is, WP Engine is what he's best known for, but he's had a bunch of other, like small SaaS companies that have done well.

He talked a lot about picking good markets and bad markets. So bad markets never sell. The consumers, they don't spend money. It's hard to get someone to pay a dollar for a mobile app. So like, just avoid it. Don't do it. That was a good one. Avoid temporary pain or points in time type companies. So think of weddings, events, anything that's not.

Avoid marketplaces. So you have to build two businesses. You need the sellers and the consumers. They're just too hard. I mean, they're amazing. Once they get started, fuck, just not worth it. So our last We're buying companies. Yeah, yeah. We, our last startup, pretty much, it doesn't check the events, but it checks both consumer, marketplace, , the audio based, marketplace.

Yeah. We were able to check off two of those and Yeah, it was, it's exactly right, like getting people. without embarrassing ourselves, I don't think anybody, I mean, people did buy things on it, but it was like poultry, what people act. It was like crazy. The, the low conversion rate. Once we switched to that marketplace model and then we're just like, man, we had to build the front and the back, and even then it was just an early stage idea.

But yeah, we were able to check off two of those, so I, I couldn't agree more with those. I'm, I'm burn out on consumer businesses and, marketplaces are twice as hard. . Yeah. So on the other, other side, good markets, naturally recurring, so anything tied to financials, invoicing, taxes, reporting, admin, hr.

They have to pay for it. It's like a natural demand there. And basically all our vertical market software companies have like a invoicing component to them, so it's pretty popular. Pain that changes over time. So seo, ppc, email marketing support like Intercom is so integral to our business. We're not gonna turn out of it.

Not real time. So you don't want to be woken up at 2:00 AM cuz you know, hosting is down or so. So he likes analytics, metrics, finance, again, project management and content. Something that can be finished. So you don't want to be competing on features to the end of time with a bunch of other folks.

So like feature complete type things, add-ons or barnacles on a whale, as we call him over here. He likes going for big markets with multiple niches, so it means people actually wanna buy your product already, like demand is validated and. You could find your niche cuz it's, so big. There's gotta be some niche for you.

And then once you land you could expand to something else. So he likes big markets. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. A any thoughts, anything else you wanna steal, from him? I, I think the biggest takeaway is the 60 day free trial. I think we should try that on everything now. Sorry, not 60, the 60 day money back guarantee.

Now, I would say we just launched like a bunch of changes on automatic to make it. So I don't know if that would make it easy. Like the problem we were having was just getting that funnel to convert and the whole model we went with was give people free premium access for, I mean, originally. Yeah, now there's, yeah, it's a premium model now, so it's like, Do we wanna walk?

That I, I don't wanna walk that back now after doing all that work, but we're seeing traction there. So that launched earlier this week and we're already seeing some, some strong traction with what we were, we're hoping, would happen, which is like, Hey, let's make it easier for people to onboard. And so it seems to be working.

I'm, I'm, I love that idea. I don't know if we can roll it out on everything just yet, but, yeah, I definitely think for Scout we should, we are switching to Stripe this. , right? So early next week, everyone's gonna get billed and we'll be off Braintree. Thank God. And then does it make sense to, to roll that out right now?

I think it, I think it does. I think that is the first takeaway is like, let's give that a shot and then we'll report back what, what happened? Yeah. So that's the biggest, I, I'd love to do that. It doesn't make sense for automatic, he didn't really cover freemium as a model. I don't know if it was as popular back then, but it's very clear that it works for like automatic style businesses.

Just bring a bunch of people in the door. Have 'em at the point of conversion. So yeah, throwing that one out. The other two I think should have it. The other one, my big takeaway is like combining this annual prepaid with ads. So push people towards annual more and then run ads and get the cash up front.

So we haven't pushed on Scout yet cuz we have, it's always like, We're just gonna buy it and we're gonna do sales and marketing and it's gonna grow. And like every single time there's like months and months of product work to like, ah, man, there's all this like stuff we gotta fix and then we could grow.

So that's just reality of buying things. But it feels like we're at the point now where we could actually, think of ads and growing. Yeah. Yeah. We, we, I think that's the thing is we realize once we talk to people, and I think it's like in with Scout, especially like the biggest barrier, which I'm really excited about cuz we're almost done, is.

Getting people off Braintree. Like that's, we have new people sign up and they can't even charge their customers, they can't use the product. Like our new customers, like they get flat. I don't know what the, the deal is if Braintree's just kind of like a forgotten platform that got swallowed up by PayPal.

But it's, it's not great for, if you have a new account, your first 10 customers, you try to. , charge, it'll, it won't let it. You have to call into support and be like, okay, I'm not, I'm not fraud for real. I'm like, our customers are just, they associate that with us and think we're broken, which is the worst part of all.

So it'd be nice to, to fix that. I don't know if you saw an intercom. There's actually like an automated thing that sends saying, Hey, this is a known issue with Braintree. This is like the workaround. It gets sent to that I think every single customer because it's just a, a thing that everyone runs, runs into and it makes it super hard to sign up.

It's kind of insane. Yeah. Oh, thing of the past. Yes. What else do you wanna talk about? You wanna do the technical one? Yeah, let's, I. We don't have to go through it, too close, but you basically, you wrote this, this thread praising your choice of partnering with myself, which I really appreciate.

Unfortunately it only got 36 likes. I don't really get why that one didn't go viral, but in short it's kind of niche. Yeah. You're acquiring a sas, are you, business person, so whatever. So like my hot take around this has always been, and I, I'm the curmudgeony tech guy. , what business do you have buying a software company if you don't know anything about software?

So that's, and obviously that's a bad take because people do it all the time. They, non plumbers buy a plumbing business. MBAs buy, they, they, they know how to leverage people better than I do, right? But that's at this scale, right? Like there's not a lot of resources to, hire a CTO that's going to basically do the job for you.

So, yeah, it was an interesting threat and I get this. to me a lot, which is like the opposite, frankly. Like a lot of listeners have reached out and being like, I'm a tech guy. I want to do what you guys are doing, and I just haven't been able to find the thing. And I would, I would actually flip. I wanted to kind of create the, the opposite of this thread.

I haven't had the time and, and I don't know if it's super compelling, but I, I honestly, I think there, there seems to be a lot of business people that wanna get into software but are unintimidated or don't feel like they know what they can do. It seems like it could be really dangerous and I agree it, I mean, think about the three businesses that we've purchased.

I think at least automatic, you probably wouldn't have done, blink Sale probably would've been okay. Yeah, with a non-technical person. Yeah. It needed a facelift, I guess was like the biggest lift on blink sale. So it's actually both sides. So I send the warnings of like, look, you could hire, someone on Upwork.

You could hire a dev agency. Maybe you find a good one. But if you've never managed, developers before, they can be very expensive. And you could rent a rent, right? You could find a cto. Yeah. But they're even more expensive. Yeah. But in the incentives are just misaligned, right? So these contractors are getting paid, it's not their money on the line.

They're not the ones buying the business. They're not personally guaranteeing anything. So like, if it fails, they're still getting paid. So your incentives are just a little wonky. But then you talk to, like, I was on this, dev developer podcast, as I should be, as a, you know,well known. So it was on Indie Rails and they had the same question just flipped of like, Hey, all these developers, like, they wanna buy a business.

They have no idea how, I mean, you can buy my course and learn it. You don't have to know finance, but they also want like a, a column, a rent, a column. So they have the same problem of like finding the, their business or marketing counterpart. I think that, so the. Yeah, I've heard, I've heard way more, on that.

I mean, maybe I'm attracting that more because of being in, I'm asking tech people to reach out to me and I'm interested in talking to tech people. But, yeah, I think that is, it's not that it's more scarce. But I think there's a lot of business people that also don't know this space that well.

Right. So there, it's kind of people that know software really well. To me, the, the number one thing is like knowing the market. And I don't know if like we have a great grasp on it anyways, but like, what's fair to pay? How do you structure a deal? Like so your course is a good place to go. I think that's one area, but it's also like, okay, a deal comes through.

I find a mic require like, I put in a, bid or whatever and it gets ignored. Like, how do you get past that? I mean, that seems to be where people get to and it's hard to know like, what is this thing worth? How should I even go through the process? And so there are courses out there, but it's also, I don't know, modeling is a big piece of it, but yeah, it's there.

There's a lot of gaps, I think, where software engineers will kinda shoot themselves in the foot and like they, they want to do this, like, trust me. It's like the dream job of every software engineer is to like own what you're working on and, and reap the benefits of it and not have to build hourly. we've talked about this before, but I think that there's something in between the lines here that's more so like compatibility with working with a tech like technical person, working with a non-technical person.

And I think there's a little bit more art than science to that. Where I think, getting to like how we work, where it's, it's pretty, I wouldn't say it's loose, but like, you're kind of hand, you're hands off the tech side. I'm fairly hands off the financial side or at least like the, like I, if you say, Hey, this is worth this.

I'm not like, well run me through the numbers of how you're getting to that. I mean, walk me through it. But, there's very little, there seems to be a little, there's some challenging going back and forth, but it's. , like we kind of respect each other's domains. I think that's one thing. And I think that the other thing is like effort.

I think developers tend to think they're overvalued. I'm just gonna say it as somebody who thinks they're, the most important person in the room, but like their time is so valuable. They, they build for their time, they set a dollar amount to it versus, I don't know that, MBAs have had that necessarily like market experience.

So I think that there's an element of like understanding. There's an equitability there and we run it 50 50. I mean, like we, for lack of a better strategy of like, there's no 51 49. It's, it's equal. Yeah. I, I think that there's more interesting like. dynamics there that have to work then necessarily like, do you need a tech person or not tech person?

You need to be compatible with somebody. Yeah. And everyone's asking like, where do you find 'em? And my advice is like, don't shotgun into this. I mean, you could have vesting and stuff, but it, it could just be a mess. So ideally it's someone you've known for a while and have worked with for a while, but you could start relationships on like wherever developers are hanging out, as well.

Or like my community. I think people have kind of partnered up as an idea. That's cool. Yeah. I mean, I, where do developers hang out? I'm curious to know where, where you're fine. What did you have in mind of like, like You mean online communities? Online communities, yeah. I see They don't leave their homes, so, yeah.

Are you on Xbox or ps4? Which one? Yeah, I, I think that there's. Like they're, I see these posts all the time, like on Reddit or like, how do I find a technical co-founder? How do I find, the opposite? My, my yin to my yang, so to speak. And I think, yeah, just getting out there. But it's hard to do.

It's like, I think you have to be, Come with like a pet idea and like we kind of did that with avocado. I hate to say it is I look in the rear view. That's what it feels like. At the time we thought this was a, a really viable, cool business. It was an idea that you had. And I, I think you have to kind of go through and work with somebody a little bit, and whether that's in a job or in an, a side project, I guess side projects makes it make it even harder though, where it's like, you're both balancing things and it's, are you really giving something a shot?

So that's just kind of a constant issue of like, how do you even get into entrepreneurship to begin with? Like how do I, pull that together. Yeah, that was kind of cool to explain to them is like, so, so many of 'em have side projects and you've been doing it for like a decade and it's like, it is this concept, concept of like starters and scalers and if you've like, tried to start things for a decade and none of 'em worked out, like maybe try just buying something that's.

And trying the whole scaling thing. So that was just kind of fun to pitch. I think it breaks a lot of people's frames. Like they think they could work for a company or they could start a company. Like there's no concept that you could actually buy something that's working. So hopefully that converts some developers to like thinking more like owners going forward.

Yeah. Yeah. I, I think it, it was a good thread. I was, I get this question a lot and so I think it's good to answer it. And then you had a, another one that had a really. Heading and I was kind of like, are you trying to infer that we're a Ponzi scheme? So it was around this, the, but somebody asked you the question.

It was are holding companies, Ponzi schemes? Yeah. So the question is like, how do they function? Right? So in theory it's like a magical compounding machine that continues forever. But if I'm putting money into this box, like I would like money to come out of that box at some point. Right. So it's very tax efficient, capital efficient.

there's less reinvestment risks or transaction frictions. So we talked about in the past how you structure it, how you get money back. So as things start compounding, often there's like mailbox money is the term for it. So you get distributions of dividends monthly, quarterly, yearly, whatever.

If they choose not to reinvest it in future acquisitions or other companies or growing existing, that's not tax efficient. It's better to trap the money in the business and continue to reinvest if you dividend it out. It also gets taxed again as personal income. So, but people like seeing that, like psychologically, they like seeing their money coming back to them.

So that's common. And then the other way you do it is liquidity windows. So an outside party. There's firms that do this, will come in, set a fair value of the company, which by default comes the fair value for the company shares and. This creates liquidity in the absence of a sale. Often it's structured so that the HoldCo itself can buy back the shares or then the gps, so you and I could buy back the shares.

Beyond that, it goes to existing investors and then it could go to outside investors. To, yeah. exchange hands. There's also just an exit. So you could sell one company, you could sell all the companies, or you could compound it, definitely you could sell it to a larger HoldCo, so you could sell it to, constellation or something like that.

Some larger entity. You could take it public, which is an obvious way to give liquidity to investors. That's what Constellation did. When investors were pushing for. . Yeah, I mean, those are kind of the different options. So not a Ponzi scheme to answer my random friend on Twitter. . Yeah. No, I mean it's, the liquidity windows is my favorite.

Like, to me that seems like the right way to do it. But I, I get people do the mailbox money thing. I mean, I think, the problem is in my mind, it's the, how many investors you have, and I think as we look at what we're doing by keeping an l. group, very small. Like I think, or I guess growing incrementally, it's not like we're out there raising a whole bunch of money and then coming back and having like a huge bill to, to cover, right?

So it's like, I think it's just a balance between, how much equity you have out there and then those are gonna be the, the stressors on you down the line. Cause it, frankly, if you raise minimum the minimum equity possible, like those problems, you can kind of decide however you want and, and general.

once that flywheel kicks in, your investors are gonna be happy either way. Cause you're, you're going to have returns as long as things are, are, this is the thing I love about this category. It's like, even like the, the poor case, like the flywheel kicks in, the debt's paid off and cash is flowing easily.

So, obviously there's a catastrophic case that all the businesses die. Somehow. The Internet's wiped off the, the face of the earth and, these no longer exist, but it's probably not. Catastrophic is, maybe in landscaping or something, some other like boring business. But in software it's all recurring.

Like something really weird would happen, have to happen for like, one business to die or really dramatically decline. Yeah, so I think it's, other folks, Vista Equity has never lost money on a deal. I would expect, something would have to go pretty wrong for us to ever lose money on a deal as well.

Yeah, yeah. So like, I. again, I, I always struggle with this hold co word as I, coming out of the cold hold co conference, it's like, we would totally sell these businesses, but either way it's, it's not a, not a Ponzi scheme. I'm glad we're answering the hard-hitting questions. Yeah. . Yeah. Who asked you that question?

Just say, wealthy tech guy that's looking at deploying some capital ahead and exit, looking at investing in, holding companies or boring startups. And he, okay. He's heard this term a bunch and it. Logistically, how does this work? Because people don't really talk about like the nitty gritty, boring details of it.

It's just sexy because it's like we're a baby Berkshire. That's cool. Warren Buffet has a lot of money. Like don't ask the details of how the sexy, functions. Yeah. I, I think my learning was, and I was talking about this before that we were recording, is like, it seems like holdcos that are like traditional one.

There's very little interest in buying those companies anyways. Like there, there are old, ugly companies that like, I guess now it's popular people have like popularized this idea of buying roofing companies and pool companies and, that's great. I, I support eta I think it's the right model, but it, software companies typically trade, I guess at a different clip that than those companies.

Maybe I'm, I'm, I'm probably wrong and as that's coming outta my mouth, but like, I don't know, it's. If the litmus test is you're gonna hold it and you'll never sell it, then we're not a hold co. Yeah. The only one I think about is like Mark Leonard sold one company in the early days cuz he's got a really good offer and he brings it up to this day and like regrets it because he feels like a tarnished his reputation of like never selling a business.

Yeah. It kind of does. It kind of does. Yeah. I mean, it's by 600 and it's like 601 one we sold. He's like, ah, god damn it, we're like a multimillionaire. She just ate that one. Yeah. Probably just buried it. But you never know, like if that's early on, that could have been the difference between like, hey, we needed that cash to then get to, just not up to that level where we couldn't get, I mean, chalk up one win for sure would be kind of nice and put money in the bank.

Well, cool. Anything else you wanted to. No, nothing else on my end. This has been good to, to walk through, Colin's social media calendar and, , I need that promotion on my tweet, so I just need those extra links in . Yeah, yeah, exactly. Cool. Well thanks for listening. Yeah. Take care.

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