Founder's Story - The Bootstrap Founder Who Turned $1,800 Into Pocket Prep | Ep. 437 with Peter Murphy CEO of Pocket Prep

Episode Date: August 26, 2026

Daniel opens the episode by asking Peter about college, AI, and whether young people should still take on debt for degrees when so many jobs feel at risk of automation. Peter responds through the lens of being a father with a daughter in college, saying that while AI may try to replace teachers, therapy, and many other human roles, there is still something irreplaceable about the instructor, mentor, or person who deeply impacts a student’s life. The conversation then moves into Peter’s own education, his unexpected love of supply chain management, and how the right instructor helped him see the hidden systems that keep the world moving. From there, Daniel and Peter unpack entrepreneurship, the discomfort of being underprepared, the reality of building on platforms like Apple, and the founder challenge of adapting when rules change. Peter shares how Pocket Prep had to restructure from around 100 apps into a smaller, more logical app strategy after Apple pushed for changes in distribution. The episode also gets into AI, leadership, bootstrapping, and values. Peter explains how Pocket Prep uses AI to help authors get started instead of staring at a blank screen, why great humans are still needed around AI, and why he believes bootstrapping gave the company freedom to grow on its own terms. He also reflects on the loneliness and emotional weight of being CEO, the difficulty of layoffs and reorgs, and the surprise of seeing a company become stronger when leaders empower and care for the people building it. Key Discussion Points Peter says AI may try to replace teachers, therapists, and many other roles, but he believes great human instructors still matter because people remember the teachers who changed their lives.  He questions the rising cost of college, especially when some campuses feel like expensive resorts and students may graduate into an uncertain AI impacted job market.  Peter shares that entrepreneurship is impossible to fully prepare for, using Pocket Prep’s experience with Apple changing app distribution rules as an example of having to adapt under pressure.  He explains how Pocket Prep uses AI and agentic tools to support educational content creation, helping writers move faster by giving them a starting point instead of a blank screen.  Peter reflects on leaving Lockheed Martin to go all in on Pocket Prep, saying the business did not fully replace salaries at first, but he chose to stop looking back and build with the energy he had once given to a large company.  The conversation explores why Pocket Prep stayed bootstrapped, how an $1,800 investment became a multimillion dollar company, and why outside capital can bring speed but also pressure, control, and heavier expectations.  Takeaways AI can speed up education content creation, but Peter’s view is that humans still need to guide, check, shape, and improve what AI creates. Building on someone else’s platform always carries risk. Whether it is Apple, Amazon, Shopify, or social media, founders have to prepare for rules and algorithms they do not fully control. Bootstrapping gave Pocket Prep the ability to grow with the flow of the business, reinvest profits, and avoid the pressure of outside investors. Being CEO often means carrying hard decisions privately. Peter says leaders do not always get to talk openly about the emotional weight of layoffs, reorgs, board pressure, or painful tradeoffs. Values can become a business advantage. Pocket Prep’s lower cost model did not fit every partnership opportunity, but Peter saw that as validation that they were building for access instead of squeezing the customer. Empowering people works. Peter says one of the biggest surprises was seeing how much momentum a company can build when you hire smart people, trust them, compensate them well, and take care of their families. Closing Thoughts Peter Murphy’s Founder’s Story episode is a grounded look at what it really means to build an education company in an AI era. His story is not about chasing hype or raising the biggest round. It is about leaving security, bootstrapping patiently, adapting when platforms change, and building a values driven company that helps people access exam prep without massive costs. Through Pocket Prep, Peter shows that education can still be affordable, human centered, and practical, even as AI changes the tools around it. His message to founders is clear: the bigger it gets, the heavier it gets, but if you take care of the people building it, the company can become stronger than anything you could have built alone. Today's sponsor: Start with Upwork, the one-stop platform to find, hire, and pay expert freelancers across marketing, editing, branding, development, operations, and more. Visit https://www.Upwork.com today to post your job for free and get matched with top talent ready to help your business grow. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I've been thinking about if you send someone to college or you have a child in college right now, and we're thinking about what AI is going to do, which is why we're seeing colleges around the U.S., they're having protests. And I think people like Gen Z younger, I'd say late teens to early 20s, I think they're almost revolting against AI because the fear is that they might go to college and come out without having a job, What happened to our son? He wanted to go to school for music. And we said, like, music teachers have very low incomes. And how are you going to survive? But now we're like, great, go to school for music. You love it. How are you looking at this with, I think you have a daughter in college? I do, Daniel. Yeah. She is studying women's studies right now with a focus on getting her teacher certification as well. And, you know, that was kind of our response to is, you know, they're trying to make AI therapy bots. They're trying to replace teachers with AI.

What aren't they going to try to replace with AI? But having that person, we can all remember that instructor or someone in our life that really meant something to us. And similar, like music or art or anything else that humans are pretty great at, why change that? If you can have a great instructor or a great teacher, we should be supporting that, not necessarily looking to replace it. Not to mention the fact, coming out of college with dead or just with bills and things to

consider, and then not knowing if there's going to be. be a job in the labor market for you because there's such a frenzy to automate everything to our own disadvantage, I think. And that's the part that I really get excited slash upset about is just as a dad thinking like, hey, look, it doesn't matter if you have a job. Like, what about your kids or your kids' kids? Like, we should be a little bit more progressive thinking than just like, well, I secured my own oxygen mask so I'm not worried about everybody else. I just, that's the part that really gets me, you know, fired up. I wonder. besides like removing besides maybe attorneys or medical where they have to go to a school and they have to get a specific certification, I wonder if you're going to some other general type degree, why even go to a school where you might accumulate debt?

Like why go to, I know not everyone obviously can have it paid for. Like I had to accumulate debt, but it was very small amounts. Like I went to like the crappiest school ever. Like maybe why even go to an eye? Navy League are these really challenging schools. Just go to your cheapest like state school. Yeah. Well, I think when it comes to those top tier schools, it's about connections. And it's about the like people who've been there before and the dynasties of learners and families and things like that. But, you know, I went to the University of North Florida. I don't know if I, if it wasn't that I couldn't make it into a better Florida school, but I really liked their business program. And I just was like, this is where I want to go.

And I was able to work and kind of pay that off and got some help for my stepdad, which I'm now able to do for my daughter. But yeah, I'm not sure. I racking up the debt and go into these big college experiences. They're like theme parks now with six-figure debt bills. And they're adding all these like brands into the food court. And they're making it like a resort stay. And you're paying for that. And then you have to go try to get some beginner salary to offset it.

And it's just not looking very good. I don't know why. I like that. I remember the, uh, getting lunch and I'm really it was pretty sad the food wasn't very good uh you know what though anthropology anthropology was one of my favorite classes that I took because when I first went to school I dropped out of college after like a year and a half because I failed every course except for anthropology and it was the focus on women and men in different cultures I learned so much from that course I use

that in my sales skills it was like learning about people and cultures I then moved into my ability to sell. And I've since, you know, 30 years ago, whenever I went to college, I've still used that today. Was there a course for you that was unexpected that you learned something that stayed with you? Yeah. My introduction to supply chain management was really just a cool class. And again, it was really the instructor that drove that content home for me. Just learning about like different modes of transportation and some of the nicknames like, gosh, so see if I remember, like piggyback was like train and truck. And then there's like, there's another one for boat and train. And like the way you have to intermodal and connect and move things around and there's terms for it and there's jargon

and there's all this knowledge. And I started geeking out about it because you just don't see a lot of that. Like it's such a backbone when you go to the store and you're like, all right, where are my favorite potato chips? And it's one of those jobs where you just kind of grab the chips and move on. But when the chips aren't there, you go, where the hell are my chips? Who didn't do their job? You know, you get all upset. You're like, what happened? The store is like, I think of like COVID times where I had to like reach up on the top shelf to get the blasting of black beans for my family. All the toilet paper is gone in Seattle.

All the beans. Everything's gone. And I immediately went back to my supply chain class. And I was like, yeah, this was a rough one. This wasn't just one person making a boo-boo. This is a whole thing. And it gave me some perspective on just the inner workings of our of our world. Reminds me of Steve Jobs, his commencement speech about the classes that he took that formed

Apple even though he wasn't even going to school for a degree. He was just listening in. But I know for you, the feeling of underprepared is really a test. And entrepreneurship is like the worst thing if somebody doesn't want to feel underprepared because I don't know if you can even prepare for anything. What was it like for you when you started an entrepreneurship knowing that you can't really prepare for what's to come. Yeah. You're right. It's it's not something that you can, you know, plan for or prepare for. There's always going to be these choices that you have to make. It's kind of like having someone come up to you and say, oh, no, this happened. Do you want to do this? Do you want to do that? You know, you're trying to figure out your choices. But it becomes kind of

a game in the sense of there are parameters to it. There are conditions and variables that happen. and you really just have to kind of try to carve your way through it and figure out with support around you how you stay on top of the market and stay afloat, keep moving on things. For us, there was a time where Apple wanted us to really change how we distributed apps in their marketplace. And it was terrifying because if we didn't get it right, we worried that one of the things that made us affordable, which was having people find it on their own without having to pay for ads, if that switched and we started to have to advertise our affordable apps, they weren't going to be affordable for much longer.

And so I started thinking about all these strategies and trying to decide how I can prepare for such a change. And there really wasn't an answer. We ended up having to negotiate with Apple, push it as a whole story. I'll spare all the dirty details. But we basically went from 100 apps, a certain way, down to 10. And we had to make that work. Instead of saying, here's the XYZ exam, and you can just find it when you Google it. Now it had to live in a more logical container.

And you still had to kind of figure out what was in there. But you couldn't have too many things in there because then you couldn't find it. So it was like trying to figure out how to like optimize. for something that I didn't really want to deal with. But that's entrepreneurial or entrepreneurship in a nutshell. Is that kind of stuff just going to happen? And you can let it sink you or you can rise above it, get the support that you need and try to, yeah, find a better path.

It's always the tough part when you have to abide by the platforms that you're on, whether that's Apple and the App Store, if you're selling on Amazon, Shopify, any social media platform, you're always having to prepare for the fact that you don't necessarily own, everything because you're on their platform but you really can't just do it on your own like it unless you have a gazillion dollars to spend we have to use these tools how do you how do you ensure that you're always up to date with across all of these platforms to make sure that you're abiding by whatever the rules and

changes they have wow that's a great one yeah you know I couldn't do it alone like you said definitely need a whole team for that for our company you know we're still semi small at 40 people we We've grown over the years, but we haven't been able to, up until we're gunning for it this year to be able to start to like launch things in parallel or have things go out on multiple channels or in multiple stores instead of doing one and then seeing how it does and kind of like phasing that work across multiple people and figuring out how a smaller team can do that.

We're trying to see like maybe with some with the help of AI or automation or something, is there a way that we can kind of go wider with it faster, get that, you know, bigger footprint out there, see how people react to it and kind of change how we do things. Because doing it one at a time has its benefits, but also its drawbacks, like announcing it, for example, like, how do you talk about a feature or something really cool that you're doing in your space when you can't really talk about it like universally because it isn't everywhere yet? You know, so playing with that and really trying to figure out how to make that the right

size for your business or what you're trying to accomplish is a challenge for sure. So for us, we started using something called Victor. It's like an AI employee basically that lives in Slack. It's been insane. This AI agent thing is my mind is blown. At pocket prep, are you guys doing something with automation? Are there certain tools that you're finding are just like mind blowing? Yes.

And I can't exactly tell you what they are because we've got really smart engineers and product folks that do that every single day. And they're staying on top of all the new models. They're retro checking everything that we've built with AI and checking against new models and frameworks. But I mentioned you previously, I think it's really cool that you can build these agents. agents and say, hey, this agent's going to do this one task. And this agent's going to check that

agent, you know, and then we're going to funnel it through this. And, you know, our company creates a lot of education content from scratch. We use reference materials, textbooks, and then we have really smart authors and experts that come write these practice questions for us and with us. And now with AI, the old days, it used to be, hey, we need to write 500 practice questions around this really niche subject. You know, here are your books, hear your things. Let's get going. and then they open up the software or CMS, and it's just an empty screen, right? Like they're, oh, man, I got to like, okay.

And they start. And some people are great at that. Most people are not. And that's like, you know, an artist looking at a blank canvas and being like, what do I do with this? And so now with, with agentic AI, having that in the CMS can get that writer started like really quickly and easily and say, you know, here's some pieces from this. Here's some from that.

And they go, ah, and they have something to work with. And that speeds things up so much better than just staring at that blank screen. It's you got to have the people around you. That's what I'm learning from you right now. You still need humans, great humans around to ensure that the AI is doing what the AI needs to do. And you're even using the right. There's so much. It's like every five seconds, there's some update.

You and I have something in common. We both left secure jobs to go all in and be crazy enough to be an entrepreneur and test the waters of failure and success. And for you, I imagine, you had this comfortable job at Lockheed Martin and somebody probably told you at some point like, you're crazy. Why wouldn't you try and continue moving up? Why would you go do your own business? I definitely did. In fact, when I sent the email letting everybody know that I was leaving to go do that and kind of like jokingly said, by the way, if you need to study for an exam, come see my company, right? We're affordable or blah, blah.

And I got this email like, what a shameless plug. And I don't know if they were like kidding with me or if they were kind of like slapping my hand a little bit. But there were definitely folks that were confused by that risk. You know, the company was making this much money, barely enough to really go off full time. We didn't quite replace our salaries. It was a very incremental process to start saying, hey, you know what? There's a demand for this. There's something really here.

This is good. You know, how do we grow this? How do we give it more attention? And that really did baffle people who were comfortable being in these very specific specialized jobs where there is some job security. Aerospace isn't the most secure industry. We all know that. But having that structure there and having that cadence that you can fall into can become comfortable, even when the job is very demanding. So I was thinking more of like, I'm going to take that energy that I use for this big company, which has been great. And I've learned

a lot. I'm very grateful for that. And I'm going to use it for my family and myself and build this different product and see if it can take off. And in the back of my head, I was always like, you know, there's Boeing, Raytheon, there's these other companies, and it's very normal to jump around. So if I ever had to go get a salaried position somewhere, I didn't feel like that was out of reach either. So it was kind of like a mix of having that safety net, but also not looking back, just being like, we're going for this. Let's go. And that was the differentiator for me. The first day that I left, I cried to my wife. I don't know why. I wasn't sure if I was so happy because I was miserable in my job, where I was kind of sad that I left something I was at for like 16 years.

And then I went out vacation like an hour later. We just decided to do a three week road trip. What was it like for you in the beginning as you transitioned? Did you have to do something to disconnect yourself and then move into this fully? Yeah. I think I had to get better at wearing multiple hats. You know, my job at Lockheed was very, it was cool. I was in charge of bringing down parts from this big kidding system, super neat aerospace.

They called it the high-velocity kidding system, HVKS. And I would go into this very antiquated software program and tell it what it needed to drop and like what parts needed to come out. It was super cool. And I had to learn all this like nuanced stuff. And so when it came to switching gears for my company, I had to do like 900 things instead of just doing one thing really well and getting really in the weeds on it. And so kind of popping back up and being this business generalist was pretty foreign to me. I was always the kid with the lemonade stand, but there's really not a lot to prepare you for just jumping into everything that goes into a business and all of the back office work that

goes into like payroll and compliance and paying your taxes and doing all these things that you never see until you're in it. And for me, that was like really getting adjusted and finding the time for that was a little bit challenging in the beginning. I got better at it, but it was lumpy at first. What do you find is the most challenging part of being a CEO in general? Because, you know, we have to show up. We have to be a certain person in front of our employees.

Obviously, we want to, you know, we want to make a great working environment. We want to have transparency, but you can't just tell them everything. You can't, you know, tell them everything about what's happening in your life or what's on your mind all the time. What do you find is something that you can't even openly discuss? because you have to be the CEO. Yeah. Wow.

I think there's a clip that came to mind of a CEO who went viral for laying off like a thousand plus people. And he started it off by acknowledging to the workers how hard this was for him, you know, how difficult, how it kept him up for weeks and how bad he felt and everything. And of course, you know, he was kind of getting grilled for that on the internet. If like, it's not about you, dude, you just fired like a thousand people. that's a thousand families that are impacted. And like, yes, that's 100% true.

But I could hear, like, I could, I could sense the sorrow and hear it in this person's voice. And I've never had to lay off thousands of people, but I've had to fire teams and reorg the business and do different things like that. It does suck. It never gets any easier. And I realized in that moment, like, oh, man, while I completely understand and agree with, like, the internet's consensus of this, there is another message here and that it is hard to do

some of these CEO jobs and to represent shareholder economics and how that trickles down and how it like can hurt employees and hurt customers and do all these things. But that's America. That's where we live. So we're playing this game together. But when it gets dark like that and you have to like shutter parts of the business or like literally take down teams, it can't keep you up at night. Like it is, it's just really lousy to have to do. And I remember being on the other side of that. And it kind of helped me understand both sides a little bit more clearly because I do. I try to filter things as a CEO through my own lens. Like, would I ask myself to do this as an employee? Would I ask my customers? If I was the customer buying this, how would I feel? And I really do

just try to like gold and rule it as I make decisions. But there's always going to be decisions that you have to do regardless of that for one reason or another. And you don't really get to talk about that. It just comes with a job. We're always so quick to judge people online. And I feel like the, the, you know, judgment is always there. It's like, look at this person. They make so much money or or they're the CEO and and they always get judged. I feel what you're saying is it's happened so many times and I remember this person. Why do you think we judge them so much? And why are we always so quick to pass that on like they don't know how it feels because they're the person at the top. But reality is like you said, being in that position is so difficult. But I think a lot of times I wonder if it's

because they never talk about it. Like they are not talking about how it really is. So people don't, you can't live in someone's shoes if you don't understand. That perspective, absolutely like, I've had to really like reflect on that. Like it's people won't understand and it's okay because they if you don't have that exact perspective

or have a similar life experience or shared experience, it's just not as understandable or relatable. And so you relate to the people being affected in the layoff example, right? But as a visionary CEO, you know, for me, I get the benefit of dreaming and trying to stay in this like creative space of like where the business can go and how we can change it from what it is today. And, you know, most CEOs in large companies are really just, how do I say this? They are, they represent the board, right? So they're the highest level employee at the company, but they still report to the board.

And when the board votes and says, we don't, we want this. We don't want that. it's the CEO's job and go, okay, and then go do the thing, whether that's layoffs or it's raising money or it's some other big activity. The CEO is just the biggest person at the company. And so I think people just have a tendency to look at that role and expect a lot from it when in reality they serve the board. That's the job if you're at a big company. Yeah, I never thought about just how you have to appease the board. Like you're like, you're like the, you are the highest level employee. Like you said, whether you're the CEO and founder of a company,

if you have a board. I've never raised money and I've always thought like maybe one day I should have raised money because I could have propelled the companies I was at. At the same time,

everyone I talked to that's raised money puts this tremendous amount of stress and pressure on them and I feel like it's 50-50. Either it was a great experience or it was the worst experience ever. I believe you bootstrapped. Yes.

When you go backwards and you look, do you ever think about like should we have remained bootstrap? Should we have raised money? I love this conversation. So I think there's different types of founders and different types of like risks, appetites and things like that. And if you can convince, if you have the network and you know people

and you're around finance and you can go and raise money and you have a great idea and you believe in it, it's a different game that you're playing, right? So if you raise a million dollars for easy math and you know that that'll carry you two years, that you can hire X amount of people and you can do these things and you have this timeline, you're basically signing up to have your own deadline. Like we need to be profitable by, you know, two years from hour. We need to hit this milestone.

Then we can raise more money, right? But if you don't want to do that or you're not sure, you're really just kind of growing with the flow is what I, what we call it a pocket prep is just figuring out how to math your, you know, profit loss or your income, whatever, so that you can continue to grow and reinvest the money without really taking on the outside risk. And that's that we turn that $1,800 bootstrap investment into multi-million dollar company and all these employees and all this great stuff. And I do, I think about what if someone had given us like short time? A million dollars for 20% love your business. Like I think we'd still be successful. We would definitely have had more meetings, more pressure. You know, we would have had more accountability and more input.

Maybe we didn't want that input on how we were expected to do these things. Because again, it's someone else's money at that point. And there is a very viable, you know, demand to see you do something wise with that and to be good stewards of it versus if it's your money and you're choosing to reinvest in and grow it with the flow of the business, of the market, of whatever, it's just, it's different. It's not as stressful to me. I know a lot of people would get like ulcers and like kind of freak out or if you ever watch the show Silicon Valley. Some of those crazy, the economics, right, behind the scenes, how they fund these companies is super complicated. It's not something a typical entrepreneur even understands, let alone, you know, I would say pursue.

People do pursue it. But you're on their terms at that point, man. And that was something that coming from aerospace, we really wanted to make sure that we had the ropes, that we could set the stage for our team and ourselves and our business the way we wanted to, which of course creates its own challenges, right? But I never say that there's a right or wrong way to do it. If you have an idea and it's untested and you want to go for it, maybe bootstrapping, if you know it's going to work and maybe time is an issue and you're racing to get something done, take the money, grow the team quickly. Just realize that it has a chance that could fail. The bigger it is, the heavier it gets. I like that. The bigger it is, the heavier it guess. We recently had Daniel, who's a shark tank. He's a shark on shark tank, the founder of kind who sold for like $5 billion a couple years ago. He also bootstrapped. And we had a long conversation around like funding versus bootstrap now that he is an investor. Would you ever consider going on the shark tank?

You know, it's funny you mentioned that. We absolutely would have back in the day. I used to love watching Shark Tank 10 years ago when it was in its prime. really wanted to work with Mark Cuban, thought he would be a great fit for our techie business and having some quick wins. But I think, I mean, in full honesty, we looked at Chartank as a huge launching pad, right? Like, of course, you meet the investors and you do this, but you're on TV. I mean, we knew behind the scenes that anyone who appeared on that show would just get instant exposure, instant ratings. They knew that.

They started talking openly about it later on in the seasons. But absolutely, like having that mentorship and having somebody that can kind of guide you in a way that feels like it's derisking it, you know, or helping you along using their wisdom, right? And whatever that means in your business or in your story was something we were actively searching for. I just don't know if I could have made it through like the audition process and the rigor and the showing up there.

We were too busy working. So it's just like, we'll just keep doing our own thing. I worked with someone who went on one time, didn't get selected in the end. Like they made it on, but it didn't make it to the show. They went on the second time and they did get funding. And I got to say, it didn't, it, it turned into a lot of sales. But over time, those sales, it almost, it almost bankrupted the company.

It's like it made a lot of sales, but then that required them to then raise a ton of money to fulfill on all of these sales. And then you can't stop. Once they did that, they had all these customers. They had to fulfill for a long time. So it was like then it moved into a constant fundraising stage. So it's fascinating. Like when something can happen to your company, it's amazing from the outside, but in the internal systems, it could almost be like growing too fast too soon.

I know for you, having a values-driven company at pocket prep is absolute. Like, it's something that you live by. Have you ever had to turn down partnerships or do you look at partnerships or even business opportunities? do you look at them as, okay, this has to fit into my values. And if not, then no matter how lucrative it'll be, we can't do it. Yeah, that's a great question. Fortunately, in our space, when it comes to education and helping students learn and increasing like efficacy and outcomes, I wouldn't say there are people that wouldn't jive with our values.

I did, however, when going in a little bit more of the, what I want to say, like corporate space, some of these professional certifications, they're expensive, right? Like everybody knows that, like certain HR or project management certifications are pricey. And we were trying to get on, we were trying to get featured on the website of one of these types of partnerships and saying like, hey, tell me about how you guys do this? Like, how can we, do we pay you to be on here like advertising? How does this work?

And I'll never forget the two people on the phone were just kind of like giggly the whole time, which is fine. You know, I like laughing as well. But it slowly dawned on me that I think they were kind of laughing, that at us maybe or at me in my ignorance about the situation. Most of the products, the prep products for this particular certification were in the thousands of dollars. And they've at the end of the call, which was only like 20 minutes long, they basically said, like, look, man, this $20 a month thing that you guys are doing over here, we can't make any

money off that. Like, we're not going to do that. Like, come back to us when you're charging 500 or more and we'll see about it because we take 50% of every sale you make through our channel on our website here and we'll happily add you to the plethora of other vendors on here, but you're priced too competitively. You're just, it's not, we're not going to work. And there was more laughter and more and they hung up. And I remember thinking like, wow, uh, this is either really great or really awful because I don't think we're going to be able to go to these credentialing companies, even the ones that

are very clearly for profit or you just operate in a different unregulated space. I don't know if they're going to care about us. We might actually be bad for them because we're 20 bucks a month, man. Like people can get the job done with the heavy lifting with our. app and save $1,000 on the learning system or whatever they're peddling on their website. And I think the giggles were just maybe a little nervousness or threatening. I don't know. That phone call was literally nine years ago, very early on for us.

We were just trying to get the name out there. And it was very clear that we weren't going to have a values match because we weren't charging enough money. And I'm kind of proud of that. I think the economics of scale and our success for helping more people. I talked to Ken, my co-founder all the time. Hey, we'd happily charge a dollar if we got more people. people. If that state, you know, if all the math met it out, we'd help as many people as we

could and stay profitable and lucrative and healthy as a business versus trying to really squeeze individuals have fewer customers, right, but still make more money. We definitely believe in the referral, the word of mouth, the testimony of like people using it. Whereas clearly some of these other companies know their adjustable market and they're saying like, no, we have to charge this much money for a person. So it really validated what you're doing in a sense. Like as much as it painful, it validated, are you motivated by people telling you that you can't do something or people encouraging you that you can do something? And the reason I ask is the situation, like you said,

I've had multiple situations throughout my life where somebody says something to me. Normally, it's I can't do something or I don't believe in what you're doing or, you know, why are you doing that? You don't know anything about it. And then it's my mission. Or if somebody doesn't want to, if somebody doesn't want to work with me, it's probably in my head. but I'm hearing them saying that. And they're probably not saying that. But then I'm like fueled. I like 10x at that moment because I'm so motivated to prove them wrong.

I don't know if that's healthy. What motivates you, though? You know, it's funny, man. The first thing that comes to mind is like I was always raised in a very conservative household. My mom is in Anglican Deacon. And so tattoos were not allowed. This was my first tattoo. So first tattoo fully hand everything all the way up.

So I think, you know, no tattoos. tattoos are bad what do I do when I'm 20 something years old tattoo let's get a tattoo you know whole arm flew all the way to London for it so I think I'm in the category of you is like 10xing you know when someone says you can't do that you're going to fail this isn't worth it I definitely choose to take energy from it and use that energy to drive as opposed to letting it drive me or crash me or whatever as I've gotten older though I have learned to hear wisdom when there's wisdom when someone says something and they have a story to share don't just dismiss it out of hand, you know, that's someone's life experiencing experience that they're

offering to you. And so I always try to take it with a grain of salt. But definitely, man, in my early days, I was all about, you said, I can't do it. Watch me do it, baby. I'm going to do it right now. You know, I enjoy talking to people like in their 80s. I feel like I learned so much about life and like you're saying, wisdom. Maybe they don't know how to use technology so well. We just had Mori Povich, John. I mean, the guy's 87 years old. old and he has a podcast and he's talking about technology and I'm like I'm fascinated but like the wisdom of older people the stories it's astonishing if you you think about let's say yourself you're at I believe you said UNF University of North Florida you think about yourself

if knowing what your if yourself knew you today and all the things that you've gone through what would be the most surprising thing to to yourself wow Yeah, yeah. I think I'm surprised by how the company has gotten like more productive, more creative, has made better decisions and done so much without my actual involvement. Again, as the visionary CEO, Ken is our integrator. He's our engineer. He's there with the team work and his butt off with everybody helping build the product. I'm reading AI articles. I'm looking at all the things that are happening outside in the world and how we bring all that together. And I was just, genuinely surprised by how when you bring in smart people and you trust them and you give them meaningful work and you set them up and you're compensating them well and you're taking care of their families with insurance and benefits and all the things that you need to do, how much momentum you'll gather in a business when you take care of the people that are building it

as opposed to treating them like tools or just, hey, I'll find someone else that does this if you don't like this job kind of attitude, which I have seen in aerospace and elsewhere in my life. And coming out of business school, coming out of college like that, I could have never known because I was still subject to some of those older ways of business. In aerospace, you know, back in the 80s, this conference rooms were filled with smoke. You know, people point at you with cigarettes and getting mad and cussing you out and making you cry. We don't do that nowadays. And I'm thrilled about it. Like it's, you know, the world's hard enough without someone literally flicking ash in your face because you didn't get 10 widgets out on time.

So I'm very surprised by how successful you. can be when you really do empower people and you care. And you'll sound surprising, but yeah. I learned a lot. Sometimes it's the simplest, the simplest sounding thing makes the most impact, but can also be the most challenging thing to create as a founder. But pocket prep, Peter Murphy, Peter Murphy, sounds like an actor's name. There was a singer from Bowhouse.

Every once in a while, someone says like, like for finger and I'm like, yeah. Yeah. I don't even know what that is, but I don't even know Boehous. I'm going to look it up, though. I'm going to look it up. By the way, final thought here. I've been thinking about as I get older, I want to get maybe a neck and a face tattoo or maybe just a neck tattoo. I've been really, someone was like, you should get a tattoo on your head. But I'm like, I've heard that's really, really painful. I don't know. I can't do that. But I've really been pondering, like maybe when I'm 60 or 50s, I'll get like a neck tattoo here, maybe like, I don't know, face here. Would you ever do that? I have actually thought about like something a little bit. See, I have Mount Rainier right here, which is pretty cool. This is my wife and I have matching Mount Rainier tattoos in honor of Seattle. I joke just to kind of, you know, mess with my mom. It's a neck tattoo. It's not.

But it is, I mean, we're also, what would you call? Neck tattoo? Yeah, it's technically a neck tattoo. But I think most people, you know, it's prominent, like a big rose or a titter or something. Maybe I'll do something here. Yeah. I like that idea. I'll do something here.

So I don't have to see it. Because I have a tattoo here. The great thing is I don't have to see it. I don't even know what it looks like anymore. I forget. But I like that idea. Do something where you don't have to see. So it's still there.

But in case I'm upset about it, I don't have to think about it every day. There you go. I learned a lot. But Peter, this has been great. Pocket prep. Amazing. Bootstrap to success. Love those kind of stories.

And thank you for joining us today. Thank you, Daniel. Pleasure being here. Appreciate it.