This Week in Startups - Growth | Scaling Your Startup S2 E1 with Growth University’s Craig Zingerline and Fitbod’s Allen Chen | E1198

Episode Date: April 14, 2021

Check out Growth University: https://growthuniversity.io Check out Fitbod: https://www.fitbod.me https://twitter.com/craigzingerline FOLLOW Allen: https://twitter.com/allenchen1217 FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis

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Upgrade to Netsweet, the world's number one cloud business system. Schedule your free product tour right now at net suite.com slash twist. Hey everybody, hey everybody. Welcome to another. season of scaling your startup. This is season two, episode one of scaling your startup. This is a series that we created and we did season one a couple of years ago. And this was an attempt for us to answer all of those questions that we get over and over and over again about how do I grow my startup. You've got a product in market. You've got some customers. You want to grow it. So we did a great job, my team and I in that first, I think, series of

doing fundraising and creating a low burn culture, hiring communications, all that good stuff. And you can find that all at this week in startups.com slash scale. And that will have the playlist for not only season one, but also this season, season two. And in season two, we decided to up the ante. And we've decided that we will invite one or two founders each week and they're going to go through a deck. And it's going to be very, very tactical. There'll be strategies as well.

and this is something that a lot of founders learn over time. There's the big picture and the vision of the company. Then there's strategy, and then there's tactics. And the idea is the vision doesn't change that often. The strategy changes, but not that frequently. And tactics, well, they can change frequently because certain tactics will work for one company, not for another. A specific marketing or growth tactic might get burned out.

A channel might get burnt out or get too expensive. And so you really want to learn a lot of different tactics and be able to deploy them in a coherent strategy. And I'll be back at the end of the episode to do Q&A. But today we are really lucky to have two amazing founders from our portfolio, share what they've learned. The first up is Craig Zingerline, and he is one of the best growth instructors in the industry. He teaches a course with us at launch called Growth University, and he spun it out and made his own company. And you can go see that company at growthuniversity.io. And he'll be joined at the end of each section with Alan Chen.

And Alan Chen is from a company called FitBod, which you can visit at FitBOD. com.me, F-I-T-B-O-D-Me. And Alan has the fastest growing startup to ever come out of the launch accelerator. They very quickly got to eight figures in revenue, maybe in two or three years. He'll explain. And so as Craig teaches these growth topics, you're going to go. get to hear from Alan who has actually put this to work. And at the end, we'll do a Q&A, and you can learn how to deploy these tactics in your startup, hopefully. Or if you haven't

started your company yet or at a big company, it's good to know these tactics as well. Welcome to the program, Craig and Alan. Are you there? We are here. Thank you so much, Jason and team. I'm pumped to be here with you and Alan as well, and really excited to be on. Alan, how's your fitness going? You look then. Doing great, actually, doing great. I've been working out at home. I got a set of adjustable dumbbells, and I use FitBod and get all the workout I need at home right now.

Awesome. How's my investment doing in FitBod these days? It's doing great. It's also still growing as well. Awesome. That's what I like to hear. Okay. I'll leave it to the two of you and I'll see you, the audience, on the other end of this.

How many slides are we going through, Craig? We got 25 total. Perfect. And Alan's going to jump in and give his real world critique. and or experience of what Craig's talking about here. So stick with us. Cool. Well, hey, thanks so much for having me on today.

I'm Craig Zingerline. And for the past few years, I've helped dozens and dozens of startups scale their businesses. And today, what we're going to talk about are kind of five key areas of focus that startup founders really should be thinking about as they approach growing their businesses, their startups. My experience really is across different industries and verticals from B to C and consumer as well as a marketplace experience as well. So what I'm about to walk through is really meant to be kind of stage and vertical agnostic.

So we'll dive right in. I like to quantify growth. And the way I like to quantify growth and growing a startup is actually by starting through looking at startup failure as an entry level. And so before we get really into the meat of some of the tactics and strategies to Jason's point earlier of how we actually go about growing. our startups. I wanted to outline some of the key reasons why startups actually fail. So I've got three sources of data that I pulled together for today. And one is a bunch of reports that

startup genome put together. And basically, to boil it all down, what they said is that startups that make it, startups that last past two, five into that 10 year mark and really get to scale, they actually grow their teams more slowly than startups that fail. They spend less money on customer acquisition early on than startups that fail. And they launch products earlier without this sense of perfectionism that might creep into the founder mindset. And I thought that was really, really interesting. When you look at a report that CB Insights did in 2018, they actually just updated it. They've interviewed hundreds of startups that failed. When you look at the top 10 reasons why these startups go out of business, very, very few of them go out of business

because of a bad product. It's actually very, very much growth-related marketing and demand generation-based themes. And finally, in 2006, Paul Graham put out a fairly famous essay on 18 mistakes that kill startups. And basically, what a lot of this got into was, again, failure to find demand for your product and failure to really understand the growth methods to build that business up. So we're going to dig in a little bit here. But as I go through, we're going to hand off to Allen to give his sense from the FitBod perspective, and he'll introduce us to what they're up to and some of the reasons that he thinks about startup failure. Yeah. Thanks a lot, Craig. You know, really great. And, you know, there's a ton of different things that you listed out there for why start's fail.

Definitely really great to dive into each of these items. When I look at all of these different examples, I think about focus, specifically focus on the customer. And at the very early stages, that's all that matters. Build a product that adds value for the user. So with us at FitBod, we started with a single user persona. We had a few user stories on how the user might interact with the product. Further, for FitBod, my co-founder and I were the first users. So it was easy for us to understand what the users wanted. We were building the product that we were using since day one. What do I mean by focus? With team, we scaled our team only. as the product scaled. We didn't hire and expand too early. We were able to find a tight customer

feedback loop early by talking directly with our users. We identified the market white space, which was that there was no great product for the self-motivated resistance and strength trainer. And finally, we perfected the product, knowing that once we had proven the market need, we would have the opportunity to scale the rest of the org and platform afterwards. Awesome. And so the next topic that we're going to talk about a little bit is how we'd like to think about approaching product road mapping. So again, if we point to the failure rate of roughly 74% of startups not failing because

of poor products, well, how do you go about actually building a product that people love and want to use? And the way that I'll often think about this is that there's really two streams of development happening at once when you're building a high-growth startup. The first is the core feature development that you have to work on. So I like to use an analogy. So let's say that you're a travel startup and you've got a website where people go to book travel. If somebody can't search for a flight and actually pay for and book that flight, then you really don't have a business yet. And so those are core features that you're going to have to build. You're going to have to

build a booking engine. You probably have to integrate with some third parties to actually do the ticketing. You have to collect payment. and do all of those types of things. So those are features that you basically can't grow a business without. This is also, though, where overbuilding tends to happen. And so the other way to think about product road mapping, and what I've seen with some of the fastest growing startups, is they leverage experiments and customer feedback

to help define their roadmap. And so what happens is the combination of those core ideas that you know you have to build, plus the new data that you're getting from talking to customers, from running experiments in different marketing channels, from getting different types of customers in, and really getting that feedback, they're using those two in combination to build the product backlog

and then to build the sprint backlog, and then eventually deploy code. And so this is kind of like the dual stream that I like to think about and staying very, very dynamic and nimble when you're approaching product development. And Alan's got some great stuff here to share as well. Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Thanks a lot. At the earlier stages for us, We got started and we built. We were a designer, developer duo, so we really didn't need to spend a lot of time on project road mapping or task management. We made sure that we remained focus on the priorities that added value for the user.

From our earlier stages and continuing through today, we were driven by a couple of principles, craftsmanship and always making progress. We wanted to build something that we were proud to tell our friends and our family. We built a product that we could actively use ourselves. And even from the beginning, this wasn't a proof of concept or something quickly hacked together. To put it maybe a different way, we knew about the concept of the MVP, the minimum viable product. But instead, we built toward something that we called the minimum winnable product. The other principle is that we're

always making progress. Like all of our core values, this still exists. in our org today, we weren't looking for the next version to be perfect. We wanted to make sure that each day, each release that we put out was an iteration and an improvement from the one before. We wanted to make sure that we were building for better each and every day. And of course, you can naturally see how, you know, this parallels with fitness and FitBod. We're supporting our users to build for better every day. For how we looked at product prioritization, we prioritized the feature.

that leveraged our core differentiator, the workout recommendation engine. We listened to our user feedback, which highlighted the workout recommendation, and doubling down on this helped lead to novel, mind-blowing experiences. We always wanted to delight our earlier adopters. By continuing to deliver new features, we were able to build trust and engagement with our users, who knew that we were constantly working on future improvements. Small businesses have always shown. and the ability to adapt, innovate, and survive even more so this past year. I've seen it across my portfolio.

Another way you can adapt is by growing and finding the right people to help scale your business. LinkedIn Jobs will solve your hiring problems. How do I know this? Because it solved my hiring problems. I needed to add at least five people in the past three or four months because things are going gangbusters for me. Boom. All five positions filled. Thanks to LinkedIn jobs, hiring is a huge burden for all founders. But if you're not great at hiring, your company will stall. Hiring is critical. Right now you can get a free job listing by going to LinkedIn.com slash your startup. Y-O-U-R startup. Lington.com slash your startup will get you your first job posting for free. Why should you use LinkedIn? It's fairly obvious. Everybody is on LinkedIn on a global basis.

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Thanks to our friends at LinkedIn. LinkedIn.com slash your startup. Terms and conditions, of course, apply because they're giving you something for free. LinkedIn.com slash your startup. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. You know, one of the biggest changes we made in our product early on was the workout recommender itself. Originally, our product was simply allowing you to track your exercises and view the impact on your muscle groups on the screen. And of course, we offer, you know, some suggestions and recommendations on what to do. But,

the early feedback that we received from nearly all of our users, including my co-founder Jesse, was that, hey, you now know so much about my workouts and my recovery state, why don't you recommend a next workout for us? And so we got to work with our workout recommendation engine. And that we saw so much usage that in a future iteration of the product, page one, the first thing that you see is your recommended workout, and this became front and center of our product. And, you know, that's kind of what really directed the direction of FitBot to today. We originally didn't start this way, and we listened to users, and we really made sure that

we are always making progress towards what our users were asking for on what they wanted. And, you know, that's definitely the way to look at, you know, product and feature road mapping at the earlier stages. So yeah, that's definitely a good thing there. Hey, Alan, I just had a follow-up question there. So you have thousands and thousands of users, right? How do you actually quantify those inputs? I mean, you must be getting feedback all the time. How do you know what to ignore or what to what to actually keep? You know, at the earlier stages, we had the opportunity to speak directly with our users. And so that qualitative feedback and that conviction about what to do with our earliest users was something that we were able to receive feedback.

We were able to use, you know, founder intuition and drive the direction of our organization. You know, today that's a little bit different. You know, we have many quantitative models that we use to prove out what features get utilized, what don't, which direction to go in. And we also have feedback that we collect from our users as well. So, you know, qualitative and quantitative still, but in a far different capacity than than what we did early on. Awesome.

So the next thing we're going to talk about is around growth modeling. And so what we often look at when we're at the earliest stages of a startup is kind of just getting started and trying to find customers and doing the hustle. And we don't think a lot about organization. And in fact, early organization and optimization is it's kind of worthless unless you really start to understand, well, what am I going to do as we get customers in the door? how do we take that both the feedback for a product roadmap as well as a future looking model that we can build upon? And so when getting started and when starting to get organized around growth, what we want to do is put together a model that gives you a sense of ownership around goals and metrics for your business.

And so the example I like to use is just you look at a monthly growth rate, month over month growth for X number of months. you've got a cost per unit, you've got a number of units sold in a given month. That plus your growth rate basically equals how much revenue you're going to bring in the door. If you're a subscription business, then you're going to want to look at things like churn rate, as well as number of total subscribers that you have active. But at the end of each month, what you want to do is you want to report back on what you did and the performance that you had and then adjust your forward-looking model so that you can understand where to place your chips.

And you can understand that, okay, well, we spent X number of dollars on optimizing our organic channels or our paid channels. And it actually yielded Y in terms of results. And so you build a forward-looking model. You start to get organized around growth so you've got goals to go after. And then you get after it and you update this model as you go. And this is one of the first things that I like to do with startups that are just kind of getting off the ground.

and you also can revisit this thing over and over again as you grow. And if you're looking to raise money, your investors are going to absolutely want to see a growth model that probably looks at a growth rate of at least, say, 20% month-over-month growth. I know Alan's going to chime in here with some of the ways that he and FitBot actually approached this. Yeah, definitely. We had some really strong early models that we put together for our business. And they really helped us understand the levers for our growth.

We updated the models at least once per month, and it helped build projections and clarify our future spending. When I take a look at Craig's growth model example, a few observations that I could make from that, that we did maybe a little bit differently at Fitby. Number one, we didn't have a marketing budget at the start. Our earliest users were organic and word of mouth referrals. And so this allowed us to really continue to scale as we started experimenting with marketing. And secondly, you know, to the point we talked about earlier, since we were a small team, we didn't have a large headcount cost. Both of these combined to allow us to be profitable right from the start. And we continue to remain profitable through today. Very, very cool. Yeah, and I think just understanding those metrics,

and in the model P&L, what often I'll look at is a, just like a simple P&L. So you understand how much money's coming in and how much are you spending each month. And that will just help you course correct as you go and make good use of the funds if you are fundraising. The next thing we're going to talk about is customer acquisition and activation. And, you know, what's interesting here is that where founders often get tripped up around customer acquisition is, is that they don't truly understand the intentionality of the audience that they're going after, meaning they're not quite sure yet whether or not, the user that they're trying to target actually is aware of a problem that they have,

you know, that you might have a solution for, or if they're not. So if they might be in a case where they don't know that they've got a problem that you have a solution for. And I think it's really critical that we understand what the intentionality is. And so, for example, if a user knows that they've got a problem and they're going to go search for a solution, the channels that are probably going to work best for you are going to be organic search and some paid search. And because they have high intentionality. They know they know what they want and they're going to go look for the solution. A lot of times,

though, what happens is the user doesn't actually know that they have a problem. And so you've got the solution that's out there. This is true for a lot of consumer startups. So it's your job as a marketer to get your brand and inject your brand in front of people in the places where they hang out. And that's where paid social and influencers, content marketing, all of those things. are going to come into play. And so I think the founders that get this and the startups that start to figure this out early, what they do is they've got an advantage when they go to market in different channels. The next thing that what I like to do is look at some of the metrics and reporting.

And so basically, again, just like with a growth model, it's really hard to grow your business strategically if you don't really understand what you're going after. What we're doing here is ritualizing the reporting of what's happening. on a week-to-week basis. What you want to get into a cadence of is that every week, and I do this every Monday morning, is look at what happened last week and plug it into a spreadsheet, and I would strongly urge you to do this manually. There's millions of tools that will help you do this. There's some great software to help you do this. But I think as a founder, you have to own these metrics to the point where you can rattle off what happened last week because you probably

did the reporting yourself. So I'd like to look at a top of funnel metric or two. a middle of funnel metric and a bottom of funnel metric. So generally, marketing, a product, and a revenue-based metric, what you want to do is get to a point where you can start to spot trends in what's happening. And so if you, for example, spend a bunch of money on Twitter one week, what's likely to happen is you're going to get a bunch of new demand the following week. So your traffic will go up, so your top of funnel metric will look great. But the conversion rate's going to probably be low,

especially if you're a SaaS platform or something that costs money. So you have to be absolutely aware of what's happening day-to-day week to week with this stuff. And one way to do that is to actually own those metrics and to ritualize that side of reporting. Do you ever wish you invested early in some of the best performing IPOs of 2019 and 2020? Well, our crowd investors did invest early in many of those awesome IPOs. With Our Crowd, accredited investors can invest directly and easily in startups even before they IPO or get bought. Our crowd investors have benefited from companies IPOing, like Beyond Meat and Lemon aid, both of which have seen big returns since going public, and some of the companies have

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which can be very risky, our crowd offers later stage deals as well because later stage deals are, just generally speaking, less risk because they're more established. Our sales guy Matt just invested in plenty, an indoor vertical farming startup alongside Jeff Bezos. and SoftBanks Vision Fund, how often you get the chance to invest alongside top-tier firms like that? Not too often is the answer. The R-C-R-C-R-O-W-D.com slash twist. O-U-R-C-O-W-D dot com slash twist. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. When we start to talk about what happens after acquisition, we get into this activation loop. And this is probably one of my favorite aspects of growth, actually. The way I think about activation

is when you hand off from acquisition to activation, there's something happening at the product level. I call this an ePag or an endpoint acquisition goal metric. And basically what this is, is what's your main goal? Are you trying to get an email address? Are you trying to capture sign up? Are you trying to get a demo request form? Are you trying to get somebody into a free trial to download your app? There's a bunch of different stuff here. But you form a loop here where you go from your first step of activation, your goal at each and every step, which is a touch point with the user is to drive towards some end goal. So in most cases, that's going to be a revenue-based goal. I'm going to walk through an example of one of the fastest growing startups that I've seen

called Miro, which is an online whiteboard solution. They run paid acquisition. They do a bunch of stuff with organic. They've got a great referral program. What they relentlessly focus on is getting the user who hits their website into their sign-up for a free trial flow. So the first step is you see them and then you click on sign up. And the first step is basically get started free today. They ask for your name, your work email, password. But they also make it super easy for you to sign up with other social channels. You can sign up through Slack. You can sign up through one login, through Gmail, through Facebook. The next thing they do is they ask you to start setting up your team. So enter your team name. What's your role in the company? Now they're getting some information

from you that your general sign up form maybe isn't going to get. Now keep in mind, this is for a free trial. then they ask you what's your company size. Then they say, well, anybody with your domain, do you want them to be able to sign in as well? Continue. The next step, they ask you to invite teammates. See what they're doing here? What they're trying to do is to get you

to inherently start inviting your team. They make it super, super easy. Once you get through that flow, they ask you what you want to do in the product. Do you want to set up a meeting or a workshop? Do you want to do design or research, wire framing? Then when you choose that, you're actually brought into the product

to start building a template. And what's fascinating about this is that they're leveraging constraints to bump you up against their paid plan. So think about it. If you sign up and then you invite somebody else from your team as part of that sign up, and then your teammate signs up and they ask somebody else from your team to sign up, you've got three people in now, you can only create two boards for free. By the time you get through onboarding, you've already created a board.

So you're already bumping up against the constraints of that free plan. and it's an absolutely brilliant way to do it. So activation can leverage constraints. It can leverage user psychology. There's a bunch of stuff in there that you can do. But I wanted to walk you through kind of how that loop plays out. And they've done that amazingly well. And I think we can all learn from how startups like this actually handle this.

The next part quickly here is around optimizing for activation. And so activation is a very broad topic. It encapsulates onboarding and parts of customer acquisition. and the life cycle of the product with the user, in order to optimize that, there's a couple things you can do. You can pick a single area of focus that might be broken or underperforming.

So look at your metrics and start to figure out, okay, well, my conversion rate from step one to step two is bad or step two to three is bad, or I'm just not converting anybody to paid. Focus on that and relentlessly run experiments there to try and improve your metrics. Or if you've already done that,

you can look at the whole process. So sign up for your own trial. See what happens. How good is your onboarding, right? Is it personalized? Have friends, have customers sign up and give you feedback on that. You can constantly be tuning and optimizing that. You're going to want to pick off the lowest effort, highest return set of items to work on,

and those become feature development items. And you can also framework this. So Intercom put out a great framework called the Rice framework that you can go and you can basically plug in some numbers around how much effort it's going to take you to build something, or to fix something in your product, and it'll spit back based on the reach that you think you'll get from that. What item you should actually handle in what order?

So this is a great tool that product managers can use and it's entirely free as well. I'm going to hand it over to Alan to give us some info on acquisition and activation for FitBod. Yeah, definitely. Thanks, Craig. And the new user experience, NUX is what we call it, is one of the core experiences that we need to optimize for.

If you think about it, the most number of users are going to see and interact with your onboarding flow and the initial experience of your product right after downloading or using your product. So that was one component that we thought about quite a bit. The onboarding, we iterated a few times. We really want to make sure that the user was able to see FitBod's value within the first few minutes of use. And to kind of give you an example of our onboarding evolution over the years, when we first started with FitBod, this is back in 2015, 2016, the prevailing thought for onboarding was the least amount of friction for the user. And by that meaning, the minimal number of clicks for the user to get integrated with her product. As we started to see the need for users to understand what they're signing up for,

to understand what they're getting out of their product, but also to offer some of the information for them to give us so that we could really construct a great workout for them. We started to have an onboarding experience that allowed us to, number one, educate the user on the product. And number two, gather information to really allow us to give the user a great experience. And so we've iterated this a few times. Each time along the way we would A-B test the experience,

and we want to make sure that this was something that we placed a lot of focus on. Also, part of the new user experience is the workout trial that we provide for our users. With us, we offer a three-workout trial with no pressures required. So users can experience the core value prop of the app and determine if this is the right product for them.

Ultimately, through this entire process, we wanted to attract the highest quality users to FitBod. And of course, towards the end of this, as Craig had mentioned earlier, the final step in the acquisition, conversion, and retention funnel is referrals. So this closes the loop and leads to further acquisition. Yeah, Alan, you brought up a really good point around, yeah, I think a lot of founders really focused on that minimal amount of friction. And I've also seen with, so with demand gen and kind of top of funnel metrics, as a marketer, you might be inclined to just drive as much traffic in and just convert as many people into something, right? And that would be minimal friction.

But what we saw with the Mero example that I walked through and then you talking through your example, you're adding some friction there and that's strategic because it's leading to stronger retention. How did you know when to change that? And are you still adding more friction? How often does that type of thing change? within your product. Yeah.

It's something that we give a lot of thought about. And to be honest, I'll go back to getting feedback from users. A lot of users would complete the onboarding process, and we knew this through our measured metrics. But at the same time, they would get to the end and they would tell us, hey, how do you know that this is the best workout for me? Or they would ask us otherwise and say, hey, I'm really not sure what this is. is trying to provide. And so we learned that users are okay with interacting with the product.

You know, they downloaded the app. They were interested in a product like this. And they're interested in learning more. And so rather than saying, hey, you know, three clicks on you're in, we are okay to really ask the user what their goals are. We're okay to let them know, hey, this is a little bit of what you're going to get with this product. And, you know, ultimately, like I said, through A-B testing, that led to

more active and engaged users and a lot of some more people, you know, that reached the next step of the funnel. So definitely a good thing. That's really, really awesome. Yeah, it's a little nerve-wracking, I think, when you're when you're intentionally slowing down growth. But it's the right kind of growth. So it makes a lot of sense. If you're a business owner, you might be making running your business harder than it needs to be. Don't let old software slow you down anymore. It's time to upgrade to NetSuite. No matter what industry, you're in, whether it's healthcare, manufacturing, advertising, hospitality, maybe you've got a SaaS company or dozens more. NetSuite can streamline your workflow and improve your productivity.

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Awesome. Well, the last section we're going to focus a little bit here on retention. And I would say probably retention is the most important, most critical part of running a business. I know Alan's going to have some thoughts here in a second, but when we think about retention, a lot of times what we're thinking about is how many customers do we have and are they sticking around? And I would say that that's what would be considered a core retention metric. So churn net revenue retention, gross revenue retention, number of subscribers, kind of subscriber growth rate, those are all kind of core metrics. The challenge with retention is that it might take three

six months or a year to actually figure out what your retention model is, right? Like, you don't know that because it's a lagging indicator. It's a lagging metric. And so the concept that I'd like to introduce here is around proxy metrics. And so what is a proxy metric? A proxy metric is the metric that you can use as a leading indicator type metric. And it's generally going to be an activity or an action-based metric. So it's somebody doing something in your product where they're connecting to value. and your product. And what's great about this is that it gives you a signal for how the product is performing for future retention. And it's much faster in terms of the feedback loop. And so an example that I like to use a lot. And Gibson Biddle, who was a former head of product at Netflix,

has done some great studies here. And there's stuff that Netflix has published publicly as well around what their proxy activation and retention metrics are. And it's all around, number of hours of content consumed per month. So if you think about it, yes, having a strong retention rate is what their ultimate goal is. But they know now if you can get somebody in watching a whole bunch of content, there's a threshold where that user is probably unlikely to churn, even if you, for example, keep raising prices. And so it's really critical as a, especially as a subscription business, that you understand what those proxy metrics are that are very activity based so that you can understand, okay, well, what's working and what's not working.

Again, knowing that core retention is going to be lagging. I know, Alan, you've got a bunch of stuff here to share with us. Yeah, yeah, definitely. You know, I always think about the image of a leaky bucket where, you know, you're filling the top of the bucket, and at the same time, it never continues to fell up. And that's because at the bottom of the bucket where, you know, the retention is supposed to keep your users for a long time, you know, things start to leak out of the bucket. And so, you know, with retention, we don't want to go through all of the hard work to acquire users and convert them into paying subscribers just to see them churn early in their membership. So because of this, you know, as Craig mentioned, retention is the most laggy measure of the funnel,

but it's possibly the most important measure. What we're really looking for here with FitBod are users that will become long-term users of the product and then they become champions and then they tell all their friends about FitBod. Of course, with the retention being a lag measure, there are ways to find leading proxies. Craig mentioned a lot of it is activity based. And with us, that's exactly right. We look at engagement. We look at the workouts, the users log per month.

And more recently, we've developed a model to determine the customer health of our customers. We call it a predictive churn model, which we can determine. given a user's activity with FitBod, how likely they are to continue using FitBod and remaining a subscriber. Naturally, this churn model can be used in all aspects of our business, whether that's product or marketing or anywhere else. We look at this customer health score over time, and as we introduce new features or product improvements, we can always look back at the customer health score to see if we're actually

impacting the score. Similarly with marketing and targeting and audience segmentation, we're able to say, hey, this cohort of users is our strongest group of customer health score users. And these are the people that we want to target more, or these are the people that we understand will have ultimately a better retention. And with that, a better LTV. And of course, with that, we're able to drive that into our CACT-LTV model. So these leading proxies are definitely things that we look at as we look at trying to look at our business in terms of engagement and retention. Ultimately, retention may be challenging to measure, especially since all these businesses are different. But if you do have strong retention, if you are able to keep your users for years to come, that's what sets your foundation for your business to build on and grow.

So definitely something that I find really important. and one of the most important factors that we still look at in our business today. That predicted churn model sounds awesome. I guess the question is, when did you know you needed that? Or how far into your business were you before you built that? Because that sounds like it was probably a pretty big investment. Like what spurred that? You know, it was a big effort.

And it was a combination of efforts from both our customer success team, which are the ones that work most closely with our customers and know what the customers want. And combine that with our data science team who are able to take the different inputs, different data points, you know, both qualitative and quantitative, and put together a model for customer churn. So definitely something that, you know, came about as a way to try to address our users better and try to help our users better. And, you know, we've been working on it for the past couple years and, you know,

really finding value from it for the past, you know, past one plus years. Awesome. Thank you very, very much for sharing that. That's really cool to see. I guess the next thing to cover around retention is it's a little less of a specific retention component, but it's more around product market fit and kind of looking at this activation, what we've been talking about, this proxy metric towards retention a little bit more in detail.

And so we hear a lot about product market fit. What is product market fit? How do you know if you have it? One of the ways that I think, you know you have it is when you start to see a, when you start to chart your user activation for a cohort. So let's say all the users that came in and signed up in the month of March, what happens to them over time? Are they still doing the core action that you need them to take for them to be an active and engaged subscriber? If what happens is over the course of three or

six months, basically your activation rate goes down to zero, then you very clearly don't have product market fit. But if what happens, is over a couple months, it flattens. The curve flattens and you have some users fall off, of course, but they don't fall off into the abyss. And month over month, you're actually getting better at that. That's generally a really positive signal. And I imagine that when you guys were getting started, you probably, I imagine you were looking at stuff like this. Yep, that definitely. We plighted out our retention over time and we made sure that if we draw a line and we extend that line that we have users remaining with us for a longer period of time. And hopefully that line does

flatten out. So that's what we do see. Cool. And Alan had mentioned you'd mentioned cohorts earlier. One way to think about cohorts is it's pretty simple. I mean, it can be hard to pull cohort-based data. And so, again, if you've got a more sophisticated product and you don't have a data scientist yet or you don't have anybody in charge of metrics, like this could take you a little while to figure out. But in a nutshell, what you want to do with cohorts is you want to plot whatever that core action is, those signups or usage of the product, and look at that on a monthly basis. And then what's happening in subsequent months for the people who came in during the month of January and then during the month of February and March. So month zero is the month that they came in. Month one is the next month and so on and so forth. And what you want to see is that your month zero and month one metrics are getting. stronger over time. So people are getting more engaged faster. And you also want to see that towards the tail end of whatever you're tracking in month five or month six, for example, your retention rate is is increasing over time. And that generally will give you a good sense of, is my product getting

more healthy? Am I connecting more value to the user? Am I acquiring better customers, et cetera, is this something you guys also look at? Yes, yes, we do. And not only do we look at this on a chart, we actually plot it out. So if you take call of one right here, you can plot out your January through June, first month retention. And, you know, like you mentioned, what we're trying to do is as we improve the product, as we're able to better address our user's needs, the hope is that retention continues to improve over time. And that's definitely a big indicator of, you know, retention and product improvement. Very cool.

I guess the third thing around retention is often ignored, but it's looking at retention by channel. And so the risk of running just kind of a broad report on retention is that if you average everything out, what you're going to miss are some false positives and false negatives likely. So what I like to do is break out retention by channel and even by source, maybe even by campaign, even user type or persona if you want to get more specific. you start to break down retention by channel, what you might find is that, okay, well, the users that you acquire for a high intent-based product through Google, those users are going to stick around longer compared to maybe a referral that comes in or an ad that you put up on Facebook.

So Google and Facebook may perform completely differently. But Google might cost you 20 times more than Facebook is going to cost you, right? So what you have to figure out is what is my retention per channel and then what's the lifetime value to customer acquisition cost ratio. And you want to find a healthy balance there where you're okay with spending more time or more money in a channel because you know that the retention is going to be higher versus just trying to drive a lot of demand with a model that the users may just fall off more quickly because it just was a channel that wasn't as good of a fit. Do you guys look at this as well? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Looking at LTV over KAC,

the formula you just mentioned by channel. So knowing which platform we're able to spend how much money on or how much budget on by cohort, by different types of users and who to target the messaging to target people. All of these, we understand the retention of these cohorts of users, and we use them to guide our marketing and our business decisions. Of course, at the earlier stages, we took the best performance. and we double down on them. So that's probably the easiest way to read something like this.

But at this point, we do look at all of the different channels and cohorts independently. Awesome. Well, the last section here is more of a summary, but I think it's worth pointing out that when you think about retention and even a lot of these other metrics that we've covered today, there's going to be a lot of variation based on your industry and the stage of your company and what channels you're using. So that's totally normal.

Consumer companies, consumer startups likely will have the ability to scale with users a little bit more quickly, but it may be a little longer, harder for them to monetize. And your retention is probably going to be a little lower mid-market or enterprise SaaS companies. You may have a longer sales lead time, but it's likely that if somebody's paying more, the retention might be higher. There's some benchmarks here that I'd like to share that were pulled from Lenny Rachoski and Casey Winners in a great study they did about six or eight months. ago on good to great benchmarks. And these metrics hold up for a lot of the companies that I've worked with. Consumer social, good retention over six months would be about 25% and great would be 45. For consumer transactional businesses, good retention is 30%. Great would be 50%. For consumer SaaS, good would be 40%. Great would be 70%. For SMB and mid-market SaaS, good would be 60%.

great would be 80%. And for enterprise SaaS, good retention would be 70% and great would be 90%. And this, again, is looking at after six months what percentage of your users are sticking around. Alan, I'm not sure if this drives with kind of what you guys are tracking on, but I'd love to hear.

Yeah, no, you know, I haven't seen these numbers before, but, you know, comparing against our numbers, I think we're right there. We're right above the high end of the consumer SaaS. So, you know, I think we fall right in line here. and I think it makes a lot of sense. I think the thing that's important to keep in mind, however, is that even though we're already above the benchmark,

that doesn't mean we're going to stop. We're going to continue trying to improve. We're going to continue trying to push this retention up. And retention is one of those things that we want to keep as many of our users as possible. Conversely for some other product that might be starting out, you don't have to hit 45 or 50 or 70 or 80% or 90% right away. as long as you know that this is something you're tracking, and each time you iterate,

each time you have a new release or improvement, that you come back and you look at this and make sure that you're always improving on these benchmarks. So definitely good to see out here. Great. Well, thank you. That's the end of our slides. We're now going to turn it over to Jason for some Q&A. Great job, Craig.

Great job, Alan. Alan, a couple of questions on follow-up. What is the footprint of FitBod in 2021 versus, I think when we invested, was it 2016 or 2017? Yeah, yeah. So we joined Launch Incubator early 2016, and we had just a few thousand subscribers. And if you fast forward to where we are today,

we're over 200,000 paying subscribers, one of the top 10, top 15 apps in the app store in terms of top grossing. And of course, we continue to grow. And how has growth changed, let's say in those first couple of years, to now and what is the composure of the growth team? Do you have everybody in that growth mindset or are you separating out and have like a dedicated growth team? Explain to me how you've architected

it, you know, over the years. Yeah, yeah, definitely. You know, early on, growth was, you know, growth was great, right? It was at the start organic. And as we started to put some money into marketing based on, you know, our targeting metrics, we were able to grow really quickly, really nicely. And, you know, to be honest, the growth team was my co-founder myself. You know, Jesse being our designer was the creative one. And, you know, I was the more analytical one that put together the campaigns. And, you know, I also did the analytics towards the different campaigns. Of course, fast forward to today. And, you know, things are quite different. We continue to grow.

We continue to scale our marketing budget. And we continue to, you know, have increasing numbers of subscribers at a really great right, especially now that COVID is, now the gyms are reopening after, you know, hopefully COVID returns to normal a little bit. We're definitely growing at a really great clip. So is that a way of saying the pandemic hurt your business or helped it or both?

So we were able to grow through the pandemic. And so in many ways, the pandemic sent a shockwave through the system. And, you know, if I were to talk about our business, you know, ourselves, we saw a lot of users or we saw a subset of our user base that just stopped working up. And, you know, I think just decided to get fat. They were depressed and would stop working. There was no gym to go to, I suppose. You know, I don't think I can fault them. You know, I think the world was in a pretty crazy time. And the fact that, you know, the gyres are closing and people didn't know what to do, I can't fought them.

Naturally, we expect these people and many of them have return to FitBod and return to the gym and return to working out because that's kind of the mindset that they're in as we get to get back to normal. The counterside to that, of course, Jason, is that there are a ton of people, a ton of new users who are now at home looking for something to help guide their workouts. And so over the past year, we did get a ton of new downloads looking for at home, body weight workouts, different kinds of workouts that they can do outside of the gym. So a bit of a shock in both directions.

And at this point, going forward, you can see that we have our gym product, which has always been great. We have our users that are at home, have a garage gym or do body weight. And that's a great experience. And I think that as you see people come back with the option, to either go to a gym or work out a home or work out anywhere they want, FitBod will be there to support them and be able to provide that workout recommendation for them. So explain to me how you think about your total spend every year and your job as CEO, how much of your job and the resources of the company go to the product versus explicit growth techniques and marketing,

50-50, 70-30. I'm just curious. You know, we don't necessarily allocate a split between product and marketing. We know that we have done really well in operating at a high revenue per headcount at FitBod. And so with product, our focus is continuing to iterate, continuing to improve the product. For marketing, specifically paid user acquisition, the goal is, is to scale spend, maintaining a certain CAC to LTV ratio. And that's kind of what the goals are. And so in that sense, we haven't really mandated and said, hey, here's the budget for one department versus the other.

We've been able to work together, continue to improve the product, and continue operating at a profitable level. If you were to look at it, profitable grade, you know, product great. But if you were to look at the spend every month, there's some amount of spend, which is just buying. ads, I would assume. And then there's the cost of the staff. So is the staff 50-50 growth to product? If you were to just look at their time spent, if we just take out the marketing spent for a second, just in terms of human capital. Is it 50-50, you think? 70-30 either way. So we're still focused on improving the product. And so in that sense, I can tell you that the majority is spent on product and engineering and improving the product.

Got 70%, 80%, 60%. Yeah, yeah, I would say 70 to 80. A lot of us is really continuing to drive that innovation. Almost like Jeff Bezos is day one company. We're looking to continue to improve. And of course, marketing is there to support us. Craig, do you objectively feel a company with eight figures in revenue? Should be spending 70% of their time on, say, product and 30% marketing?

Or do you think you would change that mix, objectively? I mean, I think it's unique for every business. Generally, like, what I, like, if I came in without a lot of context, I would probably look at your total revenue and then your unit profitability. And kind of the general benchmark that I would say is if you're spending somewhere around 20% of your total revenue and you've got good retention, you might be able to put more chips in. But that 20% ratio of kind of revenue to spend is generally fairly healthy. The thing to watch out for, I think is, one of the things that's changed over the last few years is channel saturation and different channels emerge and some kind of go away. What does channel saturation mean? It's when you can't. It basically means that you, that you have diminishing returns when you spend more money in a channel. Got it. So if you are going after Instagram users at a certain point, every Instagram user has seen an ad for com or FitBod, and there's very little incremental users to come out of that. Is that correct? That would take a very long time. But yes, that is what happens. And you also see this if you try to drive a lot of demand really, really, really quickly. And so you take a new amount of spend and you just plug it into a channel. It's going to be super

inefficient. What you want to look for is in addition to the CACT LTV. So how much are you spending versus how much you're going to get back? You want to look at return on ad spend as well, which is a much quicker way to see, okay, well, is this campaign or this channel itself working, how is it working apples to apples against something else? So like Google against Facebook, etc. And there's a lot of talk about Facebook and their ecosystem getting too crowded. Is that anecdotally correct in your experience, Alan, that over the last five years, let's say Facebook and Instagram's ad ecosystem is getting more and more crowded and therefore the KAC has kept going up? Or is that not true?

Well, I think, you know, the Facebook platform is massive, right? So you're always going to go to find inventory. You're always going to find different, you know, people and options to advertise to. So I think that the system is massive. I agree with you that I think what you're trying to say is that there's competition, right? Yeah. Everybody sees, you know, 10 different ads for fitness apps. And how are we there to be able to differentiate ourselves with the other, you know, fitness products that are out there trying to sell, you know, the exact same thing. And or phrase their selling prop in the exact same way we do. And the answer to that is it's actually relatively tough. And that's why, you know, the referral system works so well, which is to say, you know, if you heard about FitBod from a friend, and then you see another touchpoint on Facebook or Instagram, and then you get another touch point, then all of these combined to have that kind of social proof

that will allow you to emerge, you know, from the other, you know, 10 fitness apps that are out there. That being said, we also have a lot of users that, you know, tell us that they do try 10 different apps and then they find us and they settle with us. And of course, you know, going back to our talk, that's where retention comes into play. We know that a lot of people are going to try a lot of different things. But if we're able to move them into that part of the funnel where they become a long-time FitBod user, you know, that's kind of where we're able to win that game.

So yeah, that's kind of how I do that. Craig, is that direction incorrect in the multitude of startups you work with that Facebook and Instagram are becoming very competitive prices are going up? And then as part of that same question, what are the changes with the iPhone update for less tracking? When do those actually, when is that actually going to hit or has it hit? And does anybody know what the impact will be, Craig? Yeah, so I have seen that Facebook and Instagram have gotten more competitive. And I think what it's forcing is on the good side, I think more creativity from the marketing playbook. But it also means that you kind of have to continuously feed more and new types of content and experiences via ads to just drive the engagement.

You need to basically get that like scroll stopping moment in place. And that is very, very hard to do. with the changes that are coming up, so basically, it's starting to roll out now. And so I think the jury's out in terms of what's going to happen with the iOS changes. So basically, for folks that maybe don't know, iOS is saying that we're taking your security and privacy a lot more seriously. And so now when you have an app on your iPhone and you pull up an app that has ads on it, we're going to add. you want to be tracked or not. Basically, that's kind of what's happening. And Facebook has really taken a stance against that. And so what's happening now is you kind of had this clash between these two massive companies coming out.

But the changes are happening. They're rolling out now. I think it's as people are updating to the latest version of iOS 14. My guess is that what's actually happening is that within Facebook specifically, you're getting a little bit less control over seeing the customer. and seeing the full life cycle of the customer from the top of funnel when you're advertising them all the way through your marketing campaigns. And you can track fewer metrics now according to the Apple rules and stuff.

So it's going to make it even harder to reach people specifically through remarketing on Facebook and Instagram. So that's really, if you're a startup and you're dependent entirely on remarketing, that's about to get harder. And remarketing means you've cookieed the person. You know they've seen the ads before. you know they've downloaded, or have they taken some behavior, signed up for the service, you want to re-engage them,

et cetera. So that could be, what do you think? It's going to cost 20% or 30% less efficiency, if you had to take a guess, Greg? Probably 20 or 30%.

Yeah, I think the real question is what percentage of people opt in or opt out of being tracked, basically? Well, nobody's going to opt in. I mean, who's opting into being tracked? Right. Well, Facebook, it's interesting.

So the way, the language that they're using within the product itself asks almost like a rhetorical question. You know, like it's, they're going to be really strategic about how they ask the question. Yeah, but isn't that going to be, isn't it going to be more like a pop up that you would see? Like, would you like access to the microphone? Would you like access? Would you like to have reviews done? In that case, you don't get to screw with the language.

Yeah, I guess you don't get to screw with the language. Yeah, it's more of a system message, right? Yeah, it's more of a system message, I guess. I actually need to look into what the tactical. are. Yeah, it seems like people don't know. Have you been following it, Alan? Closely? Yeah, you know, I've been, we've been following it pretty closely. And, you know, we know what we have to do to, you know, continue to have business continuity with our business as Apple gets rid of IDFA. But like I think Craig mentioned, no one really knows what the fallout's

going to look like. What I will say is that, you know, for each user, for example, that we, get to subscribe that comes in through Facebook, historically we would send a post back. And what that means is we would let Facebook know, hey, this user is subscribed. And then we can go back to Facebook and say, hey, go find us to look like audience. These are the top users of FitBod. Go find us to look like audience that are like these types of users. That chain of information is cut. And so in that sense, the targeting that we have for users. And as Craig mentioned, the retargeting for the same users are going to be a lot different. And like we said, no one knows what the fall it's going to be, but the direction I think this space is going in is almost going to a point where there is no

personal targeting of ads and almost going back to, I want to say TV or different other kinds of ads where the targeting is is almost interest based as opposed to, you know, your personal browsing activity based. So that's kind of the direction I think we're going. How much, How much creative do you, how much new creative do you make each month, Alan, for your ads? Not enough. Okay. That's honest. I like it.

Then I'll ask you, how often do you change it? Yeah, yeah. The marketing team is in charge of that. I do know that we are working with, you know, internal creative where we source our own creatives. We also have, you know, third-party agencies where we're able to rotate our creatives. And, you know, as Craig mentioned, And these creatives, once we're able to display them in a platform, they do get saturated.

And so at that point, we do need to rotate creators. We need to A-B-test them and make sure that, you know, what we're showing the user is always new and interesting. So there's definitely things that, you know, we work on. So not exactly an answer, just an admission that you're not changing it enough. What do you think, how often do you think air creative at his scale should happen? Craig, you know, I think of com.com. And when I look at com.com on the Facebook ad manager, so for example, here is I just sent you the link of FitBods.

And I see some April ads here. And then going down, I'm trying to see different creative, pretty pretty good mix here. It looks like I see March. Looks like every two or three weeks you put a couple of new things up. What do you think it should be, Craig? Now that we got Alan on the spot with his lead investor. and board member, realizing that he is not doing enough creative. What should his creative be?

He's in the hot seat now. I'm glad you gave me all this time to do. You're glad you volunteered for this, huh, Alan? Calling you out live on the podcast. What should he be doing? Just an opportunity to further grow our business. Exactly. There's so many things you want to do, and this is just another opportunity for us.

It is a great. I think that's the right framing, actually. So, Craig, when you look at this pathetic cadence that, Alan, has chosen to do. See how I'm getting Allen riled up a little bit here. When you look at this, just meager, it's like, it's almost like he's lifting a five-pound kettlebell. He's like phoning it in with a 10-pound kettlebell. I know he can lift that 25. What should he be, what should he be lifting here? How often would you be changing here? We got to get some, we got to get some more stuff going. Look, I think, I think what you find as a marketer is that there's some stuff that's going to work

and it's going to work for some determined amount of time, right? It's going to work for a month or two months or three months, and then you're going to hit the same person 18 times with the same ad, and then it's no longer going to work. So I would trust that your marketing team knows what that frequency is. But if what I'm seeing here, there might be some room for additional ad testing. I don't know what your monthly budget is, but I mean, some of the stuff that we're kind of experimenting right now within Growth U on paid acquisition. And we're generally running two or three ad sets with two or three different types of ads and sometimes dynamic creative within those ads to try to generate some of the interests. But it's a totally different market. And so I would say,

understand the frequency that works and know how many touch points. But even more important than that, Jason, I think is what Alan had mentioned before is around if we're getting away from a point where we're really tracking a user, what does that mean? It means that that activation component becomes even more important. So if we have to figure out how to get somebody to do an action where we get some amount of PII, email address, a phone number, something, and then we need to be a lot better, more creative, more strategic, better personalization around activating that user, showing value and getting them into the mix. So, Alan, I think there's probably room for some additional creative, but I think what you put on in the

amount, three times the amount. Come on, Craig. Be more specific. Two to three, two to three times. I would test five times more, actually. I'd test five times more, run it for a couple weeks and and see what happens and you might have some new winners in the mix? Just hire a great designer for, I don't know, $60,000, $80,000 for a year and triple the amount. I'm looking at Calm.com just as an example. And, man, they're so good at their ads. I think their ads are as good as their product in a way

because they found ways if you ever see with the Com ads where they're like, oh, you know, you might want to stop scrolling and you might want to calm down or take 30 seconds to breathe. And they have all these crazy things. Like I just saw there was a really beautiful one where, you know, like they show a one for feeling anxious. And I'll just send it to you guys here. And it's really creative use of, I think, the ad space where they show, hold on, I'm going to give it to you guys, because it's really fun.

This is an ad where they show like a sand garden, you know, where you rake the sand. I think it's a Japanese tradition. I'm not sure or it might be Tibetan where they will make these beautiful sand. displays outside of a monastery. But they're doing like a little one where it says feeling anxious and you just watch, you know, the sand being groomed.

And so I think, you know, getting really creative, Alan, and getting more images of your customers and really five or 10xing. Because when you look at thecom.com library, now this is a company that's doing, I've got to be 20, 30 times what you're doing in revenue

or something in that range. They obviously have more resources and they're spending more money. but I do think that creative is one of those things where people, I'm always frustrated with my team for not doing enough creative. And I'm like, can I get some more creative? And then like, creative sucks. I'm like, you got to get a creative person in here who thinks like a marketer,

but also a product person. It just feels like it's such a missed opportunity in so many startups. Am I right, Craig, directionally? I totally agree. And I think, Alan, the other thing that might benefit you is you've got thousands of customers, tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands. get some testimonials from them. Social proof, you already got the referral.

You've already got that social proof component. If you put that back into the beast of Facebook, you're likely going to spit out a whole bunch of good stuff. And Jason, to your point, so the number one hire that I'm seeing, well, number one higher that I'm seeing most startups looking for is a growth marketer right now. The number two is a content editor. I think you guys are hiring, we're hiring, like almost every company is looking for. Define what a content editor is.

Is that mean a writer? it's it's like somebody that can do video production and post on social channels and kind of own that whole side of it and also contribute to the creative side right they don't necessarily have to be a designer but they have to be able to edit and produce and get stuff out the door and give it to marketing like i want to show up in facebook with the stuff ready to go and i just put it in and just turn it on so somebody else is doing a bunch of the mechanical stuff alan but somebody else is just saying hey, here's creative ideas, you go run with them. Or they make the stuff and say, here, you go place the ads.

Feels like a really interesting takeaway from this episode is doing more of that. And I notice on your Instagram account all the time you've got testimonials and people showing their body transformation, which is just amazing, Alan. Have you tried TikTok yet, Alan? I'm curious if you've dipped your toe there. So to be honest, yes, definitely. I think more creators, I think, is something that we want to work on. We do have a job opening.

So we are looking for people to join a team there. So FitBop.com.me slash careers? Fitbubbott.me slash careers. Go go check it. We're hiring at a number of different positions. So please go there. Growthuniversity.io slash careers. Both of those are up and running.

Launch.com slash careers. Come work for one of the three of us and be a legend. Listen, Craig, amazing job. Tell everybody how to join growthuniversity. It's a very affordable program. You charge monthly. what is the cost of growth? Everybody just wants to know the cost

and what they're going to get. So tell us in 60 seconds cost and what do you get? So yeah, we charge $149 a month if you want to pay as you go. We also charge $1,500 a year. You basically save two months.

And what you get is access to all the programs that we're running. We do a bunch of free events too, by the way. So we've got an event tomorrow. It'll be too late for this episode. But on TikTok. So we brought in somebody that's a great TikTok market

and we're talking about how to use TikTok as you would Instagram to basically do marketing. And so you get full access to all the programs, all the stuff that we're running. You got the Slack instance running too now, and that's been going great. Slack has been going well. And, you know, Slack, and when we think about

our own acquisition model, it's a lot of webinars in the Slack community, and we're trying to build this community. And we started from scratch, and it's growing nicely. So, yeah, we're in the hiring realm as well. I think it's well worth the money. And then anybody who comes to launch accelerator gets their first year for free, right? That is correct.

That is the benefit, one of the benefits we give for the launch accelerators, you get to get that first year for free. And if you're spending $10, $20, $30,000, $40,000 a month on advertising, which early-stage startups tend to do, why on earth would you not spend $150 a month being part of a community to teach you how to optimize it? Alan, congratulations on all the success. And it's just really great. I think we're the lead investor in the company.

I know that. And we've been essentially your sole source. of funding to date. Is that right? Yes, you are. You're the lead and the largest investor. Amazing. And, you know, largest outside stakeholder. Of course, we have other, you know, other angels, other people who come on board as well. But through the past couple rounds, launch has been the lead investor. How do you look at the crazy market right now? And how do you think about

raising money, Alan, at this stage of the company? Yeah, you know, we see it as an opportunity that we can definitely leverage, you know, if that makes sense with us. And so we're definitely out there we're exploring. At the same time, we are focused on what we're doing, continuing to improve our product, continuing to build our organization. And, you know,

we still have a lot of that money from, you know, the last round in the bank because we are operating profitably. So, you know, in that sense, we're not really going out looking to race. You don't need the money.

You got money in the bank. You're profitable. Let me just say this. You know, I always try to give you the best advice possible. When you're in this strong position, raise money from a great investor. That's my best.

advice to you, but you do what you want to do, Alan. It's your company. I'm just alone for the ride. Hopefully I've been a good supporter of yours, Alan. I hope. Are you and Jessica? No, no, you, you definitely have. It's been great working with you. And, you know, advice received and we're definitely working on it. So, all right. So I see some things here. This is my way of getting my founders to update me on the business. I haven't become speakers here. And then you're doing well with your business, too. You raised a little around from the syndicate. Is that correct, Craig? Yeah, we're kind of putting the finishing touches on that right. now. It's closed. So don't ask to come in. It's closed. It was over-subscribed by a little bit.

Yeah, it was basically double-subscribed, which was absolutely amazing. Crazy Hot Market. Next week on the program, as we go into scaling your startup produced by, by the way, Emmy Awardering producer Jackie, coming back for supporting this. She's a managing director now and runs the accelerator. But everybody knows Emmy Award-winning producer Jackie produced the podcast for five years. next week she's going to have we're going to do social marketing with Kate Lee from Lately and Meheck from SkillBank.

SkillBank is teaching people growth but more like a full-time course as opposed to a community. So we'll see you all next week. Bye-bye.