Why Ambitious Startup Ideas Are Actually Easier To Sell

[00:00:00]So it is all upside. You you just can't win on downside. It's the biggest thing I found dealing with investors who are stronger. Um like the investors we want to work with are they are focused on the what if it all works out because they know that 99.99% of your startups upside hasn't been done yet.

[00:00:20]I think you're probably one of the most interesting developer companies to come out of YC in recent years. you did YC winter 20, pivoted a bunch during the batch. I think hacked together the first version of Post Hog just before demo day. Um, but the the more interesting thing for me is what's happening now.

[00:00:38]Postthog was a really really popular YC dev tool, but it seems like you're reshaping the company now into like sort of to build AI native self-driving software. Can you talk a little bit about that, like how that happened and where you're up to right now?

[00:00:53]>> Sure. So yeah, Postto now provides self-driving software. It's our new kind of oneliner. Um, we started off by, as you say, we're open- source product analytics was what we launched during the batch. Obviously, there's been a platform shift with AI coming in. Um, in terms of what that's meant for us, we kind of, and I think it's worth talking about ambition a little bit more, but we upped the ambition of what we're doing.

[00:01:13]And from first principles uh we which is a very overused term but still we decided it was fundamentally better to entirely solve someone's job for them rather than giving them an rough idea of what's important. We felt it was better to be a company that does stuff for people rather than um an analytics company that gives you kind of this academic idea of how things are performing. We want to be able to improve your graphs and make them go up not just tell you that they're going up or down. You we've been working on clustering doing a whole bunch of stuff.

[00:01:39]We're looking to model like AI research and all sorts of things to understand across all the data types that we have where your problems are in your product, what your customers complaining about in support. Um what's happening in your logs and errors and session recordings and then shipping pull requests just to fix as many of the sort of simpler engineering tasks that we can. Um we're also doing a bunch of stuff at the top end too, but that's further out from now.

[00:02:00]>> Okay, this is an idea I'm I'm really really interested in. Um, I'm gonna give a talk later today about building um, AI native companies. And this idea of basically sort of self-contained recursive loops is what I'm really really fascinated in. The idea that you sort of you take uh, some input data and kind of feed it to an AI with a bunch of rules and policies and the AI does something and uh, feeds it back into the world and then sees how it impacts the world and just kind of iterates on that loop. That sounds like exactly what you're describing at at Post Hog.

[00:02:30]>> Yeah, and we've got a way to go. We do have the basic this in production. As of kind of last week, we're finally all the components kind of together. Um, and I think the step beyond that's kind of interesting is there are more and more data types you can pull from. Like it might be a support ticket. It might be a video clip of a user using your product.

[00:02:44]It might be what you're talking about in Slack. Um, and we're working a little bit like we shipped a desktop product recently to try and grab the intent.

[00:02:51]We're working on trying to grab the intent behind the product. So, as you're prompting, understanding um, we're working basically harness that grabs all of the intent data from you as an engineer. So instead of you kind of unblocking an agent every four minutes, it iterates with you quickly to understand why does this product exist rather than starting with just the technical requirements. So it's got something to kind of optimize towards.

[00:03:09]>> Okay. Yeah, I could see it sort of um being present in or at least listening to the recordings or transcripts of like the product meeting where you might have a chief product officer and a CTO talking with a designer and engineer about what you're trying to achieve and actually feeding that in as an input into the into the loop.

[00:03:25]>> Yeah, exactly. like it kind of um I think there's no reason that you can't build a like one things that um postto did in the early days is my co-founder and I were kind of I think actively bad at product which is a tough spot to be in if you're a product founder of a product um and we realized in our pivoting process we used to build lots of products that had never before existed at all and then we had this moment where we went hang we're better at out competing um and just building kind of product growth and having doing a better job on the marketing and the execution side and so we started building software products already had competition with the AI world. We're like, well, there's things there's so many things that are possible that don't exist in the world. So, we started looking instead of looking at replacing bits of software, we're like, well, what are the jobs that are happening inside a company because they're already happening, we feel very confident we'll have product market fit if we can just accelerate them and do them to a better standard. Um, so when we think about like uh deciding what to build, y >> a product manager usually decides what to build in most companies. Y >> I think a computer can do a better job of at least it can do a superhuman job of understanding everything that's happening in your customer base across every sales call, every internal meeting, every email you get from your customers and also all their user behavior too. And so I do think there's no reason really why we can't build something that's far superior to a product manager essentially on that particular part of the uh product life cycle.

[00:04:41]>> Yeah, I totally agree. I think that's a at once like a great horistic for finding startup ideas and also like pretty negative uh like human jobs but like find the job that already exists that you your product can like more or either in part or in whole replace um and it sounds like you've done that with product management >> yeah and I think I think the nature of a product manager just completely changes to being kind of the person that configures the software and goes hey this is how I think this should work these are some of the rules and policies in place so for example we have a um we shipped a support product quite recently um and it's got quite a lot of traction like about 1100 companies using it. And our review with this was like well if we've got all this data we can also just solve loads of the tickets better because we really understand the user in more depth than anyone else can without the data. Um and the role of the support team though it's not replacing them it's going into and I really mean this not in just a like >> I would not not saying it for the sound nice but the role of our support team is becoming you're supporting the agents to do their job. Um, so you're writing out the manual, the rule book, and you're iterating and improving, and you're kind of becoming a philosopher for support basically.

[00:05:43]>> And before we move on, I have a bunch more questions, but I I want to kind of ground this. The product you launched last week or so, what is the Can you either like the most impressive or sort of the canonical example of like turning some product data into an actual pull request that gets shipped that improves product? Have you seen something so far that's been like mind-blowing? Um, we're just repeatedly seeing in in Slack, someone goes, "Oh, um, ah, we're having problems. This thing's not working. This thing's broken, whatever." And they're like, "Oh, there's already a pull request for it. We just need to click merge at this point." Hopefully, that isn't a thing anymore in future at some stage, too. But, um, it's just repeatedly getting there. I I can just see human beings at Postto getting there after we've the robot has decided there's a problem and entirely fixed it, too. Um, so yeah, just the fact that it's so far ahead of the game. Um I think some of the implications of this are going to be most interesting. Um again we need to get this data type more. We need to do more work on this data type but it's the trace data for AI first products where you're not even waiting for when you iterate you can iterate more quickly because you don't have to wait for the next human being to show up. You can backward test changes to a product to see well what would have happened had it had its prompting set up like this for example or whatever else.

[00:06:54]So yeah, it's already looking super promising. Like a chunk of our own pull requests now generated this way. um which just means our developers then spending more and more time on um like big big features, big new services, new products.

[00:07:04]>> Where my mind goes with that is how do you avoid then a product that has like a thousand tiny features and the AI has built every one of these thousand tiny features but they don't fit together in into the kind of holistic product vision.

[00:07:16]>> I think this is the intent side and why the harness matters so much. Like I think the current state of harnesses is not good is not where it will end. Put it that way. Like I think at the moment if you ask um Claude build me a to-do list app it will the first question will probably be something like well do you want me to mock up the back end or should I provide data or should I just provide you with a database which database do you want but it doesn't question it doesn't talk to you at all like if you talk to an we consider them product engineers at postto if I talk to a human member of our team and I said hey can we build a to-do list app please they won't disappear and then come back with a bunch of pull requests they'll ask me questions like why uh is it going to be simpler more powerful Does it is it for a particular audience? What's special about this thing? So, I think we're doing a really as an industry, no one's focused that much on grabbing the product side of product engineering. Um, which I think there's a ton of value in.

[00:08:04]So, I think that side's really lacking currently. So, we're doing work, but I suspect other people will too on a different type of harness that's a bit broader. Um, and there'll probably be different modes depending on the type of task you're doing.

[00:08:14]>> Yeah, I agree. So at the moment we've sort of we've automated the engineer and the CTO job kind of but we need to bring in the CPO or the product manager someone with a kind of product vision to say like this seems out of scope or way off or like at least come back and clarify with you whether it it fits your vision. How long ago was it that you decided to make this change?

[00:08:32]>> Um probably about a year and a half ago I would say something like that.

[00:08:36]>> And was was it like what was the mood inside Post Hog like at the time? What do you remember the meeting? Was this like a we have to bet the whole company or was it like we we'll place you know one or two developers on this? How did you think about it?

[00:08:47]>> If I'm really honest, it didn't actually come from inside Postto. I went to I went on um I was on vacation for a couple of weeks and started um I actually had the longer longest break I've had at Postto uh and I was reading um and it just suddenly quite nerdly I started thinking about the difference between uh an MLM and a human brain. And I created a list and I was like okay this is the stuff and I realized there were a lot of differences in a way that made me feel that LMS could go much much further and the reason for this whole thought process was reading why some of the uh co-founders of open AI joined in the first place and the thought process was super engineering um for several of them it was basically humans have a brain it's a physical object so we can just build one um it's just a bunch of engineering and obviously it's an insanely difficult task but um that kind of attitude is why they were successful so thinking about uh in more detail.

[00:09:35]Okay, what's the next next next level detail? What's the gap between a brain and an LM right now? And I just concluded there's I think there's a long way still to go. I think other things are starting to constrain kind of the economic value that comes from a model.

[00:09:47]Like I think uh as the models are getting better, I think a lot of them are already way past where they need to be to provide a lot of value and the challenge is kind of gluing the model to the use case which I think is also a good place to look for startup ideas. So a lot of our product thinking comes from there too. Just kind of saying like hey with like GLM 5.2 to recently for example it's super adequate at doing tons and tons of work internally um the challenge is actually making it do the work internally like like letting the LM have tools and send emails and do analytics or instrument your product to collect data or whatever it might be so anyway that this kind of happened um I run the company with Tim um so there are two of us we're both co-founders and uh we considered ourselves co-CEO which again if early stage I would super recommend doing again um we started off by I was the CEO and Tim was CTO because he was more technical than me. I've got like a mixed background like I've run a sales team before. I've done some very bad engineering whereas Tim is like engineer through and through. But we kind of realized after a while, hang on, I'm doing a better I'm a little bit better at pushing for things that are on the product side. Tim's actually better at running sales than me. Um and treats it like a system much more. And so we've kind of we've just swapped around our jobs. Um and we've got as we got bigger, we got to the point where I literally just do stuff that I want to work on um that I think I'm good at. and anything else that doesn't fit those two things I just won't work on. And so when it came to this I was like well actually I think I need to make post very very AI first.

[00:11:07]I talked to Tim he agreed and then we talked about how do we actually execute this well and we decided if we both try and do this at the same time we're going to kind of get in each other's way.

[00:11:15]We're going to seem misaligned whatever.

[00:11:16]So basically Tim was like okay I'm just going to completely look after everything else like finance hiring people like we're scaling up quite a lot at this point um and hire we were like more than doubling the size of the company the same year. Um, and I just hung out with engineers building AI stuff. Um, so he kind of just like let me just go all in on AI and making the whole company go in that direction instead and I didn't have to worry about anything else. So I didn't do any one ones or anything like that. I'm just kind of randomly doing off sites or meeting up with engineers to get them to build things with me.

[00:11:43]>> That sounds really fun.

[00:11:44]>> It has been by definition. I want it to be fun cuz like part of building a big company is like I guess you've seen stuff here too like much more than me.

[00:11:51]Um but uh if it to build a big company you need to like be you have lots of growth for a long time and so for a long time if it's not fun we'll just leave. I 100% agree with you and I like I took the other route and then left because I killed myself doing all of the day-to-day things which were required and you know I'm not sure I had someone like Tim I could rely on to be like you run the entire company I'll just go and do this other stuff you know the fun future vision stuff but the fact that you've got that partnership allows you to do that super super powerful >> yeah and you can kind of swap around like sometimes and you also find even just the energy is very different like I had been running sales at the start I'm getting a little bit bored of this and I'm getting much more interested in product and Tim, my co-founder, was feeling the other way around cuz we often found that whatever you're not doing, you start worrying about. You're like, "Oh, I'm not in control of products." And Tim was thinking, "I'm not in control of sales. What are they saying?" And so, we just said, "Hey, why don't we just swap for a bit and see how it goes?" And it was great. We both had tons of energy. It's like a new job. Uh, and we just both went much harder. It was very successful swapping stuff around. So, I would say like don't be a lemming. I think people have a really high propensity to do what society expects of you, which is to follow a career path that takes you, you know, like you go get a good degree at university, you become a banker, you gradually meet make a VP and then you retire and die. Um, you really don't have to. So, you can like swap around, you can run sales, you can do product, you can do engineering, like whatever you think is most important basically like what is the bottleneck to the company being more successful. Changing tack a little bit. Um, you've argued that founders should be much more ambitious, especially founders in in Europe, and we're both European. I'd count myself as European still when I left for another country. Do you have examples of ideas that sound like too big or too hard um but might actually be more fundable, more recruitable, maybe easy to take to market than like another narrow SAS tool? Like how do you think about how much ambition is too much ambition?

[00:13:41]>> Um, I I I'm curious how you would how this would do in an OIC interview, but from my perspective I think um I suspect it would do quite well like better than people would imagine. Um I think there isn't a ceiling to where you can think there is um generically what I have learned as we've postto has got far more ambitious over time. Um like at the start we're kind of almost apologetic like we're trying to find a little place in the market hiding away from other companies that were bigger than us.

[00:14:06]We're very scared of competition for example. Um and eventually we learned to start embracing it and then we started realizing actually we can build something much better than everyone we're competing with. Um the more ambitious we have gotten like post went from one product to wanting to build like 20 to actually building like 20 of them wanting to build hundreds now saying actually these tools don't even m we've built all these products they don't even matter anymore like the like an agent should be using all of them. Um the whole thing should be proactive and it just tells you when it it like uses you as a human to unblock itself basically. um the more ambitious we've gotten, it's been far easier to um uh hire really good people. It's because really really strong people I think generically will want to and there are exceptions clearly, but they will I think are more likely to want to work for companies that are working on something very inspiring. It's just obvious. Um it's far easier to do go to market for ideas I think that are very ambitious too. Um if you're more ambitious, you're more remarkable. As the world gets busier, there's like more and more software coming out. like it's super easy to build something which means that in go to market everything gets saturated like trying to get someone's attention um I think will get harder and harder and harder for startups because there are more of them like there's more people building um if you're building something that is more remarkable people if something is remarkable that you're building people will remark upon it on the internet they'll talk about you'll get word of mouth growth if what you're building is unremarkable like um a really narrow point solution in SAS you may still that you can definitely still be successful but I think you have an easier time if you're building something that is just fundamentally more compelling and bigger Um, and in terms of fundraising, it's easier to fund raise for very large ideas. It's probably more biodal. Like, I think a bad investor is less likely to work with you, but I think the really strong ones are probably more likely to work with you in that case. I basically agree with you. I think but I I think the nuance is that you have to kind of be split as a founder. You have to have this like the Sam Alman mode like what is the most ambitious version of this idea that I could possibly conceive of and like say with a straight face and hold that in your head and simultaneously ask and sort of direct your company to like what is the next practical step I can take today and this week to advance towards that like insanely ambitious goal. And so having that kind of short-term practicality combined with the long-term intense ambition kind of hurts your brain sometimes. But I think you kind of need both.

[00:16:18]>> Yeah. you must you have to ship. It's like the longest and short of it. Like even all these ideas we're working on, we're breaking them down into small bits, getting things out the door. I think almost conversely, I would argue the more ambitious your idea is, the more important it is to ship because you're more likely to screw up because it's more ambitious. So, um if you're like, I'm going to disappear into the wilderness for 3 years, then come back with some perfect product. Um I don't think you will. Um you'll get there by building it with a bunch of people in real life learning a bunch of stuff. So we're really like when the we're more focused than ever on shipping the more innovative an idea is like the first question internally is like okay when will we launch this how can we launch it sooner and that's what all the that's what the sort of it's very busy at the moment because everything's got very innovative because which is creating so much pressure to ship things to into our users hands >> yeah I think this is such an important point and so European founders often will ask something like how do these Americans who have nothing claim to be working on all this insane in stuff when it's so like implausible or impro you know like it's they can can't possibly know the future are they all just liars >> I think a few things that have really struck me or observations along this as we've grown um like in the early days like before we did um YC we'd look up to people doing YC as kind of superstars and we had real really strong imposter syndrome which I think you get you're more likely to get kind of the more European you probably are um when we got into YC we're like actually like in a really good way a lot of the stuff is very underwhelming like people are super super like everyone is much earlier than we thought they would be. It's much more chaotic than you would expect. Um but from this is what great startup like from this we saw companies absolutely rocket and take off. Um but it was far more underwhelming on average I would say than we expected per person. But as we keep growing we think the same thing over and over again. um to the point where now when we meet people who are um you know running companies that are 100 billion or more in valuation or whatever we're like well actually like I'm you can sort of just see them as a we realize they're all human beings ultimately um underneath like they're like they're you know we've literally met billionaires who are our goal is go into the meeting and just treat them like they're one of our peers um and try and see through a little bit some of the veneer. So I think like the big these big successful companies look because they have all this marketing really impressive and it looks like you can never compete with them like I think Anthropic is a company that's like that at the moment like they look kind of undefeable but the reality is it's run by a bunch of humans who are not necessarily any smarter than everyone here. Um they're just at a different stage and they've done a bunch of stuff for a while. Um so the kind of imposter syndrome is really crumbled. So I think that's actually I was struggling with most as someone who I'd never ever worked for a sexy company before. I'd never worked for like Google or Facebook or anyone like that either. And like I was very new and that's the thing YC brought me really like I think my perception was YC gives you this network where I can just sell to all these people to get some revenue and then fund raise and then hopefully it all works out but the reality for us was it just normalized um people aiming really high people setting a really high bar for us and it sounds super fluffy and like a nonsatisfactory answer to an engineer but like honestly it made us like 100 times more confident than we were. I think this is a more normal culture to have in America than it is in Europe. Um where in the US people I think because it's not looked down upon that someone will just declare they're going to um solve cancer for example or something like that. Whereas in San Francisco that is an entirely normal and potentially plausible thing to hear because you can't get there without believing it at the start.

[00:19:39]>> Yeah. Or like cure all disease ever.

[00:19:41]>> Yeah. Like I have had founders who've said that and we funded them and like probably it won't work but if it did work I that would be pretty impactful to cure all of disease. Um and so I think the Americans just kind of have this like what if it all goes right? Like what if every everything along the way what if actually just worked? What would be possible if it worked? And I think there's a tendency in Europe to ask yourself too often like what if it fails or what if the like what are my friends or family going to think of me? What if it's not GDBR compliant in the early days? Like, oh, >> wa Jesus.

[00:20:17]>> There's this like kind of weird cultural deprogramming you have to do at YC when we get European founders over.

[00:20:22]>> I know it does sound a bit cultlike. I think the um I would also say the other thing the other thing I've sort of realized is you're just default screwed as a startup. So, it is all upside. You you just can't win on downside. It's the biggest thing I found dealing with investors who are stronger. Like the investors we want to work with are they are focused on the what if it all works out because they know that.99% of your startup's upside hasn't been done yet.

[00:20:44]There's just no point worrying about downside or how it goes wrong because you can't kind of a like a successful like I used to think this about earning money. Like if you're thinking about starting your own company um or just continuing in a regular job there's a limit on kind of how much you can earn in a regular job for example. But if you like run a business whatever it can you can make thousands and thousands of times more money than someone else in theory. there's only so much you can save. Um, and I think it's like that with upside versus downside risk when you're making kind of product decisions, for example.

[00:21:10]>> Yeah. And I mean, as an investor, you can only lose one one your money. But I mean, some for Y cominator, we've invested in 7,000 companies. And I would guess 90% of our total returns come from five companies. So, it just doesn't matter if like six and 6,995 companies just all fail. doesn't matter at all if five companies reach 100 billion.

[00:21:34]>> Yeah. And I think it's realizing then that's what investors are after. So when you come to fundraising, you got to be pitching like that. Not like, oh, we'll save the money and be super careful. I mean, you need to not die and there are lots of other things to consider, but that is the model that investors are after.

[00:21:44]>> Yeah, totally. Investing in a company that gets to a 50 million or 100 million outcome as an investor is an absolute waste of time. Whereas investing in something that has a 1% chance of being a 10 billion or 100 billion company, like absolutely sign me up. I'll take that bet every single day. even if 99% of the time it fails. Um that's how investors make money. And I think switching that mentality when you're pitching to investors is is really really important, right? Just ask yourself what if it all goes right? What could be possible? And then pitch that vision. You've got kind of a cult like developer brand like a kind of a weird brand actually like hedgehogs. Uh the you plastered on the back of buses uh you deserve posth I think is the latest one. uh your Twitter personality like how intentional is all of that? Did it kind of develop? Did it is it all a joke? Is it effective?

[00:22:32]>> It took a lot of it took work at the start to it was intentional at the start. So, we were going into a lot of busy markets and again I think this is like one of the things I've learned about marketing is if you're going into a busy market which I think can be a really good I think it's an underrated thing to do in from product perspective.

[00:22:46]Your challenge in marketing is standing out uh because it's so busy. Your challenge in marketing is nothing else really. You're not trying to create demand for the product. You're not trying to educate people that much about what it does. you're just trying to get across like, hey, this is a company that um stands for something more interesting. Like when we launched, every other company had a blue website.

[00:23:03]Like literally all of our competition at one point. They use long words. They had pricing pages that didn't have pricing on them. And we're like, man, these are super that's part of the reason we started Postar. We're getting annoyed at dealing with we wanted their products, but as quite technical people, we're getting annoyed trying to access them.

[00:23:18]And we just wanted to be able to like click sign up, put in our credit card, and off we go. Maybe with some free usage or whatever. And so um we got an awful lot of traction in the early days literally by doing stuff that wasn't product related better. I would say that stuff was more important to us than like our product was super terrible compared to all of our competition for a while a long while. Um but people wanted us to win on the internet. Um we targeted a slightly different audience. Like we went after engineers, not after um some of the other roles internally that our competitors would go after. Um and they just kind of wled us on until we got there. Um and now we're at the point where we think our product is much stronger. Um and still has a long way to go. Um but yeah, the just the value of like when you consider I think everyone talks about product in lots of depth like they really think who am I building for? What should it do? How can I differentiate myself blah blah blah blah and then they just like copy paste their go to market and instead we're like well who is our go to market for let's think about that like a product like we think about our website. We consider our website a product internally for example like what are the use cases? Who are we building our website for? What are the different profiles of person showing up?

[00:24:16]Um and once we did enough of this, we've just now built the muscle internally that um the marketing team kind of just does whatever they want. But there is sort of a common philosophy of um how it kind of all works. So I'm not kind of micromanaging our latest like blimp campaign or something. Um that one I am uh but on the whole most of the marketing stuff is the marketing team just are having a lot of fun. Um which is leading to good results. I think I would say I think it's important like I'm having an awful lot of fun running Postto. our team are as well and like we interview looking for that fit and hoping that that person will enjoy working with us. Um like you're very unlikely to get hired at Postto if you show up wearing a suit to your interview for example. So or if you really really want to be a manager you really really should work somewhere else. Um so we look for people that we think are going to genuinely entertain be quite entertained by what we're working on and it does help. It just comes across naturally.

[00:25:04]>> Yeah. I've noticed that about both you and Tim. you both seem to like really really enjoy your job and I don't think it's the single most important thing but I think after getting product market fit probably then it actually is one of the most important things stopping the founders burning out over the next five or 10 or 15 years. uh like once we met Patrick from stripe and um we asked him a bit about this and he said yeah my mentality is I want to be running this for 40 more years so my role needs to also reflect that and it's not purely a external question of um what do I do for customers and stuff he's also very he kind of knows that by virtue of being there and having a good time he will produce better output for customers too um but I do agree product market is more important and it was very grindy at the start for us it's got more fun as we've got bigger >> last question on pivots so you guys pivoted was it five times before you landed on Post Hog?

[00:25:54]>> Yeah.

[00:25:55]>> Yeah.

[00:25:55]>> Like what what did that feel like? And it's the hardest question I get as a as a YC partner is should I persevere with this idea or should I pivot to a new idea and like how did you think through it those first four or five pivots and then how did Post Hog feel different to all of those >> in order to do a really good job of learning like how are people and by learning I mean kind of we we need to learn something each week like uh do people value this concept? do people value this particular product? Can we get it in front of people or whatever it might be? We'd set goals that were based like that. It wasn't kind of like hit 20K MR or something at the start. It was very much like can we get one single user to use this thing in production for example. Um and we would just iterate really fast towards that. So I think you're like luck you have with hitting product market fit is kind of a function of how many shots you're taking and the quality of each shot. I think there's diminishing return to the quality of a shot you can take. like you could spend 10 years trying to build the first idea we ever worked on and pro I would say probably still fail but we tried for like 4 weeks or 6 weeks or something couldn't get anything any kind of traction for it and so we just moved on because we felt no matter how hard we try we just don't think this idea feels very unnatural that it's landing and so basically what happened is I would go out validating the idea with users so I would be talking to them and just spending my whole day trying to get in front of users we would go like we wouldn't phone anything in like we would always go meet people in person even if there was a bunch of travel did not care how stupid. It looked like we would like one of our first the first paying customer we got on our which was on our fourth idea or something. We um caught like two or three trains and a bus to go meet them and it was like a $300 a month contract or whatever and like we probably spent about that on getting there. Um but from that we learned later on when we tried to charge them more money for what we thought it was what we wanted to be charging, we couldn't get the price up at all. And we started feeling like this sort of just shows us that they don't value it. Like we've tried really hard to get this over the line. Whereas if we'd phoned this in, they could have been like on their phone or ignoring us or whatever. So we're very we really did commit to each idea kind of blindly um and just hammered it out until uh we either realized that we just cannot get like people to talk to us, we can't get people to use it in production, we can't get people to pay for it. There various hurdles. And once we kept hitting the same hurdle over and over again, we'd either run out of ideas for how to solve it or just decide this just doesn't feel right to us. So, um, yeah, we were pretty decisive. We're probably too much on the side of abandoning things early. But I think that's because we were quite bad product people at first. We had to do a few products to try and build some product knowledge ourselves, I think. Maybe.

[00:28:25]>> Amazing. Um, well, it all worked out in the end. I I have a million more questions I I could ask, but sadly we are out of time. I'd love to give a huge round of applause to James from Thank you.