Caya - Founder of Slidebean

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What is going on, everyone? Casey Adams here. Welcome back to the Rise of the Young podcast. On today's episode we have Kaya. Kaya is one of the three co founders and the CEO at Slide Bean, overseeing the company roadmap strategy and growth marketing efforts. Slide Bean is a venture backed company founded in 2014 and headquartered in New York City. The company closed its first seed round in 2016 and has since become a multimillion dollar profitable tech company that continues to expand rapidly. If you don't know what Slide Bean is, they've created hundreds of presentation templates sourced from industry experts or relevant startups who have used them successfully. Their pitch deck templates provide you with an outline where all you need to do is fill in the blanks. Personally, I've used Slide Bean for many presentations and I've had a phenomenal experience with their platform. So I was very excited to sit down with Kaya. And with that being said, please take a moment to share this episode with a friend, preferably one that is just starting a company, because this episode will be very, very valuable to them.

And.

And let's get into the episode with Kaya from Slide Bean.

All right, what is going on everyone? Casey Adams here. Welcome back to the Rise of the Young podcast. Today we have Kaya from slidebean. Thanks so much for coming on, Kaya.

Thanks a lot for having me, Casey.

Of course. So first off, man, I absolutely love slidebean. I've used it for my companies for a while and I just love the platform you've built. And for everyone that doesn't know what slidebean is, I'd love for you to give us some insight into what it is you built just in case people haven't came across it before.

Well, yeah, so slidebean started originally as a presentation software, ideally something that anybody.

Could use for sales, presentations or marketing or school, whatever.

But soon enough we found a nice.

Niche in the startup market where both our content marketing resonated well. And the product we started inevitably tweaking to these users. It eventually became a pitch deck platform and now it's sort of evolved into a platform to help startups in the early stage process that extends to pitch decks and financial models and a bunch of other stuff.

Got it. And when did this all start for you and where did the idea come from originally?

So I'm a graphic designer.

My co founders are as well. And we've always struggled with shitty PowerPoint presentations and wanted to solve that.

Right.

The problem is that solving PowerPoint presentations is tough because it's, it's, it, you.

Know, it appeals to a lot of, a lot of people. It's a very complex product and inevitably.

It'S kind of embedded into a lot of users and they're not willing to change.

So that's something we had to accept and then find another niche where we.

Could find something that would fit into their needs.

Got it. That makes sense. So you and your co founders back, I believe you guys founded the company in 2014, is that correct? What were you doing before Slidebean?

So I did another company and that's my first experience with pitch decks, with pitching investors and whatnot.

That didn't work. We couldn't raise money.

But my pitch decks were always praised.

Because I'm a designer and I would.

Spend hours on keynote kind of building the right slides. So that was the start.

My other co founders, you know, they.

Worked with a few, with a few other startups. One of them worked with Mozilla.

So we, it was a good coincidence. One of my co founders, we were.

We went through high school together, so we're good. We were good friends. Jose, the last one, we sort of.

Found third musketeer after, but it was.

Yeah, it was a nice match. We were all Costa Ricans, by the way, so we all met down there.

Okay, very cool. Regarding slide B, nowadays, the transitions that you said you've had from presentations to more pitch decks, what made you realize some of these internal changes that needed to happen? Because it takes a great founder to understand what the market is saying and getting feedback to pivot to what the market wants. But how are you guys able to figure out, hey, we should actually make this for pitch decks and founders and companies in a sense.

So a couple stories around that.

First, in the early stage, we sort of advertise to everybody and try to.

Get everybody into the platform, but suddenly.

Noticed that starters were converting a little better.

One other kind of aha moment for.

Us was we went through 500 startups, the accelerator program.

And before he got busted on a.

Me Too case, Dave McClure had this.

Really good reference of what a deck should have. It's out there in the Internet. And one day in the office, I.

Asked him like, dave, can we use this? Can we take this deck, make it beautiful, and put it as a template on our platform?

He's like, yeah, fine, take it.

And that sort of became the first.

Step in all of this. Because one of the things that we.

Were trying to solve was the design part.

I mean, all the time what we.

Said to do at the beginning was we'll let you input content and you.

Automatically design it for you. But when we figured out with that.

Is that people also wanted some structure. What slides should go, what should go on these slides? What's the right order? So that's what.

When we came up with this concept.

Of a template, it's hard to explain because it's not really a visual template. It's like a content template, like a fill in the blank canvas that you can use. And that helps sort of guide people in this brain process of writing your presentation.

And I absolutely love it. Like I said at the beginning, I use it myself. And whenever I'm. When I first went in there for the first time and plugged in everything that they were asking me the questions, you guys have just built such a sleek platform, and as a user, there's a phenomenal user experience. And that's what I want to ask you next, is for people that are building software products, what's your advice to launching something and building out the MVP and getting user feedback? Because I'm sure you guys have been through many iterations along the journey, but what's your advice to people launching companies in the software market today?

So I think that we live in a world where you can build an MVP and you don't need to raise money.

Right?

So first of all, and we see a lot of that because we work with Dex, but we see companies that don't have an mvp, they have the team to build it, or maybe they don't. And the point is you have to build that on your own. That's something that you have to build with your nails, bootstrap, whatever, and get.

To a first mvp and then the.

Second, and we learned this one the hard way, is you should charge people for this mvp, even if it's not ready. Try to find a way to monetize.

Users, because if you.

And we did this for the longest time, almost a year, slotging was Free. And we would get feedback from everybody. But these weren't paid customers. They were just customers. And some of them were never going to convert. So we spent a lot of time catering the product to what people were requesting and turned out that they were never going to pay for our product. So by putting that paywall, you're not only testing your monetization strategy, you're kind of filtering the feedback and only getting.

Feedback from the ones that count.

Wow, that's super interesting because I'm working on an MVP myself, and I was thinking about launching it in the free model, but now that you say that, I'm curious when you're saying, hey, adding that paywall, because obviously an MVP is a very basic version of the end goal of what you're looking to accomplish. Can you dive more into that for me about some of the benefits of that and what you learned from adding that paywall as the first mvp?

Yeah, so the paywall is. We have.

This is a fun story.

So at the very beginning, we didn't.

Have anything that was paid.

Like, everything in the platform was free. It was a very early version of the product. And one thing, one feature we didn't have was exporting decks. We wanted to keep people in the environment. So people started requesting this, these free users, and they're like, we need a way to export. What if there's no Internet connection? Whatever, fine, we'll let you export to a PDF. But we didn't have the functionality to export to PDF, so we actually did those ourselves. We would open the presentation on our side, make it full screen, do screenshots of each slide, compile it into a PDF and send it to the user manually. We would do this manually, and it was crazy at first. So then we figured, like, we need to filter people out because they're asking for a PDF, changing one little dot and then changing the PDF, and we have to do it again manually. Out of this annoyance that we figured, well, why don't we put a fake paywall on this? We'll tell them that in order to do that, they'll need to pay five bucks a month for our plan. That will filter people out. And it also tells us if they're willing to convert. We didn't have a paywall. We didn't have an actual paywall then. So if they clicked, okay, we'll pay, it would automatically unlock it for them. But it also, you know, created this filter that let us measure how many.

Of them were converting.

Yeah, very cool, man. And I also want to ask, just when it comes to how you guys have scaled when it comes to raising capital and actually building a product that you guys have built as of now. What have you learned from raising capital and building a team and scaling to the point that you have regarding just team culture and people wise?

Yeah. So I, maybe it's not the ideal approach. So my first company went out of business and we were very bullish about that company in the sense that we would, you know, we would. I put a lot of company expenses into my credit card because we were sure that we were going to succeed. So I learned a hard lesson with that, both in terms of how hard it is to close down a business, but also how expensive it is to.

Close down a business.

To go out of business, it's expensive. So with slidebean, we've actually been extra careful and I think that that's worked because we, you know, we raised money, we had burn rate for a few, for a few years while we expanded. But we've always been very cautious, like with our growth and with our hires.

Especially with people, because I hate only.

Once we have to do it. I hate having to fire people because.

I have to cut burn rate because.

That means I made the bad decision of hiring them when the company wasn't.

Ready to hire them.

Yeah.

So being cautious, even though it has undoubtedly, undoubtedly caused us to grow slower, it's also made us very stable and that lets us sleep at night a little better.

Yeah. Yeah. That's amazing, man. And I do want to ask you from a leadership perspective, over the last couple of months, I'm sure you guys have experienced a lot of changes when it comes to being in the office versus online working and remote working. How has that transition been for you as a CEO and founder and what have you learned from that?

Yeah, so I'm a big believer in.

The, in the office space.

I think that there is some collaboration that can only happen in an office space. When you sit down for lunch and you're, you're just discussing something and you come up with this idea and you use the afternoon to implement it because you just discussed it like that. That does not happen when you're working remotely.

Yes.

It's more efficient in a few ways and you can, you can make it work. We have to make it work. But yeah, right. So we sent everybody home on March and we have not been back to the office since then. Only for small one or two person meetings and the taping of the YouTube videos, which we still have to do with human. But aside from that, the Office has been empty.

Wow. I'm sure that's been a huge transition for you. Do you guys ever go back anytime soon or what does that look like?

So we're.

This is the.

I'm talking about the Costa Rica office. We have another office in New York.

But we have an office in Costa Rica.

Yeah. So Costa Rican. Big part of the team is down there or down here.

Really? Are you in Costa Rica right now?

Yeah, this is our Costa Rica space.

Oh, wow. I went to Costa Rica about a year and a half ago. Absolutely loved it. So that's why I'm here.

That's cool.

Yeah. I am so still, you know, there's still. Coronavirus is not under control down here.

So we're still cautious.

The other office in New York and we have part of the team out there. I can't just. I can't fly to New York, and.

I'm probably not gonna be able to.

For the next few months. I usually travel between the two offices.

That's just the way it is these days.

And I. That's very cool, though. You guys are out in Costa Rica, and I want to touch on the YouTube content. I know that you guys have a great YouTube content strategy, and you're crushing it. There's. When did you decide to start creating that unique style of content? And where did that idea come from?

So we had a lot of success.

With SEO for the first couple years. Our first big breakthrough was SEM. We sort of catered to everybody, and then when we found the keyword pitch deck converted great. And we're like, okay, so this is our keyword. And that fueled our first year of growth. The next couple of years were SEO because we figured, well, people are searching for pitch decks. Some of them are seeing our ad, but the rest of them are going to organic results.

So we need to be there as well.

So we spend a lot of money and effort in getting our websites to rank and pitch for those keywords, anything.

Related to pitch, stakes and fundraising.

And then we ranked and we're third, second position for some of these searches. Getting to number one is really hard because we're competing against huge companies or Business Insider type. But then our question was, well, what's the next search engine? And that's YouTube. Right. So we started producing a lot of content around that to sort of answer those questions in a video form. I'm originally a digital animator, so I. The first videos I would edit and animate myself just to understand, like, what was the format that people would enjoy. And it's this format of explaining something from our own expertise that people seem.

To have connected with.

Very cool. I love the content. I know my buddy Yoli. He sends me over all the videos that he watches, and I checked him out. I'm like, this is super cool. So I'm glad that he sent him over. And I'm sure everyone listening, if you haven't already checked out the YouTube content that they've been putting out, make sure you do. So talk to me about Costa Rica. You grew up there or what did that look like?

Yeah, I am. I'm Costa Rican.

Okay.

Been here my life. I only lived in New York for a few months in 2012 for the first time. So I'm officially a foreigner before then.

What part of Costa Rica?

San Jose, downtown.

Okay. Very cool, man. So with growing up in Costa Rica, did you come to the States often or what did that look like?

No, not really. Not really. I went a couple of times as a kid. Like Disney World sort of trips.

Okay.

But I started traveling to the US Regularly when I started the first company, which I needed to travel. We try to raise money. Even when we launched Light Beam, we always were pretty sure that we wanted to play this card.

Right.

We wanted to establish Slidebean as a U.S. company because Press, customer trust, sales, marketing, all that stuff you need, you.

Have to be a US Company. Like you, we can't use the Costa.

Rica thing as an advantage when selling. Right.

Yeah.

So. And New York was the only place where I had a soft landing because I had lived there for a few months.

So we decided that slidebee would be a New York company. There's.

There's a small team there. But the reality is that most of the talented we can recruit outside of that, we can recruit in Costa Rica. We recruit here because they're in the.

Same place in the same office. Well, for March.

Very cool. Absolutely. Regarding just what I want to say, you as an entrepreneur raising money. That's a question that obviously your platform is built to help helping companies raise money. What is your personal experience raising money? And what's your advice to early founders there?

Yeah, so I think that myself included, founders want to raise money before they're ready to raise money. I think that I blame the press, honestly. The startup press is all about how this company raised this many millions, but it's not about the traction, it's not about the bootstrapping part. Like, nobody hears that story, so they think that they can just come up with an idea and raise money for it. I was that guy for my first company. And that's why we failed. I was that guy for sliping as well, because we had an early product, very little traction, and we, and I wasted months trying to raise money. It was only until we were on track with some revenue and growing month over month revenue that investors wanted to put their money in.

Yep.

So with very few exceptions of maybe founders that have a great track record or a great, are great at fundraising, you know, most the rest of us will need to get there with traction, but still entrepreneurs are coming and what.

They want is the pitch deck.

Right. So we'll take their money, that's fine. But we try to. Part of that is the YouTube videos as well. We try to guide them in the journey and say, well, you shouldn't be wasting time building a pitch deck if you're not ready.

Yeah, absolutely. So you're saying people are building pitch decks for specifically the intent to raise money, Correct? Yeah. From raising capital outside of obviously having the right product and actually having some traction there. Have you guys seen not only growth, but the advantages of raising capital and being ready for it? I'd love to just hear you out on that because there are, I know people that listen to this podcast that are founders that they want to raise capital. They're on track too. But when you go about doing so, what was your strategy and what did you learn from that journey personally?

That's a good question.

I think that we. I had this incorrect notion that investors.

Would be really.

On top of you about everything. And I think that in the early stages, you know, when your investors are.

Putting in 100k, couple hundredk, maybe they're, you know, they're doing small bets in many companies and they're not gonna be.

You know, you're not gonna be able.

To pick up the phone and call them and ask them for an intro. I mean, maybe, maybe once or twice. But it's not, it's not that support that you expect. It's somebody I have to report to. Yes. On traction, but you are pretty much on your own as a CEO. You have to keep those guys happy and you have to keep your, your team and your co founders happy. So, yeah, two takeaways there. You sort of play this balance between the two, you know, between kind of meeting these objectives that you're proposing that.

You'Re planning that you sold, but also on your own in the sense that these guys are only going to dedicate.

Maybe an hour a month to you.

They don't care that much about the.

Money they put in your company.

Yeah. Oh, very, very great insight. I appreciate that. Where did the name Slide Beam come from?

Oh, man.

So we've actually considered changing the name a couple times and we. Right now it's so well established, I think that we can't change it anymore. Like we're stuck with it. It's hard to pronounce in Spanish. It's a mess to pronounce.

People never get came from.

We wanted to have slides in the name mainly for SEO.

That didn't work really work out. It's not as important as we thought. But anyway, we wanted that and then.

We needed something else because obviously slides.com is not as taken.

So we figured Bean, we love coffee. And then it's from a Coffee bean.

The first logo we had was a coffee bean.

Okay, okay. Very cool. When I was in Costa Rica, I went to a huge coffee plantation and did that whole process of picking the beans and doing that whole thing. So that's very cool. Keeping it native.

Yeah, it's the little nod to Costa.

Rica that we had.

Yeah, no, I love that. Very cool. Just outside of business, do you have any key passions or projects that you work on from a passion perspective or what is that outside of work part of your look life?

Yeah, I'm actually.

I started a YouTube channel on my own long before we started a Slide Bean YouTube channel.

And I've always been careful about or.

I've had to be sort of.

I've tried to disconnect myself.

I love making videos and I really enjoy it.

I'm good.

I'm good friends with Nas from Nas Daily.

We met in. We met with my previous company and I, you know, after a while and.

Seeing how he succeeded so much with his one minute video thing, I was, I honestly felt.

Woke up one day and felt envy and like this guy is living the dream.

Like, I would love to be making videos just for fun.

Yeah.

I'm gonna do it as a side thing.

So I'm really passionate about that.

I got extremely lucky that we. I was able to combine this in Slide Bean.

So now I have the Slide Bean.

Budget to make videos. And I'm always careful when I pitch video stuff because it's doing well now. But I don't want to overspend on this just because I love it.

But yeah, I would say that that's.

The closest thing I have to a hobby in whatever time.

That's very cool. When you're building pitch decks, where do you see most entrepreneurs go wrong when building pitch decks?

Good question.

I think it's about.

I Talked about it by the timing. If you as a CEO are gonna are on fundraising mode, that is a.

Full time job for a few months. So those are two, three months that you're gonna spend finding investors, getting calls, pitching to them, not doing meetings.

I mean at least zoom meetings, but.

It'S a full time job for a while.

I spent a lot of money and.

I spent a lot of time, I had to travel, fly to different cities and whatever to pitch the investors when I was full on fundraising mode. And you should only do it when the company, the rest of the company.

Can operate without you. Because if you only have a co founder and one other co founder and.

They need you for a part of.

The product, then you're slowing the company down.

And that's something that you cannot afford to do at the early stage. So that's a lesson learned with pitch decks. And then in the actual pitch deck itself, it's just about the amount of content investors expect, the structure. Docsend did this nice research on how much people's investors spend looking at a.

Deck and it's about four minutes.

So people try to squeeze a lot.

Of information in there and the reality.

Is an investor is going to spend four minutes. If you have more information than four minutes, they're just going to skip through it or read it fast or not care. So just keep it short, keep it.

Simple, keep it short, keep it simple. I like that a lot. Regarding the current state of social media and how you guys have built a brand, I know that you said it'd be hard to change your name and I look at slidebean as a very well established concrete brand. And that's coming from a consumer and someone that just loves the product. What's your advice on building brand, establishing a true brand online, to actually build that foundation and that culture within a company?

That's a great question.

I didn't used to be a believer.

In the power of brand.

Our first four years, probably we sold.

By growth hacking and by getting people.

In front of our product, not in front of our brand.

So we always think of the marketing.

Budget as 70, 80% should go to what we call direct response, which are ads and any campaigns that directly drive sales and conversions and 20% to brand awareness. That's the way we've always thought about it. It's a secondary thing. Yes, it has some value, but it's completely intangible in the early stages of the company. You probably don't have enough budget or time to be focusing on that. So it should be secondary And I still believe that. But as your company scales, as your marketing budget scales, suddenly that brand awareness budget goes from being a few hundred bucks, a few thousand bucks, so you.

Want to find a good way to spend them.

We actually started our YouTube thing as.

Our YouTube is by far the biggest.

Brand exposure we have these days and we've ever had. And we started YouTube as a direct response campaign. The first few videos we would track as to how many conversions they drove. If people were paying by watching this.

Video and they were working, Right. But then came a point when they were not only working for this, but.

They were also working to create a brand. Because a lot of people started, we started seeing this in social media, we started seeing this all around where people.

Were becoming familiar with the name.

And now we understand the value of that. Now we understand that people, when they come to your website and they've heard of your brand before, they're much more likely to convert. Resistance is lower, churn is lower, customer satisfaction is higher because they just believe in your brand. But that's something very intangible and potentially very expensive to build.

Yeah, absolutely. And you're saying YouTube has been a primary component in building that, building that, Is that correct?

Yeah, absolutely.

Very cool. Outside of YouTube, is there any other strategies that you would say have been very important to building brand or is that something that you guys just spend majority of your time on when it comes to pumping out content there?

No.

So SEO is probably the next most important one.

YouTube Just recently, very recently.

Became our.

Biggest source of customers. It used to be SEO because that's what people are searching for. If you're the answer and you're the product that answers their question, that's a direct search. But that's not brand. Right. They just came across this thing and.

Now they learned your name.

Now that they care and that they consider signing up.

But they could read, you know, you could get 100, 200,000 read reads on your articles every month and nobody would.

Know your brand because they don't care about who's writing this article, they just care about the content.

So yeah, brand came in later in.

The game, but it's been great.

I love that. How have you gone about pricing software? I know that every company has different pricing models and it's some are low ticket, some are high end for corporate. This is not only a personal question, but something I'm just felt fascinated in. When it comes to how great companies look at pricing and how you've gotten to that point where you're like, hey, this is a great price point. And that's something I'd love to love to hear your thoughts on.

Oh man. We've played around with pricing so much.

You know, started as a $5 a month thing, failed because it's not enough. $5 a month means 60 bucks a year per customer.

And if you're just starting up and you don't have a brand and you.

Don'T have SEO, you just can't acquire customers for five bucks. I mean, for 60 bucks or less, it'd have to be like 20 bucks per customer acquired. And on a SaaS product, that's just impossible.

So luckily we figured out that in.

Time changed to like 1929amonth, which worked well, but we started seeing a huge amount of churn. So we grew. We pretty much scaled the company on this 29amonth pricing. Got to our first million dollars in ARR on that pricing. But when we got to a million dollars.

We just couldn't grow anymore because.

The churn was so high that we.

Were adding $13,000 worth of new subscriptions.

But we're losing $13,000 of new subscriptions. So we were flat. And that's when we started experimenting more heavily. In the end, we landed on annual.

Only simply because it kind of connects.

Better with what we're offering. Right. If you're doing a pitch deck, it's not a one month thing, it's not a thing that you're exporting for now. It's, it's, it's a product presentation that you're going to be working on for a few months. And if you have that pressure of a monthly subscription.

You know, normally a.

Presentation product would track the success on how many presentations people are building.

But in our case, people build one.

Or maybe two pitch decks and that's it.

But they're continuously iterating on those. So when you're in an annual and.

You'Ve already paid up for the year, it's a lot easier to do that if there's no pressure for the monthly.

Also when it comes to time for.

Renewal, they've been working on this, they've been iterating on that deck. It doesn't, I mean, the deck is in slight beam. It's harder for them to leave it and turn out. So that's worked wonders for us.

Very cool.

Last point on pricing. We recently launched a new plan that's 1 49amonth. So our cheapest plan is 96 a year. But recently we launched the plan that's 149amonth. Which is crazy that people are willing for us was crazy that people were willing to pay for this.

But I also blame the brand a.

Little bit in the sense that people trust the brand and therefore their money is less of an issue as of a barrier because they've already trust this product.

Yeah. Wow. So you started off with just. It's. You have to go yearly up until this new. This new $149 a month. Yeah, Very interesting. I love that, man. That was actually very insightful and I appreciate you sharing that for sure. What are you excited about, you know, Moving forward into 2020 at Slide Bean? What are some things that you're looking forward to internally that you can talk about? Because I'm sure you guys have a lot of amazing things coming out. Yeah.

So two things. YouTube for once. I'm really excited. I talked about that. We have some really cool stuff happening. We. Right now we're shooting a new format for our company, Forensics videos, where we're doing like a full production show for an episode about Apple. It's gonna be really cool. And I'm generally excited about what we can do with YouTube because we're in this magic sweet spot where YouTube is funded by this sliding company. So we're like a little production company.

But we have the money of a.

Larger business and it's translating to sales. So we have some liberty to spend.

A lot of money in that and.

We were enjoying it.

And then the other one is this.

New product that we're launching called Monthly. It's like a SaaS tracking platform. Sliding has sort of evolved from being just the pitch deck to a bunch of tools for early stage startups. And one of them is Monthly, which is a SaaS tracking basically for your invoices. And we track your SaaS expenses month over month.

Very cool.

I'm really excited about that because people are excited about that.

We have a platform now where we can launch it. We can launch it to our customers. We can launch it on the YouTube channel.

It's like another startup internally.

Whole new world of potential. But we're not making the same mistakes as we made the first time. Starting with the name, we found something that was simple and easy to pronounce and more memorable.

Hey, I love that for sure. Have you guys ever thought about starting a podcast about, like, pitching investors and. Yeah, I'm curious.

I don't. I don't. I listen to very few podcasts, mostly because my brain can't do two things at once. I either listen to the podcast or work. So I have to set aside time to listen to the podcast. I can't do it while I'm working or maybe driving.

That's okay, but so I haven't.

I'm not that much into the podcasting world. I've started force myself into listening to.

More podcasts because, you know, we want to do that and what we planning on doing is doing company forensics episodes.

Again, these company story breakdowns, but having the real CEOs of the company as a podcast. So we'll do a full interview discussion and then from that we'll extract some stuff and do the video version.

Very cool. I'm definitely looking forward to that last thing. Kaya is just what is the most important lesson if you had to pick one that you've learned along your journey as an entrepreneur that you'd want to give to a young entrepreneur today?

So I think the most important lesson, it's that it's about the journey, right?

You have to enjoy the journey. You're not always going to be successful.

You can't. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. And I mean money here.

Like, don't invest all your own personal.

Money into this company because you're the worst. You're the worst person to decide if the company has potential because you're biased. That's one.

But it's about enjoying the journey.

There is this sort of Silicon Valley standard story, you know the Instagram story, right? Billion dollar company in three years, tiny team acquisition, billionaires after that.

But there are a lot of other.

Untold startup stories that first make their.

Founders happy, then make their founders money. And they, you know, people call them.

Lifestyle businesses, but I think that that's not the right word for it. It's a startup anyway. It's a tech company, has great margins and you can be very successful and live very comfortably by doing one of those companies. Maybe you can sell it.

I love this podcast actually, by Will.

Schroeder from startups.com and what he talks about is like, if you sell a company in your 20s for a million.

I mean for a million dollars and.

You get a million dollars, a million dollars in your 20s will completely change your life. You don't need a billion dollars in your 20s.

If you get $500,000 in your 20s.

You can buy a house, you can.

Get rid of all your debt and you can, you, you have unlimited potential.

For the years after, right? So that story is also a great story.

Totally. I love that. Kaia, before we wrap it up, where is the best place for everyone to continue to follow slidebean and hear about everything you guys have coming up soon.

Probably I want to start with. I would normally point people to our.

Website, but probably YouTube is the best place to start.

A lot of what we talked about.

Today we talked about on YouTube. So check us out on YouTube.com sipbeen love that.

And everyone tuning out. Make sure to link that down below. And again, Kaya, thanks so much for coming on today.

Awesome.

Thanks a lot for having me.

Casey.

Monarch Legacy of Monsters An Apple original series. The world is on fire. I decided to do something about it on November 17th.

This place.

It's not ours. Believe me, the most massive event of the year arrives. If you come with me, you'll know everything. I promise.

Oh my God.

Go, go, go.

Legacy of monsters streaming November 17th only on Apple TV.

Plus.