Dennis Hegstad - Co-Founder of LiveRecover

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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 Dennis Hegstad here on the show, the co founder of Live Recover, an SMS abandoned cart recovery platform. I first met Dennis on an app called Clubhouse, which is an invite only social media platform that a lot of tech people are on. And we had a great conversation on there that prompted us to connect on Twitter and and since then we connected. I was intrigued by his story and the platform that he has created. And I'm sure you will be as well once you listen to today's podcast. So before we get into it, please take a moment to share this podcast with a friend. That is how the show grows. Literally, a single word of mouth promotion goes a long, long way. So please send it to a friend. Make sure you subscribe and enjoy today's podcast with Dennis Hegstad.

Foreign.

What is going on everyone? Casey Adams here. Welcome back to the Rise of the Young podcast. Today we have Dennis Hegstad on the show, the co founder of Live Recover. Thanks so much for coming on Dennis.

Yo, appreciate you having me man.

For sure. So we connected on Clubhouse. I know we were just talking about that, but when I came across your product, Live Recover, I found it fascinating. And for the. For the people that don't know what Live Recover is, can you take a moment to tell us what it is and when you started it?

Sure. Yeah. So yeah, Clubhouse is dope. Shout out Clubhouse, Live Recover. We specifically do abandoned cart recovery for E Commerce stores. But our unique value prop, you know, our differentiator from another company is that we have Live real people doing all the texting and most other competitors use an automated chat solution because that scales we want to be more of like a real time Support and sales, extension of a business. So you're not just thinking of us like an automated solution then. It started in 2018 over the summer.

Okay.

Prior to Live Recover, I was consulting at Fashion Nova with Rich and Julian. And so I was doing some paid media stuff there for six to eight months and helping with adding some tech stuff there. And then I realized like there was kind of like an early wave of some SMS and also Facebook messenger bots was like more important then. And so we kind of just built something that made sense. After a couple of months of leaving, working with them and you know, two years, a little over two years later, we're still here, kicking it.

Very cool. Did you have a tech background prior to launching it or what did that look like?

I don't know. Kind of a blend. Right. I'm a marketing guy and a product guy and I, you know, like anything other than actually writing code. But at the end of the day I can read and write some code, but I'm not the one that's the best suited for it. My co founder is our cto. But before this I had a tech platform called Exposely that was an influencer marketing platform, which I know now is like, oh, everyone's had one of those and that's why I stopped it. But we launched in 2013 and we were what's called like a self serve ad platform that was like completely self serve. It wasn't like you had to talk to influencers. They opted in and bid on a performance based model of like cost per click, cost per install, cost per post, cost per whatever. And you could. It was all automated, so it was pretty early on. And then in 2016 we shut down.

Okay.

And then after that I got back into E commerce just because I had so many relationships with influencers and E commerce was like thriving. So all of our customers were either e commerce or content sites? Yeah, most part. And then affiliate stuff and things like that. But yeah, so before I wouldn't say a tech background. Even then I had a team of engineers, but I knew enough not to get scammed or cheated by a developer or agency that would drag me out and spend a life, you know, like a year long of salary or more. Right, Totally. Yeah.

Very cool. When was the moment when you recognized there was an opportunity for abandoned cart recovery? Because I know on the site you guys do a great job at showcasing what the product is like. When did you see that opportunity and what made you dive all in on that specific category of E comm?

Well, I mean, prior to Like I said prior to doing, I had an experience with E Comm even since like I launched my first store on MySpace days back in 2008. And even then like email, abandoned cart recovery was always something that existed and even now that's still like the king. And SMS might be temporarily the queen in terms of channels, but so it was kind of like, okay, that is the highest intent event that someone does is they go to the checkout specifically put their info and then they abandon. That's what we do. We don't even do abandoned cart recovery because we collect the phone number at checkout, not prior to getting to checkout. So technically we're abandoned checkout recovery. And for us that means we can send the least amount of messages and have the highest potential return and value provided back. And so for us it was kind of a no brainer. Like we didn't want to build the mailchimp of sms, we wanted to just build the steak knife. Not really the Swiss army knife.

No, that makes sense for sure. So what do you think have been the biggest challenges over the course of since 2018 when it comes to building the company, building the tech platform and obviously scaling, especially during the year 2020, like what were some of the biggest challenges that you guys have faced and what have you learned through that?

I think if we had been, not to say we should have been more ambitious, but if we had decided from the beginning, which we didn't, to build a platform, we could have scaled faster because some people are deciding that they want to use a platform and maybe they don't want the human powered element because they'd rather save a little money and use one tool that does everything like an SMS list versus an SMS pop ups and everything else. And that's okay too. That's just not the right client for us because we don't want to work with brands that treat SMS like they do email. It's not the same thing. So we made that intentional decision and that could be a short crutch. But at the same time it means that like we're working with the kinds of brands we want to work with, we're doing things our way and because we're bootstrapped and we're profitable, we can make that choice. So I think there hasn't really been real hurdles per se, but the setback are knowing. Like, hey, we watched our competitor raise $390 million. At Attentive, we see PostScript, which we're friends with PostScript and all of our SMS bump and some of our Competitors, and we send them business because we know that we're not always the ideal fit. But, you know, that would be a hurdle. But that was something that we chose to do. So I think it's, you know, you have to take it how you ask for it, right?

100%. Absolutely. When it comes to your background working at Fashion Nova, what did you learn working there? I actually haven't had Rich on the podcast yet, but we've talked about it a bunch and I'm definitely looking forward to it. But what did you.

He's a cool guy, for sure.

What did you learn working there and what even led you to land that gig of consulting with a brand like Fashion Nova?

So I met Rich through a friend named Dan Snow, who owns an agency, and he also owns a bunch of.

Yeah, actually, I've had Dan on the. Daniel Snow on the podcast.

Yeah, Dan's a good friend. And so Dan was visiting me, or not just me, but he was in la. We were hanging out and we went to some dinner at this place called the Nice Guy, and Dan brought his friend Rich. And Rich was like, oh, I own Fashion Nova. And then we went back to Rich's house and he had some products on his. On his desk or on his kitchen counter. And one of the products was mine. And I was branded black charcoal masks. And he was doing research, like, wow, these masks are scaling so quick. And I'm like, that's my brand. And he's like, oh, I'll pay you to come do this for me. Because I think maybe he didn't have a lot of trust in some of the agencies he were working with. But the thing I learned most was I think if you know how to do media buying, it's way easier to jump into a brand that's killing it, like Fashion Nova and scale them versus taking a brand from zero and helping them start make their first 10,000amonth. Right. Anybody that's a meteor buyer, in my opinion, could jump into a Fashion Nova or a colourpop or a big brand and say, hey, look, we scaled them from like half a million to a million a month or however many millions spend. But going from zero and saying, hey, I helped this brand make their first 10, 20k a month is like, a lot harder. It's a different type of participation. So I learned, I think I had more fun at the beginning stages and starting from 0 to 1 than going from like 5 to 10. But that's why there are certain people who like to build and some who like to scale.

Yeah, absolutely. Love that man. What has been the biggest lesson you learned from building a tech company? And what advice would you give to a founder that's looking to start a SaaS company or any type of tech company out there based on your experience.

If you can find a co founder who's really technically savvy and you might not be that person and you have good ideas but you could either afford to pay them, definitely do that and, and look for the right people. Like spend a lot of time on that because you might waste months working with the wrong people or just over investing in things that don't really matter. At the end of the day, designs don't matter that much. People care about if stuff works so over invest in things that they can worry about later. Once you have five customers you can worry about reinvesting in some cool graphics and cool designs. Ever built the first product because you over invested in stuff? I would say yeah, like just be scrappy and try to get started. But also like software is awesome in comparison to E commerce. I love both. But you don't go from zero to millions a month like you can in potentially or even a year. Right. In SaaS or software the same way that you can with E commerce. But at the same time you don't have to worry about overhead and inventory. You don't have to worry about three PLs and logistics returns. It's pretty much build it once and sell it forever. Yeah, as long as you don't get depreciated by new tools. So I think that that's. If you think about it that way you can make it once and just keep selling it for years. That's a great position to be in.

Very cool. I know that you said earlier you guys have the flexibility because you're already profitable. Have you guys raised money when it comes to building the product or was it all bootstrapped like you said?

Yeah. So from the beginning my business partner and I had the luxury of both doing E commerce and having some cash flow from other projects where we basically beta tested live recover on our own stores and we were like, okay, we were our own customers. We'd already been making a little bit of money and I had the network through Twitter and Instagram and whatnot. So within, within the first month we were already profitable. But we didn't pay ourselves anything for the first eight months and most people probably can't do that.

Yeah, for sure. That's huge. And I think that's a very important topic to even dive in more about like launching a product and Making your first dollar, becoming profitable, especially for a tech company, like that's something you see all these companies raising hundreds of millions of dollars, but it's like, okay, are they profitable? Where are they going? And yes, there's value in that. But what's your thoughts on the VC world? I know that like I said at the beginning, we connected on Clubhouse and there's a lot of high level VC talk and companies that are raising, you know, A Series C, 100, $200 million. Like what's your thoughts on that? Is that something you have planned or what does the future look like for live recover?

So for us, we had, you know, after our competitors or I don't even like to call the competitors but you know, attentive and Whoever else, postscript SMS bump. They all, you know, attentive raised 395 million. So every VC that didn't get involved with their round has come to us and said, hey, are you, are you building an attentive competitor? We see you're like one of the market leaders and we're like, no, we're not. You know, our, our goal is, you know, and we're already doing a few million a year in recurring revenue and by the end of next year our goal is to be close to, you know, 5 to 6 and 10 maybe, right? If we're doing 10 million a year in recurring revenue and we're profitable, we make great margins. I don't want to raise vc. I want to. And they don't want that. They think that's a small business. You guys aren't going for 100 million or 500 million. We're like, no. My odds at that point are pretty low. I know that at the smaller scale I have better odds and if I'm bootstrapped and I don't have to listen to anybody else, then it's like 10 million a year with 50% margins. Let's just say you and your co founder own it together. You could split two and a half million each. If you didn't want to reinvest in buying new businesses, you just wanted to make it your cash machine. That's, that's amazing. I don't think anybody, you know, and at that point of vc, like if you raise hundreds of millions, you have to sell for billion plus at 10% of your own money, right? Left, maybe 5, you're still, yeah, you're getting a lot more. But that risk is, I don't know, I think your chances are better in the smaller ranges. Plus, if you want to do VC after you've had some smaller wins, call a million dollar exit or a $10 million exit a smaller win, which is still a huge win.

Yeah, for sure.

Smaller win after that. If you wanted to go do your next business, a VC would have much higher conviction and investing in you. Plus you might be able to bootstrap and then raise at a much better valuation. So I think it's in your favor to try to do it on your own if you can. It's not always the case. It just depends on your experience and maybe your age and how big your idea is, but very cool, man.

That's. That was great insight for sure. I do want to take a step back though, like before live recover. What was your childhood like? Where did you grow up? Go to school? Did you go to college? Like, what did that part of your life look like?

I was, I grew up in San Francisco until school started, I guess like first grade. And then I was in Houston until grade school, high school, then MySpace. I played competitive video games back in like 2004.

Four was like the real counter strike.

Counter strike specifically. And then I was, you know, I got into computers heavily. MySpace came out. I became a super emo scene kid with straight hair. Emo, you know, like wow, really just a MySpace kid. But I kind of got to, I don't know, 150,000 friends on MySpace started selling t shirts, touring with bands that were popular on MySpace because I was selling them bulletin posts for money.

Okay.

And then I decided like after I did warped tour, a couple years with bands while selling my merch on tour. Yeah, I decided I'm gonna move to LA because all my friends that do music are moving there. Yeah. Then I realized in LA that I didn't really care about T shirts and selling and going to shows. It was more like I cared about building products that were online. And so I kind of pivoted from E commerce to starting to build apps or try to build web properties. And I got really into the parody Twitter game. So I got up to like 8 or 9 million followers on Twitter.

Really?

That's what got me into the exposedly platform that I did that was an influencer marketing platform. It was because I had built up 9 million followers on Twitter across all these different meme pages. And I was monetized them in la and that changed my whole perspective on advertising. And I was doing paid ads on Facebook too. So this whole thing kind of just like shaped itself just over a 15 year.

That's crazy, man.

31 okay.

For sure. That's Dope, man. When it comes to like the meme pages, like back then on Twitter, was it. Were these brands that you ended up building or was it just the meme pages that you still have and own or what happened to them?

I ended up selling all of them for a low six figure amount, but I ran them from 2009, 2008 until. Until 2017.

Okay.

And at the beginning, I wasn't making any money. I was just trying to build up the numbers. Cause it was fun. I got like 100,000 followers on three accounts and I thought I was the shit. And then I changed, you know, I changed meme accounts. I changed the themes based on like movies coming out. When Ted came out, I made a Ted account.

Yeah.

After Ted died out, I changed it to Shithead Steve or Bad Luck Brian or any of these old memes. And then we would just kind of change them if it made sense. And then over time, some were staples, right? Like food porn and house porn, things like that. But yeah, like for the first year, I made no money. And then I was like, whoa, I can make 50 bucks a day, right? And after that change, it was game over. I got addicted. Yeah, I love that. Eventually became a 50, $100,000 a month business.

It was crazy. That's so sick, man. That's tight. Do you think there's still opportunity to do that today or is it over saturated with all these big brands and pages in the space?

I think Twitter is harder because Twitter actually banned a bunch of the accounts. They did a huge sweep back actually about a year after I sold my accounts, thankfully, and fortunately for the person who bought them, they sweeped like thousands of meme accounts. I think on Instagram, you look, you see, depending on who you are, like fuckJerry. And they're Jerry Media company. They're absolutely crushing it and doing it in the most professional way.

I'm actually. I'm meeting up with Ben from Fuck Jerry in a couple hours. We were having on the podcast. So funny you bring that up.

Yeah. Shout out them. I mean, they're killing it with like their board games to the Tequila just to like how quickly they can scale ideas. I mean, you can see they're like a meme studio. So I think there is money in it. And if you saw, I think it was Warner Brothers or Universal acquired the daquan and comedy 80 million or something. 80 million, exactly. So is there money in memes? Yes, but I think you have to do it the right way. I don't think the days of copy and Pasting content and stealing people's stuff is going to last very long. And that's why I think if you do it the right way. Yeah. You can crush it for sure.

Now that's harder, right?

Because it's easy to copy and paste things from other people's work and curate and be a curator. But that's not.

Yeah, yeah, no. 100%, man. I definitely. I want to switch the conversation to back to Live Recover when it comes to the brands that you guys work with. I know on the site it says join 2000 +E commerce brands using Live Recover. What are the typical brands that you guys work with or have worked with? And for the people out there, there's a lot of entrepreneurs that listen to this show. Who is the right customer business for your product?

Cool. Yeah, no, thanks for. That's a good question. So we support e commerce brands on Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, Cratejoy, basically anyone who sells e commerce online. And if you have abandoned carts and you want to win back more revenue, our app automates sending human. I say automate as in because we manage it for you with our software. But every message is sent by a human, so you don't have to do any work, which is kind of the goal. But yeah, I mean, the brands are generally not, I wouldn't say anybody who's out the gate starting out. Although what's interesting is if you're a big brand and you're making millions a month and you recover 100,000amonth with Live Recover, that's still a lot of money, but you don't feel it as much as if you're making your first thousand or two thousand a month. And then our app brings you another 200amonth.

Yeah.

You're like, holy shit. That 200 was a difference between being profitable or not or being able to add another $10 a day in ad spend or whatever the case may be. So I wouldn't say any brand is too small. But it's kind of interesting that depending on who you are, you might feel the difference more. But I would say if you have no sales coming in and no traffic, we're probably not the best app. Just because we recover sales, we don't generate sales, if that makes sense. Totally. Yeah.

Very cool, man. And I saw that shout out to young and reckless. I see that they have definitely used Live Recover on the site. Those are the homies I know we talked about.

He was one of the. Dee was one of the first, like five beta testers. That we had. I just DM him, he's like, can you come to the office like today in like the next hour and set us up? And I was like, yeah, I showed up, he wasn't even there. And shout out Dee and.

Really?

Yeah, the girls that were working, they were like, hey, yeah, Dee said you're gonna set up and then boom. They just used the app for like two years.

That's so tight, man. No, huge shout out to Dee. I actually, I did two events with Drama and Dee last year, just live events. We had a bunch of speakers audience. It was super dope. But they've definitely been. They've been on the podcast a couple of times. I've been on group chat. Love everything they're doing, for sure.

Yeah.

I wanna talk about living in la, right? You lived there for how many years exactly?

Yeah, about nine years, maybe a little more.

What was your experience from a business perspective? What did you learn from being out here? I know that we talked about before we started. I just moved out here and I always like to ask people, right, like, what was your experience with living in la? It's the place that I've, I guess you could say, always wanted to move to. I lived in Scottsdale for two years, just came out here two weeks ago. And I've been coming to LA for four plus years now. And I understand the scene, I have my network out here. But what's your experience when it comes to living here? From a business perspective, but also personal.

I think that LA is amazing. There's so many bright people there. There's so many people there. And it's awesome because you get to like rub off that energy as long as you know how to surround yourself with good people and not sort of vultures or mosquitoes that suck energy from you. But, you know, when I moved there, I was 21, so I didn't really know much. I lived basically in a frat house with some friends and paid like 450amonth for a room in rent. And then fast forward when I was leaving, I had a nice loft and I loved my place because I lived around so many inspiring people. But I knew from a business perspective, my network grew like 10x from going there. And even now I left LA and I don't really feel like I've left because I'm still involved with conversations and brands and friends who are all based in LA because I was there for so long. So I feel thankful for that. But from a personal perspective, I found myself getting a little comfortable and maybe over Invested in things that didn't really advance my business after I got to a certain comfort level.

Yeah.

Which happened at like, maybe year seven. Not, like in early stages, but like, it was like hustle mode because I had nothing.

Yeah.

But after I got to a comfort comfort zone, I'm like, okay, like, instead of doubling down whenever you're winning, it was like sitting down and taking a rest and having fun and justifying it by hanging out with other people who are successful. So I found myself like, oh, because I'm at so and so's house and I'm meeting these people and these people who are probably not going to advance my career because they're so far ahead of me. Almost like an unreasonable ask. Right?

Yeah.

So I found myself getting a little caught up in that. And so that's kind of why I left. But that's a personal thing. That's, you know, everyone will run into those issues.

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

But I think LA is great. Right. Like, without it, I wouldn't. I wouldn't have, you know, been able to launch Live Recover in the way that we did and not have the support of a lot of the friends and partners and brands that we have. So I kind of owe all that.

To la, I think, for sure. Speaking on beta testers and launching Live Recover, when you went to launch, can you walk me through your launch track and how you guys got your first user and what was that like and what did you learn? Because I'm actually. And I'd love to talk to you after this. I'm about to launch a software company as well, and going through that beta test is something I'm very intrigued with when it comes to, you know, getting that first user and actually getting that momentum. So what was your strategy and how did you roll that out?

We. I mean, we asked. I'm like, my business partner probably hates this, but I, like, I'm okay at. Or maybe excessively talk about things on Twitter sometimes before they launch just to build up some hype, obviously when they're within sight of a finish line. But I had at least 15 to 25 friends who ran brands who I was telling them about the product and showing them screenshots for probably the two, three weeks leading up to it being completely ready. And so the day it dropped, we probably had 20 stores in the first two, three days. And some of them were doing volume and they were willing to give us feedback because we let them use the product for basically free. And then after a month, and we didn't have any charge at that point, it was completely performance based. No cost, just a percentage of what we recovered for you. And so a lot of them were like, no brainer. We learned after a few months that that wasn't the best way for us to acquire customers because we would never know what the value of them was if we didn't have a fee up front. We had to kind of put some block in place. But, yeah, I mean, I think you can. If you have 25 friends that you can ask, I mean, even five or 10, that's enough to start. And if you can get one person to pay, that means you can get two. And if you can get two, you can get five. And if you can get five, you can get 10. And all of a sudden you're like, wait a minute, I have a. You know, even making 500 to $1,000 a month with a small micro app is a nice side hustle for someone who's younger or anyone. Right. Like, does anybody want an extra thousand dollars a month? I do. Yeah. I don't think that's not a lot. I mean, right.

Yeah.

So I think that there's a lot of ways to get to your first, you know, 1, 2, 5, 10 and 25, 50 customers. And then from there you could snowball it if you more time into it.

100%. Man, I love that. When it comes to how you think about social media and how you use it personally, what is your, I guess you could say, strategy on social? You talked about promoting things on Twitter and I know you have a big audience there, but how do you personally use social for your business and what do you recommend founders do based on what you've done?

I think Instagram is a lot different than Twitter because I'm, you know, I guess I would consider myself an older user compared to someone who's 20 on Instagram. I, you know, I don't post that much. I just watch what other people post and like stuff or, you know, catch memes or whatever. Yeah, I don't use LinkedIn for whatever reason. I log in every quarter to say no to automated spam and to prove people I do know. And then I use Twitter actively because Twitter is very easy to jump into conversation. And I like that about Twitter a lot. So for me, Twitter is where I pretty much do all my, you know, call it prospecting, call it sharing my thoughts and trying to engage with other people who have similar thoughts. Whether it's from brands I want to follow or owners of brands, I want to connect with them. Maybe onboard to my App or if it's other brands I maybe want to invest in. I just started angel investing in some direct to consumer brands. And so I'm slowly starting to expand my network. I mean slowly over 10 year horizon, like over time. I used to really care about my like the perception of how my Persona looked, if that made sense. Like I used to only follow under a thousand people, so my number was like three digits at 999 or less. And then over the last year I'm like, I'm 31 years old. Do I really care about how many people I'm following? Am I dumb? I'm like, that's so silly. And then I, so I'm like, okay, so now I follow like 4000 something people. And within that last year I've met like hundreds of amazing entrepreneurs and people who I can help who are willing to, you know, stick their neck out for me. And that's what I think it's all about. So like after I stopped caring about how it looked and just kind of being more authentic and using it how I wanted to, I really saw my sort of like network grow. And that's I think a lot of the core of the sort of community around even our business at Library Cover.

I love that man. What have you learned about partnerships with brands but also like, you know, bringing on a co founder and building a team. Like what's your experience with team building and scaling from a culture perspective, especially during this year of, you know, everything's remote and there's, you know, a lot of companies going towards that. Is that something you guys have always done? Is it new for you guys or what does that look like?

Yeah. So thankfully, or maybe not for some people, but we've always been remote and my business partner and I, I couldn't build the team without him. And there's no such thing as a one man army. So if you're gonna build a business, you have to have a co founder and build a team or at the end of the day you are the business.

Yeah.

And that's not a great position to be in because if you get burnt out and you want to take a week vacation, that means you're not going to make any money for seven days. That means you're going to be stressing for seven days because at the end of the day you were the business. But you need people to rely on and to trust to do a good job and you're paying them and they want to be a part of your business. So I think that like one thing that I'm thankful for is having a co founder now, having some employees. And we have 11 full time employees, so we're not huge. But there are people who, if I wanted to go on vacation right now, even though I guess because of COVID I can't, if I wanted to go to the mountains for a week, I could do that and nothing would catch on fire, nothing would go down, Everything would operate as intended. And so that's the beauty of having a team and building a business. You can't. I mean, it's okay with being a one man team if you want to do that, but there are a lot of stresses that come that you may not know about, because on Black Friday or Thanksgiving morning or Christmas morning, your clients are running into issues and if you don't fix them, you're going to lose customers. And that means you might not pay your rent or your mortgage and you have to feed your kids. Right. And those are like all things that you have to think about when it's just you totally, if you know your business partners got it right. Okay. Less stress.

Yep, 100%. When it comes to bringing on 11 full time employees, what was the difference from hiring employee number one to employee number 10 based on your experience?

We didn't do it fast enough. Like, we took the first eight months. My business partner and I did all the texts.

Oh, wow. No way.

We were doing all the texts manually.

Or is it like scripted manually?

No, it's manually.

Wow.

I mean, our messaging is queued up with code, so we just press send and then our software generates the message and it's all customized in real time and things like that. But yeah, for the first, like, I think maybe six to eight months, we did all the messaging ourselves. We had one texting agent. And then instead of like. And we got kind of burnt out, we should have grown faster instead of, you know, we should have hired five at the beginning and not paid ourselves for another couple months. But we were just thinking like, oh, we need to be profitable. We need to be profitable. Let's do the, let's do everything.

Yeah.

And we also want to learn, like, how to make the product better and be very involved. So I wouldn't say it was the wrong decision, but it may have not been the fastest decision or best decision to grow fast. Granted, it didn't slow growth in our opinion, but at the same time, yeah, that was interesting. But at the beginning, now we have an onboarding process. At the beginning, I was like, I didn't know how to hire a person. I know how to train them. I got to kind of micromanage them and be on Slack with them and zoom and screen share and kind of look over their shoulder, have them watch me now instead. To the same sort of benefit of how you build software. You build it once and then you can continuously sell it. So we learned how to, oh, let's document the process of onboarding a new person. Let's record all this and put it in a Google Drive. So now when we hire someone, we interview them, and after that, we don't really even need to talk to them. They watch videos, they jump in Slack, they have a group chat with all of our other agents, they help each other out, and there's instructions, and we're like, oh, my God, that's day one. We're so dumb. Yeah, but yeah, it's, you know, you live and you learn.

Totally, man. I love that. Last question before we wrap up. Dennis, that is. What would you tell your younger self if you were to restart everything today in the year 2020 based on what you've learned?

I would say don't have too many projects. It's easy to get, you know, distracted by shiny object syndrome. And like, if you're early enough and you find a shiny object, you want to double down, just focus on that one thing. But it's better to commit to something and do that for one or two, three years, and at the end of three years, have consistent committed growth and focus over chasing everything, because at the end of the day, you're always just chasing something again, and it becomes very exhausting. I know because I have a graveyard of projects that I've spent thousands of dollars on, up to tens of thousands on that never launched, because as soon as one thing took off, I stopped focusing on those. But if I had just either delegated and had people run those for me, or I had just focused on one at a time, I'd probably be, you know, maybe further along in terms of financial gains. But at the same time, you know, that's why I've been excited and thankful to have been focused on live recovery for two and a half years. But, yeah, focus on something. Don't get distracted with every other thing. And try stuff out, though, right? You could try like 10 things out in a year when you're young and then find out which one you're most attracted to, whether it's sales, whether it's marketing, whether it's development, writing copy. You don't have to start big. You can start small. And like I said, 1, 2, 5, 10.

Yeah, 100%. I love that. Well, last thing, Dennis. Where's the best place for everyone listening to follow you to learn more about live, recover and just stay in touch with everything that you have going on?

Yeah, I think Twitter probably just ennishad on Twitter and LiveRecover is just liverecover.com and yeah, shout out.

Casey, I appreciate it, Dennis. Thanks so much for coming on today.

Yes, sir.

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