https://www.listennotes.com/e/d6a4df09682544d3a9afe962dfe1dfac

What is happening, everybody? Welcome back to the surfing sales podcast. It's been a little bit. I was on vacation last week. Scott was out sick, and we took a little hiatus. You know, we wanted to take a little break because, you know, nothing important would actually happen in the last 10 days, right, Scott? Nothing. Nothing's changed in the world.

It's been totally. It's totally calm.

Totally calm in the world. So are you feeling better? Are you. Are you feeling better?

I do feel better. Yeah. It was. It was not a fun head cold, though, wasn't it? Wasn't good. No, it was nothing serious. It's just, like, annoying, you know?

Yeah. Well, Scott's already in his own head so much that when he then gets a head cold and he can't even get out of his own head because of a head cold, it's exactly. I just know you. That's just miserable.

It's a horrible place to be. Yes, yes.

It's tough to be inside Scott's head. So, you know, it's. And as the young uns like to say, sometimes Scott lives rent free in my head space. So.

Yeah.

But, hey, we are actually very excited about this guest today because it's very timely. It just sort of happened this way. We scheduled this a while ago, but we have Sean Tepper of Ticker Invest, who is joining us. And Sean has two talents. One is talking about SaaS and sales and building a business and all that stuff. The other talent, and considering it's, you know, April 9th of 2025, is investing in the stock market, so couldn't be a better time to talk about this topic, which is not something we talk about a lot online. Scott and I talk about it offline because we don't do it. I haven't looked at my portfolio in two weeks.

Don't do it. That's what Sean's gonna tell us. Don't do it.

Well, you'll see what I'm about to say.

So. So, Sean, so. So give everybody a quick introduction of who you are and the kind of things you do just so they have some context. And let's. Let's turn to this topic.

Absolutely. I'll keep it really quick here, and we can dive into what's. What's going on in the market. So my background is about 20 years in tech, 15 years investing. Put the two together around 2015 or 16 with an Excel sheet to really figure out the mathematics behind investing. And really what are Warren Buffett and Charlie doing? And made returns in the market between 15 and 50%. Per year for about 4 years. Brought us to about 2019. Started sharing it with a few other people and everybody's like, hey, you should turn this into a software. It's like, sweet. I've got a SaaS idea here with some potential legs under. It went live in 2020, then took six months to get the first paying customer, which is the nature of building a SaaS business. But the process is simply listen to your customer, make a better product and then iterate from there. Fast forward to today. We have a little over 12,000 customers in about 50 countries. And our model, for context, we're an analytics and educational tool. So we, we kind of partner with or complement your broker. Brokers, where you still need to connect your bank account. For example, I use Schwab. A lot of people use Schwab, Fidelity, Robin Hood or E Trade in the States. Ticker complements that platform. So, you know, like you could look up any stock, for example, like an Nvidia or Tesla or Apple, and know within seconds, is that actually a good buy or is that a stock I should sell?

All right, so we get free access for having you as a guest. That's the most important thing that we should know. No, I'm just kidding. All right, so the million dollar question, right? This is what everybody wants to know. What the fuck is going on, man? Like, what do we do?

Yeah, yeah.

Aside from Scott's point, which is, yes, you know, just don't look right now. Don't look.

Diamond hands, Richard. Diamond hands.

So I would say do look, but with a different purpose. Now just to back up a second, you guys appreciate this. I recently wrote a blog post on Ticker that really emphasizes this event and it talks about the last hundred years. Now get this. Over the last hundred years, there have only been 17 bear markets or recessions with an average downturn of about 10 months. So that tells us when events like this happen, they do not happen for long. This right now is an incredible buying opportunity. Now agreed. Right. 2017 and 18, we had what I would call Trump tariff war one. I'm calling it. I don't know if it's going to catch on. This right now, I'm calling Trump Tariff War two. Now with the first phase, it was really China negotiations and the tariffs. The market went down about 7% over six months. Semiconductor stocks took the biggest hit. They went down above 30%, if not more. Now Trump's starting this with the rest of the world, not just China. So stocks are going down even further. Now, I did put out a video Last week, talking or really giving my audience some peace of mind here. When he started this, was it April 2nd? He called it Liberation Day or whatever, right? He's calling it right. That's when the timer started. Now, do keep this in mind. This is really good perspective, is Trump has a lot of people who have backed him that work for large financial institutions and hedge funds. And the longer he goes playing these games, the more heat those hedge fund managers are getting. In other words, their customers are pounding on their door right now saying, what's happening in my stocks? Well, there's realized gains and returns and there's unrealized. Really the difference is, you know, realize is when you, you sell right now, a lot of people have unrealized losses happening in their portfolio. So they're watching everything go down. So those customers are pounding on the doors as we speak. I'm telling people now, my estimate, it's not a guarantee, but estimate. If we go to this summer and things haven't changed, these hedge fund guys and financial institutions are going to be pounding on his door and there's going to be threats that say, hey, if you want more support, you better start coming to a conclusion. Otherwise we're switching parties. That's how this is going to play out. So that's a good sign. And in my audience right now, they know the drill. I've got a lot of experienced investors. We have a technique called stockpiling. Thank you to Phil Towne, who really coined the phrase, which is when the market goes down, you want to take that stockpile of capital and deploy it. So I've got people left and right. Like, I'm buying, I'm buying. I'm like, thumbs up all the way. This is not going to last forever. So it's, it's a beautiful time to be in. I know it can be painful for some, but yes, go look at your portfolio. Don't focus on the, where the numbers are at because you have unrealized losses. But that's okay. Deploy that capital. Buy those great stocks. And if you want to know what stocks to buy, I mean, I, I'm biased here. I go into ticker to find what are the best of the best.

Right.

I'll stop there.

So what's the advice you give someone? Because we, we have a lot of people earlier in their career. We have some, some veterans. Salty like, like the three of us. And understand your concept, right? Like, you know, you sit and you just wait. Like, you know, my wife and even my kids, and they're like, well, what do we do. What do we do? I'm like, nothing. You just have to wait. This happens. Like, this is normal. Right. And fortunately, I suppose this time around, there's a lot of financial adults in the room, as opposed to political adults surrounding our president. To your point, they will, they, they, they will go along for just a little bit, but. But not for the longest of time. But what do you do with those, with the, The. To someone who's never invested before, right. Or they're 20 or 25 and they're, you know, they're thinking about it, and maybe they're opening a Schwab account and, you know, they, you know, maybe they didn't grow up with. Like, I grew up with parents. I was investing in stock since I was seven. Right. Like, I owned a share in Texaco. Like, I had the conversations. Right. What advice do you give them now? Right, right. To help them do this. Like, what's the first thing they need to understand?

My gosh, if, if I could have, you know, learned, like, take a time machine and go back to age 18 or 20 or 22 with the knowledge I have now in the stock market, oh, my gosh, I'd be. I'd be retired by a long shot. And I'm in my younger 40s. I would tell people, compound interest can be like your best friend. And in fact, get this ticker. The fastest growing demographic is, like, between ages 18 and 25, people are joining. Fortunately, brokers now are advertised as free. There's still a small fee behind the scenes called a spread fee or payment for order flow. But like Robin Hood, E trade, the list goes on. They're all free. And. Which means the. The barrier to entry to join is. Is extremely easy. When people show up, though, it's like, all right, what do you do next? Well, that's where ticker comes in. And for the beginners, it's like, we're so focused on education, and within, like, hours, if not a few days, you can get up to speed and become really effective in the market. In fact, we get a stat and ticker. When you join that 90% of people who complete the onboarding checklist are able to confidently buy and sell stocks within their first 30 days. It's like, yeah, you. Yeah. So if I were 22 years old, just coming out of college, I would start putting away whatever cash you can, even if you have student loans and other debts, have the discipline to still invest because I've seen too many people. They'll wait until all debts are paid off and then Start investing. That's, that's backwards thinking. You. Yeah. Use compound interest pile in the market, even if it's like 50 bucks a month or 100 bucks, but start small and dial up.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Scott, when did you start investing? What age?

Well, I am very, very late to that party. I, I would say in my 30s. I have a little bit of an excuse because I spent the middle part of my 20s, you know, hospitalized and not working.

Not working, right.

Yeah.

I didn't even have any. I didn't even get a career. I didn't even start my career until I was 27. So. But somewhere in my, in my early, early 30s, I would. I'm by no means an expert at this stuff. I'm the epitome of somebody who's like, okay, I'm gonna send you a check for 50 grand every year you deploy it on my behalf. Because I don't wanna, I don't want to think about it. I just trust somebody else to kind of do it. Right.

But what's. So let me ask you this question.

Do you.

And then Sean, you know, maybe provide an answer there. You know, what scares you, Scott? Because I bet what scares you scares everybody else too. Like, what is your fear?

Well, number one, what scares me is the extreme delta between what I know and what can be known or what is known by other people. And I don't have the bandwidth to close that delta down. I also don't have the interest, frankly. So somebody will say, well, you can make the free time, right? Okay, sure. But I don't want to, you know, I have an extra hour or two. I don't want to study stock stuff. I just don't. I want to go do something else. I have other interests and whatnot. So the intimidation around learning, the self awareness to know, like, I don't know enough about this stuff. I could do some damage. So that worries me. And you know, I do not trust our holy institutions. So, you know, Sean's over here saying, you know, in the last hundred and whatever years, it's always bounced back. Well, I'm definitely the guy who's like, well, that doesn't mean it's never gonna collapse in full. Every dynasty ends up collapsing eventually. Look at Greece, look at Rome, look at, you know, everybody else. Like we are in a similar pattern, a similar death spiral, one could argue. So this is where my brain goes. So you're asking me, you know, where the fear.

I have another question, but. But yet. I'm going to call you out a little bit yet I know you well enough and deeply enough that you will take money and invest it in some startup that probably has a greater chance of failing than something if you invested in the market. Why? Why do you?

Partially because it's the devil I know. I understand that world. I feel like I have some small element of control. The second piece is there's a human component. Like I know these people and I, I feel cool, like giving Sean 50 grand to go grow ticker. If I would have met him, you know, eight years ago or whatever and we were buddies. I feel good about that. I don't feel good about giving Elon Musk one red cent so this son of a gun can become even richer. I don't care about big corporate at all. In fact, I hate big corporate hate with a capital H. So I have a problem just like investing in these things that I don't like and I think stand for much of the root of what is evil. So I stay away from it a little bit. But it's not like I don't have anything. I got a million dollars worth of stuff in my Schwab account under management from a wealth management company that I work with over here. I just am not intelligent enough or interested enough to spend my free time getting better as an individual who looks at all this thing all the time and I don't look at the market collapsing and say, oh, I should log on and go buy a bunch of stuff.

Well, I think you're. I, I think there's a lot of people like you. Right. Whereas, whereas I'm, I'm the complete opposite. So. Sean.

Yes. I'm not trying to say that I'm right by any stretch.

I know that. And I'm not saying you're wrong. I, I just being honest, trying to acknowledge the. Yeah, this is, this is the world we live in. Right. Like every.

And I'm sure Sean deals with people like Richard and people like Scott all the time. All of those are encapsulated in the customer base. Right? Yeah.

Yeah. Real quick, provide before I provide an answer here, Scott, are you a coach? Are you an angel investor? Are you vc? What's your career?

All of the above, I suppose. I spent the better part of 20 years as a VP of Sales growing and scaling tech startups. I've spent the last five and a half years running my own fractional CRO and rev ops consulting business on top of a few other businesses. I coach about 60 plus CROs right now and I run a small venture capital firm with my brother.

Got it okay. The devil you know. Definitely. Small tech businesses, private companies. Yeah, probably. ARR. What would you say? 10 million or less. 5 million or less you're talking about.

From an investment standpoint? I would say 10 million or less or the extreme opposite where we're investing in late round, massive, you know, multi billion dollar private opportunities. Not much, not much in the middle.

Yeah, got it.

Okay.

And then Richard, we've met before. Remind me here, your coach.

Yeah. Sales trainer. Coach, go to market strategist.

Okay. Yeah. All right. So to respond to some of Scott's comments is you're right. There are people that they're afraid. They feel the Delta is so far and it's this unknown when it's really not. As we teach people and as I really took an engineering lens to the financial market, realized that there's really two things that move stocks up and down every quarter. One is our profits. In other words, EPS are, is EPS increasing and are they beating their earnings estimate? In most cases, not all cases, but most stocks go up when those two things are checked. When you miss both EPS is going down and of course you miss your earnings report, you got two things against you there. In most cases, not all cases, but most stocks go down. What we do though is we go a step further. Of course, look at historical financials. It's all fundamentals to really find the best of the best. Hey, here's good stocks and here's bad stocks. But the education, to be honest, that Delta, we close that gap within minutes, believe it or not. We've got microlearning modules kind of inspired by duolingo, that really there's this whole like, oh my gosh, like just give all my money to somebody. Which is fine because an advisor is good for managing emotions, but to really know how to do this on your own. It. I couldn't believe nobody was simplifying this. And I scoured the Internet be like, why, why isn't nobody else saying this? I can't be the only one here that's seeing this. Found out I, I was. Our competitors are doing a fine job, but they're just not making it easy. So, so we do close that Delta. Now we also educate people on this, which is we don't invest in the stock market, we invest in businesses. And we like businesses that have multiple, multiple streams of revenue. A lot of stability. There's a moat in place, they're hard to duplicate. You have a lot of systems in place that somebody can take off for a week, a month, a year, and the business is still operational, you know, part of your workforce could leave, you're still making money. We like stocks that are stable. Now in your world, you guys know this, you're dealing with private smaller businesses. So the return multiples, there's higher risk but higher rewards. So you could be looking at, you know, 300, 500, a thousand percent returns. Whereas with our audience, we set expectations with people, it's like, hey, you're gonna find some strong stocks. The goal is to get between 15 and 50% per year. If you can do that, you should be pretty happy. Sure, you're gonna get some years that are over a hundred percent, but a lot lower risk. In our case, a lot lower returns. You guys have higher risk, especially on your side, Scott, at VC side, you're gonna, yeah, you, you're gonna get those grand slams that'll be, you know, out of the park. But do they happen all the time? No.

Yeah. Right now, right now we're in a couple year drought of grand slams because the IPO market has basically been shut.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When we come out of this though, you know, I'm looking at companies that have been delaying their ipo. For example, Plai Stripe is another impossible foods delaying for years waiting for that opportune time for the, the door to swing open. And that will come after we come out of this, this little drought we're in here with the tariff terror.

424 2. Perhaps by the, perhaps by the summer you're saying.

Yes, by the summer we should be good. If, if Trump doesn't change his tone, these hedge fund guys are going to be pounding on the door like, do you want support or not? Because we're ready to switch parties.

Yeah.

From a, from a building a SaaS business and building a startup company landscape. How did you get this business off the ground and going. How did, what was your growth strategy, your sales strategy, go to market strategy? Was it all, was it like a freemium model where you pound in the phones calling people? I mean, you probably have both a, you probably have some sort of two sided marketplace where there's all the consumers that you acquire and then maybe businesses as well. But can you talk to that a little bit? Because I think what everybody is struggling with right now is, you know, how do I fill my funnel, how do I get pipeline, how am I closing these deals, especially founders. So can you talk a little bit about what that was like for this type of business for you?

Yeah. So Ticker's business model right now is it's a B to C play we're a 14 day free trial, no credit card. You want to lower that barrier to entry as low as possible. We're low touch. So we don't call people or go on zoom calls to convert. So it's got to be like a Netflix or a Spotify. People join, they call it the green exit ham.

Even you just gotta try, don't eat it, don't like it.

Even, even the people who don't convert after 14 days, you're not calling and following up on those people?

No, no. Well, think about Netflix's business model. You're not gonna get a call even if you don't subscribe. Like we're that. So our model, there's a few, few ways we generate leads. So we want to get people into the ecosystem. I knew off the bat that a lot of people are talking about stocks on YouTube. So I knew I have to create a YouTube channel now. Today it's not a huge number. We got like about 5,000 subs on YouTube. We generate about 17% of our leads from YouTube. So it's all about like educational content, stock reviews, pretty basic stuff. But people, people really like it. So that's 1, 2 is SEO. SEO takes so damn long to put in place, but if you do it right, three, three years later you can start seeing the dividends pay out. So we're seeing that.

Three years from now you'll be retired, Richard. But keep working your SEO angle.

Dude, I've been working it for a long time.

It's. It works. 17 of our leads come from SEO. And then my, a lot of my experience, I've worked for a lot of larger corporations like Kohler and ge and where they generate the majority of their revenue is through channel partners. So I knew coming into this, yes, we're B2C, but the bigger play is actually B2B to C. So we do partner with other. We're starting to work on a few fintech relationships. They serve the same retail investor audience, but have a lot more people in the ecosystem. We do a Rev Share, our affiliate program. We can share like 30% and that adds another revenue stream to their business. We partner with bloggers, YouTubers, Instagrammers. The top of the food chain though for us when it comes to channel partners are brokers. For example, get this, some of the biggest brokers out there based on user sizes are Robinhood, E Trade, Etoro and Moomoo. All four based on homework I've done offline, of course, if anybody there were to call me, they could correct me if I'M wrong, but the average account size is like somewhere around $5,000. And that's a big problem. These people join brokers and they sit. They'll sit for three months, six months, nine months, 12 months and not make any transaction. So we're starting to have conversations with brokers because we're showing a 20% increase after people join ticker. And that's what these brokers want, is they want more transactions even though they're free. There's still, again, a small fee behind the scenes. So that's the play. Like, it's really building relationships with partners is where we make the most money. And doing a rev share instead of like fighting tooth and nail for, you know, every SEO post you do or social media posts, like, that's all cute, but that's not what really moves the needle. I love the channel. Partner sales is my favorite.

It's.

It is amazing. Absolute leverage is as. As I'd phrase it.

It's interest. It's interesting. And you're at 12,000 customers through this strategy. So it goes to show the freemium model is alive and well. It goes to show that SEO is not dead and entirely worthless. It goes to show that YouTube and education and essentially just like giving content away for free, which is what a lot of people do on various social platforms works. So in particular for this B2C type of play that Sean's been running and been working with, where does one go from there? How do. How do you. Or do you even think about this? How do you now think about going from X, whatever your ARR is at the moment, and 12,000 customers to double that to 10x that or whatever your. Yeah, your goal is, is the stuff that's got you to where you are now scalable enough to get you to the next place. Or are you like, okay, that worked well to here, but now we have to go figure out this other thing.

The last four years were actually more focused on not so much scale, but getting our numbers dialed in. For example, a key metric with SaaS is churn. So really making a product that people are joining and staying. There's too many SaaS products. You guys probably seen the same thing is they're throwing a bunch of money and marketing and advertising. When they have a sinking ship, they'll have churn. That's like over 10% per month. Well, a really good book I read in the last few years is titled T2D 3 triple 2 years, double 3 years, all focused on SaaS. And they were talking about if you can get to 5.75% or less. That's a pretty good quantitative metric on product market fit, give or take. Some people might say, a little higher, a little lower. I'm like, all right, sweet. So two years ago we're at 11%, not very good. A year ago we're at 6%, and now we're averaging about 3.8. And how we did that is really listening to the customer. We have a churn sequence. So when people leave, we do two things. First, we thank them for even using the platform. And two, we ask, hey, what can we do better? And that has really made a big difference. We now know what to. Or we've been doing this last few years, but we know what to add to the platform so people stay. So that's been the focus the last few years, is really getting the numbers dialed in conversion rates. For example, our visitor to trial. So on the blog, converting to the trial is over 18%. Goal for a SaaS is over 8% based on some sources. And then our average engagement time won't go in too much detail here, but good for a B2C SaaS is about a minute 30. We're over eight minutes. So we wanted those numbers dialed in first while kind of building these channel partner relationships. And now going back to your question, Scott, how do we scale? I can only make so many channel partner calls per day. So my dream role right now is to find a channel partner sales manager and eventually somebody who could kind of move into a CRO role. Dream, I need you day in and day out, just building relationships. Not really sales. You're not really selling anything. You establish partnerships. And we could scale to a hundred Thousands, a million, 10 million users with that strategy. Rinse and repeat for sure.

Well, that person exists in my network, that's for sure. So if you ever need help, if you ever need help with that, let me know. There's a lot of people that would be chomping at the bit to, to tackle that be.

I gotta say something here. And then I know you guys are jumping to your next question. I've tried, get this, three guys over the last few years that are quote, unquote, sales and marketing. And I'm like, I need you more. Focus on the sales, building partnerships. They literally can do this role for a week and then they get bored. They want to talk about, let's do more SEO, let's do social media, let's do paid ads, let's talk about the product. And I'm like, I need you to be like Michael Jordan, the guy would come in two hours before practice and practice free throws when other guys his age at the time would say, the most I could do it for is 15 minutes, and then I get bored. Well, there you go. You're never going to be the best because you can't do the boring and repeats. And I had to fire a guy in the last few weeks because he would make one call a week. I'm like, I need you making dozens of calls to channel partners per day.

Yeah. Well, the discipline of doing the small, boring things every single day is what sets the successful people apart.

Yes, totally. I say this to Scott, and I both have kids who. Who play sports. And I. I have to remind my bod, Scott knows him, that, you know, there's a lot of loneliness in becoming the best at something.

Yes.

Because you are out there practicing this one thing over and over, and you're by yourself most of the time. You're not with your buddies. Right. And that's the difference, in my opinion.

It drives me nuts.

So I want you to. Obviously, we want to turn it around to you before we wrap up and ask us a question, but I want you to go back and repeat the stats around product market fix. It's the first time I've ever heard somebody actually put a number to it. Right.

Yeah.

You start here, and then you start to look at this turn and Scott, I don't know if you've ever heard something like that. I have not heard that.

No. Not quantified like that. No.

Yeah. So I just would like you to repeat it because I think it's really fascinating for people.

Yeah. Again, the book T2D3, I think there's over 50 case studies of SaaS businesses within, and the metric is 5.75% or less. That's product market fit.

Your poised, meaning if you churn 5.75, once you hit that level, you're at product market fit.

Correct. Yeah. That's quantifying product market fit. Here's one for you. I'll go. I didn't mention this. If you can get to 3.5% or less, you are poised for a T2D 3SAS triple. Two years, double three years. So we're flirting with that at 3.8. But the goal is that's the next milestone. It's like, all right, I know exactly what to do to get 3.5, because we're hovering around 3.8, but yeah, you can get to 5.75. That's like, all right, you've got something here. People are, they're paying and staying.

And insane.

Interesting. Interesting. All right, well, cool. Thank you so much, man. Like, this is a big different conversation and I love the fact that we talked about SaaS and growth and all those things as well as like, what the do we do with our investment strategy in 2025? You know, we always like to turn it around to the guests and just see if they have a question for us. I don't know. You're pretty smart. You may not have a question that we can't answer.

I don't know if I'm that smart. I just failed so many. Damn. You kind of arrive on a road. That's. All right. So I haven't, haven't made this mistake before, but knowing that you guys are, are building SaaS businesses, I guess what is one big key takeaway that you've heard or seen in the last year? I'm always looking for good tips and tricks regarding sales and marketing.

Well, are you talking about sales and marketing in general? Are you talking about sales and marketing as you grow a SaaS business? Like, where's the context?

Yeah, may. Maybe let's focus in on sales, not so much marketing, because I know you guys are more sales focused. It's like, was there a particular strategy or tactic that you heard from somebody else you interviewed that really jumped out? You thought, ooh, that that makes sense or that that's impressive because I'm always trying to add another arrow to the quiver, if you will.

Somebody that we interviewed. That part is tripping me up.

Yeah, well, actually, I was going to go back. We. We just did a. We just did another recording right before yours. And, and it's with Sean Cease, who's, who's a. He's known as the professor of prospecting. And he said something. Scott, I'm going to paraphrase it, but Scott, correct me that. And he's. No, he's a third party outbound specialist. Right. Like, that's what his organization does. And he has the, his data said that it's not about converting the first call. It's more higher conversions happen on the second call from a cold call perspective. And he went into this speech, you know, we'll send you a link to it. It releases on Monday. But you know, that first call is really just about confirming a couple of basic things. Acknowledging that. Look, you're. You, you weren't expecting my call. I've got like three questions and I'll get out of your hair. Right. You know, are you doing this? Are you doing that? Are you seeing this, right? To get some more context for when you make the second call, which is then when you actually ask for the meeting. That was my takeaway from that Scott. I, I, you know, I don't know if I paraphrased it the right way.

But you know what I gotta say.

That was an immediate, you know, and, and the way he did it, the way he laid it out and literally the script he gave was all about just being a human to it. Like not, not this permission based opener. Right. It was just like straight up, you know, and it just sounded so smooth and eloquent and human and that, that was the part that I, which I focus on in general is around the humanity and sales. Yeah, that was something that I learned today.

Yeah, this is really good. I was, I was talking to, we've been raising, we started our seed round because we're nearing, I wanted to start the seed round when we're nearing cash flow positive. I wanted put to put the risk on myself to really find product market fit. And one of our investors, he's got a lot of experience in enterprise software sales and he's, he was talking about that strategy actually that first call Sean is you kind of want to just get on the call, qualify under like confirm the problems they're facing. Like I'm already looking at the broker play. Like I know based on research you've got X amount of users, average account sizes, give or take this. And if it's a publicly traded company, which some of these are, you can just look at their 10k or 10q. But I just want to confirm the data and then say hey, I'd love to schedule a followup and deep dive into a solution we have for you guys that's a win win and kind of go from there. And he was saying that's going to be a better play than like instead of walking up to the girl on the first date like hey, you want to get married? Like it's, it doesn't work that way. You got to build some rapport. So.

Yeah, well I, I would say this is not like a, a new groundbreaking thing but considering how much success you've had on platform like YouTube. I could see a lot of success on a platform like Tick Tock with quick short videos designed to educate ability to go viral there appeal to a younger generation. You're talking about 18 to 25 year olds being the fastest growing segment on ticker. I think that could be really interesting. I'm sure that you could clip up some of the pieces of YouTube content and find, you know, some really good TikTok content. So that's number one. Number two would be, I'm not sure why you've ignored LinkedIn as much as you had in the last couple years by while building this, the opportunity to get big, big numbers of impressions and grow your network there, especially among a demographic. I don't know how your model works, but you know, especially among a demographic of like senior level people that maybe have more money to play around with and invest with. So those would be two alternative social channels that, for what you're up to, I think could make a lot of sense. A lot of people on LinkedIn I think would gobble up, you know, gentle financial advice without being a financial advisor and on and on. Tick Tock, I think, you know, I think that could work really well and I can't believe I'm doling out this advice, but yeah, that's what I'm thinking of. That's what I'm thinking of.

Have you been anti Tick Tock? Is that, is that the shot?

I was like for a really, really long time. A really, really long time. Yeah. But I have leaned into video, I've leaned into video. I've leaned into video a little bit more in the last few months and even with what I do, I've gotten a couple leads off of Tick Tock and I still have like no following whatsoever. But your, but your topic, your segment or whatever is very prevalent there already as a subject matter that people watch videos on. So I think it could work.

I, I love that we, we were doing a lot more posts by we as myself and my media team on LinkedIn and kind of took a step back so I could focus more on investing. But I kind of went back to the media team and said, hey, we need to really dial up our content focus on YouTube and I kind of breezed over LinkedIn a little bit. So I'm, I'm happy to hear you kind of gave me the vote of confidence here. Like don't forget about LinkedIn here and, and I'm all about automation tools. We found a tool out there called Kriya Square. We're no affiliate, but like you can create a bunch of content and schedule it in advance and then just walk away. So we're thinking like create a whole bunch of content, video, text, put it in the system, tee it up, ready to go and just walk away and see, see what happens.

Yeah, I think it could work. Cool.

Well, how could, how can people get a hold of you, sir, if they want to get a hold of you. What's the best way?

Yeah, two ways. Easiest is go to ticker.com T Y K R if you're interested in the tool. Otherwise me you can find me on LinkedIn. Trying to be more active on LinkedIn. Yeah, just Sean Tepper. S E A N Sean Tepper. Cool.

Well Sean, thanks so much man. We really appreciate you coming on and and sharing all this knowledge and wisdom with us and given some education a couple things I had not learned about in a while. So thank you so much.

Yeah, well thanks for the invite guys. Appreciate it.

All right. Thanks Sean. Appreciate it.

See everybody. We will see you next time on the Surface Sales podcast. And don't forget to check us out in October in Paniche Portugal as we take the event from Costa Rica over to the EU for the EU Euro summit. Although that might be redundant. Scott.

That's okay, let them know.

Anyway, everybody.