How to Build a Flat Organization & 4 Day Work Week with Treehouse CEO Ryan Carson

Hello everyone. Welcome to this week's edition of Growth Everywhere where we interview successful entrepreneurs and bring you business and personal growth tips. Today we are talking to Ryan Carson who is the CEO and founder of Treehouse and who also happened to be my old boss before. I'm very thankful for my experience at Treehouse. Ryan, how are you doing today?

Yeah, great. Thanks for letting me be on the show. I'm excited.

Great to have you. So yeah, why don't we start off with talking a little bit about what Treehouse is, And so our audience gets an idea.

Cool. So Treehouse is an online school and we teach people how to code and how to make apps. So if you want to make iPhone apps or Android apps, or if you want to make a website or code an app for the web, we take you from knowing nothing to being able to do that.

Cool, great. And Treehouse has been on a tear recently in terms of growth. So how are you guys doing in terms of revenue? Where are you at in terms of users right now? Thanks.

We're doing— thanks for saying that. We're doing really well. It's kind of, you know, a lot of this is like half luck, a lot of trying, you know, everything in between. But we're doing about $8 million plus in revenue now a year. We have over 50,000 students and we're growing really fast. I think everything, thankfully, is kind of working really well, and we're really excited about the future.

Nice. Cool. So, obviously, a lot of companies want to get to kind of where Treehouse is at right now. So I always like to ask, how did you acquire your first 100 users?

Well, the key for us was the idea that you build an overnight success over years of hard work, right? So the key for us was I built up a business called Carsonified or Future of Web Apps, which is an events company, and we did these conferences. The reason why we were doing conferences is because I was passionate about the web industry, and that built up a good network. I was on stage, I was interviewing people, I was seen as the connector. Yeah. When we decided to launch Treehouse, we thought we want to be able to teach people but at scale, so let's build Treehouse. We did that and then we launched it on top of that business. I actually launched Treehouse at one of my own conferences and that worked really well. That's not repeatable for everybody, but I believe the basic truth of running an event in the niche that that you are aiming at and becoming a connector in that niche or that industry yields huge results. It takes a little while and it's not super easy running a conference, but if you do it and you don't try to make a profit, then almost anyone can do that. It's almost like a meetup, a glorified meetup. Do a couple of those, be seen as the connector. I can't say it enough to people. That has been probably The single biggest source of any success I've had is building up this network early on and then offering value to that network and then when it came time, asking that network to buy.

Got it. So let's dive a little bit into that. So you say maybe starting from the beginning, if you want to build a network, you might start throwing meetups. So what— I mean, you talk about adding value to them too. So how would you start doing that? Like, what would be your process?

Well, so I would start by looking at who your customer is and then trying to understand what do they want. Do they want to learn something? Do they want to find something? What is it that they want? And then you just start in your hometown and probably start a meetup. It's probably the shortest, easiest thing to do.

Yeah.

Go to meetup.com, would be an easy way to do that. Just get the first 10 people there. I mean, it feels very small and very insignificant at first, especially if you're a hungry, driven individual. But I think even though it starts small, that stuff builds very quickly. Then what you could do is just get a projector, invite someone to speak, and offer value to the attendees. Even try to get free drinks at the end for them. And then once people start receiving value— this is why I think the book How to Win Friends and Influence People has been a real key to my success, is just understanding what do people want and how can I help them get that.

Awesome.

And that same thing applies to events. Once you're kind of seen as this person that's running the event, People naturally assume that you know what you're doing for better or worse and then they start coming to you. You get a reputation and then you build on that. It's a slow build. This probably needs to be done in addition to any sort of online effort as well. This is where actually I just picked up this book which I'm sure you're aware of, Jab, Jab, Jab.

Gary Vaynerchuk's?

Yeah, I took the COVID off it. But it's a similar concept. I thought actually that book was going to be fairly simple, but actually it's got a ton of detailed case studies in it and it's really good. It's a similar concept though, like, hey, offer people value, value, value, and then ask. I don't think that concept is ever going to truly go away. The way that's done may change, but events are a powerful way to do that, and then you can carry on that in social media.

Yeah, one of my favorite quotes is from Zig Ziglar. It's about, you know, help others get what they want and you'll get whatever you want. I think I agree with you, that concept is never going to go away. So you, I mean, you started with meetups and you scaled it into a large-scale business. Why did you decide to get out of events?

Well, primarily because I didn't think I was going to make a very large impact in the world. You know, for better or worse, I guess my ambitions were higher. And I thought, well, this is powerful and I'm definitely encouraging people and connecting people, but this is never going to scale to millions of people. And also, it's always going to be restricted to people with enough wealth to attend these meetings. The conferences with ticket plus airfare plus hotel plus travel costs, it's thousands of dollars. So we just thought, how can we give life-changing education to people but at a very affordable price at scale? And obviously video, teaching through video and then taking tests online is a powerful way to do that.

Got it. Okay, cool. Yeah, so going back into kind of the user acquisition portion of it. So obviously I was on the team before. So how many marketers do you have on the team right now?

We basically have a full-time designer, developer, someone who does all the ad buys, Basically look at AdWords. They buy all of our display ads. They do that full-time, so that's 3. And then we have a community manager. So it's basically 4 people right now.

Nice. Okay, cool. And yeah, so I mean, with a team like Treehouse, some people might say, okay, Treehouse is hitting that growth, maybe they should build a full-out marketing team. So the team seems fairly small. Is there any reason you guys decided to keep it small or are you guys looking to scale it?

I think we're going to scale it. It could be and should be way bigger, but we're basically— we're kind of hitting our stride now as far as measurement. We actually have the machinery in place now to understand our metrics. What is our conversion rate? What are the channels? What is the CPA? At scale consistently. And part of that that's hard, as you know and all of your viewers know, is attribution.

Mm-hmm.

How do you do attribution right? And what we've decided on is to do a blended model where we allocate— I can't remember, I'd have to ask the team the exact percentages, but it's roughly something like 40% first click. We attribute 40% of the cost to that. And then we do something like 20%— or no, in the middle I think it's about 30%, and then at the end it's 30%. So all that stuff, because we're spending a lot of money on YouTube and that stuff never converts directly, but you know it converts. And so what we're trying to do is— and of course Google is telling us that our CPAs are like— $5 or something ridiculous. Well, we know that's not true. But because what they're doing is they're saying, hey, they watched a YouTube video at some point and then they converted. So we're trying to model that. Now that we think we have modeled that correctly, now we're just really going nuts and trying to figure stuff out.

Yeah, no, I'm really on board with that. So for our viewers, Google Analytics has multi-touch attribution. It's still not as— it's not ever going to be as good as building something in-house. But it's at least a starting point for anyone that wants to get started. A lot of companies like using last-click attribution. I personally don't think that's accurate enough. I think, you know, there's other touchpoints in the, you know, in the marketing funnel. So good point on that. I think the key takeaway is, you know, get to the point where you can build your own tool and it'll be more accurate.

Which is hard. I mean, and that took us a long time. I mean, geez, we've been running the company now for 3 years and You were here for a large point of that where we didn't have these tools in place. It's really frustrating, but the problem is it doesn't seem urgent enough when you launch. You kind of think, oh, we'll figure it out, and then the app gets more complex and there's more moving parts. I wish we had done it sooner, but oh well.

Better to have it now than never, right? Cool. So let's talk about no manager, the whole concept of not having any managers, removing that whole structure. This is something that's really new and you guys That just started it. So why don't you talk a little bit about that?

Cool. Yeah, so we got to about 30 people and then Alan and I, my co-founder, started hearing things like weird stuff like there's rumors going around and there's kind of this behavior where people are kind of acting like children. This idea of they would talk behind each other's back or saying someone's doing something or And it all— the final straw that broke the camel's back is Alan called me and he said, someone said they're going to boycott the company meetup. And I was like, what the hell? What does that even mean? And like, why are they not telling me? And how is this even happening? This is insanity. So we thought, okay, maybe we just have too many layers of management. I don't know. So what if we remove the bottom layer? We thought, well, what do they do? They pass information, they keep people aligned, and that's primarily what they do. So what if we could help— what if we could have software to do that? Okay, well, that may be possible. What about the next layer, which is kind of the middle management? What do they do? Well, similar things. They pass information, they manage people's careers. They align people. Again, like, you know, is that really necessary? I don't know. It's not. And, you know, so then let's go to the high level. Okay, the execs, you know, we have Chief Content Officer, a CTO, you know, a CEO, all this stuff. And we just thought, you know, again, it's just another layer of abstraction from actually doing, you know. So if the theory is we're hiring smart people that are making good decisions, why are we not really allowing them to make decisions? We say they're empowered, but the truth is they're not. So we sort of said, what if we removed all the managers? And we're like, well, that's crazy. No, wait, maybe. Yeah, maybe. All right, let's do this. And we basically wrote this huge document. We really had to think this through because we thought, man, if we screw this up, it could derail the whole company. So we sat down over a weekend and wrote this It was probably like a 3,000-word post to our internal forum called Convoy. I can't remember if we had Convoy when you were here.

No. I wish we would have.

Gosh, wow. Now it's the point I can't even imagine operating without it.

Open source. Yeah.

It's amazing. So we basically— it's like Reddit, but it's just internal. So we posted this post there and it said, radical idea, remove all managers at Treehouse. And then we emailed everyone and said, okay, there's an important discussion happening, check it out. And the whole company ground to a halt for like 2 days.

Oh wow.

Everyone was getting there. And one key thing about our companies that were distributed, you know all this but I'm saying this for your viewers' sake. Therefore, we ask everyone to communicate, if possible, through written words. So you go onto the forum, you don't call people because then that conversation is siloed and no one else can see what was said. The idea is try to communicate everything through this Reddit-like tool. So there was like 450 comments on this post and it was threaded way down. Upvotes and downvotes were happening and people were getting really upset or excited about it. And out of that, basically, people's primary concerns were, how do you stay aligned? How in the world does everybody move towards something meaningful and stay coordinated? How do we do things like discipline or how do we do things like promotion or how do we hire people or how do we fire people? So we had to explain all that and the basics of that stuff are— people, if they want to hire someone, they say, listen, we need another designer, we just don't have enough capacity. So they'll propose that and then most everyone goes, okay, well yeah, you probably need somebody because you think you need somebody and you're the closest to that so go find them. And then they hire— they get in candidates and then they vet them and then they hire them. And, you know, Alan and I have some say on that, you know, but the point is people usually know at the front lines what's happening so we let them make those decisions.

Yeah.

As far as staying coordinated, all we do is Alan and I, we set monthly priorities and those are very high priority, very high level. They're like, we need to— and they're kind of Stupidly obvious, like we need to decrease cancellations, you know, increase signups, you know.

Uh-huh.

They're all kind of obvious anyway, but it's important that people understand like these are what's happening. And then we let the team propose projects, and this is the key unit of work is a project. And so that, you know, in the marketing world, that would be like, hey, we want to We want to launch a campaign on YouTube. And then what they do is they write a description. We're going to launch a campaign on YouTube aimed at the 30 to 40-year-olds, career-changing people, etc. This is the budget we want to spend and this is how we're going to measure success. And that's pretty key. So we're going to try to increase conversion rate by 0.2%. We're going to try to get a CPA of whatever. Very atomic measurements of success.

So there's a goal there and then how they're going to get to the goal, right?

Correct. Yep. And this is just all done in— this is a simple tool that we built. It's called Flow. It's just a Ruby on Rails app. And then the interesting thing is then you go and you add people that you need. So you'll say, I need a designer, I need a developer. And I need a community manager. And then you submit. And then every day an email is sent to the whole company that says, hey, these are the projects that were proposed. And then if people see something they want to work on, they go in and then they click join.

Wow, this is like playing an RPG or something where people join a party and go hunt dragons.

Yeah, exactly. They're like clans.

Yeah.

I want to join this. I think I'd be good at that. And they join, and then the only thing that will stop or start a project is if you get enough people to join it. So there's no sign-off. I know I never ever approve projects. They just happen. The amazing thing is that every day I see these emails come through about projects that were proposed. Every day there is insightful, awesome things that people are proposing that I knew they needed to happen, but I didn't exactly know how they should happen or who should do them or when they should happen. And all these things are being taken care of because instead of 2 co-founders and 5 executives and 4 managers running a company, you have—

1,000.

60 people thinking like owners. So far it's working. It's kind of mind-boggling to me. It is chaotic. There's definitely this feeling of like sometimes I'm like, what is happening? We used to have a 90-day plan and it was all allocated out and now it's like there is no plan. There's just do good stuff and figure it out. It has been shockingly awesome. The worry is, and you always have this struggle, and probably every marketing person has this struggle of getting resources. How do I get designers and developers to help me out quickly? But the way we've dealt with that is we said, okay, we have focus areas. We have marketing, we have education, we have retention, we have ops.

Mm-hmm.

So pick an area that in general you're passionate about and then try to focus on that area. So the designer and developer, they said, you know what, I'm passionate about getting people to sign up. So I'm going to focus on that. Any projects that come out, I'm going to focus on them. I still don't have to do any of them but I want Treehouse to win so of course I'm going to do whatever I can.

What if it's like a boring project that needs to be done? Let's say I tell a designer he needs to do— I need help with banner ads. No one wants to do banner ads.

Yeah. I know. You know what's weird is I think because no one has to do anything anymore— because ultimately you could have pulled your card and said, listen— if we had put a designer under you, like most CMOs will say, I've got a team.

Mm-hmm.

When you change the dynamic so that you don't have to work on something, but you have generally said, look, I'm interested in this area, it seems to change that. And now we get banner ad refreshes almost same day. We get new landing pages 2 days later. And so something has changed. And I believe it's the fact that people say, listen, no one can make me do anything. When I choose to do something, I might as well be good at it and get it done fast because I need it to get done. The other thing that we're noticing is that you'll notice on that team there wasn't a marketing manager. You have a designer, developer, someone to buy ads, someone to run the community.

Uh-huh.

What we're finding is that unless you have the skills to execute, to actually do the design or to do the development, it does slow you down because you have ideas but you can't necessarily get them done.

Uh-huh.

So what we're trying to do is say— I think what's going to— weirdly what's going to happen is there won't be places in the company anymore for people that don't actually do because there isn't really a point. If you have an idea but you can't actually do anything about it, And you're always trying to get resources, then you kind of get slowly pushed out. That won't always be the case. Like, you know, there's, for instance, biz dev roles. You know, you have someone that's like, I need to go out and form this relationship. You know, that's not like a design dev role. But I don't know what— you know, all I can say is, you know, we've got 60 people. There's a lot of moving parts, but we're growing faster than ever. That it must be working.

Absolutely. So, you know, obviously we can talk about no manager for days and days because there's so many variables. But I think the key take— the key thing with that is that you need to have a team, like you said, full of smart people that are self-motivated. Otherwise, it's not gonna work, right?

Yeah, that's kind of the basis. You got to have people that are responsible and driven and talented and I think what we're finding— we actually had to let some people go when we did this change. The reason why is because they weren't able to operate in that environment. They just kind of said, I like being managed. And we said, well, sorry, it's not going to happen. So there are certain types of employees that kind of want to be guided and they just don't work in a no-manager environment.

Yeah, I can see this working for like a ton of startups or a lot of businesses in growth mode right now, and I'd actually like to use it myself. Cool. So let's talk about the 4-day workweek. Why did you decide to come up with it? How's it working out for you guys right now?

Cool. So the 4-day workweek started in 2006 actually, so it was way before Treehouse. And the idea was, okay, well actually, so I quit my job as a web I was a web developer, started my own company and then I started working like 50 hours more a week. And I was like, wait a minute. I thought running your own company was supposed to— like you're supposed to control your life.

Yeah.

Something weird is happening. And what I realized is that no matter how much I worked, there was always more. I could work 40 hours, more work, 80 hours, more work, 100 hours, more work. It kind of just never stopped.

Mm-hmm.

And we thought, I wonder if it's possible to not work Fridays. We do information work. We don't make bolts that have to come off the factory line. So if we could work smarter and more efficiently, maybe we could get 5 days of work done in 4. So at the time though, it was just me and my wife, so that was easy to say, okay, Fridays we're going to take them off. And then we hired our first employee and we had to decide, are we going to actually do this or not? And we decided to do it and pay a full salary plus offer full vacation plus Fridays off. And ever since then, we've been doing it. And now we have 60 people, no one works on Fridays. It's highly discouraged to overwork. It kind of means you're not managing your time correctly. Or you're not curating your personal life. Either of those things are bad. And I don't know, it's crazy. It works. I mean, it's one of these things that kind of fits in with my naively optimistic worldview is that, well, let's just try it. And thankfully this plus the no manager, these kind of insane ideas, they kind of defy odds. And everybody I talk to is just like, this is crazy. I mean, you are, you know, you have 20% less time than all of your competitors.

Uh-huh.

You know, you're totally screwing yourself. And I think we had to say, well, we're just going to believe that we can be smarter and faster. And, you know, sometimes it doesn't work. Of course, we are paying something for that. But I think long-term, you know, we want to build a 100-year company here. We can build one where people can have 50-year careers. It's got to be better, right?

Yeah, and I can attest to that. I mean, I was part of the 4-Day Workweek. It worked out really well. Initially, I had the same negativity towards it where it's like 20%, that's a lot, right? But you talked about not overworking and when I used to work out of your place in Portland, I noticed there was always a cutoff time where you had to spend time with family. Go away employees, I'm gonna go spend time with my family. So I think a lot of entrepreneurs kind of screw up there or don't pay that much attention to it. So what are your suggestions to people in terms of spending more time with your family and what's your process for setting cutoffs and all that kind of stuff?

I really only got good at this when I had kids. To say before that it was really easy to let work slide into personal time. So I think it was just the reality that my kids were going to grow up and they would reach a point when they— right now they're really cute. They're like, they say, Daddy! They want to hug me and kiss me and they miss me and want to spend time with me. I know there will be a point when they're too cool for me and that's imminent. That's going to happen. I can't stop it. So that terrifies me. So I sort of think, wow, I could Send some more emails or get back to people, but— or I could sit down and play Lego with Jackson.

Yeah.

Which one is actually more valuable right now? Well, clearly it's spending time with my son. They're both valuable, but I think thinking about your life as short helps me to do that. Also realizing there's just always more work to do.

Yeah.

Even if you work 80 hours, someone's going to work 100. So you'll never win. And ultimately, if you are running your own company and if you're an entrepreneurial type person, isn't the whole benefit of that that you create this universe that you live in that you control? And so if you can control that, why not choose a universe where you can have fun, do something meaningful, And also have personal time? And the answer seems clear to me.

It sounds like having kids totally puts things in perspective and you don't want to be that overworker.

It's hard. And I still feel kind of jealous of people that have this infinite time. I try not to. Someone like a Jason Fried who— I don't know if he even has a girlfriend or not, but he seems just To have 100% of his time available to focus on 37signals. And this part of me is like, gosh, sometimes I wonder if I am losing out. But the truth is, yes, of course, of course I am missing out on some time I could spend on my business. But I have this amazing thing happening over here that— and of course it takes some of my time, but that's a great thing.

Totally agree with that. I think there's more important— I think family is always top priority, right?

Yeah, and on that note, and I know you and I are both passionate about working out, and part of that is I also spend some time at the gym every day.

Uh-huh.

I mean, I changed that a little bit. So I wake up at 5:00. I work from 5:00 to 6:30, and then the kids wake up. The reason why I do that is because I want to go to the gym from 9:00 to 11:00 during the day. So I'm kind of spending time out of work at the gym. The part that I think, well, again, I want to be fit and I want to be healthy and I started a company so I could have this freedom and I need to not feel guilty about that. And that seems to work.

Right. And then all the benefits that come from working out, I mean, it's a no-brainer, right? So Treehouse has world-class investors, right? You have some of the best-known investors.

So what's your advice to people that are Well, so again, it comes back to the running events. It's crazy. So I got connected to Kevin Rose because of our events.

Hmm.

And he was the key that got me amazing investors. So he spoke at our event in San Francisco. I didn't know him from Adam. I met him literally on stage. And then we kind of became friends slowly and then started emailing and got to be We became better friends and then at one of our events in Las Vegas, I was like, hey, I want to show you this thing we made and show you its growth because it was going crazy. And he saw it and he's like, that's amazing, I want to invest. I was like, what? And I think having that kind of friend access to the initial investors seemed to move the needle for me because then he said, listen, I'm going to put together a seed round that will be amazing. Don't worry about it. Let me just introduce you to the right people. So he introduced me to Chamath at Social Capital, Reid Hoffman at Greylock, folks like that. I maybe could have got to those people if I had networked a little bit and tried to figure it out, but I think the key was having Kevin send an email and say, listen, I just invested $50,000 and I think you guys should too. You know, it's kind of— it's the best recommendation you can get. Now, if you don't have that, I think the world is changing since even I raised money now with AngelList.

Uh-huh.

It's like, it's pretty fascinating what's going on there now. You know, I think it makes it much easier to raise a seed round or even an A round, but you still need access to that person who's going to kind of lead the syndicate. So you still need access to Yeah. That kind of A-list type person. And again, that's where meeting people physically in person just makes all the difference. Having a drink with somebody and laughing and maybe talking about your kids changes everything. It gives you that ability to email that person and get some sort of meaningful response or— because you actually have a real relationship and you can't It's hard to kind of, you know, fake that.

Yeah, and I mean, in person, like you said, like meeting people for a drink, that almost beats everything else. It beats email, it beats just calling, so nothing beats face-to-face in my mind. So in terms of— let's talk about Entrepreneurs Organization. You know, you joined a few months ago, I just joined a few months ago. You know, what— how has it helped you exactly?

Yeah, so EO is Yeah, EO is good and it's like— there's a number of these kind of organizations but I like EO because the idea is you have to be a CEO, you have to be doing over $1 million a year in revenue and the idea is you get connected up with other people like that and then I don't know about for you but the value for me is in my forum.

Hmm.

So the forum is basically a small group of people and the idea is you have total Confidentiality. So you go in and you can share things that are really scaring you or things you're really excited about. They could be personal or business-related. And then the thing that I love about the group is the whole Gestalt protocol, which is you can't give people advice. So all you can do is speak from experience and say, well, I had an experience that was similar and this is what I did and this is how it worked for Yeah. Instead of, you know, I think you should do this. And that removes any of the worry about, you know, so he gave me advice and I'm not going to take it, or I took his advice and it was bad. And it's been good. I kind of think of it as kind of like small group therapy for CEOs, you know. The thing that I don't like about it that's hard is that I'm married and I'm not allowed to tell I don't tell my wife anything that happens in the meeting. And I think that causes some friction. Jill, my wife, has always been my equal, someone I share everything with, and there's a little bit of weirdness there. But I think it will work out.

Yeah. On that note, I'm not sure if they do it in Portland, Oregon, but I mean, this will probably be helpful for the audience too if you guys are looking to join EO. But in LA, they actually have spousal groups too.

Yeah, I need to see if we can join up on those.

Got it, you can send her down to LA. But yeah, I totally agree, you know, it is the forum that helps, you know, and you have people from all different trades, you know, there's people that are significantly older, you know, and then there's people that runs all different kinds of businesses that can share different experiences. And I think, you know, paying that small fee for one year, I mean, it pays for itself many times over. And they have a lot of cool events too. So definitely try to join EO, or they have a program called Accelerator if you haven't reached that revenue number yet. So running down here, we have like 2, 3 more questions. So Udacity, pivoting over to vocational learning, what's your take on that?

I thought it was interesting. I mean, it's total vindication. I mean, they basically are copying our model. They, you know, we, and as you know, we always said Our job is to make people job-ready for real, not to do a MOOC, not to disrupt education. It's to actually make people job-ready. And I think what they realize is that's really hard. You can't just throw people into a video and some quizzes and you're done. And also, asking people to pay is important because it connects them and gives them skin in the game. skin in the game. So it's great. It's total validation of what we're doing. I think that they're making a mistake because they're bringing— I mean, they just launched a Salesforce module and I thought, you know, what's happening there is clear. Salesforce is paying them a lot of money to develop that curriculum. Now, yes, there's tons of Salesforce jobs and those jobs need to be filled. And actually, it's becoming a crisis that there's not enough developers.

Uh-huh.

But I don't believe that people, if they're trying to choose a career, should become Salesforce developers. It's not the platform of the future. They should be being taught open source tools and then they can use those jobs anywhere. So I think the danger is you basically— it's a pay-to-play thing and the students will be very wary of that. But yeah, it's cool. And I think Sebastian The team is very motivated. We're scared of each other, so it's a good thing.

That's good. Competition is always good.

That's right. Cool.

And plus validation is good too. So what is one must-read book for entrepreneurs?

I would say it's How to Win Friends and Influence People, the classic from Dale Carnegie. It's from like 1936. It has just been so good. The other is if you're scaling your business and you have moved into a CEO role for real, I just finished a book called The Great Game of Business and it's about open book accounting and it's awesome. So The Great Game of Business and How to Win Friends and Influence People.

I'll have to check that one out. By the way, I've been recommending Rockefeller Habits to everyone. And that was based on your recommendations, so thanks for that. Final question here. So if you could go back and change anything about Growing Treehouse, what would you go back and change?

I think I would develop the tools to measure correctly sooner. Understand attribution, understand CPA by campaign, and really get the data nailed down faster. that we would all have the tools to understand it. I think I would do that quicker. I would work on our referral campaign sooner. I think referrals, getting people to talk about your product and signing up, can be one of the largest drivers and we've always had that as kind of a second-class citizen so I would change that.

Cool, great. So Ryan, thanks so much for doing this. A lot of insight here. You do things differently. And thanks for the opportunity at Treehouse.

Yeah, thank you.

It was really fun. I'm starting to cough here too. Well, yeah, thanks, Ryan. You know, we hope to talk to you again soon.

Thanks.