Marty: From Figma's IPO to Agree.com

All right, welcome to Executive Strategy Group podcast where we dive into bold ideas, battle tested strategies, and real stories from the front lines of building and scaling companies. I'm your host, Kevin McCann and today's guest is Marty Ringlein, founder, investor, adjunct faculty member, and all around creative problem solver with one of the most eclectic resumes you'll hear on the show. Marty's journey has taken him from designing for the Discovery Channel and Apple to building a mobile first strategy team acquired by Twitter, to serving as a Presidential Innovation Fellow at the White House, and even investing in early in game changers like Figma, which I can't wait to hear a little bit about from last week. And now to founding Agree.com, a contract and payment platform that's taking on the likes of DocuSign and Bill.com with a radically different approach to signature velocity and embedded fintech. So, Marty, great to have you here. Let's dive in.

Hey, thanks for having me. I'm excited. Thanks for that setup. You make me sound way more impressive than I am, so I'm stoked to have this conversation.

Awesome. I even practiced that. So that's good.

No, it's.

Yeah. So I'm going to talk about your little, your background, but I, I got to hear. So last week was a huge week for you with the, the Figma group. Can you just give us a little, little overview of how that went, what that was, and we'll get to it. This is kind of like if we're watching a movie trailer. This is like the exciting part, like the explosion up front and then we'll kind of go through like how did we get to that explosion?

Yeah, Figma. It was awesome experience. So they, they went public last week, which, you know, it's a big deal for Figma and it was a pretty big explosive launch too. I think they increased total valuation by like $20 billion just within 48 hours. Yeah. Which is greater than the total sum that Adobe tried to buy them for just a few years earlier. So it's a while to see all that happen, but I think the world kind of said like, hey, this isn't just about figma's ipo. This is, this is design's ipo. It's a moment where we're all going to. Some of us have already known this, but design plays a very critical part in what differentiates us and what helps our brands grow and sort of what helps our products become successful. But now it's like, it's clear that designers trying to hire a designer right now is almost near impossible because everyone wants the best ones. And so they're almost hard to get as sort of AI engineers. And that's just that personally for me is really fun to watch because they were getting not just into what we're building and building faster with AI and agentic agents, the craft. And the craft is ironically very human led. So we've got these two sort of juxtaposed ideas happening at the same time, where computers are writing more of our code, but humans are getting in there and the details for the differentiation more than ever before.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, good. Well, we'll come back to that. So congrats again on. Awesome. So for those of you watching, Marty was an investor in Figma kind of early on, so we'll hear that story in a second. But so if I back up the bus a little bit, your early career, entrepreneurial journey. You started in computer science, moved into design, hence, you know, your interest obviously in Figma, and then launched your own company, eventually landing Apple as a client, getting acquired by Twitter. Like, how did some of these early experiences shape how you think about building companies today? And what's kind of like that common thread from your early days to where you are now?

Yeah, I'm always a big fan of. You think you have. We all want to, I think, show the world or, or give this idea that we, we know everything, we have it all figured out. I think the sooner you come to the realization that you have no idea what you're doing, you never will. You're always going to have some version of being, you know, scared shitless all the time and terrified. I think you get to success much faster. That's always the way it's been. No idea in the very beginning, you know, how to, how to land a customer, how to make an invoice, how to pitch somebody. And then now we're, you know, we're pitching to, you know, some of the biggest venture capital capitalists in the world for, you know, tens of millions of dollars. Like, that's a huge shift over, you know, a career path. And so, you know, I started with the idea that we have no idea what we're doing and we're constant learners. And I think in the startup mantra, like, you're always pivoting and you're always figuring out, like, what you don't know, and then you're mastering it and making it better. And, you know, when I think about how, how all that shifted in terms of how we think about product today, this is the hardest thing is you have to be constantly open minded to the potential of the future. So we always say when we're talking about any new and emerging technology, whether it's AI or Agentix or let's just go to something that we might roll our eyes at, the metaverse or AR or VR. You can't go into any of them with a pessimistic view. You have to go into all of them with an optimistic view. If the metaverse took off, if you and I prefer. Because right now the better version of this is you and me together in person. That's a little impractical, it's expensive. So we do Riverside, we do it virtually. But you would right now say, hey, the worst version is you and I as avatars in a metaverse. My question would be optimistically, like, what if there was a world where that was the better experience, right? Better than this, better than in person. And a lot of things would have to happen. But I think to be successful, that's the question you take. You don't say instantly, oh, that's terrible, those avatars are dumb. This is never going to work. And I think that we've always done that and it's made it so that we are traditionally one and a half to two steps ahead of where the industry is. And so it means that we're building for mobile devices years before the iPhones release, which is how we land Apple. We don't just land Apple. It's like there's only, you know, probably 100,000 people on an 8 billion person planet that are thinking about websites on mobile devices pre iPhone. We just happen to be in that cohort and then who's playing with AI or even the GPT3 beta, you know, years before ChatGPT launches, it's a small cohort of humans who's downloading the Apple iOS SDK the day it launches. I mean, because there's these pivotal moments. I know that it's June 2020 when the GPT3 beta comes out, because everything changes in my entire career fit. I know that it's March 2008 when the iOS SDK comes out, because my entire career changes after that moment. I know that it is June 2007 when they start selling the first iPhone, because my entire career changes at that exact month and that exact year. And so like what is the next month and the next year? Something that's going to drop. It will forever change total consumer and, you know, business behavior, but will shift how what you build and how you build.

Interesting. How do you, I mean, when you look at all those things, how do you decide, like, this is the one I'm going after. I'm going to jump on this bandwagon and ride it. Because, like, what's your Spidey sense? Because you seem to have a pretty darn good one.

Yeah, but some of it, I think you just develop a good gut and intuition over the years. But I won't give myself the credit. I have done a really good job surrounding myself around some of the smartest and most capable engineers that I can find. I find the ones that most mesh with me and we hang out, we get lunch, we get drinks. I end up working with them for over 15 years. So I got built long term relationships. But the iOS SDK is one where I'm at South by southwest. This is March 2008 and we're in Austin, Texas. And there's a number of things you could be doing in Austin. You could be eating great barbecue, you could be at a session, you could be at a panel. I could just be having fun at UT Texas. But where am I? I am on a bunch of picnic tables with a bunch of nerds and we've all got laptops out and we're all, we're all working. And you take a picture of that and put it on Twitter and you'd make fun of that group. But the second that SDK drops, I noticed something happened. I didn't know that it was dropping. I didn't know it was happening. I didn't know it was going to be of any significance. I just noticed everyone stopped talking to each other. The beers stopped being lifted. And the sound of fingers on keyboards was overwhelmingly like. It's like an airplane flying over. You just took over. And so I'm like, what? What's happening? Right. Something has happened. And they're explaining to me that there's this SDK. You can make these apps on a phone, which you know, today seems like. So I never heard of such a thing. You never heard of making an app in an App Store on a cellular device that you would download? And so I'm like the. Literally everyone here is immersed in this. That must be something. And then what happens after that moment? We get billion tens of billions of dollars in individual companies arise overnight. Uber overnight. Right. Airbnb over seemingly overnight. Cash app overnight. Like none of these things square doesn't exist without the iPhone, without the App Store. And then. But all of these people, they're not predicting Uber's Airbnbs and squares, but they know that the shift is here. So I watch them and I mean sometimes they're, they're wrong and sometimes they're so early they haven't been proven right yet. So crypto is one, I think Agentix on the web, transacting money between each other. We're going to see a reemergence in stable coins and cryptocurrencies. I think VR metaverse, it's just way too early. I think this conversation 20 years from now, we're going to laugh that we laughed at it, but we'll see. But I do watch where everyone goes, where they get excited, where they build.

So taking this into, into the Twitter journey, walk us through a little bit about being part of that like during their IPO era. So like, I mean you get another one with Figma right now. But like back then, like what was it like going, you know, through that whole process? I think you got there through acquisition, right?

Yeah, yeah, they, they acquired that first company we started. We were their sixth acquisition. It was about 18 months before IPO. So it was a fun time because this is Dick Costello, still the CEO. So this is Dorsey's in between from when he was to when he is again. But we do our deal with Jack, we Jack Dorsey directly. That was fun. But this is 140 characters. Twitter has no photos, no videos. Like that's a different Twitter. It's just text. Now to ipo you have to tell a monetization story. Social media, the easiest way to monetize is advertising. And the best advertising and call it 2011, 2012, video and photo. I can't advertise without a video and photo. So they need videos of photos. Not because consumers want it, because advertisers want it. We had again being sort of one and a half, two steps ahead, had built the first photo app within a third party Twitter app called Tweety. And then there was Tweety. And so you could have photos. And that was built on something we built. The codename was Godzilla. But Twitter ends up acquiring. So Twitter did not build their own iPhone app. They acquired Tweety Tweety too, and they renamed it. And then they brought us on to help them with this whole mobile first strategy because it seems silly to be like, wait, Twitter wasn't once mobile first yet. There was a time where it wasn't. It had sms, but that was about it. And so that was just fun to watch it. And then for me it was NBA in a box. Going up to the ipo, watching the conversations they talk about how do they expand internationally, how do they deal? This is, right, this is too early for Trump, but Obama, he's the social media sort of candidate. He wins on social media. So you're not, you're watching the good side of Twitter, which is fun for me, where it's like, hey, how does somebody like Barack Obama use Twitter to basically win the presidential election? And then we see the other side, politics aside. But how does Donald Trump use it to also win the election, but in a much different way? Using information in a much different way.

Yeah. Awesome. Well, then that kind of led you into joining the White House as a Presidential Innovation Fellow. How did that go? What was that experience? And then actually, how did that influence your thoughts about speed, innovation, public impact and all that?

Yeah, I'll start with that last one because everyone was asking what my time was. I'm on, you know, it's one of those things on LinkedIn. It looks so cool. Worked at the White House last, Obama's last term. It was a lot of fun, but it, I always describe it as the most fascinating and frustrating experience of my career because it just moves so slow. And by design, you know, I, I, I respect what Elon wants to do with, with Doge and, and, and sort of make it more efficient and make it move faster, but at the, the scale and magnitude, it needs to work. One of the things they told us from the beginning is if you do really good work here, work that, you know, on some level, if you're dealing with like, veteran affairs, like, you're literally save lives, the impact won't land for over a decade, you'll be long gone from government, and your name will never be on anywhere in any mention in any press release. And so that's why you do it, knowing that it will take decades for your work to be realized and you'll never get any credit for it. And if you're not here for that, like, go home. And I was like, that's the coolest thing I've ever heard. Because in any tech company, you're the complete opposite. Right. Do it for the fame, the glory, the money. Do it some speed. But it is hard when you're just, you feel like they're getting in their own way and you can move quicker, faster. So that's where they brought us in, is a bunch of Silicon Valley folks. It just so happened that Obama is a very big proponent of Twitter. And I just sold to Twitter, so again, I looked good on paper. So it helped me sort of get through the application process. And I'd spent a lot of years in D.C. so it's fun to go back.

Nice. That's awesome. Wow. All right, so now take us forward now to Agree. So see the hat? Agree. See the shirt short? Doc, you sound pretty funny like that. Walk us through a little bit about that story. What was the pain point that sparked the idea for Agree? And I think you told me last week that it was originally you guys had a pain and you developed the software to solve your pain. Turns out guys like me and all kinds of other business owners have the same pain. So kind of walk us through what that looked like.

Yeah, I always get frustrated with first time founders. I try to be patient, but you know, they'll always ask me a very simple question like, how do you get your first user? And I was like, I hate that question. Ask me how to get your first 100 users. Because your first user should be you. You should be experiencing this pain. You want to solve for it. So I do a lot of investing, as you'd mentioned, Figma Chime, some other big names and a lot of names you've never heard of, where hopefully 10 years from now you're like, oh man, how'd you get in on that one? But when you do a typical investment, say early stage safe document, the, the founder sends me a safe, I agree to the terms, I sign it, I send it back for them, they send me payment information, I gotta go to a bank, I gotta wire the money. There's a lot of different people involved. And I just thought like, hey, at the end of most signatures, somebody has to pay somebody money. Or we're talking like if you're going to get a rental agreement for an apartment, you're going to buy a house, you're going to buy a car, SaaS sales agreement. That's interesting. Why is it so convoluted and is as I'm having this thought, I'm driving down San Francisco in the 101 and Adobe had just acquired Echo Sign. And they put up this big billboard for Adobe Sign that said Sign Send Done. And I thought, oh, the marketing people there think that they're, they're trying to say that it's a very simple, easy to use product and platform. But I think it's not done, it's not done until the wire hits, until the cash goes into the bank. So that's interesting that Adobe doesn't get it. And I was like, well, why can't Adobe do it? Why doesn't DocuSign move money? And so this is really a fintech opportunity. This is really About AR and AP Automations. Okay. If you approached it from that lens and you thought, okay, the most important thing is one person paying another person. And then you reverse engineer that to generating the invoice. Sending the invoice, Generating the contract. Sending the contract. You could build an income, an entirely, completely different docusign from the ground up, and you could probably beat them, especially in the context of people that were at the end of that signature. Money does move. And that was kind of the catalyst for like, let's go. Let's go do this. This. This is something we want, something we want to use. The more people we talk to, the biggest pushback we got was just feels too obvious. Why doesn't this exist already? This has to. It has to.

Exactly. Or people just used to, like, duct tape and things together. Like, of course, the next thing I do is then go get my stripe blank and send that out to them. But why. Why take that extra step if you

have to duct tapes the magic word? We work with a marketing person who we go back and forth on language usage, and I was told her, like, everyone we talk to uses that specific word for their operation. How do you. How do you do it today? I'd say everyone, at least 87% of people use the word duct tape to describe how their operations flow today.

Exactly. So your model. So if I understand correctly, your model gives away E signatures for free and then monetizes on. On payment. So I could essentially dump my DocuSign contract and. And have you guys like the E signature part for free and not have to duct tape my stripe payment request out to my customer anymore.

Yeah, so we're. We're just a rip and replace of DocuSign. So we always say today's the last day you'll ever pay for DocuSign. So it's completely free on the signature side. And then we're. We're a rip and replace of QuickBooks Invoice or Bill.com Invoice. Or if you're using like, mercury invoicing or even stripe invoicing, you don't need to pay for those tools either. So invoicing is totally free. And then the only way we make money is if who you sent the invoice to. If they pay, you know, you hit the little like, pay now button, put in your credit card or your wire information, same way stripe does. So someone somewhere has to collect a 2.9 and 30. It could be stripe, it could be intuit, and it could be agree. And so we found if we just make Money and we don't charge anything more. So same as Stripes. If you're already using Stripe, you know, you're not going to pay anything more, but you'll get invoicing and E Signature for free. It was like, well, that. That seems like a great, great deal for folks.

Interesting. So it's not me paying Stripe and you.

That's right. Just pay us. And then we work with people like Stripe and other payment processors and we are getting our own money transmitter licenses to, you know, have the unit economics be stronger. You know, at a large enough scale, you end up making a deal with these folks where, like, I don't keep the full 2.9. I keep some small potential percentage of it. And for us to make it work, like, it's really. It gets really small, really fast. But it only works at massive scale. But it's about 0.6% is all I really want. I don't want the full 2.9. I just want my 0.6. But that over. Let's call it half a billion dollars. You know, that's $3 million in annual revenue and. And half a billion seems like a really big number, but that's only like a few hundred companies that do roughly 4 to 5 million dollars in annual revenue. It's not that big.

No. That's awesome. So what would you say is the hardest part of moving? I'm intrigued in this model because I'm probably going to be your next customer. Moving people from Free Signature to paid invoicing and payments. And I'll just. I'll kind of put it out there. I've already, like, as a business owner, I already kind of like, looked at dumping QuickBooks invoice. So, like, we use QuickBooks as our back office across the board. When you look at just the sheer numbers of it, it's like, I'm paying. I'm paying even more than Stripe for invoicing. So I'm like, screw it. I'll just create a payment link, send the payment link on Stripe. Then that way I know I'm kind of like rock bottom at that 2.9%. But now I got to do all that manual effort. Unless I can string things together or duct tape or use Zapier, whatever. So that in mind, what is your. What's the hardest part of moving users from just the free E signature over to saying, I'm going to trust you guys, I don't need QuickBooks anymore. I'm not gonna use Stripe payments and invoices or Stripe invoices. How hard is it to get them to jump that hurdle to trust you with the transaction.

Yeah, no, great question. I'm glad you asked. It's one of my favorites because it is on the list of like, you know, it's the current hardest thing to do is that, you know, we can, we can build an amazing product, we can market it, we can brand it, we can get an amazing sales pipeline. But now you got to convert folks over and we've made sure that one after this call and then anyone listening on this, you know, love to give you a one on one demo. So you know, because it is, it is a pretty high touch. The product is totally self serve. But what we found is if you do a million in revenue a year or you do 50 million in revenue a year, what I'm asking you to do is move all of your revenue through my platform 100%. Right. So it's the same fear. It doesn't matter if you think you're small at a million or you think you're big at 50 million. 100% of your revenue is, is a massively terrifying thing to sort of hand over to a new vendor that you're working with. So we do a number of things to make sure that that experience we call like the 10 out of 10 onboarding experience. Which means it has to be high touch. Which means at this scale you still talk to the founders, you still get on a demo with us, but we have, you're going to love this. And when we do your demo for you, QuickBooks integration because you should be using QuickBooks on the back office side. You just, your account, your bookkeeper, they probably prefer it and they're going to love you for it. But you shouldn't be using on the invoicing side because it is way too expensive and it's cluttered and it just moves too slow. It took them 18 years because they just announced this where there's a Pay now button. 18 years for a pay now button. We had it in the first, you know, 18 weeks of agreeing invoicing. But so, so there's. But we have QuickBooks integration so you can take all of your invoice data, all of those transactions, have them go into the back office side of QuickBooks. So that's great. You're going to love that. Also integrate with things like HubSpot and Salesforce. And then we also look at when we talk because you asked me about the E Signature side to the invoicing side. Usually what I'll do is tell people they do hate paying for DocuSign more than anything else, it's like I just need a signature. Why am I paying 25, 50 bucks per seat, per month, per person? So it's totally free. And then what we usually do is we're watching. You know, we've got a bunch of campaigns set up where, okay, you've started using us for e signature. We see that you've sent out, call it six things for signature and they've been signed where the the AI behind the scene knows what kind of contract it is and it knows that there's what we call payment intent. So at the end of this contract, someone has to pay someone money. We just simply say, hey, did you know that we had invoicing? And the magic of what's happening is when you upload your document for signature, the AI is scanning and parsing it, but it's looking for the payment terms. So in all of these contracts, someone has to pay someone money. So who's paying who? How much are they paying? Is it recurring? Is it on schedule? Just go grab those and put them into the invoice. So that way no more manual entry, which again, everyone that duct tapes their operations together, they manually open up a PDF and they're like going into QuickBooks and typing it now that's all gone. And so that's usually the magic for folks. We're like, yeah, I already love you on the E cig side. Like it's just super convenient to use only on the invoicing side. And then we've got a great deal drive helps us with this too. But we'll. For folks that do sign ups at last, last little product kits plug here is we'll, we'll waive your transaction fees on the first $250,000 in transactions. We'll make it like really, really sweet and easy to move over. And, and yeah, most of the products for you only. And you can also one thing that stripe doesn't do. I don't think QuickBooks or Build.com does this because they did it in the past and they took it away. Pass on fee to payer is probably the number one feature request we get. So yeah, someone, there's no getting past the 2.9 on the credit card. You can do a. You could do cash, right? But if you're doing credit card, you could pass that on to your. Your payer so that they eat the 2.9 as a surcharge.

Got it. Love it. Awesome. All right, thanks for that. Well, I'll definitely be working through a demo with you. Guys. All right, so moving on, go to market and growth tactics. So you built $160 million pipeline in total transaction volume since launch. What's been the most effective in driving that for Agree.

Yeah. So there's three places where the pipeline and even the user growth are kind of attributed to. One is it's, it's. It's totally organic but related to a lot of guerrilla marketing tactics we do. I'm big. I just go to where the customer's at. I'll be in San Francisco September 3rd through 5th because HubSpot's having their big inbound conference there. We got HubSpot integration. So I want the whole world to know about agree. I'll be pushing a copy cart around. If you're at Moscone center, get free cold brew right outside of I'll be there probably wearing this shirt. So we do a lot of that. We go in front of places like Saster and Dreamforce. So a lot of our traffic comes there. A lot of it's organic. People just searching. We've been really good on like the SEO but also the geo side now too. Like geo people asking LLMs these questions. We've been really. We work so this also speaking to like we. We do buy Google AdWords as the other 30% and we work with this woman, Katy Perry out of New York who's just. She knows fintech, she knows marketing. She's like the best in the game, but she's just so surgical with this stuff. And so she brings us these ideas sometimes where she's like, hey guys, I think your customers are using LLMs. We start looking at the data. She's right. And then she helps us optimize that entire experience that we're getting more of those users. And then the last one's just the product. If so we're going to get you on to agree. We're going to start you with E Signature. You've got customers and most of those customers are probably other businesses. When you send them an agree. The victory here is that you had a great space. But what I really want is I want your. The customer's customer, your customer to have an amazing signing experience where they say, wow, that was awesome. What is this thing? I should use it. And so a third of our customers, they originate as signers on the platform.

Do you guys offer an affiliate program?

We need to. Is it one of those, like, I've got so many list of things to do because you had mentioned the big pipeline. It's like sounds like such a silly thing to say because I should have more confidence in our own business, but I was just so taken back by how much demand there was. We launched the advanced invoicing side and then that is out of the gate, that 100 and now it's like 175 million in total contract value of customers in terms of how much they process annually. Just right there in weeks. And it's just like, wow, it's like overwhelming, which is awesome. But it's because I'm not inventing a new category. I'm not introducing you to new way of work. Everyone that we work with, they already pay someone for E signature, pay someone for invoicing and pay someone for payment process. We're just saying stop paying for two and put them all together and make your workflow a little bit more efficient. So it's, it's, it's a little bit of an easier pitch and sell. But it, but it does mean that we get some of the benefits.

Yeah, this will fit nicely. Part of our value to our customers is we, we build out best practices, sales processes, go to market strategies, et cetera. Part of it's that workflow, everything from lead to closed deal and, and then, you know, into, into delivery. But that last kind of half mile before you hit the end zone is we're, we're helping them build out that process, what it looks like digitally. So we could plug your stuff into our delivery.

Yeah, I would love it. This is one of those ones where everyone you work with in that capacity should just be using agree because there's things that are just so silly and everyone listening right now is going to realize we do this and we shouldn't be. We're so fast with getting the signature. So signature velocity is key because we're using E Signature tools, Docusign, agree, whatever. They're all quick. But after that, the biggest bottleneck to getting paid is usually us sending the invoice some. Most of the time for smaller companies, it's the CEO, you know, they have control. They're not their way to send out. They batch them on like a Tuesday. It's like, no, get it out more real time. So how do we generate the invoice quicker? But what we really found, the biggest thing that's just going to sound so obvious to folks is most people, when they are signing a sales contract, they're, they're in the zone. I'm looking at the contract, I'm making sure it lines with what you and I talked about and all the terms of this. I'm in the zone. I blocked out my, my hour to make sure I'm like getting this or 20 minutes, whatever it is. Once you sign right now on DocuSign, it just says like, sign and you're done. Okay. And then I got to wait three or five days for you to send me an invoice. Just going from sign to, hey, yes, it's net 30. Yes, it's $20,000. Most people, especially in B2B capacities, they don't actually want to wait the net 30. They do when you get in the option. But if I, if I'm in the zone and I know that I owe you $20,000 and I just agreed to it, I kind of want to just get it off my plate. I don't want to deal with this. And most people, they want what's on the other side of the transaction faster. Like, let's say I'm buying Sock 2 compliance. I need that Sock 2 right now. I don't want to wait 30 days to get the process started, but get me my rep, give me on a kickoff. So let me send you the money. If I'm trying to lock down a software engineer or a freelance designer, I don't want another company taking their scheduling slot. So I want to get that deposit over to them asap. Rentals like this, you just found the best two bedroom apartment. You want to get that deposit check as soon as possible because you want it off the market. Right. And what does the landlord want? They want the deposit check. So they're not, you know, marketing the unit. So it's a win win for everyone in, in these scenarios. So, like the simple thing. Yes. Like it's, it's funny that QuickBooks has taken, you know, over a decade and a half to do a buy now, a pay now button in an invoice, but it really should just be faster than that. It should be right after execution. And you can only do that if you have a platform that does E signature and invoicing.

Exactly. All right, so no one can buy agree.com from this podcast until I get my affiliate link.

That's right. Yeah. Yeah, we'll hook you up with a great affiliate. You and I will work on that. We'll do a custom one for you.

All right, Cool.

Perfect.

All right, so actually, one thing before I jump on to the next thing you mentioned GEO and LLM, kind of SEO, if you will. Geo, you shared something with me last week. That is. Here's the rub. So. So we're working with a lot of customers too, and they're like, well, SEO. It's like, is SEO dead or is it not? And it's debatable. But what's not debatable is that people need to get found in ChatGPT and Claude and all these other places. So what was some of the best practices you guys saw or started doing to show up there in the search for whatever it is, you know, document signing.

Yeah, yeah. Again, sharing the credit, I got to give a quick plug to. Her name's Katy Perry, based out of New York, runs her own marketing then. Not the, not the singer. We always say in New York, fintech. She's more famous than that Katie Perry. Everyone knows her. So I was actually pretty stoked that we got to lend working with her. But she's the one that did all the work on this, so I don't want to steal thunder there. But what she uncovered that has been working really well for us is that it's a combination of things. It's a lot of SEO like tactics. But the biggest ones that if you do know about the SEO world and you're a little bit og, you would have known in your first footer of your website 15 years ago, you're going to have something called a site map. And it turns out that the search bots back then over index on the value of a site map. So they would go there first and they would index your site quickly. Today's version of that for LLMs is FAQs. So it turns out the FAQ page is so important. But what's more important than an FAQ is you got to take a step back. That sitemap, it was never meant for a human to use it. They were kind of nonsensical. They were made for bots, the faq. Same way don't write an FAQ for a human. If anything it should be like miles long. Should have a million of them because the, the human would be overwhelming to consume, so it'd be a bad design. But for the lam, they're consuming it in fractions of a second. So make it as long as possible. But that's where they're going to go first and then they're going to value that kind of experience heavier. So they're going to spend more time with you. And then the third thing you need to do that. I don't know if this is universally true, but it's been true for us because we're new in these models. They're, they have a moment in time so they don't know things after sort of the date in which they go out. So like the GPT4 model is older than agree. So we don't exist on the Internet when it's being trained. So how does it know about us? If someone asks, right. It searches the Internet. That was a big deal once it started searching the Internet press. Because I need. In the context of what you're searching, hey, what is. I'm starting a new business. What's the best way for me to do e signature invoicing and payments? It's going to go okay. Who knows who is a, a valid source in those three domain areas? And I, if I have like, let's say TechCrunch or Forbes or Wall Street Journal, even payments.com, it's gonna say, okay, were they who was mentioned in there in this capacity? And then if it finds agree, it's gonna surfaces up higher. So we spend a lot of time trying to get ourselves in the press because it helps boost that sort of relatability and reputation. Score higher. Love it.

Awesome. Thanks for that. All right, so shifting to, to leadership and mindset. So you said it earlier on the call. You've talked about always being, you know, scared shitless at, at each new stage of growth. And when I hear that you say, well, you know, I'm around smart people and they kind of keep pulling me through.

So how do you, how do you

work through those moments? Because there's this, there's a, when you're learning something, there's the unconscious incompetent. I don't know what.

I don't.

Then there's the conscious incompetent. At least now I'm aware and I know that I don't know it, but I got to get better. You turn into a conscious competent. Now I'm like producing and I'm okay. And then you get to the unconscious competent. You just do it. Like you just, you found your way to work. You drove your car. You're like, I don't even remember the drive here, but I just got my way here. So how do you, how do you navigate the like, new stuff? Like we're talking AI, we're doing all this other stuff. How do you navigate the unconscious incompetent just to bring it into your awareness? And then where do you go when you've never done some of these things before because you're, you're kind of blazing new trails. So help us kind of crack your skull open and listen a little bit to your thought process around that.

This is one where it's hard because I feel like, the answer isn't what a lot of folks want to hear where. I just think you naturally have to be a very curious person. And I think that that is what makes founders, entrepreneurs, business owners, a little bit different than everybody else. So you have to be naturally curious. And it turns out that my curiosity over indexes around new and emerging technology. So this is an example. Yeah, the most important thing for me was got to launch this product. And the product, I can't go on this podcast and say it's better than DocuSign in. In QuickBooks. And then you're like, marty, I'm in. You get in. And five seconds later you're like, no, I need a great product. And then I need to figure out, well, how do I tell the world about it? So I got to brand it. And I figure out, okay, how am I going to drive this sales pipeline with this icp? And then I got to figure out, how am I going to convert them. I took out these things, so I am focused on those things. But what I like about this will be her last plug. What I like about people like Katie is that she. She drops into my head and she says something that I just can't leave. When I think about it on a run with my dog, I think about it in the shower. It's like, yeah, LLMs. How does it work? And then, and then I think what I want to believe with someone like her and the rest of my team is when we all get excited about the same thing, we know something's there, there's a there there. And then we all start compounding on each other where it's like, hey, I did this research last night. Did you read this article? And it's like, oh, we all start getting really. See this new companies. There's this one called Profound that kind of does this as a service. Hey, what are they doing? How are they doing it? Let's do a demo. Let's learn. Just curiosity. And I think that is how we go into everything. That's why we were building for mobile devices before you had a great experience. You're just on like WAP and even before the BlackBerry. It's why we're thinking about iPhone apps before any phone on the market even has the app store on it yet. And so I just think that level of curiosity is how we do it.

So how, like, what advice based on that? What advice would you give other founders that are maybe newer to the game than. Than. Than you are around about surrounding themselves with the right people or the right advisors?

Yeah. And this is where, like, I think the best thing, especially on the advisors or mentors. I heard this advice from One of our VCs, Shield and Jake at Better Tomorrow Ventures. They say, don't go talk to people that have the outcome you want. Like some entrepreneur that started a startup, raised hundreds of millions of dollars, IPO'd their company. Like, it's my album, I want to IPO. So I should go talk to people who have IPO? No, they're talk to founders who are just one stage ahead of you. So wherever, whatever your oh shit moment is right now, go find the person that had that oh shit moment a year ago and they just cracked it. That's who you are. Don't talk to anybody else. You're wasting your time. And so I think about that a lot is, you know, from an advice and then the other side, I'm just like, I think you got to know yourself personally. Because I'm not going to get excited about things that I just don't get excited about. I didn't know. I nerd out about new emerging tech. So I tend to surround myself with people who also nerd out, where if you're ever doing that moment where you're having a conversation with somebody and you can kind of tell they zoned out, I like the person. Yeah, they didn't zone out because I'm uninteresting and they're bored and they're just rude. They zoned out because, like, their brain just started solving a problem and it's the unconscious thing. They don't even know they're solving it. They don't even know they zoned out. I'm like, dude, what are you doing? Like, I'm right here. He's like, oh. I was like, hey, no, stop. Pause. Like, what were you thinking in that exact moment? It's like they're solving some problem. I like those people because you're just constantly in your head. And then it turns out if I surround myself with those kind of people and the thing in your head and the thing in my head are relatively the same, that's where I find the magic happens.

That's awesome. So last question in the mindset piece is how do you. How do you and your team think about failure? How does that resonate? Like, is there no such thing? Is there? It's just. It's just learning. Like, what's your. What's your M.O. around failure?

I do like that quote, you know, we don't lose, we win, or we learn. So I do believe in that. But yeah, I'm, I'm all for failure. I think you should be failing all the time, every time. I also think if you're not constantly failing, that just means you're not taking enough risk. Like if you have no failures, like you're just very risk averse. Someone told me that a great entrepreneur is somebody that's missed a few flights because they showed up to the airport late because they pushed it a little too close. Right. I'm kind of the opposite. I like to get there like an hour, hour and a half early and relax and not be stressed. But I get the sentiment. And so I look at that with failure. My thing on failure though is it's hard for me. Like hey Marty, tell me your, your, your four biggest. They aren't big ones. It's more like I have 4,000 really small ones, you know, and half of them probably just happened in this morning. I, I don't even remember them because tried it, failed, pivoted, recalibrated, tried something else at work and it happened so fast I don't even remember. But yes, there were so. There were way more failures than successes. But we just get past them and evolve from them so quickly that like they're, they're forgettable.

Got it. Minor modifications. Got it.

Absolutely.

So coming in, home stretch here. So what does success look like for you guys for aggrieve over the next 12 to 18 months?

Yeah, okay. Yeah. Because you have 10 year plan, go ring the bell and you know, watch DocuSign go out of business because of our work. But yeah, next 12 months is. I'm going to answer your question from the perspective of a high growth startup. So we are capital intensive. We do use venture capital funding to grow our little monster. And so I reverse engineer back on whatever I need to do to raise the next round should be in exact alignment with the thing I need to do to build a really great sustainable business. And so I'm an order of operations person. What do I need? I, I need revenue and I need to generate more revenue than my total expenses. That's just business 101, I think like okay, well the venture capital world at my next round, which would be the Series A right now the market kind of demands 3 to 5 million ARR. So like okay, backtracking that if I am taking 0.6% of payments, you know, that's half a billion dollars. So I need a half a billion dollars moved through the platform. I need to be able to take 0.6% of it and I'll have my three to million. I will, I will reach my series A. And even if I don't, you're like, oh, why are you still focused on VCs? Even if I don't raise the VC capital, having 3 to 5 million ARR is amazing. What are we fighting about? So, but then I'm like, okay, but that's, that's still a distraction to get to the 3 to 5. The half a billion I'm a big fan of. Well, that's a big number. Before you get to half a billion, why don't you just get to 100 million? But before a hundred million, get to a million. Before a million, just do 10,000. Before 10,000, just do a thousand. So it's like, let's just get the first person to do a thousand dollars in the platform. Done. You know, then get to the first million.

Done.

Now it's like, okay, you know, my eyes on, you know, the, the 10 million, the 100 million. But that is like also a distraction because how do I, how does money move to my platform? An invoice. So I just need more companies sending more invoices and that's all I feel, one company at a time. So just find one company that does over a million dollars a year in revenue, get them onto the platform, get them sending invoices and just rinse and repeat. And the, the last sort of cliche startup line I'll share is, because I love it is slowly. Then suddenly it's like this will. It'll feel exhaustingly, painfully slow. And then before we look back, I'm going to be laughing at the day where like a hundred million in money move was my big metric. Because we're, we're off to a billion.

Exactly. It's kind of like the visual I was thinking about when you said that is like when you go bowling, you see those little triangles like about five feet away from you, like that kind of sets what you're aiming for. Because if you hit those, then you're going to hit the pins down the alley. Kind of like, all right, so partnerships, distribution channels. What's like, are there certain things, I mean, we just talked about affiliate. So is there certain targets or goals with, with regard to like how you go to market that you're trying to hit, whether it is like affiliates or partnerships or distribution channels, that's like critical for your next stage of growth that I may be able to help in or some of the listeners may be able to help you with?

Yeah, so I think spot on. Someone exactly like you who's works with and provides value to our icp, especially in the context of like what we build. You're going to be our greatest sort of brand ambassador, brand builder. So this also is true with like on like the legal side or the bookkeeping and accounting side, because we find that like anyone that does use QuickBooks invoicing, they're, they're sometimes like, they're not embarrassed, but they, they know that they've outgrown it. They just don't really have the time or patience to move on from it. But the reason that they use Quick invoicing, it's not because of invoicing. It's because when they were first starting up the business, their accountant or CPA or bookkeeper said, hey, you know, do everything at QuickBooks easier. For me, it's like, oh, QuickBooks also has invoicing like mine as well. I'm already in there, I'm paying. And then when you, when you're sending your first few invoices, it's actually not that expensive. It just compounds over time as you're more successful. So what we find is just creating that oh, so, so brand ambassadors, people that sort of talk to our audience that it makes sense for them to, to recommend our product. So we like those people then. I think there are so many organizations out there that share free legal templates. LegalZoom does this. CooleyGo does this. Y Combinator is very famous in the startup world. Like the Y Combinator safe. Every one of these, even Stripe Stripe has this thing called Stripe Atlas. You can get a, you get a free NDA Advisor agreement. They're all Word docs. So funny that this world still lives and dies. On Microsoft Word docx, there's an opportunity. Instead of clicking a link on Y Combinator and downloading the safe and downloading a Word Doc, just go right into the agree template. It's all there format. All you have to do is change the variables, how much you're raising and who you're sending it to, and you're off to the races. It would be the best experience compared to a Word Doc. But what I think is most interesting for these, these partnerships that we're going to start rolling out soon is the data play. You know, I want to be very conscious of your PII and your data, but aggregate and anonymize why Combinator Right now they have no idea how many safes were set last year. They have no idea what the average valuation was. They have no idea if it was more pre money or post money. Because all that data lives locally on a Word Doc. And so, you know, we can again, aggregate and anonymize, but turn back that bigger data to them and let them know how their own documents are being used. And the other thing that we can do that a Word Doc can't do is we can lock it down. So there's certain things that YC doesn't want you to change about that template or if they, if you do change it, remove all YC branding. It's not a YC Safe anymore. It's just a safe that was once a YC safe.

Yeah, yeah, got it. When you say safe, what do you mean safe?

Yeah, I'm sorry. Just a safe document. It's what most early stage founders will use to raise their first round of financing because it's, it's, it's more about like future equity than kind of an equity round right now. So it's just very cheap to do it. So, you know, you can just download the doc. You don't really need a lawyer to do it. So I only mentioned that particular document. But like Cooley Go is a good example where they have. Yeah, Cooley, I think it's Gouley.com and it's just a repository of all sorts of sales contract templates, NDAs, but something that they did just to give out to the world. But Cooley Go has no idea who's using them, how they're using them. Right.

They.

They do like a little email capture to download it, but that's all they get.

Yeah, interesting. All right, and the final question. So you're still investing through your venture fund. How do you balance building agree with staying involved with, you know, the little guys out there that need your help on the investment?

Yeah, so we were. So we've raised three funds within the Adventure fund. We won't raise a fourth. Maybe one day in the future. But like all intentions on agree. But we'd had the other the fund before we had started Agree. And so now we're just deploying the rest of the capital there about I think like $3 million left in a $10 million fund. So small fund, but it's actually I get to double dip. Same with, you know, I still an adjunct professor at Northwestern where with a, with a venture fund I meet these new startups and so I will, if it's appropriate, tell them, hey, you're raising. Where are you sending that safe document? They're like, oh, DocuSign, you're up for it? User agree. It's free. So, you know I get to do a little biz dev and then, you know, I get to meet a founder who I connect on LinkedIn. I get to build a relationship with them and you know, I will sort of reengage with them once they start up their first sales team and start sending out invoices like, hey, remember your buddy Marty? So I try to do that in a respectful way. I don't want them to think I'm just taking or pitch meeting to sell them, but I do. But that is the what allows me to double dip and think about like how I organize my time so that I'm not sort of giving too much to one and not to another. And then what I really love about founders though great ones, is they've, they're pitching some thing they've unlocked. They see the market in a different way. They've created some competitive advantage or some wedge that they realize that they can master. I love just hearing those stories. So I get, I get them wrong and it just helps fuel my creative mind and I take that back into agree and how I built the business.

Yeah, that's awesome. I think, I mean, agree isn't like, it's not like you're pitching dog food. It's like very relevant to their business. So you're in like me. It's adjacent. But they need any.

I try to do it to get the most respect because I don't want them to feel like I just took the pitch so I could pitch you because I want them to also know, like, hey, I only talk to early stage companies. So they're all pre revenue, right. So there's no invoicing. I'm like, hey dude, I'm just saying, just don't pay for it. Occupy keep your burn down, right? We always will joke with early stage founders. Like reduce your total burn by the size of your, your contract, your docusign bill. And I think most of them are appreciative of that. And then also like, I can just kind of tell early on, like if the call's not going to go anywhere, we're definitely not going to invest. Like, I don't, that seems inappropriate. I don't do that. I just, I'm polite. We get through it. Then I kind of explain to them why, like it's not in our thesis or it's not going to work and then we part ways. It's really the ones where even if we don't make an investment, but we have a really strong conversation relationship with, I try to bring them over.

That's awesome. Well Marty thanks so much. This has been great. Totally appreciate you taking us behind the scenes for agree.com and a little bit of your background which has been awesome. So for everyone listening I'll give a little pitch here. So for everyone listening if you're ready to ditch clunky E sign tools and get contracts signed invoices and paid in one smooth flow, check out agree.com I'm definitely checking it out and see why why they're changing the game so you can get it.

Yeah I'm just I'm Marty so MartyGree.com just email me I will personally get on a zoom with you and the same offer to Kevin applies to all of you listening on this pod. So exclusive to this podcast we'll give all of you the first 200 quarter million in transactions fee free.

Perfect. Awesome. Well Marty thanks again for joining us and to our listeners feel free to reach out to Marty as he mentioned and until next time keep building.