Building a £ 7 Figure SAAS and Leading Design at Triple Whale - Zach Murray | The Midnight Pod Ep 58

Right, we're back with episode 57, I think, at the Midnight Pod. We're back in miserable London. Zach seems to think it's the cleanest city in the world.

I mean, yeah, like, walking around it.

But we have Zach Murray from Triple Whale and Foreplay, which we're going to get into both. And obviously Ollie's co hosting again. First episode in 2023 in the original location. Only six more weeks in this flat before I move to a new venue, so hopefully it will be as good, if not better than this one. But the Bali episodes are fun. Everyone got very ill. We are now back to reality, back in the trenches and back in 2023. Midnight Pod, first question, as always. And actually just for context, how well do you know each other? Because obviously you put us in touch and arranged this.

Not, like massively well.

We met each other at Geek out two times last year.

We met at two events, so this.

Is the third time. And I messaged Foreplay support the other day on live chat, trying to cancel an account because we have a duplicate one. Thinking I was speaking to some bot because I just felt like, cancel. And you replied. And then I didn't reply to your nice response about, oh, we're gonna see you at the weekend. And then I was, fuck.

A true bootstrap. Sass.

Yeah, exactly, Exactly. First question, I guess, as always. Well, it's not a question. We just dive into everything. How do you start, like, where you from? What do you do? We'll get into loads of shit. I know very little, to be honest, as is normally the case. The least researched podcast host of all time.

I don't know if that's a good thing. You keep shelling it. Is it gonna turn some people away? Eventually, but it works. It flows probably.

Yes. I'm from, like, just outside of Toronto, Canada. Moved to Toronto for like, school. Dropped out in second year. And then from like 16 until like 20, I was like, doing a lot of just agency stuff mainly, but not like E comm stuff, just like building websites, doing like some design stuff, a little bit like animation work and a lot of just taking overflow from like larger agencies in the city, things like that. And then I had met a guy that was drop shipping and I was just like, this seems pretty cool.

Always a drop shipper.

Yeah. And yeah, and he was like building a brand that he started dropshipping and he kind of just like spinning up new ones. And then so we just started, like, we really got along and so we started just trying new ideas. And one kind of like, stuck. And it was. We just like, a few winning products for, like, a bohemian home decor brand. And so we, like, scale that, like, really, really fast. And then it, like, crashed just as fast. Fast as. Well, along that time, like, I got, like, introduced to, like, E Commerce and just like. Yeah, direct response marketing and all that kind of stuff, and started to really, really enjoy it. And so along that journey, we started an agency called Foreplay, me and him. And then about, like, two years into us working together, I kind of just decided that I wasn't. I didn't really want, like, a partner anymore, and I kind of wanted. I like, a lot of ideas that I wanted to start fleshing out myself. So, yeah, we sold the E Commerce brand that at the time was at kind of like 50% drop shipping. 50%, like our own products. Yeah, mainly like, bohemian home decor stuff and wall art and. And then so we sold the brand, I bought them out of the agency, and then I started building Foreplay. Yeah, that's pretty much like the story, like, the professionals.

Did you go to, like, college then? Just go back a second.

Yeah, no, I went to Toronto. Yeah. So I moved to Toronto when I was like, 8, 18 for college. Stayed there for two years, but dropped out in second. Yeah, like, at the time, I was. I was doing a lot of just like, freelance design work for, like, other apps. Other, like, honestly, like, anything you could take kind of, and I would just, like, figure it out. Yeah.

Is this the first American slash Canadian guest you've had?

No, no, it's Canadian, Right. Was he American?

No, it's American, yeah.

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

So obviously had him. No, also Jordan Welch. Oh, yeah. Okay.

So about two Americans, for my own reference.

First Canadian. Yeah, I think.

All right.

Global.

Yeah, Jordan's definitely American. Yeah, I think. Yeah.

Okay, I'll just check. I'm always interested to know, like, from the outside looking in, from knowing the UK and not knowing those two countries, I feel like there's so much more entrepreneurial places, which is just definitely seems to like, from like, a college perspective.

And Tall poppy syndrome, whatever it is.

Well, yeah, Canada. Canada, like, I wouldn't say is like, very entrepreneurial at all. Like, you. Like, we have, like, a little bit of, like, Spillover from the U.S. but, like, the difference in Canada. The U.S. like, yeah. It's insane. I'm not a huge fan of Canada or, like, Canadians in general. Like, I just don't like the way they think they are very, like, scarcity mindset it. And especially if you're building, like, a business like, that's kind of just for the Canadian market. You very quickly just only think the world is as big as Canada.

And I think you get that here. English people are scarcity mindset. Yeah, Scarcity mindset. They're very, like, hard to sell to. They're, like, very pessimistic. No trust. Whereas Americans are just like, take my fucking money. Let's, like, go. Most of the time if you've got a good product.

I think, like, when I spent a lot of time in the US last year and when I was there, what I had realized was just, like, how much more open people were specifically in business.

Yeah.

To just, like, to take meetings, talk to you, and just, like, even help you, like, specifically if you're in, like, a sub market. Like, I spent a lot of time in Austin and, like, Arizona, and if you're not in, like, one of, like, the big cities, it's. There is this, like, feeling of, like, camaraderie that you guys are, like, working. Like. I don't know. It's just, like, a way better vibe than I've had ever, like, in Canada.

Yeah. You see, like, the films where they're like, oh, there's, like. And maybe it's not true, but there's, like. There's a lot of. Feels like even at college, there's a lot of entrepreneurial stuff going on. Whereas at university, it just feels like binge drinking and it's just like, nothing education. Whereas I feel like they're a lot more supportive, which is interesting. So I wonder if it's how much easier it is. There's not. Nothing's easy. But, like, obviously you say kind of Canada sounds a bit like the uk, which is kind of related.

Yeah. I never heard that. The comparison between Canada and the U.S. that's interesting. You kind of assume they're, like, culturally similar from the outside.

Yeah. Like, in a lot of ways, we are like. And then obviously there's a lot of Americans in the US and a lot of Canadians and America and, like, that kind of stuff. But specifically, I'm talking about in, like, business mind. Like. Yeah, that kind of mindset is starkly different. In a lot of ways. I feel like Americans, they do still kind of believe in the American dream and, like, all that kind of stuff. And, like, that's not a common kind of thing that people rally around in Canada, but, yeah, still a good place to live.

Yeah. With the agency, did you mainly service. So obviously you started that. That's how led you to triple air, which we can carry on down the Story, I guess. But with the agency, did you mainly service Canadian U.S. and then beyond that E com just you said could it.

Just an ads agency. Sorry, was that an SMMA agency or what?

It was once I started dropshipping but we also were still doing a lot of stuff that I was doing before.

Everyone starts drop shipping, even you and.

Me ordi there's a dropshipper that forks the path in everyone's life for better or wor takes you. You either go deep or you or then you split again and come to non crooked pursuits.

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I mean I was always like very much like focused on the creative side of things, doing like design and production. And then my business partner was the one doing like the ad buying. Like I've never really like honestly put much time into like buying ads myself. That was kind of always him and I was just like supporting on like the other side of things. And I was also because I was doing agency stuff before that for like a wider range of businesses. Not like direct response E commerce. Um, yeah, I brought in like a lot of clients. There was like some apps and like gaming and stuff like that that we like kind of partnered up really, really early on. They did like a series A. We produced like a bunch of like high production commercials and like things like that. Yeah. And so we did Like a wide range of stuff. When it became foreplay is when we were like very much more focused on D2C. We were using like that team to support like Nomadic Fabrics like the brand at the time.

Who did you run that with?

My. It was my ex business partner. Okay. And yeah, I did like it was me and him doing the agency and that. And we had like a few other like kind of degenerate drop shipping little things as well.

Chad. Scale.

Yeah. Because obviously you're very designed for that. I actually think you two are very like design based are quite similar. I feel like when you look at not like obviously identical, but the vibe behind the way that Space goods is branded and the vibe behind how you've taken triple well, which is obviously what you do now. Isn't that too dissimilar? And obviously I don't know you as well as I know him, but I just like the way I even think the way you design is very similar. The way you think is obviously again, don't know the depth of your thinking as much as Matt, but from the front end looks fairly similar. And the creative like the creativity behind it, which is quite interesting.

I'm like just generally like a very nostalgic person. Like in like a lot of ways in my life. Like I, even though I do have like a lot of. I'm pretty positive about the future in my own life. I think in terms of like society I'm much more nostalgic about like the past in a lot of ways. And yeah, that's kind of. Yeah, that's kind of in terms of that. And honestly the triple whale stuff in terms like the design, it was very like it wasn't like a master plan. It was like an iterative thing from like when we launched Pixel and then it was like, okay, let's just like lean into this. Like people like it and it's kind of just like went on from there and. Yeah.

Wait, so I'm confused. So agency foreplay, triple whale.

Oh, so triple.

They all fit.

Yeah. Where do they fit?

Timeline.

The timeline would have been middle of 2021. I. I was like living in Mexico with my ex business partner. I like one day just like had this like gut feeling that's just like I want to, I want to move on from like this and I want to do something new like walk downstairs and I was just like, hey dude, I want to do something new and like I don't want to do it with you. And like I think there's just one thing when you, you're doing a bunch of stuff with one person. There's this like expectation that any new thing that you want to start, you kind of give them like first whatever. And I just like didn't want that. And so I just like, I want to do something new, I want to do it alone.

And I rate that A lot of people would be shy away from a difficult conversation like that. And I feel like some of those difficult conversations are just so necessary.

Yeah. And like, I look back, it was like probably one of the best. Like in the same way that like starting stuff with him was probably the best decisions I made. Like, looking back, ending, it was also one of the best decisions. And then I was in like very much like a flux period. The actual, the reason, like the way the triple got like folded into it is like I had a bunch of these like agency clients. I bought him out of the agency and like I needed to kind of service this even though I knew it wasn't like my long term play. And so it's just like asking around, being like, is there any agencies that want to like white label from like the media buying side of things?

So the agency was called for play to start.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It gets a little bit confusing. So like, yeah, four players in agency. And then I got introduced to like Alan Porter who's like a friend of a friend. And I was like, hey man, can you just like take over these clients that I have from like a media buying perspective? And he did. And then he invested in Triple. Well, I took like a really early on call for the investment in Triple. Well, and then if they just started asking me to do like a lot more projects with them, like they were really lean at the time. Like, yeah, under 10 people, that is a mad opportunity.

Yeah, that is a.

When did they launch?

Like not long ago. I took the call.

It's barely two years now. It's probably 20 months maybe. 22 months?

Yeah. Because I took a call pretty early on with them because I got introd to them through Forgotten the founder's name. Aj. Aj. I took a call with aj Obviously the founder.

Yeah.

And he was like we were like one of the first agencies that joined the platform and especially definitely the first UK agency. I was just chatting was just like showing me. He actually showed me like some weird influencer setup he had for his brand that Madison.

Madison Braids. Madison Braids.

And then he showed me Triple Whale and it was just the analytics platform. And then he was like walking me through how the Pixel was coming, etc, etc because it was like post iOS and they'd obviously pivoted pretty heavy towards that. But I thought that that was. Must have been like fairly early on in the. In the process.

Like super early on if it's pre. Pre.

I don't think I realized how early it on was and then I got offered the opportunity to invest in it.

And at what valuation?

Like must have been seed round like pretty early. It was like minimum checks were 100k USD. Oh.

So like I had. When I had the call, minimum checks were 25.

Yeah.

So you know, I know people that were like getting in when it was like minimum checks 10 and it was like.

Yeah. So I was probably right.

Maybe third.

Yeah, I think I was just before.

It's always 2020 though, ain't it with anything like that? Because you don't know it's gonna become.

It was pre series 8. I think it was just before you went and did the Series 8.

It's like all the people that didn't invest in space goods.

Yeah, true.

It was before we invested in you but it's like it was soon it was. Yeah pre Series A and I was like at the time it looked like a lot of money. Now obviously hindsight would. Would do it. Yeah. Like. But it's yeah. Weird to look back but it's probably. It must be one of the most fastest growing valuations of a tech company in the last however many years. Not like the fastest but like in the E comms. But it will be up there definitely.

Like especially outside America. Right. Because it's what Israel based hybrid.

The actual companies in America. The dev team is in Israel.

Right.

A lot of good talent in Israel. I had a call with a company called Fondue. Do you know that?

Okay, yeah, I've heard about that.

Yeah.

They're like instead of doing discounts, they give cash back.

Oh yeah, I've heard of that as well.

I had a call with a founder, really funny sales call actually character. But they, they've basically he's based in Israel. There's a lot of dev talent out there and quite a lot of E comm stuff, isn't there? Yeah, which you wouldn't just if, if you don't know that and someone told you that you'd be like what?

Yeah, I mean they have like a couple like as like a country a couple wins in terms of startups like Waze and like some other massive, massive companies. Right. So it's like yeah, it's a good hub and yeah it's even just like a good vibe out there. In terms of like how hard people work and things like that, it's pretty cool.

Yeah.

Anyway, I pulled you away from your story so you got intro to them through Alan, who you like.

Yeah, yeah. So I had the first call I ever had was a call to invest.

Yeah.

And then they just started asking me. So at the time I had pivoted like a lot of the agency work to just doing motion design. And so we were mainly doing like software or, sorry, motion design for software companies. So just like animated explainer videos, launch videos, things like that. And that was like going really, really well. But I wanted to start software and so I was like, I was like working on for like, so working on that at the time. Like my current company for played the software was called Addison and I was like, okay, yeah, like this could be like a good opportunity to kind of get connected to these guys who like building in the space, all that kind of stuff. Ye.

Yeah.

And. And so yeah, we did just like a really. Couple really good projects together. We did like their launch video. We did the launch of like the Pixel. So we did like the design and everything like that for the launch of the Pixel. And then they just kind of kept asking me to do more stuff and. And then came on full time probably like October of last year. And it's just been like a rocket ship since then. I've like learned a ton and scaled foreplay at the same time. Like the software specifically. Yeah, it's been like a ton of fun just like to build in the industry and in a lot of ways, like I look back when I was doing E commerce and it's like if I had triple whale at the time, like I was very much like, like most dropshippers, like a very messy operator. And if I had something like we were trying to like set up dashboards, like super metrics and all this like bullshit. And I was like, if there was like a solution, like triple whale, like, I think my outcome with the business would have been a lot different, a lot more positive.

Yeah, it fixes a real problem. There's not much better vehicles to be in other than if you don't like, especially if alongside your own company. That's probably the best vehicle to be in in terms of learning and growth in the E commerce space right now. Well, as a company, so how fast they're growing is pretty mad. So you've got it, but you don't use it properly from looking in your dashboard yesterday. Quite a lot of competitors, but I.

Use the dashboard, but that's not set up properly either. I don't use the triple pixel because AKM used some other custom stuff.

Yeah, they use status, don't they? Statless is like a competitor. There's quite a lot of competitors. It's just like Statless looks horrible.

I don't use it. They use it because they say they like it but it looks like a child's fucking project. It looks so bad.

I mean in a lot of ways like it is like an internal project of an agency, right?

Totally.

So it's like if you take someone that's like only focused on software and you take someone that's like building an agency and then trying to build software on the side, it's like you could see how like those outcomes. I mean I do think starting software as an agency is good because you have like so much domain expertise and like you know the problems. But at the end of the day it's like it is so much work to build really good software and like so much attention. And so I think if you just like play it out over a series of time, whoever's like focused on the software is going to build a better software.

So I mean like there's that North Beam triple whale argument which was a weird thing. Never even heard North Beam North Beams again. It's like it is fundamentally quite a good product but it looks horrible when you use it. And now I feel like triple whale, the size and valuation that it's at, it's now almost the same as making decision between Shopify and another ecom platform. It's now why would I choose something that has a smaller dev team that's going to release features way slower, that's iterating slower, that's not supporting the community as much. So it's just a no brainer to choose Shopify. We actually had, we're about to onboard a client who decided to move away from Shopify to say WordPress or some bullshit to some fucking platform called Odoo. She's just like. I was like, I got a call.

With him, I was like, how these platforms get customers.

Please don't do this. I was like, please just don't do this. Like your shit convert. It makes no sense. It makes no sense. But he's done it and it's. His website's horrible. Hopefully you don't listen to this. If it does, it does. It's just one of those decisions that it's just like when you actually think about it logically, it makes no sense to use something else.

Yeah, it's funny, I Used what I used briefly, like two years ago. Forgotten the platform. What's the other one? Not Woocommerce.

Oh, big commerce. Big commerce.

Yeah, big commerce. Why now? There was some reason because of with the neon setup.

It was, I think it was customer. I remember you doing that and I remember you going, that's a terrible idea.

There's some custom setup I couldn't do on Shopify. And then I remember thinking, what the fuck have I done? It's just like so much admin, just stupid. Shocking. So foreplay the app then. So the agency is originally called that you get involved in triple world from the agency and then it becomes full time. What then happens to the agency and then how does that become. There's always these fucking flies, by the way.

Yeah, yeah.

How does that become the app.

The app. When I bought my partner out of the agency, I knew I wasn't gonna keep doing agency stuff. We kind of just kept servicing clients because like one, they were reliant on us and like the cash flow wasn't bad. And so I was like, most of my dedicated focus time was going towards like, I want to build software. And so I had like four or five different ideas and I was just like playing with them and just running little tests and like talking to people I knew and like whatever it was called Addison at the time, the saving ads from Facebook and stuff like that, I was like, that's the one where I had like the most positive response. I'm gonna go ahead and build this. And so I like, I found like a developer on Upwork. I did like all of the UI design myself. And then we built like an MVP and then launched it. And then for like the first like few months, just like working through like all of like the bugs that come with like having a software and just stuff that like most people that sign up don't tell you there's a bug. And so if you're only getting like two sign ups a day, it takes like multiple days for you to even realize that that bug exists. And like one of them, for example, was like for the longest time.

What the fuck is this? Space goods spacegoods.com Rainbow Dust version 1. My newest entrepreneurial econ brand venture. I spent six months in the trenches building this shit from scratch. We launched six weeks ago. What's it all about? The next generation wellness brand with a long term vision to essentially consumerize the pending psychedelic consumer goods market. Which might sound absolutely ridiculous. We're not quite there yet. The market's massively illegal. But what Is this rainbow dust? Version 1 is an all in one mushroom and adaptogenic blend designed to unlock your supernatural self. Essentially experience a sharper focus, sustained energy, Zen like calm throughout the day. It's an all in one powder. Tastes like fucking hot chocolate. Tastes delicious, works great, looks great, feels amazing. Essentially the broader concept here was to legally imitate a psychedelic microdose and like I said, experience those symptoms. You can mix it with anything, brownies, bake brownies with it, mix it with your coffee, have it without coffee, replace your coffee, put it into a protein shake. It's super fucking versatile. It tastes great. It replaces the stack of supplements I was previously taking. But you need to try this shit. It would definitely change the way you work, get you into that deep workflow. I obviously think that myself. Plenty of a thousand plus first customers think the exact same shit. It's not just a pretty packaging, it actually works really fucking well. Keto, vegan, all that good shit. Trust me, you need to try it for yourself. Let's scale this shit to the moon. Spacegoods.com get on your rainbow Dust subscription and see how you fucking feel. Let's do it for the boys.

Spacegoods.com if you downloaded the Chrome extension, your browser language wasn't in English. It just like completely didn't work because.

Like, that's a pretty big problem, right?

But like, if I'm, if I never change my browser, but like most people just like sign into it, they would try it and like this isn't fucking working and then whatever. And it took like there was no way, like there's no logical way for us to ever think about this. It was because like the Chrome extension was attacked, was like injecting itself on the page and attaching to a word that if that word was different, no longer would exist.

That's bad.

And so it's just like little things. Like that is like what we had worked through. And so yeah, the transition from agency to app was like.

Well, it was.

It took a while. Like it just like, it was just like you kind of kept building and then when you ever. You're building a software, it's like most people start with like freelancers and stuff like that, if they don't have a technical co founder. But like that gets old really quick. Like you just can't. Not having someone that's like invested in the project from a technical point of view, it's like almost impossible. And so like, even when I talk to people that are like building a software and they're like, oh, I Have like this team that's working on it. And I was like, okay, that's good. Like it's going to get your MVP but like 100% of your time should, outside of that should be going to like finding a technical co founder or like someone that can just come onto the project and be like committed to it.

No, he's got some horrible stories around technical co around his CTO setup who does nowhere from social snow.

Oh yeah. Oh dude.

Stories that I think you might have got into on your pod.

Yeah, a few.

So do you have a technical code? Wait, before context. If you go to Foreplay co just explain what you'll explain it better than me, Give a little pitch so everyone knows what it is.

I use it by the way.

I also use it for both our agencies and our e commerce company.

Yeah, every day. Yeah, Foreplay is like the best way to manage your pre production process for ad inspiration, briefing, everything like that. And so we have a Chrome extension lets you save ads from Facebook ad Library from TikTok. Like everybody kind of knows if you've used Facebook ad library, the pain of copying a link, sending it to someone, that link, that ad gets taken down. Now it like shoots a 404. And so we allow you to build mood boards from Facebook ad Library from TikTok Creative center and TikTok Organic Share Board share links with your internal team. And we also have a discovery library that is like every ad saved from everyone on the platform and so you can like search that by keyword and that's mad.

That's a massive. That's one of the biggest value ads, the thing you're bringing out soon, about the time that an ad's been up.

Yeah, yeah.

So that's fully in the line basically.

Yeah, basically. Because if you're not going to run it after a thousand days, if it's not printing money for you consistently. Yeah, most cases we have like close.

To 200,000 ads now saved by our users. And so now you could like. I like did a couple filters, it's not in the platform yet, but like a couple of filters myself. And I was just like, okay, search just like dogs and then sort by longest running and like you find just like winners, you know that have just been like, okay, this has been running for three years.

Yeah.

And so yeah, people have been using that and then we've also just launched like a briefing feature for briefing your editors, briefing content creators and stuff like that. And so the overall vision is to from the moment like a media buyer or someone on the team is like, we need new ad creative all the way through the asset being ready to like deploy in platform. We want to like own that workflow.

I think the cost to value ratio is the. It's the best app we use for our business.

You're going to put its price up now.

Yeah, but it is other than maybe just because. Other than notion. Just because that's what we run all our company through.

I've never touched that.

It's just like you need a PM software. Like it's so mad how many businesses don't have a project management software. Yeah, because you're obviously you don't. It doesn't surprise me at all. You have to have a PM above a certain size.

I've used ClickUp before but I just psyched it.

Yeah, you have to have something above a certain size because otherwise it's communication bottlenecks which are just annoying. But other than that I think it's the most. It's with how important creative is. It's the best value for money software you can get if you're an E commerce owner or agency.

I'm glad you feel that way.

How much does it cost to build a software like that? And at least like how much time initially when you went from like idea because you said you had a few ideas going from idea, why did you land on that one as well?

Just talking about it. Yeah, just talking to people. Like, yeah, I would use that. Or like yeah, I have that problem. And I was talking to a friend actually who has like another software company. His is in like the sales niche but he built his, his app off of like LinkedIn sales navigator and like just adding more functionality to that. And so I saw a lot of parallels like talking to him being like, oh, like I can build this software off of Facebook ad library. Like there's already adoption that people use Facebook ad library.

That's what they say that you should do. You should either build on top of something that people use at scale or you should iterate on something that's already better and make it like 5% better than it is. Or have a different feature. Yeah, yeah.

So that was kind of like the thesis around it. And like I had the problem myself. Like when I was running the agency, I had everybody in the team always there was. We had like a weekly call and it's like everybody needed to bring five new ad ideas to the table for like all of our clients. And like they were putting in like these like slide decks. Like it was like hard to like they Couldn't embed the videos. It was like the most annoying process. And so like I always just wanted this tool to build mood boards of ads anyway. And so it just seemed like it was like the one that was like the most aligned to a problem that I was having. And then when talking to people was like oh yeah, that but like to be fair there was like a large gap between like our MVP which like solved the problem but like wasn't that great to use.

Yeah.

And like we really didn't start growing until we solved the problem and it was like a great product to use.

How long was that? Between probably three or four months.

And like in that process was finding like a technical co founder who I found through a friend. He first came on like still working a full time job as a developer at a different company and then yeah eventually kind of he went full time. April of this year we've just MVP'd.

An app just in terms of technical co founder. We don't have a technical co founder right now. It's a peer to peer betting up using starting in the game and do.

You told me this idea when you're in Barcelona.

It's.

And I was like I've had like I've always wanted this cuz like I'm not really a gambler.

Yeah.

But I love betting as my fucking friends.

You know it's like a peer to peer betting out where it's. The goal is to facilitate. I shouldn't, I don't know if I should say this because we're only MVP stage.

Maybe we can't. Oh yeah, because all the fucking viewers are gonna.

It starts. It cost us a lot to build an MVP for an app on your phone. I was so unaware how fucking expensive it is to even get to a point where it's.

Oh, you've done that already.

Yeah.

Is this one you try and raise money for?

Yeah, we're raising money at the moment. We're going to need a fair whack of cash to turn it into a working product. But it facilitates peer to peer betting. So if I was to say I bet you 5 pound I don't really play games anymore. But like it's starting in the gaming niche. So if I was going to play with like FIFA or something we'd be like five quid both put it into the platform. Winner submits proof and takes it. But the vision is to get to a point where if you were going to play golf against someone, if you're going to bet against on anything peer to peer. So Me to you, you'd use this app rather than cash. So, like, obviously now we use quite a lot of cash inside. I do think eventually it'd probably be cashless. Yeah, but I didn't realize how expensive it is. We need to. We either need to raise a lot of money off out of technical expensive has it been? I think it cost us 260k to get.

Holy shit.

What?

It's pretty, like, laborious.

You spent all that yourself?

200K. Now we've got a couple of like, seed investors.

All right. It's already got that.

Yeah, but we need like, we're trying to raise like VC money. About 3 mil, like a significant amount of money.

Have you even got like a. Like, could customers use it yet?

No, it's pre, like use based, which makes it harder. It's, it's. It's a working mvp. But there's a lot of, like, there's.

Also like a lot of compliance with that kind of.

Yeah, there's a lot of. Maybe I've got that number wrong. I can't remember. I can't remember what we paid, but it was so. It was. It was around 200 grand. It's just so, like, just the dev work is expensive.

Wait, so who's doing this? You and Joe.

Me, Joe, a guy called Will. And then we've got a couple of seed investors.

I swear, you have a new business every week.

We've been doing that for like.

I feel like I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. I've got like one brand in a podcast.

Not really that at the moment. Like, we'd been doing like the pitch deck and stuff. Two years it's been in the process.

All right. Fucking hell. I thought you were doing like two months ago.

But I don't want to, like, bounce off onto that conversation. It's another day.

That's interesting.

But from the outside looking in, it's just like the MVP was.

Five grand is like what I put into it.

That's not. That's not bad. It wasn't bad, but like, sensible.

Like, to be fair, like, I did a lot of the work myself. Like, yeah, I built like an entire prototype using webflow actually, so that I could give it to the developer and be like, this is what I want it to look like. Exactly. And like. And it was like reusable code that you could like copy and paste originally.

So you're not technical at all then.

I'm. No, I would not consider myself like, some people would consider me technical, but I'm definitely, I'm definitely not technical.

Better than, better than an average person.

Yeah, like I don't, I don't write, I don't write code.

Yeah.

But like I can like make, I can like, I guess manage around and like when I was doing agency stuff like I worked with a ton of startups. I've been like building websites for a long time and so there's like a little bit of like whatever, knowledge, rub off kind of stuff like that.

I have a theory. Well, not theory but I just want to get your take on this because I, I'm definitely creative first. Sort of figured out the business after but still don't know what the I'm doing. But I definitely think that's the better way around for 0 to 1 than being like the NBA type who I know some of them are clearly very smart, probably better running a business than I ever will be, but they just can't do the 0 to 1 by themselves. They have to like hire a lot of people and hire a branding agency.

Yeah, well, I mean I, I 100 agree. And it's like all these like, like anybody that ever told me they were going to school for business, I was like what the. Why, why are you going to school for business? Because at the end of the day if you start a business like they probably great at running a business but if you're starting a business, no one, your customers aren't buying a business. Your customers are buying a product. They're buying like a feeling or they're buying all that kind of shit. And like inherently business students probably under index on like emotional intelligence and things like that. Right. And so they're just like not really the people. But to be fair, like I'm horrible. I'm not great at like running a business. Like you know, like I'm probably the.

Way I struggle, I would really struggle to go from zero to one without having some cash. Which is why the agency was a good vehicle for us. Because Facebook ads is data using. Used to be when we started was data and just knowing how to run Facebook ads and then offering that to a service where people didn't know. If I couldn't start a creative agency, I couldn't start a brand without leveraging cash flow from the businesses we already have to employ someone to do the branding for it. I would struggle to go from 0 to 1 in any other aspect other than a service based business. I think there's probably businesses other than that that be all right in like trading time for money basically.

Yeah. That's like the.

In a skill that I know I.

Can do, but I wouldn't be like running a business.

Yeah, I know you do that. I've told you this. This is why you need to position better at it.

But it's.

That's position. You do like running a business, but you should. But running a business is positioning yourself in the leverage position.

Yeah.

So like there's a lot of creative. There's a lot of like, I think a good example of that will be like influencer, led brat. Mr. Beast is like a really high level example of that. The businesses he runs, he doesn't run the ops for him. He just, he just does the ideation in the videos, like Feastables, for example. He doesn't do anything other than become the face of that Beast burger. Like those sort of. That's similar to you, but on like a much bigger level. Yeah, like you do.

Yeah.

It is about kind of positioning yourself. But I agree, like, I think I would struggle. You two would. You could. You two could rip business ideas from zero to one like really easily. I probably couldn't.

It's my favorite part.

Yeah, it's your favorite part, certainly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, it's always been like my pro, like with foreplay. I've been really. And to be fair, like, because I'm still contributing at triple. Well, like, that's kind of what's kept me focused.

Yeah.

In a lot of ways. And like, I'm kind of grateful for it because like I was always one to kind and I still like already have like a ton of other app ideas that I want to like build out and like other business ideas. But I'm like, you know, like, it kind of really keeps me centered. It's just like. No, like, just kind of work on these like two projects that have a very similar customer cohort. And so like all of my time now is only thinking about like, yeah, software for like DTC brand. Like DTC brands are just like, even just like people spending in direct response is kind of like where my head's at.

Yeah, you sound similar. Like you have always have this like shiny object syndrome for new brands and it sounds like you somewhat have that shiny object syndrome.

And I'm just trying to keep my shiny object within the same brand. So like new product in the same brand rather than new brand.

What's interesting is like, that's kind of where I'm at because like I've got this like, weird. I've had this desire to like make a coffee table book for like the longest Time. And so this year I was like, okay, like, I want to have, like, a creative side project, and I want it to be a coffee table book. But, like, how can I make, like, how can I make this, like, make sense in terms of whatever. Just justify it to myself. Justify it to, like, my logical self. And so, like, right now I'm working on a coffee table book that's called 100 Years of Foreplay. And it's 100 years, like, the best vintage advertising of all time. And copywriting.

Yeah, Sick idea. And so, like, Porsche ads and, like.

The Porsche ads and like, I mean, car ads inherently, in going through this process, they're definitely the ones like, over index. But I want to make it so it's not.

There's something.

Just a car ad, coffee table book.

There's some incredible cigarette ads. Oh, yeah, incredible cigarette ads. Like, and beer ads. And like, Guinness. Guinness has got some unreal ads when you go. Because I feel like when you're going back for advertising further back, like, now, it's a lot, like, broader. But it used to just be, like, massive conglomerates making, like, cigarettes, beer, like, house PNG and stuff like that. Like, really big companies. So you.

All the stuff I used to say and do is now banned. It's like.

Yeah, yeah.

Too offensive.

Yeah. The Porsche is so sick. That is a really good idea.

There's one I'm thinking of.

I also think what it says, it's like they don't. Some. They don't look at you in a.

Well, there's like a few. There's like. There's like a Lamborghini one that's like. Or no, sorry, there's a. There's actually a Volkswagen one that's like a Volkswagen full of people. It's like Lamborghini, like something like a Volkswagen or a Lamborghini holds, like, one girl. Like.

Yes.

It was like, 11 or whatever. And there's like a bunch of, like, all that kind of shit I really enjoy. And I have, like. We're talking about, like, nostalgia. Like, I. I have, like, a longing for, like, old school. Just, like, the way advertising was done, which was like. There was like, a few massive agencies that did all of the advertising.

Yeah.

And there was, like, a few massive admin that, like, dictated the way that, like, all of America perceived everything. And it's just like. I don't think it's ever gonna go back to that. But I definitely like. I like that.

I like Mad Men.

Is it David? What's the copywriter? Really famous one.

Oh, David Ogilvy.

Yeah, yeah. Ogilvy's obviously massive agency. They must have done a lot of that. I think that's a really good idea. I think I'd probably buy that book. I think it's cool.

But I'm trying to bring back a bit of fucking retro advertisement. These 80s movies, just beautiful.

Those look sick.

Beautiful pink lights. Ye like it's just like. That's the new product dream dust that I'm fucking pitching on the. On the coffee table there. So that's gonna be chaos when that comes out.

I do, I love 80s. Like it's very unnecessary, I think. 70s and 80s and even some early 90s, I think that was like, that's like pinnacle of like the balance between modernity and like retro. And it's like they come together to be like such a nice mix. Even like 80s 90s fashion. I much prefer to like a lot of the nowadays stuff. That's a really cool idea. Yeah.

I feel like I pretty much work on it just on Sundays right now.

Yeah.

Just like curating and then I'm like trying to figure out if I need to find copyright for every single one of these old ads. I find to put it in print and just like figuring that out. But the goal is to have it in print by December 31st of this year. And I think it could be even just like a good like Trojan horse for the software into getting into larger agencies. Like I think inherently it's like a really good gift to like thousand person agencies and then it's like open to a call and just like all that kind of stuff. And I just, I didn't think about it. I just really wanted. I just really want. I really want the thing that I make just be like on people's coffee tables. Like I think.

Yeah, even in like that's. That'd be a great way to get big ages onto software to send them this book you've made.

Yeah.

And that's the opposite of software. A big hard printed hardware.

Yeah, it is. That's sick. That's sick idea.

It's timeless. That's cool. Yeah, that is sick. So triple. Well, is that officially full time now? Is it still like an agency relationship?

No.

Did you join the team?

I joined the team. I joined the team in October of last year.

So 21 or 22? 23.

Shit's blending together. No, 2121.

Terrible time frame.

2123 now, which is.

Yeah, that's fucking.

Yeah.

Yeah. 2121. October 21st was when I started kind of like full time and Then, yeah, it's been, like I said, it's been like a rocket ship and it's just. Yeah, people love.

How many people was then compared to now?

When I joined it was between 8 and 12 and now we're 130.

Is that a fully remote team or is that.

No, it's not fully remote. We have hubs, so like, I'm fully remote, but we have hubs in Austin for marketing, Columbus for operations, and like, that's where the founders are. And then Israel for. For dev and like a little bit of operations. Yeah, I was just. I. I flew from Israel here and we did like a one week Sprint there. Yeah, it's been a. Yeah, like I said, it's been a great time, like, and like building something that people actually like, use every day and like love is just like forever.

But did you get equity?

Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah.

Fuck, yeah. It's got a cult following, I'd say almost like, not. Not quite.

They built that brand on Twitter, so that's. That's my experience.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's actually, it's actually insane how much I think Twitter's contributed to like a very large valuation.

Like, but I think like, that's possible with that platform, especially now. Like, if you look at how. If I think Elon Musk put something out the other day about how Tesla started properly tweeting in December about like car updates and like just things they were making about and the, the impressions they're getting off that platform and the contribute. Because they don't do marketing. That's like a famous thing.

They don't have a market.

They have like, no spend on marketing. It's all word of mouth. But now that's. They've been their first active, like, marketing pursuit. And it's crazy. The impressions, there's a graph. It's just literally like the most exponential thing ever. They're getting hundreds of millions of impressions from these tweets. I think like, there's sub. There's sub niches for everything on Twitter. Like my. Our Twitter feeds will be so far removed from other people's like dtc. Twitter is like such a bubble. But it feels quite. Is quite big. But it's not.

Not.

It's not that big. No, a lot of.

It's a lot of a circle jerk.

Yeah, fair.

Like, it's like when I talk to people that are in D2C that don't know about D2C Twitter, like, what are you fucking talking? Yeah, they think that I'm joking. Like, they're like, are you serious? And then they'll get on and then like two weeks later, like, I can't believe I didn't know about this.

Yeah.

Then it's like there's D2C. Then there's like money Twitter that surrounds it. It's just like. It's like this is. There's this safe space in the middle. And then you get into this toxic extremity.

Hoes and cash, like onlyfans agencies, like.

A lot of it. A lot of the advice in there is great, but some of it's funny and it's just like, whatever.

Just like a lot of based on Twitter plates, red pill red and a rouge pill. It's a very dark red.

So funny. But even that seems big. But it's pretty niche. There's like a few people who are like massive in it, but, like, still fairly, fairly small.

Isn't it mad how the world. When you say, like, oh, the world's a small place, because I've been speaking to loads of BCs recently and so on, and literally every single one knows each other. They'll say, oh, you spoke to my friend the other day, this other fund. I'm like, what was that? 20 people in the whole fucking world that are in this industry. But that's what it feels like.

Yeah, it feels like this. It's a pretty small industry.

But then someone else in like some fucking steel mining industry will feel the same about their little club.

Yeah. It's actually insane how I do think that just like the number of people who are actually doing things in the world, like creating things is. It is very small. Like the actual number when you compare to the population of a city. Like, for example, we took London, like, and then you said, how many people are actually making businesses? And how many people are making businesses are online. First it's like. And then you compare that to like the population of the city. It's like probably less than 1%.

I think this is why, like, when you create rather than consume, you get. Yeah, it's such a good mind. Like, that's a. Such a funder. If you swap. If you stop consuming and start creating, regardless of vertical, I think your life would just change just by that decision alone. Just because of like the. Because not many people do it.

I actually almost. I tried. I had like a tattoo gun for a while and I tried to give myself a tattoo, like on my leg right here that said like, creativity over consumption.

Yeah.

But I realized and I. So I started doing it. My back. My back like froze up and like, I don't have the flexibility. So now I just have like a C on my upper side. I never got through the whole. The rest.

You use that ink box, semi permanent.

Freehand pen, finally get it through.

That's pretty much how the economy works though. Yeah. It's why creators and consumers and like there's probably like 99 consumers for every one creator generally.

And it's, it's always happened I think.

Like.

I feel like it's always been like that as well. But the gateways to being a creator has just become. The barriers to entry of being someone who can create and distribute stuff has become fallen massively over the last like 20 years. And it will continue to fall probably, maybe, maybe less. But like tick tock, Twitter, like being able to put things out is inherently easier. Whereas the method of, the method of like putting out a message was like TV and print media. Which the gateway to was really odd a while back. Which is why probably five people control the narrative of how people thought in America. Which is interesting, maybe a bit deep.

It's probably similar now for most people though.

Yeah.

Ships going on and shit.

People consume fucking mainstream news. I can't remember the last time I read a news article or news other than sport. That's the only thing.

Recently I've recently within the last eight months I've decided to kind of just like more or less be like ignorant towards world events and shit like that. Because it's just like it's not negative to know. It's not negative to know. And like at the end of the day it doesn't really affect us. And just like if you take all that like energy and just like focus on like the 10 closest people to you, it's like you're gonna get way more like return from that than just like taking your energy and attention.

And like I think it's privileged position to be in to not have to have like care about any of that in some way. But that's just like.

But then like I argue with my parents about the fact I don't watch the news and they're like, oh, you know nothing about the world. And it's just like end of conversation. But. But you say it's a privilege, but I think it's just how you put yourself in a better position, isn't it? By focusing on what you can control and creating rather than just mindlessly consuming. Most people will go to a job and they come back and watch the news for two hours or whatever it is.

Yeah.

And that's just like how Is that working for you? It's not even enjoyable.

Such an energy SAP, isn't it?

Exactly. Yeah, but then people are scared to create shit because you're always shit when you start and you don't know anything when you start. John. Mean, I think I wish I'd done more YouTube stuff when I was 19. I think I thought I had nothing to speak.

Dude, I've been trying to do YouTube for. It's like the one thing that I've like consistently failed at my entire life was just like YouTube stuff. And it's just like. Because I look back and I'm like, fuck. Like I wish I look back and like the videos I've made and I'm like, I'm so glad I made those. And it's just like, how do I have that much perspective? And then day to day, even now, like, I'm not, I'm not doing it. Like, I even just like it from like a personal. Like, like I look back at old videos now, I'm like, oh, it's so cool being able to just like jump back in time. It's like a journal, but like way more rich in terms of like, everything is yours.

More of a time thing. You don't do it because time and.

Like, I think I've always overthought it.

I was about to say, I think but 95 videos were you.

And do you want to make.

I want kind of logs. Like, like for a while I was just doing like. I was really obsessed with personal development and so I always wanted to make like a YouTube channel that was just like me reviewing like personal development things. Whether it would be like, like going to like a Tony Robbins thing or like, okay, I'm gonna go and like fucking do DMT and like document it.

And just like that would be a good series.

Yeah, like kind of just be like a guinea pig in a way. Like I always, I always really loved how like Tim Ferriss was kind of like the productivity person guinea pig of the world.

But you try ice baths for three weeks and be like, this is a dude.

So one of my most successful videos, me building a DIY ice back bath back in 2018. And it has like 400,000 views. And like I still get like Instagram followers of like people asking me questions like, oh, when you did this, like.

It'S a good, that's a really good idea for channels to be fair.

Yeah, I love that shit.

The thing with that sort of channel or just channels in general though is you'll say, oh, maybe it's not a good idea. Blah, blah. Everything's a good idea when it gets views the same way. Like every band name is stupid until they're famous.

Every logo and brand names.

You know what I mean? If Gymshark was small, you say it was such a shit name. Yeah.

Nike. Not even Nike's logo, like the Tick.

Everything is shit.

It's massive. Yeah. And it's like it's the same. You overthink it, but then you probably overthink it. But most people do it because they're scared of other people's opinions. I think, like they're fundamentally scared of it.

I think I've finally got past that YouTube stuff.

Yeah.

I don't really, really care about Nothing happened online.

What are you doing on YouTube right now?

Well, I have the pod and then I have this documenting the Journey series where I just make a shit video every week of me building this brand.

Okay.

And it's the ultimate accountability exercise because I'm just publicly saying this is what I'm trying to achieve and I'm literally updating people even when it's good and bad. But it's also. It's literally like it's me at that desk usually there's no production and like thousands of people watch every week.

Yeah, it's just raw.

But it's also. I don't think I've ever seen anyone start a business and make a weekly video until like hopefully the point where it's massive.

I think you'd probably get.

I'm also just doing it for me.

I also think yours becomes the. With this alongside the pod. It's a market activity. Like it's not. It's not going to drive massive growth, but it's still going to drive incremental revenue. You doing those videos to the audience that you're doing it to because some people will share that with people and then it's going to bring people into your ecosystem. I think like you could probably do it with foreplay as well. You probably get. His is just like talking about problems, reflections and then forward looking is pretty much it like this what. This is what happened this week. This is what we're gonna do basically with a bit.

Even now I look back six months ago. Like the first one is. Ah, that's interesting.

Yeah.

Yeah. I honestly would do it if no one watched it. That's like the decision I made.

I think it'd be good. You'd probably enjoyed it. Like that could be like it's such a low effort way to start YouTube. The key to it is having a little bit of a moat around your business so no one rips it.

Which I guess I almost think it gives a big emote by doing that. Because like if someone comes along and rips my brand tomorrow, like there's so much proof that I did it first.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I've never been someone that's like scared of like people like copying my shit.

Yeah, People are too scared of ideas being stolen. Ideas mean nothing.

That's the thing I hated about to be fair, like in the drop shipping niche, it's drop shipping.

It's like a little, it's a little.

Bit, it's like a little bit reasonable. But I remember like when I first started drop shipping, I would get around with like these new people that I was like meeting and they were all just like, oh. Like they. None of them would tell me what they're working on. And I'm like, well, how am I.

Supposed to have a flatmate and I live for them for a year. He would work in his room and if he's watching this, you know exactly I'm talking about. And he would not leave his room because I know he was doing like some gray hat shit and he just.

Dude.

I always found like, I remember like being in these like groups with people and I was just like, you guys are fucking like lame. Like it's just like if you, if everything has to be a secret, like.

Even in dropshipping, I think like fundamentally you're competing on market and you should just back yourself to out market them. Yeah, obviously like not in maybe the first two months of launch, three months of launch that you should try and get a bit of market share and not give someone new products that's winning. But beyond that point, it's literally. I also think e comms been this for a while. It's like it's just been getting product market fit and then the leverage has come in the marketing now it's tried. I feel like it's transitioning more to like supply chain and ops and bigger things. But yeah, like you shouldn't really.

The good thing about software is that even when like people copy you, it's like like I've had two messages from people. So I have this like thing. I'm like a pretty ruthlessly competitive person. Like I'm not. People think like I'm like anti competition in a way. I'm definitely like, not anti competition but like if someone's gonna like rip, rip stuff like, like all of my energy should go in towards like making them feel like they wasted their life doing it. So I have this like, tweet that I put out being like, whatever. Like, I have a bunch of copycats, like all like. And I just like have this thing that every time I find like a new copy pack cat, I'll send them a link to the tweet. And what's hilarious, I have like three now where people like full outs, just like copied the software and like copied like code from like our buttons and like all this type of shit. And then like, recently I've had like a few messages like that just like pop up in my inbox of like these people. And like, it's like the response to the thing they never responded to being like, hey, like, I'm quitting. Like, do you want to buy it? We have this many signups, this many, whatever. And it's just like. But that's the nice thing about software is like, there is just like, if you have like a good product, it's not as simple as like someone finding the AliExpress link and then just like running your ad. It's like, yeah, it's like much harder. The actual product can't be. There's a, there's a level of execution that needs to happen to like copy the product.

Yeah, it's like you stacking things there.

Typical wine break midway through the pod. So obviously triple whale and foreplay. Not a pretty. Not a bad position to be in. Involved in both. How old are you?

26.

You're younger than me. I'm 27.

I'm 25.

25? Oh, yeah, I thought you were gonna.

Say like, I'm 19 or something. There's always like, if you don't know someone's age, there's always a risk they're gonna throw everyone off.

Oh, there's the odd person who looks a lot older than they look as well. We were talking about one earlier.

He looks about 50.

Yeah, he does.

And he's what, 24?

26.

Fucking hell, dad. It's got to be a genetic thing going on there.

It must be heavy though.

That's like Robin, world's tallest man.

Imagine if you get to like 70 and you look like 110.

I think it has a bigger effect when you're younger.

One big flake.

Where do you think? Where is triple whale going first? Like, what's the vision with that? I mean, obviously, yeah, triple whirl is.

Like very much like large vision, venture backs to the moon type kind of swing.

Can you talk about that?

Is it already venture backed?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Can you say how much is worth evaluation or not?

I don't think I can.

It's I, I. More than I can. I can.

More than 100 million? Less than a billion, I think I've.

I'm pretty sure. On another podcast I heard it was around 400 mil, but that's me saying that, not you. I feel like I could be wrong, but it's, it's.

How many users do they have? Like, is that probably.

Yeah, yeah, it's like between 5 and 7,000.

Like paying. Yeah, that's where they put the prices up. Yeah, they probably. Well, last week I got billed and I was like, hold on.

It's bolt on features.

I think it's bolt on features. Or if your revenue.

Yeah. Increases revenue threshold. You probably pass the revenue threshold because that's like days. The amount of data they have to process through their APIs, I'm assuming guess.

Because Triple well have something similar to foreplay built in though I might imagine they have some creative thing.

They have a creative analysis tool to like analyze your own creative, which is much more of like a direct competitor to like something like motion.

Yeah, we use motion to be fair.

You mentioned that to me the other day.

Motion is really good.

So yeah, I was talking to Reza, the founder the other day.

Yeah, I really like their products and like Triple Whales is good. It's just again like we were using motion when that came out and it's like can I really be asked. Moving across.

Yeah.

No changing processes for anything. Yeah. It's got to be a massive step in value to change that across a lot of people. But there's works as well. I've used it on like a smaller scale. And the creative hubs. Good.

Is Triple Web pretty much trying to be like the data hub for online businesses?

Yeah. You're actually probably like throwing the ball a lot further than like the average person would see. But it's like right now we're obviously just growing inside of Shopify. Like Triple doesn't work on like WooCommerce. It doesn't.

It's not even just works on Amazon literally this week.

Yeah, this week just started working on Amazon. So but like the long term vision for Triple Whale is to be like a smart data platform for business, for online businesses.

The big data play behind that is ridiculous as well, which is people don't appreciate like when you have access to.

An island that's going to make a big offer for someone.

Like when you, when you have access to that much cross sectional data. If you're Someone who has the money to launch ecom brands or even just brands. I don't even. I don't even. Just the. I don't know. I don't know if you're allowed to use it. Were you allowed to analyze it? Like, they can't really stop you. I'm assuming if you pour it into the platform, the big data. That could be so crazy.

The obvious transition, like they could become something like obviously they could become like a lender, like Wayflyr on the side, except all the data. It's a similar thing to conjure that.

Kind of stuff's like obviously on the roadmap.

I know, like could become a fucking VC fund in itself.

And like you have like every piece of data about so I mean they.

Have like all the due diligence on every brand pretty much. Obviously they don't have the P and L and everything but. Well, they do to an extent.

But they've even got a product, so you probably haven't used it, but there's a product which.

The finance one?

No, not the finance. The one where it allows you to see cross section vertical and how your benchmarks, benchmarking against other people in your verse.

That's what status does.

Yeah, so they do.

But stylus is only against like. Is against like I don't know how many people, but like it's definitely under a thousand probably customers. And then comparing against like 6,000. Yeah, it definitely is just like more data.

What's the biggest revenue store? Not the store itself, but like revenue.

Bracket, you know, I know billion pound brands on there.

I want, I know one brand doing $400 million a year.

Can you look at all the dashboards of every brand?

No, imagine, imagine it. I bet early on you could, but not anymore.

Yeah.

That'S some clearance.

Go on Twitter and start calling out all these frauds. You're like, access to all their numbers and how about foreplay in comparison in terms of size? Well, in terms of where you see it going. And like. And also. Well, yeah, answer that first. See how that like. Because where does that fit into like your involvement in Triple World? You want to keep doing both? What's the deal?

Yeah, so I mean, the way I think about the doing both thing, like I've had lots of conversations with like the founders of Triple. Well, like they're like, hey, when you know, I'm public with the dam about like what our revenue is and like, yeah, a lot of times I've said like, why are you still doing dribble? Well, and like, I Very much in what I was saying before. It's like, well, one, I fully believe in the product. Like, if I had this when I was doing E Commerce, like, I think my outcome would have been different. And so I get a lot of like, just satisfaction from working on it. Another thing is that it keeps me focused on just like one niche. Like, I do think that if I, for example, were to like leave Triple, well, I honestly think it'd be a couple months before I had some other fucking stupid thing that I'm working on. And so right now I feel like the most focus I ever have in my entire life. If that ever feels like if that ever changes is like when I need to make a decision. But at this point, like everything is trending up into the right and I feel like I'm doing like the best work of my life at Triple. Well and foreplay right now, if that ever changes is like when I'll need to like make a decision. But up until then I've just been like, yeah, let's just like keep working hard and like as long as I feel like I'm doing the best work of my life, that's kind of all that matters in terms of like what I want foreplay to be. It's like I want us to be like the pre production platform for direct response advertising. And so from the point of like a media buyer needing new ad creative all the way to having the ad creative ready to go into platform, I think there's like a lot of. There's a large gap that we can still fill. I look at brands like Frame IO as like inspiration for like what they did for like video collaboration as a whole. I think I can do that for like advertising and, and that goes to like banner ads, like all of the other placements that exist right now.

We're tip of the iceberg, really.

Yeah. Right now we're just doing like meta and TikTok and even not building that entire workflow. So my roadmap in my head is build the entire workflow for Facebook and Meta and then eventually branch out to other platforms, just like allowing creatives to communicate better with the media buying teams.

Seems like Triple Whale would be a good acquirer for FourPlanet potentially.

Yeah, I do want to sell the idea. Yeah. So I do want to sell for.

Sell it to a business you're involved in and make the rewards of both.

Yeah, I mean it wouldn't. It's very like. I mean there has been like those talks like in the past, like at this point in My life. I have no desire to sell it.

Big power levels.

Yeah. But yeah, I want to sell it before I turn 30 and it's like my time, obviously time is your head. Like I don't always like work out but timeline in my head is like like sell foreplay before I'm 30 and then whatever. Maybe like take some time off and like in my 30s, like do like another like big swing that will probably be venture backed in like a large like kind of like my swing for the fences. That's what I want to do type thing.

Yeah.

I mean I think foreplay could potentially be that. You know, like when I think about companies like Frame IO like they sold to Adobe for 1.3 billion. Actually like met the founder when I was in New York last week.

So how. What's the revenue they doing? Software is obviously mad.

Yeah. So Frame when they sold for 1.3 billion was doing $55 million in revenue.

It's interesting because one of my investors and guy that came on air sold his business to Adobe for 120 million.

Was it somewhere.

And the ratio revenue wise was the same. Interesting. So it was like a tenth of.

That just to touch up. So why I'd be interested to ask. This is a question you're not gonna be answered. I don't con. They're shutting down Content Cow. Adobe, they've stopped supporting it, they've stopped putting money into it. Like my housemate Lucas, who's not called Contact anymore. No.

But Adobe Express. Yeah.

So they've just. But like it's still a separate platform. Obviously they just, they bought it to just roll it in and then get rid of it. But Adobe Express just isn't as good as Content Cal, which I feel like is just a problem. It's interesting, a power move. I just buy it and fuck it off.

It's interesting. Like look, I feel like it's like how often do you ever hear about acquisitions and then like, like you can like follow the path just straight to value, you know like.

Oh yeah, yeah.

It's just very unlikely. Like it just doesn't seem like it happens very often, which is kind of interesting.

I feel like they bought up probably both of those. Just.

Well, you want to be in a position as a founder where you get overpaid.

Yeah.

Because a fund has got to move money.

Yeah, yeah.

It's enterprise, the capital cycle in it.

And I feel like for Foreplay probably like where you see it going now and where it actually goes, it's difficult to see the end of something like that because it could spew off into so many different things.

Like, when I started it, all I wanted to do, I was in like this like really weird place in my life where like the brand was gone. I was like now with my business partner and I was like, kind of just like figuring out what I wanted to do next. And like, I had like very small. I, when I first started it, I had like a very small vision for it. It's like I just want to make 10k a month from this and like not have to do anything and not have to ship anybody anything and like just on subscription. And like, we blew past that. And so it's like. And in that, it's like, that's where it kind of like opened up to being like, oh, there's like a lot more out there. And then you start looking at other companies and like their story and you can start drawing parallels to yours. And so now it's like, yeah, like, I want to build a really big software company. That's.

Is there a lot margin in software then? Because like, yeah, it's pretty much. I don't know much about software, but from like, other founders have heard that they're just fucking burning money on development.

I bet.

Does it have to be that way?

It does not have to be that way. There's definitely a significant difference between bootstrapping a software company and then venture backing a software company. And there's also a big difference between like building a team before you have product market fit and after you have product market fit.

I was literally about to say that. I feel like that comes down to how fast you can get product market fit and how quick and how good you are at marketing to that early products market fit.

Because if you still don't have a product, people like, yeah, you're burning cash fast and like you're like trying to bring on new developers, new product people to like, figure it out. Like, luckily I knew the product I wanted to build. Like, I was the customer for it. And so it was, it wasn't as much of an exploration process, you know.

Like, I guess that also comes down to what vertical you're trying to enter. Because if you're entering something like fucking, I don't know, like an example, maybe graphic design is a macro vertical. If you're going to try and compete with Canva, you're going to have to blow some serious cash to get to a product where it's even close to. That's like, no one's going to try that. But like an example, whereas if you're building something where there's a clear problem that no one else is currently solving, then it's easier to probably get to Product market.

How long did it take until you had Product Market Fit? And how did you define that you'd done that? Like, just people buying it.

It's funny, I was actually, I was at a dinner last night when I was talking to someone about that because, like, a lot of people would say that, like, Foreplay has Product Market Fit. But there is this YC article. I can't remember who wrote it, but if you just like, type in, like, YC Product Market Fit, you can read it. But it's like this guy describes what Product Market Fit actually feels like and he's like, Product Market Fit isn't having people that like, paying you every month. Product Market Fit isn't having people evangelize you. Product Market Fit feels like people trying to knock down your door for the thing you're building. You can't build it fast enough. And even when you build the thing that they want, they still want more and they want to pay you more. And it's like he paints this picture of what Product Market Fit actually feels like. And so I would say in that lens, we don't have Product Market Fit yet. We still have to market, we still have to sell. It's not just like this, like, thing where it feels like it's growing faster than we could ever imagine.

Trying to think of some examples. ChatGPT is a good one.

Yeah. Where it's just like.

Yeah.

They just turned to a paid model today.

Oh, really?

Yes.

How much is it?

$49 a month, I think. Yeah, instantly.

Is that why I said the other day, can't use it? Yeah.

Well, so the paid one. No, that was just high demand. Like, there is a. It's got to a point. It went from zero to three.

They were burning $3 million a day on server cost.

Zero to 3 million users in what, like four weeks? Something like that. Probably the fastest growing SAS company.

Yeah.

Ever.

If. Well, one of. But they've just flipped on a premium model, which is 49amonth, which means you can access it no matter what the demand is.

Is that front of the queue? Is that a better version, though? Is it?

You also get. It's the same version, but you don't get limited by, like, you don't get limited by demand peaks. You get access to new releases and new updates. Yeah, you can do it from today, but a lot of people, it's hard.

Even use it, but I probably should.

Well, there's a lot of people who have built software on top of that. So for them it's like you. They're gonna have to pay for that. And there's a lot of people. And there's a lot of people that were relying on it. So it's probably tailors to them. And it also.

They could probably charge way more. Yeah.

But they will have just done it to a point where they're making enough.

Well, they have like an API offering as well that's based on credit. That's like people that building apps on top of it.

Oh, really?

Oh yeah. Like that's like on a credit basis where it's like that was before chat GPT, like when Jazz, like Jarvis or Jasper, whatever the. It's called AI. Like they built on like the API and all that kind of stuff.

Sam Altman's a nuts guy.

He'd be the next Elon Musk in it.

Yeah, he's. He's already. Already is. He's just like in some ways just in different verticals. Like, he's a pretty. He's what his. If you actually, if you read into like his background, he's pretty much.

I've read a lot about him.

They talked about him on like the most recent My First Million podcast. Yeah. And I was just like, oh my.

God, he had that much money?

Yeah.

He literally wrote a 375 million dollar check from his own money to this.

Wait, how's he got that much money? I thought he sold some stuff for 40 minutes.

That's what the podcast is about. How has he gone for? He started. He started. He was the head of YC obviously, which probably got him into a lot of seed rounds and a lot of money.

He also was like a investor in Stripe, which is like the best investment you could have ever made in the last.

Yeah, a decade, two decades, whatever. But like he. Yeah, he invested $375 million of his own money in a fusion. Nuclear fusion startup. Just like gave $75 million for cash.

Was he a billionaire then?

Yeah, yeah, massive. Microsoft offered him 10 billion, but then he had him. He made a great quote, like a buyout.

I thought they were investing.

I don't know if they actually. I think he turned them down, didn't he?

I thought the investment happened.

Oh, did it?

Yeah.

I can't.

Well, it was like. I was reading some of the quotes he said and like, it's just. It was, it was about like.

How old is this, Donna? 35. He's pretty young. Before He.

I don't know.

I don't know.

He looks about 20.

Yeah.

But his life story is pretty lizard. But he was talking about like accepted investment based on like a long like a 10 year time horizon or 100 year time horizon rather than now. I thought it was just really interesting. You said on your most recent weekly summary that you'd had second thoughts about the vc. What, what made you.

Yeah, I have. Well, perhaps be careful what I say because I still want the right one maybe.

But like what's, what's made you doubt some of them?

Well, two things. I mean I'm still going through that process. I think I was maybe naive into how easy it is and to raise money off BC it's very different to angels. So we raised some more money off angels at a much bigger valuation.

Jack. It would have been easier six months ago probably 12 months ago.

Probably, yeah. So macro conditions are you be the shittiest thing ever.

Probably the worst it could be right now.

Secondly was when I started to learn about press shares and so on. Yeah. Which I didn't know anything about before. Yeah. And then you actually realize, which basically means for anyone watching, hypothetically, if they put a million quid in at 10 mil valuation, say hypothetically, but then the business goes wrong and we have to sell it for a million quid and they only own 10%, they will get the million quid, no one else gets anything else.

So it's a bit like banks, like banks always get paid off.

That only really works if it goes perfectly. Otherwise you get screwed and they win.

Yeah. It's like if you take a company to insolvency and like if, if a client, not this has happened in a long time but if a client owed us money and they went into solvency, the bank always gets the money first.

Because they've got a debenture or something.

Yeah, because they've got like stakeholder that they have. They're more, they're a bigger institution so they've got more.

Right.

Like I don't know why but like.

Yeah.

So that.

And then also. Well, don't you need it like we're profitable last month. Yeah. I was gonna say you can grow. I mean it does, it does change how you approach growth.

How do you think about like so you can to raise vc? Just a context. Like you wanted to raise VC and then.

Yeah, I mean I don't really know where it came from initially. Like it came from a bunch of VCs reached out to me because the brand had loads attraction. It's an interesting space. I think it's very VC backable and like the whole. The thing I'm trying to achieve with it definitely fits that narrative, I think because I just, I'd rather go really big with it. I think it's is actually a massive opportunity, blah, blah, blah. Then I decided speaking to loads of them and I put a deck together, having never done that before, never spoke to VCs and just went on this like, process of speaking to loads of them with the intention to raise money. Because I just thought, fuck it, it kind of fit the plan for next year. But then I realized, well, actually we could just make a slightly different plan and not need to raise loads of money, which is kind of what I've done now. It's also probably a bit too soon when we're like eight months old, I feel like. But then even just going through the process, I've learned so much, the things they've asked me and like the feedback they've given.

We were looking to acquire a content agency actually in North Carolina recently. So we want to expand into content for the agency. We're looking to acquire one, add a studio and some people and just roll it in. And we didn't do it in the end, but we went through the process. It was really interesting. So now if I did another process, it'd be so much quicker. I think for vc it's possible in a business to have too much cash. Yeah, that makes you make fucking stupid decisions.

Yeah, I start to think that like.

And I also think if you pivot to profitability and then grow it profitably for a year when you actually in.

This market, when you go to rate. Yeah, it's not 2020 anymore.

If you go raise money, you'll probably get better, way better terms.

No, I think right now is like one of the best times to be like a bootstrap startup and like the entire world, like whether the next few months, like whether. I hate when people like be too dramatic about that kind of this kind of shit. But like, yeah, like, if you can like grow through the next few, few months or like, whatever. Let's just say it's 18 months from now. If like raising money is like in your future, you're going to be in a best, tremendously higher leverage position. Like, hopefully you don't even need to in like 18 to 24 months because like right now you're gonna be giving up the most amount of equity you're.

Ever going for the least amount of.

Money for the least amount of money. And so it's just like money is just like the most expensive thing right now. I don't know for like me personally, I've always just been like I, I, I've had like whatever offers for people to invest in like foreplay specifically in like other things you've done in the past. Like I've just never been able to like wrap my head around like I just can't like I can't make myself come to like do it. Like it just seems like so foreign to me of like some like what would I do with this money? Yeah, you know it's like a interesting.

I feel like it's easy to accept if you like I'm going to use this percentage for this, this percentage of this, this percentage list and have this percentage just in the bank for a bit of like safety net.

Well yeah, because as like this sort of ecom business like it would all just be like Opex and it would just be spending more on marketing basically. Like there's not like we need to fucking spend a million quid on some hydrogen cell fucking like machine or some bullshit. So I mean so it's, it's like it's a nice idea. I would just have more dry powder in the bank. But all you would do is actually to spend more on market and you.

Probably do it less.

Yeah, yeah.

Like you 100 would do it less efficiently. You can say you wouldn't but then when you're actually a position where you don't need to squeeze as much out of it, you just naturally become looser.

I mean if you look at the public markets like they haven't treated D2C venture backed companies like favorably. You know like once, like once they go out of VC and like into the public markets it's like, and that's kind of like on the public market is probably one of the truest, you know.

Yeah.

All birds horrendous. What are the hymns?

Isn't doing well, doing terribly hot group.

What are the other ones?

There's loads of examples. Tons.

Yeah there are. They're so bad. Some of, some of the valuations from when they first floated so now is so, so bad. Some of the worst investments you could have made. Yeah, I think it would be as you say, like it's not a bad process to go through because now if you do it again in 12 months you're gonna rip through.

Well you also plant a lot of seeds and just yeah build relationships and people get to know that there's never, it's never time wasted.

Definitely not.

And it's like a skill set in itself, I think, learning how to deal with like big investors and so on. It's very different to like you may invest, which is what happened before.

It's also like a whole other skill of being able to create leverage with capital. Like I think a lot of people think that when you get capital that instantly the capital in your bank is now the leverage. But like the actual skill is like creating leverage from the capital. It's not having the capital in itself. Like the person who created capital with the leverage is the one that gave it to you. But it's like having the capital itself isn't inherently like a leverage thing.

It's where you deploy it and how you deploy it through what vehicles, through what decisions that gives you the. And you need asymmetric returns on those decisions. If you apply it in like a linear fashion of like one to one return, then you've literally just burnt a lot of money that you got give them and you gave away a lot of equity for it. But if you can deploy it in the right avenues, then that's when it makes it worth it, I think. Do you think from a speed perspective, if you've got to grow a business quick, like it makes sense.

But yeah, like Triple Whale for example is not a bootstrap company. Like no, for the timing and all that kind of shit. Like they needed to raise money.

Are they profitable now? They can't be far. They are. Wait, they will have need to raise money because of like. Like it's such a car. I imagine it's such a. I don't know, I don't understand developments. The depth that is required to comment.

On like yes, a good example. Like I mean running foreplay now, is there a lot of overhead?

No.

Or is it really a case of once you've built it, it's kind of built.

I mean there can be a lot like it's. It all depends on like how you're acquiring customers. Right now we're acquiring customers like super profitably. Like we don't really run unpaid. It's all like a lot of product LED growth and like Twitter and.

Yeah, I was gonna say that actually we haven't spoke about that at all. Like how have you marketed it and built investment base. So like you've done no paid.

No paid. Actually I ran a little bit of Google Ads for a while and like it was saying that it was like driving growth, but I was like, I'm turn these off for a month and then growth stay the same and so Our biggest acquisition channels right now are SEO is like pretty good for like high intent keywords. So like when people Google like how to save ads from Facebook ad library, like we're the first result when people search like creative strategy or the first result. So that's driven a little bit of growth, but the conversion rate on that stuff's not as high. Working with like kind of like DTC influencers has been like really, really good building in public on Twitter. And then I ran a survey recently amongst all of our paid subscribers. So I wanted to just know like where did the people that ended up actually their credit card out come from? And like 28% was like word of mouth and so like a significant amount of our customers came from and like even like people that say.

And 72% was the midnight pod.

Yeah. Word of mouth. That's. That's great. It will have been higher than that as well.

Yeah, that's why that's like word of mouth as reported is always like lower than it actually is.

I'd call like Twitter isn't word of mouth but it's effect. It's an extension of word of mouth.

If I take word of mouth as a, as an answer and then Twitter is also as an answer, it's close to 50% of.

Yeah. I'd class Twitter as Twitter is people's thoughts.

Like is the reach on Twitter is mad as well.

Yeah.

I regularly get like 50,000, 100,000 views. I've got 11k followers that doesn't exist on any other platform.

I find it mad the way that he's. The features that he's brought out in the time frame that he's been in that company compared to the features that were deployed on that platform before.

Yeah.

As someone who uses it a lot, like it's actually insane how fast he's iterating on features and bringing things to market. It's pretty nuts. Which makes you think what the fuck are they doing?

To be fair, the bar was pretty low.

Yeah, it was, it was like what the fuck were they doing?

They're just burning money and playing ping pong in a big office.

It's like, God, it's just what he did in that company was so simple.

Yeah.

But produced such like. But no one was willing to do it. It's kind of crazy.

Yeah, it's crazy tangent.

I can't remember what we're saying before that. Yeah. So obviously triple. Well if triple whale raised, they probably are. I don't know if they are profitable but like with that kind of amount of users and the cost of the platform. It's not cheap.

I mean like to be fair, like so Triple World's main focus right now isn't profitability. I don't have an access to P L but like our, our KPIs are growth right now like not profitability.

Yeah, yeah. So not surprised at the rate they're growing in the valuation. It makes sense.

Yeah. So we're growing like really, really fast. Obviously like a company like that where it's like yeah, you're, you know, if we find a good developer, we're hiring them. That's kind of like the level of growth that we're at with like foreplay. It's like it's like right now it's just like me and a developer and like a few freelancers doing like random things and so on a month to month basis. Like our like our net is like even if I talk about like after paying are like everyone in the team in terms of developer and myself like our nets over probably 60% after paying myself for my time and paying for my time and like all of our stuff.

And so yeah, that doesn't exist in D2C.

No. The num like you would never get.

It doesn't even exist in agencies really. Yeah, you have to be running a fucking very efficient agency to expend that. Yeah, that's the thing. Once you get, once you get SaaS profitable, they can absolutely print money. I guess like not to do your platform injustice, but your platform compared to Triple Whale is just infinitely more simple. Therefore the cost of growth is infinitely higher for Triple Whale. But they can fund that because they've got mad product market fit.

Yeah.

7,000 E commerce stores. The data that must go through that platform is mad.

7000 e commerce stores. All of their Shopify data, all of their Facebook ad spend data, all of their Google sats band data. Like it's like an insane like disgusting. It's like billions and billions and billions of events that are getting trapped. Billions and billions and billions a day.

Like do you use the Pixel for your agency fines?

Yeah, Pixel's interesting.

Why is they can using it.

There's multiple different ways of the Pixel. It's like a big difference for you. So we. It's like you have to learn to use it if that makes sense. So like it's not like there is no single source of data truth anymore. I don't think from our perspective.

I don't know.

I don't, I don't want to like I'm not saying the platform because we use it across every client. So it's like you have to learn how to use it in conjunction with your on platform in conjunction with like your top lines, in conjunction with your Google Analytics. It's like it's another data point but it's still not perfect. And it's. Nothing's going to be perfect because that's privacy in it. Like you're not going to get those people back. Fundamentally it's. And it's going to continue in that way. But we do use it. Yeah, we use it for everybody. I think it's right. I think it's the best solution available from what's available from not only from a date like a balance of data, ux, UI and how easy it is to teach someone to use which I think is undervalued. Like when you teach in a team of 50 people to use something it's infinitely easier than North Beam and status. And again like I'm confident that definitely looks better. I'm confident that and even like I think it's the best now but I'm confident over a one to two year timeline it's going to be way better than the others because it's got way more tech funding and support behind it.

We also have like a significant amount more customers than those people. I think one of the highest value things are custom feedback loop is a feedback loop of just like thoughtful customers. Like even with foreplay, it's just like you would be surprised about how many people are willing to just give you feedback, give you the most feet more feedback than you could have ever asked for just like randomly on like a Friday night. And people are just like this is what I think that it should have. This is the way I want to see it. And it's like okay, thanks dude.

Like a especially especially early adopters. I was listening to a podcast the other day. I can't remember what it was but like there's there's a thing called Golden Cohort in E Comm. I think that was my first million again which is like your early, your first two or three months of customers accord your like Golden Cohort which I'd never actually heard of before but there apparently if you actually track their LTV relative to every single customer that comes after them, they have infinitely higher LTV because they were the easiest person to convince to take the plunge on your products.

Yeah.

And I feel like they're the perfect people to ask for feedback and like you're probably in that stage with foreplay right now. You're in that kind of golden cohort stage. Same with triple. Well, to a degree probably. Not quite. They're probably beyond that now. But like they were for a period and they're the like, like I'm just massive on feedback loops. I think they're the most powerful thing, whether it's creative to media buyer, whether it's, whether it's customer to agency, whether it's like user to SaaS. Projects. Like, just optimize your feedback loop and you'll make your product better and you'll also learn about what they want and you'll be able to bring out more features and more products.

Yes. A simple example for that for me is I kind of fucked up the first version of the product. So I put like a, an artificial sweetener in it when I was claiming all natural, which is just an oversight for me because I'm an idiot. And then like everyone commented, a, it's got a fucking artificial sweetener when the whole brand is like natural. Yeah. And B, it's way too sweet. So I just changed it to Stevia. Then overnight all those reviews just went away. Yeah, that's one thing. And there's other things as well, but like, yeah, if you just listen to shit.

I think it's also like surveying why they bought it from you. Yeah, it's like fundamentally why am I, why they use it?

I need to use type form more. I'd never look at it because you're.

Trying to do it, you're trying to build that community. But it'd be really interesting to learn about like what your customer base is and why they bought.

Even just post purchase surveys. I started like making them way more in depth. Yeah. How old are you?

The founder of, of Superhuman, you know, like the email, he has a blog post about how to find if you have like product market fit or not. And he gives a, he gives you a, like a list of questions to ask people. I can't remember them all off top of my head, but we ran it with like all of our customers and it was just like the most insightful like survey you could have ever done. And so like it was something like if, if this could only have one feature and you would still pay for it, what would that one feature be like? If it lost one feature and you would stop paying for it, what would that. It's just like these very pointed questions that like, I think sometimes some of these like feedback surveys can be so broad that people are like, I don't fucking know, man. Like, just like.

Yeah, right.

But if you Give people like very like spec just. And the way this guy has constructed these answers has been like if. If for example, it was like some metric that if you're over 46% on this, you probably have product market fit. And I know, remember when I ran it we were like a little bit over that and I was like okay, sweet. But the amount of like insight it gave us like looking and reading those answers because they're the most pointed questions ever that like allow just like normal people who like might not be thoughtful in that instance to give you like a thoughtful response.

You can also pull that forward. You can use it in feature development marketing. Like if you did a survey and you found that 89% of your customers were just replacing coffee with something that didn't give them jitters, then all of your resource should go into that hook and that angle.

Yeah, I definitely see more of that.

And that like you should make landing pages around it, that you should make hooks and content around it. It's like that kind of small piece of data is so massive for your resource allocation and how impactful that'll be. But no one actually does the feedback loops like we have. We didn't for ages for the agencies either. We're trying to find out, we're asking a lot. I'm trying to do it for the essence for at the moment around like whether the buying for themselves or gifting, how, how quickly they replenish products, why they bought, what was the biggest hesitation before they did stuff like that. Because it's really, really useful.

But meaning to set that up for ages. Like way more feedback loops and shit. I made this page called like the Lab. Yeah. Then I realized my type form has been on a free plan for six months. So I'd hit the threshold like months ago. So I was not getting any responses.

Terrible data.

Classic. It was like 30 quid a month and I wasn't paying for it. It's actually fucked. Where's your glass?

Here.

What are you guys mo. What's like, what's most like top of mind for you guys this year?

I just like making products and making fucking movies. I'm just a. That's what I enjoy the most. We've literally got a movie coming out in 10 days time. It's 10 minute film and I'm the protagonist with this girl. It's so fucking weird. But it's just like why the fuck not? I wanted to be a movie director when I was younger, like so why not just actually do that with my brand? And the movies got We. I'm driving a DMC DeLorean from the.

Back to the Future movie. That's sick.

Yeah. Who the fuck does that?

That's funny. I went to school for film. That's what I went to university for.

Oh, really?

I wanted to, but I wanted to be a documentary filmmaker. That's what I want. I just wanted, like, travel and just like, whatever. But then I realized when I was university, they also, like money and, like, documentary filmmaking. Money.

Yeah, exactly. I never wanted to be a starving artist.

Yeah.

So my mate, the guy I live with, Josh, he literally is exactly what you said, but he makes loads of money. Like, makes film documentaries for, like.

I want to do a documentary where we, like, follow customers for, like a week using the product or some bullshit. I mean, it has to be kind of scripted to an extent.

Yeah.

Something like that would be quite cool.

Like, George Heaton just did it.

Like, find your superfans and follow five of them for a week.

They do that on, like, quite a lot of magazines. George Heaton just did one with someone. Can't remember where. He just followed him for a day.

And it's like, yeah, that's him, not his customers.

Yeah, I know, but you could. That's what I mean. Like, same concept that you follow someone.

Yeah.

And you've proved the benefits. What. But what's your biggest focus? Like you say your biggest focus from what you just said is probably positioning yourself and hiring other people to do the other. Maybe.

Yeah, wells. Yeah, probably. Products are. There's loads of product I want to do. Ultimately, it starts with products, I think, like the culture on money, Twitter and so on. Particularly not so much D to C to it. Well, partly that, but it's just everyone talks about marketing, whereas, as you've said, like, ultimately, you can't mark. You can't polish a turd. Like, there's no point trying to market if you haven't got a good product. It has to start there. I think I do have a good product, but I want more good products.

There's no better, like, way to increase LTV than launching of the sku. Like, we were doing, like, mentor pass calls for all of our team at the moment. It's like a training thing. Have you used that?

I haven't used it. I've looked at it.

Yeah. So one of our. I was just. We've just got to the point with some of our team members where I physically can't part any more information on them because they're probably better than I am. So I'm just Like, here's some mentor past credits, book calls with whoever you want.

Yeah. Kenny Rock. I was, I was in Mexico.

I was just like, you go and speak to people who are better than me and learn and develop. And one of the calls, one of them took a call with a guy who sold an E Com brand and bought another and he was like, he wish you'd just launch more SKUs because every time, like especially in the first early parts of the business, because I think he said from 1 to 5 million, your focus should be on 1 to 2 channels and then launching more products.

Yeah. Because we've had one skew for nine months.

Yeah.

So I reckon that new SKU which is launched in nine days could completely double the business basically overnight.

Definitely.

I think it's better skew I do.

As well because I think sleep's more.

Powerful and it's actually good. I use it every day, every night.

Yeah. For ltv, it's massive.

You can.

The emails have impact but like nothing better than finding product market. Like fit with your customer base. With a new sku, it's just instant double. Like you say, not double, but probably.

Massive increase and new markets. Like we've only been advertising in the UK for nine months because we've sold worldwide but fulfillment's been. But now we're EU with Connor, Connor's warehouse. So yeah, we're going live in like.

Germany and again, I think horizontal scales.

I mean that's how to scale profitably.

So yes, do a million a year.

In 10 countries rather than trying to do 10 in one because the economies of it just don't add up with like CAC and shit.

That's what we do with TEV as well.

Yeah.

We're trying to still scale both but like my focus is in the agencies. I don't really do much from a day to day perspective. It's like marketing and position within the market. We've got a really good foothold in the UK in terms of like the brands we work with and the size we are.

Yeah.

How many employees you have? Obviously I see like the signups come through on your team. I'm like, how many people this guy have now?

We've now got 32 people at. So and we're gonna try. We're building a creative department. So I reckon we'll get to 40 by like maybe. Maybe over 40 by the end of Q2. Then the other tick tock agency's got 20 people, so we've got about 60 people all in.

Yeah. That is a lot.

80. 85 of our revenues UK at the moment, which is probably very rare for an E commerce agency. So like we're. Our focus is usually. And then also just continuing to solidify that UK position because I think like when you consume E comm information it's inherently focused on US markets. And I think there's an under appreciated nuance between the UK and US from a consumer perspective, from an economics perspective and just that E commerce market in.

The UK and it's launched in the US as well. It's so big in it.

Oh it's so much bigger.

You guys don't ship to the US right now?

I do. I don't advertise. There's.

I think it's just like incentives work better. Hard selling works better. People are less skeptical. Like you will find it so much easier to sell your products in the uk in the US probably because there's.

So many brands like Mud Water Everyday does for Sigmatic in America that are massive. And my idea was there's no one doing it in the UK basically. So I just brought it over to the uk, did it my way. But I guess it's been proven in America so there's obviously a big pie there.

Yeah.

So probably doing both just one at a time in it. Like EU first made sense in my mind because it's completely open.

It's hard to think how. It's almost like hard to conceptualize how much bigger the US market is.

10. That's bigger.

It's not even 10 times. But even like when you look at the incomes at the top end, the like the people who are interested in certain things. So exponentially bigger.

Yeah.

Like people like endure. I don't know. We've just started working with endurance brand in the us. If you compare people doing endurance athletics in the UK to the US it'll be a hundred times bigger in the us, not like ten times just because of that. That's just the market in it.

And.

Yeah, those, those two focuses and then just trying to build a team for Tev. We're just about to get an office in London.

Is that why Connor was in London you're saying Fred? So I'm in one eight house.

Yeah.

We're just wearing a synergy hoodie.

Might be getting an office in 180 house but I'm not confirmed yet.

Oh really gonna build a team. I think like that was a sick location.

We've got really good logistics and cost of labor etc where we are in Ireland. But like the talent. If you want to build like a world Class marketing team in Europe. London's the only place you can do it really. Five people in London could probably produce the same output of 20 people in the place where we've got the.

It was interesting we have such an over index of customers in. In like Denmark and Germany. It's like the weirdest thing like is agencies because it's, it's all agencies. It's like probably one third of our customers. I'm just like that's the fucking like. And so it must just be like.

A really like there is quite a lot of like if you went like thinking about geek out the geek house we went to. There's a lot of Germans.

Yeah, there's a tons of Germans.

There's a lot of Germans and a lot of them are pretty like gem. Like GEM guy for example.

Yeah. He's meant to come on the pod but he flew to Dubai when I was in Bali.

Like he's a, he's a good operator, he's doing some numbers. He's a nice guy as well but like him and all his network like he's got a pretty big network of e commerce operators in Germany like Carl etc.

Yeah.

Yeah.

How about you?

Yeah.

What are you focusing on is about you?

Coffee table books only on Sundays. So right now it's.

That could be his name.

It's like honestly finding some more like growth channels.

Yeah.

Or for like coffee only on Sundays. I want to find like a scalable growth channel.

Yeah.

Which like I don't. It's funny I was like talking to like Noah about this like last, last night. It's like I feel like that's always like the what we want but like with SaaS it's not necessarily like as clear as like oh you're gonna find a channel. And like to be fair like not that many softwares like grow using like meta and stuff like that. So but like I don't know finding more predictable growth or at least things we can like because right now we've got a good amount of profit that I would love to have a channel to put it into but it doesn't exist for us right now. So finding that and then also eliminating some of the platform risk for the business. So a lot of our value comes from the existence of Facebook ad library. A lot of value comes existence of TikTok and so with that is building a lot more features into the brief side of things and workflow features and so yeah finding like yeah discovering more growth and eliminating platform risk and just like making it just more of a Stable business. Like the two things are like the most. Most top of mind. And then, yeah, like starting to think about how I want to like build a team and like how big we want to build it and all that kind of stuff.

Nice. Do you have a team under you at Triple Whale? Is it just you?

So when we, when I started at Triple what we started building a team underneath me. But it very clearly became like, like very early on I very much became like, I. I shouldn't really have a team. Yeah. And so like I'm kind of part of this team in Triple. Well called like Commando, where we kind of just like are like build something. We build stuff.

Yeah.

And so I help very much with like the storytelling and.

Yeah.

And like positioning of the product and like the design of the product and then just like getting it to market as quick as possible. And I. If I were to like. Yeah, it just like works out super well that way. Like, if it was anything else, like, I. I probably wouldn't still be there.

Pump out features so quick.

Yeah, yeah. Like working on like a lot of like, really interesting, like stuff with AI right now, which is just like super fun to work on because it just feels you're kind of contributing to like the future in a way.

The forefront of like very innovate. Innovative.

I paid for like 500 fucking AIP pictures of myself the other day. Yeah, I saw this on Twitter.

Have you guys played with Mind Journey or Mid Journey yet?

What's up?

It's like a Dude, you'd love it because, like you can just like type in the most detailed generative. It's like Dolly, but it's been completely trained for like digital art.

I haven't heard of that. Journey.

I'll show. Yeah. So it's a. You go and you connect it to a Discord channel and so you interact with it via Discord. And so you can just like write out the most descriptive thing you want. It shoots it out. It shoots you for four different options. You can.

I'm definitely saying this, dude.

I like went down a rabbit hole the other day and I was just like making so much cool shit. Like, my one friend has a company called Wiza and it's like an email. Email scraping platform. And it's like their whole thing is like a wizard. And I type in like wizard working on a computer with glowing coming from his computer. Hyper realistic cinematic with bokeh. And like it spit out the most beautiful. And I was like. And then it was like purple theme and it spit out like the most Beautiful shit ever. And I was just like, fuck.

Like, I think I've seen them on Twitter, people being like, matt Donald's on Mars. Not to be like, nowhere near as complex as your example, but like, it's just like these mad restaurants.

Even for concept art, it's just like.

One of them was like night concept stores throughout the Milky Way or something. And it was like Pluto, one on Uranus, one on like Mars. It was just sick, but it's mad.

Yeah.

What I've actually been using it for recently is I'm like a big believer in like vision boarding and like envisioning your future and just like. Yeah, being like very clear on that whenever you're like, living your life. So I've been using it to create generative, like, AI pictures of myself in the future. Like, things I want or like very interesting things. Like, that's a great idea.

I'm getting on this straight after this.

It's fucking awesome. Like, like, recently I made one like I've always wanted.

Does it know your face? So no, like, can you upload your face or what?

There's, there's obviously like other like those tools that do the AI face generation. But this midjourney one, you kind of have to describe like a general, like, kind of like what you. And it doesn't look like 100% like me or whatever, but like, for me it was like I always wanted to. Growing up, I always wanted to be like, like a race car driver. And so like, for me, like, when I look at my futures, like, I want to like have like a. Whenever I have kids, like, I want to like have him like start go kartening super early and like, that's whatever. So I have like, AI generate this like, photo of me, like coaching my son. Because I just think like getting the visual, at least for me, it's just like the most powerful thing to like incentivize like action in your own life.

And be like, that's a great way of using it to be fair.

Oh, it's like part of me was like, fuck, I don't want to build an AI tool that's like vision board AI.

It's really.

Someone's gonna. Yeah, someone's gonna do that, right? Final question, which I ask everyone is very cliche, but if you had three bits of advice for your, I don't know, 16, 18 year old self, in hindsight, would it be.

I think it would be like, trust your gut has been like something that's like came up and I look right just back to Human life. Every time I go with my gut, it ends up being something I don't regret. It's like when I try to, like, overanalyze is like, usually when I'll find a situation in which I don't have, I don't love the outcome.

And.

Like, for me, like, lean in to, like, the chip on your shoulder, like, and don't, like, try to fix it. Like, I've went through, like, a few periods in my life where I tried to, like, fix the chip in my shoulder because that's what people told me I should do. But I think at the current time of life, it's like, no, like, lean into that and just like, you get a lot of value out of. Or like, you get a lot of.

Like, fulfillment and competitive advantage.

Just like, even fulfillment of, like, that's. Yeah, you don't need to fix that part of yourself. And that's a good one, to be honest.

Honest. Better than a lot of the ones we've had.

And like, I think earlier on in my life I was like, a lot less patient. But there's like, a lot of, like, value that comes with patience, especially when creating value for, like, a marketplace. I think you can, like, often look at people that, like, whatever, they're making like, a ton of cash when they're like 19 or like 20, like, inherently, like, those people don't actually create, like, a ton of value in the marketplace.

He's got you. You parted a good saying on me a long time ago, which was patient in the macro, impatient in the micro. Yeah, like impatient day to day, but patient on a longer time horizon.

Yeah, I think it's very true. Yeah. Any closing remarks? We could probably go on for three hours, but people stop watching at that point.

I don't think so. There's nothing for myself, if people want.

To use forklay, I can give them a discount code.

Yeah, midnight.

Yeah, we'll check that. Yeah, I guess. Closing remark. We'll chuck that in the, in the description to see if there's actually any audience of value watching this shit.

If you think you're a value, if.

You'Ve made it to the end of the pod, use code Midnight.

Yeah, that's good for, like, dropshippers as well, right? It's perfect for all that.

Oh, yeah, it's. It's cheap to the value. Like, if you're a dropshipper, most of your leverage comes from creating good ads.

Yeah, exactly.

I'd almost say it's probably most valuable to either a creative agency or a dropshipper. Because that's where your leverage comes from. It's. It's the cost that you're gonna put down to use it in your day to day workflow is so minimal compared to the output you're gonna get for it.

So yeah, we got some DJ and dropshippers like selling dude, some of the stuff I see getting saved in discovery, like people selling dick pills. There's legitimate people getting ads passed on Facebook that are straight porn. Like shit like yeah, like there's gotta.

Be some like AI thing that's getting.

That or they just like know someone or like paying someone off or something. I'm like how the are like skincare brands are having issues running ads. How the are these people running like dick pill ads to like porn?

But yeah, see if you're selling dick pills, use four plugs. It's the conclusion. And on that bombshell, cheers for watching the pod. As always, weekly episodes 20, 23. I've set a lofty goal of a certain subscriber amount, which I'm not gonna say. Yeah, we're gonna actually do a full year of episodes. Last year I did and then sort of didn't for like six weeks and then it lost a bit of momentum and I wasn't sure about the pod. But we're back on it. It's going to be a new location soon as well with some big guests coming. Subscribe as always, cheers for watching PE.