A Deep Dive Into Marketplace Expansion & Growth With Sparsh Mehta | EM Group Chat #164

So welcome back to Everything Marketplaces, where we talk with founders and leaders from some of today's top marketplaces. So this is episode 164, which is a really great group chat that we just had with Sparsh Mehta, who's currently the head of growth at Belong. So Belong is a marketplace that's making the process of renting a home easier and is taking the full-stack approach in doing so. Belong is also backed by top investors like a16z, GGV, and Battery Ventures. Prior to joining Belong, Sparsh was at Convoy, so some really great marketplace experience. Sparsh was actually a past Group Jet guest. So this is great to welcome back on where we started off with a quick refresher on his background, what some of his key learnings were from Convoy. We did a deep dive into Belong as a housing marketplace, got to learn more about how it's evolved as they've scaled. We discussed marketplace expansion and growth in more detail, and we also had a great group Q&A. I really enjoyed this conversation and you're going to find it a great watch to the end. So, Sparsha, welcome back, and it's been a while since your past group chat. So, you know, I'm really excited to have you join us here today. I'd like to start off by saying a huge thanks for taking the time to do so in advance. You know, so we have a lot that we're going to chat about with all of your marketplace expansion and growth experience, but I think it might be great if you can start off by briefly sharing your background as a quick refresher, then also for those that have just joined us here.

Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. I'll jump right into it. You know, I've spent my entire career at marketplaces operating primarily in a growth capacity. And within the marketplace world, I've seen a variety of marketplace business categories, if you will. B2C, pure software-led marketplace at LinkedIn with the jobs marketplace, B2B managed operationally complex marketplace with Convoy, B2C managed operationally complex marketplace at Belong, right? So I've seen some of those dimensions. And also seen a variety of ways to tackle the growth problem, more product-led at LinkedIn. At Convo, you know, depending on the business, it was either more product-led or sales-led. And Belong to this point at least has been more sales and operations-led. So seen a bit of everything in terms of what it takes to grow a marketplace and excited to dive into that. And lastly, for better or worse, you know, I've spent a lot of that career over the last 4 or 5 years in one of the more operating, more challenging operating environments as it relates to building a marketplace business, at least since the late 2000s. So, you know, no more free money, completely different environment and what it takes to be successful. All in all, a lot of great learnings and I'm excited to unpack that today.

Quite the background. And, you know, thanks for the kind of refresher on that. So I did want to, you know, go back to Convoy though, since that's of course a notable B2B marketplace. It's also, you know, referenced quite a bit. You know, so could you maybe walk us through, you know, your experience at Convoy and also, you know, specifically discussing expansion and growth with it as a B2B and more operationally complex marketplace?

For sure. Yeah. And then maybe I'll give a quick background on, you know, my time at Convoy and then we can jump into more of the learnings. I joined Convoy 2018 right before the hypergrowth Series C and left in 2021 post-Series E. So I've been out for a few years and if you're considering, you know, I'm sure top of mind is the recent news. I can only speculate on that if we do get into that, but I can definitely share more about my experience while I was there. It was an incredible experience for me, a launchpad for my career, and the team truly was special. I think for those that aren't from the Pacific Northwest, like being there at that moment in time in 2018, if you were anyone, in tech in the Seattle area that wanted to work at a startup, like Convoy was the place to be. And I joined the original growth squad, cross-functional team mandate was basically identify growth opportunities and pursue them aggressively and in a scrappy manner to build the next growth drivers for the business. And the team took many forms over the years. leaders from that initial growth strike force became the functional leaders across the company. So truly, I think it was a special place and time at the company. Specifically, some of the things I did, I did new market expansion. So I brought the company in the marketplace nationwide. I launched our first international market cross-border with Canada. And I also scaled some of the early incubations. new segments basically of the business, our refrigerated truck segment, our spot auction business. And at the end it was, and we can dive into this if interesting, you know, sort of GM of that spot business right around when COVID hit. A lot of really interesting dynamics at the moment in time in freight and was able to scale that business right place, right time, really 6x at one point was over half the business. driving all of the profit. So really wild ride. I'll pause there quickly and, you know, if you have any questions, Mike, and we can dive deeper into the learnings.

Yeah, no, that's helpful context. I appreciate, you know, sharing with us on that. So I guess, you know, to learn a little bit more and dive into, you know, expansion and growth more specifically, you know, what was that kind of like a playbook like there that you used?

Yeah, it was interesting. The playbook on the team was the initial growth team, right? It was very much And this is more sort of tactical, but I stay very close to customers, right? Identify what are the problems that they have that we are not yet solving. And then, you know, 3-person, really small squad, like find a way to solve that problem for that one customer. And if we, you know, find a way to do that, then scale and automate and solve for the rest of our customers. and ideally build a big business, right? So that was like sort of the mantra of the team. And, you know, a lot of stuff didn't work, but some stuff really did, like the spot auction business that I mentioned. And this was like really like scrappy, the spot auction business, just to give you an example, right? What it was, was if a company, let's say Anheuser-Busch, right? Big consumer brand, They need, they obviously have freight needs across the nation. They have large contracts with a lot of brokers and carriers, but often will have last-minute needs for trucking, right? Either 'cause their contracted carrier can't support it or demand changed and they need to fulfill an order, right? And so we are like, oh, that's interesting. Let's, you know, try and build a business to support that need. in a uniquely Convoy way. It wasn't a new business to the industry, but in a way that we can really have a competitive edge. But it started with, you know, folks behind the screen closely monitoring their orders and like bidding manually, right? And figuring out, okay, how do we actually start winning this business and then learn the operational complexities? And then, you know, because it was a cross-functional team, you have the product person, the engineer, sitting and watching the main, the person that's doing it manually build the spec, start building some easy product and then like over time scale. So that was like sort of the playbook for growth if I was to just abstract away what we did as a team. And we did that across various dimensions. Like every business that we tackled was the same kind of approach that I think worked super well because you can learn fast, fail fast. You don't have like the bureaucracy, As long as you have the autonomy and budget from the leadership team to go do it, I think it was a great way to build our business.

And I know on your past group chat, you actually mentioned sometimes, you know, growth can be at odds with ops. And since Convoy is an operationally complex marketplace, could you maybe share a little bit more about that? And, you know, I guess like, you know, if and when the right time to really be aggressive with growth is?

Been one of the most challenging questions to answer in my career, right? Working at operationally complex marketplaces. Because when you have heavy operations, like at Convoy, we had a support team, the brokers that when the automated matching system would not find a match, would step in and try and find a trucker because we still gotta fulfill every match. At Belong, initially when we started, you had local inspectors, local field runners. Belong's a real estate marketplace, by the way. So when you have an operationally complex setup like that, if you don't find the right scalable way to scale those operations, you are sort of capped by your ability to build those teams to support the growth that you could drive with your sales and product, right? So it's really challenging. And at Convoy, the thing we did was obviously very quickly, were leaders in the industry in terms of automating that matching system. We were the first ones to put mobile phones and a mobile app in the hands of every trucker at a time where truckers thought that would be crazy, right? Because then we could track where they are at all times, which is the first step to then automating this matching process, right? Finding the right trucker for the right job at the right time. And that took a lot of hard work, but then you pair that with then really sophisticated matching engine, which we built over time as we got more data and a great team. We really were able to automate a lot of those operations as we expanded from one market to the next, unlocking exponential growth as opposed to that linear growth if we were capped by the team of people. So that's just one example with Belong. When we dive into that, I can share more, but that was sort of the mindset, like how do you unlock exponential growth in a world where you're capped potentially by linear operational capacity.

Yeah, no, that's a really helpful example. So I'm sure, like, as you mentioned, we'll get to more with Belong. But I guess, you know, kind of looking back now, you know, what do you think some of your biggest learnings were from Convoy?

It's a great question. And I was thinking about this a bit before our chat. One of the most— there's 4, right, that come to mind. One of the most important ones for me that stood out is And this sounds obvious when you say it, but I'll share more light on why it was not obvious at the moment. Unit economics matter at the end of the day. And what I mean by that is the payback period on your cost of acquisition, right? That famed LTV/CAC equation. Are you paying back the cost of your acquisition in ideally less than 12 months, depending on your business, 12 to 18 months? That's really important as a founder, as an operator, to know what the answer is to that question and the path to get to that sub-12-month mark. And it's easy to lose sight of that in a B2B marketplace because depending on the type of leaders you have at the team, you might, especially if they come more from a technology background, potentially SaaS background, if you're building enterprise B2B company, which we were at Convoy, you might approach it a lot like a SaaS business. And that's very dangerous. Because SaaS businesses are inherently much more profitable than a marketplace business. The trade-off is there's almost no switching cost in a marketplace, you know, while you have lower margins generally, once you build and have that network effect, much higher switching costs, much higher cost for anyone else to compete, right? But the reality is it's not on a unit economic basis as attractive of a business as a SaaS business. You don't have 80+% gross margins. If you're lucky, you probably have 40 to 60%, right? And if you approach it with that SaaS mindset and lose sight of that, you can very quickly get to a point as we did, I believe at Convoy where the economics don't make as much sense and you're burning through a lot of cash. So that was, I think, point number one. And B2B in general doesn't have the same rigor, I think, as B2C for marketplaces as it relates to economics. But that can be dangerous for a marketplace. So that was learning number one. Learning number 2 is definitely like as it relates to expansion and network effects, right? Operationally complex marketplaces, I think you can easily get into a point where you expand into new businesses without considering like, is that new expansion adding value to the rest of your network, right? Are you actually turning the flywheel faster by adding this expansion or not? Or are you actually building a net new business, which is easy to fool yourself to do? I'll give you an example. Like, at Convoy when I was launching the cross-border freight business, right? It sounded attractive 'cause we were, like I mentioned, very close to our customers. Our largest customers were saying, hey, we have needs cross-border, help us support that need, right? So we're like, okay, that is reasonable. Let's try and figure out a way to do that. But what ended up being true was the supply, the liquidity of the marketplace that is truckers for Convoy was completely separate, right? And the truckers that did cross-border freight legally could not do any domestic freight within the US. And as a result, basically we were getting no leverage out of that supply base. We were not helping the broader network and we're building basically a net new business from scratch. Also, the decision makers on the demand side were completely different. Although they said, oh, like, you know, we have this need, but those guys make the decision, not me, right? So we're building a completely net new business. That's distracting. That's expensive. Don't do that. I did that. So, you know, when you're expanding, I think considering the network effects are really important. The third is I think domain expertise matters, especially when you're going deep into industries like freight and real estate. Where these businesses have existed forever. And I think we came in with exceptional tech talent that had never spent a day of their lives in freight, myself included, and repeated too many mistakes that we would not have if we had some freight expertise to pair with that technology fresh perspective, right? So that's the third. And the last I think is just Cash flow, negative cash flow cycles can kill you. And I think that is one of the things that really hurt Convoy. We brought innovation to the market where we said, hey trucker, we will pay you immediately for your business, right? That was like unheard of in the, in, in the industry that helped us attract a lot of truckers. But then we had terms with shippers. where it was net 90. So you're paying the trucker immediately, you're getting the revenue net 90, you're in this negative cash flow cycle. And as interest rates rise, your debt load for a business that scaled as large as Convoy did, it could kill you. And I think it had a part to play in Convoy's, what, again, speculating, but whatever happened there. So I think those were 4 of my big learnings coming outta Convoy.

No, those are really great learnings. So yeah, thanks for sharing with us. Hopefully save some founders here from some hard learnings, right? Yeah. Yeah. So I guess, you know, transitioning into Belong, you know, could you, I guess, briefly start, you know, maybe give us an overview of Belong as a marketplace today?

Yeah, Belong's a fairly unique marketplace. It's a fully managed marketplace for long-term rentals, most akin to property management as a traditional business. For folks that aren't familiar with the business, you're probably thinking when I, you know, said the first few sentences, Airbnb for long-term rentals, and you wouldn't be way off. And by long-term rentals, I mean 12-month-plus leases. So it's not vacation homes. It's like the home that you want to live in for several years. But the reason I said you wouldn't be far off is it's not exactly that. That would be more akin to, you know, Zillow's rental business. Ours is fully managed. And what I mean by that is we layer on the marketplace with service, end-to-end service. So if you as a homeowner own a rental property that you want to rent long-term, right? All you have to do is hand us the keys, collect guaranteed monthly rental income and forget about it, right? That's the idea. So we help you find the residents, place the residents, manage the residents through the course of the lease, collect the rent. So it's marketplace, but also a SaaS business at the same time. And that's what I think makes it unique. That's at least a quick snapshot. I'm sure we'll dive deeper into that.

I mentioned it too, as far as, you know, on your last group chat, you know, I was asking like what that new market kind of launch playbook looks like. And you mentioned that was, you know, you were in process of kind of, you know, figuring that out, right? You know, expanding into your first kind of market. So I guess, you know, like fast forwarding to today, you know, what goes into launching a new market at Belong? And, you know, maybe what are some kind of learnings around that as far as, you know, what's worked and what hasn't?

Yeah, it's a great question. I'll give you sort of the chronological series of events because it'll also help you gain insight into how we've evolved, how we approach that problem. But I'll start with the beginning. I was hired as the first general manager at Belong. The idea was the founding team built the company so far in California, primarily the Bay Area. And the challenge was, okay, figure out how to do this outside of the market we built as a founding team, the first market being Seattle, and then build the playbook to do that everywhere else, right? And at first what I did when I came into that role was I imitated the structure from California. And what I mean by that is that it was a very operationally heavy setup to achieve our growth and experience goals. We hired, as I was alluding to earlier, right, our own inspectors to get homes rent-ready, our own contractors to do any repairs, our own maintenance folks, our own field runners to get, again, manage tours, do all the things to list and lease a home, right? And that was what worked when we did it in California. So I repeated that and it worked for the objective at the time in Seattle where, you know, the objective was the intersection of growth, and a fantastic experience for homeowners and residents, right? And if you own the experience end-to-end, the hypothesis was it's the only way you can provide the very best experience and get the flywheel to turn and get customers to trust Belong as opposed to, you know, traditional old-school property managers. And, but the challenge was obviously what you're trading off is it made it significantly more expensive to launch any new market and reduced as a result the speed of expansion, right? So when I was trying to figure out, okay, what is the playbook to do this everywhere else? And we tested a few other markets, we quickly figured out, or were forced to, because side note, this was also around the time, let's say, I think a year and a half, 2 years ago when the capital markets changed entirely, the macro environment changed entirely. And we were forced to think through, okay, this is not gonna be a scalable way to expand because there's no new money coming in and we don't wanna raise right now. So how do we then scale a linear operation knowing that is the case, right? So we had to shift our approach quite a bit. And what we did is we outsourced our entire operations. So the inspectors, the field runners, the contractors, What we said is, okay, let's focus on what makes the beer better, right? Building that ops business is not what makes a beer better. There's companies that do that. Let's partner with them and then we can launch more scalably, not have to put down the capital investment. So, we did that. We were able to launch much more scalably, much more quickly. The trade-off though was the experience. When you don't control end-to-end, You, as much as we tried to provide a cohesive high-level experience to our members, we lost some of the high level of service we were providing. We still knew that would be the case and had to do it given the need of the time. But, you know, we're now in this phase where we're having to deal with, okay, we solved the expansion problem, which ultimately coming back to the equation of payback, It increased our LTV, right? Because our variable costs to, and our operational expense to launch any new market reduced. It increased our LTV per home, which was awesome. Sacrificed experience. So we're now in this phase 3 where we're saying, okay, how do we still have a completely— well, we don't have to hire these people in-house, right? But we also don't rely entirely on these third parties that make it impossible for us to control the experience, which the answer likely is build our own marketplace on that front of vendors, operators. So like the inspectors, the contractors, so we can control the experience and we'll see how that goes. We're like on that third leg of the journey now for that LTV and operational problem, right? And quickly, the second piece we focus on is we thought about expanding and going through that change in economic environment was the CAC, right? How do we reduce our cost of acquisition as we expand? And obviously there's all the obvious things you can do to reduce your cost of marketing, optimize your Google Ads, focus on SEO. We can get into that if interesting. But I think the more challenging piece, because that's like, if you know how to do the job, you can do that. The harder piece was we offshored our entire sales team. So we had completely onshore US-based account executives, sales development reps. I had to offshore that entire team with the BPO in Peru. And we're now figuring out what it's going to take to make that team work. There's some promising signs and certainly on the CAC side, like again, have achieved Reducing the CAC to where we need it. So our payback is now, you know, in a very healthy spot, but new challenges building in that offshore team. So that was a lot. I'll stop there. Hopefully that was helpful.

No, that was a helpful walkthrough, you know, taking us back to kind of how it's evolved. So you of course have some really awesome experience, you know, at Convoy and now Belong. And so we'll probably get into some of it more here with the group Q&A, but, you know, kind of like zooming out and, you know, from a high level, I guess, you know, how do you advise kind of like early stage, you know, founders and teams think about marketplace expansion and growth?

Yeah. And I think it's some of the stuff we talked about. And then I think one new more, one more learning I could add. So the first one that I mentioned is definitely unit economics matter, right? Don't fool yourself into like the growth at all costs type approach that no longer is rewarded in the market. Ultimately, you need to just build a real business. So focus on that day one. And that doesn't mean that you have exceptional economics day one because that's, you know, that's challenging, especially if you want, you have large ambitions and want to grow quickly. And there's a lot to learn as you scale, right? What it means is it should be one of the things front and center every day And you should have a path to get there because too easily, especially B2B, that can be forgotten. Expansion, the point to highlight is focus on deepening your network effects, right? So when you're expanding, adding a new market, ask yourself the question, is it adding value to the rest of your network? And I always go back to my cross-border example, but there's several others. In my experience, that is always the mistake I have made when expansion didn't work. It's because I was building a new business and fooled myself into thinking it was adding value to the marketplace. And that's distracting. And the last one is, and this is the new learning, I think just as an operator and quite tactical, but the power of daily quota. In growth. And what that represents is a mindset of daily achievement towards your goals, especially in B2C. I think this is critical. And too often I think we fall into a trap where we're thinking in weeks, months, and quarters. I've been there and I've done that and it's fine when things are going well. But as soon as, you know, things get challenging, if you're thinking in weeks, months, and quarters, Guaranteed, you will end up at the end of that week, that month and quarter finding that you missed your goals. The only way in a challenging environment when you're behind your goals to achieve your goals is to think daily, right? What are the goals for today and what do we have to do as a team today to achieve that number? And as you're doing that very tactically, you'll figure out how to do it scalably, right? And that's important. But that has been a really important learning for me the last year or so as we've gone through all these transitions and could not emphasize enough the importance of that. It could be the make or break and it doesn't mean you shouldn't have long-term vision, long-term plans and roadmap. That's critical. That's what gives you direction. It tells you where to focus. But then when rubber meets the road and you need to make it happen, think daily, right? How can I make today happen? So I'd say that's my third and biggest learning that I would definitely guide operators, founders all to hopefully adopt if they find themselves in that situation.

Yeah, no, I like that point as far as about the daily goals. So do you have any examples of that? You know, maybe some of what the daily goals and then also kind of, you know, the more long-term goals look like at Belong?

Yeah, so long-term, right, we have a vision and mission and we want to build what is the first at-scale branded company that makes both homeowners and residents first-class citizens in this rental, long-term rental world, right? And that there is no player like that. The industry so far is a lot of broken incentives. So a lot of bad experiences. I think everyone's had an experience where they hate their landlord, right? And that is like much of the industry. So we want to change that. And because it's mostly local property managers today, there's no one at scale and we want to build that brand that can achieve that at scale, right? And that's the true north because we can, if we do that, deliver a lot of value to all sides of the marketplace. But daily, that, you know, then you translate that to yearly. Okay, what are the growth goals to achieve that? What are the experience goals? And then daily, to give you the specific example, what I have for my sales team, again, thinking about growth, right? Today is what is the daily quota for us? It's like new homeowners signed on to join Belong, right? Whatever that might be in your world, what is that daily goal to help you achieve the weekly, monthly, and quarterly, right? And then how do you make that happen each day? And like literally intraday intervention to make it happen. So, it's 4:00 PM and say the goal was 5 new customers. And we're at 3, and typically by 4:00 PM we need to be at 4 to be at 5 by the end of the day. What are we going to do in the remaining hours of the day to get to 5, right? Like intraday on-the-floor intervention to achieve that daily goal. And as you do that, you'll figure out, okay, what are all the problems you need to systematically solve? And that will then help you achieve the weeks, months, and quarters. But hopefully that helps illustrate.

That's a really great example. So we're gonna get into questions here in a little bit because I know, you know, I promised our founders we would save some time for that. But actually, you know, one question for you myself before we do though. So, you know, what are some of the biggest mistakes that you see, you know, founders and teams make when it comes to expansion and growth?

It is, I think, some of the things we talked about in my mind, at least in my experience, right? Expanding into segments that sound cool and sound exciting, but do not add any leverage to your network and do not benefit your network is a mistake and is a distraction if you do it too soon. There's a point in time where you might need to and want to do that, but if you do it too soon, you'll spend too many resources and distract too many teams and that could be catastrophic, right? So I think that's a mistake that comes up often. The other, especially in B2B marketplace environments, Not having that rigor and focus on what are your unit economics, your payback period, and how do you get that to a healthy spot, I think is a really other common mistake that I see. And the third, which I— and by the way, all these are mistakes I have made. It's the only way I know. And the third is really that when the going is tough, especially, but always, I think best practice, Thinking in small increments of goals daily, hourly, as opposed to like, oh, I have this roadmap that will, you know, once we deliver on it, which will happen in a month, set us up to achieve next month. And then as most things go, you realize it didn't play out exactly as you hoped and it, you know, delivered half the impact you thought it would. And not only did you miss this month, but now you're gonna miss next month. Like, that's a recipe to lose. Like, make it happen today. And if you can prove you can make it happen each day, then only will you have the confidence you can achieve longer-term goals. So that's, I feel like I'm, you know, repeating a lot of the same points, but hopefully it really drives the message home because those are some of my biggest learnings.

Yeah, these are going to be super helpful. So we're going to jump into questions. Hey, Dimitri, I know I was messaging you. Did you want to come on?

Thanks, Mike. I had a question for you about how to do kind of experimentation in these kind of very complex, operationally heavy marketplaces, because that's something as an outsider seems much harder compared to like a typical tech company where you just run your A/B test and go to town. So how did you kind of do experiments? How did you use them to validate some of these growth levers that you were pulling? And what do you think is the role of that?

Yeah, it's a really great question. And even in operationally complex environments, right? You can do more traditional A/B testing for the parts of your business that are more software-led, your landing page, things like that, which you absolutely should do. But to answer your question, I'll focus more on the operationally complex experimentation that you would be doing. Go back to the model we had at Convoy on that growth team, which was sort of first proves that if you have a hypothesis, right? For example, like at Convoy, one of our hypotheses as we were building that spot auction business was with, if we have with the leverage of our data, right? Because of all the companies in the freight business, we have the most structured data. So knowing that we have that asset, and speed of execution, right? Because again, other freight traditional brokers don't have that urgency or don't have the ability to use software to have that speed of execution, right? If we do those things right, we have a right to win in this like decades-old spot auction business. That will be a competitive advantage. That was the hypothesis, right? Now truly to test that. There's a lot of operational components because you have to find truckers, you have to provide the bids in each TMS system for a shipper that is unique and separate. You have to service the shipments or no one's going to give you the next shipment and do it successfully, right? So there's all of the operationally complex reasons why it might not work. And so for that reason, you don't want to invest too early in the software, right? Until you've ironed out all those kinks. So what we did was like put, like throw a person at the problem, right? Put someone smart, a program manager behind the problem, one person spend all their day just doing it. And as long as they're a good generalist, right, will be able to execute the job but also extract the learnings and then guide your product and engineering teams on a roadmap if it works to scalably solve the problem, right? And you can do, once you start building the software, do A/B tests there. Like at one point we reached a point where we're like, okay, this human-led thing is working and we're already winning because of the asset of our data. Do we even need to spend engineering resources automating this, right? Because there's a trade-off to that decision. So, for some time we did man versus machine where we had a person bidding on a treatment group and then a control group where The early software and algorithm we built was bidding and there was a feedback loop where the, you know, when the machine won, we'd try and figure out why. When the man won, we'd try and figure out why and help iterate the system to a point where ultimately it was purely software-led. We automated the entire system. There's still the operational components of servicing it, which we figured out in the process. But yeah, that's just one example. Obviously, every situation is unique, but I'd say like find a cheap, inexpensive way to learn quickly and don't build too soon because when it's operationally complex, there's a lot to learn still.

Hey, Asparsh, I actually had a question that a founder asked and they wanted me to ask in the community that they posted in advance, which is around, you know, moving from growth being founder-led to, you know, making your first hire. So how do you advise early-stage, you know, founders and teams think about, you know, when the right time to make the first growth hire is? And then do you have any tips for doing so?

It's a great question and I will caveat with, I have not yet been the founder that had to hire that first person. I have been the first hire. So, you know, I have a specific perspective on that which may not apply always, but my learning there is it is absolutely imperative for the founder to do the job Until they have found product market fit, let's say, right? So they have done the sales job and gained the confidence in doing so because only when the founder does that, they care the most about the company, they know the most about the company, will you iterate quickly to find that product market fit, right? Hear firsthand from the customers what's working and not. And that is a journey that is invaluable. So I think the founder needs to do that, one of the founders, right? And once they found product market fit and they have at least the backbone of a process that might work, I think then you bring in your first hire. And then the first hire, as long as they're a generalist, which I think makes sense in the early stages because there's a lot to learn still. And if you bring in someone that's like, you know, 15 years of sales experience at large organizations with a lot of resources, systems, tools, processes to be successful, that's going to be the wrong person for this job. So again, who you find, I think for that first hire matters. But if you, in my opinion, find a generalist that has that hunger and ability to want to like replicate almost what the founder did and have that same passion for it, As long as they have the skillset, I think that's the right first hire once we have product market fit. And this is even if the, you know, the founding team is fully technical, does not have a salesperson on the docket, in my opinion, it does not matter. Like someone needs to go take on where that sales at, figure it out, or you're gonna face many problems down the line if you just brought someone else in too soon to do that job.

No, I'm glad you mentioned that. So something we always need to, you know, have reiterated here. Thanks for joining us again for the follow-up chat and, you know, sharing some of your latest, you know, kind of learnings and, you know, kind of going back to Convoy as well. So it was fun to chat through things here. And then I actually had one last question for you. I know I asked it last time, you know, if you could go right back to before you joined Convoy, what would you tell yourself about marketplaces? But I guess, you know, for today's, you know, kind of final question, you know, what would you tell yourself, If you could go back to right before you joined Belong?

It's a great question and I remember my answer from last time and I wanna give the same answer as the problem, but I guess maybe there's some insight in that. And my answer last time was almost like go eyes wide open. It's too damn challenging, right? Building an operationally complex marketplace is very difficult. But that is also the opportunity because if you do it, no one else is putting in that work to make it happen. And you then will put yourself in a position where you could win the market, right? As long as you have the right team and vision behind it. So there is a piece of that and I find myself wanting to tell myself that like go eyes wide open, but then there is also the flip side of that, which is the beauty of it, of not going eyes wide open. And I've heard founders give this feedback as well. And I think it's very true about marketplaces because they're difficult, right? Almost the delusion that it can be done is the only way you will make it happen. Because if you're too aware about how difficult it's going to be, you might not do it. You likely won't do it. And I think there's a lot of founders that have said, I wouldn't do it again. Right? But it's the delusion of thinking you can, and that's important. So I don't know what the right balance is between those two, and maybe I'm getting more jaded with each experience, but I try to find a way to convince myself that it can be done still. But at least I have more experience now to know what mistakes to avoid.

Well, once again, really appreciate, you know, joining us here today for the group chat. And then for those that are new in the community, where can we keep up with you at?

Yeah, LinkedIn, Twitter. Both great places. I'm very active on both.