How I Raised My Last Round — Lessons From Starting, Pivoting and Raising $30M

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I learned the lesson that you never count anything unless the money is in the bank. So I learned that in that was my lesson from the first startup. On the what did I learn the most from the second startup was two things actually. And I've done this for every company that I've ever built or participated in or co founded. We've never built, we've never written a line of code until we've actually gotten like we've sold the product in advance. So we've always started with screenshots, mockups, and we've showed people as if it's real software, you could click through it, but it's not real. And we've shown these things, gotten a lot of interest, and then actually started to build the software. So we've never built anything without having a customer in mind beforehand. So that's been common and I highly recommend that to everyone. The second thing that's true about every company that I've ever been involved in is that the first thing that we went out to build wasn't the thing that we ended up building. So there have been pivots along the way for each and every company, including what we're doing at Fellow. So these two things are true. One is we never start unless we've pre sold the product. And then two, we've always pivoted anyway. So these are two commonalities.

I need some traction. You need some traction.

Hey, what's up innovators, entrepreneurs, visionaries and disruptors. This is your Traction podcast host, Lloyd Lobo. We're a community of over 100,000 people just like yourself on a mission to help you get the methods, the money and the madness to explode your business growth. Featuring stories and tactical advice straight from those who've done it before, like Shopify, Twilio, Asana, and many more.

Hey everyone, Lloyd Lobo here, co founder at Boast AI and Tracktion. Today's Tracktion webinar is brought to you by Boast AI Launch Academy in partnership with Growth Lasers as You're joining, click everyone on the chat and introduce yourself what company you're from and where you're tuning in from. We usually get a very international audience from like Dublin to Dubai to Denmark. So let's see where people are tuning in from. I'm tuning in from Austin, Texas today. Aidan, where are you tuning in from?

So I'm in Ottawa, Canada.

Awesome. Cool. Let's more and more people will join as we go along, but really excited for the session. Aidan is the founder and CEO of Fellow App and he's here to share lessons from starting pivoting and raising more than 30 million for his company. Previously, Aydin bootstrapped fluidware to 12 million ARR and eventually sold it to Surm Donkey. And today his current company not only has raised 30 million from top tier VCs but it's also the number one rated meeting management software on G2 used by top brands like Shopify and Uber. So we're going to get into all of it, coming up with the idea, validating the idea, managing the chaos of pivots to product, market fit and escape velocity and then diving into fundraising in 2022 and managing investor relationships and everything el in between. Folks, you got people from Ottawa to Toronto to Rangers Land. I don't even know where that is hit. Everyone by the way, not just host and panelists, Silicon Valley. So people from all over tuning in. Aidan, thanks for joining us. How are you today?

I'm very good. I'm glad to see some other people from Ottawa. I know, I actually know Nick, so. Hello Nick, thanks for tuning in.

Fantastic. So you've had a super successful career. 2x entrepreneur, 1 bootstrap, 1.

Are we counting failures? Because if we're counting failures, the number is more than two companies.

How many counting failures? We all have to count.

If we don't count like many side hustles and side projects and those sorts of things. Three companies in total, one very successful failure and then one exit and then things are going well at fellow so.

Far, yes, pain is the precondition for growth. If you don't fail, you don't know what to do. I'd say like before boast, there's been two, three failures, three film companies, two bootstrapped, one funded. And the way I look at it is even both, right. Like companies are built in phases. Validation, product market, fit, product channel fit, scale. And yes, you may have raised a big round of funding, but that's success up until now. Let's see if it can IPO kind of thing. Failures Successes, all learnings to build something massive. So give us your backstory. How did you get into entrepreneurship? Walk us through your journey to fellow.

Yeah, so entrepreneurship was pretty early for me. So I actually grew up in New York City. And if you live in New York City you probably have parents or you have friends who have parents that work in Wall street or work in, yeah, basically work in the stock market. And just growing up I had a lot of friends with parents on Wall street and, and like growing up in the 1999, like 2000 era and seeing like the first.com boom and then seeing like all of these entrepreneurs basically build startups, go ipo, do all that fun stuff. And my brother and I, very young age, I think I was probably 13 and maybe he was 9 when we were doing this. We were day trading like all the stuff that people were doing now like post pandemic. I think we were doing that stuff back in the first dot com boom. And so we just got exposed to all of these like technology entrepreneurs doing these great things, buying their stocks and then we were like, oh, it's cool to trade these stocks. It'd be cool to actually start companies in this area. And so I think we, we caught the entrepreneurship bug then and then started doing things like building websites for other people while I was in high school and then took the first full time plunge probably, you know, once I started to work. So I used to work at Nortel, if you remember Nortel. And my first startup, the first failure was, was on a nights and weekends basis while I was at Nortel. And then after Nortel was fluidware which was the online survey company that we bootstrapped and sold SurveyMonkey. And then fellow, of course we got the idea for Fellow while after we got acquired into SurveyMonkey. So that's how all this stuff relates.

Fantastic. What were your key learnings from the failures and the bootstrap company that you rolled forward and helped you immensely with Fellow?

Yeah, so that's a really good question. So the talking about the failures first I think the, we had a pretty. So this is a long story, so I'm going to shorten it. But basically what happened was at some point when we were building our first startup, the one that that failed, we had an investor that had expressed interest in Fellow. And so a lot of our competitors were raising money and we were these kids in Ottawa, Canada that didn't really even know what venture capital was at the time. Again like we're talking about 2006. Right. So this is a long time ago and all of our competitors were starting to raise money and we thought that we should do the same. And we got some traction. Someone committed to invest half a million dollars in our first company and that was a lot of money back then. And he actually flew to Ottawa. I took time off while working at Nortel and showed him around and we talked about the business plan and all this stuff. And then I, I thought it was a done deal. I thought this was happening. And then I started slacking off at work more because I was like, I'm going to quit this job and then do this thing full time. And my co founders who were students at McGill at the time, they stopped going to class because they were like, we're going to end this and we're going to start this company and we're going to be funded. But you know how the story ends. The funding didn't happen for whatever reason. And so basically that killed our momentum and killed the energy in the startup and it was like, it was a death blow. It was like literally we were looking for this thing, so much was riding on it. And then it didn't happen and it just sucked the motivation out of what we were doing. And so I learned the lesson that you never count anything unless the money is in the bank. So I learned that in. That was my lesson from the first startup. On the. What did I learn the most from the second startup was two things actually. And I've done this for every company that I've ever built or participated in or co founded. We've never built, we've never written a line of code until we've actually gotten like, we've sold the product in advance. So we've always started with screenshots, mockups, and we've showed people as if it's real software. You could click through it, but it's not real. And we've shown these things, gotten a lot of interest and then actually started to build the software. So we've never built anything without having a customer in mind beforehand. So that's been common and I highly recommend that to everyone. The second thing that's true about every company that I've ever been involved in is that the first thing that we went out to build wasn't the thing that we ended up building. So there have been pivots along the way for each and every company, including what we're doing at Fellows. So these two things are true. One is we never start unless we've pre sold the product. And then two, we've always pivoted Anyway, so these are two commonalities.

The only thing constant is change. And don't be married to your solution. Be married to the customer's problem. And I love that. Sell shit, then build shit.

Yeah, a hundred percent. And this is really important because say you're showing someone mockups and by the way, this is still true at fellow. Now we're 60 something people. A little a few years into the journey, but we're still doing this. Obviously we're building new things. But before we just go into go off and start building something new, we're always showing customers in advance and we're like, hey, if we do this, how excited would you be? And it's not really about what they say, it's about their reaction, like their emotion behind it. Are they leaning in and they're like, holy shit, that is game changing. Or they're like, oh yeah, I could see how that could be helpful and it makes a huge difference. So I would say like, when you're doing this exercise, it's about the intensity and the emotion and like how excited the other person gets. And I think that's a way that like we're always constantly like looking for that product market fit, even as we're continuing to build and any product.

So definitely. And when you sold fluidware, you bootstrapped it at 12 million and you sold it to SurveyMonkey. You're a GM there for a little bit. What made you start Fellow? Because you could start a number of things. I'm assuming you cashed out well since it was bootstrapped, or you could do nothing. What made you start Fellow? And what else did you consider? What was that thought process of I need to do another idea? And how did you land on Fellow?

Yeah, so this is a really good question. I think it's super applicable to anyone who sold a business. But anyone who's, you know, been at a startup and wants to do something else or something new, it's very challenging. And the reason is, I remember when we started my last company, we ended up. It's funny how we ended up into online surveys. It was many pivots and we ended up there. It's not like I woke up and I said, I'm so passionate about surveys. I couldn't care less about surveys back then and I still am not really passionate about them today. But we got into that space. But I'll tell you what my market research was before we started Fluid Surveys. We didn't so much as search on Google for online survey software to see how Many competitors there were. Before we started the company. We knew that there was some tool out there called SurveyMonkey, but I didn't so much as do a Google search. This is how naive we were back then, right? If I had so much as done a Google search of how many online survey tools there were before we started Fluid Surveys, we would not have started it because we would have learned that you can page through the results. There's hundreds of tools. Building a survey or a poll is like the first thing that you learn how to do when you program. Right. There were a gazillion companies out there and had we done that, we would have never started it. So we were very naive and that's how we started that company. But it was, it was a little bit different for fellows. After SurveyMonkey we had many ideas that we looked at. And the problem is the next time around, now that you've been doing this for a few years, you're a lot, I don't want to say you're a lot smarter. I guess you're a little less naive. And so what ends up happening is all the reasons why you shouldn't start a company or all the reasons why a certain product doesn't work. And so you come up with these ideas and you find all the reasons why you shouldn't actually do them and it really stops you in your tracks. And I was in this place where as they were coming up with ideas, we were figuring out like why we shouldn't do that idea. And it felt like we were never going to get anywhere because we would shoot down any idea that we did come up with. And so what we ended up doing was we said we're going to set a six month deadline and whatever the least bad idea is going to be, after six months we're going to start doing that. And the reason is no matter what we start, we're going to end up pivoting anyway because, and most companies have some sort of pivot in there. And so knowing that it's, you don't want to take too much time like thinking of something or coming up with something because as long as like the general area that you're pursuing is something that you're interested in and it's a growing industry and, and a few things like that, you will pivot into the right idea if you are open minded enough. So that was like the preamble to that, but it was, we started that first idea knowing that we would pivot into the right thing. That that was, that was something that that we approached for both companies.

What are the top three favorite questions to ask to kill ideas or go through a pivot?

Yeah, so it's one is, one is. It's very hard to. It's very hard to find something that has never been done before. If you search hard enough, you will find someone who's done some variation of. Of something before. So nothing is. It's very hard to think of stuff that's truly. You could say teleporting or something like this would be a new idea. But for most ideas there is someone who's done something or a similar or something's been tried, but it may not be exactly what you're going to do. The other thing is the just understanding. So that's the first thing. So that deters most people, but I don't think it should actually be a deterrence. Facebook wasn't the first company that did a social network. Right. So just because something has been done before, it doesn't mean that it can't be done or it can't be done better. But the other thing is like what I would say the biggest killer should actually be founder, company fit. Because you just have to have a really compelling reason as to why you feel you and your founding team are the right people to work on that particular product. What is the unique advantage that your team has? Right. So for example, if I were to build a chat app for teens, I can tell you right now that it would likely fail because I don't think I'm the right founder to build something like that. It's just not in my a. It's not in my passionate area and I'm not super current in the area and it's just, it's not the right sort of company for me. But I think like what the kind of stuff that we're working on is, are things that I'm passionate about. I've worked in this space for a long time. I feel like I have a good understandings, I would say that which is, are you the right founder to do that? Kind of a startup is probably the biggest criteria.

Definitely. Fantastic. So let's switch gears into the initial idea for, for fellow or rather the idea before pivot. And how did you go about getting your early customers and then going through that? All customers may not want this. We're going to pivot into this meeting management.

Yes. Yeah. So that's a good question. So the original idea of what we were trying to do was. I'll tell you a story. So we sell this and we're almost like we're just under a hundred people and we get acquired in. And I had never done a one on one meeting in my entire life. Like I didn't even know what that was. I didn't know that you should meet with your direct reports and you should do it regularly. We had no board, we had no budgeting process. Everything was like cowboy stuff. Every month we would figure out what we should, we have extra money, let's hire someone with that. It was very like bootstrapped and unstructured and all of these things. And I had we scaled a little bit more, I feel like things would have really broken. But we got it. We sold the company right at the time before we needed to figure out all that stuff. We get acquired in. And then I get exposed to all these things at SurveyMonkey. Basic things like one on ones, quarterly business reviews, planning sessions, staff meetings. And so we start learning about all these things that managers that manage a scaling company do. And the question that we asked is if we didn't know about this stuff, how do other people learn this stuff if you don't end up working at one of these larger companies, like how do you actually learn this stuff? And it was really funny because if you go back to 2008 when we first started our first company, the way we would learn things is by using other software tools. If you use something like a Salesforce, you'll learn things about how sales processes work, right? Like how funnels work and how things start as leads and then opportunities and you'll learn about those things. So the question that we asked ourselves was why isn't there some software out there that will just like Salesforce can teach you things about sales? Like why isn't there some software that will teach you what you need to do as a manager? And that was the original concept behind what we wanted to do at Fellow is we wanted to start a manager's copilot. But then as we started building that and again we started with a customer in mind, we created some sketches. I showed it to some people at Shopify and they were like, sure, if you build that, we'll try it. And we built the first version and the first version was something very different. It was a Slack bot. So it was a bot on Slack and it wasn't like we didn't actually have a web product. And so we launched that within Shopify and it flopped. It was a complete failure. And they were like, okay, we got, we gave you guys a chance and that's that. So out you Go. And I said, no, give us one more chance. Let's actually talk to the users. Why isn't this working? And as we, like, really dug in and understood what value our software offered and what it didn't, we ended up figuring out that the thing that managers care the most about or where they spend most of their time is actually in meetings. And everybody complains about meetings. There isn't. Most people out there will not say, I love my meetings. They're such an effective use of my time. Yet most of the world continues to meet. It's not going away. And so we just saw this as being like a major pain point. And so we eventually changed the product and pivoted it from being a manager's copilot, which was the first thing that we were building into being a meeting productivity platform. And so that. That's how that really happened. But all this to say is that we wouldn't have figured that out if we were just sitting in our houses and just trying to imagine the future. We really, once we started to try and sell the first idea and try to move that product, did we actually learn that? Yeah, that's a problem that people care about, but what they actually care about is this other thing that's tangential and that really has changed the game for us. So that was like the core pivot that we made at Fellow. If you go in the way time, way back time machine, you can see original versions of the website where we're really like pitching a manager's copilot. And today what we're focused on as a mission is just solving the world's meeting problem. We want to help people have shorter, more effective meetings everywhere.

Fantastic. That is a great story right there. At what point did you think we have product market fit and did you have like, go, no go timeframe to drop this and work on potentially a different idea or a pivot?

Yeah, in terms of. This is a really great question. Like, sometimes you just have to give up and say that an idea is not working. So the first time that we did this, we definitely, when we were working on the manager's copilot version, we definitely, like within a few weeks figured out through the analytics that it wasn't getting the traction that we thought it should get. And so we very quickly realized that we should pivot and we should try and do something different. But I would say that the. You should never really give up unless you have exhausted all of your. All of your. Understand, like, if you're continuing to do the same thing and you can't figure out new ways to approach a problem. I think then maybe you give up. But I think like my default is you don't give up until you can solve a problem. Now, if you find out that the problem that you're trying to solve isn't actually a problem worth solving, then I would ask, what is a problem worth solving? Right. The notion of giving up, I'm not very much a fan of, but I think you should continue to try different things. But if you're trying the same things and not changing your ways, then I think that's not the right way to go either.

That is also the definition of insanity. Not changing your way and expecting a different result. Sometimes you just need more data. Sometimes you just need to talk to more customers, have them use it, see if they keep coming back. But at some point you got to figure out, what is that North Star metric or. Or have like a critical mass of yes versus no. Now, what channels work in the early days in terms of customer acquisition? What failed and what did you learn from them?

Yeah, customer acquisition. Yeah, sure. I would say, like the way that we approached Bello is the first handful of customers that we got were all founder sells. So it was me reaching out to people and then talking to CEOs, like other CEOs and founders and just saying, hey, can I show you this product? And it was very much leading with the product and showing them. Obviously, Shopify being an early customer was a huge win because it was like, hey, Shopify is using this. And when people hear that, they're generally like, oh, they're using it. Okay, you have credibility. Let's chat. So that definitely getting them as a first customer was a massive thing for us. But really it was just leading with the product, messaging CEOs and saying, hey, here's what we're working on, showing them a demo and getting them on board. But that was the first handful of customers. I would say, like the first handful. What we were trying to do was not really get sales, but it was more. We were trying to see that if someone agrees to use our product, do they continue using it? Because fellow is a tough thing to make work. Right? Because it's a every person in your company product. If you think about how many products there are that are like, every single person in your company will use them and they're technically going to use them regularly, maybe they're going to use it every single day. Like, you can maybe think of email and calendar, and there's not that many products that kind of fit that category. So it's incredibly hard to actually make something that succeeds. So what we were really looking for is, okay, if we can convince a company to use this, what do the usage metrics actually look like? So the thing that we learned from my last company was that we were not data oriented in the way that we should have been. Sure, we had some marketing metrics, but we didn't really have product metrics. Like we didn't really have in product metrics that where we would study the cohorts and we really understand user behavior. So those first five customers for us were about like tracking engagement when it isn't working. Like, why is it not working? Who's using it and who isn't. Like when they're not using it, like what, what are they telling us? And then not being hurt or upset by that, but just like using that as an opportunity to make it better. But once we had the first handful, we had to change our approach. So the thing from a marketing perspective that works best for us today is just from a customer acquisition standpoint. Recognizing that this takes a longer time to build is just content marketing. And our content marketing approach is super simple. Like we, our goal is to help the world meet better. So how do we do that? We have to teach them how to do that. So we create a ton of content around meetings, managing your team. And so this content helps solve the problem. Because part of the problem, no software is going to solve these problems on its own. Like, people also need to learn about how to solve these problems. And so I think we do a lot of thought leadership that way. And a lot of people get exposed to fellow. They can read all our content and maybe they never end up using Fellow the product, but they can walk away gaining some value from us. Now if they don't want to read all the content and they just want a product that helps them do all those things, obviously fellow is there, but it's not a prerequisite. So I think the way that we think about Fellow the company is we think of ourselves as an education first company. So we lead with educating people and then we have tools that will help you implement those things if you choose to use them, but you also don't have to. And I think like doing that has been really successful for us from a customer acquisition standpoint.

What about engineering shareability or virality? Because it's a meeting management product, it could be inherently shareable. Viral, what are your.

Totally. Yeah. Okay, so how we get like the first person in every company is 100% like that. It's. It's content marketing. Get people excited. We created this Persona called super managers. So super managers are. And we have a podcast with that name. But the, the super manager Persona is basically someone who's a manager who's constantly looking to get better at the craft, like the craft of managing and leading teams. So our content marketing is about finding the super managers, getting them to know the brand, learn from us, and then getting into the product. But once they're in the product, the product takes over. So to the how do we get from one person to the whole company? That's going to be largely from a product perspective. We have spent a lot of time, many years, we have a growth team. We run experiments constantly. Like we always have tons of experiments running in the product. And it's all about trying to get people to understand the value of inviting others to collaborate and use Fellow at the same time. A lot of the value that fellow delivers is through collaboration. And yes, you can use it as a solo user, but if we can get you to invite another person, get that person to participate in a meeting with you at the same time while using Fellowship, that's like a true aha moment for those users. And when we're successful, we can go from one person to hundreds of people within a company without ever having talked to anyone at that company. But that's also not always enough as well, right. Sometimes if it's a many thousand person company, there are other forces that will prevent your product from just like magically getting to all many thousands of people. So a human touch is also necessary. But definitely like the spark, the spark happens with the product and that goes a long way.

Definitely. When people experience moments of wow in your product is the time to refer them.

Right.

That's when they're most likely. But a product like meeting management is just inherently there to make that person to person connection and it drives more users. And by the way, I love your super managers podcast folks. Subscribe to it. Listen, I was on it not too long ago. I'm going to drop the link here, so please.

My favorite episodes is so good. You're.

You're too kind. But it's exciting.

Well, you were the only one actually. It was really interesting because you gave us a masterclass on community building, right? And that's such an important boses and traction. Like you guys are like the community people, right? It was really nice for you to break that down for us on the podcast. So it is a highly recommended episode.

People build companies, not the other way around. And I think your first community is with the people within the company. And if you want to learn how to build a company for the long haul, you got to listen to super managers. So check that podcast out. I dropped the link. And now let's shift to fundraising. So we went from unicorns being minted every day, sky high valuations, to a ton of uncertainty in the markets right now. And you raised 30 million probably at the cusp of this or in the last year when things were at the up and up, when, according to you, is the right time to raise? And as a founder, how do you manage this life cycle of always raising, sometimes raising, never raising? In the last couple of years, people were raising, like, every three, four months.

Right.

It wasn't like, I need this company to get to this milestone, and hence I need this much money.

It was.

That's always raised. It was fomo. It was investor interest. So how should founders make sense of all of this? When is the right time to raise and what do you need to have in your arsenal before you go out there?

Yeah, there are. You should. Yeah. If you play the game, you should raise money when times are good and when you don't necessarily need the money. You know how it is when you really need the money, there's less people out there willing to give it to you. So the best time to raise, for sure, is just to give you an example. Like, we had probably, we had a year of Runway Easy, like when we raised our Series A round. So we didn't need to raise money at that time, but we just. Time was good, metrics were good, everything was on the up and up. And we just. It's a great position to raise money in because you're like, like, this is our business, this is what we're working on. And if you don't want to invest, that's cool. It's not like we need the money right now anyway. It's a very kind of, like, strong position to be in. And raising from a position of strength is generally a good idea. Right. So that's if you can time it really well. So I think, like, that's a playbook that I would want to use is, you know, like, don't wait until you have three or six months left, you know, before you start raising raise at that time. The other thing is, like, try and raise when things are like, again, if your growth has been so. So. But then the last two quarters, like, you really hit an inflection point. I think, like, those are the points where you want to time it. The other thing you want to do is if you're going to raise, raise before a big launch, like a big launch is coming up, you raise before the big launch. Right. Not after. Because once it's after, then it's all about numbers. And maybe the numbers don't pan out to be what you thought. So there's some tactical things that you can do that way. But I think the real answer, though, to this question is you should raise when you have a compelling business proposition and you know how to put the money to work in a very effective way. Way. So I think that's the most important thing, which is like, what are you going to do with the money? And if you have a compelling thing that you're going to do with the money and you have evidence to show that you can take that money and do compelling things with it, then I think you are an investable company. Right. And investors are always looking. That's their job, is to put money to work. So as long as you can present a compelling case to put money to work, I think, and again, you have, you know, proof to show that is going to work, then I think you are an investable business. Right. Some caveats, obviously, like you can't burn $5 to make one and so on and so forth. But I think that's what we're looking for. Right. I bet you're looking. If I told you I have an opportunity and you invest $1,000 and you're going to get $2,000 at the end of the year, and you look at my numbers and how I've done that before, and if that makes sense to you, like, that's an investable thing. Right. So I would just break it down into unit economics. What are you doing? How are you going to put the money to work and your confidence level. I guess we can dive into this if you want. About, like, the differences between let's dive.

In, let's dive in into managing the process, building the list, when to reach out, let's go through it and I'll ask you questions. And folks, feel free to drop your questions in the Q and A tab or chat as we go through this.

Yeah. So I think there's a huge difference between seed and series A. The series A was definitely more difficult. Like, it definitely involves a lot more work. Right. So the seed was if a company is a spreadsheet and a story, the seed is very much story and almost no spreadsheet. And then the series A, there's like more spreadsheet and Less story. But even at the Series A stage, this is really interesting, right? And I was actually shocked that I got this advice. So we had really good investors that actually I know Via and Felicis who participated in our seed round that leading up to the Series A, they did something really nice, which was they allowed us to pitch them partially. They want you to pitch them because they want to decide if they're going to participate pro rata in your next round. They need to make that determination. It's not a guarantee. And so you need to pitch them anyway. But the other nice thing is that they actually give you feedback and how to make your pitch better. And what was really interesting was just to go on the story side, I actually got feedback that the original thing that we were talking about, they said that your vision is too small. Which is like a really funny thing to hear because I was much more. I think I came from it from an angle of practicality, like, this is what we're going to do with the money. This is what we did in our seed round. This is how we spent the money. These were the results. Very practically, we're going to take this money and we're going to do this. And this is how the business is going to grow over time. But what they wanted to hear was, okay, that's cool, but paint us the picture of the entire world all of a sudden using fellow or having effective meetings everywhere. Like, how can this change the world? What is like the, the world changing idea that if you, if everything worked according to plan, what can this look like and how big can that be? And I think like the first versions of what I was doing was lacking that. And the thing that I realized was, especially when you're raising from institutional investors that, you know, have the billion dollar funds, you've basically got to build a business that can potentially return the whole fund and then some. So you need like very major outcomes and very major outcomes aren't like very, you know, aren't incremental. So you may think a few hundred million dollars acquisition would be really good, but if you have a billion dollar fund that invested in you, they might not think that's all that great. And so I think like this is the, this was one of the main lessons that I learned was around like what you need to actually paint the opportunity to be. And you may know that, but you have to be very articulate about showing how big this can get and how big the opportunity can be. So that, that was a major kind of learning there in terms of the process we can go through. Do you think it's better to go through seed or series A or like.

In terms of the process, I look at everything in phases, right. And this is where founders don't focus. Like for me, phase one is validation. And having done this a few times now is what is, what does success look like in validation? And let's say a B2B product, maybe it's getting eight to 10 people to pay you to try it out. And then the next phase is product market fit, which ties to a series A, which is like maybe expand that cohort to 50, 60 people, you get a million dollars in revenue. But your high metric there, your key metric there is the leading indicator is engagement and the lagging indicator is high retention. And that gets you to an A is how I view it. So let's talk through like your process at seed and actually let's ask this question here. What percentage of the people? If you're in a seed, type 1 in the chat to everyone. And if you're series A or beyond type 2 in the chat to everyone. So folks, if you're raising a seed, type one, if you're series A, type two, and then we'll, we'll take it that way and, and hit it to everyone.

Yes. Yeah. So lot of. Lots of seeds. Okay.

Okay.

Someone is a type 2. That's awesome.

Type 2 is a series A. So awesome. Lots of seeds, Series A. We can take it naturally through there. So maybe let's walk through fellow's journey. Because you raised a seed, how big was your seed?

Okay, so we raised a big seed round. So it was a six and a half million dollar seed round.

Which, at when was that?

All right, so that was in 2018.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah, it was a while ago. Okay. But I will say this, which is, I don't want to say we raised six and a half million on a PowerPoint deck because like we were further along. And so my co founders and I, like, we were working on the business for at least a year, more than a year, and like we had funded it. I think each of us put in 100k into the business and we had put money into it and we were working on it when we raised a series A. So it wasn't just like a PowerPoint. And what we did was a couple of things. One, one is we just wanted to have a really compelling story. So I think for a seed round, what you want to do is you want to have at least a prototype, you want to have some users, and if you can have some revenue as well. That goes a long way. I almost think that these days, like, having some form of revenue is. Is very important and is. Is almost expected because it has become cheaper to produce software. Maybe you do a friends and family round beforehand and you get some traction. You get some prototypes going, some people using, you know, or at least expressing interest in the product. So I do think you need something like that. But ultimately, like, if you're gonna. So we raise institutional money for the seed round. And we also talked it up.

It was a safe.

Was it? No, we actually did a. We did a price round, which is maybe strange to do, but I think we did get a good valuation at the time. And so it. We did do a price round for our seed. So what. What I would say is the. A couple of things. One was that I. We knew at some point we were going to raise money. So even though when we first started the company we were not like actively raising money, I was still talking to investors the whole time, and it was really like chatting with them. Here's what we're working on. And by the way, like, we're not raising money right now, but I just, I want to learn and get to know you guys. And. And I was just like, building up all these relationships. And so I had a ton of relationships. A lot of people that were interested in the story. And I would tell them, we'll raise money once we can put the money to work very effectively. And that's going to happen once we have a product, we have a handful of customers. And I just kept repeating the same thing was like, once we have a handful of customers, once we know how to put the money to work, then we will come to you and, and we'll raise money. And so, like, they were familiar with the story for an entire year before we actually went out and tried to raise money at that time. So that was the thing. And even today, like, what I'm doing with fellow is we have no intention of raising money anytime soon, but we're still like, I'm still having those conversations. I'm still building relationships, I'm still meeting with new people, still evangelizing and telling the story. And when the time comes that I already have the relationships, it's already ready. And then we can actually run a process. Yeah, that, that's what I would say for the seed. It's. It's have a really compelling idea, maintain those relationships. And then, and then when the time comes, you just message everybody and you're like, it's now Time, like you've been asking, what are you going to actually raise money? Like now is the time.

Yeah, definitely now. How did you. Let's break that down a little bit, right? How did you get connected with investors? You've been at build a startup before, but what are your best tips to get connected with investors? Is it cold email? Is it warm intros from other founders? Is it warm intros from other VCs? Is it all of the above? Because you got to earn that right to build a relationship, to eventually say, hey, now I'm raising. So that, that is one. And then the second thing I want to dive into is a little bit about that fundraise timeline. So you decide. So you built these relationships. Now you're like, okay, you know what, we're going to raise a seed round. We have hit X metrics. What does that timeline look like? So let's start with how did you get connected with the investors?

Yeah, so this is a good question. I think, like I had a little bit of an unfair advantage because obviously had a startup that had an exit and just through that, I think I had a little bit of an unfair advantage. What I would say today is there are. What I would do and what I advise people to do is if you can get involved in an accelerator, I think it's worth it. If you can get into a Y Combinator or tech stores or there's many other ones, I think these things are worth it. Yes, you give up a little bit of your company, but I think what you get on the other side is you get a. You're gonna get, you're gonna make up in valuation what you maybe gave up in equity to those accelerators. So I do think that they are worth it. So that's one way to do it. The other way to do it is to just whether it's, whether it's events that you participate in meetups, that's another way. The other best way is if you actually have other friends that have raised money. Like asking them to introduce you to their investors is another great way. Like, investors in general are very excited to get intros from other founders. So if you have other people in your network, like if you've been to startup events and met other startup founders that have raised money, asking them to introduce you is a really good connection. So those are some of the things that I would do. What have you done or what do you recommend people do to meet investors for a seed round?

So here's the thing. I'll step back one and say the Number one job of a founder is to learn to sell. Right. You're speaking to media, you're recruiting, you're evangelizing employees and you're evangelizing customers effectively. Evangelism, right. You gotta be really good at communicating. And I'm an engineer, so I didn't always communicate like this. I, I was super shy. So you can develop hacks. Essentially, the more you practice in your mind and everywhere you go, and the more you talk to people on the train or bus or wherever you meet without saying I'm practicing, you're just evangelizing is going to get your story right. So that ability to communicate is one of the key things I found. Right. Clearly articulating and communicating your vision to excite and motivate people. So that's step zero, I feel.

Right.

And a lot of what you do in the early stages is that refining that messaging, you're going to speak when you're speaking at conferences or whether you're talking to investors, it's evangelizing. But once you have that, learn from your best sales reps. If you have sales reps, if not, learn to sell. But a lot of what I did was cold emailing, cold calling, combined with leveraging founders like yourself to ask for intro but give them a copy paste reason to make the intro. Don't just say, hey, can you introduce me to 10 investors? Say, Aiden, you're connected to BFJ and you're connected to Andreessen Horowitz and you're connected to this other person. And here's why that partner would be a good fit for an intro. Here's here's my business high level. Here's what we do. Here are the metrics, here's some social proof, here's why they would be a fit. Do you think you can facilitate the intro, make somebody proud of you to make the intro and use that same approach to cold email. And even if you cold email 100 people, I feel and you got another 10 people to make interest to those same people. I think if a VC is getting hit by hey, I got cold email. But then I also saw this person in the press to you retarget those people on your LinkedIn ads through some content if you want to really engineer it. And for folks like Aiden are making intros, that's a good way to build intros. For me, everything I did has been distraction, community. Our investors came through it. A lot of our key hires came through it. A lot of partners, we know each other through this because you came to the dinner we hosted at Saster. I'm sure Super Managers, the podcast and that content is opening a ton of doors for you.

Right? Yeah. So I, yeah, I 100% agree with you on the. On the learning to sell and also making it easy for people to do introductions and copy them in a copy paste format. The one book. What's interesting, I don't know, Lloyd, if you've read this book, but have you read Pitch Anything by Oren Klass? No.

I should. So I'm gonna drop the link.

Okay. I just dropped the link into the chat. This is the. I had a friend who, who all of us, like, in my whole network, we go to this guy about fundraising. Like, he's the fundraising guy, and we always chat with him. And so when I had read this book, I sent this to my friend Paul and he was like, holy, this is the best book that I've ever read on fundraising. So I know I'm building it up a lot, but there's many key things I learned from this book, one of which is you have to keep in mind when you're selling your company money, everybody's money is green, right? Everybody has this commodity called money. But the only person that has the ability to sell a stake in your very unique business with your very unique people is you. So, like, the actual. The only thing that's not a commodity is you and the business that you're selling. And you just have to walk into every room knowing that. Like, knowing things and approaching things from that way. And I thought that this book does a really good job of teaching you how to persuade. And there's a lot of, like, tactical things in there, too. But I thought it was, like, the best book on pitching that I've ever consumed.

And another book recommended. One of my favorite speakers is Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson.

He's.

He keeps coming to traction. And I've seen his journey as an engineer to somebody who's been a powerful speaker. And he recommended Made to Stick. And his biggest recommendation is going in, day out. Because the job of the leader is to communicate, to inspire and evangelize and excite people. And if you're. If you just want to inform people, then send a memo, send an email. But you want to evangelize these people, and you're doing it day in, day out. And what better way before you start pitching to the VCs and the customers that you really want to then pitch with friends and family and coworkers and do it on a cadence, consistently, not in a format where it's contrived. But you're naturally evangelizing. Learn to evangelize, kind of. So now you got these VC intros. You've leveraged cold email, maybe you've had some ads, got introductions from folks like Aidan. How do you manage the timeline? Because you could be raising forever and as a founder, you gotta build a company, right?

This is a really good question. I definitely did not do this correctly. But rather than tell you how all the mistakes I made, I'll tell you what I'm gonna do for my Series B, which is you have to run a very structured process, right? First of all, it takes a long time. So for the Series A, I think I spent an entire month. And it wasn't just me. It was like other people on my team too. Like getting together the story, the practicing it, Getting like the spreadsheets together, the financial models and so on and so forth took a full month. And then what you want to do is you want to have set a series time, ideally one week, where you have all of your first meetings, and you want to schedule these in advance so you know that you're going to fundraise during the month of, say, July, which is maybe not a great month to fundraise, but say the month of July, first week of July is first meetings. And then second week of July, there's the second and third week of July maybe is like second meetings. You leave it open for that. And then what you do is you tell all the investors that, look, do not send me a term sheet in advance. I'm doing term sheets, say in week four. And if you send me one out of respect for everyone in the process, I won't be able to look at it because I'm considering term sheets in week four. And this way you run a very, like a nice process where you know what's going to happen at which time if you don't do this. What's going to happen is each investor is going to be on a different timeline. And so some are going to work really fast because they can. And you're going to get a term sheet in week one. And then you're talking to these other investors. And now, like, you didn't even give them a chance to really evaluate the business. And it's not one investor is better than the other. It's just different. This Lloyd, is like each institution just works differently, right? They just have different processes. So I would run this very structured process. And then even the step before the week one of doing the first meetings, not everybody's going to come into the first meeting. So the way you get the first meetings is you create what's called a two pager. So we just created like a two pager document that's very basic. Like here's what the business is, here's rough metrics, here are the founders, that's it. And your intros, when you get intros, you send this two pager to them and that will. Are they interested in just looking at that very quickly? Is that enough interest for them to go into the first meeting? And the first meeting there's a pitch deck and if people lean in, you send them some more information. But the real magic happens in like the second and third meetings. But the other thing is you've got to clear your schedule because they're gonna ask all these questions about due diligence, so on and so forth and it's extremely time consuming. So you've just gotta be prepared for that too.

I can't say that enough. Our series A just sort of happened. We were bootstrapped up until then near eight figures in revenue and we met them through the community. Then we punted a series B. There was a lot of you raised, you got all this press. TechCrunch Venture Beat Media has become the unicorn pornhub. So you get all this press and then we got preempted into a series B which we punted. And I'm glad we did because you got, we went from 30 people to 120 people. And you don't want to immediately raise and freak people out or stress them out that hey, I have to run with a sort of gun to my head. But through that what I learned was the same thing. Bringing people along at the same time. There's interest in raising week one pitch them and a very data backed deck. This company called I forget the name Matild Collin Front Front. If you Google search, Mattel, Colin and Front, she has some great decks on her seed. Series A, series B, series C. And you can see the progression. See through series A is more vision, less data. And then it goes very data heavy. Still sharing the story and then bringing people along. And like a good salesperson would follow up, send a follow up email after that meeting and ask and maybe quote some things you really like and ask them what data you would like to see, tell them about your process, don't let an investor run a process on you like you said and close it four or five weeks if you can because you got to run your company. So let me ask you this, how do you Reconcile this allocation of time right between building product and fundraising. How do you allocate your time?

Yeah, I think this is different. If I were to look at the. This when we did the seed stage is really harder because you have less people working in the company. We might have been like maybe eight people or so when we raised a seed round or maybe six or seven. And so the. Yeah, at that time it's just. I guess you were just working a lot. Is unfortunate. The unfortunate answer because you still have to do everything else but you also have to do fundraising. During the Series A I think the team was a bit larger. We were 20 something people at the time. And you think leading into it plan that you're basically going to be close to off grid. Obviously you can never really fully disconnect from everything but it is I think for the Series A because you're more people, you can plan plan for it a bit more. But either way, even on the seed round you can do some things and schedule it to make sure that you aren't having unnecessary things being done during the time that you're raising the money. And I will second what you said on the pitch decks from from front. Those were awesome. And I definitely used the for Series A deck as a starting point of how to craft a story for fellow Definitely.

I'm going to drop the links and you can follow along. A question for you. What's the best thing and the worst thing a VC has done for you?

Yeah, that's a good question. I think the, the best things are always like introductions to other founders or other people in their network. Like this is something that through the course of the type of work that they do they just end up meeting a lot of people. So I think the best things have come from hey, we're having this problem or we're trying to figure this out and for them to introduce you to someone who just finished figuring that out or like recently did, that's definitely been the best thing. And then the worst thing, I don't want to give a cop out answer because like we do have good investors and I do really like them. So I can't think of what do people say for the worst thing. Sometimes some investors might like waste your time and not be interested and keep talking to you. So I guess like that that that's.

There'S a few worse things that could happen. So the one learning macro learning is always optimized for the relationship. If you treat people like a transaction and keep optimizing for the valuation and go high and high. We've seen that happen in the last year. And now everyone's raising at a down round. There are founders who get fired by the VCs. All those things happen. Right. So optimize for the relationship because when the first hardship hits, they're going to help you navigate it and be there. So that's one. And then in terms of VCs, they never say no. So read the signal. It's interesting from anybody, whether it's you're meeting somebody for the first time at a bar or it's a customer or it's a vc, it's interesting. Means I'm not interested. Right, right. And so give them some data. And then the other key, learning, I noticed was much like a sales process. Let's say you have a four week fundraising process between each week, say first week, you're doing pitches, then you send a follow up email, they request all this data, you put together a data room. And that is super valuable, having all the right metrics and your finances being in order to. They should have follow up questions happening pretty rapidly. If people start ghosting you, and that's a very common thing VCs do, they ghost you. Ghosting means no. They just don't have it in their heart to burn the relationship with you by saying no. Ghosting means like from anybody. If your wife is not responding to you over a day, she's ghosting you, she's pissed off about something or unhappy about something. It's the same thing. It's all humans. Do business with humans. That was my learning. So here there's a question from Betty. She's like, when in the year would you consider the best time or month to pitch if the summer is bad? So what I. Let me rephrase. What I heard from Aidan is as a founder, it's important to keep building relationships with VCs. That's part of what you do with VCs and customers and whatnot. And then when your metrics are on the up and up or looking like maybe one or two quarters of good metrics and you need the money, of course, don't wait for running out of money six months. But let's say you, you're getting on that 12 to 18 month Runway, then you start a process and you signal to all of them. But is that accurately summarized?

It is accurately summarized. I think the people say don't raise money in things like July or maybe don't raise money in December. But I'm sure you have friends that have like, we raised our seed round in July, I think. And, and I think we have many friends that raised money in December. Right.

We closed the 30 million Canadian or 23 million USD around in December.

Yeah, there you go. I think like some people may be on vacation during those times. And that's true. Maybe some months are better than others, but I don't think it matters all that much. I think it's more what you said. If your metrics are really good, things are trending up and you know, exactly like the iron is hot right now, I would go and not really wait.

VCs have a job to do, which is invest in the best companies that fit their thesis that will deliver an outsized return. And if you look at it, customers.

Have the same job is finding products.

That solve their problem. Right. And so they don't sleep, they're like in the back of their mind, they're thinking about it. And if something comes across them that fits that profile or solves that outsize return requirement, they're going to lean in. Right. And so your job is to make them lean in, essentially. I want to get into some, some final questions here. It's been a very interesting conversation way past the top of the hour. What is the CEO's most important responsibility when building a company? Right, you run fellow, you're running one of the top podcasts and building people here, super managers. What advice do you have for people? You've raised a lot of money, right? But like, ultimately to take it from A to B to C to ipo, you need people. So what is your advice there?

Yeah, I think the. So the job of the CEO is another sort of question. But here's what I've learned. So I've Talked to over 100 managers, like leaders on, on the super Managers podcast. And the thing that I've noticed amongst like the best managers and leaders in the world is that they are treating the art of manag people like athletes treat playing professional sports, like professional athletes literally. They tape themselves, they get coaching, they watch the tapes, they mark it up, and then they practice and they do drills. The best managers and leaders in the world are doing that in their role. Like, they practice, giving feedback in the right way, they journal and they keep track of, oh, that message that I communicated, did it land well? Oh, that hiring decision that I made, it didn't go as well as I thought. Why? Oh, I didn't do a great job of setting expectations with this person. What can I learn from that process so that I can get better at that? Like these sorts of things like they're doing that on a tactical level. They're getting coaching. Like investing in coaching is always a really good idea, especially with people management stuff. I find that it's really helpful. So these are the things like you're just like professional athletes and they play that game because they want to continue to get better at what they do. And I think that's also true for the job of the CEO. Is one of my goals is over the course of the next 40 years I want to be world class at what I do. And it's going to be a 40 year journey, but I want to reflect and get better at it all the time so that over the next 40 years I can, I can be the best that I could be at my role. And I think, I think like that's the just like the attitude that a lot of super managers have.

This coach thing is very interesting. Founders the last people to get coaches. And for every sport to play at the top level you need a coach. What are your top recommendations in finding the right coach?

Yeah, so I think like the, so it's interesting. So I've had a few now and what I would say is the most important thing is rapport. Because you really want someone that you very much jive with and like you really respect and enjoy talking with them and so on and so forth. And a coach is different than a mentor. Right? A coach doesn't necessarily need to have built a 10 billion company before to be able to coach you, although that's always useful. I think it's more about the rapport that you have because this is like an external observer that can like hear what you're saying, hear your problems. But ultimately a lot of the problems you solve, you're going to solve. But it's really hard to be the external observer for yourself. And so I think a coach helps you do that, helps point out things that you're doing. And yeah, I think like the rapport thing is probably obviously get a certified coach, someone who actually does that and has been through the training and so on and so forth. Not just like any random person but, but yeah, assuming you, you do that. I think rapport is the most important thing.

Fantastic. Past the top of the hour, I'm still enjoying the conversation. I think we can go for hours, but let's take a few in rapid fashion as you now go towards series B and scale. How do you define success? What KPIs do you recommend measuring?

Yeah, the one thing that I look at is I would love to. This is for a SaaS business. So I think the things that like and David Sachs, who's an investor through Kraft and in our series A has a lot of great content on this. The things that I look at right now are things like the burn multiple. So the burn multiple is the amount of money you burn like in comparison to your ARR. So if you add a dollar of ARR, like how much money are you burning? And so for ser, like to get to series B, we want to be at like 1.5 and below. So that's the threshold that I look at more. And I also look at the magic number that kind of tells me about just on a sales and marketing perspective, how effective is our customer acquisition and adding customers? So these are two things I pay attention to.

Fantastic. And any sort of key learnings you picked up in building a high growth team and culture without breaking the things that made you great.

Yeah, this is a really good question. You know what I realized is sometimes it's good to digest and not be like some. Sometimes it's like not every area of your company is ready to scale and you really have to pay attention to that. And if certain teams, certain processes, certain people, it might not be the right time to scale that part of your business. So you have to be very strategic about which areas do I scale and expand and which areas do I not? And sometimes you scale a bit. It's okay to take digest all the people you just hired, make sure everyone's working together and so on and so forth. So I think it's not growth at all costs, it's sustainable growth so that you don't build this big pile of jelly that's all wiggly and it's going to fall over. So I think like you want to build, but build with purpose and make sure you have the systems in place to support the scale.

As you look back at your journey, what was the lowest point in your career and how did you navigate it?

Ha. You're going to be surprised with my answer. Yeah, so I think like the lowest point, like emotionally the lowest point was so we sell the company and it's you'll get through this experience and you haven't had an exit yet.

In a way, I recently exited both day to day. We brought in a new CEO, right? Yeah, as well, but because we were a bootstrap company. So I did not sell that.

Okay, cool. Awesome. So you know how it is. It was like basically 24 hours of euphoria. Like you're top of the world. You built something that another Company like wants to buy. It's a great outcome for everyone. Everyone's really happy. And then after those 24 hours, I think it was like six months of. I was just like depressed. I was like, what did I do? Because you become one with the company, right? Your company is your identity. It's like all day and night, like that's all you do. And then all of a sudden when you sell your identity, who are you?

I'm going through that, right, that, you know, we had bootstrapped the company, we raised the big round and then we, we realized that post eight figures, there's a different playbook. And I had a third kid and I hadn't seen my kids grow up the other two. And so the timing was right to transition as a founder. We brought in a great CEO who's been like CTO at Sage and two other big unicorns came recommended by our board member who also sold her company last year for a billion. But now I'm going through this, oh, what do I do? Like my cup. My, my name is. Luckily my name is also tied to traction. But it's like you, it's like you raise a child, a daughter, and then she leaves her house or son, right? That's the feeling. It, it is. And now I can't spend time with it and I gotta move on.

Yeah, it's, it's totally true. So I think. And then the other part is that you, and this is stuff that like you work on and you realize that your identity is not the company and so on and so forth. But I think, yeah, it's a, that was probably. But I learned a lot. I learned a lot about like my, myself and what motivates me and like how I can keep motivated as I continue for the coming decades. Right. Continuing to build companies and yeah, so that, that's my story there.

The ups and downs of entrepreneurship come at the cost of immense mental health, family sacrifices and physical health. And for me it's prioritized those things. I'm writing a book on community led growth. I signed a deal. So that's getting me going, working out every day. You prioritize that, you prioritize time with the family and soon you realize that you gotta take on other projects and self care is not selfish. You can take self care on as its own startup and become a better version of yourself because how you take care of yourself will manifest itself physically, mentally, professionally, in all different walks here. What's one piece of unconventional advice that people typically ignore but shouldn't? Maybe managers Maybe leaders.

Yeah. So I'm gonna flip that question a little bit and say that my, my biggest advice is to be very careful before taking advice, which is the problem is people give you all sorts of advice. And the problem is like, the advice is all context based, right? It, like, it really depends. Like, I could tell you, hey, you should do this or you should do that. But like, my where I'm bringing that from is like, from my context and from my unique experience in a very specific circumstance. Right. If you advice, follow advice blindly, you can actually get into really big trouble. And I think a lot of people look at other successful companies and they're like, oh, they do this and so we should do that. And it could be that they're successful in spite of themselves screwing up that way. One of my favorite things was I was chatting with the former head of growth at Slack and he was saying that Aiden, like, people copy all these things we do in Slack and they're like, oh, we copied your onboarding and we copied like this thing. And he's laughing because he's. That's the part of the product that like works the least. And we just haven't gotten to it because it's so low priority. And I think advice is very dangerous. I think that what I try and do when someone asks me about something or asks me for advice is I don't know what you should do. I will tell you a story about what happened in a very specific situation and you can choose to take some learnings from that. But by no means am I in any way, shape or form qualified to tell you what you should do in your situation. I can just provide anecdotes that are similar. So I think be very careful, especially with people who are very smart and very opinionated and speak with a lot of confidence. Be very careful. That's what I would say.

It's important not to reason with analogy, right? Everything gets tapped out, everything is irrelevant for different situation. The number of times I get asked, hey, what's the next growth hack? Hotmail put P.S. i love you use Hotmail and grew to like millions of users. And Airbnb jumpstarted growth by cross posting to Craigslist. All those hacks and UX tricks and everything else gets exhausted. It's very important to break it down to, hey, what does step one look like of this problem? Right? First principles, thinking. That's fantastic, folks. Great conversation here. Check out Aidan's Super Managers podcast. I dropped the link to it and any books you recommended. You recommended the Pitch book Which was good. Anything pitch anything. So I'm dropping the link to that I dropped the link to Aidan's podcast. Anything else that you want to share that you're promoting that we should check out?

Yeah, check out if you, if you are having trouble, if you feel like your meetings sometimes are a waste of time, check out fellow app. Obviously we can definitely help there. But the. The other recommendation I would make is I just recently finished it was just shocking that I hadn't read it up until now. Like I feel a little silly but is a high growth handbook. I'm sure you've read it. But it's so good. It's so very relevant to scaling. So yeah, I highly recommend that one too.

I'll say something. I'm writing a book but I hate reading so I don't read books. What I do is I invite smart people like yourself twice a week and I interview them with my burning question. And I had Ilad Gill on our podcast as well. If you go back and look and I asked him all those questions. But I do read from time to time. But like I do just in time reading like I need something then I search I reference. Otherwise it's I'm too add for that. Aidan, what a great pleasure, man. Super fun. We'll hope to see you in Vancouver at the Traction In Person conference. By the way, folks, if you want to attend, we have a super line of speakers. Today's the last day for early deboer pricing, so check out Traction Conf. And Aidan, I'd love to have you as my VIP guest. So we'll see you in August.

All right. Yeah. Thanks for everything. This was really fun.

Take care. Love and peace, my friend.

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