Rebels and Missionaries: How Breaking Norms Helped Rafael Loureiro Raise $30M To Scale Wealth.com

This episode is brought to you by Boast AI. Each year, the US And Canadian governments give out billions of dollars in R and D tax credits and innovation incentives to fund businesses like yours. But the application process is cumbersome, prone to frustrating audits, and receiving the money can take up to 16 months. Boast AI gets you access to research and development tax credits and innovation funding opportunities without the headache and red tape. Join thousands of North American companies leveraging boast AI software to maximize cashback. Check out www.boast AI.

Try to find the ones that like to create. Try to find the ones that are a little bit of a rebel. Don't like the. Don't like the unnecessary steps. Create all the documentation. They actually want to get code done quickly, right? They want to remove the red date. They're the best candidates for a startup. The rebels. That's not at least that's that that worked for me in the past when we, when I set up my team at Milo, I was thinking, hey, who are my good friends? They were amazing engineers and they were a little out of the norm. And those are the ones that brought first to the company. And he worked for me. 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.

You need some traction.

Hey Traction fam. Super excited today. It's going to be Fire Today's podcast An old friend, One of probably my most respected technical leaders that I've met in my entrepreneurial journey. Today we have Rafael Lurero, co founder and CEO of Wealth.com recently raised 30 million. Led by Google Ventures, wealth is a technology driven estate planning platform designed to assist financial advisors in creating high quality real estate planning for their clients. And before starting Wealth, Rafael served as the CTO of Emailedge, a global fraud prevention SaaS startup that was acquired by Nexus Risk Solutions for nearly half a billion. And under his leadership now wealth has empowered over 500 wealth management firms to modernize their estate planning. And he's been named as one of the best technology providers in the Trust category by wealth management.com he's received the Advisor Choice Award for technology partners or providers as CEO of the Year. The personal relationship with Rafael is when we were scaling Boast after our majority growth equity round. We begged Rafael to join Boast as cto. He was a great advisor and he almost joined. I think I almost got him this close. And I think we were in Seattle. We met at a bar and I think I was. I had one too many drinks at a time when I used to drink and I was trying my best to oversell him. And he's broke. But the beauty of it is he's always been a very thoughtful leader. He's made also a great transition from CTO to CEO, and that's not an easy transition because most technology leaders have a hard time understanding the customer side of the business. Right. And Rafael has been very thoughtful as a CTO to understand the customer journey, the customer pain points, and how technology can drive customer outcomes. And if more CTOs were like Rafael, there would be more half a billion, billion dollar outcomes in this world. But nonetheless, Rafael almost joined Boast and then he had a change of heart and he decided to start wealth.com and we stayed friends. And I'm super, super happy and excited to interview you on your journey. Rafael. Thanks for joining us.

Lloyd. Thank you for having me here. It's my pleasure to be talking to you. You're looking good. Very skinny, very strong. That's awesome. And I don't think you had to beg me a lot to join Bose that you guys had an amazing team. I really enjoy meeting you and Alex in Seattle. Right. And I know we got super close, but then wealth.com came along and the idea was too good for us not to pursue. And then it was not an easy decision as we discussed, but here we are. Glad to be here.

You know what, it's funny is now both of us are on different sides of that equation and building companies in the space before we get into the deep dive of Wealth. I would love to understand your experience as CTO at Emailedge and how did it shape your approach to founding wealth.com give us the backstory. There's an emotional side of it as well with your former CEO at EmailEdge.

Absolutely. I. I know there is a relation, a correlation with second time founders. Right. We've been through the pain. Growing a company from zero to acquisition, it's not easy. You know this. You've been through the journ and I was able to carry a lot of that experience. But before I go there, I want to cover something that you said in the introduction about trying to understand the customer. And I think one thing that helped me a lot in this journey is not only I was a software engineer, but I also worked in consulting for a long time, right? So I worked for Avanade, which is a central Microsoft company, interfacing with clients, trying to actually understand what the pain points were before engaging the team to fix those pain points. And I believe that that consulting background helped me a lot on the transition from just being an engineer to be now a CEO of Wealth.com that helped a lot. Going back to emailage I joined the company. I was not original founder but I joined the company before series A and then at that time my team was like three developers and along that journey growing the company. When we sold to LexisNexis, my team was close to 60 engineers and I made a lot of mistakes along the way, several. And I think we can cover the podcast but, and I know this sometimes sounds cheesy, but one of my main recommendations for people creating their own companies, find the right team, this is critical, find the right partner because that makes the whole make a big difference in the outcome, right? The reason I did not join both is when I was ready to sign that letter. Ray Carvalho, like you mentioned, he was the founder in Millage. He's also Our chairman of wealth.com he had this idea, right? Ray sold the Millage, he got all his state planning done, right? And he's I'm done with the heat in Arizona, now it's time for me to look for cooler weathers. And then he decided to move to Denver. And then the moment he moved to Denver, Denver, Colorado he got a call from his lawyers, right? And he had just spent an enormous amount of money getting his state planning done. And then the lawyer called him and said look, now that you Colorado you need to update all your documents and that's going to cost you money. And at that moment he had that idea, hey look, there must be a better process for state plan this process super pen and paper and you spend all this money and then your documents are going to go to a shelf to collect dust. We got the co founders together from Emilia and say let's do this again and here we are. I was able to bring a lot of my A players from Imelig because it's a non competing business. And we went from have an idea how to improve estate planning to have a product in market in nine months.

That is insane. That is insane. What convinced you though to join as CEO? Because it's the first time you're CTO and of course it's a natural leap. You had a consulting background you understood the customer journey, but now you're going out on your own. You're starting. What gave you the confidence that okay, you know what, I want to be a founder CEO.

Lloyd, that one's a hard one. I don't know if you ever have the confidence from being newer, say, hey, I'm going to be a great CEO. But I always love your channel. Challenge, right? I never run away from a challenge. Growing in millage from a small company to a leading me, fraud prevention gave me that confidence. I could do it. Right? And I said, hey, we had the same team, we had a ray backing. And I'd say, let's go, let's do it. One thing you're gonna learn throughout this, and you and I have a personal relationship, but through this podcast is I'm not afraid of failure. I think failure makes you better. Right. As long as you fail fast and you fail forward, I think that's the way to do it. And so far it's been working.

That is fantastic. Now, you had a lot of learnings, right, at EmailEdge because how long was your journey at EmailEdge before the half a billion dollar exit?

I was there for six years.

That's a long journey. There must have been a lot of learnings because you said you brought some of that to wealth.com and launched a platform in nine months with several customers.

Right.

And then that led to a $30 million round led by Google Ventures. What were some of those learnings? What are some mistakes that founders make on the technical side when just launching?

Right.

You pretty much created an MVP that was beyond an mvp. That MVP took you to product market fit when you launch with 500 plus customers. So what are some insights there?

Absolutely. One of the main insights, I'll give you one that actually shaped wealth.com is when I joined Imileage, all our process, our systems were running in a on premise data center. So needless to say, every time Thanksgiving came around because we're working like with the largest corporations in the U.S. think about all these big banks. I'm not going to name names, but because it's fraud prevention. But crypto exchange, banks, airlines, they're all clients. And the solution or solution originally was running on premise data center. So I had to. It was super hard to diminish capacity because during Thanksgiving my traffic would 10x. So we always found a way to serve that traffic without any downtime. But it was painful in the beginning, right? So when we decided to create wealth.com, i challenged my team and said, hey guys, from day zero I want a scalable, highly secure, highly compliant solution, right? So we have a solution that deploy multi region, multi availability zones, extremely serverless. So I only pay for what I use. I know this can be a little bit more expensive than have your own hardware, but I was willing to pay for it just to have a solution that's scalable. From day zero, I can serve 100 advisors, I can serve 1,000 advisors and I'm not going to sweat because I know my solution is going to scale with it. That's one of the main solutions. From an engineering point of view, from a personal, hiring people, I think setting up the right team is critical for the success of the company. And I made mistakes. As I was growing the company and we raised a series A, we raised a series B, I decided, hey, let me go into this hiring spree and bring as many people as I can. And that can be a painful lesson because it's easier to hire, but it's really hard to fire someone or let someone go. And it causes a lot of attrition, it caused a lot of, how do I say, like a bad environment, you know, I mean, so with wealth.com, one thing we do is we make sure that when we bring someone, this person going to go to the hoops, this person is going to talk to a lot of people. We're going to upfront because Lloyd, you and I spend in this growing, going to a startup. But a lot of people, they come from the corporate world, right? So they don't know the, the grind. They don't know what it takes to build a company, the sense of ownership. And every now and then you're gonna have to sacrifice a weekend, you're gonna have a sacrifice a game with your son. I know that's not ideal, but it happens, right? Because you're doing a lot of things, playing a lot of roles. So we make sure that anyone that's coming in, we take the right picture. So invest the time, make sure you hire the right people. Sometimes you have to spend a little bit more but bring the right talent because it makes a huge difference. And the other thing I want to say, I know that's not your question, but there are different talents for different stage, right? It takes certain, certain type of people to go from 0 to $1 million, from 1 to 10, from 10 to 100, so on and so forth. You need to make sure you keep evolving.

I love those two things. Nonetheless, I think, I think those lessons were very important and they're crucial. So let's dive into it. I like that you mentioned the stage specific. A lot of us and me included have made the mistake of getting enamored by the big logos and then you bring them on and they're not the right fit because they probably saw the journey at a company that was already at 100 billion or already at a billion and you're trying to get to 0 to 1. And that 0 to 1 journey is a lot of pirate. Like it's a lot of grinding. And the 1 to 10 is also hard. Right. The founders are almost rolling the sleeves and then after some time you go into scale mode and your systems and processes and you need a combination of scalers and then you need also a combination of the things that you didn't figure out. You need the doers there versus the scalers. So how do you, what are your recommendations in the 0 to 1 phase? How do you find those people and how do you convince them to join? Because tied to that is another issue. Right. When we're desperate to hire, we over evangelize people. Find somebody in a role and a logo. And now you've evangelized them, you've oversold them. But the second thing is they might also not be stage specific. So one, it's important to be stage specific. Find people who went from zero to one and made that leap at least once or twice or one to ten, like whatever your stage is and find the person, the doer that can get stuff done at that phase. But then there's also a balance of you don't want to oversell somebody. Right. Like how do you bring these people on intentionally? So the expectations are right because zero to one is all about pirate like grinding.

I like pirate grinding. Yeah, yeah. It's not easy. It's not easy. It's. I wish I had a easy answer. But you, you have to find the hungry people. You have to find the people that they want to build something. They want to. Not the mercenary, but the missionary. How do you find the missionary? How do you find the people that love the mission? And I've been lucky here with the original team from a manager, so it made my life so much easier. And that's one thing, and that's why investors like to invest in second time founders is because you had the team, you've done it right. So in my case I was lucky with wealth.com because I was able to go back to the old well of immediate and say I want this guy, I want that guy. Because I know they love the grind. They're not afraid to work. They love to build something and put their name on it. But let's say I was not a second time founder. You know your friends, you've been working with them for a long time. Yeah. You know the people you've worked for the past like five, ten years. Try to find the ones that like to create. Try to find the ones that are a little bit of a rebel. Don't like the, don't like the unnecessary steps. Create all the documentation. They actually want to get code done quickly. Right. They want to remove the red date. They're the best candidates for a startup. The rebels. Yes. At least that's that. That worked for me in the past. When we, when I set up my team at Mineralogs, I was thinking, hey, who are my good friends? There were amazing engineers and they were a little out of the norm and those are the ones that brought first to the company. And he worked for me.

Amazing. Amazing. Now here's the thing. You said one thing, and I'm going to make this funny because I use this term a lot I inherited from my mentor Jason Lemkin of Saster. He said in the early days you need pirates and romantics and that's what you said, missionaries versus mercenaries. But it's saying you need pirates who can grind with you, but they're also romantics on you and their belief in you to. Towards that vision. Right. And I think that is important. You're fortunate that you had that team at Emailedge. They grinded with you en route to a half a billion dollar exit. And of course Anthony Enrico has now started another company. He worked with both of us at Boast and then before with you at Email Edge. He's down the street from you. There are people you know, you can pull and push as you need, but when you are starting at Email Edge, how did you find these pirates and romantics? I'm trying to like poke and see, like how do you find these people? If you're starting out my case, I.

Went to my network and I'm like, hey, who are my friends that don't like to follow the rules? And amazing engineers. And then I enjoy spending 12 hours a day with them. That's very important because if you don't want, if you don't, if you don't enjoy spending time with them, that could be a problem. And also they are here for the journey. Right. They are not here to become millionaires. I think the money is super important. And that's when I, that's what, when I say Missionaries and mercenaries. Because at that stage you don't have the money to pay these people, right? I mean you just create a new company, you have an idea, you have a picture in your mind, but you don't have the money to pay them. Google rates, Facebook rates, Amazon rates. So they need to believe in you, they need to believe in the mission. They need to be excited with the idea of building something together. In my case, I was fortunate. I had been working as a developer for almost 10 years when I joined Millit. 1012 years. So I knew a lot of people in my journey that it would be a good fit for a startup and they were like the first ones. I got my call and it worked.

That is fantastic.

Sorry. And Lloyd, just to add Internet recon, we actually lean scale. They work with us. It's one of the first company we brought on to help us with wealth dot com. So the team brought the whole team together.

You know what, we have some shared team members. It's like, I guess what's really interesting is my new startup, which I'm not ready to disclose what it is, but we're tackling different sides of similar ICPs, right? And it's funny that couple of your pirates were with me at boast that I might bring on here. So it's fun to jam. But I like this is people need a vision and a purpose that's beyond the money, right? Ultimately. And how do you drive that? Because ultimately without a purpose and without a vision that they are inspired by, money can be made anywhere. Because think about it, we're in 2024. The money that you make can be made doing consulting online across a variety of sites. You can do gigs, everyone is working remote. What drives people to go for the long haul is a purpose that creates some impact. I always say if you chase money, you make short term decisions. If you chase power, you destroy relationships. The only way to drive people is to chase impact. And I know you're a very impact driven founder, so I can appreciate, I think when I talk to you, Rafael, it's like, oh man. Like I want to work with Rafael. But moving now from a technical role to a CEO role is a big shift, right? It's funny because you had to do three things. You had to transition to a CEO, but on day one, you're not a CEO, you're a pirate founder. You have to also validate and you have to build and you're doing everything right. And then you have to also navigate the zero to one aspect and you've done it Masterfully. What are some pieces of advice there on navigating from a CTO of a company that was half a billion to becoming a zero to one finance founder CEO.

It was a super interesting journey. I'm not going to lie with its challenge. I love engineering. It's easy for me to just go back and say, hey, let me be a cto, leave me alone. I love my work. But I took on the challenge. I'm not going to say I did everything Lloyd, right. So I have an amazing group of people from day zero. I had my co founders. Ray Carval has been here from the beginning, my chairman. I talk to Ray, I would say once a week. He's my sounding board, right. And Ray has no problem saying when he thinks something's wrong. But at the same time he gives me freedom, right, to make my own decisions. You're not the type of chairman that look at every step, every decision I'm making, which is amazing. He's always been like this all the way back to image. I also have team White, right. So I brought team White from Imilage. He's my co founder and is focused on partnership and that's huge, right? Because from day zero we're like trying to develop a go to market, try to develop a message. And then my last co founder is Daniel Orfenick. So I bring the engineering background, I bring the building a team background then on a company from zero to a hundred and then. But we don't. What we didn't have in the beginning with Roth.com was the wealth management experience. So we went out there and found someone amazing like Danny Laurfin that used to work for Goldman Sachs, used to work for Sofi, but he's a pirate at art, right. So we got together and then we started building wealth.com but you only see the success. But there were a lot of failures in the beginning, right? And building this company. I'll give you an example. When we launched Wealth.com, our original go to market was employee benefits, right? We launched May 2022, it was employee benefits. We did close some major accounts. But one thing we noticed is the sales cycle is super long because the three hop sales you have to sell to a broker that sells to an employer that sells to an employee. And in the meantime we got a lot of inbound from financial divide and say hey, I'm having this discussion about stake planning on a daily basis. How can I offer wealth.com and that's very important. You need to believe on the mission, you need to Believe on the idea, but you need to be ready to pivot as well. You cannot be enamorated to the point where you're going to say, I'm going to die in this hill and I'm not going to change my go to market. So we decided to change the go to market. You focus more on financial advisors and things come fine. But that's just one example where we say even with all this experience, our original go to market was not ideal. But it is a big tradition coming from being an engineer to now managing a company, worrying about compliance. Hr, finding the right talent, go to market. There's a lot of learning. I love podcasting, I love reading books and talking to people and finding the right mentors. Like in your case, you had a mentor. I have my own mentors. Ray is one of them. I have others. Google Ventures. Amazing partner. Antos Capital. Amazing partner. So, yeah, it's been a great journey. A lot of lessons.

You bring up an important point, right? It's so important to fail fast, right? And this tied to that is customer acquisition. Understand the customer journey because customers want outcomes. They don't want software. You don't want marketing automation. You want more leads, right? So who is that leads driving direct benefit for. And if it is two hops down, it's a harder push. But if it's like immediate, I get the benefit. Now, like your wealth advisors, that is the route to go on. And I think it's very important to validate that and fail fast. The faster you can realize this is not for me, but it's not easy to do, right? A lot of founders get stuck in this trap that I got three, four paying customers and they latch on and then they don't grow very fast. How did you determine?

Right?

Because it's hard to say no when somebody is paying you. And walk that back.

To your point. Yeah, not immediate decision, but we just saw. We just start capturing the metrics and looking how long it took to close one customer, how long it took to onboard all their clients, and we're like, hey, look, that's not the business we want to be in. We need more clients, we need better interactions, we need a shorter sales cycle. Let's try mvp. Let's try to create a product for financial advisors and let's see how we go, right? We're still building this company. We also use a lot of user interviews. That's one thing I highly recommend it for anyone building a startup is do you use interviews, spend the time trying to understand the customer, told the customer it doesn't have to be the real product and say, hey, if you're using this product, do you like this flow? Can this save you time? Can this make your clients experience better? I mean, it doesn't have to be a dumb product, you don't have to own it. So we did a lot of that before we engaged with, we presented a working solution for financial advisors and we just saw the revenue going through the roof, right? Really caught on fire from 2022 to 2023. So don't be afraid of trying different things. Don't be afraid of reaching out to the customers and asking them for an interview. Even if you have to pay, pay for the interview, but make sure you prepare, show them something. An Image is worth 6,000 words for a user to see something even though there's nothing behind the scenes, just a figma board, how the system would work and provide feedback so much better.

That is very key. Now when you started and you were trying to validate all of this, I'm sure, because I know you did it at emailedge, did you talk to customers? How much time did you spend? What was your process like in understanding the customer's journey, which was very suboptimal for wealth management before you came into existence.

So in my case, it wasn't me, it was Danny Orfik, my cto. He comes from the wealth management background and he's a pirate. Clear concept, right? So he's the one that had the idea of the user interviews. He's the one who put the interviews together and then we find the clients. I spent time with the clients. One thing we do well is we invest in events, right? And I highly recommend this. It's a new market for us, the team, the leadership team. We actually went to several events throughout the year when we were thinking about the pivots and talk to clients and see what the pay points are. Also you have to watch the macro trends, right? And for us we see three major macro trends for estate planning. One is the greatest wealth transfer in history is happening now, right? The silver wave, as they say, 83 trillion, $83 trillion are changing hands in the next 20 years. So that's huge. Second, financial advisors are going through transformative period where financial planning and wealth management are. Investment management, I should say are become a little bit of a table stakes and they're like, hey, how do I justify my fee? Right? 1% over AUMC. So that's where like state planning is going to be very becoming, like a number one priority for, for financial advisors and lastly is AI right. We see AI now at our stage where we can use AI heavily on state planning, not to create documents, we cannot do that. But we use AI to lead existing plans. But get out there, go to events, find your clients, talk to them, pay them to do a user interview if the if they're willing to do and show them some mockups, get feedback and iterate quickly. That's one thing that's very important. Gotta keep moving. Don't spend too much time in not on the core business. In the beginning, 100%.

100% like get to value quickly. Now you talked about culture. That's how we started and I like we started in that direction because people build companies, not the other way around. Right. If you teach, if you treat your people with love and help them grow, they will treat your business with love and your business will grow. And I know you embody that. Tell me some of the things you did to inform and build the culture because how many people is email is worth right now?

We were close to 60 people now. Yeah. And growing.

But.

I hate to say these Lloyd, but I'll keep going back to the same story. But we've been lucky because the fact that we come from emailage and I was able to bring a lot of my A players from day zero. Think about this. I had culture from the beginning. From day zero I had people work with me that I really enjoy spending time with them and that's huge. Right. I had people that have been throughed, tried and tested throughout this process. I had engineers, I brought DevOps, I brought my head of security, Jair Basel, Tim White. He was definitely beginning from the ideation phrase Danny. Now Dennis is a new one. But I would say 80% of my people in the beginning were like from the million. So we were able to hit the ground running, have a culture and they just extend that culture. @wealth.com.

Interesting culture has in most tech startups and you're a very different kind of leader has turned into this La Croix and beers on tap and like the it's become futons and couches and massage chairs and that's not what drives purpose in the early days. Right. You're not love bombing them. Culture has turned into love bombing people to join and then you grind them and you have a very different style. How do you scale this style though when now you turn into a few hundred people?

That's tough because we are a remote first company. We don't have an office. I'm about to get my first office in tp just to receive customers and everything. But we are truly a remote first company. A Covid company because we were founded in 2021 so everyone was still working remotely. I have a team in Dublin, I have team everywhere in the US People in New York, San Francisco, I'm here in Arizona. So it's a challenge, right? Culture on a remote first company. It is a challenge, but you gotta, you gotta get mission driven people, right? That's your missionaries, not your mercenaries. I know it's easier to say, hard to do, but we have a set of values that are very important for us and we keep reiterating them constantly. Right? When we're finding people and we're, when we are onboarding employees is the first, you have to be member driven. You've gotta love the customer. You, that's, that's your survival, right? If you don't want the like to work with customers. If you don't like the mission, don't come and that's fine. Second, we need to think like an owner. What we do here, everyone has shares from the secretary all the way to the CEO, everyone has shares. You need to think like an owner. It's not so and so's problem is everyone's problem. You need to make sure that you can have the tough discussion, right? So we call empathetic candor. When you talk to someone, put this gunk on the table, right? Just discuss what the problem is and move on. No hard feelings, right? This one, one of my favorites. Progress over perfection, right? I think one of the biggest crimes for a startup is spending a lot of time over engineering a solution for a problem that might not be there, right? So do a little bit, do constantly deploy every day, get feedback from the customer. No seamless rule, no signage rule. Let's say that's my Brasilia accent coming through. No silo rule. We try to keep everyone informed of every, every decision that we make in the company. And finally be. Bring yourself to work. Be yourself. Don't try to be different just because we are wealth management management company. We don't have a kombucha on tap. We try to get. And one thing that I actually am trying to implement from both, to be honest with you, when I was talking to you and Alex and you guys said, hey, we have this gathering twice a year where we fly everyone in with their families and it's nothing about work. It's just like opportunity to get to know each other. I love that idea. I'm stealing it. I'm.

And I'm help you. I'LL I'll help you. And maybe that the, maybe not this year, but a year from now, we can host it in similar close locations and then we can have our teams party together. But you know that the key thing is ultimately community is very important, right? When I was writing my book From Grassroots to Greatness on Community Led growth, and it's become a Wall Street Journal bestseller. But one of the key elements I found is that every obscure idea that eventually became a global phenomena, from Christ and Christianity to CrossFit, went through the exact same four stages. And the thing is, a lot of what we see today are tech companies and we're celebrating them. But they're not generational companies, right? The generational companies are companies like Apple, like Harley Davidson. And what were the common threads there? People listen to you or buy your product. You just have the first line. It's an audience. But when people come together on a cadence to interact with one another, it becomes a community. Now here's the kicker. When that community comes together to create an impact towards a purpose that's beyond than your personal profit or your company's gain, it becomes a movement. And when that movement has undying faith in its purpose through sustained rituals over time, it becomes a cult or a religion. We say cult like brand. That's what audience, community, movement, religion. And one of the key things about having that is bringing people together to interact with one another around a central purpose. And it's just joy, right? Breaking bread together, that's not work, that's not tied to money. And I think that is very essential. I think not only will you steal it, you'll make it better. And then I'll borrow it.

100% agree. And that's one thing that we do from day zero is we try to see each other very often. We go to events and that's how we get to interact with our clients. We take them out to dinner. That relationship is critical because it's not. You're not treating them as customers. They are like people like you. And if they truly like you, they're going to be your biggest advocates, right? Evangelist. They're going to let you know when you're not hitting the mark. We truly enjoy our customers. We truly try to get in front of them as often as we can. As like a lot of engineers, they don't have, they like to be, hey, leave me alone in my computer. But that's something that I also had to learn. And I go a lot to the event, right? Future proof, it's an amazing event in Huntington beach and the Raymond James and Charles Schwab event. I'm always there, market counsel, interacting with my clients. One thing I'm going to be doing for the first time next year, Lloyd, is we're going to start by doing a Wealth Room connection event. That's just the seed of an idea. But we want to be doing these events now that we have Google Venture to help us. And they actually made. Google Venture has been an amazing partner so far and the station is another one. They actually made their office available to us to run this event. So we're going to have events in San Francisco, New York, Chicago next year because I truly believe it. Right? It's creating a community. It's creating. It is a big mission because I guess I didn't give you the stats, but like state planning, 2/3 of the US population don't have state plan. And you can say, look, Rafa, but a lot of people in this population don't have assets. Okay, that's fine. But even in the high Net Worth population, 54% don't have any state plan. And in our mind, financial plan cannot be complete without a state plan. And we see state plan as an act of love. You love your kids, right? You spend so much time with them all your lives and then at the end of your life you want to make sure that whatever you have doesn't matter how much it is. Maybe it's just like sentimental value. Goes to the right person, right? Doesn't go to the government, let's say. Right? It's a big mission. I believe it. I need to read your book. I haven't got my signed copy yet.

I will. I am waiting for shipment. I will. I can send you a non signed copy from. From the shipper, but at first it needs to come to me. But I will send you a signed copy. I'll personally deliver it. I'm going to come see you in Scottsdale because I'm due to hang out with Anthony as well. So I'll do that for sure.

Let's do it.

But that's a very interesting stat. And maybe there's one insight to that. My parents don't have an estate plan, but after the boast liquidity event I had almost died of COVID right. A couple weeks ago. As sometimes you run and you collapse at the finish line. And the first thing my wife did was set up an estate plan, but my parents don't. And I think what happens is estate planning is often tied to a feeling of dread, right? Because it's oh, I Am giving something as a function of me dying. And that's a very important part of my life. It's like why you don't like to go to the hospital. It's a feeling of dread, it's not a feeling of joy. And I think how you are solving that is brilliant because you're turning a feeling of dread and anxiety into a feeling of joy, right? And you're saying that, no, you are. This is a moment of joy. You're passing the love.

Right?

And that is very important through the messaging that you're doing. And I really like that.

I think it's.

I think a big part of that 54% comes from the dread. And there's dread one and it's a manual process and I got to do this. And then you combine that with the dread of, geez, I'm giving something as a function of me dying and you don't want to deal with it. Right. Have you encountered that at all?

A hundred percent. That's one of the reasons we decided to go through financial advisors is because if you go direct to consumer, you have to find the consumer at the right moment. And the right moment is they just lost someone or they just got married or they just divorced. It's not right. So instead of doing these, we decided to work with financial advisors because they are having this conversation every day. They're talking to Lloyd, I know you just had a liquid event, but you don't have a state plan. Who is going to take care of your daughters if you're no longer here tomorrow? Right? And how do you want to divide up your assets? And what about that PD collection? Who should take it? You know what I mean? Because if you don't do this, it's going to go to probate process. And the probate process takes like an average six month, sometimes a year in some states and they get 50% of your assets in fees. You don't want that. You want your. You want the money work so hard for to go to your kids, right? Or to your wife or to a charity that you believe in. So it is truly an act of love. I know it's not an easy conversation and that's why we decided to go to the financial divider route because they already talking to you. They already work on your financial plan. It's just a natural progression of your financial plan.

But is.

Don'T do it. Well, if you want to do with a lawyer, do with a lawyer, but just do your estate plan. That's my recommendation.

100% very important. I couldn't agree more. Because the worst thing is you don't do it because it's a feeling of dread. But now you pass on that feeling of dread and you provide your next of kin with a feeling of misery. Because the worst is you don't want the government to take it or it goes to nobody and multiple people are fighting. And now this thing that you procrastinated on has turned into misery for everyone. I completely agree. Encourage it. I want to take some questions in a rapid fire round. Right on. MVPs. How do you know when you've added enough value without overcomplicating the product?

When they start paying for it? The vote of confidence is when they pay with their wallet, they see the value, whatever value already provided is enough for them to say, all right, I'm going to subscribe to your service.

Exactly. That is, I love it. But sometimes what happens is they subscribe. Then how do you know I don't want to keep adding more and more like, where does it stop? That it's not a bloated product? And they're like, how we. It's how I did to you. I try to oversell you by love bombing you at the restaurant in Seattle to join. But like, how do you. Don't do that, not do that with your product so the customer doesn't just feel like this is just too much.

Oh, I did such a great job at Digression. Forget about this. It was a great experience, man. I really enjoy my time with you and Alex and Chris, but it's hard. It's a balance. We were able to raise prices four time last year. We kept adding new features and the clients were actually appreciating the new features. And the way we know we're going down the right road is they can't pay for the extra feature that we put on the platform. User interviews. I cannot say this enough. We use this resource extensively here. Before we engage in new features, we go in front of the clients, our key clients, our friends, and say, look, here's where we're going to. There's no pill, is just visual. We use Figma a lot. Hey, here's the visual. Would you use this? Does that work for you? Yeah, it does. I love it. Now there's a. There's an easy way to do this. You only take us five minutes. I don't think this feature would be nice. And that's how we decided we have. Oh yeah. Now I just remember something else that it made a huge difference for us is we set up an advisory board. So we got some key clients, people very influential the advisory space and said, hey, do you want to join an advisory board in exchange for some shares? Right? Just come join us in this mission. We want to completely disrupt the state planning process. And they came in and these guys, they became like a trust fund for us. Not trust fund, a brain trust. That's what I want to say, right? So anytime we have these crazy ideas, we go to this team and we share the ideas. Sometimes even if they say no, we go ahead and works. Sometimes doesn't work. But they became like a brain trust for us. Do a lot of user interviews, do your mock ups in figma. Don't involve your engineers, they cost too much money. Everything takes long if you involve the engineers. Get feedback early and iterate before you spend time creating new features.

Now one thing, this is a trap that most technical founders face fall into, right? What are the most common ones? I think this is one is like the overbuild, right? Is there anything else you've seen.

The overbuild.

This is great. And I love how the processes and everything you've laid out now in rapid fire, really quick. What's one tool, practice or system you think every startup should implement from the start?

Sales fans, fail forward.

Awesome. And if you had to pick one key skill that tech founders should develop to lead a company, what would it be?

Get out of your shell. You have to talk to people.

I love it.

You have to get out there and.

Talk to customers, sales fixes, everything. Looking back, what's one piece of advice you'd give to yourself when you are starting at EmailEdge? That knowing what you know now.

Don't try to save money with talent. That's the people you work with is the most important thing.

I don't want to get canceled for this, but generally what happens is when you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. And when I say P meaning pay doesn't always have to be money. It could be any number of things, right? Like it could be the vision, it could be, it could be the purpose, it could be a whole bunch of things. But when you give people, if you treat people with love and help them grow, they'll treat your business with love and your business will grow. You need pirates and romantics. Rafael, one thing which was very memorable for me, we had very memorable conversations. But you talked about back then, when we spoke a few years ago as a part of the process, you said deploy frequently. I love to deploy multiple times a day, right to the we're pushing to prod. Tell me more about that. And if your thinking has evolved, tell our audience what that means. Firstly, from a technical standpoint. And if your thinking has evolved from.

Four years ago, oh, we've got more aggressive. I love it. And the reason I do the ngp, right, your discussion, right, get you get the feedback from the client, right? You show the figment, be like thumbs up. This sounds like a good direction to go. You put your team to work on it, but you don't want to roll out that feature to everyone. So we use feature flag heavily here. We use Vercel heavily in here, right? So we create the feature, we enable for a subset of clients and then we get the feedback. Hey, is this what you're looking for? Yes, it is working. Then we do a full rollout. What I tell my team is anytime you deploy anything, make sure it's behind the stitch flag. So if we need to disable and roll back, we can do this in minutes, not days, not hours. The other beauty of these and the assignment benefit is now that we're working with larger wirehouses, larger banks. Some of these banks, they're like, hey, look, I love everything here, but I don't want this feature for my clients because I use something else. So if you have the proper feature flags in place, you can actually disable certain sections for certain customers. So you become more customizable, your solution becomes more flexible. Right? So deploying every day, smaller packages, it works beautifully. Not easy. You need the right engineering team. But I highly recommend it. It made us super successful. Both the millage and wealth.com we can move fast. It's easy to know what's causing the problem. Hey, something caused the problem. Multiply this package. I did one small line of code. Let's roll back. Boom, done. And then your client is operational. At emailers, we had a SLA requirements of 5 nines of availability and we still deployed like multiple times a day. It's just how you do it. Having many regions, many availability zones, having the right feature flagged framework. And now with Vercel, it's even better.

Love it. I was just curious if your thesis had changed because you were. My head was, this is crazy. So I wanted to bring it back and close out with that conversation. Rafael, thank you. Thank you so much. We're going to jam together in person whether you come to Austin now that I'm here. But before that, I am definitely going to come to Scottsdale and we're going to hang out because we have a few common friends. Any parting words? Of wisdom here for us. Anything that you'd like to share that you didn't share? Maybe something is coming up.

Yeah, we are hiring. If you're looking for a fast growing place, great engineering, go to wealth.com and if you don't have a state plan, get your estate plan. And if you don't have a financial advisor, if you have a financial advisor, you can get wealth.com if you don't have a financial advisor, get one. Just get one.

Rafael, this has been fantastic. You're probably one of the best technical founders I've met in my life and if I wasn't doing something right now, I would beg you for a job anyway. So thank you so much and have a wonderful weekend.

Lloyd, you're too kind. You too. Looking forward to see you in person soon.

Take care. Bye.

This episode is brought to you by Boast AI. Each year the US and Canadian governments give out billions of dollars in R and D tax credits and innovation incentives to fund businesses like yours. But the application process is cumbersome, prone to frustrating audits, and receiving the money can take up to 16 months. Boast AI gets you access to research and development tax credits and innovation funding opportunities without the headache and red tape. Join thousands of North American Companies leveraging boast AI software to maximize cashback. Check out www.boast AI.

Thank you for listening and we hope.

You enjoyed this week's episode of the Traction podcast.

If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a five star review and you can find more information and all the.

Resources mentioned in today's episode at Boast AI.

That's B O A S T A I've done some silly focused on the tech stack thinking it was brilliant. Now I know that it's no way for you to build a unicorn.