Leverage the Potential of Integrations for Your Customers

Hello everyone, I hope you guys are all having an amazing Wednesday. My name is Daniel, I'm a part of the FI marketing team. If you're here for the first time, let me just introduce FI. We are the world's most proven network that helps turn ideas into fundable startups and startups into global businesses. And today we are back with a very, very exciting webinar with someone who's really been there and done that. So we have with us today Roy Pereira, who's the founder of Unified and a couple of other startups. He's done this 4 times, so you definitely want to kind of tune in and listen, listen to all the gems that he's going to be dropping, right? And today he's going to be talking about leveraging the potential of integrations for your customers. And before we kind of begin and get Roy on stage, why don't you all tell me where you're coming in from? So in the chat, let me know where you're coming in from, right? We have people here from Toronto, awesome. We have people here from London, Barcelona, Massachusetts, awesome, awesome. Dubai, Las Vegas, London again. So we have a pretty global audience, and that's one of the really great things about the EFI network, right? We have people who are interested in building a startup or learning more about the startup ecosystem all across the world, right? Okay, so actually, why don't you bring Roy on stage? And while Akshay brings Roy on stage, right, Roy had a question that he wants to kind of run by you all, right? And the question is, how many— okay, let me just— yeah, you'll see a poll here, right? So the question is, how many integrations does your software currently support? Today is all about integrations and everyone really wants to know what you're kind of working on. Is it 0? Is it 1 to 2? 3 to 3 or more? Okay, so it's 3 or more, 0, it's kind of a mixed bag. Uh, hey there, let me know if you can hear me.

I can hear you.

Awesome, awesome. So I hope you can also see this, uh, the poll on your screen so you have an idea of like where your audience kind of stands, right? A ton of people here who are building softwares that support more than 3 integrations. So this should be pretty interesting. Awesome, right? So before I kick it over to Roy, let me just go over some house rules. There is a Q&A button right under the chat button. On the right-hand side of your screen. If you have any questions for Roy, if you wanna know something, please do click on the Q&A button, type your questions out there, and when we come back to the Q&A, I'll be sure to run your question by Roy, right? And if you look at the bottom of your screen, you should have an emoji button. If you like what Roy is saying, if you're enjoying the content that we have for you today, let Roy know, right? Click on the emojis, show your love. And right after the event, we have our networking portion as well. So I encourage you all to stay back. Hopefully Roy will have a little bit of time to stay back with us and talk to you all. I'll be there as well, and you can kind of also talk amongst yourselves, figure out what everyone is kind of working on, right? Roy, I'm going to close this poll, and I'll be moving myself to the back of the screen if you want to share your screen, and we can kind of kick things off.

All right, let me do that. Uh, so interesting poll. We saw, um, we saw about what, 5 or 6 people voting, uh, I guess. And surprisingly, 50% had 3 or more integrations in your software. That's amazing. That's by far better than the industry average, uh, which is quite, quite low. But let me back up. Let me introduce myself. Thank you for spending some time with me. I've been a Founder Institute mentor for quite some time, over a decade. I've been a Techstars mentor for about a decade as well. But I've been a tech entrepreneur for 20, 25 years. So I grew up in Canada, where I'm based today. I'm based in Toronto, but I've also worked down in the Valley, Silicon Valley. I was there during the dot-com and dot-crash eras. Those were good learning. And I've only done tech. That's really what I do. I'm a serial entrepreneur. I'm on my 6th startup. I'll be talking about the insights that led me to build this company and why we're building it. What I don't want is for this to be a sales pitch. I'm not trying to sell you. I'm trying to enlighten us. I do a lot of mentorship, as I mentioned, so I want to share why I feel integrations are so important, especially in a modern product that we're all building. So let's, let's start. And again, please ask your questions. I'll try and get to them when I can, when I see them. So let's go. So my new company is called Unified, unified.to. It is a unified API, and what we're doing is integrations as a service for product companies. So if you're running a software company, you need to gain access to your customers' data, and that's typically done through an API. So that's what we're building. Let me tell— talk about how we got here. So yeah, there's me in my younger years, probably about 5 years ago. So integrations are, are API integrations that allow you to gain access to your customer's data, right? So why is this important? Because data is stored all over the place today, and we know it, right? Just as end users, we have how many applications that we use on a regular basis? And more importantly, there are a couple of platforms where we store key data. So if you have an HR solution, you're going to store all of your employee data in that HR platform like Workday or SAP or Bamboo. Uh, and if you're running a sales organization, you're going to have one CRM and that's the source of truth for your sales data. You're not going to be moving that data around. The problem though is, um, when you're building a software company, that's not a source of truth, but you need that data, and that's where integrations come in. I'll give you an example here. So let's say you're building a brand new AI payroll system that's amazing. The very first thing that you're going to need to do is to figure out who your customers' employees are so you can pay them, and you're going to need to do that in real time because if they fire someone, you don't want to pay that person. And if they hire someone new, you're going to need to pay that person. And so the old way is by asking our customers to upload a CSV file, a comma-delimited file. They first have to figure out how to export that data from their other application, um, and then upload it to your app. But that's only one time, and that's a really poor choice. In 2023. It was a poor choice in 2013, uh, and maybe even 2003. Um, and so a much easier and better and much more, um, uh, seamless way is to ask them to gain access to their accounts, uh, whether that's an HR account so that you can bidirectionally fetch and update data in their HR accounts. And this is, I think, really important for us as, as founders and tech entrepreneurs to understand. The way that we build software today changes from yesterday, and this is one of the things that we absolutely need to do in our apps, right? If you get asked to upload a CSV as an end user, you're going to churn, right? And because that's not what you you will see normally in top software. And so there's a lot of stats that prove this. Integrations are the number 3 most important factor for buyers of SaaS software, right? And then, you know, 82% of buyers agree that a system's ability to integrate is super important. And these are all from different sources. I know one anecdote that, and I can't tell you which company it is, but I know the CEO really well and they have a bunch of integrations that they've built themselves. And they tell me that if a customer comes in and during the onboarding, they connect one of their accounts through one of their integrations, they're 4 times less likely to churn. That's massive. Right? And so they can, they have a longer lifetime with the company, return more revenue because they're not churning because their data is synchronized. I think the other thing that we, we are going to hit here too is that this is not a conversation for the CTO only. This is not a conversation just for the CEO. It's also a conversation for marketers. The last bullet talks about that. If you can integrate into another piece of software, especially one of these large platforms, you can leverage their, their marketing. You can leverage their great brand and their awareness to bring leads to your software company. And this is something that I don't think people realize, but it is an amazing way because you are basically leveraging someone else's a better-known brand. And yeah, stickier, less churn, really that's what integrations do give you. They give you a seamless onboarding, a seamless way to gain access to that data. And if you go back to that example that I used about the payroll company, you are dead in the water if you do not have the employee data. You cannot do your job. You have one job to do, and that's to pay people. Right, so that's one example. There are countless other examples, and really, I think personally that every single SaaS application today needs some sort of integrations, needs some sort of way to gain access to their customers' data. That is the source, whether you're putting that through an AI machine learning model, whatever, I don't care whether you're doing payroll or whether you're doing some sort of like sales scoring thing, it doesn't really matter what mousetrap you're building, you need data. That's how the world works today. So I talked about how this is not just a talk about CTOs and technology, it's not, it's really about us as entrepreneurs and how we increase our growth, our revenue, and really our addressable market. And I really believe that integrations allow you to do this. In the case of the payroll company, you're dead in the water, like I said, because you cannot monetize the user if, if you don't have an integration that supports their account, right? So if you support Workday but they're on Bamboo, then you can't load their employee data. So you have to build a Bamboo integration. All right, let's do that. But then of course someone else comes in and says, hey, I'm on ADP, or I'm on SAP, or I'm on some other HR system. And you're constantly building integrations. But it is an amazing way to expand your addressable market so they can monetize more users. And this is the stat that I mentioned before, uh, 4 times less likely to churn. So this is the reason why we're building unified. But like I said, I think every single company needs to build integrations. And whether you get the technology from us or from someone else or build it in-house. I think integrations are super powerful, right? So we talked a lot about most of these. The competitiveness is super important because everyone is adding integrations, so you need to also add integrations. But the serviceable addressable market is something that I'm going to mention again. As a CEO, this is what keeps me up at night. How big is my market? How do I monetize all of those users and more? And through integrations is a really good way that I have done in the past. And then of course, if you can get your customers to integrate their other data into you, you are much less likely to have them churn. So the stickiness factor and the lifetime revenue that you get from a customer that has just one integration is so much more than customers that don't have any integration. They're not tied to you. They can leave you at any point. You don't have any of their data. They can just go to one of your competitors. This is a, a case study that looks at the leads coming in from partners. So I mentioned that this isn't just about CTOs or CEOs, it's also about marketing, right? So you need a whole look at how integrations can help your business. Obviously sales, 'cause you can monetize, but marketing is the one that brings in customers. And if you can leverage, say, a better brand like HubSpot, so RollWorks, small company, probably never heard of them, they integrated into HubSpot, into the API of HubSpot, um, and then they also leveraged HubSpot's co-marketing because they were integrations. So that's the key. You can't leverage HubSpot's co-marketing if you're not integrated into HubSpot. So not only are you providing benefit to your customers by being able to synchronize data, sales data from HubSpot into your own app, all of a sudden now HubSpot will help you get more customers. And you can see some of the numbers here, right? 200% increase in average deal size, 24 times more marketing results, 500+ installs just from building an integration. And again, this isn't even listing the benefits to the actual customer or the addressable service market, serviceable addressable market increase that RuleWorks got. By integrating it to HubSpot. So yeah, this is what I've been saying all along. I think every single SaaS company needs integrations today. The data is just everywhere. The problem though is that it's super hard, and that's really what we found. We've built these many, many times, and I'll get into that. You know, as a CEO, I'm always thinking about, again, how do I expand my revenue And that is by tying into all of these other integrations to allow these customers to come in and share their data so that I can take my feature set and use it on top of their data, right? And if I don't have that, then I see churn, right? I see people coming in and not really getting bonded to the product, and then because they don't have any data attached to it, they just leave. There's no point in them staying around. They're going to try something else. So sort of a dilemma as a CEO. The other issue that I, as a CEO, is, okay, I'm going to build all these integrations, but that's going to take a ton of time. And that's the issue that I've had many, many times as a developer, you know, building one integration, you know, your product team comes in and says, hey, I just need HubSpot. So you build it, but you don't think about the fact that they're going to come back in 2 months and ask you to build Salesforce or Pipedrive or some other CRM. Um, and though, and so it means that you haven't built it properly, um, and you can't actually scale. The other issue here is that developers are constantly building and maintaining this stuff, and it leads to back to the CEO's problem. Um, The fact that the more time that developers spend on building integrations, which is non-core, needed but non-core, the less time they have spending on building core functionality that differentiates your product. And that's a problem because in this market, of course, it's really easy to build. But if you don't have enough time because you're building the wrong things, then you're not going to be competitive. And so it's almost like a lose-lose situation. Again, I've been doing this for quite some time. The last startup we spent 7 years, it's originally called Zoom.ai, it's a great name. And then some other Zoom came around and it was so more popular. So we rebranded, we called ourselves CalendarHero. We were a scheduling tool and we had customers in the sales space and in the recruiting space. And so we integrated into CRMs and recruiting software. Applicant tracking systems, and we built 60 integrations in-house. And what I noticed was that sometimes we were failing to be competitive in our functionality, in the actual scheduling software. And that was a problem, right? Because other competitors were starting to, to catch up, sometimes, uh, overtake us in terms of specific scheduling features. Because we spent about half of our time building integrations and then maintaining them. So that was a, a really good lesson to learn. Um, you know, we were acquired, but when I look back, I always ponder as a CEO and founder, could I have exited at a higher valuation if I spent more time on the core differentiation feature set? And less time on integrations. So that was the big lesson that I learned, uh, and this is why after we got acquired, um, I left, uh, earlier this year to start this company. So what we built is a unified API. It allows product teams to add integrations one time and never deal with them again. And this is something that I've always wanted in all of my previous startups. And so I basically am the customer zero, if you will. And my co-founder too, my CTO co-founder, same thing. He's always built these things. And so this is what we've wanted to have so that we didn't think about integrations. We just built our core differentiating feature set to gain customers. And so just to back up, if, you know, for those that are less technical, APIs are not just APIs. There's a lot of APIs. What we're really talking about here is customer-facing APIs. And so your product taking data from another product, typically a source of truth platform, so that you can do something with your customer's data. You can do whatever that mousetrap, that special thing that your product does. But it needs the data. We're not dealing with internal APIs and all that. So this is what we've built. And again, I don't really want this to be a sales pitch. So if you're interested, just go and take a look at unified.to. We have all of that there. I think the main message is that we believe that integrations are super, super powerful in today's ecosystem, but they're super difficult. They're still super difficult. This is a really good example, HubSpot versus Salesforce API. They're both, how shall I put it, crap, uh, for a lack of a better technical word. Um, and they're really hard to integrate and they're different, obviously. Uh, and then if you multiply this out by 10, uh, you get quite a lot of complexity. And think about this, when you go and ask your developers to integrate, This is one time, maybe two times. Think about all the maintenance that you'll have when these APIs change, and they do, and when the documentation isn't the same as the API underneath. And so this is again part of the problem. Part of the solution is that we have one consistent API. Doesn't matter where your customer data is at. We have front ends as well. We won't go through that. Yeah, examples, obviously the HR example that I mentioned before, you want to pull employee data. Sometimes you want to push employee data. Let's say you're, you're adding benefits. Sometimes you want to pull candidate data. A lot of times you want to pull sales data like deals and contacts and so forth. If you're doing scoring of deals, you want to push data in. So a lot of different use cases, but every single customer that we've spoken to has a need. We just spoke to a customer today that is basically an internal search engine for all of the accounts. Think about this, right? So a mid-sized company has about 40 different pieces of software that their employees use, right? And so when an employee is trying to find a piece of information, they have to think about which 50 applications they have that in, right? So there's a group of software companies, um, that are building these internal search engines that have to attach to your Salesforce account and, uh, your Mailchimp account and your Zendesk account and Google and all of this stuff. Uh, and then you can just search. So that's another example of API integrations that's come to mind. Um, and then again, if I can leave you with one message, this is not a bad technology. It's not about making your developers' lives easier, although they will. This is actually— you should be thinking about this as a CEO and founder. You should be thinking about how do I monetize my customers better? How do I keep them longer so that I can increase my lifetime revenue from them? And integrations today provide that stickiness that customers expect to have. And that is it. 24 minutes. We have time for Q&A.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Roy. You can see the emojis right on your screen. You're getting a ton of love. Uh, the folks loved it. So yeah, Todd, if you have a question, please pop into the Q&A section and you can ask your question there and we'll bring your question on screen. So we have 2 questions that I wanna get through, but before we kind of get into that, Roy, being a little selfish here, we talk to a ton of founders, right? You've been an FI mentor, you kind of know how we do things. One of the things that you mentioned in your presentation was talking to customers, right? So for someone who's a first-time founder, do you have any tips or like maybe a framework in mind on how you should go about talking to customers and what's the type of information that's really, really important for a founder?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's a great question, right? When you're starting off, you have this vision, this maybe instinct, maybe because you've been in the industry, maybe you just have this idea, but you don't know if it's real. And, you know, during my presentation I mentioned that like I'm customer zero for this. That's great. And I remember in January of this year when I started, I thought I knew exactly what I needed to build, how to price it and how to go and market it. And then I started talking to potential customers, right? And then there was a lot of things that came true. So initially we thought that the CRM, the sales tech market would be the best because it's sales, it's revenue. Everyone loves that. But it wasn't, it was HR tech. There's a ton of innovation happening in the HR tech system. And so we pivoted to overuse that term, but we sort of double-clicked on HR tech. The other thing that we learned was pricing model. Our original pricing model wasn't as good and wasn't going to win us too, too many friends. And so we changed it, and we changed it based off of about 30 different conversations that we had with our target, uh, person, decision maker. I don't want to use target customer because that's a company. We actually talked to the CTO at these target companies and asked them What kind of pricing would you like and why? Right. They wanted flexibility and this and that. And so we actually changed the entire pricing model to, to work with them. And so even though we thought we knew because we would be great customers and we always do, and I think entrepreneurs make that mistake all the time. It's like, hey, I know, but you don't know anything until you start talking to customers. And that's the other thing about launching early. You got to go and talk to customers. You have to have them use your system, even if it's gross, there's no design or whatever, have them use it and focus on the core value that you're trying to do to show the core solution to their problem. And then add in the dark mode and all of the other superfluous stuff that you know you need. Um, but you got to get to that core, uh, out so that you can get to customers, real people.

Awesome. Yeah, I think that's a pretty good way to sum it up, right? You kind of have to get to, uh, the core of things, right, before you kind of really build everything else out. So I want to bring up a couple of questions that we have. Uh, Nathan here asks, do you have a framework for identifying the key integrations in your industry?

Yeah, so we do. So part of my background is product management. I mean, I started in university as a math geek and then moved to computer programming, but I moved to product management. And so I've taken a lot of courses and training on product. So one of the things that we did here, because there are literally 50,000 integrations that we could build, right? Just in HR tech and sales tech. So we can't build all of those. And so we have a prioritization list. We've actually built it in Notion, but you can do this in almost anything, Excel or Google Sheets if you want. And we add in several variables, columns. So how many customers are asking for this? Is this strategic? Is this in, in where we want to go? Right, how big is the integration company, right? So if we're building one into Workday, Workday is massive. They're gonna have a ton of customers that could leverage our integration. If we're building it into some brand new payroll company that has 2 employees, 2 customers, you know, I think we'll wait. And so there's several variables, and then we've actually automated that. That gives us a little score, and then we We sort based off of that score. It's that simple. And there's a bunch of different product management frameworks that you could use. This one is quite simple and it works for us. I would urge you to Google to find some other ones, but whatever works for you guys, it has to be something that you're going to use every week and not keep changing and not keep forgetting. Right.

Awesome. Nathan, I hope that answers your question. So we have a couple of technical questions here. I'm going to kind of hand them over to you, Roan, because, yeah, I think you would probably be able to help these folks out.

Yeah.

So, yeah, who asked?

Yeah.

Can you elaborate on what makes the API unified? Is there a limit to the support in the unified API versions?

Sure. So it's unified because the API that you call, just as an example, to get a list of contacts from a CRM, that API endpoint is exactly the same regardless of which CRM that data is on. Okay, and so as a developer, you're, you're calling one, one server, one API and that's it. You don't need to know if it's Salesforce or HubSpot. Okay, so that's one, one part of the unified. The other part is the data. So the data that's coming in and out of the system is always the exact same format. The data model, the schema, is exactly the same. A contact at, uh, in Salesforce is the same format as a contact in HubSpot, as a contact in Pipedrive, and so forth. And that actually is the number one thing— data normalization. And just to step back, if I could, if I could give one piece of technical advice, um, it doesn't matter about integrations or whether you're using us or not or whatever— build your data models internally so that they can be normalized, okay? Because what happens in the end is that technology changes, you may go from AWS to Google or whatever, right? And they'll have different data models, but if you normalize it internally, then you never have to refactor that. And that's something that I've learned through my 25 years of being a technical architect, being a founder, and writing code. And so this is something that we've definitely done here. We've normalized the data model and we'll never change that. We'll expand it, but we'll never make it backwards incompatible. And so a contact has a name, an email, and 20 other fields. Those are always going to be the same. So that's part of our unification strategy. We've also unified authorization, so there's only one way that you need to do to get your customers to authorize access to their accounts. Again, you don't need to know if it's if it's Salesforce or HubSpot. Yeah, I hope that answers that question.

Awesome. Yeah, so, Yehuda, I hope that answers your question. And okay, so we have another question here from Marcel, and he asks, how big of an obstacle are data regulations like GDPR for integrations?

Yeah, that's a super good, uh, question. Um, we are GDPR compliant. We actually have an EU data region And there's a couple of reasons for that. If you were living in Europe or you're dealing with European clients, having the data being processed or transferred through, say, the US may not be what you want. And I'll be nice about saying it that way. And so you'd want the data to reside and be transferred only within Europe. And that's not actually part of GDPR, but it is almost unanimously requested by European software vendors. Now GDPR is really about storage of data. So when you're looking at, say, an integrations provider like Unified, you're going to want to ask, where is the data stored? Where's my customer's data going to be stored? Is it being stored in the US or Europe, or is it not being stored at all? We've taken the, the tactic of not storing any data. It only goes through our platform. It doesn't get cached, none of that. We do not want the liability, nor do we think that as a customer we would want anyone to store our customer's data. It's our customer. It's like, if, if that data gets hacked, we're the ones getting in trouble, right? Our customers are going to sue us. And so if we're relying on a third party for integrations and they get hacked, they're not the ones going to be in trouble, it's going to be us. So I think this is a really important question, not just for GDPR, but for liability and risk management overall.

Awesome. Thank you for that super detailed answer. So I wanted to kind of go to our last question. But I have another question that just popped in, uh, and it's from Mufaz, right? And this is more about product management. Uh, when managing the development of numerous integrations as a product manager, how do you determine the right moment to go to market and ensure you avoid overbuilding the product?

Yeah, it's similar to a previous question, right? Like, when do you launch? Um, you have to bring in customers in and, you know, launch lean kind of thing. Get it out with the warts and all, and then get feedback. Because as a product manager, you are not coming up with the ideas. Now, I want to stress that. I've hired a lot of product managers. I've run whole organizations of product managers at publicly traded companies in a previous life. When you first come in as a product manager, you think that you're the decision maker. You are the person coming up with the ideas. You're not. You are the note-taker. You are talking to customers and aggregating interest and figuring out what the priority is. And so as soon as you can get out and talk to them, go, you know, get out of your chair and go outside of the building and talk to them, maybe on Zoom. That's easier. But that's what you have to do. And you You know, you have to, you know, for, for us, I'll give you an example. For us, we have 103 integrations. You know, I'd like to get to 300 integrations, but then am I going to prioritize the 301 integration? Probably not, because at some point, the more you build, the less you're going to get back, right, as a benefit. You know, number 301 integration again is going to have like maybe 20 customers or maybe 100 customers, and it may not be as interesting as the first 20 integrations that we built that have 100,000 customers. And so as a product manager, there's a ton of variables that you have to use for your prioritization, right? And you should have a discipline about it, and you should be public about it, because if you're not, the VP of sales is going to come in and bust your chops. And push, right? Or, and then he or she is gonna go up to the CEO and then the CEO is gonna do the same thing. And then what are you gonna say? No, it's gonna be harder. So if you can publicize your criteria, your prioritization, your backup, hey, I've talked to 30 different customers and this is what they have to say. I think that is super, super important. It is not an art, it is a science. That was a tangent on product management. You, you didn't even know that I, I was interested in that.

Yeah, so what's really cool about this Q&A in particular is we have a ton of like very diverse questions. Typically what happens is, you know, we'll get questions that are very specific to the topic, and I think that's probably the beauty of integrations here, right? Because you have to take so many things into account when you're building out integrations into your SaaS, right?

Yeah, it's a balancing act, right? It's like, should I build a very specific differentiator feature set or should I go and do this non-core integration? Because I know that I need it, but I also need to compete with unique functionality, right? So it's this constant battle.

Yeah, for sure. And that makes perfect sense. So, okay, having said that, let's kind of move on to the last question we have. And this is from Kayla. She asks, what do teams typically underestimate when they start building customer-facing integrations for the first time?

Yeah, I'm gonna answer this by giving you a story. You know, like when you have this idea about building a company, It's in your head and you think it's a good idea and then you start talking to people, right? And then like you're building up momentum to like finally do it, right? To get over the bridge, to get off the fence. And I had one of those moments and it was in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. A lot of people aren't going to know where that was. I was visiting for a holiday party. It was December 16th. It was -55 degrees outside. So whether you're in the US and take Fahrenheit or Celsius in Canada or anywhere else, doesn't matter. It's really cold, very, very cold. The coldest I've ever felt. So it was this other CEO of a 12-year-old software company out of Boston who was also there, and we were sitting around having some cocktails. Middle of the night. And, um, I asked him, why do you only have like one integration? You only have like Salesforce, you know, in your app. And his CTO was actually there and his CTO was like, well, you know, when we built it first, I didn't think anything of it. I thought Salesforce is the only thing in town. I only care about Salesforce. They're the biggest player. I'm only going to do Salesforce. And then I never thought about adding more. And then, you know, when customers came in and they asked us for HubSpot and Pipedrive and all these other ones, I'm like, I don't know, I don't know how to do that in my architecture that I used to first build these, could not accomplish that. I built this once, the data models that I used were all around Salesforce. They weren't normalized, they weren't mine, I'm only using Salesforce. And so they were so tied to Salesforce they could not add And this was 12 years of that. 12 years of, oh, there's something more important, but really I can't do it technically because the architecture doesn't allow me to. So that was the CTO's answer because he was there as well. And then I looked over at the CEO, and again, this is why this topic is important, not because of the tech, but because CEOs, we live and die, or our companies live and die actually our jobs too, uh, with revenue, right, and customers. And the CEO looks at me and he's white, and it's not because it's really cold because we were inside, uh, he looks at me and he's like, and this is why, um, our revenues have stalled and, you know, we're not doing well, right? And so I really took that to heart as a, as another fellow CEO. That's when I really felt like this was a massive issue. This company that had raised $40 million was stalling because they could not expand their integrations to monetize additional customers coming in. So I think that's really important. And to, to answer Kyla's question, nobody ever thinks about doing the second integration. No developer, no architect, nobody. They only think about getting that one integration out during the sprint cycle and checking that off and moving on to the next thing.

Awesome, awesome. And with that, folks, we are done, uh, with our webinar. Uh, so as a follow-up, you will get a recording of the webinar and the presentation as well, right? So before we kind of sign off here, Roy, and head on over to the networking lounge, do you have any parting words for our participants?

Look, it's hard. If it was easy, everyone would do it. That's the stupid sentence that you hear a lot, but we're all here because We like it hard. We want to build something, you know, we don't want to go 9 to 5. And so it's all about execution. It's all about grit. It's all about hustle, if you will, to some degree, but it's really all about just going, just keep going, but listen to your customers. Listening to your customers will set you free. It will set you in the right direction. Right? That's who you're here for, to make them happy. And so they will make you successful if you listen to them and pay attention and work super, super hard.

Awesome, awesome. So there you have it, folks. Listen to your customers and work super, super hard. If you are, you know, looking forward to our events, you can check out fi.co/events. For all our upcoming events. We have a ton happening next month, in the upcoming weeks as well. I hope you all have a great day and a great week ahead. With this, we'll be heading off over to the network lounge. Hopefully Roy can stay back for a bit. I'll be there too. If you have any questions, you can kind of talk to us directly. I hope you all have a great day.