Lessons from Building a Billion Dollar Business | Interview with Jonathan Cronstedt of Kajabi

When you shift into growth mode, psychologically, you are going to have to give up a lot of the things that you may have originally built it for in order to get where you want.

How much more successful would you be if you had lunch once a week with insanely successful entrepreneurs who share their biggest secrets on how they think and achieve success? Grab your seat at the table, because this is Business Lunch with Roland Frazier and Ryan Dice. Hey, business owners, I've got a quick question for you. Do you feel like you're missing the data you need to make strong business decisions? If so, it's probably time to build a CEO dashboard. It's an easy way to get everyone in your company literally on the same page, focusing on the numbers that matter. So the scalable company put together a free spreadsheet template that will give you everything you need to deploy your own dashboard. And to make it even easier, Ryan Deiss recorded a short training on how to use it. If you want to get your hands on the template, go to businesslunchpodcast.com dashboard that's businesslunchpodcast.com dashboard and you can download it for free.

So I want to introduce one of our good friends, Jonathan Kronstadt, who he was actually, I think it was 2013 for a. For a bit, the CEO of Digital Marketer. And then he went on to Success magazine in not necessarily in this order, and. And a bunch of other companies and landed at Kajabi. And Kajabi. Is it okay to say kind of where Kajabi was in terms of revenue when you came up?

By all means.

Okay, cool.

So, yeah, when I, when I joined, we were roughly 30 team members and approximately 6 million annual recurring revenue.

6 million ARR. And it's not public now, but are there, Is there information on kind of.

Where we are now? Over 400 employees and over nine figures. ARR. Nice.

Okay. That's better than when you started.

It's, you know, turned into a thing, actually.

So, so I just, we.

John was kind enough just to come out here and. And share some of kind of what he did in helping take that company from a $6 million ARR. To a $2 billion valuation with Tiger coming in, two private equity companies that.

Came in, and Spectrum in September, Spectrum Equity in September of 2019. And then 2021 was Tiger Global TPG, Owl Rock, Maritech, and Tymark.

Okay, so nobody that had a big name.

No.

Yeah.

So relative unknowns.

Relative unknowns.

So we would like.

We have 29 minutes and 23 seconds. And so we would like to all have $2 billion businesses too.

You're in luck. Let me give you the URL for my 8 point failed double unicorn plan and it's available for the next 10 minutes. I love it.

It's expensive but it's, it's worth it.

It's actually quite short. It's just work really hard on the right things.

Okay.

All right.

So overwhelming download.

So when you came in there, and I know you've got some talking points so if I miss anything let me know. But when you came in there, what was the first thing that you did?

So it, it probably doesn't sound that intelligent but really it was looking at the business with new guy eyes that I think all of you can relate to anything. You start and spend your first 30, 60, 90 days you have all of these questions because you're not coming in with all of the frameworks or system elements that after you've been there 90 days it falls into, well, that's just how we've always done it. So I think for me, having really been fortunate that I was very dear friends with Kenny for the six years prior, I had an outside view of the company and had actually we joke about it because this was a six year long partnership and it was third time's the charm because they hired me as a consultant about six months after launching the company, fired me to work with Frank Kern because he was cooler. Then they hired me back. I quit two weeks later to take the job with digital marketer. We joke because they fired me and I quit. We were even and this third time was going to work out.

Then they poached him back from us.

Which was not cool. Kenny. It, it really was looking at the business and saying okay, no, this, this really is a thing. It had been a spectacular lifestyle business. It had really helped spawn an industry that prior to Kajabi was workbooks and DVDs and CDs and looking at that business and saying wow, we have unbelievable trend lines, we have unbelievable opportunity here. But if we don't really step into this in growth mode versus lifestyle mode, we are going to miss that window. And rather than leading the market were going to be a footnote on whose ever white paper talks about leading the market. So it was I'd say a redoubling down but also a reimagining of the scope of the business.

So how do you move from lifestyle to growth? Let's say. What, what, what's different?

I think the most important thing is the psychological shift in the ownership that you are going from Something that you probably have built and optimized for a certain purpose. You know, you built a machine and that machine might be super cash flow focused, or that machine might be super lifestyle and demands on your time focused, or it might be a super small team because you don't want to deal with the management headaches. When you shift into growth mode psychologically, you are going to have to give up a lot of the things that you may have originally built it for in order to get where you want. You know, I've heard people call it the no man's land. I've heard people call it the desert. But whatever the purgatory is of, we have a really cool thing and we believe it could be 10 times the size, but it's in the middle. It will be 10 times the headaches and one tenth of the income. But there's this thing we can do and if it all goes well, it's going to be pretty cool.

Were there any specific action steps that you took kind of making that change?

Definitely. So for us, the two big guiding points that we were fortunate to really nail early and prevent as much dilution as possible along the way is really the ideas of culture and community. That culture was without question the number one driving factor in our success. Culture. I think. I think it was Peter Drucker who said, culture eats strategy for breakfast. And for us, it was perpetually outworking and modeling a closeness to the customer that our team knew every single day, that our team knew when our app went down, I would be the first person at 5am in the Facebook group. I would be the Last person at 10pm, 11pm, whatever it is, checking out of the Facebook group all of the days of the week didn't matter. Weekdays, weekends. We made sure that we were always living closer to the customer than anybody else. We never shied away from any piece of feedback. We never were unwilling to engage in difficult conversations of why we built this, not that, or why we weren't building the super weird, esoteric thing that the super vocal person wanted. We always had a point of view on it, but our cultural foundation was living closer to the customer than anybody at all times. That also meant making sure our team knew that we were closer to them than they would find at any other organization. So especially early on. And it did get more and more challenging to keep this as a system that evolved as we grew. But we were really able to have the most amazing team because of the culture. And the culture really was. I mean, if you're looking to have your outward Culture be a reflection of what you want. Unless that culture is modeled and reflected internally within the organization, it doesn't work that way. It's not like you can, you know, flog people into loving your customers. It doesn't work that way in management. So for us, it was always a real goal of having the team have an opportunity with us that was not boring or mundane or didn't have paths of advancement. Because when you're an entrepreneurial enablement company, you're basically training and coaching and showing your team examples every single week of all of these unbelievable businesses that are being started. I ran into Greg Todd just before I got on stage. And, you know, when Greg started, he was a physical therapist who then started adding digital components for his patients, who then had physical therapists wanting to do the same thing. Built a business of physical therapists that then were using his systems. It spawned an outsourcing business supporting those physical therapists. You literally see the iterations of business. And so if your employees don't see that same level of motivation, upward mobility, and that culture being modeled, they're not going to reflect that out to your user base. So those were really the two things that we tried to keep in tandem during those periods.

Was there any codification of the culture anywhere?

Definitely. So mission, vision, values. Everyone talks about it, but most people just end up crafting them and they never get talked about again. It's something that really should be your compass, your North Star, that if you're not actively mentioning it, using it as a compass, using it as a lens, using it as a meeting format, if it is not something that is living, breathing, and a tool that you're picking up every day as actively as your iPhone, it's not going to last. And that's something, even as we grew up, it did get harder. I would say probably in late 2020, we actually revamped it as more of a manifesto. And the manifesto at that time was, hey, everybody, this is what got us here. And you know, yeah, now we're hiring people from shiny logos, and now we're being talked about, and now we're doing cool stuff. But if we lose these elements, we won't be the company that got us here. We won't be the company that attracted all of these people to us. So I think, again, going to that growth idea of, like, it's here, but I want it here, you have to accept that some of your abilities to control will get diluted over time. And so beginning to figure out those foundational systems that you can continue to leverage as you grow, become all the more important. And just like anybody, you know, I think we were. We were a little bit late bringing it back the second time, you know, and just being transparent, because this is war room and I'm. I'm happy to share it with you. The growth was something that even I think in some ways outpaced our acumen, outpaced our comfort levels, at times outpaced our understanding of how do you navigate an organization like this? Like, we were great at 30, we were hitting our stride at 150, approaching 400, you're like, how are we doing? And now we're virtual. When we were an office first company and all of those things, so learning for us would have been, I think, building more of those guardrails and putting them in physical documents of some kind that can be referred back to and continually referenced, because I think we allowed sort of the tribal indoctrination and relying on our in office culture a little bit too much.

And so you mentioned how culture helped with recruiting. Would you talk a little bit about, A, how culture helped that and B, how the heck did you get from just a few employees to 400 and some and not go insane?

Sure. So I would say our recruiting mechanisms worked amazingly up till about 100, 150 employees. The learning that I would say, looking back on that, we did a great job of cultural indoctrination. Once we found people, once our, you know, human resource team or people team or whatever you call it, once we got them to see us, they were excited. And once we got them onboarded, they were unbelievable, plugged right into the system. Where I think we could have done a far better job on the recruiting side is we made the mistake of viewing recruiting as a support function that as a bootstrap company, we recruited or we hired when it was painful, when it was like, gosh, we need this person because we can't tax our existing team anymore or we can't do it ourselves. Whereas going into growth mode, hiring is a massive force multiplier. That should be a strategic focus in your business. And if I knew then what I know now, I would have been far more vocal on LinkedIn and on whatever channels you are connecting with your future employees. I would have been publishing content, I would have been engaging with those audiences, and I would have been getting our point of view and company culture in a very visible fashion so that people could reach out to us because it resonated with them. If you treat recruiting like a reactive element, you will constantly be beholden to recruiters and giant recruiting fees or the luck of the draw on, you know, indeed or wherever else. But if you're proactively putting out your culture for everyone to interact with and letting people disagree with you, agree with you, et cetera, it's the most powerful recruiting vehicle on the planet. Dan Price, who's the guy that got all the fame in the world for, you know, raising the base salary at his company, 70 grand a year for everybody, does a masterful job at this. Like on LinkedIn, he'll get 800, a thousand comments on everything he posts. But I guarantee you they always have a backlog of people that want to work there because he's constantly talking about what working there looks like. And now granted, any of you who own companies, he's got a little bit of revisionist history. And hey, I can now tell everyone to take a day off because I got famous for telling people that we're going to pay them more. But I did that because I didn't take days off and built the business and whatever else. But I would have said for us, recruiting should have been a far more strategic, proactive content driven by culture endeavor versus oh, that's people department's challenge and recruiters challenge. And let's just patch it as we go.

So knowing all the things that you know now from the lessons that you just mentioned, if you're, let's just say a 5, 6 million dollar company now and you're having a challenge attracting talent, what would you do?

I would definitely go culture and content.

Okay, so culture and content, but specific steps.

I would not like write a plan, but I mean I would be writing on LinkedIn every day. I would be writing on LinkedIn every day and talking about what's going on at your company, what you're excited about, what your needs are, the who that you need to actualize those opportunities in front of you. I would literally be doing that daily, both from a visibility and brand building perspective, but also with a significant focus on recruitment and team attraction. Because it's the only way that you're going to find people that will join your team without more of a mercenary motivation that if a recruiter reaches out to them, they're being bought, if they're got a resume out there. I mean, everybody knows that in today's labor market, anyone who's talented probably isn't out looking for a job or browsing job boards. So you're only going to get someone if they're seeing you and you're bringing something different to the party that answers more fundamental desires that they have. The only thing that's gonna do that is culture or why. So I would absolutely say if you're not on LinkedIn every single day talking about your culture and attracting people into that universe, you'll end up with the backlog and going down the rabbit hole of recruiters or you know, best guess on referrals, which, I mean you can't scale off of that. It's not systematic. If you need one who, maybe if you need 10 who's or a hundred who's, you're not gonna get it from there.

That's awesome. So what about retention? Obviously that goes to retention, but in terms of, let's say compensation or equity participation and things like that, how did you approach that and how would you know?

So equity participation is a huge, huge, huge hot button right now. Silicon Valley has kind of made it table stakes for anybody who's in any aspect of technology. I would say that I, I don't think it needs to be that way. Like, I don't think it needs to just be a, every job has it. I think that it really needs to be something where it needs to be thoughtfully applied in your organization at the stage that you feel like you can do so appropriately. Because I mean everyone's had the job where you have equity, but it's like, well what's the likelihood of that equity being something? You know, are they just trying to underpay me with the equity carrot? So I think it's something where it needs to be stage appropriate. But there's no doubt about it. We at Kajabi always operated under the belief until we got larger and labor market studies became more of a bible for us. We always were trying to pay people at what they were excited about. It wasn't, you know, gosh, can I, can I get them a little bit cheaper? Because if you get them a little bit cheaper, they're going to be far less excited to be there. And what you're really looking for is a force multiplier in your organization, not somebody that's just going to punch a clock. So I think that especially in compensation and retention, most companies are very penny wise and very pound foolish that you're forgetting why you have that person in the org versus where do they fit into the box of compensation. Now at Kajabi we're doing, I mean pretty much our people department does it quarterly where we're looking at all of the baselines of what is the band for this job, this description and everything else. Because you Just you have to. But prior to that, it was much more about the motivation element and what is the job that they need to be doing and how can we have them ready to tear the COVID off the ball.

And when you brought them on, was there a specific onboarding process, like an SOP for that?

Definitely. So for us, depending on the department you came into, there were a variety of what I would call tribal indoctrinations, where you're going to be spending the time with the individuals in that department that we really wanted you modeling, that we wanted you kind of having a. Almost like a buddy system where you had a guide that's going to, you know, walk you through our product processes on the product side, or walking you through our dev cycles on the dev side, or walking you through our marketing rhythms on the marketing side. But it was. It was not as codified or systemized as I would like it. It was very people driven. But as we grew, it got a little bit more formalized. Okay.

And then moving from kind of getting that culture in and getting the people in. You mentioned to me you told some really good stories about how the first time that private equity came to you, you guys were just like, oh, my. You just buried in work. And then when the round that came in most recently, it was like just total easy breezy. Will you talk a little bit about that? Because I think that's a very good thing for everybody to hear.

So their first one, I mean, they were. Yeah, it was almost six months of paperwork and paperwork and paperwork and paperwork. And just when you thought you were done, there was the next round of paperwork. But what was nice about it, and I would say for any of you that are likely going to explore a journey like this in the future, whether it be for a full acquisition, whether it be for a capital raise, whether it be for just taking on a partner, we had a tacos and tequila test, and we applied this because we were getting so much inbound interest. Everyone and their mother wanted to get together, ask us about our numbers, you know, hey, tell us about your business. And at first, we blew all of them off. I just really didn't have any interest in any of it. And then it really became something where we were like, well, you know what? Why don't we have some discussions? But, you know, the whole thing for us was we didn't need the money. For us, it was very much about the intellectual capital at the table and the seasons that were coming. So we basically said if we would not have tacos and tequila with these Guys, regardless of if we were doing business together, it's a non starter. And there's no doubt we met with some very, very, very smart PE groups. That it was, it was painful. Like, I mean, five minutes into the lunch, we were like, gosh, I'd rather not have a lunch than have lunch with these guys.

And Spectrum, was lunch a common way of doing that?

Oh, absolutely, it was. The lunch actually was one of the most systematic approaches because it was always at Javier's and Irvine, the menu was always the same. Right. And so, yeah, I mean, we literally even down to the location and table and everything else, it was like, no, how did this one feel? Because we just ate at this table last week. Right. But yeah, it's. What ultimately happened was Spectrum was the fund that really. They actually gave a. About us personally. We kind of had said no to them. And we had our user conference coming up and they showed up at the user conference, took a selfie in the lobby, sent it to us, and we were like, oh, my gosh, these guys bought a ticket, which was very impressive because, you know, all of you that put on events, you know, every friend of yours comes out of the woodwork for free tickets during event season. But the fact that they bought a ticket, showed up, hung out with our users, and we're like, this is really cool what you guys are doing. It put them in an entirely different category because as everybody else is sending us spreadsheets and, you know, metric requests and whatever else, these guys were like, no, we're just going to come hang out with your people. And so that took them into the realm of, gosh, we really want to work with them. But what we really learned is just how little we had documented and prepared for this season. You know, we didn't have audited financials, we didn't even have reviewed financials at that point. We didn't have all of the HR documents and systems and contracts and intellectual property. Like everything under the sun. We learned, oh, wow, this is the. This is what you're supposed to have in place. So it was a much longer and much more painful process than it could have been. These are all things that if we knew then what we know now, we would have been building as we went versus, holy cow, we need to backfill all of those. But the good news is in the silver lining was if you have a supportive partner, you're going to be able to backfill all of those because they're both excited about where you're going. It's more about the Business, the culture and the customers than it is about, do you have all your paperwork in order? And are you an easy deal for us? So that was a big learning, but, yeah, it, it was a process that was very, very painful. But I am so incredibly grateful for the learning that came out of it.

So when you. That was the first experience with private equity. And then how was it once you closed the deal, did things change? Did so expect for things to change? Did they tell you things were going to change?

John Connolly at Spectrum, who is our managing director, he actually told us during the process. He said, guys, I gotta tell you, I so much enjoy the process after this, far more than I enjoy this process. And then it really was one of those things that it proved out to be tremendously meaningful because he has been a very vested, very involved, very enthusiastic guy that doesn't mind getting his hands dirty. This is not like, I'll see you for the quarterly board meetings and just send me the updates on the financials. It is, let's talk about TAM expansion. Let's talk about the markets internationally that we might not be effectively serving. It's. It's very much. I cannot overstate that your entire experience with any equity partner will be dictated by all of the things that are not financial. The financial element is going to be almost identical across the board. And if you're over indexing on again being pennywise and pound foolish, everything that we have learned and everything that's been the most valuable was not the financial elements. It was the core values of how that group operated, the willingness to dive in and operate alongside us. When Spectrum's been unbelievable partners. And the last cohort of investors that came in led by Tiger, that was a very different process. I learned that that next tier of equity largely relies on the first tier of equity. And what's great is it works amazingly well when you have very diligent firms in that first tier. Because Tiger literally was just like, oh, Spectrum's involved. Yeah, we're good. And it was really, really unique to see how quickly that process moved because of the amount of legwork and the amount of immense diligence that Spectrum did. Tiger just was like, yeah, we're really covered. And then the other thing that we learned also about Tiger is the amount of acumen that they had on our industry. We hung up our first call with them, and they knew aspects of our business we didn't even know. I mean, Bain had done studies on us that like, like I said, we learned about our business sitting through their presentation.

That's pretty salty.

Ryan here. And look, if you're an entrepreneur, you're busy, right? Whether it's replying to emails or scheduling meetings, whatever, there is a lot of work and a lot of hats that we need to wear as entrepreneurs. And that's why as entrepreneurs, especially if you're a visionary founder, you need help, right? And I don't know about you, but at one point for me, I was getting so overwhelmed with all the little day to day tasks that we face it, they gotta get done, but they don't necessarily need to get done by you. And so when I came to this realization, I said, I gotta get help. I need to get a virtual assistant. I gotta get a social media manager. And that's when I called my friends at Belay Solutions. Belay Solutions are an incredible organization. Now, look, I don't know about you, but I tried to work with VAs in the past. It was always a disaster. And so I was really, really suspicious of being able to make it work. But their process was fantastic. They found out the type of work work that I need done, the type of people I like to work with, and they really did match me with a perfect virtual executive assistant. And this person's been with me now for three years and counting. So obviously it worked for me. And I think it's going to work for you. So here's what you need to do. All right? The good folks at Belay, they're actually giving listeners to this podcast $300 off the startup cost for their virtual assistants. You'll pay less than I did. Here's what you need to do. Text, lunch. All right. Text, lunch, lunch. L U n c h to 551-2-3. Again, that's text lunch to 5512,3. To talk to Belay about getting a virtual assistant of your own. You need it. You know you do. And they can make it happen.

What, in terms of customer acquisition and things like that. Once you get to the point, like you mentioned expanding tam, right? So once you get to the point where you feel you're kind of bumping up against something like that. Did that happen to you guys?

Definitely.

And then where did you look for expansion and where are you looking for it now?

So I'll give you. I'll give you the Kenny and J Cron non academic TAM focus.

No, I want the academic one.

I can't give it to you. Okay, so Kenny and I was always very simple. It was, how do our customers win? We were never a software platform. We were never a course platform. We were never a coaching platform. We were never a membership. It was literally, you have an outcome that you want to achieve online. What does that require? And now that is a very hard mantle to hold. It is at times a very hard product lens to motivate to. It is a very hard lens to develop to at all times. But it's the only way that you win. It's the only way that you don't get relegated into a single tasking app. It's the only way that you don't put your customers into the hell of plugins and a tech stack that keeps breaking in 37 places. It was something that we decided early on that was the landscape we wanted to own and that was always our true north. So our TAM expansion was very natural. It was just, what do our customers need that we don't offer? What are our customers doing that we're not serving? What will our customers want to do that we could hopefully skate to where the puck's going to be. So that was our view of TAM expansion. Now, whether it's vertical TAM expansion, horizontal TAM expansion, whether it's, you know, however you want to color it, it's all going to boil down to that. Right?

But I mean, yeah, total addressable market.

Yeah. The best, the best TAM discussion that, that I would say that was one that we learned about in the discussions with Spectrum. And it's something that I think for anyone's business, it can be an exciting thought exercise. Is every equity group got the TAM of Uber wrong because they all built the TAM around the academic exercise of what is the taxicab market and how much of that can Uber capture. They never thought that Uber would completely change the TAM of people that were taking shared rides, which was way bigger than the people that were taking taxicabs. Yeah.

So Airbnb too, they, they, I think they said 30 million was what they put their TAM out when they had their first conversation with the VCs. And the VCs said, you need to make that billion. And they're like, there's no way that that's possibly the case. And obviously it turns out that it was right.

It's definitely a divining rod that for, for anyone in here that is currently in a business where you're asking yourself, could this be a growth engine beyond what I'm currently applying? If you have a offering of some kind that is bringing non academically defined TAM people into your universe organically, those are tremendous signals. I cannot overstate the value of if you are watching people that you're like, oh, I didn't know you would be a customer for me. I'm not marketing to you. I'm not serving you. I'm not doing interviews with you to find out why you're here or what prompted you to use this thing. That's where all of a sudden you have something that might be a commodity but that if you move it into an industry that right now doesn't have it, doesn't use it, doesn't know about it, all of a sudden you can take over giant swaths of market share while everyone else is wondering how that happened. So don't miss those divining rods by any stretch.

So in the last five minutes that we've got, what have we not yet talked about? Because I know you had that a good list of things that you think would be really valuable to everybody, knowing all you do about our audience here.

If I were to give you the number one thing that I think we lucked into a little bit. The motivation was sound, but the application of it had a lot of serendipity to it. But I think for us, the coolest symbiotic relationship we ever found with our community was the opportunity to recognize and celebrate their success. And while getting to recognize and celebrate them for their success, give them the opportunity to share that success with the community at large. And hopefully we've earned enough trust and delivered enough value for them that they would also like to be compensated to be a referral partner for our platform. It turned into this super cool flywheel of and for everybody in here and some element of your online business journey. You know how lonely it can be at times. You know how many hours in front of a screen it represents. You know, how many cocktail parties where someone's like, I don't even understand what you do. Even though you just explained it really effectively four times. And they're just like, I don't get it. Must not be a business. It's an industry that is still psychologically challenging even when you're successful. Like, I still don't think my in laws actually know what I do, but it's one of those things where we had the opportunity to meet entrepreneurs at varying stages of that journey. And it began. Kenny named it the Kajabi Hero program. And it started with a T shirt. And the T shirt got to be such an exciting recognition element, showing up everywhere on social media, becoming sort of an opportunity for celebrating your success within our little microcosm of a community that we expanded the program. Then it was a T shirt, then it was a hat, then it was a hoodie, then it was. And. And it turned into something that we were able to.

Were those at different levels or was that at just the thing that you gave was Different.

Different levels. Thank you. So at different levels of revenue, as their business grew, we would recognize them with cool and fun things. And then as we started seeing this recognition and seeing this opportunity socially for people to celebrate what they were doing on the platform, we were like, well, you know, digital education is one of the only businesses where if you're taking digital education, you're probably thinking, I could probably be educating. So it's really got this super cool flywheel of I'm learning, but I'm recognizing I could be teaching. So the recognition program, the Kajabi Hero program, kind of gave way to what we like to call a closed partner program. And this was one of the other learnings that we had because for anybody who's ever been part of an open affiliate program, it gets to be pretty pirate oriented pretty quickly. And so for us, we really said the only way that you're going to refer people to Kajabi is if you're actually using Kajabi, if you're experiencing the application, if you could talk about it with integrity, if it's something that you would be excited about. And so that really turned into one of our greatest organic growth engines that not only allows us to pay out super amazing partner commissions, but it gives us so much opportunity to expose audiences that we would have a hard time speaking to because we don't even know about them. Like I, you know, I know of dressage for horses and I assume they would need core strength exercises to do dressage, but I didn't know that people taught core AB exercises for horses that do dressage. But if I send that person a Kajabi T shirt and they've got a huge following in this universe of dressage, they now are learning about Kajabi. But I can tell you in any marketing meeting we ever had, I never thought we should market to dressage, right? So it really turned into a super cool way to be able to reward and recognize our users doing super cool stuff, as well as asking them to tell people about the platform they're using to do all of that cool stuff. And it was, it was for a long time and it may still be one of our largest organic traffic sources, bar none. So that would be my one takeaway of how can you have doing business with you become a status increasing, excitement inducing experience experience for your customers and how can you then, after providing unbelievable transformation in some format, ask them to be willing to share and encourage others to have the experience they had. But you got to give first. Like, if you're just going out with the, hey, sell our shit, we're cool too. We'll give you a commission that, in my experience, doesn't really work. It doesn't have the heart in it that you're going to want it to have. But that was one for us where the most personally gratifying thing in the world was seeing people send us photos where it's like, I'm on a mountaintop here, or I'm on a beach here, or I'm in a villa here, or I'm in whatever, and I'm wearing my Kajabi hero T shirt because that's how I got here. And by the way, I just hopped off my coaching zoom call this morning, and I'm gonna go windsurfing or whatever. Like, that kind of stuff was just like, wow. Like, you know, don't get me wrong, the business has been tremendously rewarding in a lot of categories, but that was one that. That made all the difference. And, yeah, my favorite part.

You're going to be around here a little bit today.

I am. I was just hoping we got questions or something, because I. I didn't, you know, I don't have slides or a plan other than my download, of course.

We can do some quick questions. You guys want to do a couple of questions? Anybody have a question for John?

So there was a transition from bootstrapping to growth mode. A lot of sort of higher when it hurts talk. Would you have raised money from real investors sooner and gone faster if you had to do it over again? No. And I think both Kenny and I would answer that with an unequivocal no. Being able to skip all of those early rounds allowed us to not only have a much greater acid test of are we delivering enough value that somebody's going to buy it versus spending like drunk sailors and ending up as the next. What was it, fast.com or whatever. You know, 100 million bucks burned, 10 million a month down and then closed like that. That's just. To me, that's just irresponsible. Like, that's just working people with hubris. And it's just not the way that I think business should be done. So I would say that allowing us to skip a lot of those rounds really enabled us to get really clear on our value prop, get really clear on our customers. But also in the subsequent rounds, be able to operate in a way that we didn't have to surrender control of our customers experience because we had built up something that people were like we want to join you. Not we built you, we own you. So get to work. It's a very, very different structure and I think capital. The only time that I would ever advocate early raising capital is if you know exactly what you're going to do with it and if you're in a market where it is a land grab that you're like, I have a defined period that if I don't win the fastest I lose, then I would consider it. But to me, if, if I look at the amount of companies that early stage capital, I think it hurts them far more than it helps them. Thanks.

Cool. We do two more if, if anybody has one.

Okay, so you're, it's, it sounds like you've always got the finger on the pulse of your people and that's how growth happens. Which boss love that. So that said, what are you doing right now? Like what are the next things on your radar on on like either products or features that you're adding to what you have based on what people are asking for.

So just again giving you guys the war room unedited answer. It is definitely a huge psychological transition to go from operating and being able to simply move the pieces to moving to a board only position, which is where I've been for the last nine months and Kenny and I understanding how we now get to lead at a much bigger, bigger level, but that it's now much more of a nose in, fingers out type approach to things. So I would say that for us it has really been a reimagining of just how important the culture and the foundational pieces are because once all of the tactical pieces are available, hired for can be pressed on all of those things are in place. That true north and that point of view becomes what differentiates you versus everybody else that has a development budget and a smart team.

It was a pleasure to have you join us today. For all the links and resources mentioned in today's show, you can check the show notes. If you want to be notified when new episodes Release, go to businesslunchpodcast.com and you can subscribe to our newsletter. And if you know someone who would benefit from some of Roland's advice, please send them a link to the show. Thanks again for joining us. We'll see you on the next one.

Ever wondered how some people build real wealth through acquisitions while others just sit on the sidelines? Well, I'm here to tell you it's not about luck. It's about having the right system, the right deals and the right guidance. And that's exactly what we give you in the EPIC Deal Fast Track. If you've been thinking about buying a business, but you keep getting stuck, whether it's finding the right deal, structuring the financing, or negotiating with sellers, you are not alone. Too many people waste months, even years just thinking about acquiring a business while the real opportunities pass them by. The EPIC Deal Fast Track is not another course. It's actually an implementation program and it's designed to get you from the idea to the acquisition in just 16 weeks or less. We work with you one on one to help you find, fund and close your first or next deal. And once you do, we're going to plug you into our elite EPIC board community so that you can keep scaling through acquisitions. We install three powerful systems in your business. The first is the Deal Flow engine.

So you always have high quality off.

Market deals coming to you. Number two, we give you our offer and funding system so that you can structure offers that get accepted and fund them creatively many times with no money out of your own pocket. And number three are closing and integration systems so that you don't just buy a business, you actually successfully run and scale it once you have acquired it. Plus you'll have direct one on one support from an EPIC Deal Advisor every step of the way. And that's people that have actually come up through the system and done these deals themselves. That's the only way to become an EPIC Deal Advisor. And if you're serious about acquiring a business this year, don't just sit on the sidelines. Just text I'm in to 334-458-9034 and we'll get you in. So text I'm in to 334-458-9034 will get you in. No fluff, no wasted time, just real deal making from people that are actually out there doing deals right now.

I'll see you there.