The Most Underrated Marketing Strategies (feat. Jess Chan)

I am super, super, super stoked to have Jess Chan joining us from Toronto, Canada. Jess is the CEO of Longplay Brands. She bootstrapped this agency, scaled it to 7 figures in revenue in 18 months, which is crazy. What is going on in your mind in terms of leaving a safe job and jumping into the sort of uncertain waters of entrepreneurship?

Yeah, for me, one, I'm always the first one to say like, I am not a risk taker. There's always this pressure of like in the beginning with Longplay, it was like, how do I scale? Scale to 7 figures as quickly as possible, and there's no room for failure in that.

All this noise around celebrating, I feel like there's a victory lap every day going on about some startup, some founder, which is great, but it's kind of like sometimes it just has this unfair setting of expectations for yourself.

So retention marketing is just the game of like, how do you keep your customers? Email and SMS are kind of the foundational, most important channels to use in keeping your customers.

I lost $18,000. By investing into— Hey everybody, welcome to the Building Public Podcast. I'm your host, KP, and on this show, I interview world-class entrepreneurs, ambitious startup founders, creators, and builders on the internet who are boldly building the future in public. This podcast is my excuse to take you all on a curious journey to understand, learn, and hopefully be inspired by the worldviews, insights, and stories of these fabulous people changing the world. So far, I've gotten the rare privilege to sit down with incredible guests like Gary Vee, Alexis Ohanian, Kat Cole, Sahil Lavingia, and many more leaders. So check out the full podcast listing at buildingpublicpodcast.com. Now buckle up and get ready for our latest episode. Hello everybody, I am KP and welcome to the Building Public Podcast. I am super, super, Super stoked to have Jess Chan joining us from Toronto, Canada. Jess is the CEO of Longplay Brands, which is a full-service retention lifecycle marketing agency for D2C e-commerce brands. She bootstrapped this agency, scaled it to 7 figures in revenue in 18 months, which is crazy. And since then, she's been building this business and scaling it sustainably and profitably with a remote team. Longplay Brands has generated over $300 million in email marketing, email revenue. For clients from startups all the way to $500 million clients. She's now also focused on a product, not just an agency, a product called Backbone, which is a platform designed to streamline email marketing for small e-commerce teams. It's one of the first email marketing solutions for DTC companies. I love her content. I mean, apart from these 2 amazing accomplishments, the thing that really resonated was the fact that she's, you know, she's gotten a lot more active on Twitter. Now, and I've been following her Diary of an Entrepreneur, which is sort of the reality show version, or if you will, a series of daily tweets and updates, almost like a vlog of her journey as an entrepreneur. Much more than all of this, I loved her content and her DMs that we've been exchanging over the last few months. And she's such a giver and someone who I would love to emulate in terms of energy, in terms of vibe, in terms of just like being generous. So with all that said, welcome to the show, Jess.

Thank you so much for having me. And that was the kindest intro of all time. So I really appreciate it. I'm so excited to be here.

Thank you. And I, for a while, in the early stages of the podcast, I had like a very formal intro for people and I kind of hated it looking back, 'cause it felt like so not me, you know? And I'm like, what? I don't have a boss. I'm the head of this creative project. And every time I gave out, I said, or did like a hype intro, that was so me. You know, I call this hype intro 'cause that's my, There's a joke at On Deck when I was working that I would give hype intros to people all the time. So I brought this back. So now we're back to hype intros. Anyway, why don't you kick off with one of the inflection points that got you into the journey of being an entrepreneur? You know, like if you look back, was there a defining moment or a couple, you know, drop hints or like if you look back, like some inflection points that made you realize that maybe that's where I get this drive to be an entrepreneur from?

Yeah, I think the first inflection point that just kind of popped up when you asked that question is, When I was, I think I was 19, 19, 20-ish at that time, I entered into essentially a year, year and a half of just, it was just a dark period. So it was panic attacks, anxiety, depression, like suicidal thoughts, just like general hopelessness, purposelessness kind of space. And I was still, you know, doing my university degree at that time and just really feeling like, you know, this isn't the path that feels right. Like there's nothing for me to be excited about after I finish this degree. And looking around me, everyone was just like, Well, you don't have to think 2 years ahead yet. You don't have to think 3 years ahead yet. Just finish your degree first. And I was like, why is no one else— like, am I the only person who is like looking ahead and realizing this goes nowhere? So I think there's this combination of like aloneness, but also missing purpose, and also feeling there's something bigger. And that was when I— and just being in that dark period, I remember just waking up at some point. I was like, you know what? I am done with this. I am done with this. I hate everything. Everything sucks energy. What, where can I at least, what can I do at the very least to get out of this? And that's when I started researching like self-development blogs, like early stage, like Tim Ferriss, Seth Godin, and just looking for something to do and really leaning on a daily routine of, you know, let me read for an hour and a half and then journal and then go for a run. And I would do like 3-hour-long runs listening to Tim Ferriss podcasts and then started creating these mini side projects. So, You know, what if I was to be a UI/UX designer? Let me design a little UI/UX project, or let me be a JavaScript developer. Let me try to create a mini project for myself and launch it. Then I did like a daily blog. So it was all these like little projects just to have some level of like purpose or something I would be excited about. And that whole path led me to becoming a marketing assistant at Best Self Co., which was my first like real quote unquote real job at an e-com company. And then that became a CMO position, and then that eventually Um, led to the agency. So even though that wasn't my first like true, like starting a business and being an entrepreneur, I think that was kind of when the seed of you can create anything and, and create your own path started. And I kind of almost see the CMO position and my job as like the stepping stone into entrepreneurship, but the seeds really started kind of before that.

Yeah, I, I love that. And, and okay, so now I got an interesting, like maybe off tangent, but like take me into the mind of Jess where you're CMO at this e-com company and you were running this You know, massive business. What's the rough run rate of the business at that point? How big is the company?

At that point, I believe when I joined, it was probably like low 7 figures. Maybe like they had just launched their— or finished their Kickstarter. They had essentially a single product and maybe like a few peripheral products. It was probably a team of like 5 people. Came in as a part-time marketing assistant at that time. That was my— I had no experience in e-commerce or marketing at that time. And then I was there for 6 months part-time finishing up college. And then when I graduated, they offered me the chief marketing officer position. And I remember thinking like, this is the world's most unqualified promotion of all time, but like, we're just gonna run with it. And then I was with them for 3 years and we had ended just under 8 figures when I left.

8 figures. So by the time you were leaving, right? And so it's almost like, let's say, you know, close to 8 figures. And my, what I'm curious about is what is going on in your mind in terms of leaving a safe job and jumping into the sort of uncertain waters of entrepreneurship?

Yeah, for me, One, I'm always the first one to say like, I'm not a risk taker. Like, I'm not a risky person. I hate risk. It gives me anxiety. Like, even going to casinos, I'm like, how do I play with 25 cents and like play craps? And you know, there's no big bets happening here.

That is so funny because, you know, that just goes against the grain of the general perception of entrepreneurs. I genuinely believe some of the greatest entrepreneurs are risk-averse.

I think so too.

But the rap, the reputation of our industry is that, oh, it's risk-taking, right? Oh, like it's jump completely into it. But I feel like some of the savviest, you know, people on the planet, including Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett and all these amazing legends who are not entrepreneurs, but like, you know, investors, they're very calculated and smart. They're not blind into jumping. So that was funny you said that you were a risk-averse person.

And it's funny looking for the, 'cause my friends would say the same thing and they're like, you just, you, you put, you invested 6 figures of your own money into building this software company and like completely bootstrapped. So like that in itself is technically risky 'cause we're like, here's a bunch of poker chips, like 6 figures and like, let's, let's hope this works. But I think you're, you're completely correct, which is the whole game of entrepreneurship is how do you make big swings and then de-risk it as much as possible rather than making this like blind leap of faith.

Yes. Um,

so

that's why I was curious because you were at the, at the seat of being a CMO, which is, is a nice safe cushion job, right?

Mm-hmm.

Um, what, what was the series of events that happened to go, to go full-time?

Yeah, so it was honestly still pretty relatively de-risked in the sense where I was doing the CMO position and I had start— started taking on like essentially consulting clients and eventually it became, you know, the consulting was like, can you just do it for me? And then I was taking on a bunch of, doing a bunch of different marketing things and eventually realizing, you know, email and SMS is kind of the most scalable business. So, but before I left, I was already doing the CMO position. Then I was also having, I probably had like maybe 3 to 5 clients at most on the long play side. And I think I already had a full-time, 1 or 2 full-time virtual assistants and then maybe a copywriter and a designer contractor. So it was quote unquote like an established business. We were still, it was still very little money. Like it was, we were, we, I don't think we broke. You know, 10, 15 grand in MRR by the amount.

Could you replace your salary with it or not yet?

No, I couldn't replace my salary with it yet. But also at the time I was like, I was a 22, 23-year-old kid. Like I had no responsibilities. And that's one of those things where how much risk is it really? And when we think about risk, it's this idea of, oh, it's so risky. But like the biggest risk really was ego. It was, what if I fail, right? But is that really that big of a risk? It's really not. Because if it really came down to it, like I could go back, find a job, I could probably take on some more, some more consulting clients, do something scrappy. I could make the money back from my salary if I really wanted to. So when we think about this risk, the risk is really about what if I fail? What will people think? Like, oh my God.

What would people think? Right. That's the big risk, I think.

And if you can get over that identity ego, there actually typically is not as much risk as we think there is. Even losing a lot of money, like Even with our software company, which I know we'll kind of get into, like investing six figures there, it's like yes, it's a risk. But also, our agency can make it back if we just double down on if we really need to. So the biggest risk is what if I dump six six figures in and I lose it, and I have failed as a second time entrepreneur? That is actually the scarier thing that I think entrepreneurs don't don't talk about.

Yeah, also, and and you know, if you are a high agency person. and you work hard and you have the work ethic and like in the grand scheme of 80 years, right? Like you will make that money back, right? Yeah. I lost $18,000 by investing into an offshore agency for the dev shop to build an MVP for an unvalidated idea in 2018, right? And again, I was naive and I did the best I could for that year, that version of KP. The wisdom of what I have today, I would definitely not do that, right? But like that version of KP's highest peak ceiling wisdom was that. And I, and I did customer discovery and all these other things. Ultimately had to shut down the company in 8 months. I felt devastated. It was rock bottom and all that. But looking back, oh, I learned. It was my MBA.

Yeah, that's the cost of your MBA. So it's actually money very well spent.

Exactly. And it was an MBA in what not to do. I'm like, for the rest of my life, I am forever wise. Like, that's the beauty of education through failure, is that for the rest of your life you're forever wise in not doing what I did there, which is in that case, I didn't have product-market fit, right? I was trying to build a SaaS product for sales reps, and I was not in that industry at all. And I also didn't have a full-time CTO or a full— like a technical co-founder on the team, which I would do it on day one. So now I would never repeat those mistakes, right? But like in the moment, those painful failures were the necessary, you know, step to get to the next level.

I think an important, uh, element that you touch on there too is the benefit of thinking in longer time spans. Because if we're, if we're looking at the time span of I must be a successful As I, as I can in 2 years. And you really have no room for failure. And I was in that camp, like there's so much pressure in my early mid-20s.

20s is like that though. I was like that in 20s. Oh my God.

Like, and trust me, I'm 27 now.

Oh, so you're still okay.

I'm 35.

I included you in 30s camp.

I'm sorry. No, it's okay. People usually assume I'm like in my 30s, but there's always this pressure of like, in the beginning with Long Play, it was like, how do I scale to 7 figures? as quickly as possible, and there's no room for failure in that. Whereas now, I think I was tweeting about this recently, like, I am thinking in like 50-year timeframes. And it's so much more fun to do entrepreneurship when you're thinking in 50-year timeframes because a few failures, you know, it doesn't really matter. The urgency isn't there as much. It's really about having those long-term investments. And it also reduces anxiety too.

Anxiety. Oh my God. And see, look, I also think that all these noise, you know, on Twitter and LinkedIn, whatever, podcasts, whatever, all these noise around celebrating, you know, like I feel like there's a victory lap every day going on about some startup, some founder, which is great. But it's kind of like sometimes it just has this unfair setting of expectations for yourself because it subtly influences your thinking and compresses your timeline in which greatness happens, right? Michael Jordan, anybody would agree on the planet, is the GOAT in basketball, NBA. 15 years of his career, lost 9 years championship, only wins 6. But nobody can deny he was the GOAT. He was the GOAT, but he only won 6 times out of 15. I made a tweet recently about this. So can you imagine you were the GOAT of basketball? You were given— you were kissed by God when you were at birth to be this person, right? MJ. And you could only win 6 rings out of 15 appearances. But if you view your career as 9 failures or 9 losses or whatever, you're never going to get through it. You know, so even like a star-studded career like his only had such a small hit rate. So we as entrepreneurs, the beauty is we can play this for 80 years. Charlie Munger was dead, was, you know, passed away 99. So we can literally play the game. And he was still taking meetings and podcasts and all that, right? So we can play the game until 90s as long as we're interested in it and win the last 5 years of rings and bam, you know. So it's like, but we— it's such a hard thing to muster this when you're in, you know, in the influencer, right?

Like the— I couldn't agree more. And it was something I was so conscious about when I started this Diary of an Entrepreneur series, because I'm like, I want to be transparent, but I also felt like in my, like intuitively I can't share numbers and I can't share like these big wins, not because I don't want to be transparent about our numbers, but because it's going to contort the way I actually run the business if I feel like there's certain KPIs that are being watched. So let's just share the emotional experience because you can, you can have a great, you can can have a big win and still feel like a failure. And also you can have no wins and feel like it's great. And I think that's actually a more true experience of entrepreneurship where sometimes your emotional experience of being an entrepreneur is completely disconnected from how your business is doing. And that's very real. And also I think it's just so easy to get addicted to the dopamine hits of like big announcement, here's a big win, here's posting up a screenshot of a dashboard. And usually those KPIs are less representative of where your business is gonna be in 6 months or a year.

Yeah.

And then you chase those dopamine hits.

Yes. And it's like none of that's permanent. Like the real, like the only respect that I'll get or give is if we can show that same graph over 70-year period. Sure, then. But like I've been in companies, you know, where I was, you know, leading from the forefront and then, you know, like 3 years later the company's, you know, evaporated. Like it's gone, right? Like, so startups, the game is such a volatile thing and you can't even, you know, it's not even your fault, right? Like I said with MJ, like, He may have played amazingly well every season, but it's, it's a team game and a market game and a combination of so many things. So I feel like as entrepreneurs, especially in our generation, because we're so glued to our devices, I mean, I'm not saying all of us, I'm just saying, you know, it's just the nature of where we are. We have this unbelievable pressure to crush it in 2 years or 5 years. You know, meanwhile, some of the greats have taken decades.

Yeah, I think there's a lot of— and I do think the narrative has shifted a little bit with like the market shift and like you know, there's less like unicorn venture cap stuff happening. And, you know, I'm in the e-com space, but I think in general it shifted a little bit away from that. Um, but I think like a few years ago, every headline was scale to X dollars in X, like an X number of months. And that was the mindset I was influenced with when I started Long Play, which was, you know, for me to be a quote unquote, like real entrepreneur, I need to hit 7 figures because everything below that is, you're not a true entrepreneur, which looking back now, I'm like, only, I think only 4% of entrepreneurs hit 7 figures.

Yeah. You know, you know how long it took?

I didn't know at that time. I didn't know at the time, so I was like, everyone, everyone has a 7-figure business.

Oh, so every winner, right? We— the perception was every winner hit, you know, uh, 7 figures in like a year. If not, you're a loser, right? But like, you know how many years it took for Nike, like one of the greatest companies all time, to hit 7 figures? 6 years.

Wow. 6 years. I didn't know that. That's crazy. I love these statistics.

I can't think about that. Could you think Phil Knight was dumb? Like, what's Yeah, that's crazy. Goat. That's the problem though, because we're all over-indexing on— it's like over-indexing on how fast your baby can walk and crawl, but under-indexing on whether they're gonna take drugs or not in teen— the shit that matters is later, right? Like,

yeah,

are they gonna like, you know, like your baby when they're growing up is fine. Like, when I have a 2-year-old son and I see some of the parents when we go to these, you know, like, uh, daycare stuff or whatever, I'm like, they're so desperate to prove to everybody in the room that their kid has— is, is like on the faster path of learning. I'm like, I don't give a rat's ass. Like, my son Neil could come home and not be interested, or I mean, not be learning as fast as talking as quickly as the other peers. I want him to find his curiosity whenever he can eventually and just have fun, love it, right?

Yep.

Because that's the stuff that I think our parents did well, at least for us, right? Like, my mom did that for me. She didn't— like, there was no insane pressure. And so when I think back, I'm like, wow, you know, we, we as founders treat our companies like the way these you know, competitive parents treat their kids. There's so much pressure to perform in the first 3 years and you're like, what's the stuff that matters is, you know, in 30 years, 40 years, 50 years, what are you gonna do?

Yep. And I think you also touched on an important point here, which is especially with building a business, the decisions that we make if we're optimizing to hit as big of a growth rate as we can in the first year, 3 years is often at the cost of long-term success. Yeah. So it's not even just removing the anxiety and things like that. It's typically like, you see those businesses that scale so quickly in 3 years and then they're gone or they're losing money or, you know, all these IPOs that have gone to shit once they, once they launched because the business foundations were never built for long-term profitable, sustainable growth. They were always built to move as quickly as possible and be damned what's going to happen in 10 years. And that was kind of very similar to my journey with Longplay as well, where it's, you know, the first, you know, let's get to 7 figures in the first year and a half, did it. And it was great. I was like, oh, I'm a quote unquote real entrepreneur now. And I'm like, there was no. I felt nothing when we hit 7 figures. You know, it's like, it's just another like P&L that you get. But the day-to-day experience of that was everything felt like it was on fire. I was stressed out of my mind. I was like, in every single part of the business, nothing was built to be sustainable and scalable because we just needed as much input as much output as possible. Like growing top line revenue is pretty easy in the sense where it's like, just do as much as you humanly can, whether you make money or not. So. That was kind of the first, you know, year, year and a half. And then I'd say like we, this year has been probably one of the best years again, but the years 2 and 3 were, we kind of almost, we basically just flatlined revenue a little bit. We plateaued. And then we grew, we grew a little bit during, like we grew during COVID and then we grew last year as well. So we still grew a good amount. But we, I think at some point we were like increasing profit by like 3 to 5x the pace as our revenue growth. Um, and then our, we like restabilized the team at some point. We like turned over the entire team, turned over our entire client base, rebuilt the foundations. And I think it was such a beautiful reminder and beautiful lesson of if you don't get the foundations right and you try to skip that step, you're gonna have to go back and slow down to go do it right again. So you might as well do it right the first time because you get to avoid the emotional pain of like overhauling everything. Yeah. Yeah. Either you don't get to skip steps, like either your foundations are strong or they're not. You either build them right the first time or you have to go back around and do it, do it again. The second time. Yeah. Um, but having the foundation strong is like, team is better, profit is better, like potential is better. I'm, I'm enjoying the process a lot more and like when I'm happy and our team is happy, that is really where the growth of the company is gonna come from.

Yeah.

Um, and I think just even reflecting on building this first business with the agency, like that was, that perfectly mirrored this lesson that we're talking about, which is you could have the short-term growth, but you know, playing the long game is the Different way of building this.

I think, you know, it's just the nature of, you know, lack of introspection or lack of like, you know, because we're so busy reacting to cultural expectations, right? So you're like not really thinking independently. And like this year I had a reckoning during Thanksgiving. I had to pause and really rethink about like, why am I influenced dramatically by all these little nuggets of tweets and posts and everything? And I'm like, who is grading me? Right? We always have this thing where in school, like ultimately write the essay or you write the math exam and there's a teacher who's grading you and giving you an A+ or A, and I'm an A student. All in all, an A+ student in school, which is a bad thing sometimes because I'm like so stressed to be at the best. And I'm like, oh, in real life, nobody freaking cares. Nobody is grading you on the timeline that you think they are. So I took a step back and the questions I had to ask myself was like, would I trade— I think there was a fun prompt I had, which I'm trying to recollect. Would I trade a 3-year 7-figure status but insane pressure and pain and all that, but uncertainty for the rest of My life, or would I trade a 50-year solid business that only makes $1 billion in the last 10 years? I'm like, ladder, right? And so I'm like, who's counting? Who's keeping track of time? Who's like really, you know, like, so and then I realized that this Olympics that I'm signing up to is all my own choice, right? This mental gymnastic Olympics that I'm doing like a monkey. I'm like, that's dumb. You know, I can learn from the greats. And so that's why I'm like starting to learn about Warren Buffett and all the world. And oh, they played through decades. This is a decade game. So anyway, I have a very interesting follow-up question because One of my strategies is something that I feel like you are embodying right now, which is start with an agency or some version of a service business with an MRR component, which is an agency, right? Typically with a retainer and do that for cash flow, but really sort of transcend or graduate into a product business or SaaS business because that stuff can scale much better. And also that is a sellable asset compared to, you know, and also margins are better. So when did this come about for you? When did you discover an opportunity for Backbone?

Oh man, I have so much that I can touch on in this topic, so I'm glad you brought this up. So it's funny because with master game plans, it's so easy to backtrack into like, wow, there was this master game plan, but I will be fully transparent on like, here's the actual journey of this thing. So the agency was, I kind of stumbled into it in the sense where there, I had, I had kind of like a 4-step game plan for my life, which I created when I was 20, which was very vague. It was just learn how to build a business was step 1. Step 2 was learn, build a portfolio of businesses in a variety of different industries. And then third one was actually starting an education company. And then nonprofit education was always my end goal. Um, so that's like my mission, my vision. So that was like a super, like super broad game plan, but as long as I was going in that direction, everything was fine. So the agency was just the thing that kind of naturally appeared because that was where demand was. And I was like, okay, cool. I'm gonna use an agency to learn how to build, just learn how to build a business in terms of team finances, hiring, X, Y, Z. So scaled the agency up and went through the typical agency process, which was got to 7 figures. Hated everything. Everything's on fire. I'm like, I'm dying. I remember having, I was crying every single day.

It's labor intensive, right? For like a year and a half. Yeah.

It's labor intensive. I also, it's very emotionally intensive. I think that's the part people don't think about with agencies is like—

Why, why, why, why though? Which part of it? I want to, I'm curious.

Because all there is is people and you're, you have team and then you have clients. And I was in a position where I was, so I'm also a people pleaser, which makes it very good for starting a business in the sense where you always overdeliver, but it's very emotionally draining. And I think back and I'm like, I'm an introvert and a people pleaser, and an agency is the most emotionally abusive company I could have started for myself based on my personality. But it was guaranteed success because I would just kill myself to make sure everyone was happy, right? So it actually worked out as a first business. But it's just, you're just always in communication. You're always in conversation. Whereas like with a product, you know, there's at least a little bit of a bubble and you don't have as much of a relationship with your customers in that In that way. So,

so are you saying that agency is kind of like a glorified group chat?

It's just, it's just all people. And until you really embrace like true relationship building, which like now I love, um, at that time it's just, it's just a lot to take on because like, and when you're this close with your clients and someone like their business is going down or they're upset or like something is happening, like all that gets channeled towards you to some degree. Um, so you really get sucked up into like 20, 30 people's businesses. And you also have your team who is going through their own life things. So at some point, I always felt like something is always like someone's— someone's always have a family crisis. Something's always burning down. Someone's always having an emotional breakdown. Someone's always stressed. And like, that is just the nature of it. And there's this— I remember I was reading Bob Iger's, I think, like book on Disney or scaling Disney. And there was one story that like really stuck out to me where he was saying, Based on the scale of Disney's team, which is the company size, if there is a world crisis, a world event, anything that happens in the news, it's almost guaranteed that someone is directly impacted in the company. Yeah. And I think that was a really grounding moment of realizing, oh, as you scale, there's always going to be something on fire. And that really reframed my expectations for how I relate to the company. Because before, I always felt like, oh, a team member's upset. Oh, no, there's a problem. Oh no, a client is upset. Oh no, there's a problem. But you realize like at scale, some client's always gonna be having some problems. Some team member's always gonna be having a problem. And that helped like deescalate how I emotionally reacted to everything.

Mm-hmm.

So anyways, that's a total side tangent to the question, but that was kind of the agency and really went through a phase where I was like, burn it all down. Like kill it, kill this thing. I can't, like it's actually killing me. I'm having a panic attack every single day. I remember like I would have a panic attack crying on the floor and then get up and do a sales call. Oh my God. And that was like what I would do for like a year and a half. So, um, so that was kind of the process. And then I brought on Rachel, who's my wonderful COO and a partner at, uh, Longplay now. Um, and we kind of run off the EOS model. And that was a really, really big, important hire. And just our partnership has been one of the most important elements of scaling this business. Um, we really reframed it of, okay, let's, let's get me out of the day-to-day. Like, that was just a priority for like a year, year and a half. It's like, we need to build a team, we need to build systems, we need to get me out of client-facing role. And it was a very painful gradual process. But eventually we got to a point where I was basically out of the day-to-day. I wasn't client-facing at all. Um, and we carved out that additional space and time. Um, and we actually were planning to, I was going to start a traditional Chinese medicine company and do, go into D2C e-com. Cause I was like, that's, I love consumer marketing. That's what I'm good at.

Right.

So it kind of like started like early stages of building that business and then Backbone as an idea just kind of like arrived.

And

I remember, I think I was at an event with Matt from Square Dance, and I was like talking, I was like, oh, this agency, blah, blah, blah. And we built out so many systems to train the team members because it's so hard to find great email strategists. So we just started building out all of our training, building out all of our onboarding. And we have like, I'm like, we have so many systems. It's crazy. And he's like, why don't you just turn that into software? I'm like, that's the most ridiculous idea of all time. Like, that's dumb. And then, and then like dismissed it. And then it was one of those ideas where it just didn't leave my mind for like 3 months. Mm-hmm. And I kept thinking about it and I was like, and then I, I literally got so annoyed cuz I'm like, in my head it was a bad idea, but it wouldn't leave my mind. So I was like, let me just map this thing out to prove that it's a bad idea. And that this isn't gonna work. But I was like, I just need to get this thing out of my head. I started mapping it out and the entire like product roadmap, feature set, positioning target, like literally all that came out in like one sitting. Um, wow. And it was like this like 3-hour-long thing. And then, and then we kind of kept looking at it. I'm like, you know what? I think, I think we have to do this. Like, I think it's right here. Like, I think we have to do this. And we had, we, we had all the cash reserves. for it already. I was already out of day-to-day. Um, so that's kind of when we started the process with, with Backbone. And in my mind, when we, when we started building Backbone and launching it, it was going to be 2 separate companies, right? It was like we had Longplay, the agency, and then there was going to be Backbone completely separate. Right. And now this year, which is its own journey to talk about, um, in the process of actually launching and building a software company, is realizing it's actually all one big thing. And it has actually been in the process of launching and building software, I've actually, we've fallen in love with the agency and service model again. And it's not like it's better or worse, it's just different. And I have this like really beautiful appreciation of like business as a whole.

Wait, wait, wait, why did you fall in love with it again? Like, as in like what elements of it stood out?

Yeah. So, so I guess for context now, I, we have, I have some obviously experience in the agency service business, have experience in the software or still super early stage, not in scaling software, but like building and launching software. And then And also productized services is something that we kind of started off with midway through this year as well. So now it's like, cool, I have the service model, I have the productized service model, I have the software model. The biggest thing I didn't appreciate about the service model is how quote unquote like malleable the product is. The offering is. The offering, yeah, that's a better word. The offering is. So if we think about like a service-based business, a productized service, a software, and then also like a CPG, like a physical product good and think of them as like different materials. Service-based business is kind of like Play-Doh. It's like, as long as like you're on a sales call and you're like kind of within like 50% scope of like what you can do and what they want, like you can kind of just tell people to do different things. Like people as a team is a very malleable thing. You can just mold the Play-Doh. It's like, here you want, you want, you want like a pirate ship? Like here's a pirate ship. Oh, you want a statue? Here's a statue. So it's Play-Doh. And then productized service is like kind of more like maybe like ice where, or maybe somewhere in between, or like clay. It's like, it's a little bit tougher, but like it's just more systems, but it's still pretty doable. Software is kind of like a block of ice, right? Like you gotta carve into it and it's still pretty adjustable. But for you to adjust the feature set, like on the sales call, you're either, your product either does that thing or it doesn't do that thing.

Does not, right? Yeah.

And you can still adjust it, but you still have to pay more money in development costs to adjust the product. And then a physical good, like if you're selling like a shirt or pants, like It just is. And like, yes, you can, you can make adjustments to your product, but like currently your product, there's nothing you can do about it. It just is what it is. So it's kind of like cement. So that was like one of those like—

Wow, that's a great framework. You should, you should tweet about this and write a blog. Yeah, you should do a video or blog or whatever about this. This is amazing. Great framework.

Thank you. Um, so there's all this stuff where I took for granted how easy it was. The process of finding product-market fit for service-based businesses is so wildly different than software and even in building the software, we had done the usual, like, do your MVP, do your user feedback, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. But looking back now, if I'd known what I'd known, I actually would've started, and this is kind of what we're doing now, is like, would've started with a productized service version.

Mm-hmm.

And then developed the software knowing that it's a lot less malleable as a product. So that was kind of like one of the big things I really learned. And I think that, that level of appreciation of in a service-based business, it's so easy to find product market fit and you're making money in the the process of finding product-market fit. Whereas a software, you need to find product-market fit and then you make money. So the order of events is just completely different. And then obviously there's a whole benefit of like cash flow and things like that on the agency side as well.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think SaaS or just a software business is a compounding game. You know, nothing compounds it like that though. Like Calendly is a $4 billion company, which is crazy, right? It's a widget. Like if you think about it, when as an MVP, it's just a small tiny widget that would like help you with scheduling. And there were 4 other products in the category. So like it's a multiplayer, you know, opportunity. There were some other people that did the exact same thing. Google eventually came out with their own version of it but could not, you know, compete. But if you think about it, the first 3, 4, 5, 6 years, I don't think anyone took it that seriously, you know, compared to like Shopify, for example, right? But now 10 years in the game, amazing, insane, insane, you know, valuation and also just the ARR. So that's the thing with software. Is that it is a very slow compounding asset, but it's a beautiful compounding asset over time. But if you're like I said, with agencies and services, I think the way— the other framework I think that came to mind when you were talking about the way that you describe these 2 is that, you know, an agency or service business is almost like a job. And having a job is helpful to keep— pay the rent and keep the lights on. But a software company or software is almost like an asset investing. So that is great. But, you know, if you have like $50K, you're not going to live off of $50K in interest rate, right? With the investments. So you need both, I think, in the long run. But ultimately the one that will make you insanely wealthy would be software. So

I think so. But I think it's also, it's one of those like, it's just all bets, right? So

yeah,

it's all bets kind of like, and the way I think about it now is like, one, I'm more interested in just doing like a holdco long-term. And it's like, if there's certain things, if there's certain certain parts that can be sold, great. But I, I'm actually building everything to not exit or not need to.

Right.

Um, and if the, if an exit, and it's still built to exit in the sense where like I will be out of the company and, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a standalone thing, but we're not optimizing for an exit. And in that sense, it's like, is the software really necessarily better than a, than an agency? Like, not necessarily. Um, and I think the other thing to kind of think about too is like with an agency, you, you're, you're, or service-based business, the chances of losing are a lot lower. So for, But talking about, thinking about our bets in terms of expected value is actually a different equation. So let's say an agency is like, you're capped at $10 million.

Yeah.

But there's like, let's say an 80% chance that you'll hit $10 million. So your expected value of your agency's actually like $8 million.

Yeah.

Right. Because it's 8 or 80% times $10 million.

The probability, right?

Yeah. The probability. Whereas like with a software company, it's like, cool, your cap might be $100 million, but you actually only have a 10% chance of hitting that $100 million. So it's actually only a $10 million bet. Business or value, like expected value. So is it really that much bigger? It's like, oh, it's actually only marginally better. So the way I think about with the agency to software is it's still a leap worth taking, but only by like locking down your like expected value of like $8 million first, because that's pretty more of a guaranteed success. And you take that guaranteed success and you invest in something slightly less guaranteed, and you take the software and invest into something else slightly less guaranteed. Um, so I think that part is an important way to think about businesses because everyone always thinks about the potential to scale. We always think about, wow, software is so much better because it can be an $80 million thing, it can be a $100 million thing, but your probability of success is so much lower. And actually sometimes the math actually works out that your agency might actually be more valuable than your software depending on your probability of success between the two.

I think, you know, it reminds me of Alex Hormozi's story, right? The way they've done it, they've done, they've kind of had this similar approach of, I mean, I think a portco or a holco, a holco, and they had a software called Allen, and they also had Gymshark and Gym Launch and all that, which is, I think, productized service, if I'm not wrong. I don't think it was an agency. It was definitely more of a productized thing. And eventually they sold that version along with Allen, I think, for a massive exit, I think $40 million exit. So yeah, to your point, maybe the better bet or the better move is hedging against both. Yeah. So you have both cash flow and you don't need to exit. Keep this going. And then you also have a, a small, like you, you also have a small software side on side that could become big. And then that could, if it does, if the odds are in your favor, if it does, then you can, you know, think about the future that way.

Yeah. And this is, this goes back to the whole de-risking as an entrepreneur, right? It's how do you reduce, how do you increase your probability of success first? And then the second thing I think is making sure you don't lose the game. Like you don't exit the game. Like I think about a video game of like Just don't die. As long as you don't die, you have 80 years to play this thing. But once you die, then you're screwed. So we always optimize for like actually the floor first. It's like protect our downsides at all costs.

Yes.

So no matter what, the agency cannot go below a certain threshold. Our team is always protected cuz that is our core asset. Don't lose the team, don't lose the ca— the, the cash flow. And then We can, and then we can start optimizing for upside. But I find a lot of entrepreneurs so focused on optimizing for upside. I'm like, oh my God, this thing has the potential to be a billion dollar thing. But if it's going to take you 10 years to be a billion dollar thing, but you might die tomorrow, then what, then what good is that 10 year potential? Yeah. Um, so I think that the, the first rule of entrepreneurship is like, don't die. Don't exit the game. And then, and then, and then all the rest of the rules matter.

I love, I love so much of what you talk about is so, so relevant or on point with all my learnings from Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. It's so funny. I don't know. Have you

read any of their stuff? But I just watched The Tao of Charlie Munger.

That is so funny because the first rule of investing is don't lose money, right? Warren Buffett's classic maxim. Second rule is don't forget rule number one, right? So the way you described entrepreneurship, by the way, this should be a tweet on its own. You should put Warren Buffett on the top. You should put yourself on the bottom and say, Warren said this about investing. Here's my take on it on entrepreneurship. Because it's so true, right?

I love that. I think I literally tweeted something about like the 6 rules of entrepreneurship or something, and I'm trying to find it.

It's so true because the number one rule about entrepreneurship is don't die. But like you said, most people don't talk about this until they get in the trenches and then they're like, oh my God. You know? I'm like, yeah. So that's brilliant. You're such a great conversationalist. I'm having so much fun.

I'm so excited. Yeah, I'm having a great time. And it's one of those conversations where I'm like, I have no idea where the conversation is going to go in like 5 minutes. But it's great.

Exactly. But it's, it's to me the, the essence of a great, great podcast interview is where I feel like I'm having a coffee chat with someone who's interesting and someone who's relevant to what I do, my line of work. And, you know, I'm like, I'm peppering them with so many interesting and thoughtful questions, right? Which is exactly what I think the last few minutes have been. Okay. So tell me, let's get to the parts where we try to collaboratively create some value or tactics for people to walk away with in terms of email marketing. You're the queen of email marketing strategies. Give me or give the audience 3 underrated strategies about email marketing when it comes to, um, let's say e-com businesses?

Oh wow. Okay. I've never, I've never been asked this question, surprisingly. I'm now, I'm surprised that no one's ever asking this question. So I'll say to start off, email marketing is kind of a subset of retention marketing. So I'll talk about email marketing first. Yeah.

What is that? Yeah. What is, give, give us a definition maybe.

So retention marketing is just the game of like, how do you keep your customers? Email and SMS are kind of the foundational, most important channels to use in keeping your customers, but they're just channels. So when we think about true retention marketing, we're talking about like lifecycle marketing, we're talking about extending customer lifetime value. And there's a lot of different channels, tools, and programs that you should be using as an ecosystem to keep your customers around. I think that's an important conversation to kind of give context to. And I guess a couple of rules is One, when you're just starting out with any business, but if it's ecommerce specifically, don't invest too much time in retention marketing, which is the rule against what I, what I share typically. But when you just kind of go back to common sense, in the beginning you have no customers to keep. So you shouldn't be investing. Just get customers first. So get the basics down with retention marketing. I always say like in the beginning, maybe like invest 10, 15% of your resources, whether it's time or money, into retention marketing, but the rest of the, you know, 80, 85% should go into Acquiring customers and acquisition. So, uh, when it— when you're investing that first 10-15% of effort in retention marketing, I always say focus on your automated flows. That's the highest ROI activity that you could be focusing on. It's build it once, let it continue running. It'll keep your customers around. It's just the absolute—

Give us one example of an automation flow that would be forever, like an evergreen flow.

Specifically for e-commerce or just kind of in general?

For e-commerce.

Yeah. So for e-commerce, the basic, the basic 7 flows are So our welcome flow, browse abandonment flow, add to cart, abandoned cart, post-purchase nurture, and win-back flow. And that covers all the key areas of your customer journey, which is insane.

Damn, I love that you have them on your fingertips. It's so wild.

I mean, I've been doing this, I've been doing this for years, so yeah, but like I didn't have it on my fingertips.

Yeah, but like I, I interview a lot of experts, but they don't like remember stuff like this on like so methodically. That's amazing.

Thank you. Yeah, I'm like, if I didn't have it on my fingertips, I'd be concerned. But it really covers each, each area of the customer journey where you could lose customers. The most. So welcome flow is anyone from, you know, learning about your brand for the first time. Browse, abandonment, add to cart, abandoned cart is what we call like the buyer intent flow. So it's anyone who's showing intent to buy and becoming a customer. Post-purchase nurture is like make sure your customers are taken care of and like introduced to the product and actually using your product. And then win-back flow is bringing back lost customers. And then if you have some extra time, you can build out like a replenishment flow, cross-sell flow with a focus on getting customers back For a second, third purchase. So we always say, and we literally have like a chart on welcome flow should minimum be 3 emails, browse abandonment flow minimum 2 emails. So there's literally like, I think 20 emails to get built out. And that should be all the retention work that you do.

What's the number one recommended platform to design and send these emails from your angle, from your point of view? Is it Mailchimp or Klaviyo?

Klaviyo's still the leading, I'd say like ESP for e-commerce brands. I think SendLane is kind of starting to compete up there as well.

Do they do— do either of them do SMS too?

They both do SMS. Okay,

cool.

Yeah. So basically get like email and SMS done. Email and SMS strategy is the same strategy. And I know that that in itself is probably a hot take to some people. It shouldn't be. But when we're thinking about true retention marketing, we should be thinking about retaining customers from each stage of the customer lifecycle, which is just lifecycle marketing. So customer lands on your website, they have intent to buy, they make a purchase, You know, they're getting introduced to new product. That is the customer journey. Then we back into what email flows are relevant to send to customers at each stage of the customer journey, and then we can back into what SMS makes sense. So the strategy is the same between email and SMS, but the content, the copy, the timing, those things are gonna be different. But the—

tell me about 3 like peculiar mistakes that most people who are getting, who are new in this game make and how should they avoid them?

I'd say first one is really just not investing in retention marketing initially. So then you're like, Acquiring all these customers and it's this like the classic leaky bucket metaphor of like you have all this input, but you're like bleeding out customers. So it's like these 7 flows that we're recommending is like patching that bucket, right? Make sure you're at least doing the minimum. Second thing is honestly overstressing on email design, copy strategy, A/B testing. I think A/B testing has been talked about so much and like to the point where it's kind of overkill for early stage brands. Mm-hmm. Because early stage brands, retention marketing is like, just get the stuff out there and say, it's like, just launch. Doesn't need to be perfect. Get your email flows going out, get regular campaigns going out. Like that is actually the hardest part of retention marketing is the amount of workload that needs to be created. And I find a lot of these brands get so caught up in like the perfect email design. Is this all optimized? Is this being A/B tested? But the truth is like, if you have 100 customers, A/B testing kind of, you're creating extra work for nothing because you're not gonna have statistical significance anyway. And it's stopping you from doing the work that really matters, which is just getting the email out.

Right.

And it's following that 80/20 rule, like 80% of the results is gonna be generated by getting the email out. And then you can refine and do the rest of the testing and design stuff later. So we find a lot of brands, and especially early stage founders get really caught up in the details and then you miss the big picture, which is like just doing the work. Um, so that's a big one. The second thing is when it comes to retention marketing, it all starts from the ground, from the, from the foundation, which is like, do you have a business model and a pricing model is actually built to retain customers? And this is why we're so excited. Like with Longplay, our ultimate vision is having a holding company with e-com brands as well, because I think everything goes back to are the foundations strong, right?

So, yeah. So I was curious about that third one, right? Which is the, sorry, the second How can you assess strength of a foundation of business model? What are some signs?

Yeah, the way we kind of think about it is with retention marketing, the job is to maximize, maximize how much of the potential lifetime value of a customer we can, we can capture for the brand, right? Let's be honest where it's the best email marketing in the world is not going to get a customer to spend $50,000 on your brand if you're selling like, you know, clothes. Like, that's just not realistic. So there's, there's a very real ceiling to how much a customer, even your best customer, is ever going to spend on your brand. And no amount of good marketing in the world is going to fix that. Like, let's just be honest with that. So the foundations of a business model kind of set the potential ceiling of how much a customer can spend with your brand. And part of that is going to be like the value of the product and the product market fit. But also part of it is around, do you actually have additional products for them to naturally expand into? So we get a lot of, you know, we have brands coming in where they have a single SKU product with some, with like, that's like, let's say worth $30. And they're like, we wanna do more retention marketing. How do we increase customer lifetime value? And we're the first ones to say like, you can't because you have a single SKU product that cannot be repurchased. And no matter how many random periphery add-ons you create, cross-sell strategy's not gonna work because those peripheral products were created to cross-sell, not to actually solve a real problem.

Mm-hmm.

And you're just kind of creating additional widgets and like stuff that you're like hoping people will throw in their cart, but you're not actually solving a real problem. So the way we kind of look at it is when you're starting your initial business, and you're developing, and you're deciding what product you want to sell, knowing your customer and knowing what is the core problem you're actually solving for them, and what is your product expansion, like opportunity, even if you're not building all those products right away, are there naturally other ways you can solve that problem? Or is this the a very like single tactical, like isolated problem that you're solving for them. Like if you're just selling something that is like a one-use like problem, it's like someone just needs to buy a charger. Cool. You're going to sell them a charger, but there's no ongoing conversation,

right?

Additional peripheral problems you can solve for them. Then like there's only so much you can do. So that's kind of where we see the biggest—

I feel like a lot of brands make that mistake though. I think majority of the brands that I run into, DTC, are just trying to sell me their very like single SKU, or I just don't think that they're thinking that far, you know, except the greats, right? Like especially early stage, I feel like this is a huge, huge gap. Like you said, what kind of business is super exciting for you? Like if you were to create an e-com business right now or purchase one, let me just phrase it this differently. If you could just go out there and magically purchase any e-commerce business, what would you buy? And don't give me like the top Kylie Cosmetics, like, you know, like somewhere in the middle.

Um, so I mean, I actually wouldn't go for like any like well-known 8-figure, 9-figure brand or anything like that. Because it's like, they're already at the 8 to 9-figure range. Like all that is going to be like retail expansion and market expansion. I would actually probably like, and we're kind of actively doing this now, is like looking for the ones who are kind of doing like $10K, $20K, like they're like super low 6 figures, they have a core product, But like there isn't, they haven't scaled anything yet because that's really where like that's where our operational and industry knowledge is worthwhile. So that's kind of what we would look for. I personally really like the health and wellness space because there's that natural replenishment element. You can, there's natural product expansion to it as well. I think there's still a lot of opportunity potentially in like apparel, like lifestyle type stuff, but that's not necessarily like my personal expertise. In a marketing strategy, so that'd be kind of where I looked. Like I think I'd say like health and wellness is a big one, but I don't know that I would go into like just pure supplements because there's just too much competition there. So we need to be looking for like there's a few brands off the top of my head that I don't want to out. I know I have a few friends who are doing some good stuff in the health and wellness space where they found little little niches and little bubbles, and I would look for categories where either one there's no market leader. Um, in terms of brand. So it's like, hey, people are still buying like the generic like Amazon grocery store stuff, but there's a, there's a brand or storytelling that could be had in that category. Or I would look for categories and products where they're getting some traction, but there's a way to actually improve the product itself and the quality. And there's that demand that's being proven for like a low-quality version of that product. Um, so those would probably be the 2 areas I would look for.

Yeah, which is, which is amazing. If a bunch of low-quality products, you know, can attract demand, that means clearly there's a big opportunity there, right?

Yeah.

Awesome. All right. So I think for the last segment of this episode, I got a rapid-fire round for you. You ready?

Yes, let's do it.

Okay, cool. So question number 1, what's your favorite cuisine?

Thai food.

Oh, mine too.

That's crazy. I'm just very basic. Every time I go, I'm like, I'm going to try something different and I just get pad thai.

I'm a Panang curry person. So, you know, well, that's awesome. Favorite book you wish you read sooner?

Oh, The Creative Act

by

Rick Rubin. I just read that very recently, and it's one of those books that you're just savoring. Like, every single page is like, wow, this is like good stuff.

Yeah.

Sad when it's over. Like, when I find a book where I'm going to be so sad when it's over, you know it's a good book.

That's the good one. Okay. All right. I'm going to keep going. All right. Favorite musician or artist that hypes you up?

Taylor Swift.

Oh, wow. We have a Swiftie in the house. I love— I can't lie. I can't lie. There was 2 or 3 songs of hers that But I'm driving, it's the best, right?

We could do a whole podcast just on Taylor Swift if you need, if you want, if you want me to come back for round 2 that you didn't ask for.

Round 2 dedicated just to Taylor Swift.

All right. On her business, on her business savviness too.

Oh, that too, by the way. Right. Most underrated.

She's a billion-dollar artist. Why is no one talking about that? Most underrated.

I can't wait. Founders Podcast, David Senra, you know, to do an episode on her because she's OG. She's an OG in that. Okay. Number 4, favorite project or phase in your career?

I really am nostalgic for my times at BestSelf as a CMO because we were so early stage and it was like the golden period of e-commerce that we could just kind of do everything. So we like, we did a live event, we launched a Kickstarter that like was fully funded in like 48 hours. We like did all these like content videos and like launched new products and we were just kind of like winging it. And it was just so much fun of like the level of creativity that we had and how easy it was to get traction and success. Um, I, I miss that playground and I wish I appreciated it more for what it was at that time. Um, but I didn't, we didn't know it was the golden age of e-com because we were in the golden age, you know? So

you were living through it.

Yeah, I miss that.

Okay. Number 5, how would your parents describe what you do for a living?

Who? For a long time they just, I think they still say I send emails. I think their friends think I'm like an admin person and then they're really confused by like my lifestyle. They said that I send emails and then I think they said now I built a tool on, but I don't need my own servers. Like something like that. Yeah.

Serverless AWS cloud. Well,

yeah.

Um, I just can't, you know, I just can't imagine someone like my grandma who, who, you know, like she's 80 years old. Like, can you, can you try, can you think about like trying to explain cloud? To someone who is over 80, I

don't even understand cloud. I'm still amazed. You know that feature? You know that feature on iPhone where you can like share Wi-Fi password every time? Every time I'm just like, the world is magic. Blown away. Coolest thing in the world. How does this work? But I remember the first time when I told my dad, I was like, oh, I'm launching a software company. Like it's this big exciting like new thing. He was like, where do you where do you put all the data? And I'm like, I don't I don't know. I don't know, Dad. He's like, where are the servers? I'm like, I I don't know. I don't know how to.

Ask Jeff Bezos that, right? It's AWS. Funny that we mentioned, because if Jeff Bezos calls you and offers you unlimited supply of one item from Amazon, what would you pick?

Any item unlimited on Amazon? Hair products. My hair maintenance is very expensive, Bill, every year because I'm Asian and I have black hair and I'm trying to make it blonde, like platinum blonde, and hair masks and conditioner are extremely expensive. So I'd probably—

Really? Okay, that's, that's an insight that I didn't know coming into I don't— I think the whole— the grand total of amount that I spent on my hair this year is $0 except for the haircut.

It is a mid-four-figure expense every year.

Oh, it's a big deal. Okay. All right. Okay. Finally, the last one, last but not the least. What is your definition of success?

What is my definition of success? Being able to wake up excited every day, building, creating things I'm proud of with people I love.

Wow. That was poetic.

In both life and personal. So I think like creating a home, like building a family, hosting an event, like that is just as much of success as building a business.

Yeah, that's awesome. You should also tweet about that. This is such a great line.

I'm going to need this whole transcript.

There's like 5 or 6 moments where I was thinking like, oh my God, this clip, this clip, this is so— you should definitely, I'll send you all the links when it comes out. You should definitely take some of it and then turn it into your own content. That's it. That was the last question. Thank you so much, Jess. This has been such a blast. I truly had so much fun. I don't know if you could tell. I've done so many podcast episodes and I think when I find a great connection, you know, and the way, like the way we see life and the way we see business a part of life, I think it's such a true joy.

So— Thank you so much for having me. I also had such a blast and it's, I think the best conversations are the ones where you're simultaneously discovering where the conversation is going to go. So I really appreciated this.

Yes. I can't wait to bring you back in a future episode again and continue our friendship. All right. Online.

Absolutely love that. Sounds good. All right.

I'll send you all the links when it comes out live, and I'll see you around. Okay, perfect. Thank you. Have a great rest of the day.

Bye.

Bye, Jess.