210 - Outrageous Membership Platform Success! 99% Margins and Zero Ads with Tarek Arafat

24:47This is awesome. We think we were about 500 people. You feel like the magnetism of like, oh my God, people are using this thing that I built. You launched September 2023. When did you start getting those DMs? Yeah. So I guess like to back it up, right. So we launched a beta on, on a website in March of 2023. And then that's why what I meant is like, this wasn't supposed to be a big thing. We were literally just like, let's create a website and people use it. Great. People don't, no big deal. So that was March of 2023. I started getting the DMs first week of April of 2023. Oh, wow. Really quick.

25:23It happened. It happened really, really fast. And people were like, this is insane. Like, I want this feature. I want this restaurant. I think there's so much great advice out there. But if there's one thing that I love was that keep your product super simple because then your users will tell you everything else that they need. And that's exactly what happened. So my DM started filling up with people who were just asking for, wait, what if we could do this? And what if I could select multiple party sizes? And what if we could add this restaurant? And it was infectious, man. It made me double the time I spent on it simply because I just loved like responding to that feedback and I loved giving it back.

25:59So when did you get, when'd you get to a hundred people using your product? Pretty much by the second day, I think. What? Yeah, it, it, it really, it was insane. Like, wait, how, how did you get a hundred people to sign up with no, like, were you running a much paid ads? Yeah, no, I mean, we, we, we literally paid an influencer, like, I think it was a hundred dollars to put us on our story. and then we got like 41 people from that and then honestly that was the only paid ad we ran for the longest time and then because those 41 people started using it then their friends started using it and then my friends started using it whose other friends started using it and then yeah before you know we had 100 people we had 300 people 500 people and then by week three we had a thousand people it was crazy wait by week three you had a thousand people yeah totally organic Totally organic.

26:48Just network effects. Network effects. Friends of friends of friends. What's your churn like? Well, the thing is, is that when you're a free product, right? It's like, you're not really focused on. So honestly, I can't even tell you. All I know is that like the growth rate spoke for itself. Right. And the funny thing was, is that at that time, you know, now obviously we're a fully fledged app. We send push notifications and push notifications are free. but at the time we were sending text messages so i think by like week three to the point where we had a thousand people on it we were sending like 27 000 text messages a day and we were like dude if we keep growing at this rate i think a text message is like a cent per text we're not able to afford our own our own business so we basically we shut it down yeah we shut it down what you shut down the app you shut it down we literally started getting so expensive to send text messages Just it was the craziest.

27:44Actually, looking back on it, I can't believe we did this. Like we fully just sent out a message that said, hey, guys, we're going to shut this down. We're going to try to make this an app and then we'll let you know. And so we went two months just radio. And then we launched our app in test flight because we wanted to like, you know, test it out. And I don't know if you've ever used it. Test flight app. You need like three steps just to get into the app. You need verification code. all this stuff. We launched that on June 17th of 2023. By August, we had 2 ,200 people using the test flight version of the app, which just grew up the demand, right?

28:19It's like, honestly, I don't even think I realized how big the problem was until I started kind of seeing those numbers. That's, and so you shut it down. You're like, look, we can't even afford to send these text messages out. Yeah. I mean, it was, it was crazy, man. All right. So, so March, March, you launched, you're working at Amex within a month. You're like, Oh, this is too big. Let's shut it down. And then you, you relaunch and test flight in June. And by, you know, by August, you're over 2000 people are using it. At what point in there were you like, Holy crap, this is it. I'm quitting my job.

28:53Did you, I wanted to, I wanted to quit my job so early, but I, I mean, I, I think that like, there's a difference between being excited. Right. And then there's the difference between like being pulled so i think like in august we were really excited about the traction but it wasn't enough if i'm honest with you it wasn't enough for me to leave my job and i knew it like i wanted to quit but i knew it and i needed the paycheck right it's like i think that keeping my job like helped me make more sane decisions it helped me be a little bit more creative it kind of gave me that like mental clarity of just like i'm not worried about money So I'm not operating from a point of fear.

29:34I'm operating from the point of true strategy. Like, yeah, I want my messaging sound like this. I want to work with this person or we should design the app this way. And I think that like so many people are like, oh, when you build a startup, you have to quit your job because you have to only focus on that. And I disagree. Like I have an ADD brain. I so like for me, actually having a job was kind of therapeutic at times. Like whenever I was able to dive back into building Tableau dashboards for the C-suite. It was kind of like, you get frustrated that you're building and you're like, okay, I'm just going to focus on this other stuff for a while.

30:08And then you come back to it and then you have a new perspective. And then it really helped the growth. And obviously the money was good too, to keep us afloat. I've talked to a few people and they've told me like, oh, you've got to hear this crazy story. So a ton's going on. You've launched, you shut it down relaunch test flight etc you're balancing like do i quit my job you're working on the side apparently that's not the craziest part of this whole story it's not tell me not even getting there not even beginning tell me when it gets crazy all right let's let's get to the crazy part of this thing yeah crazy thing is all fast forward right so launch the app store i'd say like by december we had about 5 000 people using the app at that point again purely organic like really the it was crazy to us like i mean the crazy thing was in march of 2024 uh we get a dm from this guy the new yorker and he's like hey guys like i want to talk to you guys about like what you're doing in the reservation space and you're like us two the dudes who just launched a reddit app that is sure man that sounds good and what was crazy about that is a month and a half later, you know, in the same week we were in the New Yorker and then that New Yorker article became the number one most read article.

31:30I think it was the previous year for the New Yorker. It was a glow. It was a global thing. I was getting it. I was getting sent. My aunts were sending me the link. Shut up. Do you know that you're in this? And I was like, what was crazy though? This is the, this is the hilarious thing. This guy fully the interviewer, Adam, this guy's awesome. I think he fully came and was like truly writing a piece about like how, you know, kind of destructive the reservation space becomes. He wanted dirt on, on all of the platforms. He wanted to talk, he wanted to talk a lot of crap. And when he met us and he just heard our story, exactly what I just told you, he's like, damn, I'm rooting for you guys.

32:07This is awesome. Like, and the one neutral line I would say in that whole article is just us. It just talks about what we do. It doesn't say anything bad. It doesn't say anything. And we got like, I'm not even kidding you, Nick overnight, 3000, 3000 plus downloads. Then, then another publication hit us up called Gothamist because one of the reporters said that we were, we had almost helped her get into like Tatiana, which is like a big restaurant. And she was like, you guys are the closest thing I've come to actually getting in. And I'm actually, I actually think I'm going to get a reservation.

32:39And then the last thing then, because of all this press, our, our emails got flooded with VCs who are like, you know, we need to talk to you guys now. Also one Friday, that, that same weekend, Friday, I think we had like six or seven BC meetings by 2 PM. And we were like hopping around places in Manhattan. Okay. So when, when was this, when was this? This is April of 2024 now. Okay. So this is before you even launched the paid version. Yeah. It's just, we're still free. I know you're not paying for text messages, but there's still going to be some costs associated. So how are you funding the app at this time?

33:08Yeah. So, I mean, this is where the optimization point that I told you about, right? Like we had gotten kind of Frank had gotten really good at what he was doing. Like, is this, he'd kind of gotten our, our, uh, you know, our, our cost down to like a very nominal amount, like in terms of kind of near where we are now, like, you know, maybe a little bit more. So for us, it was like, great. We still had our jobs and that was it. But you know, I left my job in a market. Still, still it's costing a grand a month. Let's call it. Yeah. Like, it's like, you know, who was paying for us? You were just on your credit card or what?

33:39Yeah. We were splitting it. I'm not, we're literally, then I was literally Venmoing in like half of it. That was it. Just because you were so stoked, you're like, dude, it's growing. This is awesome. Like, yeah, let's keep putting money into this. I mean, like, because I wanted this to be the full-time gig. And I think - And how many, before the New Yorker article came out, how many people were downloading it and using it? I think at that point, like talking February, March, we're talking like 7 ,000, 6 ,000, not 6 ,500, 7 ,000. Okay. Let's fast forward a month after the New Yorker article comes out.

34:10How many people are using it? At that point, 21 ,000. Yeah. 3X. I talk about this all the time. And there's a saying in venture, first time founders focus on products. Second time founders focus on distribution. Distribution is just incredibly important. Most of these companies, when they go and raise money from venture capital, half of those dollars go to Google and Facebook to acquire customers. Because they're running paid ads and they're trying to acquire customers. And that's why it's always, hey, what's your CAC? Oh, what's your LTV? Oh, your LTV to CAC ratio and your ROAS. in your, that's why those metrics are so important because you have to have customers in order to have a product.

34:45So distribution is incredibly valuable. And like, I just looked it up 1.3 million paid subscribers to the New Yorker, 21 million monthly readers because they have an online presence as well. So just randomly you get this New Yorker stroke a lot, calmness, it reaches out to you, writes about it, throws you in there. Boom. You're on the fast train, man. The dude, Nick, the crazy thing, right? Is like, we're still two dudes with an app. The way that this article talked about us. It was like we were one of the big companies, right? It's like it had literally listed. It was like Resi, OpenTable. I don't know if you're familiar with a company called Dorsia.

35:21It was crazy. You're in an article with multi-billion dollar global platforms. And then you also have new startups that just raised, I think you can plus million. It's like you have two guys who just built literally a thing and launched it on Reddit. I mean, it was insane. So when you went from 6 ,000 to 21 ,000, did anything break? Oh yeah. Were there any moments where you're like, I've screwed this up. Great. It's over. We screwed ourselves. If you're not, if you don't have those moments, then I don't think that you're really, you're really out there. We thought, we thought we were like, I mean, there were so many times we were dead.

35:59A lot of our stuff is, is broadcasting reservation inventory, right? It's, it's, so you're able to go and cross check that on Resi and it's sitting in Resi, but it's not sitting in your app. And then your app just goes blank because your connection broke for a second. We were dealing with that a lot. It was a fire that we were constantly putting out just because of the sheer usage of the product. It was insane. It really was. Well, dude, I have to tell you this story. So Chris Kerner is one of my best friends. And we're not one of my best friends. He's my best friend, known for 20 years, business partners.

36:32And years ago, this is probably close to 10 years ago at this point, he was deep into crypto. deep into crypto, big believer. And he still is a big believer in crypto. He reaches out to this guy named John McAfee. You know who John McAfee is? I do know John McAfee. Yeah. Okay. So John McAfee was huge. If anyone doesn't know who John McAfee is, if you have antivirus software, it's most likely McAfee. He's the one that invented that. But then he became a big Bitcoin believer. And Chris had figured out this algorithm basically that took underutilized data sources and projected which coins were going to take off.

37:06Basically, he went to Reddit, and some of these other sites, Twitter. And based on the sentiment, he was able to predict accurately which coins were going to take off. So he DMs John McAfee. It's a great story. I won't get into all of it. Long and short of it is, he and McAfee end up partnering. And they end up launching this as a service. It was called No BS Crypto. What it was is basically, hey, you have access to this group and we sell tips. And that's like the very short version of it. But anyways, on the day of launch, McAfee had over a million followers on Twitter and probably a couple million across platforms.

37:42They launched this thing. It's getting massive traction. Hundreds of thousands of people within an hour have already seen the tweet, and it's pointing them to a Discord channel. And so they're going to the Discord channel, and Chris realizes, holy crap, I messed up the permissions on this Discord channel. Everybody has admin rights. and so really quickly people had taken it over and were like just changing a bunch of stuff chris got kicked out and he's like john you gotta you gotta take on that tweet and retweet and john's like no i don't i don't ever delete any of my tweets chris he's like no john i don't think you understand like i screwed this up and anyways for years we've talked about that experience because that was a moment where he was like super high holy crap this is amazing this is incredible to super low because he's like i just effed all this up all that good will that we just built up that amazing launch that we just executed, I effed up because my backend sucked.

38:36So I always think of that story when something goes really right. Cause anytime something goes really right, a lot of other things are going to go really wrong. And it's all about how you manage through that process. Frank and I have felt this. And I think like the one thing I will say is like, you know, the system that Frank built considering that it really was just that, you know it was him it was a one-man army and like for him to be able to build a system that not only did what it was doing to provide the product but then also handle the traffic that was coming in like i mean it it was insane to watch him just kind of go into this overdrive point and he killed it he crushed it and we were getting all of this this traction and and people were loving it and it started just to really kick off.

39:23I think by the end of, you know, by the end of that summer, I want to say like July, you know, we were closing in on 30 ,000 people just because again, it was just, and we're talking, it's New York and dining is hard. Dining is hard. That's what's crazy is it is just one market and you've, and you still have never to this day, run paid ads. It's still only ever been organic. This is the beautiful, and I could talk about the raise that we had just done. And, and this is, that was the whole point of really Yeah. And we have someone on who's kind of really helping social strategy and she's fantastic.

39:55But I never ran paid out. We ran some here and there just to test it. But as far as consistently committing to, let's say, a strategy and all that stuff, Frank and I were never the guys that were going to be able to run social. We did not feel comfortable in that realm. We did not really know messaging and all that stuff. So to be honest with you, like we kind of stuck to our strengths and our strengths in this case, product. Let me ask you this. You've gone to the paid model. It just sounds like you're obviously you're not growing at 18 ,000 a month, but you're still growing at a good clip. Where do you think table one is a year from now?

40:33Yeah, it's a great question. It's just so crazy to me because I think we've opened up kind of the eyes of a lot of people in the space. So I think that like right now, when people think table one, they think of the B2C product, right? They think of the app. They think it's like, oh, yeah, it's a consumer subscription. That's great. There's so much more to this business. There's a B2B angle here where we're actually selling into sales teams and investment managers because they need it for their clients. There's a world here where we're selling it into hotel concierges because they're approaching us for their own clientele.

41:07And then there's a world here where the system that Frank has spun up, it's white labelable. So there are companies that have approached us to like spin up their own reservation world because the movement right now for a lot of, you know, corporate travel or, you know, anything kind of related to experiences, it's all about consolidation. So, you know, for them being able to kind of have that on hand to connect, let's say, travel to dining and kind of ironing out a whole night and a whole weekend is huge. And I think we were just kind of scratching the surface is like what this thing is, is truly capable of.

41:45That's before we're even talking about the expansion into other cities for, for, for the B2C app. So, so yeah, it's a, it's a crazy, crazy time to be, to be frank. there's two things that are kind of competing here i think if somebody's listening to this on the one hand they're thinking like well must be nice to find a founder who could just build the app really quickly and partner with you must be nice to just randomly get featured in the new yorker and then have your growth accelerated that's fair but at the same time i'm a huge believer that you can increase the surface area of your luck whether it's through networking or hard work or just iterating and trying a bunch of things.

42:26And what I would say the counter to these is that at the same time, you didn't go the traditional route. You didn't raise money. You were a bootstrapped tech founder. You did it in a very non-traditional way. So yes, the exact things that you did where you got lucky are not necessarily replicable. However, I think the way that you approached it and bootstrapping it could be replicable. So if you're talking to that person who's listening, what advice would you give them or even what advice would you give yourself five years ago when you were starting out this process to help them get started or to help them feel confident in like yeah i could do this i could i could figure out how to do this like what do they need to look out for what advice would you give yourself the number one value i'd say that like frank and i have right and and what we look for in people that we work with it's not where you went to school it's not what you've kind of what portfolio what your portfolio is telling you, you said it's not what your Twitter looks like.

43:21It's not anything. The number one thing is, are you, are you going to show up like every single day? And there are like, there are tangible qualities that I can, that you see in a person, like when you talk to them, it's like their energy. How are they, how are they like asking questions? Is it, is it, is it, is it empathetic? Like, is it when they, when they talk about, you know, working with you, is it, is it really from a point of a we, or is it a point of like coming from a point of self interest. And I think that like the number of the only thing that made Frank and I a good team wasn't because like, yeah, I mean, he's an insane engineer, but we had to learn, right?

43:55It's like, he had never built an app before table one. I had never designed that before table one. I had never raised money before table one. And, and, you know, I think that like, as long as we showed up every single day and committed to each other and said, yeah, man, like, I don't know how to do this, but I'm going to figure it out. Like that's, that was the only thing that we needed. And we were able to through walls because of that. What about any other advice you'd give? You're like, man, if I could do it over again, I'd do this different. A lot of people seek comfort in this journey. And that is totally okay.

44:25Right. I think that like, when you think about what makes the road less scary, it's sometimes finding people that unlock you and can, they kind of cover your blind spots in a lot of ways. Right. And people do this in the sense of like, oh, but I can bring on my friend who's in X sales and he can start to do partnerships. to bring on this person to do the design of the app that I can bring on. Do it yourself. You have to try because if you are not at least trying and failing, then you don't care enough personally. And I think that like I did that in my first startup where I tried to outsource everything.

45:03I and to the point, Nick, genuinely where I'm not even sure what my job was anymore. Like I had some people come on and these are amazing people. They're amazingly talented people like like someone for design, someone to do partnerships, someone to do obviously the tech. And then it was just like, there's me and I'm sitting here and I'm not doing product. I'm not doing engineering. I'm not doing basically the business development side of it. I'm not doing marketing because I already told you that I'm not great at that. So realistically, like, what am I doing? And I've kind of just talked my way and sold my own equity out of the job.

45:36And so I'd say like that is first and foremost to anyone else, if I could tell myself something five years ago to that. It is 100 % that. Just try everything. It has to do it. I think it's a really good piece of advice as well. I mean, a lot of people want to talk about Silicon Valley now of like, oh, founder mode. However, you do need to know what your business is. If you are outsourcing everything, then you have no core competency. There has to be something that's special about you or at least you're in the weeds on if you think that your business is going to be successful. So I love that advice.

46:07I think that's fantastic advice. where do you hang out? Where's the best place for people to come find you? YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn. I just got on Twitter because, you know, I basically was told it was bad for business to not be on Twitter. So now I'm on Twitter. I'm talking about, I'm talking about everything I'm talking about here. I love LinkedIn. I, you know, honestly, LinkedIn gets a horrible rap B kit, but I love it because of just, I really do believe that there are a lot of people there that are like trying to learn and, and they want to share in a lot of ways. Right. It's like, I hate some of the AI cringe content that I see.

46:40But I think that in a way, you're almost standing out more if you go on there and you start to try to share genuine content because I think people can read it. So those are the two places that I hang out. And we have Table 1 on Instagram. It seems like somebody who's benefited so much from organic reach, you would just be all over the socials. I had to, right? And this is the last crazy story I'll tell you. And it really was how we raised the money. So I think we had all this traction, we were in all these articles, we had everything, right? And I told you, we were running the business efficiently.

47:13No VC was really... They basically told us like, guys, we love you. We love you. We love the product. We love the traction. We just can't get to conviction on the size of the problem. And right now, consumer is very not in vogue. And that was really the last domino that we can never tip over. So what did I do? I dove into the world of AI. I went on lovable and I spun up what I'd call like an investment portal. Right. And I basically said, you know what, screw it. I'm tired of going to these people who don't understand the business, who don't understand how hard we work to do this and like what it really is.

47:48So I basically just blasted all of our metrics up on a page and I made it this really lovely, beautiful thing. I said, Hey, hey, this is table one. Here's a video about us. Here's all of our metrics. Here's our growth. And then by the way, if we were to raise the money, here is a roadmap as to how exactly we're going to execute. And I shipped it. And then I put it on Reddit. Is this live still? Is it still live? Yeah, it's live. And I'm going to sign it. Where is it? If you type in invest.table1.app, this is the page. So I shipped that. And I'm not even kidding you. It took me two days to put together.

48:21I put it on Reddit. I put it on LinkedIn. And within, you know, within about what, three days, I think we had over$600 ,000 of investment interest from users, from people that have followed the journey of Table 1, from my friends. Yeah, here it is. Dude, this is it. Okay. Scroll down. Yeah, if you scroll, this is... Invest.table1.app. So I'm looking here. First of all, looks fantastic. You built this? Yeah, I built it. Yeah. So I designed everything and there's our metrics. There's a story. Let's see our metrics here. And this was back in, I think this is April. Oh, so this was almost a year ago.

48:57No, no, this is April of this year. Oh, dang. Okay, so you've already added$70 ,000,$60 ,000 of ARR. Yeah, it was a good quarter. Okay. $514 a month in operating expenses. Holy Moses. 2 ,000 active paying members. What does that translate to? That's$30 ,000. Well, that was back when we had our$9 a month in our - Got it. Okay. Paid user retention, 89%. Dude, why didn't we look at this earlier? I'm like over here trying to wrap this interview. Son of perdition. Okay. Paid user retention, 89%. Industry benchmark, 40%. Dude, this is so clean. This is perfect. This is like - Those are the A16Z benchmarks, right?

49:44So we went into pitch meetings and we said, yo listen based on what a traditional paid consumer app is this is where we are this is what we're doing and we yell and we were like we're trying to get it through their heads and we couldn't get any conviction so we said you know we know what we have let's let's go and take it to the community what does conversion rate mean so that's paid conversion so it's basically from download to paid subscriber what is got it wow almost 40 percent in the Industry benchmark is 5%. It's correct. Yeah. You guys are freaking crushing it. Organic 98 % industry benchmark, 75%.

50:20Holy crap. Okay. Clear. So what is this hyper card? Super good. Yeah. These were, these were pieces to our, our puzzle, right? So like hyper card partnership, hyper cards, great. I mean, it's a, it's run by a buddy of mine, Mark. They basically have this great, great card product that they're not actually selling into enterprise. So we were actually kind of picked as their dining perk so that anybody with the hypercard can go in and sign up for table one. And that was a pretty big win for us. Super good is something that we're still noodling on as far as, you know, how we can kind of aggregate content around food into more bite sized actual stuff.

50:57Kind of like when you see like the you search something on Google and it comes up very aggregated. And then the last two things are the table one plus one events. It's kind of really getting humans back, you know, together to kind of foster that community. Oh, that is so smart. And help along with them to bring a friend like to a dinner event or something that might not be on table one. So smart. Yeah. Let me ask about this one. Hold on. Does that turn table one basically into an events platform where it's like, hey, I'm hosting a dinner and it's just dinners and people are able to connect that way?

51:27Or is it something different? You're very astute, man. And so one of the things that we've talked about a lot is there are actually a lot of private chefs that like really want to host more intimate dinners and they ticket them. And this is basically a way for table one members to kind of get a little bit of an more exclusive experience. Right. So smart. Add notions for you. And yeah, so we're really excited about it. I think it's going to be great. I really do. Dude, that is so smart. And in-person things are so popular right now. So I have a company named Tribe, which is a community for entrepreneurs.

51:57and it's not like YPO or EO, which are, oh, aren't we so smart? Yes, I went to Harvard. Where did you go? Oh, I went to Brown. Everyone's patting themselves on the back. Tribe is for entrepreneurs who are in it. They're like$10 million and less. There are bigger companies than that, but it's like those entrepreneurs who are trying to get to the next level. Because we niche down on it and it's in person and these are connections, it's been really popular. And I think anything that facilitates human to human connection like this is super smart. So I love this plus one events idea. I think that's an incredible idea.

52:33Yeah. We're, we're excited, man. I think it's, I think you hit the nail on the head really. I think, especially now, I think especially now. So this was all built in lovable in two days. This is insane. This is amazing. I know. So we, we basically said, dude, if, if no one else, if no one institutional is really going to look our way. Let's see if the crowd around us does. And honestly, most of our investment came from our users. So we were able to start funding this next stage of things. And we're still actually very much on the investment side of things. But I think what we're looking towards, right, is it's more so about, it's not now like how much money are you bringing on?

53:10It's who are you bringing on? So actually allowing our community to participate in this event was great because not only are you kind of bringing them in as part of the squad and this is like, this is theirs now too, but you kind of allow them and you enable them in a way because now they become an advocate for the product even harder than you've ever been. This is really clean. It's not just the look of like, oh, you know, you made it look nice, but the way you've structured it. Cool. That, you know, this is our company. Here's our story in two minutes. You can click on this video. now i'm up to speed we've been we've been featured in these so it's like instant credibility builder forbes the new yorker gothamist great and then it's okay here's a little bit about the high level pieces of the company is how many app downloads paid member like all the metrics i would want to see it's not too many metrics i'm not overwhelmed it's it's enough and then you just pick three that are like very clearly showing how powerful the company's operations are they pay to user retention, the conversion rate and the organic acquisition, like as an investor, those are, that's what I want to look at.

54:16Right. And you just clearly call them out. There's a very clear comparison against the industry benchmarks. And then you've got obviously your roadmap, like it's not too much information. It's very clean. If I want to learn more, I can reach out to you. Like, this is a really smart way to communicate this because there's so much you could have thrown into this and you didn't. Being on the investor track, right. Where you're like really going around and having so many meetings, like you kind of learn what to cut out. You kind of learn what. And I think like, you know, for us at the end of the day, too, it's like when we were advertised to our community and say, hey, guys, come on in.

54:48It's like we wanted to make it as digestible as possible. Like you said, it was enough to start a conversation. And if they really wanted to dive in, like you don't have to you have to throw up all of your metrics onto a page and and have them look through. If they if they want to find out more, they'll ask because And at the end of the day, that's all we really wanted was just to get to a point where they were like, hey, I'm curious. Can I read more? Can you tell me more? Can we go for a beer and talk about it? And that's, yeah, it was insane. How much are you raising right now? We are capping around at$400.

55:21And it's because, honestly, we really don't need much. There was a time where I wanted to raise a million. And, and I, and I looked at it and I was like, why would I be giving up so much of this company if I need to use all of that? So I've since kind of reprogrammed myself and said, no, no, let's take less. Let's really just iron it on paper, only what we need. And we landed at 400. So we are, as far as the WeFunder is right now, like that was exclusively community from users. We've taken 157 ,000 so far. we have, I mean, I'm not even going to kid you when I say this is about 2 million of interest on the table.

55:59We're kind of overcommitting. Now we're kind of having conversations as far as like, who is the right partner here? Yeah, it's a good place to be. Totally a good place to be. And that's where we're operating from. So for the first time, I think we're operating from a place of leverage and not from 10 tests. What was the WeFunder valuation? So$150 ,000 at what valuation? we actually went with a four million dollar cap because so many people were like dude you could raise that seven you could raise a you could you know and we sat there we're just like no if this is going to be our community and this is kind of our first real go at this like what you need is results you need to show people that you can raise you or you can you can build the plane you can fly the plane but you can land the plane and then they can get a return so that if i'm going to be a certain entrepreneur my whole life and honestly like this is a huge conversation my co-founder and I had.

56:48If you're going to be a serial entrepreneur your whole life, potentially going to raise money in the future, the number one thing you need on your resume is an exit that produced. So for us, I'm not going to try to shoot for an insane valuation. I'm going to go for a very, very modest valuation and then try to exceed that target by however much so that my investors are even more happy. And then we go from there. And that's our top process. So when you say a$4 million cap, you guys raised a safe? Yeah, on a safe. Or post money. What's this next round? Is it a safe as well? You know, the thing is, right, it's like we're talking with syndicates.

57:30We're talking, there's a lot of people that, you know, they might want to do an SPV. They might want to do something else. We're figuring what that is, but we're thinking that depending on the partner, it'll it'll still be somewhere around four to six million dollar you know okay preferably we would do it on a safe that was that's my prep still a great valuation dude i mean for where you are in the life cycle of your company and the position that you're in to be able to go and raise money and at terms that you want to be selective with who you bring on is dude it's incredible all right dude this was amazing thank you all right hopefully you liked that episode and if you've made it this far you're either really committed or you're stuck doing yard work and you can't actually skip on your phone.

58:08So while I have you, the show is growing, but I have a favor to ask of you. Will you please help me grow the show? I want to reach more people. There's a couple of things that you can do. Like, and subscribe is the simplest thing. Obviously you want to get notifications for when the next episode is coming out. But if you go the next step, will you leave me a review five star on Spotify or Apple? What that does is it tells the algorithm that, Oh, Hey, this is a high value podcast because more people are leaving reviews for it. and it then pushes it out to more people. So that's why when people are like, will you log and subscribe and put the five-star rating?

58:42It's not just to make themselves feel better. It's actually to get more exposure for the show. So if you do that for me, I would greatly appreciate it. And I'll see you next time.