247. 5 Million Users After Sleeping on Cofounders Floor w/ Neil Tanna | Co-Founder & CEO at Howbout

0:00We're at 5 million users now and those 5 million users have added 100 million pieces of content.

0:06Amardeep Parmar:That's Neil Tanna, co-founder and CEO of How About The Social Media App. He's got a beautiful journey that started with heartbreak. Sadly it was a terminal diagnosis and I spoke for her about the idea I'd had and thankfully she was nothing but supportive. She told me to go for it so it was kind of my way to cope as well. His idea is in a classically difficult area but his innovation and grit was remarkable. We got our first 1 ,000 CFOs to join the platform, and the network effects took off from there. So we got over the Cold Start forum by getting the first 1 ,000 CFOs to find out about it. And we coined it the CFO, the Chief Friendship Officer.

0:42But we're going to reply to every comment, as just Neil, 40 ,000 replies from myself, and I'm going to find a date with a flying tweet button.

0:50Amardeep Parmar:They smash through the Cold Start problem, and the network effects is a full flywheel. He's also a great boss. You have to have four out of five DWE at a team of 17. now right we've only ever lost one person we've had people say we're the four and five year anniversaries with us they're just raised a series a and there's no stopping that big plans are coming five million today we're going to be at 50 million in two years if not more

1:13so when i was growing up it was just all about being a doctor my uh granddad always wanted to be one he couldn't my mom wants to be one she couldn't for various reasons and so the kind of expectation of me growing up was that i was going to become a doctor i don't know if i ever wanted to become a doctor but that was kind of like the story that was brought up and then I realized very quickly that I didn't want to be and I actually went on to study law at university to be honest I don't know if a career in law was ever one that I really saw myself doing I funnily enough when I was growing up I kind of always was an ideas guy and I knew I kind of wanted to work in tech but when I graduated I got a training contract I moved into corporate at law, it hit me really fast that actually I wanted to be the guy who I was ultimately just advising.

1:58I wanted to be the guy who was building. And that's where the idea came very, very quickly when I started my career in law. What was that idea, the initial idea you had right at the beginning? So fundamentally it came that when I suddenly became an adult, right, I was working as a lawyer. I was only about six months in, but it hit me really fast that all of a sudden I was really busy all the time and my friendships were fizzling out. And what I mean by that is, and we all know it right your friendships feel like they go on pause when you stop chatting every day so at university you can let you wake up every morning know that your friends are within 10 minutes of you and you've got nothing to do with your day apart from maybe the occasional lecture and otherwise you can just hang out with your with your mates right so time is something that you're just not worried about contrast that to when you're at school time is also something that isn't your responsibility right your parents are in charge of your time or the school is in charge of your time but then as soon as I became a lawyer as soon as I became an adult I could be doing anything it hit me really fast that oh shit I'm in charge of my time I have to wake up every day and I've got work to go to I've got commuting I've got personal relationships I've got hobbies and this new thing I realized I need is an adult called downtime and it hit me really fast that okay this meant that I just wasn't hanging out with my friends and just my friendships were fizzling right and what was meant to connect me with them was social media but social media wasn't doing that for me anymore because even five years ago when the idea came, it was actually just turning more and more into entertainment channels, right?

3:21It wasn't so much video like it is today. It was all about memes and ads and brands. But life in the office, time was very different because time was multiplayer in the office, right? So in the office, it's really easy to schedule. It's really easy to see when colleagues are free. It's really easy to plan meetings because time has been sold. It's been made multiplayer. But outside of the office, time was still single player. So calendars were all boring, dry, single player, focused just on me. Group chat was apparently the solution for keeping me up with friends. We all know the pain of just like constantly trying to go back and forth with your friends, constantly needing new triggers to message.

3:57And then you do this classic thing was like, hey, we haven't met up in a while. Should we organize a beer? And then you go back and forth. You realize you can't find a date that works and another three months passes. So I wanted a way to socialize the experience of time and make it a multiplayer experience, but outside the office. So that's what sort of where the idea came from. I just, to be honest, I just sat on it for a few years. What then triggered you to be like, this guy, I'm going to do it? It was like, to qualify as a lawyer, there's years of exams. You then have to get a vacation scheme, training contract.

4:27There's a whole process, right? So when I had this idea, six months into my career, I just kind of went with the flow. I thought, oh, it will happen one day, it will happen one day. And then sadly, in 2019, my mum passed away. And that was the wake up call. I kind of needed to say, what the hell am I doing with my life? Like, I liked my career. I definitely didn't love it. Money was good, but you realize very quickly. Hint to a career. Speaking to a lot of friends about it, when you're at university, you think it's all about the money. You think it's all about the career. You think, you know, you're going to build up this amazing career.

4:57And of course, you're going to love it. And you realize very quickly that the money doesn't matter if you're really not enjoying what you're doing every day. You don't feel that sort of passion in what you're doing. And we knew my mom was going to pass away. Sadly, it was a terminal diagnosis. and I spoke to her about the idea I'd had. And thankfully, she was nothing but supportive. She told me to go for it. So it was kind of my way to cope as well. My mum sadly passed in March 2019 and in April, the business was incorporated. I just literally went straight into it and haven't looked back since.

5:26Amardeep Parmar:So obviously with your mum, right? So I think, you know, I had a swimming experience. So BHD started quite soon if my dad passed away. And I want to dive into that more because sometimes we can have quite a surface conversation like where yeah you know okay that's a motivation for you but as i know it's like it's a lot more complicated than that right where when you're tying that relationship with okay so i'm doing this to like fulfill my mom's legacy or like make sure i'm doing her proud yeah that also then creates a pressure and it's like that balance of that motivation versus pressure and what's the healthy level about it and like what would you say your relationship is there with yeah it's a brilliant point so i i definitely have and i think i think a lot of asian kids would feel the same way that we're talking about right now.

6:07There was definitely an expectation. I really want to make my parents proud. The amount of sacrifices my parents made for me growing up, my education is just a small part of that. So many elements of my life where the school they could get us into, the sacrifices they made with extracurricular activities that they weren't able to have when they were growing up, the opportunities that they offered us. So throughout my life, my parents never made it clear to me the sacrifices they make, but you could just see. You know, you can see what they're, how much they were doing. And so I've always sort of carried, it's not a burden, but it can sometimes feel like a burden.

6:42It's like a responsibility. Responsibility is a great word. I feel the responsibility of like making all the sacrifices they made worth it. But the way that even as an adult now and in my early thirties, I still, it still feels as like, I want to make my parents proud. I want my dad to hear what I'm doing and my mom, and I'm sure if she's keeping an eye on me, to hear what I'm doing and be like, that's my son. And, you know, and all the sacrifices were worth it. But also, fortunately or unfortunately, it goes beyond that. I want people to know that, you know, when they hear of things that I'm doing, they're like, that's Scott from Natana's son.

7:16You know, and that's the things he's doing now. So is it motivating hugely? Is it sometimes does it get a bit too much? Yeah, absolutely. And so you have to try and find that balance. We all have our motivators, right? For me, it's actually nothing to do about funds or money or income or anything like that now. It's purely just constantly striving to make myself a better version of myself tomorrow than I was today. The difficulty with that is where do you complete it? When do you get to a point where you're like, OK, my parents are proud enough now. I am a good enough version of myself. Maybe I'll never feel like that.

7:54Amardeep Parmar:I don't know. It's something I'm constantly battling with. It's the hard thing with having a level of responsibility that you never can achieve or succeed. If you ever figure it out, you let me know. I think you're a copy is ahead of me, right? So one interesting thing, so when my dad was in hospital, I told him about the idea for BHQ. So like with my dad, it was in terminals. So he thought he was going to come out and then he didn't come out. But the idea was he was going to be part of it, right? And then to me, like what the idea was three years ago is very different to what it is today. but it is that element of like he knew about it did you tell your mom about the idea was she like was she encouraging you to do this and then now you feel like you've how's that relation yeah that was it man so like back then unlike with back with all products i went five years into our journey the product was so different back then i mean five years is the journey but i told her of the idea but um at that time but i'd still had the idea three years earlier than that right so the idea was an idea in your mind and what you end up actually building is entirely different things but yeah I literally um she wasn't totally lucid all the time so I it wasn't like I was able to get too deep but I was able to just basically fundamentally tell her that mum I'm thinking of leaving this stable career I built for myself and wanting to follow an idea I have and wanted to build my own business and I gave her some of the sort of high level of the point of view but it was fundamentally I just wanted to talk to her about the fact that I was going to take this massive risk in my life and my career so nothing was sported um almost like i was i surprised that she was sported yes and no almost it was like on the one hand i'm like it's my like it's your mom right like she wants what mom doesn't want their kid to be happy let's follow their dream but on the other hand i'm like mom this wasn't part of the plan is surely what you're thinking like you know it's like okay you work you become a doctor a lawyer's another great career you like you know it's really hard to get a training contract and to qualify as a lawyer in this country because there's so many people going for so few jobs and i was one of the lucky few who managed it and now i want to give that up so i don't know what the reaction i was expecting but no nothing was supported well by the people around you as well because where they're like okay because the mom passed away is now having a psychotic break and is ditching his career and he's throwing all away how is that kind of relationship too because it's like i'd already quit my job by the time my dad passed so i was kind of pivoting a little bit but i'd already quit my job it's like you were there uh that's that's exactly what happened right so um thankfully my dad and sister were nothing but supportive my dad's always known that i've had an entrepreneurial side so i think for him and he my dad himself set up his own business so i think for my dad the way he was looking at it is like look you've had this idea you're passionate about it go for it i'm going to be nothing but supported if it doesn't work you'll still have you know you'll still have a career that you could go back into my sister was nothing that supported but it was the wider family i don't want to say they weren't supported everyone was supported but there were definitely questions after like hey are you sure you're not doing this a bit too quick your mom's just passed away you're you're doing you two weeks after you're leaving your job like this could be like a like emotive reaction like so they're they were being in a concerning way like in a are you sure this like should you not sit on this for six months a year and then if you feel the same way but i knew exactly what i needed to do um and so like they were they were still supportive in a more like are you sure this is the right thing way and obviously okay when you've decided to get all into it now right yeah what are those actual first steps to get this going correct you've got the full motivation now you're doing this because you've got all this passion behind it but you actually need to make it reality yeah so the first couple of years were the best and the hardest um um because you have no idea what's going to come so you're like it was the naivety that really kept us motivated because you just have no idea what you're building but the naivety is also really difficult because you have no idea what's coming so it's definitely a double-edged sword but at the beginning we were naive to the point that we thought just with by we i have two co-founders myself uh jake and duncan we went to university together um so i started as a corporate lawyer jake was an investment banker duncan a spacecraft engineer so very different to each other we all left good careers and we thought like good backgrounds granted nothing in tech let alone consumer and an idea we'll be able to raise some funding none literally that was one of the points where we were so naive we really not only had to prove out the idea we had to prove ourselves as founders, right?

12:31Because if you're a tech investor, or even an angel investor, you're like, what does a lawyer or investment banker know about building a whole audience in consumer social, right? Which is a very valid question. So in the early days, we did what every first time founder should do, right? And I literally say this to everyone who's since asked me for advice about how we started. You have to read every book under the sun on zero to one, cold start problem, the network effects, if you're building in consumer social, building in other platforms, that some of these will still be applicable, but I'm sure they'll be better.

13:03But you can learn a huge amount. It's always best to learn in practice. But if you can't learn in practice or you want to speed up that process, learn in theory. We read every book that was applicable. And the other thing is we surrounded ourselves with advisors who later became investors who we could just learn from. So we had early advisors from Deliveroo, Snapchat, Facebook, FinTechs in the London tech scene. And we're just sponges. We just learned a huge amount from them, made mistakes in front of them that they could then help us learn from quickly. And the other thing is we just had to start building.

13:42So we were in the fortunate, and I always say this openly, we were in the fortunate position because we came from careers where we could build up savings. right and it was those savings that we lived off for the next nine months so don't get me wrong we're not going out to restaurants we're eating pot noodles but we were still fortunate enough that we were able to just focus on the business without having to worry about okay well how what are we going to do to pay a mortgage we didn't have any of that at the time we were we were in our early 20 or mid 20s so instead we just slept on duncan's floor why his floor because he's the engineer he had the best tech setups we had we slept on his floor we just worked on his kitchen table but for six months we just built the the mbp the the b1 constantly thinking that we were only a month away and then each time when you get feedback and like we need to make it better we need to make it better and then when we got to the point that we were happy with our b1 we launched it and at that point you have the cold start problem right and looking back on it we should we should have launched it earlier like i gained to this point where it's like every you you constantly thought you can make it better you never get to the point where it's going to be good enough for launch but you have to launch it because you have to figure out how you're going to get over the cold start problem and how you're going to what users are going to actually think because before that you're just getting your friends and family to give you feedback but you need just random people who've never heard of your product never heard of you and what did they think of it thankfully the first couple of months we'd really put in place a good foundation for that and then that's how we got the the flywall going and thankfully it's just grown since then

15:10Amardeep Parmar:oh hello quick interruption to let you know a bit more about bay hq we're the community for high growth Asian heritage entrepreneurs, operators and investors in the UK. You can join us totally free at thebayhq.com forward slash join. There you'll get our CEO structure in your inbox every week, which is content, events and opportunities. You can also get access to our free startup fundamentals course by joining. Let's get back to the show. You mentioned there about the books as well, right? Yeah. it's one of the things that always shocks me is just how many founders will come to me and ask me questions like have you googled this have you like yeah yeah it's like chat tbc it's ai it's always always like at this point and i think one of the things that we've got all these books here it's like you need to yes practice but it's like some of the questions you're asking random strangers yeah you could probably just figure this out or get a good knowledge enough yeah to then ask more advanced questions yeah only thing when you're asking questions you're always asking questions that are based on some kind of theoretical knowledge and then how do you apply to your particular situation yeah whereas if it's just like oh tell me what this is yeah and so i'm not on google right yeah yeah and i think when you can do that level of resourcefulness you can talk about stuff like the cold start problem and know what it is yeah then it makes such a difference when you're talking to central advisors because they're going to respect you there because they be like okay this person's doing some work they know some stuff yeah they're hungry which if you expect everybody to tell you what to do i totally agree yeah yeah and i think that's what shoots many early stage founders in the foot because they're like oh nobody's helping yeah but you You need to help yourself.

16:42The best way we were able to use our advisors in the early days is we would understand principles and get their take on how to apply them in the best way. But we didn't need them to explain the principles to us. That's what books can educate you on. Books can teach you the principles and the different mechanisms of how you can apply them. But the best thing an advisor can do is with their experience, they can say, OK, this is the best way to apply that to your business. Because that's the way experience really does help. but yeah if i'm going to an advisor and explaining hey what are network effects you're not going to get the same response on that because everyone everyone is short of time whereas if i say hey i understand what network effects are i understand there are these ways we can apply them we're thinking of applying it in this way to get over this problem what do you think about that we're going to have a very very good conversation and we talked about earlier as

17:30Amardeep Parmar:well like how with the idea of building a social yeah it's like very consumer-based yeah and then And the challenge is always, like you said, with the cold start problem, network effects, like what makes you stand out? And how are you going to make people actually use this app when everybody has an idea about, oh, we're going to get people to solve the loneliness problem. Right. But you've actually been able to scale and grow that. Yeah. What do you think you did better than other people did at that stage? So it's a really good question because and this, thankfully, we put a lot of time into only because we knew that, I mean, every single day, two and a half thousand apps get released every day.

18:04So how do we cut to the noise for that? I think we we took it so seriously because and I mean this respectfully to ourselves. We were nobodies. Right. We didn't have an audience. We're not influencers. We we probably have a combined less than one thousand followers on Instagram. We didn't really have a whole network to launch into. So we have to find that network. And what the theoretical reading did is we have to figure out who our niche is. Right. Because if you go after everybody, you go after nobody. so we had to figure out right this app and it's the dangers of social technically could be for everyone how do you how do you trigger that network who is the first person and we coined it someone who would nap like someone called the cfo the chief friendship officer because we said and we figured out that every single friendship group has a planner or an organized type right it's

18:53Amardeep Parmar:usually a she not always yeah and guys are generally useless but if like if you and if you think of any friendship group it doesn't matter if it's your family your friends your work colleagues your sports scene there's always the planner the the person who gets that group together but if just because you're not the cfo in one group doesn't mean that you're not in another group right personas always change so we knew that if we could get the cfo she usually would bring in a couple of friends. At least one of those friends should be a CFO in another group and the network should continue. So we don't need to build for the friends or the group we need to build for the CFO because we're making, at the beginning, we're making their life a lot easier because we're going to make the first, probably focus on the scheduling.

19:39We're going to make their life easier to schedule to see when all the group are free to hang out, right? So what we did is we had to figure out where the CFO was going to be and we just did a number of growth hacks to really understand who the CFO was. Bearing in mind at this time, we didn't have budgets to spend on marketing. And it's not like you can just put paid ads at CFOs. So five years ago, it was all about Facebook and Instagram memes, right? And we saw a meme that we then worked with meme pages to do more and more of because meme pages fundamentally want to go viral themselves. So we showed them ones that go viral.

20:13And it was all around the problem that we were trying to solve, right? So the meme said something, it was different variations of wouldn't it be amazing if there was an app that could instant that could sync your schedules and instantly show you when you're all free and the awesome thing was is it would get flooded with comments tens of thousands of comments of friends tagging the cfo or the cfo tagging the friend so what we had created is the place where the cfos were now going so we knew the way the cfos were the next step was how do you convert them right we realized early and thankfully this learning has just continued that nobody trusts the brand that they aren't already familiar but no one trusts a new brand right especially that's why everyone checks reviews but a new brand there aren't reviews so but everybody trusts a stranger it's a fascinating phenomenon but like if you follow if you look at a tiktok and this is the latest trend or dialing.

21:12It doesn't matter if this person's got no credibility. You're just like, okay, look, yeah, there must be proof. So we were like, we've got all this here, but we're going to reply to every comment as Neil, not as Neil co-founder of HowBout or as HowBout the business, but just Neil, friendly guy, Neil, who replied to every comment saying, hey, there's an app that does this. You should check it out. It's called HowBout. If anyone ever opened all the comments, thankfully all the comment replies were nested. But if you ever opened all of it, you'd see 40 ,000 replies from myself and my go finder jake that's applying to each one uh and that's how we got our first 1000 cfos to join the platform and the network effects took off from there so we just we got over the cold start problem by getting the first 1000 cfos to find out about it and they did

21:54Amardeep Parmar:the best so you mentioned as well like the first bit of funding you did right it was 100k yeah and then you've now been able to i guess get the product out yeah you've now got the cfos using it when we sit now like okay we've got like attraction we really are solving the problem where did you start think i can now it's ready for the next stage yeah really good so we have always here's in our early days we would just focus on the uk right we've never limited the outside the uk because if it was going to grow organically fantastic so we've been and we were the top app and top social app at one point in hungary and i think the the number three in denmark now those are not target markets for us uh but it's awesome to see that this pain point and the problem is felt there and how about it's being found organically to solve it.

22:39But the point where we really knew, right, it's time for scale. We reached that product market fit within the UK is when we decided after our seed round to really go after the states, right? Because when we started talking to US VCs at our seed round, no one was interested because we didn't have a US user base, right? So they were like, the UK is a small island. Okay, yeah, you've got a lot of users in the UK. You've got random European countries where you're showing traction, but US, this is a whole new market. It might work, it might not work. So that's when we realized, right, if we really want to become something that's a serious business here, we need to stop focusing on the UK and really start focusing on the US.

23:18And so it was that point, thankfully, now the US is our largest user base, but it was at that point, we had to really shift gear and think, right, we can't limit ourselves to cities in the UK, let alone the whole of the UK, we really have to go into the US. And that was a whole different plover, because how do you trigger new networks in the United States, right? And the best bit of advice that was given for us is when you are launching a new consumer business in the US, don't go where everyone thinks they should go first. Don't go LA, San Francisco, New York, because everybody goes to those places, right?

23:49So it's ultra competitive for new brands to break through. Instead, we focus on big cosmopolitan areas that was still much larger than most cities in the UK. We're talking like Dallas, Chicago, Utah, like other big cosmopolitan areas in the United States where we were then able to trigger networks that way. And Mint had the original product, right, was aimed at the schedulers. Yeah. How has it evolved since then? What does the product do today? So we started, interestingly, as a social planning app, right, a place to make it really easy to make plans together. It's the idea that everyone on the street has had because we all used to use Facebook events.

24:24No one uses Facebook events anymore, right? So we're like, wouldn't it be wicked to organize this, make this like event planning up? But we took it a step further because Habat also instantly shows you when you're all free. But what we found fascinating is that for Gen Z and now incoming Gen Alpha, they were using Habat not just as a planner together, but they were using Habat as their go-to calendar. And that's not what we built it for, which was fascinating because we were like, oh, my God, everyone, they're not just putting in their social plans. They're putting in everything. And I mean everything.

24:54They were putting in what time they are going to sleep, what time their buses in the morning are, what times they're working, because so many of them work shifts, right? NHS, hospitality, retail, leisure. So they love showing their friends when they were all free and busy. They start putting in everything. And so we're like, OK, this is really cool. We're evolving into this like Gen Z calendar. Then what we saw is actually what users are doing is there's some there's a lot of utility in what we've built. because if I see that you're busy next Saturday or free next Saturday, it makes it easier if I'm coordinating meeting up with you.

25:26If you're free and I'm free, let's hang out. But what a lot of them are doing now, and now it's our majority of the use case, is they are looking at each other's calendars for interest because it's not just, hey, what are you doing next weekend? Let's hang out. It's what are you doing next weekend? Because I'm interested in you as a person. We have built authenticity into the platform because on Instagram and social media, it's all about the ratio. right you want more people following you than you follow it was instagram that hasn't been that authenticity is gone where it's nothing to do with your friends anymore it's just about it's so performative right whereas on how about it's your close friends only so the majority of users on how about have between five and ten friends it's your closest friends and family who you want to share time with so what users are now doing is they are interested in what each other do with their time it's exactly the same with social mapping right social mapping took over find my friends life 360 snap maps there's some utility because i can see if you're nearby and we can hang out together most of it is just nosiness it's interesting what do you where do you go with your day time is exactly the same what do you do with your day and it's turned more social than utility now because users their content is their time and so people are triggering each other in making friendships closer because it's like okay let's say you've got a date next saturday you've decided that i'll be like mate good luck uh you've got a date next time you haven't had a date in a long time on the day i'll get pictures of it um you're on your date right now i'll be like i'll send you i'll react with the love hearts be like mate all the best good luck off the day i'll ask you how it was so your content what you're doing with your time is connecting us closer as friends because you're not gonna you're unlikely to just randomly message me on on whatsapp being like hey

27:06Amardeep Parmar:i've got a date next last day i'm like okay and then you're not gonna message me at the date being like i'm on a date right now so like the will because users are adding content that they're already doing for themselves they're not adding it to be performative we're connecting friends just through how you're spending your time and that's why it's working so well now well if you can see in there you said it's about gen z and the gen alpha right because i would say you're millennial as well yeah i'm on the cusp you're on the cusp let's let's say a millennial yeah because i guess when you're not part of that user how are you understanding their behavior and how did you go about it's really digging down and this is a this is a Really good question.

27:40So when I first had the idea I was building for myself, one of the hardest things you realize as a founder is when you stop building for yourself. And you fight against it. You do fight against it. You're like, no, no, no, I'm a Gen Z. I totally get 21-year-olds. And then you're like, well, I'm early 30s. I really don't understand like 21-year-olds. It's at that point when we are like the people in our growth team who are fantastic, people in our product and design team, fantastic. they're gen z and because they understand the target user now more than i do and don't get me wrong i can be empathetic but i really can't be subjectively like i can't really understand what triggers you have how you feel every day because i'm i'm not a 24 year old 25 year old anymore right when i was when i had the idea so yeah it's a it's a real lesson that you can you can like become objectively aware but you never have that subjective understanding anymore

28:35Amardeep Parmar:And you mentioned there was all about how it's grown in the States and how much growth there is now. Can you give us some of those numbers of like, yeah, where are you? Yes, we're at 5 million users now. The majority of that are in the States. I think it's about 60 % of that are in the States now, which is awesome. And those 5 million users have added 100 million pieces of content to the app, which is just fantastic. That's what we're really excited about. So it's growing fastest in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany randomly, Canada and Australia. So Canada and Australia are as surprising as less.

29:05English-speaking countries. South Africa is also doing well. But Germany is one that can surprise us because the app, not yet, hasn't been language localized yet. It's a big problem we have to face now with like, right, US is doing well, UK is doing well. If we want to move into continental Europe, you need to localize that. Now, AI will make this a lot easier, but it's still not as easy as just translating the entire code base for me because there are certain colloquializations that we have to make the app feel authentic, right? Now, this is a really bad, outdated example. But if we had Houston, we have a problem in our copy for push notification if you're locked out of your account.

29:42That doesn't naturally translate into German. So you have to have the equivalent of a colloquialism. Yeah, exactly. So there's a lot that we would have to worry about. It's the next challenge of how do you unlock continental Europe? Language is the big thing.

29:56Amardeep Parmar:Did you ever think a few years ago that you'd be able to say, like, we've got five million people using the app? No, genuinely. it's a great question because when you're when you're starting you have to be so naive that you're gonna you're gonna be the next unicorn but you also never you also have that innate like because you're fighting fires every day uh that oh my god are we ever going to reach her but genuinely in the the sad thing is about it we probably celebrated more we had our we had user number 5 000 and we had user number five million because you at the beginning every new user is such a massive milestone when you the difference between four and five million feels less impressive than when you go from four to five thousand so and truthfully no uh you never probably think like oh my god we're gonna we're gonna because look this is what we're trying to remind ourselves as founders every day right the where we've got the business today we would have only dreamt of when we were back five years ago sleeping on duncan's floor right but you're too much in that you're too too often in the weeds we're already thinking well how do we get to 10 million and so as you and i were talking about it's like how do you pause take a breath and look at what you've done because you're just otherwise just in in the race to make constant further progress and you're certainly going to use ai potentially for the localization yeah how's ai changed though you're bringing things up there's into there's like the internal facing use of ai and there's like the product base right internally it's changed it's completely changed how we like we've been able to reduce costs and speed up things so one example is uh like user success when you have five million users you have a huge number of reaching out weekly ideas new features they want problems they're facing locked out my account i want to change my password previously that was the founders you were like when we were earlier you're like responding to every message you've got like founders on on on whatsapp it's ai that does that for us now and ai is just it's just phenomenal at what it can do when helping you with the user success side of things it's also it's also just made us better product people like you can we're all data scientists now to an extent because you can take all the data it's giving you and um and just like form better insights and judgment from it but with the product it's getting really interesting because we've got a hundred million pieces of content that have been added to our platforms right which is a huge amount of insight and you can learn from to make the product better for users right so like what is the top date night spot for users in Paris?

32:21Where do users in California like to go if it's raining outside? Like we know a lot about what users want to do with their time that we can learn from those insights and then make better like product decisions to learn, to like apply to them. So AI has just been fascinating. It's just lowered the education bar for so many things. It's increased efficiency. It's just opening doors of things that you just didn't even think were possible with just the data set that you had before.