Why Smart Content Creators are Abandoning Social Media

29:08I'm like, one, I think that's like a total waste of time because their job is just like to build their pipeline of potential companies that they want to invest in. But times your most valuable resource as a founder and especially in LA and like traffic, like you think I'm going to like drive, like take two hours out of my day when I'm putting out fires and struggling to like stay alive to like drive across like blue bottle, have a coffee with you. We're going to have the most surface level conversation. You're going to be like, okay, well, if you're raising, let us know. I'd be like, cool. Like that, like That doesn't really help me at all.

29:35Any of the problems I'm facing today. And so I've never taken a coffee chat or any of these meetings with these investors. But what I do is like, hey, do you want to grab coffee? And if they're interesting and they haven't invested in one of our competitors, I'm like, no, but I'll add you to our investor list. And you'll get an email from me every single month of exactly how we're building the business. And so every month, we have our existing investors, employees, friends, family, and this pool of people who have not invested but are interested in investing. and they get to see the company month over month, keep like new revenue milestones.

30:05They get the brain dump of exactly how I think about the business. So they understand exactly who I am and the trajectory of the company. And they get far more value out of that than ever getting a 30 minute coffee meeting. And so I preface that with when we went to raise our series A, like I already had a pool of like 40 investors who had tried to hit me up that had been seeing our growth for eight months. And as soon as I took my three or four favorite and hit them up, I was like, hey, I think we're interested in raising a series A. They're like, bro, we're ready. We'll write the check now because they knew the numbers.

30:33I didn't have to go through the bullshit and everything else. To the extent we're like, hey, do you want to do a partner call and meet a few analysts? I'm like, no. I want a decision maker now because if you don't, we're going to move. And I had already built that trust and reputation because they've seen all the numbers. So we raised our series A in six days. And then our series B could have been probably just as fast. But I kind of played the field a bit more and wanted to see what was out there. Could we get better terms? We ended up going with the firm that we were kind of most bullish on in the first place.

30:59so I stretched it out and tortured myself for no reason but I think it was worth just like explaining the field and meeting people yeah that's awesome that's so interesting to just hear that story when you think about pivoting the company originally right we're just like just newsletter and now you're like we want to be this hub for we want to host podcasts want to be able to host websites want to do all this stuff at what point did you sit back and were you thinking like you know you're you're at home and you're like I think that to really be as big as we can be we need to be able to like host everything like why that decision why why like turn a little bit and like from a lot of the founders that we end up talking to it ends up being like some of them three pivots four pivots their fifth pivot that's like this was the thing that we ended up like winning with yeah well do you know who hosts your podcast now red circle cool you're actually one of the few creators i think that like knows who hosts their podcast i've learned recently there's zero affinity to like podcast hosting yeah there's yeah there's not like i i could care less we We reached out to dozens of people to get on our early beta to launch this thing.

31:58And they're like, don't even know who's hosting my podcast. I log into Beehive every day already to send my newsletter. I'd rather have one login and I trust you guys and the pace of velocity than to manage three or four different accounts. And I think my thesis on the creator economy broadly is from the platform and tech side, we're just going to see massive consolidation. Whether you look at a Kajabi or Circle, they started off as course platforms. And then they did community. And then they recently launched a website builder. and then recently launched like they try to do newsletters pretty poorly but they tried and like you're starting to see like the existing creator companies and like even patreon launched like a newsletter thing i think a few months ago so these creator companies are already seeing that creators and publishers care about ease of use and i think the knock on the all-in-one is like if you try to be everything to everyone you're kind of terrible at everything and that's like a butchered way of the actual saying but like it's really hard i think most people would actually prefer a specialized podcast and newsletter and whatever, that's all nine out of 10, then like a bundled thing that everything is like a four out of 10.

32:57But I think our core competitive advantage is we're incredible at product and engineering. And I think we're like a nine out of 10 on email. And I think we can actually be a nine out of 10 on website and podcast and digital products. And so I think it's a bet on us and our team that we actually can be the exception and provide like a nine out of 10 experience across the board. And if you can get a nine out of 10 experience across all of the different mediums of content you're creating. Why would you ever pay more? Like, I think we're gonna get to a point by the end of Q2, where it's going to be archaic to think that you paid$300 for a single platform that only did email, and then$300 to another platform that only does website, when you can manage your entire business on Beehive in one platform.

33:36And then I think to layer AI on top of that, if you actually if we can study and give you data on like who's visiting your website, who's buying your products, who's clicking on your ads in your newsletter and know in your podcast there's like a 360 view of who your audience actually is i think most content creators actually struggle because they live in the world of youtube doesn't really tell me who these people are yeah it'll give you like a broad age demographic and like geographic like where these people are but i feel like i cool like you have no idea if you have super fans in there that have watched every minute of every video and then you don't have a way of actually targeting them again and being like oh i have a thousand super fans that if i launched a course or an irl event in New York or LA that they would spend$5 ,000 because they love us so much.

34:15There's no way to extract that from YouTube. But I think we can build like this audience intelligence layer on top of it. And it's kind of like stepwise. First, we have to build the platform where you want to host your newsletter and your website and your podcast. And once we do that really well and earn people's trust, then we can add like the audience intelligence layer on top of that. I think it's a one of one, like very differentiated product. I'm sold. I think I'm not ended. I mean, yeah, I think that if you ask most creators like who makes up your audience they might have like a general idea but you're right there's no way to really get the like in-depth data and beyond even knowing like how do you get like and that's why email is so important at least with email if you do your data right you can see that certain people have opened every one of your email and when you promote certain events or episodes they click on everything so there's a way with email especially with like the beehive mcp we launched where you don't even have to do that analysis you just ask claude yo who are my thousand most engaged readers in my audience based on clicks and opens and everything else and it will give you that which is why i'm very bullish on the mcp and like ai in general um but like if you can't identify who those power audience fans are and email is the way to get in front of them like you can't just push a youtube video to your 500 biggest fans like there's no way to even identify them see that sucks that sucks for us because you have a group where I think, you know, that our subscriber count is whatever, 33 plus thousand now, a percentage of them are not going to see it.

35:45And like, we've tried to capture those via our newsletter platform, but it's like, it's such a micro fraction because we took so long to start it and just had no awareness that that was even a thing that we should be thinking about. We're like, oh, we're good creators. We're going to focus on making videos and putting out a great product. And then when someone's like, oh, you need a newsletter. I'm like, why the fuck do I need a newsletter like why should i do that okay for someone in that position who's listening to this because there's a huge group of them that are listening i think it's most people i think i think there's such like a react like negative reaction to email because the email is usually like work right like when i open my inbox it's a to-do list of people i have to respond to or people asking shit for me or to schedule something and so like i think email gets a bad reputation of like it's annoying it's unnecessary spam it's like spamming it's like not sexy like it's not sexy at all new thing is short form content or youtube which has been our alpha the whole time the fact that we're like finding opportunity like a not sexy area i think is like a great opportunity for like founders in general like that's been part of the reason why it was so hard to raise money and it's like harder now we aren't trying to raise money now but like in a time where like everything's ai this and we have like a lot of ai capabilities and we actually have a pretty ambitious ai roadmap but like we're core until we pivot more into like the podcast and everything I just chatted about, like a newsletter platform.

37:00People are like, dude, email's been around for 30 years. It's like the least sexy thing. We've built an incredible business off of it. And so like the person who is primarily video content and like, why do I need a newsletter? I think we already kind of gave the pitch of like, you can't extract those super fans out of video. But like when done right, and like Colin Samir do this super well, like they have, they started on YouTube, they have a podcast, they have a newsletter. In their newsletter, they can reach hundreds of thousands of people and push them to their YouTube channel and to their podcast on their YouTube and podcast, they can shout out their newsletter.

37:30And knowing that people, you want them to create habits around your content, but people are busy. They move around like they might miss the podcast. But if you re-mentioned it in their newsletter, then you can get in front of that audience again. So I think it's like a very symbiotic relationship that you can create. When you think about growing the newsletter, I know like you have a lot of people that are listening to this and some of our group might be listening and be like, man, I have 200 people, which is still a lot of people. You think about them in a room, but they're looking to like, I want to get into the few thousand.

37:55I want to get my first like 10k on a newsletter how does someone tangibly grow their newsletter audience but like the simple cta might not work for them but like what is the other layer yeah because i remember when we started it was like posting on our story hey join the newsletter join the newsletter yeah like crickets yeah i mean yeah you get a few here a couple here yeah the the real well the real answers it depends like there's so many different ways to do it and i can walk through like a few of those different ones give me a few of them but i also think the thing that everyone's looking for is like they want the silver bullet of just do this one thing and you're going to have thousands and the truth is like you posting on the story and getting five signups is like one of like 25 things you can do but if you do 25 things that give you five signups every time you do it quickly adds to a few hundred every time every week or every month and like that compounds and so like in like the tech like small like annoying things to do is like i email gate every post that i create actually i'll take a step back i publish my newsletter on tuesday and so every monday across like Instagram, LinkedIn and X.

38:53I already know what I'm writing about. So I do like a preview, like teaser. It's like a teaser video type thing, but except in text. And I'll write, I'm writing about how we hired our first 10 employees or whatever. And like my core audience, which are founders, like whatever I'm writing about would ideally be interesting to them. And I'm like, if you want to be the first one to get it, subscribe below. Gets a few dozen signups across like X and LinkedIn. Then when I publish my content, like a feature we have in Beehive is you can like hard email gate it, which means you can't even read a sentence unless you put in your email.

39:21And so on Tuesday after I publish, I then go back to all of his channels and I have a more extensive preview. So one recently was like, here's 10 things I learned from my founder mastermind. And I'll preview three of them, get people's interest. I'm like, if you want to read the remaining seven, here it is. They click on it and they can't read any content until they put in their email. So again, like that's not thousands of signups, but from both of those, I now have between 25 and 100 new subscribers. we have like a recommendation network so you can build pods of other newsletters and recommend them so when you sign up for my newsletter you'll see my four recommended most recommended newsletters which are for other people who are also recommending me so when they get new signups they're sending subscribers back to me so there's like network effects built into the product and how does that work so it's like a feature in the platform so if you guys launch your newsletter i could go 505 newsletter i can add it we'd really appreciate i can add it to like my top four and Now everyone who, so now.

40:18I feel like I made your top eight in MySpace. Yes. Which is what we named it after. We made a feature top four after the MySpace thing. We wanted some exclusivity to it. But the thinking there is like, while I'm doing all of this dumb shit and like promoting on X and LinkedIn Monday and Tuesday, you're now benefiting from that because everyone who signs up to my newsletter is now seeing 505 newsletter pop up as like one of my recommendations. I like this. And vice versa. When you guys are promoting your newsletter, if you recommend me back, like I'm benefiting from your growth. So like we've seen a lot of success of these newsletters creating pods of recommendations and they all benefit from that.

40:51There's obviously you can go paid. And I think there's a point where most newsletters eventually shift into like trying to acquire subscribers on Facebook for$2 an email. And you can do like a pretty simple calculation of how much depending on how much value you can extract from an email. You can pay two, three, four dollars for an email. Like if you know that you have an ad in every newsletter and you can charge sponsors more revenue based on how large your list is. if you put$5 ,000 into Facebook and grow an extra$2 ,500, I charge an advertiser an extra$500 per sponsor. And so there's like some calculation that you can do where like it actually makes sense to put money into Facebook to grow faster.

41:25We have like something called like the Boost Network, which is basically paid recommendations, where I can say I'm putting in$5 ,000 a month. Other newsletters on the platform can apply to promote my newsletter. And every subscriber they give me, I pay them like$1.50,$2. And so it's basically like paid acquisition built into the platform. That's through Beehive? Yeah, yeah. So, okay, I know how it's going to depend on the group that's reading, i.e. high school seniors aren't going to be worth as much as new age founders, right? But is there a normal pricing structure that most people follow in newsletter land, or does that just not exist?

41:58I know it's going to— You're saying for sponsors. Yeah, I know it's going to depend on, oh, my group is this, your group is this. That is the answer. It totally depends. Totally depends. But an average. Can you give me an average that people can understand, just so the group might get an idea? Like, oh, I have a few thousand people. Yeah, I mean, we have something called the Beehive Ad Network where we have tons of advertisers like Nike, Netflix, AG1, HubSpot that sponsor your newsletter. But because it's like a marketplace, say the CPMs and CPCs are probably between$2 to$4. So cost per click and then CPMs between$3 and$8.

42:31But that's like if you go through ours and we are still working on making ours more sophisticated where we can identify higher quality audiences and pay$15,$20,$25 CPMs. people about versus yeah versus like maybe a less engaged audience that's not as relevant to the advertiser they only get paid three to four dollars cpm but like if you do that cost or earning potential relative to like banner ads on websites it's like many multiples higher and i think youtube is maybe in like the three to four dollar range i don't remember but like it's very comparable like basically what we're doing is we are creating what youtube did for video creators where you don't need to do your own sponsorships, you can.

43:10But if you just want to turn on monetization for your video, like YouTube will give you ads and you get paid out without having to source the ads and do the tracking and everything. Oh, so you have 10 ,000 people. I want to turn on monetization. And you can see all of the advertisers in our network. You don't have to talk to them. You see AG1 is paying$5 CPM. And they can just pick me. They could be like, I want to. Other way around. You pick them. We're only showing you ads that we know would work well for that audience and for that advertiser. So you won't see ads that we don't think would work well.

43:37That's because you have the data of who our audience is. We know and we're getting better and better. We have a full ML team that's making that better and better every week. But the thinking is we know your audience are 25 to 35-year-olds that are interested in business and tech and whatever. And so HubSpot is probably an amazing sponsor for that. Whereas maybe CBD gummies aren't as good as a fit. And so we would be able to do that and show you the most relevant ads. And right now you log in as you're creating your newsletter. you type backslash ads and you see all of the ads available to you choose the ag1 one or the hubspot one you drop it in you get to choose the copy and everything and it just goes into your newsletter and you get paid the next month i have a question um as far as like on the topic of growing the podcast like for us specifically um we do a we do a newsletter an email blast every time we like launch an episode where it kind of gives you know a debrief our big takeaways ways, and then we link the episode.

44:39Is there an ideal amount of times we should be emailing? Somebody else should be emailing? Is one email a week great? Should we try to amp it up to two or three a week? And for us specifically, just as someone who's in the trenches and understands newsletters better than anybody, what else could we maybe incorporate into the newsletter on top of just a debrief about the episodes. I think it depends on like the, like what I think, again, going back to Tom and Samir, what they do so well is like their YouTube and podcast is like very creator economy, like speaking to other creators. But their newsletter isn't just regurgitating that same content and like putting it in text form and like slicing it up differently.

45:24They're like the people, the same people that are interested on their YouTube video with our interview with X person, X creator, would also just want to get the news about the creator economy. So Facebook launched this and like this creator is doing that. And so they found like tangentially related content. That's not just a rinse, wash, repeat version of the audio version, but they still plug back to their videos and their podcasts. So I would think about like, what is your audience actually subscribing for? And like, what does both the YouTube audience want and the newsletter audience? That's like kind of symbiotic in a way where they're two different products.

45:57I think the easy thing to do is say, we already have this transcript. We just talked to this founder. Let's just like slice that up. and maybe it's like thoughts after the episode from both of us and here's what we thought was really interesting and here's some takeaways i think there's like a place for that type of newsletter um but i also think there's like additional content and like theses you can be creating but i think that's where i'm always like least best in in recommending other people is like people always ask me like what type of content should i be creating and like kind of like up to the creator to kind of come up with like you know your audience better than anyone and like where do you think you could provide the most value and like what are you passionate about because I've seen everything work.

46:33I've seen once a week, once a month. I've seen sporadic. I've seen daily work, newsletters work. I've seen newsletters that are just top of funnel to get someone into a community. I've seen newsletters that are solely trying to build trust so they can flip a product on them or like an IRL event. And I think that's what's interesting about the creator economy is there's not really a one size fits all the same way that some people only do short form. Some people do long form. Some people have like all of these different strategies. I think newsletters are the same. It's a different medium. And there's maybe like best practices on building a consistent cadence to when you drop your newsletter.

47:04But outside of that, I think you could do a multitude of different things. See, I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to make a little type form and ask people. And I think that could be fun. And I think you get a few thousand submissions for free on there. And I'd love for the Rocks to go fucking fill that out because that would help us. Or even better, we have a survey feature built into Beehive. Dude, come on. Consolidation means all the way down. Come on, dude. Now I don't have to go to type form. You don't need to go to type form. I mean, granted, type form, I think is like a... So this comes back to like the 10 out of 10 versus a 5 out of 10.

47:31I see what you're saying. I'd say on our survey forms, which is not as good as our podcasting or newsletter or website, it's a little bit less love because it's a little bit of like a niche product, but it fits the same thesis. Our survey forms are maybe half as good as Typeform, but you don't have to buy a Typeform account. And the data, like let's say - It's all integrated. You send an email to people, you see exactly which person submitted it, and it fills into their custom fields and like their profile. And then you can like in the database where you're sending the email, show me everyone who's interested in X and just send them an email.

48:01You could export from Typeform, import into Beehive and do that the long way. But integrations, yeah. I'm just so interested because normally the way that we've been using our newsletter is like to sell our own digital products. But I think there is quite a bit of income to be made through advertising, through the newsletter. Yeah, and I also think something that I've been trying to do, like what you were saying, you know i try to tell a story based on something that we find out or like you know i was just in minnesota we're filming with anthony edwards i want to tell a story of what i think went really well and what we can do better as a production company and i think like you're saying that's something that is like my moat where no one else filmed with anthony edwards at his house this weekend like that's interesting and you get humble flex humble flex dude but i mean that's it like it's an interesting story i know that there's things we could do better and i can share that and hopefully someone can take it and go make their shit better when they go do a bigger shoot or something like that.

48:57So that's interesting that you say that. Like thinking about it more, how we do our videos rather than just like, oh, this is the update of the episode. You know what I mean? I think there's so much content to do via just writing. The only thing that I wonder, because like when we started the podcast, it was more so tailored towards photographers and videographers. I don't know, I wonder who's, that's our name, we got to survey them. We got to see what they're doing. But I'm also interested if like the podcast has shifted so much towards somebody like you who's like a forward-facing founder or a creator who's like built personal brands and launched a business outside of brand deals on top of it and so i'm interested to know it's like do you think almost like we need to create like a separate newsletter just to talk specifically about like the production stuff well no i think you can still relate it back to like general business business points that any founder could take like whether it's hospitality whether it's how you deliver like you can i think pull and extract from what we're doing to be like you would take this and be like ah this is a service like we provide a service your service is a perfect example of you know someone's bitching about the product it's fixed go check it yeah like that that's that's tangential to me as a production company owner where if like a client is like upset about something like how can i make this right today not like i'll give them i'll let them wait over the weekend and sizzle like i can i can attack this right now make it better and like go forward you know um you bring up how beehive is doing and integrating a lot of different things.

50:24Like it started off as, you know, just newsletter and now you're doing so many different things. As a founder, how do you decide what to do next and how to know if it's the right time to add something onto the plate? Because I think a lot of times people, you have these big dreams and aspirations. And I oftentimes think about like the iPhone when it first came out, if they were to put out, granted the technology is different, whatever, iPhone's been around for decades. If they were to put out this iPhone as the first version and you give it to someone, it's almost like they're overwhelmed because you can do so many different things.

51:02But if it's like, okay, we got the iPhone and it takes really good photos, you can search Safari and you can listen to music, three different things, but all in one phone. And then the app store came along and started to introduce more features. And so what advice do you have for a founder who's like, I have these dreams and aspirations of like building this company and adding different, you know, branches to the company. How do you know when it's the right time to add new things versus like, let me just focus on this one thing, get it really good before I add something new? It's like one of the hardest things to do, honestly, is like once I've discovered we have this superpower of product velocity because we have really great engineers and me as like the head of product can just like come up i can come up with an idea one day and go and i have and go to work the next day and be like i know we had this plan but i think this is the better plan and people i've built the trust at the company where they're like we believe in you and if that's what you think is best we'll do it and like having that power just the shooting point and people just start building shit is like an incredible superpower to have and to do it in a tank top with a pump exactly and maybe that's why they respond that way but it is it's you it's a big responsibility to make sure that you're actually pointing and shooting at the right thing.

52:15And so I think the way to think about that is where, and I gave this story previously where I, back when crypto was like the hottest thing ever, I like thought that I could just get into crypto and I had no business getting into crypto. Like, but that was where all the money was and that's what everyone was talking about on Twitter. And so I bought like a thousand cold storage wallets from China and just started slinging, tried slinging them. But I'm like not in the community. I'm not a crypto person. I had no relations or connections at all. And I was such a fraud. and like for that reason exactly i like was not the right like founder market fit to be able to be a successful creator but if you flip that like where i am with beehive like when i am the end user like i have my own newsletter of a hundred thousand people so i want to build features that would help me grow faster monetize my audience know who my audience is so these are problems that i face on like a day-to-day basis and then i have the engineering team to be able to shoot in point of like solve my problems because i'm just like the tens of thousands of paying users that we have that have the same exact problems that I have.

53:14If not, I'm on the cutting edge and like more forward thinking. And so one, I think being the end user is super important. One of our superpowers at Beehive, outside of me, I think we have about 15 to 20 other employees who have like an actual side project newsletter that's like printing money as a side project that they just, they either, we either found them through that or since becoming indoctrined at the company or like I went to launch a newsletter as well. and then we also have I'd say every team lead at the company sends a monthly update about what their team did and like all of the milestones by sending a newsletter through the platform so I'd say there's probably half or more than half of the company is actually using our product at any given time so they see the pain points like yo this feature so whack like doesn't work at all or this is so confusing so I think the closer you are as a founder to your one using your product or your customers the better and then like the flip side of like the same coin is like i'm on x and linkedin and i've already done like the whole build in public and the transparency like i'm here if you need me and so now our users have don't hold back at all and they just shoot me complaints and bitch about things and like hey this sucks hey we'd love to see this and i'm receptive to all of it like i'm not there's not a layer between the raw user feedback on x and like 15 people reporting up to me to get that to me.

54:33Like they just bitch at me all the time in my mentions and I respond. I'm like, yo, that's a great point. We should definitely do that. And so I think the closer you are to your customer, the better, which sounds like very obvious, but one being the customer and two being as close and receptive to that feedback is how I know, like I have a finger on the pulse of where the pain points are, what we should be building to solve those pain points, or like just like a vibe shift in the market when you can tell like other competitors in other spaces are struggling and people are complaining about them.

54:58And I view that as like an opportunity to be able to build in their space and take some of those angry customers. It's kind of like all of the above. It's going on vibes. A lot of it is vibes. When you, okay. When you think about actually getting customers onto the platform, what has been some of the biggest W's that you've seen? Like really cool going into podcast land, which is pretty sweet. But what are the other things? Like you're obviously you're on LinkedIn, you're on X, you're talking about it. That obviously gets some people to like be interested in it. But how other ways, what other ways are you acquiring a customer?

55:27Like what have been the most fruitful? Yeah. I mean, just to piggyback on like the build in public and like the content led approach because i have my own newsletter and i hooked up like the mcp as an example i woke up the other day i used the mpc for or the now i can't even talk mcp mcp there we go three letters so tough um i i use the mcp for like my own use case and the output was so dope so i screenshotted it i go yeah i just spent 10 minutes got some information would have never been able to do in the platform posted on x posted on LinkedIn. I think showing people like what is possible on a platform because we have so many features and I think we used to be very like, hey, we have X, Y, Z feature.

56:04It's like the classic mistake that everyone makes in marketing is like they don't really give a shit what the features are. They care about what it does for them. And so rather than being like, here's this new feature we launched, which we do a lot, it's it's here's a problem that I wasn't able to solve before that a new feature allowed me to do. And it's important because now I know who my audience is and now I'm going to charge more for my sponsorship. So I'm making more money and now I'm getting the attention of every content creator who wants to make more money, which is everyone. And they're like looking at their.

56:30So and then I think the other thing that, again, going off vibes, like the counter positioning, a lot of the things that I promote that we can do, I say it in a way because I know other platforms can't do it. And so the whole purpose is I want people who are scrolling through X or LinkedIn to see some cool thing that you can do on our platform, them to want that and then be like, fuck, my platform doesn't allow me to do that at all. And like building that friction and that frustration point gets them to realize, like, why am I overpaying when this beehive is cheaper it's more affordable they can do shit that i want to do that i can't do on my platform and the proof is in the pudding that they have so many they have the social proof of all these successful creators and even their founders using the product and having a bunch of success so a lot of that kind of compounds on top of each other two questions one do you get more new users that have never done email joining beehive for the first time or more people coming from a different platform to try out Beehive?

57:23It's a great question. Like the raw volume, probably beginners, but like for like converting to paying customers, the latter. And like we don't spend time, like it's a hard, being a creator is hard, right? Like the cold start problem of going from zero to anything is like a very difficult journey. Most of our marketing and focus is on knowing that there's a massive market out there of people who are hosting their website. Like anyone who's hosting a website technically could host their website on our platform. Anyone who's sending an email on any of the dozens of competitors could be sending an email on our product.

57:54So I'd rather get people who are already used to paying some legacy incumbent platform that hasn't updated in years to move over to a more like nascent, developed, cost effective and just like innovative in general platform. Like we can do that much easier. And so we've prioritized like what are all the barriers to entry and like friction points like you can import your list, import your paid subscriptions, do everything like as seamlessly. as possible like that's always been a top priority for us like we get tons of people who are aspirational and they want to launch a newsletter or they see the capability of like building a newsletter then a website and then a podcast but then our game isn't how are we better than the other platform it's how are we better than the competition plus we need to educate you and inspire you on how to go from zero to one and that's like a whole we do it and there is a motion that we have to help get the people from zero to one we have a ton of amazing case studies Like we have people that have gone from zero to millions of subscribers.

58:50We've had, I think, probably dozens of newsletters get acquired for like HubSpot has bought like two of our newsletters. Wow. Not like our personal, but like our users' newsletters. So like there's a lot of aspirational. It's just like a whole different ballgame. It's hard. We create content. We got banger lead magnets. I could make those for fucking money. Well, that's the only thing I was going to get to in terms of like how do you grow the – I mean, I could list off dozens of ways to grow the newsletter. And I did like some of the basics, but lead magnets are amazing. and it fits perfectly with like my thesis of i'm going to be more transparent than any other founder it's like every founder typically wants someone to bootstrap but most of them want to raise capital raising capital if you've never done it before such like this like intimidating thing to pursue investors that you don't know and do the whole pitch and then get them to wire you millions of dollars and so most people don't share the investor journey or like their pitch deck because their pitch deck is actually kind of their vision yeah and like my thesis has always been And like, there's a lot of incumbents in this space.

59:44I have more confidence that we are better. We're more talented. We're more driven. And like, I've been saying what we were going to build for four years. And like, I was like, hey, we're going to build an ad network. And I said that two years before we launched our ad network, knowing that we would be able to out execute people. So there's a bit of maybe a little bit of arrogance. But like, I just think that we can like out innovate and move quicker. And so because I have nothing to fear in terms of like talking about our roadmap. So like in our pitch deck. So going back to lead magnets, our lead, our pitch deck that we raised two and a half million dollars on is available on my website.

1:00:15You can go to it. You just have to put in your email and I'll email it to you. And so like I've run that I've run that pitch or that lead magnet a ton. Like you put paid spend behind it, put it boosted on X and LinkedIn. And then I've done it for a series B deck to like the deck that we use to raise thirty three million dollars. Like I haven't seen many series B decks because most startup founders don't share those things. But again, I'm transparent. I have nothing to hide. So I have a lead magnet. If you want to see our Series B deck, you go to my website, you put in your email. I get your email.

1:00:43So now I can email you my newsletter. You get the Series B deck. And the truth is, if you are someone who's interested in our Series B deck, you're probably going to like my content. So it's like a direct one to one from like lead magnets, like target customer for me. Man, my other question was about pricing. And you guys are winning on pricing. Like, I feel like the other platforms are pretty predatory on as you get more. Yeah, dude, it's a pain in the ass. For those of you that don't know, that have never done this before, as soon as you get into a newsletter platform and you grow a teeny tiny bit, it's like$350,$450,$550,$1 ,000.

1:01:17Like it's a pain in the ass. So was that something when you were building this, you surveyed other people and you're like, this is a huge pain point. Like as I grow, I'm going to get screwed over by like the chimp. Dude, the chimp's brutal. So expensive. And I wanted to. Disgusting. I also want to know like how you decided. Yeah. The price point. Like how did you decide that was the right price point to charge your users? You give me way too much credit with like the whole surveying thing, which I think a lot of startup like gurus are like, oh, you got a survey. There's like all of these like pricing analysis things.

1:01:45Like the early days, like I'm just so anxious to launch, like very little thought went into it. I think for me, well, I think as a early stage founder, you're like very insecure. Like there's a market that is so advanced. They've already done the pricing testing. Some of them can justify higher prices. They have a very thorough platform. they have tons of capabilities they have a massive support team to support and then meanwhile we have like four people and we make our platform doesn't even work and so like you can't you can't like charge a ton of money like a lot of it comes from i guess like there's a few different like schools of thought but as like an early stage founder who i know where all the bodies are buried as when we first launched like nothing even worked and so like how am i supposed to charge like hundreds of dollars so a lot of it comes from insecurity it's like and another thesis I have is like just live like fight to see another day as in like some problems are just better to be solved in the future and I think a lot of founders like work themselves in a pretzel of like trying to figure out like the optimal solution to everything we're like sometimes like employees have like negotiated like a high salary that we really needed on the company as I'm like recruiting them I was like hey we'll give you that in like 12 months and like my assumption is in 12 months we're more successful we're making more money money helps solve a lot of problems we have a bigger team.

1:02:57We have a bigger support system. There's other ways I can incentivize them. So like, not that I kick all of my problems into the future and just hope that like they don't come due. But I think a lot of times like you can just be like, this might not be the most optimal pricing structure. And it wasn't like when we went to market, we launched. There's one plan for ninety nine dollars up to one hundred thousand subscribers. And like for context, like MailChimp, I think charges like maybe two grand for one hundred thousand subscribers. And they put limits like you can only send X million emails a month before you have to pay more and we were unlimited email sends up to a hundred thousand for ninety nine dollars it was like such a good deal again part of it in security because like we weren't as good as the other platforms and so i thought by undercutting the market's like one way to get market share but like i think if we would have went with the most optimized pricing structure from day one it would have slowed our growth because like then you're not just fighting no one knows who this company is and we don't know if we trust you you're also fighting like hey you're just as expensive as the other platforms whereas in the early days i'd rather reduce all friction like to me, it's better to have 10 ,000 customers not paying you as much as you should than having 100 customers that are paying a lot more.

1:04:03But like you're just fighting for market share. And like in the game that we're in, like we need social proof. We need relevance. We need and we need feedback. We need people actually using the platform to tell us what sucks to make it better. And so like I think we could have priced more competitively. But that was just like one of those problems. I'm like, hey, we can fix that later. And it sucked fixing that, right? Like getting people from who are used to paying$99 a month for unlimited emails to like that same group of people paying$350,$400, like that hurt to rip off the bandaid. And like some people churned and that's fine.

1:04:33I made the bet that one, I think our product's better and I don't think you're going to churn. And even if you did churn, you're just going to go to a worse platform that's charging you the same price. And then come back. Yeah. So I get that. It sucks that we're 3x or 4x in your pricing, but like that's actually just like table stakes for the rest of the market. it now there's nowhere else to really go so i'm not an expert in pricing but i'm an expert in thinking like some problems i just like punt to the future knowing that i'd much rather solve that problem when we raise our series b and have 40 million dollars in the bank then solve it when we're fighting for our lives and have like three million dollars in the bank you ever watch parks and recreation no yeah good show okay i don't remember the characters names okay so i'm not going to do this story as much justice as it should but there's like the main guy and then I believe the actress's name is Audrey Plaza, I think.

1:05:17And she's his assistant. Talking about Ron Swanson? Yes. And he's like, anytime someone wants to schedule a meeting, he's like, just push it to another day. Push it back. And she was like, I would just push it back to this day. And then the day finally came. And he had like 100 meetings. He's like, why the fuck do I have so many meetings? She's like, because you said to push back all the meetings. And then the day finally came. That reminded me of that. that like but a lot of problems also like work themselves out like going back to like the like this new hire who wanted like a massive salary like i could have spent like weeks trying to figure out like the right comp package for them sometimes like they move on they don't even stick around for the year so like the problem solved itself or i don't know like a lot of things do work themselves out and a lot of things just get better as you get bigger as a company and have more resources and more money and like the other point on pricing is like most of the creator economy is like more predatory and like they take a cut of revenue so sub stack's like one of our competitors and then we have whether it's patreon and like gumroad like all of these platforms they take 10 to 15 percent of every dollar you make on the platform and i think just fundamentally like philosophically where we stand like we don't think that we should be taking a cut of like your hard like if you can get someone to convert to a paid subscription that you did all the work for all we did was hook up stripe like we're just a middleman passing through cash and like providing a platform.

1:06:35I don't think that justifies a 10 % tax on like your revenue. And when you sell a course or a guide or some consulting, whatever, like, I don't believe we should take 10 % of the revenue that you did all the work for. So we're one of the few con creator and content platforms that doesn't take a take rate on revenue and like never will. And I think that's philosophically like the right side of how you should build one of these businesses. And so we see a lot of growth from that as well because people will what we call like the graduating problem they'll use patreon and they'll grow like it's fine paying 10 of like five dollars or like fifty dollars you're like oh this platform is so cheap i'm paying three dollars a month but then when you actually scale and you're paying for the same exact service they were providing when you were paying them five dollars they're now taking fifty thousand dollars a year from you you can just come to us we pay them you pay us eight hundred dollars a month flat rate predictable and we don't take a tax on your earnings.

1:07:29And so I think that's like another counter positioning we do in terms of like not being predatory with our pricing. I want to ask about going from being an employee to founder and how that transition has been and like the biggest lessons you've learned from that transition and how it has been, you know, going from working for a company from the very start and then starting your own thing and being like first time founder, you have this great idea for this new product. Um, but like you said, you're putting out fires like all day long. You're man, you have to go from being managed to now managing a team.

1:08:05Like how has that transition been and what have been some of those biggest, uh, like lessons you've learned? I think even as like an early startup employee, you realize like, I think at like a 10 ,000, 20 ,000 person company, unless you are the guy, like the CEO, like other people can solve those problems. Like sometimes it's just like above your pay grade and you're like someone else can solve this. Like the buck stops with me always. and like that is very sobering when all of my wealth and well-being is like in this company being successful like i've poured everything into it and like knowing that uh its success is like has the biggest impact on my life by far and so like an example like i didn't take off for the first i did took no vacation for the first two years starting the company and then one of my friends had a bachelor party in cabo and i'm in cabo we're playing drinking games like my first time like not like locked on the computer like during a weekday and all of a sudden i see something like in the slack channel like something's blowing up like websites are kind of going down people are like filing support tickets people are super pissed off but we have a great team so i'm like yo they'll figure this out and then like i check back three hours later it's like getting worse and it turns out that godaddy who used to host our domain didn't tell us that or something like no they found like phishing one of our users like doing some like sketchy shit and because it's on our infrastructure we got blamed for it so godaddy sent us a warning which i didn't i missed because I was like playing drinking games and like like out and they took down our domain like no we didn't have an account manager we didn't have anything so they took down our beehive.com domain but because we host websites for our users all of our users are on a beehive.com domain which is the worst problem to have it's one thing if if we fuck up the experience for our users when you fuck up the experience for their users and their readers they're like hey I didn't even do anything wrong here and now my readers are paying me can't access my shit and so it's like like all of my friends are we're hammered all my friends are going to like dinner like one of my friends bachelor party i'm like i can't i like really can't go like no one else is fixing this problem so i'm after hours we don't have an account manager i'm on like customer support lines i'm in like i'm talking to their indian team that's like overseas is brutal dude the worst worst of the worst support and and we we are you're hammered yeah i'm getting i'm getting very sober very quickly we we we are uh we are looking on linkedin at their c-suite and their vps we're hitting them up we're like i have a friend from home who like it's great getting people's phone number somehow i'm like yo can you figure out who these people are like can we get their phone number we're hitting up everyone i sent it's it goes it's like company lore now but i sent an email to our investor list the only one i've ever sent that's not the monthly investor update then like someone needs to help me like like literally a code red like aren't every one of our users websites are being taken down which is like a cat like a company ending thing i finally got on support of this guy in india and i'm trying to explain him the like he's like a level one support agent and i'm like trying to understand like explain the severity of what's happening spell your last name you're like we don't have time for that all right i just want to say thank you for being a go daddy customer and i'm like i don't know how to explain this like i'm gonna have to fire my entire team and we lose all of our customers tomorrow like we have to solve this now and like this is like the perfect encapsulation of like i couldn't pass that off to anyone like that it was like my job to do the first time i decided to take a day away from working at the company oh my god um i give you ptsd yeah never taken a day off since wait what ended up happening we finally got through to someone they they undid the block and like our website slowly started coming up got off go daddy the next day and i was like never again but but it was actually a very sobering experience of like something's just like you make these like thoughtless decisions of like oh we'll host on go daddy we'll take payments through stripe we'll use send grid to send our emails like you just make these vendor decisions and then you don't realize like the the like uh how vulnerable you are to failures or like a single point of failure for something like if go daddy ever took a disliking to me or our business and was like yeah we're not serving you anymore our whole business falls apart and so i think that was pretty interesting and like what are your dependencies as a company and like how do you limit those dependencies on like third parties like another random story we use we use send grid to send our email so like they're like an api sending like a lot of like the big esps actually use other email infrastructure underneath and one day like send we just started blocking some of our users from sending email and there was this one who writes about psychedelics like he's not selling psychedelics like psychedelics are very interesting like studied about uh topic and he was covering all of the recent studies and development of like health and ptsd and all these things with psychedelics and it's a great newsletter and because psychedelics are legal in some states but federally illegal it went against their uh acceptable use policy and because it's going through their pipes they just stopped sending his emails but like he doesn't know that we're using send grid we're the ones who get the brunt of like the pushback of you can't send crypto you can't send psychedelics and like again just a massive vulnerability for us to be built on someone else's pipes who tells us what can and cannot be allowed on the platform when we're taking the risk and we're the front facing business um so just like another example of like understanding where your dependencies are and you ideally get to a place where like people can't fuck you like you need to be defensible and vertical in a way that you control what you can control and i don't think we're going to replace stripe like you have to pick and choose your battles like there's payment providers probably not one we're going to build in-house and i don't we're going to build a DNS to compete with GoDaddy.

1:13:28But like we look to go vertical and reduce dependencies on third parties as much as possible because I've lived through far too many of these. And again, like my entire wealth and livelihood is tied up in this company, like growing and succeeding. And so I think that I guess like a long winded way of like how to like what's the difference between like a founder and like a startup employee. It's like one of the most psychopathic, scared, and

1:13:55anxious about literally everything. And you have to be. We talked about this a little bit before, but we have$30 million that's staring at you in a bank account that you can see. That we could go spend today? We could go spend a day, but we have burn that's happening. Every single month, there's burn happening. You have employees, you have all these softwares, all the things you're building, engineers, whatnot. We have paying customers. But we're still not profitable at this exact moment. So when you zoom out and look at the rest of this year, what are you really trying to focus on that you're like, this is my bet that I know will get us to this golden point to where we are in the clear and like this money has served us.

1:14:32And now we can keep keep moving on to where you know it can get to. Yeah. One thing that I never understood until one of my friends told me when we were debating raising a serious, I'd say a year and a half into the business, we got an offer. I don't know how legit the offer was. It's from a legit competitor. It's just like an email. But they expressed interest in like buying us for$30 million. And as a founder who's been building for 18 months and like, again, like chewing glass, going through the GoDaddy experience, like I have tons of gray hairs from this experience. And like 18 months in, getting offered$30 million, I feel like most founders would be like, no way.

1:15:06Like 18 months of hard work for$30 million, not all$30 million for me, but like that's a great outcome. But on the other side, we were in the talks for raising a$12.5 million Series A at a $75 million valuation. And so we had like, that was like our first like real fork in the road moment. And granted, I hate that competitor who tried to acquire us. I never really considered it that much, but it was worth like, it put me in a weird situation where like, I never understood until my friend explained it to me. He's like, as soon as you take that$75 million valuation, companies like that can't buy you anymore because they can't afford you.

1:15:38So like, if you imagine you're only doing$100 ,000 in revenue that you could get acquired for like a million to two million. And like how many companies can dish out two million dollars? There's like thousands, tens of thousands. So like the whole world could be your potential exit opportunity. But once you raise it a$75 million valuation, that means those investors are expecting probably a$200 million minimum exit. How many companies can dish out 200 million? It's a lot less than the tens of thousands you could do that. And so by simply accepting that we wanted to raise the series A, we just wiped out like tens of thousands of companies that could be optionality to buy us.

1:16:11And so it was just like an interesting paradigm that I never thought about. For me, I'm just trying to live to see another day and grow revenue. But every time you raise capital, you're just cutting out these people that could be the exit option for you. So we obviously chose to raise the series A. But like every now and then you come to that fork in the road moment where like when we raised our series B at a$225 million valuation, we just knocked out so many companies because like now they're expecting a billion dollar, eventually like a billion-dollar-plus exit, which one is really hard to do.

1:16:39So the game gets harder and harder because it's harder and harder to find more incremental revenue. And the companies that can actually afford to spend a billion dollars is so few. And once you're into the billion-dollar range, it really is actually like when you narrow down to our space and who would actually be interested. There's a few dozen that could potentially buy us. I always always kind of laugh at the idea of an IPO. But as you keep growing, there's kind of like sometimes the only option towards liquidity where there aren't that many companies that can dish out that capital. And so to get to your question, it's like we have 30 million in the bank.

1:17:11We're burning about a million dollars a month. So easy math. We have like 30 months to live. You never really want to get within 12 months of living because then like you never know. There could be like a market downturn where something terrible could happen. No one's to invest in the company. So that gives us 15 months to kind of figure out the fuck we're doing, which is why I'm very envious of people who are profitable because they don't like I live with the anxiety of like we're just we have 15 months to figure it out and figure it out can mean a bunch of different things. figure it out could be how do we get burned from a million to 200 ,000 and then our runway goes from 30 months to 100 months and then we're kind of chilling 100 months is a long time to figure things out ideally the end goal is be profitable and then you never have to worry about that unless you want to raise like some sort of debt or capital to accelerate and do things like acquisitions and whatnot or it's like is there a end game where we can find a large company that we actually think we could still serve our mission and our customers, but much better and much faster with the backing of like a multi-billion dollar business that has deeper pockets and where like I would love to wake up and just not refresh Stripe.

1:18:11Like when I refresh Stripe and see if we're making money, like a lot of money or a little bit of money dictates my mood of my entire day. Being profitable or not having to worry about us burning capital, like and I can just focus on building amazing product without the stress and anxiety of like budgeting. I think we'd be able to execute a lot. so like so your vice is not wake up check instagram it's check stripe it's check stripe and then do like sometimes like obviously like especially on the west coast because a lot of the teams east coast like i start meetings like seven seven thirty i'm up at like five and so yeah sometimes i don't check stripe to like eight o 'clock at night and it makes or breaks my day sometimes i've refreshed stripe and we had a fucking ripper of a day like 10k i'm like dude we're gonna make it this is how i feel my investment account dude when the market's down i'm like give me the fucking let me drop jump off the balcony you brought up crypto man i'm still very long on crypto but i'm not not super invested still but i believe in i should have pulled out i think you could say that a lot of things yeah true october october november though of 20 god dude should have uh dude just stay patient i'm super patient guy man be patient trying to try my burn is my burn is high dude my burn is high but to answer your question in terms of like what we're prioritizing i think we're actually living in this really interesting time with ai where something happened in the past three months where ai is just so much better with like the latest models yeah and it went from like me knowing that it would eventually get there i've always been like you know i see the potential it's growing exponentially and what it can do like there's a world where it it's one going to be smarter than humans be able to like automate a ton um and like i think anyone who's like blind to that is just like in denial but up until like three four months ago it was a lot of like i've saw so many companies that were like faking ai in india or like doing all this like weird shit or like the just the end product wasn't good they said they could automate your marketing channels or they could build your website and do all these things and like the output just wasn't great yeah if you spend enough time on x you're thinking you think yeah you think you're like i can just levitate my brain and it'll just it'll just all work itself but i'd say in the past three months it has gotten a lot better right it's not fully there yet and there's still like a few things that are a little fugazi but for the most part like it's like really powerful.

1:20:21And so we have like this company wide AI adoption thing where it's like not a mandate per se, but like people are automating a lot of their work. And it's not like they're like, don't have anything to do. They're just finding 40 other things to do. And everyone's so much more productive. It's like my goal this year is like, let's say we were initially going to hire another 20 people. How do we hire zero people? How do we, and I said this to the company, like we're 130 people right now. How do we take this to the promised land, whether it's IPO or acquisition or profitability with these 130 people, like the people that we have here is like the people I want to stay here.

1:20:56If things do get to a point where they're automated, there's so much more to do. We can move them to other positions. But like, I want these 130 people to get us to like the promised land. And so like, that's like how we solve this problem. It is, we need to, like, we can't have our head up our ass. Like, we have to like actually use the tools in front of us. It's like hiring a growth person. And they're like i don't really use computers it's like what do you mean you don't use computers like like the the tools that are available today in the game on the field is like you have to be able to leverage like claude and be able to automate things and do 10 times what someone could have done three years ago i think if everyone takes that mindset and does it there's no reason why we can't have 130 people at the end of the year and long that that would get us from a million in burn to 500k and burn and then we have 60 months of runway and that changes the entire equation for us but it's like a real urgency around adopting it have you always been a 5 a.m kind of guy or is that something that has come from you being in charge uh definitely like the west coast like i love being on the west coast when i'm in columbia like i'm more east coast hours okay and for me it's like i call like time zone arbitrage in the sense of like when everyone else is on between nine and five like especially me being the one who like runs the company and has like 18 direct reports i just get pinged all day and like it's my job to respond because if I'm blocking people like that's a waste of their time.

1:22:11So from nine to five, nine to six, like I'm just unblocking people and like never able to focus. But when I'm on the West Coast, I have to wake up at five. I have to go to the gym at seven. I have to be back by eight. Like it's a very red like and I also find when you have slack in the morning, like when my first meeting is 11 a.m. on the East Coast, like I say I'm going to go to the gym at 6 a.m. I'll take an extra 30 minutes to do something and then I'll like hang on my computer for an extra 20 minutes. Maybe I get like 10 extra reps in the gym before you know it i thought that i had like eight to eleven to do work but it really is like nine to eleven it's like a wasted hour on the west coast i don't have that like i have to be at my desk by my first meeting at like 7 38 and better when i'm done meetings at one o 'clock and then you're blocking to work and then they're like east coast to start like europe's asleep east coast team is like winding down it's like five six o 'clock their time and so my two o 'clock to 10 o 'clock is peace i like actually get to do work um so i just find like on long on like undistracted blocks of time is like my secret weapon and i don't get it on the east coast but on the west coast i do i also feel great working out in the morning for me it's like kind of gotta like i don't understand how some people just roll out of bed open up their computer and just start typing away on things like i'm getting like a good sweat in and like waking up is like where i do my best thinking and i come back like feeling accomplished are you fasted or do you have a little snack i i eat my drink my protein shake when i get back and i eat breakfast like 10 11 oh so you don't you don't i don't i don't eat in the morning okay well i'm a breakfast person i'll eat breakfast like 10 30 but not before the gym nothing before the gym just empty sound wake up stretch meditate for 15 minutes go to the gym come back at 7 30 i think that's what i need to get into because i keep telling myself think you're we're not evening gym guys huh not an evening i'm not an evening gym guy you see then chloe's like what's for what are we having for dinner i'm like I'm trying to finish this up.

1:23:59It's tough. Well, I'm not an evening gym guy. And I also think I just need to make it a knock it out first thing, non-negotiable. Because then it's like, I saw Peter McKinnon made a video about this. He was talking about Casey Neistat. And Casey was talking about how he runs first thing in the morning. And it just becomes a non-negotiable. So it's now not something like, what time am I going to work out? Or what time am I going to do this? Am I going to do it? It's like, I'm doing it. we're knocking it out first thing it's done you feel me i mean there's a lot to like feel i mean i'll make my bed most of the time it's like the same philosophy like just get like stack your wins early in the day for me to get like a good sweat there's like the psychological benefits too like i'm not gonna start breaking down serotonin and everything but but but in terms of the next pot yeah yeah but in terms of like what it actually does to your body and your brain to like wake up and feel good and have a sweat like i feel like i feel so much better afterwards i think more clearly and i have that like sense of accomplishment by like 7 30 by 7 30 i have like stretched, meditated, went to the gym, had an amazing workout, listened to two podcasts in the gym.

1:24:59And now I'm starting my meeting at 730. And like the podcast I typically listen to are like the business podcasts that like inspiring, they're motivating. It's like the combination of that while working out. It's like a lot going on. So I think I feel on top of the world. I feel like I can be the best version of me when I get back to the gym. Yeah. You said something very interesting to us how you potentially might go to a four-day work week. How likely is that to happen? And like, it seems like you're, um, like from a founder's perspective, you're pretty, uh, like new age or fully remote, potentially might do four days a week.

1:25:38Um, like, is that something that you think will actually happen a four-day? I'd love it to. Hopefully my employees don't watch this so they don't get overexcited we cut that out dude cut that out no so my my thinking behind it is well one like if we had a four-day work week it just means like another focus day for me so i just work on fridays without people bothering me i think a lot of people would actually do that too not that that's like the the intended consequence of that but i think we're at like anyone who's grown a company knows like how valuable their best employees are and there's so much built up context over three like these engineers have been building our system for like three four years they know everything about like the decisions we've made and like if one of the very senior people on any team leaves the amount of time it takes someone to recruit to find someone to interview them to onboard them that's like six to eight months assuming that they're going to be just as good as the last person which like they rarely are and then another like call it year to get close to the context of that person head or for the same cost you could just make sure that that person never fucking leaves.

1:26:42And so there, there comes a point where my job becomes like talent retention is like one of the most important things. And we've been fortunate. We've had, I think in the four and a half years we've been in business, five people have left voluntarily. It's like attrition rates, like very low. I think part of that, like we pay well, the culture, uh, remote company, you can work like people decide to pick up and go to Portugal for two weeks and work from there. And like, couldn't care less. As long as like work is getting done, I couldn't care if you're like in a cafe in China or at your home office in like new york like it doesn't really matter to me and so from that same train of thought like if we do go four-day work week and the preface there is like we're still burning a million dollars a month and like we are fighting for our lives so i think it would it would be an awesome story if it actually helped us in some capacity but i think it's a bit misplaced while we are in like this like unprofitable fighting for our lives to then take 20 of the week off more but i do think there's a point either at profitability or closer to profitability where you just weigh your options You're like, here's this company Beehive that I like.

1:27:41We're growing fast. I believe in the vision. I think the payout is going to be amazing. And I can work from wherever I want and to come from my home or on vacation or wherever. And it's four days a week. Or the offer that you're getting from whatever company down the street that might be paying you$20 ,000 more is nine to five in the office, tight vacation policy, and commuting 30 minutes to and from work every day. And like I think 99 % of people would choose the remote first company that works four days a week over the nine to five in an office. And so when you start to do that, it's like why would anyone leave?

1:28:15And so I think you have to think about retaining talent at some point. And I think a four-day work week. Because like we've done – we're a quarter of the way there. Every month we do a wellness day, which is like the third Friday of every month is a day off. Something that when I worked at Google for all of 10 months that they did there during COVID because they thought like their snowflakes and thought everyone was like super like stressed. and like they needed more like mental health days. And so they, Sunday there gave a few like mental wellness days on Fridays. Everyone loved them. They're like, dude, three day weekend's amazing.

1:28:45Like, thank you. Makes you happy. And so I took that and I was like, dude, one, I'm a big mental health guy. We're all working super hard. I'm super stressed all the time. I'd love a day where people can enjoy a three day weekend to go on like a weekend trip or whatever. So we incorporated that and it's gone super well. I love it, man. This has been such a fun episode. This is episode 201 of the 505 Podcast. If you're still here, please hit the subscribe button, drop us a comment, leave us a like. We'll see you guys all next week. Peace.