Hardy Michel & Shak Lala: Go slow to go fast

0:00We ended up going to a really, really large advice conference and we actually exhibited the product and it did not exist at that point. So we turned up as a vendor, we built essentially like a very rough working V1, but it was designed incredibly beautifully. It looked great on the front, but it did not exist. Advisors spend 80 % of the time non-client facing when their job is to be client facing. And the people like MiniShares as investors who can't afford advice or don't have access to it, those are the ones who can disproportionately benefit the most from it. I think you went through a bunch of ideas while you're in that exploration phase.

0:33solar installation at one point i know like trade finance i think was another idea why did that not make the cut but you know the company now known as malo did the way i characterized that period of our journey was that you know frameworks don't find markets what does it actually mean to move really quickly ship really quickly but still be beautiful and still be compliant hi everyone i'm sam wong one of the blackbird partners and welcome to another episode of Wild Hearts, where we uncover the bold moves and the unlikely paths behind extraordinary founders and operators. Today's guests are Hardy Michelle and Shaquille Lala, the co-founders of Marlou, a company transforming how financial advice gets delivered.

1:18Marlou is singular in that it is the first investment Blackbird has ever made before the founders had an idea. This conversation unpacks their go slow to go fast philosophy, how they spent months in the IDMAs exploring completely different industries, why they embedded themselves inside advice firms before writing a line of code, and what they learned by watching advisors struggle through their day-to-day work. We dive into how they validated demand before the product existed, including by exhibiting at a major industry conference with a barely working prototype, and how to build a culture where disagreement is encouraged and clarity of ownership drives speed.

2:00This is a story about rigor, conviction and choosing a problem that you could dedicate a decade of your life to. Artie and Shack are two of the most intentional first-time founders I've ever met and I'm so excited to share their journey with you. So let's get into it.

2:18Welcome Shack and Artie to Wild Hearts. Can't wait to share this story with our audience. as a kind of way to get started. I might hand it a bit to each of you to introduce yourselves and just talk about how it is that you came to start Marlu. Cool. Happy to be here and start off as well. So, hey, everyone. I'm Hardy. I'm the co-founder of Marlu. Quick backstory on me. Kind of grew up across Australia and New Zealand, spent most of my childhood in New Zealand. Lots of competitive sports, which led me to actually cycle competitively for New Zealand, race internationally win a bunch of national titles and kind of very naturally from there fell into startups and early stage company building and probably like most notable helped build sharesies in New Zealand so kind of New Zealand's leading you know retail investing platform and probably one of the most loved brands that's out there as well so I was lucky enough to join as the second employee and helped kind of grow the business over five years from just a few of us to more than kind of 15 % of the New Zealand population as our user base, billions of dollars of assets under management, and a team that went from kind of five of us to well over 200.

3:29So that was a real roller coaster and ride. And then more recently, I've ended up in London and the UK, where I was headhunted for a role with a company called Lightyear, which was building a retail investing platform across Europe. So helped kind of build and launch that from the zero to one stage across 22 European countries. No sweat. And tell us, Shaq, about how you came to start Marlow with Hardy. Yeah, so quick background on me. I grew up in Auckland, proud Kiwi, but ran across the ditch to explore greener pastures for university and ended up doing a degree in maths over in Melbourne. And then, like all lost STEM graduates, ended up in management consulting for a few years.

4:16And then in the three-person strategy team at Orica, which is the world leader in mining explosives. And then after that, found my way into Sharesies when they eventually helped me shape a role that was essentially an early stage strategy role where my main focus was to identify new products and look for areas for Sharesies to expand into regionally. And then after graduating from that role, I pitched to start with my boss at the time, the B2B product team, which we eventually grew into a team that was able to build products for some of New Zealand's largest companies like Fonterra, Spark, Meridian, Conta in New Zealand.

5:02And in that, I found myself cutting my teeth, building consumer-grade fintech experiences, but for an enterprise audience, which certainly shaped a lot of what Marla was today, but also where I met Hardy and we fostered our intent to build a company. Awesome. Love that intro. And so I guess you can kind of see from those potted histories that, you know, consumer finance and investing platforms are sort of in both of your paths. Like, I'm curious, what was the itch that, you know, still needed to be scratched or what felt unsolved that wasn't being solved by those huge platforms with all the benefits of scale that they had?

5:48Yeah, that's a really good question. So I think the thing we encountered was the demand for financial advice. So we had hundreds of thousands or have now built products for millions of people over the past few years. And it always came back to one thing for me, which was what should I do with my money? And the demand was there. And kind of what I learned is that, hey, by and large, everyone is engaged with their finances. They want to do the right thing, but we didn't necessarily have the tools to help them at the time. So the example I would give you would be, you know, let's take the pandemic or maybe Trump tariffs earlier in the year when you have kind of historic volatility, like the VIX index, which is a measure of volatility is kind of like at an all time high.

6:33you know all we could do in those moments was really send an email to our entire customer base saying like hey don't panic the market goes up the market goes down you know you might remind them kind of the s &p 500 returns over the last 50 years or so which are kind of gradually up and to the right the problem is that like human psychology is such that it's exceptionally hard to do that during those moments every being in your body is wanting to sell wanting to kind of de-risk you You know, even the feeling of seeing yourself, you know, maybe have less on paper than you did yesterday. It's not particularly easy to navigate.

7:07And so we, you know, thought about and looked at things like, do we offer robo advice? Do you maybe bring human advisors onto your platforms? Or, you know, what a lot of, you know, retail investing platforms are now starting to do is build their own wealth management kind of arms and businesses to offer kind of a higher touch service. are the human powered wealth management services got it yeah exactly and so yeah what we kind of saw through that was just the the demand that it wasn't necessarily being met and kind of a byproduct was that we spent a lot of time with financial advisors themselves and i guess my view on it is that um the power of financial advice at the right moment is transformative for people's lives and it isn't just you know what should i invest in it's things like can i afford to retire what should i do with this inheritance?

7:56I could be going through separation or divorce. Am I going to be okay? Can I afford to buy another home to grow my family? These are all kind of pivotal event-driven life moments. And the power of having trusted advice from someone who understands your goals, motivations, capacity for risk, all those sorts of things can have a really material kind of difference and impact and trajectory on your life. And so the drive for me was that we were keen to see more of that in the world. And then off the back of that, the other challenge we saw in the market was that advice is quite a troubled industry from an economic perspective.

8:34And like advice has been, you know, 80 % of the time non-client facing when their job is to be client facing. And the people like many shares as investors who can't afford advice or don't have access to it, those are the ones who can disproportionately benefit the most from it. And so it almost opens your eyes to a system that's pretty broken when like helping more people is bad for your business where you've got. Yes, more customers is bad. Fun based or asset based fee models where you've essentially got a variable fee for a fixed cost. And so there's a threshold at which you become economical from an advice client perspective.

9:10And frankly, that threshold is fairly high. And it becomes very difficult under the current delivery model for people who need advice to just get advice. And that's, you know, some of the things we resonated with as well. I don't see an advice proposition calling out to me saying, I'm right for you and you can be my client. And that's some of the change, you know, we'll get to later that we'd like to pull forward in the world. Yeah, we'd love to chat a bit about that a bit more as we dive into product. But maybe sort of staying kind of at the pre-Marlou or genesis of Marlou stage, you know, those of our listeners who are keen followers of Hardy and I on LinkedIn will know that Blackbird invested in Marlou before I think it even had a name.

9:55I think it was called Hardico at the time that we went to IC. And you didn't yet have an idea. So even though I think, you know, it's fair to say that you have robust experience and clear ideas around what the market needs and what your customers could benefit from, you did spend, you know, a good while in the idea maze, in inverted commas, trying to work out what that first idea for the business that you were going to go all in on would be. And so I would love to kind of dive into that a little bit and maybe even talk through like some of your own internal frameworks that kind of convinced you, you know, idea A was better than idea B, for example.

10:37Yeah, absolutely. And maybe some good context is during my time at Sharesies, I was lucky enough to join Blackbird as a flocker or a scout, as we might otherwise have been known. And so basically the whole intent of that was, hey, Blackbird's getting set up in New Zealand and our goal is to see every early stage seed or pre-seed deal that's going and basically build a network or an extension of Blackbird. people like myself who had kind of good connections, knew lots of other early stage founders and kind of in return for bringing deal flow. We were basically taught kind of Blackbird's world of investing, which was pretty incredible experience for 12 months.

11:19It was really structured. There was kind of five or six of us. And that really opened my eyes to a few things and kind of complemented the operator experience that I was starting to build out. And so on one side of the table you have kind of how to build a company at scale and like go through kind of hyper growth to billions of dollars of assets and lots of capital raised and you know hundreds of employees and on the other side how to kind of really robustly like frame and then evaluate like lots and lots of different early stage companies which is an incredibly hard thing to do and so i absolutely love that and kind of the view of the world that i started to form was it just takes a long time kind of stuck in the idea maze to build a truly iconic company with a product that people like love to use and really that like a lot of people that i saw on the blackbird side of the table were like incredibly smart they really could have built and done anything but they just went and worked on the wrong thing and it wasn't for lack of trying but it was just that they didn't get the kind of foundational steps or stages of their business right and they weren't maybe as rigorous as they could have been to really evaluate the size and stage of kind of where they were and then where they wanted to go and then you end up raising capital and you kind of lock yourself onto this treadmill that is exceptionally hard to exit um and can you know take years before you really have that conversation with yourself and go like hey is this the right thing for me and am i actually confident in this business and so we kind of set out with this first principles approach where we said um hey we want to go slow to go fast and i'm claiming that term now um i need to buy the i need to buy the domain so i might do that before this goes live basically like the biggest headwind for most startups is working on something that like doesn't matter it's in a domain that's not growing in any kind of macro sense and um really kind of the thought process was choosing a material problem matters like way more than your ability and like the amount of effort that's required to kind of execute on it and if you get that right it's really a force multiplier for everything that comes after that and so we basically said like hey we want to spend kind of six to nine months going unreasonably deep on problems that we might actually want to work on to decide on the idea to build and really just to be in listening mode for a long time and try and learn more than anyone else so find insights and secrets that compound form a unique kind of view of the world and then go after them with um kind of intensity and purpose so um i think you went through a bunch of ideas while you're in that sort of exploration phase i went around like solar installation at one point i know like trade finance i think was another idea at one point that that kind of got cut from the chopping block.

14:16But maybe he's using one of those as a live example. Why did that not make the cut? But the company now known as Marlow did. We did absolutely explore numerous, very different ideas. And a key part of that process was to sharpen our teeth at identifying what would make a good business for us versus not. we always wanted to be in a big market under transformative change with good tailwinds. And so some of those markets and the funny ones we ended up exploring were vertical SaaS for roofing, trade finance, buying, employee purchasing large and retiring businesses. And yeah, what we learned from that and what started to develop after each of those ones was adding to a growing list of, let's say, what ended up about 20 evaluation criteria, which made a good business.

15:14And I just distinctively remember one day, Hardy and I just looked at that list and just said, or realized or dawned upon us that, man, we're not going to find something that's going to tick all of these boxes. We'd be lucky if we even got to one that hit 15 out of 20. So we did something quite funny. So basically screwed up the list and threw it away and just said okay like where do we where do we have an unfair advantage and like the way i characterized that period um of our journey was that you know frameworks don't find markets uh and you know we had gone through a period of basically writing a bi-weekly memo about each space that we're interested at the time and debating each other um trying to pull it apart to build this list of 20 and when we threw everything out of the window it just kind of how happened quite serendipitously to us where we just started going back to what we felt innately close to and interested in, which was starting to ask people and talk to people in the financial services space.

16:15And it slowly narrowed itself to advice. And it felt so much more organic in terms of where our thinking process is. And you could just feel the excitement in our two-person shoebox room, building and building. and then we started to get to a space where we just were able to message people and talk to people at the click of our fingers to noodle and noodle further into what ultimately ended up as financial advice but i'll throw it to hardy to see if he's got anything more to add to that interesting part of our journey yeah i think the takeaway was you can't framework your way to a great business um although that was like a really useful exercise to us so i wouldn't necessarily have like discounted what we did but we kind of we had to experience it to reach the point where it was like okay we need to shift approach a little bit but it also narrowed down like what the things were that actually mattered and i think ultimately for me and like the reason that we ended up walking away from like home services like roofing specifically was that um i couldn't see myself being passionate about the space for for you know 10 years or having roofers or homeowners as my customer, maybe is like the more honest question there.

17:26Everything on paper said that, you know, it could be a great business and it made sense. And like it had a lot of the kind of themes that we were looking for, but yeah, it fell down on the passion front. And like, ultimately that's probably the most important. So how did it feel at that point where you kind of screwed up the piece of paper? Did you feel like you were back at, you know, day zero and you had nothing? Yeah. Like just kind of unpack that a little bit. Yeah. It was an incredibly uncomfortable experience, I would say. It was very uncomfortable because you're essentially sitting there conducting this search process, but we had kind of pretty clear guidelines and principles in place.

18:05And there wasn't necessarily like a timeline. But what I would say is that the go slow to go fast kind of approach doesn't mean that we were any less kind of intense or like we still moved extremely quickly. we like had a lot of rigor in what we were doing so it's definitely not to get confused by you know we had our feet up on the chairs waiting for the bolt of uh inspiration to to land yeah that that was not happening but like essentially what we did is we kind of did two week sprints and kind of the clear litmus test for us was we could very quickly go out and talk to a whole bunch of people and so we could open doors and we found that pretty hard to do with a few of the early ideas that we found And then the second stage of that is convince people to let you in-house with them.

18:52And so the intent of that was we're not financial advisors in this case. We do have a lot of kind of tangential experience and that helps us open doors. Like as soon as you go to someone and say like, hey, I built these things and I manage billions of dollars under assets and I've held regulated roles and like I understand. Yeah, there's a bit more trust there. And by the way, like here's these proof points. it immediately got us meetings. So I think, you know, within the first two weeks of kind of the pivot to financial advice, we had more conversations than we'd had in the previous kind of several months.

19:27And then by the end of that two week period, we had five or six firms signed up to let us go in-house with them. What does that mean to go in-house? Unpack that because I don't think everyone's fully, you know, people do customer discovery or whatever, but is that the same thing as in-house-y? No, this is like a few levels deeper, I would say. So going in-house literally means turning up to their offices and like embedding yourself in there for a few days to kind of a week or so. And so basically we put together a two-page pilot partner agreement and it basically said nothing. But it was really a social contract.

20:02It was like a social contract and a commitment to let us come into your offices for a few days and to spend time with a bunch of different kind of people within your firm so for us we said we want to have kind of like three like minimum three two-hour sessions with management so that could be the ceo the head of compliance and managing director these are the types of things we're looking for then for your advice team we want you know a couple of hours with a few different advisors with your back office with your support staff and then depending on the business for example one had a call center we also said hey So we were basically getting a commitment from them that we were going to spend a bunch of time with your team to really try and understand what's the purpose of your role and then how does that tie back to the day-to-day reality.

20:48And we essentially said, we think we can build something in this space. We clearly have a very good background and in return for letting us do this, you will get early access and preferential treatment should we decide to build the thing. And that was it. It was reasonably vague. But what we found in return was kind of the pain that people were experiencing was so great that they were signing and returning these documents the same day. They were sending us calendar blocks to make the time with their teams. And all of this was unprompted from us. We essentially didn't have to organize anything.

21:29And it was pretty incredible now thinking back on that. But it was just really early signs that there was demand and that we were getting pulled kind of into this, you know, area and that there was something very clear going on for us to pull apart and really understand. And so the way I would kind of differentiate this is a lot of people go in to kind of customer interviews and they say, like, list out your top 36 pain points, right? And, like, you get heaps of notes and you walk away from that and you're like, yes, I've got data, I've got information. like there's something here that um it doesn't necessarily equal demand and so like what you're really looking for is we did two things we did kind of informational interviews like this face to face just getting to know people kind of getting them to lower their guard a little bit understanding what they're trying to achieve in their role and then we also did kind of side by side kind of desktop sessions saying like hey let's bring up all your emails that you received yesterday what are they what do you do with that information what does it mean what other systems do you interact with and we started to learn and see really interesting things and kind of where like the purpose of a role starts to diverge from the day-to-day reality and this is kind of the messy middle where a lot of pain and frustration starts to to uh occur really interesting shak did you want to jump in there yeah there's there's a couple things that like were really core to that approach as well.

22:58We felt it was so important to have them put something at stake the whole time. And that's why we invented that social contract. I think it gave them like a 50 % off to the first version of Marlowe that had no confirmed delivery on data or whatever it was going to look like. But it essentially instilled in us this commercial intent and always forcing a commercial question. And I think the benefit of that approach is it always pulled us out of this like, oh, this is interesting and this is cool type situation because the next thing and they always expected was a question to buy or a question to pay.

23:39And then working back from that, we framed our questions a lot more around what would stop you from buying this and why aren't you doing it? And some of those very, very early interviews that we had maybe a year ago now really also helped in pre-sales for what ultimately became Malu. So we essentially developed 300 or 400 lists of people that we could eventually hit up to start doing that. And I think that going back to that constant approach of evaluating the tools commercially forced other people to decide what it is and focus on what their pain points were. Because we heard every pain point under the sun.

24:23Someone said, my pain point is booking meetings, but I get my assistant to do that. And it's just like, okay, we need to understand exactly what constitutes a real pain point in your job. And I think where we then focused a lot more effort was then where people were sort of saying no and where they were having trouble understanding the product. And then when we couldn't communicate the product or the initial version clearly enough, it's almost as if we step back and say, all right, this needs to be so obviously simple in terms of an initial wedge product that I need to describe in three points.

24:59You have a problem with taking notes. Let Marlo record your meetings. We'll do it in a minute versus an hour. And we had very strong signal that there was a problem space for us to build in, but we needed to identify a very small wedge to start and that we could communicate very clearly. And so that whole navigation piece became one of us identifying for ourselves as well what the initial version of Marlou was. And I think it was incredibly helpful that we didn't feel so rushed at doing that. But we were very sure after six months of doing that, what the first, second, third versions of Marlou were going to be.

25:34It's really interesting because most founders think first about problem identification, right? And then solution, shape, form, et cetera. And then once the product is kind of actually ready to be used by anyone, what is the language? What is the channel, et cetera, that I'll try and distribute that through? But there's obviously room for error at each handoff point between those three stages. and I guess your process collapsed all of that into just one stage. So you just did not start building product until you knew you were building the thing that was going to sell because you had worked out how to articulate it in such a way that they were like, shut up and take my money kind of thing.

26:21And I would say that we didn't have the crystal ball in sight at the start of that journey, but we just had enough gut instinct that one was the market big enough two is there enough change in it and three are we passionate enough about it to care to actually push the market and the technology forward like we answered strong yes to all of those we're like okay cool let's just insert ourselves in all of these situations right the way from superannuation funds that you know we're running critical compliance workflows off a bunch of excel spreadsheets where they could be you know handled like a license losing penalty if some of the stuff was wrong right the way through like an original individual mortgage advisor selling mortgages to you know a handful of clients and that spectrum of client diversity as well also helped us like tease out okay like what's something that could be picked up by you know a lot of people off the bat and open our surface area to learning more and more pretty quickly gotcha the way i would describe it is we did not build anything we didn't even go into solution mode until we felt like we had exhausted um like every avenue and we'd learned as much as we possibly could probably more than anyone else about the like current reality of the advice space and so we were just like exhaustive and like i distinctly remember we ended up in the boardroom of like a very large very well-known firm with their entire exec team and they were just grilling us like just taking us to the cleaners and um it was fantastic because we were able to kind of turn that conversation around everything just becomes a customer interview in that situation it's like hey um you know you said x can you tell me more about that i'm curious and we got all the way down to the point where we basically asked them how they would procure software like ours what would they take us through what are the checklists and expectations we would have to meet so like we just ended up basically having all this information up front from what could we actually build what might that look like how would we market and sell that all the way through to like how is it procured by you know everyone from an individual to the largest enterprise kind of operating in the space and so we kind of paused and stopped at that point after a few months and said like are we absolutely convinced and the trick was just to be like very intellectually honest with yourself like is this actually the thing given everything that we know um right now and there was definitely a pause moment and it was kind of like a few days and we went like yep we are incredibly fired up about this like let's go and the final stage was that we ended up going to uh a really really large advice conference and we actually exhibited the product and it did not exist at that point so we turned up as a vendor we built essentially like a very rough working v1 but it was designed incredibly beautifully it looked great on the front but it did not exist in any way shape or form and we basically spent three days like selling this thing as hard as we possibly could and we just came out of it so energized and also so like abundantly clear that we had now lost sales and like we should have built it yesterday and just went into like crazy fast execution mode and was like panic like oh my god we're onto something here like let's go and we should have done this three months ago but in hindsight we had done everything right up until that point and we're extremely confident and kind of tick the like critical boxes in our mind it's like we were passionate we were fired up there was like change in the world that we could bring forward And then we'd found real demand, strong tailwinds, and there was a real opportunity to make an impact.

30:16I love it. Just quickly touching off the back of that, it was pretty funny that, you know, much to our surprise, the largest advice conference in the country doesn't check whether you actually have a product or not. So we got in with a Vive coded product and a marketing website and we're essentially selling the dream to people who wanted it immediately and we couldn't deliver it. And so that's what convinced us that we should have hired our engineer the month before and then just gotten straight to it. What did it look like actually to run that sort of test of turning up at a conference? Like what level of interest, you know, convinced you, oh, this is more than just the people I've gone in-house with?

31:02It's the number of people who like through a one minute demo of the product immediately got it and they're like, okay, I'm in. And all it was, was a web app where you click record. It was fairly brittle as well. So half the time, like maybe a third of the time, it just kind of broke because neither of us knew how to fix it. I get to that a minute, but there was no database. It basically recorded like a minute's conversation between myself as a fake advisor and you as the fake client. And then it would send that to a retail workflow. It would summarize the meeting against, you know, that it was an advice meeting and then send you an email summary.

31:39So we also used it as a bit of a lead gen tool. Yeah, I'm going to have to take that email off you so I can send you this summary. Exactly. If you want this. Exactly. and they got it into their own inbox. I asked them to check the emails and immediately then they had something from Marlou in their own emails as well. And I think that was a nice closing loop to it as well. So how much did that, call it an experiment, how much did that experiment cost? Maybe 10 ,000 AUD. Yeah, good experiment. For three days and that included flights, turning up a whole bunch of marketing materials and T-shirts.

32:13And I think we negotiated the cost of the stand down and guaranteed them that we'd be back next year. We're actually just about to go for our own. Awesome. We're the much larger. Yes. And sponsoring the drinks. It's going to be great to come full circle, but we basically committed ourselves a year in advance in order to get a big upfront discount. I mean, it's so counterintuitive, right, to spend 10 grand when you don't yet have anything to sell. But on the flip side, you'll spend way more than that building a product that you don't know anyone wants to buy. yeah and like that was a big reason as to why we should raise in the first place to help let us be resource constrained but not too resource constrained like having the flexibility to spend 10k and really prove something out was well worth it for us and like you know you know founders who would have spent months chasing down the wrong rabbit hole and we just wanted to be so right yeah 100 i think it also comes back to like the reason for raising and again my view on kind of how companies should be built in the early days is you're trying to answer like a true false question and so for us that was can we raise money to get a product and market that we absolutely like are convinced of that we know people love and that there's clear demand for and can we answer that yes or no within 12 months and then like if you can answer yes it unlocks like a huge amount of uncapped upside and then like another set of kind of true false questions that you then need to go and answer i.e like can we scale this thing up can we launch in multiple markets it kind of like one leads to the other but that's how i think about venture capital and really like it's an aid to answer those questions with massive upside like if you can answer them uh like truthfully right and i think we basically like did everything that we kind of said in those first 12 months we got the product like built and launched and then yeah kind of off to the races And so that period of our time became what that series of true-false looked like for us was initially leveraging our network as an unfair advantage to find people to talk to.

34:17and then it became like sell to learn improve demand as much as possible and then once we were convinced enough of the space it became something more along the lines like noodling around for the perfect or the right implementation of the idea because like it just needed to be so easy to communicate what we were doing and that was almost different very different like our long-term vision of the company but very early on it became so important but we so clear to us that we needed to have early wins on the board with the product that we could sell before we could start to paint the vision of the future we saw for advisors.

34:52Yeah, awesome. And I'd love to kind of like dive in a little bit more to, you know, what makes the product special? You know, the idea that this, you know, it's beautiful, it's simple, secure, but it's also for regulated advisors, you know, in a very high risk, high trust sort of situation. Like what does it actually mean to move really quickly, ship really quickly, but it'd still be beautiful and still be compliant? Yeah. So that's a great question. I think a couple of like starting thoughts for me was like, one, all the software that we came across and we went extremely deep as well on existing software.

35:28We looked at everything. We got demos. We signed up as potential customers and said, like, show us how this works. CRMs, modeling software, basically every other tool that an advisor could possibly use and my overall like view on what we saw was everything was windows 95 error it was awful to use extremely clunky and if you asked any advisor whether they enjoyed using that software or not they would come back with extremely strong negative feedback it was just so one exciting to us that that was the case and two apparent that you had to build something that the advisor that actually love to use.