Dave Carruthers – Co Founder of Voxpopme

Speaker 1 00:00:02 Hello. Welcome to the Growth Elevated podcast. Today I’m super excited to welcome Dave Carruthers. Dave was the founder of Vox Pop me. I had the pleasure of working with him for several years, and we’re going to talk about that, that journey of building a tech company. Dave, hails from the UK. He is now an entrepreneur in the United States, and, he is a tenacious entrepreneur with some incredible stories. And I can’t wait to to hear them for our group. Please welcome Dave Carruthers. Speaker 2 00:00:33 Hey, Gillian, good to see you. Speaker 1 00:00:34 Great to have you, Dave. so obviously, you and I known each other for a while. We’ve had the pleasure of working together. my goodness, the amount of late nights, the amount of times we’ve set over a beer or whiskey, talking about stories. I think we could probably do five podcasts to pull out all those stories. Speaker 2 00:00:49 For sure. Speaker 1 00:00:51 But I’m looking forward to start. Start today. obviously we have to know each other working at Vox Pop. Speaker 1 00:00:56 Me, tell us a little bit about Vox Pop Me and the founding story. And when you thought that this idea you had could be turned into a company. Speaker 2 00:01:03 Yeah. For sure. So, we started Vox Pop me in 20, 2013, and, it was a kind of nine year journey for me from kind of zero to kind of just under 10 million of RR and kind of what we really kind of focused on building with, with the company was helping consumer brands really get to know their customers better. we really kind of, leaned in to video as a medium, and the idea for the company kind of came out of kind of seeing the the kind of rise of everybody having this smartphone in their pocket. It was just kind of like, well, you know, we looked at kind of how companies got feedback from people and they did all these surveys and it’s like, wouldn’t it be cool if as a brand, you’re Nike and you can just say, hey, we want to know what a hundred people think about this topic and give get feedback in, you know, 60 minutes, you know, a couple of hours. Speaker 2 00:01:57 And, it was really. Speaker 1 00:01:59 What were they doing that at the time if they wanted to find that out, what’s the what’s the state of play before vox pop? Me yeah. Speaker 2 00:02:04 So before vox pop me I mean, you’ve got two sides of the research quantitative which is your traditional surveys and then qualitative which was more kind of traditional kind of old school focus groups. And the focus group hadn’t really been involved since, you know, when it was originated in the 50s and 60s. And what we wanted to do is kind of mash the two together and essentially bring these, advances in technology forward and create something that was a video survey. So all of our surveys were typically 3 to 5 questions. People’s responses were about 60s per question, and it was done with that selfie style of video. And that was key, because what it allowed people to do is just articulate them their thoughts more naturally. But what it also did on the back end was provided the brands with really powerful consumer feedback that they could share with their stakeholders. Speaker 2 00:02:50 Tell, tell better stories, really kind of understand the consumer. The power of video to influence was huge. It was, you know, so funny. We saw so many times at big brands, you know, how, you know, there’d be survey data and people would ignore it. But then you show them a handful of clips of someone talking about the problem, and all of a sudden that’s what drives changed because because essentially, you know, as human beings, we kind of kind of, we need stories. You know, storytelling is such a core part of kind of how we make decisions, how we, you know, create emotion. And, you know, whilst the data provides that kind of rational, side of the thinking, the kind of emotional side, was missing. So, yeah, our value proposition was really about getting to the consumer, consumers meeting them where they were in the world and being able to, you know, you think about, the efficiency of being able to get into someone’s home and see how they’re doing things. Speaker 2 00:03:43 You know, previously to that, they would send a film crew and be like, hey, just that natural, you know, show us, show us dinner time at your house. And it’s like there’s like three camera crews and a moderator there. And, you know, this is this was so much more kind of like intimate in terms of getting into consumer’s lives and being able to understand them in the moment. Speaker 1 00:04:01 So that’s that that’s a strong value proposition. You can go out to more people, you can do it much more quickly, and you get that into some intimacy in that, that, that authenticity of, of people, you know, because of the comfort they have with their phone and the fact that they’re actually talking to their phone on all kinds of mediums. You’re bringing that to the corporate world and, and, you know, did it take was it hard for the corporate customer to adopt that? Did they see this right away and say, oh, we want this, or what were some of the the challenges and getting them to change their ways? Yeah, I. Speaker 2 00:04:32 Mean, I think, for the first, first 4 or 5 years, kind of felt like a missionary evangelizing. the good word of video, so ironically ended up moving to Utah, but, yeah, I mean, just. Yeah, it was it took a lot of, like, education and advocacy and, you know, kind of, you know, I think kind of people, like, were intrigued by the concept, but we were definitely selling into an. Industry that was, you know, this is how we do things. This is how we’ve always done things, you know, and things there. And, you know, in the early days as well, you know, our kind of hypothesis of like, people are going to want to watch all of these videos and really get close to the consumer. And the reality is that was too much of a time bird and they didn’t have time. So, you know, we were we were, you know, I guess doing AI stuff before everyone was doing AI stuff in terms of how do you take this corpus of, you know, hundreds of videos and use AI to, you know, manage transcription, theme, coding sentiment, you know, and the platform was even able to be like, hey, out of those 200 videos, give me a reel of females under 30 talking negatively about these three things and bring that into a highlight reel. Speaker 2 00:05:42 So yeah, really kind of took the all of the pain points out of working with video, there. But yeah, definitely in the early days kind of getting consumers, brands started using this. And even in the first days, we, we started the company thinking we were going to be a tool for the market research agencies. you know, the big the contours of the world. GfK is these big, big agencies. And, you know, we kind of got pushed back. Our clients aren’t asking for this. It’s not interesting. And that essentially forced our hand to be like, okay, well I guess we need to go and validate that directly with Unilever themselves and these other brands and McDonald’s and, you know, and all of a sudden, like when we got into the right people, the forward thinking people in those organizations that could see that this insights function needed to be the, evolved. Like that’s where we start to get traction. So that, again, I think is a big thing for any startup is you’ve got to find those early champions that believe in your product, that they’re trying to do something in, within their business. Speaker 2 00:06:39 And, you know, there’s some great examples of clients that were early adopters of Vox pop. Me, they spoke with us at conferences. They kind of turned their department around, and then they’ve seen benefits in their career in terms of their progression in terms of like, you know, the now running, you know, you know, hugely, large departments within these big companies because they’ve kind of, they adopted tools like ours and others. Speaker 1 00:07:04 You know, that’s a great point. You really had to find the early adopters, the the people at the beginning of the crossing of the chasm. Right. And let’s just go over the dates. So you started the business in 2013 and you grew it from, from zero to, you know, around 10 million of RR. What what was the headcount? You know, when you. Yeah, we got, we we got. Speaker 2 00:07:24 Up to about 70 I think at you know when I kind of left the business. So yeah, that was. Speaker 1 00:07:30 A great run zero 0 to 10 0 to 70. Speaker 1 00:07:32 But you know, you’ve got a great value proposition. You’ve got big customers, big enterprise customers. So all that looks positive. But I think, you know, sitting here now in 2024 looking back this seems obvious. But like you said, it really required people who were willing to change the way they were doing doing things. And as I also recall that it was it was also the way they were used to buying things and conducting the work. Right? So that was that was a big challenge. Yeah. I mean, that. Speaker 2 00:07:56 Was a huge challenge. I mean, you know, now it’s kind of a fait accompli that most of these insights teams are buying multiple tools on an annual license in a, in a SaaS model. And I you know, I remember kind of when we first sat down and I was kind of explaining to you a bit more about the business and you’re like, okay, tell me about the revenue. And you’re kind of like pulling faces and like, what? What do you mean? This is there. Speaker 2 00:08:18 And like, we’re kind of like working through it. But yeah, I mean, like in the early days, like these people were used to buying projects, you know, and yeah, it was it was wild. You know, they could get 50 grand signed up for a project, but try and get them to get 12 grand, signed up for a subscription. And it just like that wasn’t how they thought about stuff. So yeah, it took a lot. You know, we had a we started off as a kind of, pay per video kind of usage kind of based model. We then, moved into more of a like a buy and bought credits and then eventually kind of, through through kind of, some of your leadership and kind of focus and again, kind of, you know, you know, what the our investors wanted to see was, you know, moved more to a full SaaS model. But, you know, again, it was it was interesting because we were kind of, you know, a lot of that we were you’re trying to sell something that people aren’t sure they want yet. Speaker 2 00:09:09 Yeah. In a, in a modality that they definitely aren’t comfortable with yet. And so trying to balance that and. Speaker 1 00:09:16 Trying to change the, the, the long standing behaviors and, and relationships that the industry have is difficult for a startup. So that was you know, I want to talk about, talk to you about in this next stage about the move from a UK company to the US, which you, you know, you and me have done very successfully. you know, I think 80 or 90% of the customers now are our US customers. But one of the challenges was what you just described, which is, you know, coming we wanted to raise capital in the US. We needed to have a business that that was attractive to US investors. It was a SaaS. You know, it was a it was a it was a business that had some service revenue. We moved it to, to to SAS and we were successful in raising capital. But let’s talk about just the overall other. Speaker 1 00:10:00 Challenges of moving to the US. You made the move to say, hey, you know, you’re an aggressive, bold founder. You said, I’m going to go plant the flag and live there myself and come to Utah, as you mentioned. Tell us a little about that story and how that impacted your founding team. And, you know, looking back, is that the way you recommend companies would would expand in the US? Speaker 2 00:10:19 Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I was I was fortunate enough to kind of, you know, it always been a personal ambition of mine to kind of, you know, I’d been in tech for a long time, building companies, you know, it was a personal ambition to kind of move to the US. I never imagined it would be to to Utah rather than kind of Silicon Valley, I guess. But, you know, we had a we had a great partnership with a company here, and it was a it was the catalyst to kind of convince the board that, hey, trying us expansion would be would be good. Speaker 2 00:10:49 I mean, we were probably about a million in revenue when we went to the US, which is way earlier than I should say, is that. Speaker 1 00:10:55 You think that was the right time to move to the US or what? In retrospect, what do you think? what do you what do you need to be able to move the US? Let’s start it that way versus a revenue number. Speaker 2 00:11:03 I think, I think it’s really tough to find if you might get lucky and find that key hire and things like that. But I was very much of the opinion that if we were going to go to the US, it needed to be a founder mentality person. It couldn’t just be a job for somebody, you know, it’s the biggest market in the world. you know, you’ve got to get it right, you know, kind of, if you kind of outsource that, you know, is it because you’ve picked the wrong person, or is it because, you know, the product isn’t isn’t there and stuff? So as ever, kind of throughout my career, I’ve kind of been opportunistic. Speaker 2 00:11:43 You know, there was an opportunity to kind of move to the US because of this partnership. so I was kind of really focused on how do we leverage this opportunity, to kind of to show that. But it’s yeah, there’s definitely challenges for sure. Speaker 1 00:11:58 So, so you chose the model of one of the co-founders moving and establishing the base and leading from the front. Do you think that was a key to your success? Speaker 2 00:12:09 I think it was a big part of it. Yeah, I still firmly believe that, you know, and again, it’s not it’s not, you know, something everybody can do and depends on your kind of stage of life and where you’re at and stuff. Fortunately, like my kids were young, my wife said yes, you know, kind of, you know, like, I think you’ve got to get kind of buy in and stuff. But, you know, it was I definitely sold it as a let’s go to Utah for a year. maybe knowing that like many. Speaker 1 00:12:36 People have done that. Yeah. Exactly. Right. How many years has it been now? Speaker 2 00:12:40 Guest nine. Yeah, yeah, I’ve been in the US nine years now, and yeah, my kids accent’s a little bit ruined. But, you know, other than that, it’s, it’s. Yeah. You know, love living here, particularly in Park City with all the great mountain biking, snowboarding and kind of, you know, access to, to, to everywhere in the US is just so easy with the, with the airport being 30 minutes away. Speaker 1 00:13:02 So let’s let’s unpack it. You chose the strategy of the founder move, which is bold. And I think it was a key part of me success. What you know, once you were here, what were the next handful of hires? And looking back, you know, were they the right, right sequence? And what were the critical ones that allowed us to get scale and us. Yeah, I. Speaker 2 00:13:23 Mean, I think we you know, initially it was just some kind of, more junior folks just to help, like on the project management side and the, basics there. Speaker 2 00:13:32 But, I mean, obviously kind of bringing yourself on board as our CFO was it was a big move. we’d obviously been chatting about kind of a fundraising journey where we where we were, and it was kind of, you know, it was such an interesting challenge going from the UK market and having raised money there, which is, you know, relatively conservative versus kind of US approach to fundraising. And I’ll never forget I had, you know, at the time we had one deck. And you know, I’d advise fathers founders. Now if you’re raised in the UK, have one deck and if you’re raising the US, have a different deck and don’t those decks are probably a little bit different because I presented this deck in the UK and someone was like, this is crazy. It’s like pie in the sky. It’s two things. What’s your EBITDA? You know, all this kind of like kind of UK kind of thinking. And it has improved in Europe and the UK, but it’s still lagging way behind where the US kind of thinks about scale and ambition and things like that. Speaker 1 00:14:28 What was what what was your revenue state when they were asking about EBITDA? Speaker 2 00:14:32 Oh like, yeah, like a million or something like that. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 1 00:14:36 It’s like that is definitely different. That’s that’s when you and I met and I’d been coming from Bessemer. I share with you there’s a little different expectations here in the US. Yeah. Speaker 2 00:14:43 Some of us like UK early stage investor. That’s like asking for a five year cash flow forecast balance sheet, fully integrated balance sheet. And you’re like, what do you want? Like, you know what I mean? It’s just such a disconnect between, you know, all that it is. And then, I presented exactly the same deck to a, a usb-C who’s based in New York. And, he basically described what we’re building as a lifestyle hobby business. And I was like, hey, Morley kind of offended by that because I was like, you know, that’s not what we’re building. But B is like the disconnect between one guy thinks this is a lifestyle hobby business, and another investor thinks that we’re, you know, pie in the sky, crazy big dreamers. Speaker 2 00:15:24 It’s just, interesting. So yeah, definitely some cultural differences on kind of raising capital. the growth expectations, obviously we were raising kind of a larger round kind of more towards 2017, 2018. And again, the market’s changed a lot. You know, we were definitely in a zero interest rate situation growth at all costs. You know kind of don’t you know don’t worry too much about the burn. As long as you’re growing 100% year over year, just keep on that trajectory. right. So you know and you know, that was this was a great while it lasted, but it’s also kind of a conveyor belt that you get get on and can be difficult to, to keep up. So, you know, there are definitely some benefits of, you know, the UK investor is more pragmatic, more willing to be patient support. the US investor, it’s like, you know, you better hit the market. Otherwise we kind of writing you off from our portfolio’s return. So, you know, there’s pros and cons of both both sides of that. Speaker 2 00:16:22 But that was probably the biggest thing for us. Like the cultural differences between, our mixed investor base having having, investors on both sides of the pond. Speaker 1 00:16:32 Yeah, the investing on both sides is definitely a rich topic. And I think you summarized it well. Let’s talk about building a team that can expand the US. I think that with with you and Victoria moving over here, you know, you had a co-founder and a senior operational executive. Do you think that’s the, you know, the right, set of anchors that you need? And let’s talk about some of the key hires that, you know, you made for the for your go to market expansion. Speaker 2 00:17:00 Yeah. So the key, the key hires, I think, well, obviously, you know, to get a foothold in the market, you know, it was all about. Sales velocity and sales traction. So it definitely became a company where, you know, find it out of the UK. Very proud to find the company in the UK. Speaker 2 00:17:17 Co-founders based there, all of the product team based there. So product became, you know very much UK based and stuff. So the the hires we were focused on in the US were all really go to market hires. So, a couple of the key first hires were a couple of experienced, sell, people on the sales side and then a customer, customer success leader, Brendan Johnson, who came in, who had experience in the industry and was able to kind of, navigate and build that kind of customer success and retention function, from the ground up. So I would say, yeah, kind of all all really focused around, around go to market. And then also we, we ended up hiring, VP of marketing in the US as well. So yeah. How did how. Speaker 1 00:18:04 Did you find these folks. You know, it was when you find them when we’re still in the UK or is it after you’re here in the US? And would that make a difference and be able to find these critical hires that had some industry expertise? Yeah, I. Speaker 2 00:18:14 Mean, a big part of our growth story was being out and about events and conferences and stuff, and we really kind of made an impact and kind of, you know, were were, you know, were we’re very kind of visible at conferences. We’re very, you know, hosting a lot of kind of events and kind of, you know, kind of we we built a good reputation within the industry through that. So we, we attracted, a lot of talent kind of inbound because people saw what we were doing. So we got a lot of industry talent that was maybe, you know, kind of excited about how we were kind of coming into this new industry and disrupting it a little bit. So I would say like, yeah, I mean, it’s the most of those hires came through, kind of, kind of networking with people and recommendations and stuff. Speaker 1 00:18:59 Going to events, almost building a brand through your presence at these events. And, and that, that allowed you to build a team of people as experts. Speaker 1 00:19:08 And were you in the US at this time, and would you be able to do the same thing if you were in the UK? Speaker 2 00:19:13 so it started off, it was just coming here regularly. But yeah, I mean, most of those big hires were made once we moved here. And I think it’s just, you know, hiring is difficult when you’ve got a team down the road and you’ve got a thing. It’s even more difficult when you’re hiring people, you know, in a, in a different country. And and again, that was a big impact shock for us. I mean, the, you know, compensation expectations are vastly different here. That created some friction with like the team. And we’re spending this much on a project manager here versus here or, you know, this is how much. And you know, again, trying to as a UK company that was kind of modestly compensating its executives, trying to move to the US and hiring mid-level people that, you know, salary expectations were more than the, the, the executive team. Speaker 2 00:19:59 It was. Yeah, it was it was an interesting transition to, to kind of, to kind of deal with. So, yeah. So there’s definitely a kind of a lot of learnings around kind of how do you build that team and kind of, you know, how do you how do you think about, bringing, bringing the right people in? And we definitely had some mis hires, you know, for sure. In terms of like, people that didn’t work out, you know, for one reason or another, either, you know, we were we were very scrappy. I think companies take on the identity of their founders, particularly the CEO. So again, particularly in that 0 to 5 stage, you know, again, as you grow, you have to bring in, you know, different personality types, different levels of experience. But, a lot of the times, I think, I think early stage companies get attracted by logos on people’s resumes. Oh, like this guy was at Google. Speaker 2 00:20:51 It’s like, yeah, okay, great, he said. But they were used to having this, this, this, this and this around them. And that’s how they were successful. It’s not that they’re not good at what they do, but you take that away from them. They don’t know how to be a success as successful without the resources in the same ways. You know, smaller companies, right, aren’t quite clear on how to 0 to 5. Speaker 1 00:21:11 You have a different resource set for sure. And you have to be scrappy. And you’re right, you you definitely, you know, model that behavior. And I think built that culture in a great way. well, before we move on to another topic. Moving to the US. You moved first. You hired people within the industry. You made a presence at the trade shows. I think that helped. Speaker 3 00:21:36 To talk, talk, talk to me about. Speaker 1 00:21:39 some of the other challenges of coming, coming to the US. I know when we first started talking, the business had an operation in Australia. Speaker 1 00:21:49 You also were looking at expansion in EMEA. You were obviously growing in UK, and then you were now really pushing on in the US. Now, in retrospect, was that a sustainable strategy or did you kind of have to experiment to kind of focus? And I know we, we narrowed down to the US over time. But you know, looking back at that geographical expansion strategy, what are your lessons? Speaker 2 00:22:10 Yeah, I think the lesson was we tried to. being opportunistic works, you know, can work, but it also has downsides. So again, kind of, you know, like we had, someone from the industry that wanted to, you know, invest, you know, a decent amount and wanted to set up a presence for us in APAC. And we’re like, okay, well, it’s kind of little downside risk. You know, we’re getting a chunk of investment and, you know, you know, kind of adding to our expansion. But you know, the the the kind of lift or the additional kind of, kind of challenges that that brought weren’t kind of I guess a lemon wasn’t worth the squeeze in terms of that. Speaker 2 00:22:51 So I do think kind of we got a little bit distracted with trying to be too broad. I think it took a bit of time to kind of figure out, how to do that and how to do that, kind of do that effectively. but I also think kind of moving to the US also, you know, there are, you know, there was definitely unexpected impacts on the founding team and founding culture. You know, we’d gone from the three of us being like in a room together every single day, traveling together all the time to, you know, now one of us is, you know, 3000 miles away on a different, different time zone. And, you know, as we tried to transition the business and went through funding, obviously kind of brought in, brought in yourself, and I think one of the blind spots I had as a leader was essentially the impact that that created on the founding team, you know, because, you and I were very focused on, you know, the fundraise and some strategic thinking and, you know, and, you know, we kind of try to iterate quickly. Speaker 2 00:23:51 And it was it was it was more difficult to, I wasn’t intentional enough about bringing, my co-founders on that, on that journey with us. So they, you know, we, you know, definitely kind of ended up with a bit of like a, a them and us for a little period that we needed to kind of kind of work through and figure out kind of a better way to kind of communicate. So that was definitely a blind spot for me in terms of kind of, you know, it’s, you know, you know, the impact of different, different time zones and, and bringing other people in can, can have and just, you know, if you if you’re not talking regularly and I think being open and honest with each other, like that’s where kind of things start to, to bubble up that aren’t being said. And you know, there’s then assumptions, you know, on both sides that are kind of, kind of wrong. Speaker 1 00:24:43 Yeah. That’s definitely a hard thing when you, you separate the founding team and then the priorities shift, right? You know, with multiple markets, UK, EMEA and eventually I saw a shift to really focusing on the US, where most of the big customers were and most of the revenue was, but that that does have an impact on the team. Speaker 1 00:25:02 Let’s talk about scale. So so you know, there’s a number of journeys. There’s the 0 to 1. There’s the kind of the 1 to 3. And then there’s kind of, you know, the 3 to 10. you went through all three of those stages, but in that, that 3 to 10 and starting to scale a little bit after we raised the series A, let’s talk about some of the challenges you had in, in scaling the business and, you know, hiring teams for the next level. Speaker 2 00:25:27 Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think that’s definitely, Where I reflect on kind of most in terms of like, what am I good at? What, what what did I find more challenging? And, you know, 0 to 5, the scrappy stage, you know, getting anything off off the ground. I feel like, you know, you know, you know, in the top decile for doing that type of thing. when it starts to get a larger company and you’ve got to bring in, more senior roles and kind of figure out how do you kind of, build out that executive layer, to the team. Speaker 2 00:26:02 That’s where it was definitely, kind of more challenging and trying to figure out kind of who we needed and what did that look like, and what was the experience there? I mean, I think kind of, you know, key, a key thing for, a fitness perspective is obviously you’ve got to be able to be a great storyteller. you’ve got to be able to kind of inspire people to join the join the journey, inspire customers to take a chance on this new vendor. And you know, so, again, whether you’re raising money, getting new customers or recruiting key employees, all of that comes down to kind of storytelling. and being able to kind of, Gets people to do something a little bit crazy and kind of jump on this, this bus with you. We don’t really know where it’s going, but it’s probably going to be cool when we get there. So, you know, kind of get out. Yeah. Speaker 1 00:26:54 That requires a little bit of a magic. Right. That’s that’s the the founder storytelling, which is the, the key key ingredient. Speaker 1 00:27:01 Yeah for. Speaker 2 00:27:01 Sure. And I think that’s got to be matched with, you know, if you have a founder that’s like an amazing storyteller, but there’s no tech substance or product substance behind them. You know that’s not going to work. Likewise, if you have an amazing product tech founder, but they can’t tell stories or bring anyone in on the journey with them, that’s not going to work as well. So I think I think that’s the key thing that, you know, investors want to see when they’re looking at companies is like, what are the dynamics between the founders, you know, what are the you know what what is the kind of overlap skill set. Are there any gaps? kind of kind of between that. So, yeah, I mean, I think, in terms of scaling up, I think, yeah, as we started to kind of scale up, you know, I think a couple of things were kind of interesting. One was, we, we pushed into we had a core kind of audience for our product, which was insights of market research, but we’d had the partnership that brought us to the US was based on like a customer experience use case embedded into that there. Speaker 2 00:28:01 So we saw that as a really interesting idea and that kind of had more potential scale and kind of, opportunity. So we spun up our team that was focused on customer experience. We also because we’d seen one partnership, but also spun up a partnership team. And we’ll kind of figure out, okay, there’s a lot of other tools in this space that would benefit from having the video layer. How could we do that? So both of those were, I guess, interesting endeavors and like strategically made a lot of sense. And it’s always easy to kind of Monday morning quarterback this and be like, oh yeah, we should never have done that or done this and stuff. But I think from 0 to 10 you should be able to get you should be able to get to 10 million an hour with one core product category and one core product, and then expand. Speaker 1 00:28:50 And you’re seeing that because you think the focus is critical. Yeah, I. Speaker 2 00:28:54 Think the focus is critical. I think I think it it creates a lot of stress on the product team in terms of trying to do, you know, everything, you know, or try to be all things to all people. Speaker 2 00:29:06 And then a lot of the stuff with the partnerships was a lot of investment upfront for the promise of future revenue that may or may not come. So then you’re and that’s. Speaker 1 00:29:15 Hard when you’re capital constrained and resource constrained. Yeah. Speaker 2 00:29:19 100 100%. So you know, it feels like I mean we we I call them Bonnie partnerships. You know, I love you we love you kind of thing. Great press release but like where’s the where’s the dollars, where’s the revenue. And you know, we definitely had some that kind of, worked. But you know, I remember every year and you remember this. Well, we had a line in our forecast that was partnership revenue. And, you know, it was always, you know, you know, you know, five x what it ended up being because we were like, but there’s so much potential if we just do this and here’s this big pipeline. And the reality is if you haven’t, someone once described it as like, if you think about the McDonald’s franchise, like McDonald’s didn’t start franchising until they perfected the model and the go to market and figured it really has. Speaker 1 00:30:02 To perfect your own model before you can expand. Speaker 2 00:30:04 What you can’t do is start all these partnerships and be like trying to get them to kind of figure out the messaging, the go to market, when you’re still like. In iterating on that, you need to give them a playbook that is proven and, you know, works because otherwise you’re like, well, is it our current messaging and we’re not doing it right? Or is it how they’re delivering it and stuff? So a lot of lessons there. And I mean we went through four VP of partnerships, none of them bad, you know, bad hires. You know all experience partner people. But like, you know, we probably should have realized earlier that, hey, maybe it’s not the person. Maybe it’s the maybe it’s the stage or. Speaker 1 00:30:38 Yeah, or capabilities in general. Yeah. Well, Dave, despite all those challenges, you led the business through several stages all the way to 10 million. you had you have an incredibly, tenacious, leadership style. Speaker 1 00:30:53 You you talked about, you know, the challenges that kept coming up and, and the setbacks, and you had a particular way of describing them. I want to give you a chance to to talk about that briefly. And, you know, when you get hit like that, how do you come back and and keep your motivation high and keep being that, that motivational storyteller? Speaker 2 00:31:09 Yeah. For sure. I mean, yeah, I think, kind of coined the phrase like, yeah, when you’re, when you’re a startup founder, it’s basically about being kicked in the balls every day and just kind of keeping keep and going and stuff. And it’s just, you know, it’s I think from, from my perspective, it’s there’s always a lot of like, you know, ups and downs on any startup journey, you your best day and worst day are usually 24 hours apart in this side of things. And, yeah, you kind of have to, you know, not get too high on the highs, not get too low on the lows. Speaker 2 00:31:39 And, you know, it’s just it really is kind of, All right. That resiliency I think kind of you know, grit is a is a kind of undervalued kind of skill set. And the ability you’re going. Speaker 1 00:31:53 To get those highs and lows. And yeah, and it’s not easy. It’s it’s it’s really hard. Right. Speaker 2 00:31:58 Yeah. Kind of keep pushing on for and kind of keep figuring out, you know, that said the inverse of that, it did get to a stage where I decided, like, now is the time to step away. Like I’m not the right person to lead this from 10 to 25 and stuff. So I think it’s, you know, I think the key to good founders is, is knowing what you’re good at, knowing where you need help and bring it in the right people around you, and then also kind of being open to say, okay, this needs grit. I’m going to just push through this because I’m the best person to do this. Or actually, this needs more than grit. Speaker 2 00:32:30 This needs a different set of skills or different, kind of perspective on it and, and things like that. So that’s something kind of earlier in my career, I was I was less self-aware. And I think as I’ve kind of, you know, grown and, you know, had had the mentorship of yourself and others have become more, kind of introspective around, okay, what am I good at? What am I not good at? What are the what are what are the things that kind of gives me energy? What are the things that kind of drains energy and definitely is as the company started to scale, you know, as you get more people and more layers, you know, you kind of, you know, you you almost stopped doing work at some point as the CEO and you’re essentially just in meetings about meetings and, you know, there’s, you know, if someone’s talking to you, it means there’s a problem. So you’re just spending a lot of time firefighting stuff. And like, you know, I’m a builder and I like to be scrappy and iterate and like hands on and hands in. Speaker 2 00:33:22 And, you know, as a leader, kind of as you get a bigger team, you need to kind of get let them kind of be the people kind of doing the work. And, you know, that was a interesting transition for me. And, you know, I just kind of got to a point in my career where I was like, you know what? Like I am excellent at 0 to 5, 0 to 10. I’m going to focus here and can create incredible value for myself and investors in that, in that stage and, and get companies into a great space. And, you know, I’m sure at some point in my career, I’ll end up kind of hopefully finding the right opportunity where I can go, you know, all the way from 0 to 100 million. but I think kind of, you know, the stars will need to align for that to be the right thing. Or, you know, maybe I just need to, you know, you know, continue to work on those skills. Speaker 1 00:34:11 Well, that’s a great segue. Tell us about what you’re doing now. Speaker 2 00:34:15 Yeah. For sure. So, yeah, I’m launching a new business right now called Zeta. zeta.com. really exciting new, marketplace, business. So it’s a group buying platform. we’re focused on the outdoor industry right now. So bikes moving into kind of other outdoor enthusiast categories. And really the the value proposition on the buyer side is, you know, you’re going to spend, you know, 5 or $6000 on a bike. It’s difficult to negotiate a great price. You haven’t got five mates that all want to buy the same products. And we’re essentially, group aggregating buy side demand and matching it with sell side supply. So essentially finding 5 or 6 consumers that all want the same product in the same window. So think about an eBay auction where there’s one product, one person wins and they pay the highest price. The person who bids the most with the idea. The more people that join, the lower the price gets and everyone gets the product. Speaker 2 00:35:09 So we’re really excited. Speaker 1 00:35:11 As a as a as an outdoor enthusiast, I want to get a new bike, but I want to get a deal. And so this is kind of like Groupon for that category. Is that. Speaker 2 00:35:18 Yeah, absolutely. Kind of Groupon meets Overstock, for starting with bikes and then expanding into other, other categories. we’re starting as a marketplace, but our vision is really to not just be a destination marketplace, but also be, a technology layer that sits across kind of other sites. You can apply. Speaker 1 00:35:38 It to a lot of categories group. Speaker 2 00:35:39 By, power and group by across the e-commerce thing. So we’re thinking about kind of, you know, different ways to do that through browser extensions, Shopify apps, things like that. So I’ve got a co-founder based in Amsterdam. So doing the, long distance co-founder thing yet again. Speaker 1 00:35:55 You have experience doing that for sure. Yeah. Speaker 2 00:35:58 but, yeah. So that’s been, that’s been a great, thing. And, you know, obviously we, we share an office a lot of the time. Speaker 2 00:36:05 So you see, and kind of, I guess, it’s fun to be back in, that zone of excellence, zone of genius, and kind of scrapping around. Speaker 1 00:36:13 Well, I think you’re you’re you’re in your sweet spot. You’re a tenacious entrepreneur, and I can’t wait to see what you do with Zeta. Where can people find more information about Zeta and where can people find you? Yeah. Speaker 2 00:36:23 So, you can connect with me on LinkedIn. I always love to talk to founders, share their story, and and help wherever I can. So just Dave Carruthers, on, LinkedIn or at Dave Carruthers on, Twitter and insiders [email protected]. And so, yeah, check it out. sign up and, yeah, we’d love to help you get a great deal on, on your next. Bike right now. Speaker 1 00:36:45 Awesome. I look forward to to shopping with you. Hey Dave, thanks so much for your time today. This has been fantastic and best of luck with all the all the future endeavors with Zeta and your other other activities. Speaker 2 00:36:56 Thanks Julian. Really enjoyed the chat. Speaker 1 00:36:58 All right.