Dave Schappell talks about raising seed and VC funding as a repeat entrepreneur
Kruze Consulting's Founders and Friends Podcast for Startups
0:00
0:00

Full episode transcript -

0:2

Welcome to fenders or friends podcast with Scott or on a cruise consulting and before an excellent podcast, Quick shout out to our sponsor. Brexit Rex is a credit card for startups, the 1st 1 ever. It's fantastic. They don't require personal guarantee by the founder. That is a huge huge deal. Also has great integration with cookbooks, which makes life easy for your accountant. And finally, they have really good rewards. They do start up centric rewards. So like bonuses on ride sharing and travel and eating out and things like that, all things that appeal to the whole team not to start up. So check out Brexit. If you go through their sign up and typing cruise, you get a discount.

Hopefully, you enjoyed Rex and thanks so much guys for Sponsor the podcast. Thanks. Welcome to family friends Podcast with Scott Morning Crews consulting in my very special guest, Dave Chappelle from my Perfect Colored

0:55

a welcome Hey, how you doing, Scott?

0:57

We've been friends for a great friends, but 10 years

1:1

long times we met. Yeah. Met via Gregg Spiridellis. A jib jab. Yes. I guess he had raised adventure debt from you. Your old year old fund and you help me with an injury that almost turned into an acquisition. But it was yes, we've known each other a long time.

1:17

Well, Greg is newly acquired by Netflix that he's doing pretty well. Yeah, great. If he's listening on, then the opposition that didn't work actually ended up working out for you the other way, right? Because you got acquired. By what? Yeah,

1:31

you introduced us to Angie's list. And then that fell through and then living Social. That fell through. And it ended up as the smallest of the three acquisitions on paper, which was the Amazon, one of the end turned into by far the best because Angie's list and living social both essentially flamed out. I don't really know him, and Amazon is up 10 x from when they from the acquisition. So we got very lucky

1:55

that zits. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. You're good and lucky. I just go with Lucky have one of the luckiest humans alive s So now your new venture is called my perfect color, which is awesome. And I've known about it for a couple years because you just meteo the founder of the company. But maybe just retrace your career a little bit and then talk about how you involved

2:17

my perfect color. Yeah. So I was a long time when I was an accountant out of undergrad. I, uh, hated it. And so when the internet started coming up when I was in high school, I ran a bulletin board on my computer in my bedroom. And so when you know a well and things started to come up, I said, This is a lot like what I used to love doing. And so I went basically said, I hate accounting. I like what's going on with the Internet. And I applied the warden to get my MBA, and I only apply to one school, so that hadn't worked out. I probably would have jumped off a

2:48

bridge if I had to keep going that confidence or just not understanding the way the process works. Yes, I

2:56

have confidence. I lived in Philadelphia in school, but yeah, if it hadn't worked out, it would have been a rough year, probably applying to a whole bunch of other schools. So I went to Wharton and knew I wanted to get in tow tech. That's where I met Gregg Spiridellis and Jib Jab. And that's where I met Jason, who's the founder of my perfect color. I was there, and short story is I ended up getting a summer internship at Amazon in the summer of 98 then I I didn't go back, so I stayed. I got really lucky with timing of a lot thing is gonna come up a few times. I got lucky with timing and work that Amazon from 98 04 launched a lot of work done a lot of different launches,

3:33

including a tough time to be working at the company fund, but also tough, like the Cummings going through tons of growth waves. Yeah, it was capital market pain and probably experience of a lifetime.

3:43

It was awesome. You know, I get to work with Jeff all the time and all lot of the key people that were there, Jeff Blackburn and you know, Andy Jassy runs the Andy Jassy who runs eight of us and found it was my hiring manager during the summer 98. So I

3:57

remember we talked, like, two years ago at a party, and you're like you. Or maybe it was like three or four years ago. And you're like, you're not gonna believe how big a W s gets because Andy and I'm gonna miss Prince named Jazz Jazz me, Josh, Jesse. But you're like, he doesn't lose. That guy doesn't live. I was like, Yeah, I don't

4:15

know. I feel that way about a lot of my feel, like, you know, lots of great companies. But Amazon is stacked just like, you know, with talent at everywhere at senior levels. And they all sort of channel Jeffs way of thinking, I think. And, uh, and Jeff's just getting started like he's never gonna stop. He's like the Terminator. So, um, in a good way,

it's a good Terminator. But like he just he looks at the opportunity and learning and exploration, and I think everybody focus is way too much on the money from his mindset. He just sees it as I'm interested in that. Let's go do that like, yeah, let's do it. So it's a pretty neat place toe work. It's stressful and challenging, but it's ah, it's a neat place to work just because you work for somebody who's willing to invest big and ideas versus I think a lot of CEOs air just working for their own exit, you know, 10 years down the line. So So, yes. So I worked at Amazon from 98 04 I left and did some things and started the company called Teach Street.

We raised invents adventure for, You know, basically, we failed. We got lucky at the end with an acquisition that brought me back to Amazon and did basically worked with startups. NBC's in the eight of us start up business development team for a few years, and eso along the way did a bunch angel investing like I know you guys, d'oh! And got lucky with few those and stop working a couple years ago and then recently invested in my perfect color, which is what we're talking about a little bit today and and again, My perfect color was founded by a friend of mine from Wharton and who worked at Amazon

5:51

with me, and it's you've had a long relationship with them because his name is Jason. I don't know his last name, but you had talked to him a couple of years ago because he was It was kind of a Internet company. Tied Thio retail help like they were there, kind of experts in paint, right? And they saw the opportunity to do this on the Internet, too. And now it's like It's my bird colors like, Yeah,

6:14

so we still owe Breslow like this heart, this store that was founded by Jason and his brother Dana by their grandfather, 1924. And you know that business is big. It's doing more than $2 million in revenue. It's profitable and all that stuff. But along the way, Jason, you know, saw the the idea with vision of selling paint online, and it's hard to believe, but nobody does it still. So, like you could buy cans of cry alone or Rustoleum or whatever. But it's like the old Internet days with channel conflict, and you know Sherman Williams bear Ben Maur, not allowing these places to sell online like they and buying paint in the stores okay for most residential experiences, you know, it's sort of like you just cover

6:59

your walls with something, you know, a few samples. Check it out. Jason's

7:4

first idea was, let's sell pain online and probably with my perfect color, and probably 10 years of that muddling along was doing fine. And But it is in the last 18 months that he realized that the big opportunity is the B to be. So we sort of pivoted the company into doing a lot of the really hard to match bright colors. Pantone's Ariel's and so my perfect color now is focused exclusively on that. We do exact match paint solutions. You know, just two days ago who loophole they needed. Who Lou Green in a spray can. Not only could you not get Hu Lu Green made it a hardware store, but a hardware store can't even put it into spray cans because you have to be industrial area. So that's almost like an example of the niche that we're in. We can create all the hard to match bright colors like Tiffany is a customer. Yeti coolers ideo these air companies that all they care about is the match that, like the color, has to be perfect and they need

8:3

because it's their brand, writes their brand identity like the Tiffany box. That's right, who green and so they're smart about that? Jason

8:10

asked the girl from who is like, What would you have done if you if you didn't find us? She's like I, she joked. She's like I would have cried, but she's like we would have gone to the hardware store or Home Depot and we would have got whatever's closest. And that's a terrible experience like that color. Yeah, it would just be a green. And so you know, Jason describes it as we think we're building a new category like everybody says, We don't have competitors. We truly don't have competitors because there is and I don't want to Daryl y Combinator company.

8:39

But there

8:40

is no way why Combinator company's gonna come out that says, Hey, let's get in the business of making paint you know, like it's hard but you have to be in an industrial area, you know, like Jason's done this stuff for 30 40 years and you know, there's still there's lots of things that make it attractive, but it's also what makes it difficult, like we're creating a new category and we have to go find the people of thes marketing companies and manufacturers and three D printing. And once we find them, though it's It's exciting like a repeat order rage, expansion rates. All that stuff is really exciting.

9:12

That's amazing. No, I'm not asking to bury your secret I p or techniques, but like how? What goes into creating the right kind of match? Because I conception. I understand that my dad did. A lot of any blunder retails for over 25 years, so I'd be in there painting different than yet different colors, right? The thing is, there's

9:32

a technology that anybody could buy, so you buy. It's an expensive piece of equipment called the specter of a Tom Attar, so you can then scan so we get parts in all the time. So looks like it's not just we have a massive database of colors like that you can order immediately, but by companies. They send us all of their bike forks so that we can scan them. But though, but then you have to do you have to actually mix the paint and you have to do you know X number of shades lower and darker, and you we require eye tests for all of our employees because and you have to let it dry. You have to learn how to match the sheens, the finishes, the qualities. And then once you get it dialed in, then you can recreate that with a pretty high precision level and so it can be done. But then you think about the other barriers like, Well,

PPG is not gonna take the time to do that for somebody for 25 cans of spray paint. So we sort of do things that the hardware stores can't do because they don't have the equipment or because, you know, we have 10 times the number of pigments and this is the boring stuff. But like so it's it's things that they can't make because of their two bright colors. Or we can put it in formats, a lot of spray paint, touch up balls and then for the really big companies that could do it. They don't want to deal with orders less than 10,000 cans. So yes, we could do is little was one can up to thousands and thousands is. We don't have the automated equipment, so that's a clunky order. But we do them all the time, you know, because it's a high profit Martin High gross margin business, but So that's the knee. She finishes really hard to match colors things that people can do. But also we're willing to do sizes that the people that could do that won't touch because it's too small to do less than 10,000

11:10

cans. I love it. You kind of I we really geek out on, like process cruise control because we have kind of the same niche, like the Light's not Gonna do what we did right, but also like the local bookkeeper who's a fluency of the hardware store. Can't do

11:25

what we do either. But they can't because they don't really know financings. And they don't Yeah, what Esther's were looking for. Yes, so that's the It's very It's a nice place to compete because you know that the pain point for your customers is I just want somebody that really has their shit together and knows what I want my financials so look like and what my investors wanted to look like, what my 409 a is gonna be done and have that all integrated and great customer service, and we have the same thing. We know exactly what our customers pain point is. It's just like, how do we find him?

11:55

You know, like so it's totally and we don't get the word

11:57

of mouth. Least you get order mouth because you get a happy startup belt tight. 10 other start ups, like, you know, the guy in the manufacturing line at husband or whatever isn't gonna go tell his other 10 colleagues and other companies. So we sort of have to call on everyone.

12:9

Oh, I didn't think about that. They might be kind of competitive. Did you have you guys done like content marketing or like, could re actually, we've kind of found this is so, so simple, but it works. We just answer our clients questions in a public form like on our block are finesses, pose or whatever. Yeah, and actually, that is like a magnet for people because they kind of they do the classic fight. If they can answer this question, they must know what they're doing right now. And

12:35

I love that idea. The reason with the reason we're terrible at content marketing, it's because I'm in charge of Theo.

12:43

You know, the guy like me in charge of content marketing here, you need the person to Jason, right? Vanessa, for us really knows there's no,

12:51

but it's a really good idea, like, and I'm not gonna geek out on this like we literally just put a block up the other day. It's like wrestling with Well, do we put it on block, Got my perfect color or my perfect color, that block and we know the right answer. But there are, you know, like technical issues. And

13:5

so in any case, we, uh, yeah, we get.

13:8

That's a really good idea, though, because we're constantly like, What should we write about? But we also get questions every day that we could just publicly say We got these three questions last week. These are the answers. And and Google would like that type of content.

13:19

It totally works. Yeah. Do you guys have the other just getting on process here, you guys, because one of the biggest challenges we have is training new people to get them kind of indoctrinated in our flows and like you say, good customer service, knowing how to do things Do you have, like, training programs or documented all this stuff? I would

13:38

say yes, but I So I live in New Hampshire now. So we moved back from Seattle, Los Angeles, London and s. We live in tax free New Hampshire. It's awesome. But Jason and the company is in New Jersey, so they're right outside of New York City. And what it's gonna say is Jason, he trains all of those people. I've seen the documents and the forms and the processes, but I'd say I'm sort of outside of that because I'm doing s CEO site development. Marketing. Yeah, exactly. Well,

some of it. And so I'm just saying, like, I the answer is yes. But, you know, it's still relatively small company. There's, like, 10 people in our We have a 5000 square foot warehouse where we make mix dual customer service and that sort of stuff. So But I think Jason would say he'd like to improve it as we as we grow the company.

14:23

It's like that you we still wanna prove ours. And we're 50 50 people now, right? That's like you just you stairs. You've been through it? Yes. We'll start up stairs. Step it. Yeah, And then every year you look at you like this is a little outdated. I need to fix this, you know? Yeah. Uh, we're drowning

14:38

when Google docks. Let's put it that way.

14:40

Yeah, that's a problem. Created good

14:42

luck to track other Google,

14:43

Doc. So I was stuck in my mind is gonna blow up at some point When you talked about, you know, we talked about the history of the company a little bit, but, like, where was kind of your entry point in how you know, in hindsight now, you've been doing this for a while. What? Jason, How did have it? What do you think? Your value? Because I think the reason I ask that question is Jason seems like a subject matter expert. Just kind of generally speaking, started Well,

oftentimes you look for, like, a really strong subject matter expert, and then someone who's either on experience start a person or a good operator. You know how that tell your story of how they

15:17

interacted? Well, when I was so I wasn't working, I was doing, you know, advisory, working all that stuff that we all try to do. And so I wrote down, you know, like a This is the advice I always give to people when they're gonna make a change like write down what you want and be honest, Be brutally honest like how hard do you want to work? What do you want to do? Like you know, because I get people calling me all the time saying, Well, I don't know if I want to go to Amazon, start another company, become a B C. And I'm like, you haven't really thought about this very much because those were all, you

15:45

know, clear differences. Yes, So

15:47

I reached down and I said I wanted, you know, I had worked on start ups and investment start ups, and a lot of times they're sort of like fake products. You know, you will launch this thing, we'll see if we could get customers. Then we'll see if we can figure out how to make. And I just said, I don't want to work on a real thing with riel margins, you know, with profitability like known customers. No customer problems. Not like going after the Instagram crowd. So and I wanted to work with friends, and I brought all this stuff down, and I said I wanted to get my hands really dirty,

like in own things and So I have been talking with Jason for years. But Jason, you reached out again and said, Hey, you know, we need to raise the money, need to pay off some bad, get like above, above a lot. And so that's it. Sort of checked most of the boxes or all the boxes, Really? And so yes, So I got involved. We raised a small round last October. It was probably about a year since I started actively talking with Jason and raised a small round.

And since then, we've accelerated sales, you know, the site is you know, there are areas of the site that air still hideous. But the important pages on this site on, I mean idiots from the perspective of people who live online all the time. Yeah, pages that matter where we get all of our organic traffic and where customers actually spend their time are beautiful, like they've been really modernized. So it's really sort of proud of what we've done in the last 12 12 months. But so what? I brought to the answer your question. I think Jason is the subject matter expert. If Jason gets hit by a bus, we are we're in trouble.

So But like, I brought the perspective of we got what the what are the important pages? One of the important experiences. How do we fix s CEO and get that moving in the right direction And, uh, the investor mindset, you know, like Jason had? Never really? It sounds like everybody else starts with getting great at the investor mindset and then figures out all the other stuff. And so bringing that to Jason and introducing himto what professional investors want to see. And you know what the metrics need to look like and all that sort of stuff. I think I brought that plus, just helping him a site development, Like having somebody who's filing bugs and reviewing bugs. And, you know, up until that point, it was largely him doing everything

17:56

okay? Yeah, Well, let me make a point like that. The people who are subject matter experts, it takes time and energy to end just to be the subject matter experts. So, like, you sometimes have to pick your battles. You're either going to be the person who just knows the category really well. How to do everything, or you're going to be a person who is good at talking to investors because they're kind of different skill sets and they both take practice. Yeah, now in raising money is a skill in cleaning up cap structures. A skill and running your financials is a skill. And that's not always. That's not always where the person who really knows their stuff yet in the category can spend their time.

18:32

Yeah, I think, Jason. I mean, I know, he would say, because he's like the mistake he made. Probably the biggest mistake he made was bootstrapping for too long. Like Jason, he's really good in front of investors. His enthusiasm sort of oozes out. And like people see, this isn't a short term thing. But, you know, he struggled along like there are investors within 25 miles of his house. He's right outside New York City and so not nurturing that network of professionals versus trying to figure it out and sort of the local community really probably subjected him to a lot of pain that that didn't need to go

19:7

through. You know, sometimes I can relate to that, Dave, because you're trapped too, and I'm like man would be nice to have $5 million in the bank to invest in all these things you want to dio. Yeah,

19:17

that's what's crazy about this. Like I said, we're doing what we talked about it offline. We really strong revenue, strong margins, Crazy customer base, like you can see our customers. Like you said earlier. Like Yeti Cooler is Tiffany Panera, the U. S Postal Service. Like it's crazy all these when they come in every day. But it is primarily way just haven't awareness in a sales problem. And we you know. So right now we're saying OK, we're the sites. Good,

like these things air good. Let's just go all in literally on building out the SNB sales final. And so it's like anything with a start up, you move from problem the problem, the problem. And we have 100% agreement that our you know, our laser focus right now is on, you know, both fundraising, but also fundraising via driving the sales finals and getting better metrics

20:4

around that I'd see, though wearing this is a good problem, I have in the sense that you could you guys have a product in a process that works right you have you already demonstrated there's demand there. Yeah, so it's repeatable. And that's what's so exciting about pain. You know, it's like every Tiffany store across the country needs the buy. Yeah, you guys probably once a year something like that. You know,

20:25

way of this customer that, you know, sort of showed up in June. Now Jason had been talking to them for a year, but since June they've placed six orders for about $13,000 a paint. So it's just boo boo boom. And now they want us to become their only am paint supplier. It's

20:39

crazy like Oh

20:40

my God, like 1/4 $1,000,000 a paint a year. And that's a conservative estimate. And so we have these repeat customers all over. The place is, to your point, like Pella windows and doors called us, and people actually pay us to do these matches like they send us their parts and then they say,

20:55

Oh, that's awesome. That's like, Wow!

20:57

So paella paella paid us to match their 24 colors, and it could have been 16 who knows? But then Jason and I were like, Oh, wait, say, let's just call every paella distributor in the country. And so that was where the light bulb went off. It wasn't like the sails. Close rate was one in 100. It's like one in three, and it's about catching somebody in the right mood on the right day. And then that those orders just, you know, the nor Cal. You know, the Southern Texas,

the whatever. The order's just come in every couple weeks like they need 16 Kansas breaking. So it's It's just like we see the opportunity all over the businesses. But it's very similar to any purely tech startup, and we have. We have an engineering team were constantly working on the Web site, but it's very similar to anti tech startup. Where you sort of go this quarter are problems. This next quarter are problems that you know. So you just It's a lot of wack, a mole moving from problem the problem. But But like so there's a lot of fundamentals of the business that are really good relative to most start ups, which can't they don't know what their revenue or their customer. What they don't know what their customers are willing to pay for. That's not our problem. Our problem is just finding customers.

22:5

We also I think, maybe talk a little about this, like the importance of, like an attractive gross margin and just making sure the business fundamentals were there. Like, Did you do that analysis? Or is that something that, as you rework some stuff, you now now got to that point where it's a really nice gross margin?

22:20

Yeah, we have a great we have a north of 60% gross margin business. And even if competitors here, they do, too, because we know where we're priced. And but we never, ever hear issues about price. So my hunch is that we're underpriced, that most people there I mean, like, it's it's hilarious. We read these e mails from customers all the time, saying, You know, like the paint match was indistinguishable your you know, Or like that woman from Lulu. She's like I would have cried like and the matches are crazy. Good. Like if we do a bunch on Instagram where you can see the matches and you're like it's indistinguishable.

22:57

But Jason Oh, that's actually a smart marketing achievement for you. I never thought

23:0

about it is, but I'm not sure how smart any of that social media stuff

23:4

ISS way do have? A.

23:6

It's good for our brand. It shows a good what we did. But I'm not really sure how many people are actually transacting other than e commerce or social media experts, that they might be the only ones making

23:16

money on something. Okay, but back to

23:20

the margin thing, it's Jason. Just always price. It just always built in. He knows what the costs are on everything, and he just always built the models at a margin that we need to sustain the business. And that's awesome, because it's one of the first things we see like feces don't care if you're losing money or or they like they prefer if you didn't, but what they want to know is, Are you? What are your gross margins? How would have gross margins can actually increased over the last few years? But that's been as we've pivoted away from consumer and towards B to B. But like I said, it's nice because the only time we'll get a margin request for is when it's a really big order. But we can usually conserve the margin because we can go to our suppliers on those really big orders and get the same so it just sort of ripples through. But the free cash flow on those big orders, It doesn't matter that you give

24:9

up a little bit of margin. Yeah, it's worth it. Yeah. Is that something where when you guys talk to be sees their their validating that Because Because I think the reason why I'm so curious about this is the flip side, as you have companies get started that have no idea what the margin structure is gonna be. And they're kind of trying to discover it while they're building their service or product and they gonna get lost these perpetual money losing company. I

24:31

mean, we literally just did our investor deck in the last, like, six weeks. So it's, you know, it's me doing that for the 412 times, and that was the easiest slide. I'm like, Oh, thank God we have a margin.

24:40

You know, we have a

24:41

margin slide and we have a graph that shows it's going from 50 to 63% you know, like and so I think the seas like that and they really like our repeat order rates. So we were just talking about that this morning. I'm like, Jason, we really should print because we always use like, the 10 common examples. Obviously, we'll always mentioned Tiffani because that's an example of one where the color is really important. Yeah, you know, I don't know how many customers we have that order 6 to 20 times a year, like we have a lot. And so I said to Jason, like, we should actually pull that data like, because that is the second.

Like VC, investors love the once you get a customer repeatable like that, what's the LTV like? We don't know. You know what's What's Yurcak? I don't know. Like, what costs do you want to include? Do you want to include the content costs? You want to include just Google like, because a lot of what we've done is our advantages. We have nearly 250,000 colors on the site, so we get massive amounts of long tail organic traffic because most paint companies think about color as the 1000 colors that Sherman Williams has waken create all of those colors. So we have all their color books, and so it's it's just a different way of thinking about it. So we're trying to cast a wide net.

25:56

But that's what the people who are searching on the Internet looking for is that one match that one color, you know. So we do really

26:4

well with again people looking for those Pantone's and paint or the Ariel's. They have these weird, long color codes that a normal human would never search

26:12

for, you know. But

26:13

we also have Sherwin Williams agreeable gray like, and there's again hundreds of thousands of these things. So I mean, it's just like the Ted Conference ordered the other day, which was just the Pantone color. But we immediately created Ted Red. So if you go to my perfect color now, you search Ted read or you go on the Internet to say, Ted, red paint, we're gonna show up and that's it means, and we just continue to just add. So the way we think about it is there's a color for everything, and so a competitive advantages like let's get them all in our database and, you know, and satisfied customers and then rinse lather.

26:44

Repeat. It sounds like such a perfect match for Internet business because of that long tail. That's right. Now the specificity. I especially like your Amazon experience. You know, people are searching for that stuff tryouts like, so it makes so much and we're not really. It's like

26:59

there are some companies that have been funded in the consumer space like there's a startup called Claire not to give shoutouts the competitors at c. L a r e dot com There you go. They just have a different approach, like they're more like Warby Parker like that. We have 55 colors and their sights beautiful and everything. But I'm were not convinced that the residential market is that broken. Like it's not that bad to go into a hardware store for a blue. That's good enough if you don't care that much about the precision of the color. Yeah, but for the customers that do care about precision prices, not their issue, like they it's sort of flips the models. We again. Jason spent a long time doing the consumer side way. Believe strongly that the bigger plays, the long tail, massive selection, you know, price insensitive customers that really need customer service and follow through and all that sort of thing.

27:51

Yeah, I was just I was talking about this, like having a complex business is. Actually, it's stink sometimes, but it's actually incredibly defensible. Yeah, because the odds of someone figuring out everything that you figured out everything that we figured out. It's just so what's that like? We love

28:7

our competitive slide. We got feedback from a New York V C about our competitive slide. He's like, I don't believe it. I'm like, Dude, let me send you like we'll send you to the warehouse and you tell me which of the startups you've met in the last five years want to touch any of this

28:20

stuff, you know, And our competitors, the

28:23

local body shop or the ace hardware it like and so we don't know how big it is. Let me say, What is this? A. You know, it's probably not a $1,000,000,000 but like it's a tens of millions of dollars revenue business and like and since nobody sells paint online, still, it kind of reminds me of the early days where they're they're they're all protecting their channels, and then ultimately they're all gonna want to have an online e commerce business, and we think we have a chance to build that. And then, by the way, eight years from now we will, you know, we can be the leading consumer seller paint

28:52

if you want it.

28:53

We'll just by virtue of having it all in lowering prices, constantly getting more efficient, increasing shipping speed. It just reminds me very much of 1998. You know, with you, you sort of start with a minimum buyable product and you have happy customers, and then you you sort of improve it. Overtime.

29:10

This'd isn't a credible story. And kudos to you, Jason could've to you for lending all that. I know your investors, so you're not lending it, But you're a lot of your expertise he built

29:23

over the years. It's all it's all Jason. I mean, honestly, I'm not being fake. Humble, like this thing wouldn't exist. I just wish that he could have saved himself a lot of pain. Well, if he never left Amazon, he'd probably

29:34

say that was the worst economic decision ever. Uh, but he could have saved himself

29:38

a lot of pain if he had, you know, plugged into the right group of people with a different mindset about how to build a business. But yeah, you can only play the hand you have now,

29:48

so totally it and you might not be. You know, it just word. Life tends to work out. I think, for people work hard. Yeah, well, you can tell everyone this is an awesome He's everyone. Where to find my perfect color and just give the

30:2

pitch one more time. Yes, Real simple. My perfect color dot com on Darkest. Like I said, our core customer is cos brands manufacturers. A lot of marketers who need exact matches for their colors. And exactly We were just covered in a hub spot block post the other week. And so we created Hub Spot Orange so they can now order there. So it's that sort of thing, said conference. Whatever it. So if you have a brand color or three D printing, whatever, we do a lot of custom work and can ship it out pretty much same day for most stuff if needed.

30:35

That's incredible. Thank you so much for broadcast in Awesome talking, catching thanks

30:39

out of Vanessa. You guys are awesome. Thank you, everybody right. Hope you enjoyed that episode of Friends of Friends Podcast Quick Shout out to Brexit. The first start up credit card Brexit are sponsoring really appreciate their support. Bricks has no personal guarantee for Founder's. That's a really big deal. It integrates really nicely. QuickBooks. Great rewards. They're startup centric. It's a really nice little

31:6

tool, and we are seeing it all

31:8

across the crew's portfolio of clients. So check it

31:12

out and again. If you go through the sign up flow and typing cruise,

31:15

you get a discount, so hopefully you'll check out breaks. Thanks again for the support on the podcast, guys, take care.

powered by SmashNotes