hello. Welcome to another episode of the Hillary podcast, where we travel back in time to dissect founders previous startups and uncover what they learn from their experiences so that you can apply these to your business. I am Brandon Honda Co. And on this episode, I'm very excited to be joined by Steve Long, the current founder at the Travel Brief, a company that is aiming to aggregate and clean up crowd source. Travel data to allow developers to use this individualized travel AP ICE This is not Steve's first start up them. You got to start after leaving his job at Oliver Wyman and founding a company with his repeat roommate and co founder room and Crimean ski called Xiaodi. Chatty was a solution for young Canadian professionals to be able to pick up Chef Cook meals at what they were calling hubs, refrigerator units at cafes and coffee shops in its north of three year run. Chatty was amassing almost $100,000 of revenue month had Stephen Roman turned their apartment into a makeshift restaurant and was even on dragons then, although they eventually turned down the funding offer. This episode has Steve and I discussed the tough unit economics and last mile problem that is prevalent today in food delivery startups across the world. The new pickup model that shoddy tried to implement to counteract this and the ugliness that comes from trying to put bubbles in your IOS. Sit tight,

get a notebook ready and thank you again for listening. This podcast episode wouldn't have been possible without the help of our friends over at a KT um, the plucked from the connects founders and startups with marketing students for three month internships. No matter what kind of business you're running, there's a big chance that you need a hand with marketing and sales Katie and provides a cheap solution for that. For only $299 you get a three month partnership for interns and virtual assistants. The best part of it all is that they're offering a $50 discount for all of fail early subscribers. Redeem this now at fail. Ary dot com slash get slash Arcadium. Once again, that's fail. Ary dot com slash get slash Arcadium Hello and welcome to another episode of the Hillary Podcast. Your one stop shop for failed ventures failed founders, but More importantly, the lessons you can learn from them. I'm very excited today to have Steve Long on the podcast.

Hello, Steve. Hey, Brandon has it

going. Good, good, good. I hope everything is well on

your end. Yeah. So far, so good.

Okay, Perfect. Thank you so much for being on the show. And yeah, I just love to jump right in. So, Steve, I've done my research and, like, feel free to, like, you know, peppering any details that you feel like we've missed. But Steve was the former co founder at Xiaodi. And prior to that, you worked that Oliver Wyman out of college. And you graduated Queens University as well as some study abroad at sync y in Beijing.

So yeah, I hope that would like a good you know, it's a Miriam of like what you did, but I guess I just want to jump into it. Did you ever I knew that you were gonna be, you know, a founder?

So first what? Brennan, I think you did a much better job summarizing what I did. Then I ever could. Whenever people ask me about tell me what you do. I just tend to ramble on. And so yeah, so that was awesome. First civil. And I'm sorry, what was the actual question?

Sure. I mean, granted, I do have, like, you know, the notes. So I have, like, the liberty of just, like, reading off of rather Than is like introducing you, but yeah, I just wanted to, you know, jump in And like, you know,

you worked at Oliver Wyman out of college. Yeah. And you know, after Oliver Wyman, like, a couple of years you went into doing Xiaodi with your co founder room and kamienski? Yeah, I just, you know, wanted to explore that tangent, Like, how did you, you know, get into start ups and, you know, working industry And, like, what was the difference there? Like, how did you know you wanted to do a start up after working

industry? Yeah. So I think my whole desire to get into start up if I think back I feel like I've always been wanting to do that. Even when I was in school, I come from a fairly entrepreneurial family, So my father and my mother, they're both immigrants to Canada. I mean, this sounds may sound like a cliche story. But when they came to Canada, they never could get a job because their English level was just not good. So because of that, I think, you know, even when I was going through elementary, middle school and high school, my parents been always been working on their own business.

My mom had a nail shop. I don't know how to call it like Nao Salon, I guess in Toronto, and my dad kind of started with couple of just flipping houses, but he started to kind of build sort of a portfolio of rental properties. So my whole family's been kind of working for themselves during my guest formative years, and I think that was a big influence on me. So when I went to school at Queens, I was at the Queen's business program, Queens Commerce, and at the time I didn't really know what I wanted to do. That's the reason that kind of shows this very generalised program, and when I graduated, I still didn't know what I wanted to do, so I picked consulting, which was also very,

very generalised type of career. He doesn't really limit you in terms of what you can do. But I think after started working, I kind of learned, you know, what the workplace with the corporate type setting feels like. And that kind of made me realize mawr that I need it to. And I've really felt the urgency that I needed to just get started with entrepreneurship, because that, to me, is something that I really want to do with my life. And while I learned a lot in the first few years at all of the Wyman, at some point, I felt like my learning was plot towing, and I don't think I could have learned any more at that point in the corporate world that would help me in entrepreneurship. So in 2014 I decided the best way to learn entrepreneurship was to just do it,

just jump into entrepreneurship, not learning from the side, not learning it from the safety and off the ivory tower of, you know, a consulting job corporate world, but just to jump right into it. So that's when I kind of 2014 was the year that I made a decision to leave Oliver Wyman and jump into entrepreneurship. It was a little bit of a leave of absence tours. I end, but overall, the jump was fairly

quick. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. For, you know, being so candid and just like that's a good Segway into, you know, going from Oliver Wyman to, like your first start up. And this was Chao de correct.

Yes. Yes.

You know, I'm trying out this, like, whole way of, like, describing your startup. But if you had to, you know, explain to like a 10 year old what shoddy did. What would you say, child? He is.

I'm not good at some rising things, but I'll give him my country of it a shot. Chao de was a debt simple meal subscription program for working professionals.

Yeah, I did pretty well. Thank u s. So chatty was, you know, this meal service program for Toronto professionals and feel for, you know, like, this is all our own research, but feel free to, like, correct me where I'm wrong. So, you know, behind the scenes you guys had a, you know, chef team of like they made food per week and like you would be able to like order from these guys and like,

you know, there was like different models are living plans where you would choose three meals a week or five meals a week and yeah, so I guess it would be like, would you say is like, comparable to, you know, like, affordable

today. So I'm gonna take a step back, actually. So we first started Chao de, we weren't using coffee shops as hubs. We were actually just distributed meals out of our own apartments. It works really well initially, because when we were during our beta phase, so we had about a one month of no testing period called Beta Alfa. What? I want to call it all the customers were really close friends, and these were the same people that would have been coming to our apartment every weekend for house parties And what not So it was pretty natural to have them come up to your apartment on the Sunday, grabbed the meals and then just, you know, leave afterwards. So that worked out really well for about a month by month to when we started having kind of non friends, public customers that we acquired through Facebook.

That's what this whole model started to not work really well because we couldn't have all these strangers keep coming up to your apartments because the doorman would not let them sign an So we would be like coming down from apartments in the dead of the winter just on the really sketchy street food deal. And it didn't work out really well. So, you know, that's when me and Roman, we kind of just start to think about, like, what other ways do we have to get the meals out? That's not going to require one of us to be distributing the meals. And then the concept of hey, what if, like it was It was like a light bulb moments where, like, we'll be talking and they'd be like, Oh, wait,

what if we do this and we have a lot of those but most of the ideas airship. But this one was actually good. Like, Oh, wait, what if we find independently run cafes that don't have food? We partnered up with them and then, you know, within two weeks of having that idea, we actually got our first hub. So that was pretty cool. That was like first business deal. Like I remember walking out of the cafe after shaking hand with the owner of Fell So proud. I was like, Hey, this is the first business deal that I've ever done,

you know? Yeah, You take a picture in front of like you take a selfie in front of the first restaurant that you get. Absolutely. Thank you so much for being candid. I guess I'm just curious about this, right? Why did you guys choose? You know, these coffee shops are like beverage only restaurants to partner with to like, you know, put your

hubs. And I think he was just a process of elimination. We were thinking about what kind of business would likely want a partner up with us. So obviously, we eliminated restaurants pretty quickly because restaurants with CIA's as competition instead of partners and, of course, by the same kind of logic we eliminated all the non food like clothing stores, for example, and then we were left with was really either convenient stores or cafes. So convenience stores we thought about my partner. Roman didn't really like them, mostly because he didn't think the convenience sourced. The brand would really fit our brand right? Not to kind of trash talk anyone, but most convenience was a very generic looking. They're not branded.

No. No. Yeah.

Yeah. So we're basically left with cafes and within cafes. We pretty much eliminated any cafes that sold food or sold sandwiches because to them, I think it was the same issue.

Yeah, you'd be, like competition

record. Exactly. Way basically, we're left with, you know, independent cafes that are pretty much beverage or desserts on Lee. So that was the just process elimination. I think it's actually helpful to do that process of elimination, right, cause you know, if you think about any sort of marketing exercise, you know, the more narrowly defined your target market is the highest success we're gonna have. And by this process of elimination, we were basically left with one very specific target market that we had. And I think that's one of the reasons that when we reached out the response written success rate were both fairly high because we're so focused in we were targeting.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. That makes a lot of sense. And, you know, I just love to, like, unpacked the story that you gave us, you know, about like the having people like, open or like, come to you, get a guy's apartment for like, I guess, like I'm still very, very surprised has been,

like, you know, a month I'd imagine you're cooking the food also in your apartment. You know, you guys are like packing the food in your apartment and, like, per order on order basis, you, like, come down and give people their food for, like,

lunchtime. Yeah, basically, we had a cook. We have one cook at the time. There was a friend of Romans, and he will come to apartments or hiss apartments, one of the apartments, and make a large batch of meal. So we never cooked on demand. So every cooking session was for a batch of meals, right? That's right. Okay, Exactly. So we cooked twice a week, and every batch would been for half a week worth of meals.

So yeah, After the meals were cooked, we were stored them in our fridge, our own fridge, and at set times on, you know, Sunday night and Wednesday and I are friends would come over and pick up the meals. It was very, very labor intensive because one of the issues

with it, I'd imagine

right. One of the issues we didn't foresee, for example was, Well, when we tell people to come at seven o'clock, not everyone's gonna show up at seven o'clock. That's right. It's like some people gonna come about five. Some people are gonna come at eight and others gonna come by 11 p.m. And you know So it was a very much a trial and error process. And that was another reason these hubs made sense was that he kind of freed us up from having to distribute its meals, like our time perspective, not just location, right? And then the distribution time was very flexible. So instead of saying, Oh, you have to come between five.

PM and seven PM, you know, cause that's how was how were available. We could say, Well, you can come any time during the business hours off this particular

business of this cafe. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. So it really was a match made in heaven?

Yeah, absolutely. And I'm just, you know, like just to put into perspective with, like, numbers or, like, quantified everything you said, like, you know, every week are like every Sunday you would make, like, half a week's worth of meals, right? And I guess what I'm trying to ask is, like me and my roommates today,

like we live three people, so, like, half a week worth of meals, like, not a lot of meals, but I just leave it like you guys are, like cooking in batch. Like, how much food was this and like, how many boxes of food did you have, like, stored in your fridge at

one time? So when we started, we I think we had about 15 friends slash customers. So the meal plan, I think at the time was also for six meals. So a batch would have been three meals times 15. So about 40 to 50 meals. She s so basically 40 to 50 boxes every time our cook would make these meals and we're store 40 to 50 boxes in our

fridge. Uh, wow. And then I'm just, like, curious here, but without any, you know, personal bias here. Did you think the food was any good?

I loved the food. Honestly, that's I I am not even at I'm not even sitting my own horn. But when we ran Xiaodi like you look at my personal budget. My food budget was tiny because I literally a chow de food 95% of the time. And the other 5% was when I visited my parents. My mom was cooking the food.

No. Yeah, absolutely. You know, like you would love founders who, like, you know, like live by their own product. And I feel like you're definitely embodying. That s Oh, thank you so much for, like, you know, sharing the numbers. Like I love to just like, you know, talk about the chronological,

or like, moving past like child here. It's so I guess at peak writ, what were you guys doing? I know you said you were like 1.3 million air are like, How many customers would you say? You know, we're using your guys services

Every batch We were making about 1700 meals.

So at our peaches

you wish was right Before we close down, we were making about 1700 meals every batch or 34th every batch. So we were making two of those batches per week. So we're creating and distributing about 343,500 miles per

week Jeez. Yeah. And then this was still all with, like, you know, the chef that you guys hired?

Yeah. So all the meals were created by the other team that we built. We had one head chef, and under him, we had about five cooks under him. And so we had one driver, a part time driver who was moving the food from our production facility to the four hubs we had.

Yeah, Yeah, you know, it's like I'm very, very glad that you, like you're being very vulnerable at this Because, like, you know, from like a consumer standpoint, you only see that you're only getting one meal or like you getting picking up, like eight meals a week. But like in the largest game of things, you guys were like, you know, child, he's making, like,

3500. They're packing boxes. They're delivering 3500 boxes of like food, too. Like these, you know, hubs a week. Wow.

It was a pretty pretty big operation

in the kitchen. Uh, yes. Oh, and then, you know, like you guys found, like, success and then I don't want to, like, diminished the opportunity here are like, diminish your experience here. But like at one point child, he was also Are you guys competed on dragons, then traded in Canada?

Yeah, we did well, He came about, I think, when my partner, Roman he ran into one of the producers at an events in Toronto. So Toronto's kind of like a hub is like the tech hub and the financial hub and the hub of a lot of other things in Canada and the media hub off course. So it's relatively easy and trying to run into folks that are involved in all sorts of media. You know, different industries, which is fortunate, were based in Toronto. And at one of these events I think you ran into one of the producers for Dragon Stan and he wasn't really pitching. I don't think he even knew that this was a producer and he was just kind of talking about what he was doing and one thing leading to another. We got invited to go to the public audition for Dragon Stand Canada, and we went there. We met with some other producers,

and by that time, the other produce already heard about us from this producer, so he wasn't like a cold pitching. He was like a warm pitching. So they're like, Yeah, I love you guys. You know, we love you guys. Have you scheduled from a show? It was a fairly I guess it was a fairly easy process for us to get on the show. Yeah, and once that was kind of decided, we basically prepared with our producer on what the pitch was gonna be. And, you know,

they really didn't tell us how to pitch, like they gave us a format, but in terms of content, it was very much, you know, it's your story. It's your business. You pitch you however you want to. So I really appreciated that about the producer, as she was super helpful and kind of, you know, making sure that we stay within the two minute or forgot the exact time you was. Maybe a mid and 1/2. Anyways, it was like a very short, concise eyes pitch,

so yeah, so that was sort of how we got involved with the show. I didn't really feel nervous the entire time, you know, to me, it was I guess I felt like it was pitching the business. The entire time I was running it whether to, you know, friends who didn't know about it or two different people. I met events. So to me, I was pitching all the time. I was so used to it. So I was like, Oh, God,

just same pitching. We're just different, you know, Different setting. So it was like, not nervous entire time until, you know, the day off and I shop the studio. I'm like, Oh my God, it's like a such a big production. And like, half an hour before the show, I see everybody else around me. There were, like,

20 other teams, and I was like, I see everybody be nervous was not everyone, but, like a lot of people are nervous. All this really pumped and they kind of being in that setting kind of put me in the mood as well. So I was like, Oh, maybe maybe I should be nervous and I psyched myself. We're just thinking about that, But yeah, but like once I watched that door, all that tension and nervous energy disappeared. And, you know, I just was natural. I was kind of back in the zone again. It

was pretty fun. Yeah, and like, I'm gonna lengthy episode below for, like those of our listeners who haven't seen it. But, you know, I watched the episode and I guess I don't know. I think, like, one question that I'm curious about, you know, for, like, the founders, what would you say? You know,

the experience of being like on a TV show for like, pitching is, like, comparative to like how it is actually like it goes down in, you know, the actual room because I know, you know, with, like, post editing and everything they like, add a lot of, you know, dramatic music and, I guess, like sound effects to show that like, Oh,

yeah, if, like the dragons asked, like a serious question or something What we say your experiences like an I assume you've seen the episode like, How would you say that? Different from the episode that actually aired.

So I think the actual pitching is a lot more mundane than appears on TV. The only dramatic part about the pitching process was the entrance on and maybe the exit. But, you know, the big all these like smoke machines and they got these lights.

Yeah, the royal treatment.

Yeah, exactly. It was like super stage. But once you kind of go beyond that once you literally just walked to the door and have all these crazy things move about you. But once that's done, you're just face to face with four very business looking. You know, normal people, really, And there's no sound the facts. There's no one on the side giving you accuse. There's nothing. So it fell really mundane during the pitching process, and that was good for me because, you know, like that reminded me of a typical board meeting. I would have doing consulting right like I would finish the project that would kind of deliver the presentation to the client.

I'll get questions and challenges and judgments, you know, all kinds of things throwing back at me. So that was my element. Like, I didn't feel like I was doing something crazy or doing something stressful or something different, like I think I have. At that point, I was just tunnel vision looking at individual dragons and be attentive. Listen to what they're saying, really try to understand their critiques and you know, if it's a good critique, right. I would not say anything back. I would accept it. But if it's something that I disagreed, I would say so because that's what I was trained to do

through my work. Absolutely. Yeah.

So to me, you know, he was fun. I'm curious, actually Ran into here where to listen to a Roman has to say we talked about it. I don't think either of us were really nervous once the pitching

started. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like, that's what it seemed like when I watched the episode and I guess I watched the episode and, like, one of the dragons Majid minutes like she was very, very critical of you guys was asking about, You know, this concept of Chao de and you said the statistic was like a nine week turn. You know, where users would sign up and then in nine weeks later they wanted to like, just, like, get off shoddy instead of using that they're like primary meal subscription. So,

you know, if I'm not prying, I just left it like, talk about this. Like, what do you think lead to you know, the nine week turn like, why were users you know find with you guys for nine weeks and then like after they wouldn't.

Yeah. So this was actually one of the best questions that we got asked a dragon Stan. And it was definitely a question that Roman and I, we spent a lot of time analyzing and just talking and brainstorming about. So we realized this issue fairly early on because I was really deep into tracking all sorts of data. So any kind of things that customers were doing or interacting our platform, I was tracking it. So once that kind identify that, like our average customer lifetimes. Nine weeks room that we talked about it. So spree must. Soon after that, we instituted a future where, when people cancel, they have to let us choose a reason why they canceled. And the biggest finding that we had from that was people were canceling because they were getting bored with the food. The food was getting repetitive and they wanted to try something else.

So one of the fundamental problems with Chao de was that again. This is my theory, right? This is no looking back. This is my judgment of what happened. So we decided early on to fix the price to give a flat. Pricing at first was 6 99 and then 7 $99 a meal, and the reason would start on the flat. Pricing was mainly influenced by, you know, all the SAS platforms. That was all the rage back there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And still less state right now.

You know you go. Yeah, Yeah, exactly. Like you have your Netflix subscription for at the time, was like, you know, I think 10 99 months, you got whatever other subscript you gotta slack subscription. You got whatever other subscriptions, everything. Everybody was flat pricing. So we're like, Oh, man, like,

you know, like, we're not a food company Where? Tech company. So, of course, we're gonna do a flat pricing subscription. So I think that was a very big mistake. We made for two reasons. Number one was because of the flat pricing, we could not afford certain kind of ingredients, right? So because we limited the pricing to be flat and the pricing was really, really low, there's a lot of things we couldn't use, like we couldn't use good cuts of beef as an example we couldn't use a lot of kinds of a lot of fish or seafood.

That's another example. We couldn't use a lot of kinds of vegetables, like asparagus, for example, was like a super premium and super expensive vegetable. And we couldn't use that about often. I think every single meal we used asparagus we lost money on, actually. Yeah. Yeah. So for all these reasons, we basically without his reason, Number one, it was, You know, we kind of limited ourselves because we had this low,

flat pricing. And I think the second mistake was pricing was such a core part of our marketing message. It was like, built into the brand itself. Whereas, you know, if you think about any sass, right, when you go to the website, they don't advertise front and center. What? The prices, you know, they draw you in with the features, and then they would say, Oh,

by the way, it's, you know, 99 months, whatever. They don't exactly, But for us, for whatever reason, you know, poor decision making. We first started this. We decided that we wanted to make the pricing a core part of our messaging and brand identity. So the 6 99 and 7 99 That was what we used to draw people in. So you got everybody coming here looking for these cheap, low price and, you know,

and flat price meals. So we couldn't all of a sudden just raised prices, one of the meals or even, you know, do incremental price increase to indexed to inflation because the pricing was fixed by our marketing message. Yeah. Yeah. So those two things combined basically limited the variety of food that we can have. And this is an issue that Roman and we talked audible and Roman that, you know, is much more of a foodie than I am. And he brought this up with me a lot of times as well is like the food just gets repetitive after about for him. It was six weeks, right? After about a month or so, you start to realize that all the ingredients were using was the same thing over and over and over and over again.

And in not context really wasn't surprising that when we analyzed the data you know the exit survey, if you will, of why people quit and most will quit because they felt like they were getting repetitive. They just want to take a break in, not contacts. He really wasn't surprising that, you know, that's the reason that people wanted to quit. That was, like, 80% of the reason that people wanted to quit. We were fine with the pickup system. They were fine with the price. Of course they were. They were fine with the service and they just wanted to take a break.

Yeah, I think a lot of it was like the, You know, the circumstances of like, you want to produce, like, higher quality food, but you can't because of the ingredients and like everything seems so cyclical. But yeah, thank you so much for being like, you know, sharing about that. I think also just going back to like the Dragon's Den episode. Or like, you know, I was reading. There's a hacker.

News posts are like, I think it's like 2014 or like 2016 about Saudi, and I think a lot of the public are a lot of the people that I've you know, I've read the comments of it seemed like a 50 50 split between, you know, people who do like the hubs model of like getting, you know, being able to, like, have the leniency to, you know, pick up their food wherever they want their like cafes near them. And there's like the other side, which is like, you know, people who are talking about the safety regulations of,

you know, thes third party beverage restaurants and like keeping you know, your hubs in those guys just like venues. And I don't want to, like, you know, pry here. But I guess without, like really being biased, I guess, like, what's your take? You know, they're like, What would you say? Toe,

you know, calmed the masses of like people who you know who love your guys model and people who you know, only highlight about like, Oh, this is like super dangerous because of like, the regulations are like the food you know, the Clinton, this regulation that like third party restaurants.

So I still to this day, I think the hub model is the way to go for the food industry as a whole. I think there needs to be more regulations, and they're using clear regulations around what is acceptable on what's not, um, and you know certain processes that's got to be followed. But I still think that just from a pure common sense perspective, I don't want to say from the economic perspective, because I know it's not all about, you know, costs, especially when it comes to people safety. I totally get it. But I think from a common sense perspective, it just doesn't make sense to be sending all these meals to every single address, every single house, every single apartments and just think over the amount of resources,

the amount of manpower that takes to do that. I don't think any company can make that work. So you know, when I think of, you can see a parallel with groceries, right? Like the industry, the succeeds that's withstood the test of time our grocery stores but grocery stores is a perfect example of the Hub model at work, right people that live in the neighborhood. They drive to the grocery store to pick up or to buy their groceries. Grocery stores don't they started to do now, but it's still very niche part of that business. They still, by and large, don't drop off the groceries at every single house around them because it's just doesn't

make sense of

it. It's way too expensive. So still. I'm a farm believer that for a significant part of the market, the hub model makes a lot of sense, absolutely. And I think other food startups out there, you know, if there's still any money left out there for food startups, after all the recent round of closures, I think this is the way to go is to think about are their distribution partners that are geographically and physically close to the end customer. And can you leverage their existing infrastructure to get the meals outs? You know, of course, until now, once when we have robot drivers than this whole issue becomes a non issue. But you know, until we get there, somebody's gonna pay for the delivery,

right? Yeah, yeah, that's a good transition into like my next question here. And just answer the question would like example, you know, snack pass. If you're familiar, they're also based out of Berkeley. But they raised, I think, like 21 million, you know, sees a led by a 16 Z, and I know their core businesses like, you know, based around pickups like having color students be able to,

you know, go to restaurants to pick food up rather than get, you know, uber each delivery and what's interesting is also like uber eats. Also, you know, I've never used it before, but they also have a feature or like one of their other, you know, core functionalities is that you're able to order food for pick up and you don't have these guys pay for, you know, the last mile of the cars have to drive from the restaurant to your house. So I think if anything, you know, child, he was maybe,

like, ahead of its time in, like, thinking like this and, like, I definitely you know, I agree with your analogy of, like, grocery stores being like the perfect hub. But I guess on the topic of like, you know what, I'm trying to introduce you and, you know, just like, yeah, if you just learned about snack pass and,

like, you know, breeds and like, picking up, I guess you know, I'm curious for someone who's worked, you know, in the food space, you and Roman for, like, three years, I guess. What's your take like, you know, coming out of it. And you know,

what do you think about the food space? And like I know you know, there's like Door Dash. There's Postmates. There's a lot of money going into, like things in food, and I think personally that there's, like, a lot of, like, not real barrier. Whereas I think there might be, like, a consolidation or something that happens to, you know, really emblazon the market leader out there.

But I guess you know, like I hate to, like, keep rambling here, but I guess my question here is like, What do you think about the food space as a whole? You know, would you ever come back to work in it? Do you think like Chao de there like the space that exists for a child? Eat today here a lot on back? Yeah.

Yeah, I think you asked like a couple of questions in there. Let me try to answer them in the sensible order. So the short answer is yes. I think the marketplace can still support a service like Chao de. There's some changes and tweaks and needs to be made, but I definitely definitely still believe that you know, in both U. S. And Canada. There's a huge potential full of business, like charity. But I would personally not be sorry, not business. And that's Segways into my answer to another part of your question, which is, you know,

what's my sort of take on the food industry as a whole? I think it's a very challenging industry, too. Succeed in I think you're spot on when he said that, you know, it's a very low barrier to entry and a degree. So you know, my assessment of industry is that it's a very easy and district will get into, but it's a very, very difficult industries of succeeding and this couple of reasons for that. So the first reason and it's something we've learned is people. Customers in the food industry has very low barriers, low costs of switching. So if you think about, you know, just your eating habits,

my eating habits, you know in the course of one week I will probably go from Chinese to Italian to Greek, two Japanese and probably wrap up the week with Mexican, right with food. It doesn't cost me anything mentally or monetarily to try different restaurants. There's literally zero switching costs. Because of that, there's no loyalty very, very little loyalty that restaurants or food businesses can build with customers in general, right? There's always exceptions to any rule, right? Like if you're on the particulate diet, for example, like you have to stick to a certain provider. But I'm talking about 95% of market out here.

So that's the first big challenge. Is that very little customer loyalty and very low cost of switching? The second challenge is what you already mentioned, which is very low barriers to entry, you know, even back then and certainly today with, you know, Uber's founder launching. You know, you read about the news, right? Like you know, Kalanick. He's launching this clout kitchen, and that's even going to reduce the barriers to entry for further. So you got an industry where anyone who wants to launch a food business,

whether it's a traditional restaurant or, you know a new type business like a food truck or, you know, a non establishment business like a cloud kitchen type business kitchens right? Or or just Internet Onley, and especially with the introduction of services like door dash and uber eats that makes distribution easier for the producers. You know, you're gonna always gonna have just a constant churn of new food businesses popping into existence. So that makes any existing business is very, very difficult to manage and to grow. Yeah, right. It is like, you know, very basic Porter's five forces, right?

You got, like, a huge threat of new entrance constantly coming in. So that's the second challenge Is low barriers to entry. The third challenge, I think, is already mentioned, right. It's the economics of delivery, right? Yeah. Yeah. And I think this is a huge issue. I don't think anyone's figured out. Uber Eats hasn't figured it out because you're still losing tons of money. They're the biggest money losing unit within the uber portfolio.

I just read a news that they just sold. Which country was it? In India, they sold their Indian basis. Juice, tomato, tomato ray and door dash is losing money. It's causing huge issues for Softbank, the fedora in Europe. In Toronto, it's losing money based on their public releases. So you got some of the biggest and most well funded food business. Is hemorrhaging money on such a large scale and, you know, further evidence. But you know,

that closure there was like a mass closure of food start ups two or three years ago, right? It was spoon. Rocket went out. Montreat disappeared. Three months was the biggest, highest profile, one that disappeared. There were so many that we were kind of looked at as our model. We first started shouting. It was Sprigg

was another one. Sprig Rossen's in.

Yeah, caviar maple, like everybody either just got, you know, sold for a fraction of its value or most nous completed. Shutdown went on the business. Obviously, you know, you read the postmortem from these companies, Ray, there's talk about the product market fit. But I think to me at the end of the day, it's the economics They could not make the economics of delivery of work. And I don't think anyone has been able to figure that out. I think maybe the only companies getting closest Amazon with their network of established delivery infrastructure, But other than that, I don't think anyone figured out.

So for those three reasons that I just mentioned right, So you got very low customer loyalty, very low barrister entry and very high cost of distribution. I think those three factors is what makes me very, very pessimistic off this industry in the longer term, you know, it's something that's I don't think I want to get back into. And, you know, frankly, I think my personal passion for the food industry is lukewarm is not, you know, super passionate. It's

probably Yeah.

Yeah, probably personally, the main reason. But I think there's a lot of challenges with, you know, this industry. But kudos to anyone who's still trying to, you know, make it work. I

don't know. I'm just know. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. You never know. Somebody could figure it out. There's always some bright on trainer somewhere out there. And somebody could all of a sudden figure out how to make this work. You know, I don't wanna say never, but it's hard.

Absolutely. Yeah. You know, maybe it's time for me and my roommates to, you know, cook out of our apartment and, like, have people come and pick up food term boxes. Hey, you could be the entrepreneur. You could be the one to figure it out. Maybe. Maybe. Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing. I You know. I wanna thank you so much,

you know, for being vulnerable, a charity. So I'm just, like, moving past, You know, the chronological timeline here, but from what I've gathered, you and Roman didn't work on, like, the next companies together. But, you know, from Saudi, you shut down in May of 2017 and then you moved to spear,

which is, like a consumer social app, and then huddle, which was, like, focus around gaming that body today to like the travel brief where you started in June of 2017 I guess. Is that, like, a good description of, like, you know where your timeline was? Like from, Like going from charity to the cattle brief?

Yeah, that's spot on.

And, you know, I think the first thing I'm curious about here definitely like kudos to you for just like being number one like a repeat founder are like, but like also number two like, ah, founder of, like, things that are, you know, different industries, you know? So you go from, like food to, you know, consumer social to gaming. And then now, with,

like, travel and like, logistics. So I guess I'm just curious. You know, like, why solve the problem like multiple different verticals? I guess I'm just like shooting for the stars here. But, like, what about, you know, you working at Oliver Wyman? You know, you growing up in Canada that make you want to solve these problems. And, you know, consumer social gaming as well is like

today in travel. So I don't think it will be very happy with the answer. There is no, like master design or there's no consistent reason. Why did any of these? You know, Chao de was something, you know, I thought it was interesting at the time. You take a step back. I thought the problem that Xiaodi were trying to solve the charity was interesting. Like we thought. We stumble upon this negative insight about last mile delivery, and we executed on it. And that was what really got me going was so interesting to me. And we sort of solved it until we didn't. But after that,

I felt like I went through about 1 to 2 year period. Where was kind of just drifting about not really doing much or truly trying to figure out what my next steps need to be. So you know, I didn't work at the time. I had some freelance gigs at the time, and then I was talking to a lot of different people. Number one to kind of, you know, it's like getting a closure on Xiaodi. Really? Just kind of talk everything out, talk everything through what? Also trying to get inspiration, you know, in terms of what I can do. So Rome and I,

we were roommates all throughout Xiaodi. And, of course, after charities stopped we, you know, split apart because he had to work. You know, I had some savings from my previous work that I didn't have to work immediately. So I was kind of, you know, continue to I traveled a little bit as well, so I didn't have a fixed location. We just left the apartment, etcetera. But he reached out to me a couple times about some of the ideas or hypotheses that he had and the 1st 1 of which was the concept of keeping in touch with friends and keeping in touch with acquaintances. And I pod assist Was that all the existing tools that was out there,

right? For Jim managing your social contacts Facebook Messenger Instagram linked in etcetera. They were not good enough at proactively reminding you to reach out to other people, right? They were just there. You know, they would maybe give you a push notification for someone's birthday or if they change jobs like a big events. But the hypothesis waas any relationship is like growing like raising like an animal, like a pet or like a plant. You gotta continue to water a You have to maintain it. You have to put in something into it to get something out of it. So the hypothesis was, you'll be nice f a tool that can remind you when your relationship with someone is becoming not as Thai and yeah, right, like, so that you can start.

Teoh put some effort into it. Really? It was like alarm clock for your relationship, basically. And the idea, I think there is still some merit to the idea. Actually, I think there's a lot of merit to the concept. I think you know, the way that we execute against it probably was not the best way and also, you know, there's tons of other tools out there that solves the same problem that at the time we didn't really think of because we were very tunnel visioned. I think that, you know, we kind of just went down the route of Well, let's just build it and see what happens.

So I don't want to take too much credit for this because for both sphere and Huddle, these were Romans ideas, and he was the main driver and champion behind it. And I still agree about the underlying need for these ideas. Yeah, but, you know, it was one of those things where both of us wanted to just test the hypothesis and see where that went. And obviously, you know, I was able to code. So I said, You know what? I'm not doing anything right now, so I'll just help you make this happen. So for those two projects for both sphere and Huddle,

I was sort of the lead developer and really the only developer. And I wasn't super involved on the business side of those. But, you know, if I would think about why speared in take off was because I think the tools that we built to satisfy the knee that was just talking about I think the tool itself was really clunky to use, and the interphase was probably not the easiest one to use. We were so focused on making it look super slick, like right. So, like, I wish you consent to a screen shop. I think I don't personally have any pictures of this, but it was like, Imagine, like a screen with lots of bubbles. Your picture is in the center of the screen,

and that's a bubble. That's the biggest bubble. And all around it are bubbles and pictures of your friends and acquaintances. So the idea was right. The people that are closest to use the ones you have the most amount of interactions with would be the biggest bubbles and that they're the closest bubbles to you. So you can visually see that these are Oh, this is my sphere. This is my circle where everyone's closely. I'm surrounded by, like, close friends, right? And then further out, you have smaller bubbles, you know that are farther out from you. Maybe your acquaintances that you talk,

you know, once every quarter, etcetera. So he was just an entire screen full of bubbles is the best way I can describe it, and it sounded so cool and he looked so, so, so cool. What? We developed it. And where Roman mocked it up. I was like, Oh, my God, this is like gonna be huge. This looks so awesome. Like,

I've never seen the interface like this before. It looks amazing and that he was describing the interaction of how the bubbles would move around and etcetera, like, this is the coolest idea. And, you know, I thought about how to execute this, right? And then that got me into my put my developer hat on and went down this rabbit hole of how to make this really slick algorithm that can determine what the distance and location of all these bubbles are. I was, like whipping out like high school math, using trig and everything. I was like, This is so cool. This such an interesting problem. And then when we first like shipped,

the very first version would testing everything was working great. It was such a good feeling And no usage. Yeah, Yeah, it was like we put it out there. We got bunch of beta users to sign up was mostly our friends. What shrines like, you know, encourage people to use it. And very, very little engagement hands. The funniest feedback we heard at one point was from one of a very close friend of ours. She was a big supporter of this idea, and her comment to Roman was like Roman. I love this would be so cool if this was like a table, Like a list

even whipped out the high school math. You know, you have to calculate the bubbles until she wanted was I know I did. Yeah.

Yeah. And I remember we're talking about this Steve back, and he was so funny because it was one of those moments where I think deep down, even at the time, we both knew that was the right thing to do. But what it was made so much emotional commitments to this whole like bubble idea that neither was wanted to admit. And I think this is a terrible thing. This is a learning. I'm learning something every time I do this right. We weren't honest with ourselves. I certainly wasn't because I look back. I can't speak for Roman, but I look back to myself. I know at the moment when I heard the feedback. I know deep down that the feedback was right, Right? Even when I was using it,

I think I knew that the whole bubble interphase looked really pretty. But it was so clunky to use. It was I couldn't find, like, If I want to say I want to find, you know so and so I couldn't find that person immediately. Had to, like, spend 20 seconds to look for that person. Sure. But even though we knew that he probably wasn't the best idea, we're so we spent so much emotional capital on building it out that we were in the denial phase. Yeah, we just rationalized that feedback away were like, you know, it just I think we're talking about,

you know, like any new interface going takes a user sometimes to get used to. You know, there's some other use cases, blah, blah, baba. But thinking about there were all excuses. Every single one of the things we came up with were excuses because we spent so much commitments building it so, you know, lost re shore. It didn't work out because it was very little engagement. And we also didn't have a channel to acquire customers. We didn't have an effective challenge. Acquire customers right because he was a free tool. We couldn't just put it out on Facebook and put,

you know, run Facebook ads against it because the economics obviously wouldn't work out. It's not funded. So that's something that I think we let it run for about four months before Roman decided to pull the plug and for huddle again. I think this was another one of those things where you was just a this more recent and this is perhaps another learning experience for us. I don't want to say it's completely dead. I think there's still some potential in there. But you just night, it was really half the time to figure it out, to figure out what the product market fit is with Hado. I still think there is definitely a lot of potential, So the quick I guess summary about Huddle is it's a seamless platform for playing games with your friends. So imagine you're playing a board game, but instead of the board being a physical board, the board is your TV monitor and the controllers are your phones and that's it, right.

You can play all sorts of games. You can play traditional board games. We had three games on there. We had trivia, we had cards against humanity. And so we have this mean game were like, You know, you have to capture the means. OK, they're actually really fun. And again, I think we took some learnings from Sphere Roesler interface was mawr rational. It wasn't driven by what looks cool. It was driven by what actually works. And in terms of the developments, it was the same kind of a set up.

It was Hatta was Romans idea I don't want to take credit for it was his brainchild and at the time I was in Chem I was part of my travel around the world Explore myself phase and I had some time. I was building travel brief a time as well, but it wasn't a full time thing, so I agreed. Teoh support Roman in this and I create the first prototype for Huddle, you know, for me was it was also funds creating anywhere he was solving a new problem which was we had to create some sort of riel riel time synchronisation between the phone and the TV and so some pretty cool, nifty coding things I learned. But we released the products and we also had a channel. So that was that. Another difference between Huddle and Sphere West fear we didn't really have a channel to get our customers for. How do we actually, luckily had a channel. So we had a friend who ran a chain of escape rooms, and, by the way,

he's escaped from school. Captive escape rooms. Shameless plug. But it's actually really fun. So he had a chain of escape rooms in Toronto and his escape for him host a lot of corporate clients. So this is what we like for team building exercises. So big companies will go to these escape rooms and, you know, for like a Friday afternoon or whatever and to do like a team building exercise there. So for Huddle, one of the things wanted to do was, can we use Huddle as a corporate social application, whether it's for team building or it's for employee engagement? Or it's for employees surveys for anything in the corporate setting that requires interaction with or amongst employees? We thought this would be a good product for that. So in order to get into it,

we're like, OK, well, our friend Shawn has escape rooms. He's has a lot corporate clients. Could we use that channel to get us in front of potential customers? And we did, right? So we set up a TV at the downtown location of the captive, and that's the one that hosted most number of corporate. And we tracked, you know, like the data maniac that we are. We track everything. So we tracked all the ratings and older feedbacks from every single customer that went through the escape room, and we were so encouraged because the feedback were so good.

Thes were completely organic feedback because neither myself nor Roman was there. These were completely self serve platforms. People little just go to the go to the TV, go to this address on their phone and punching the game code and start playing. And afterwards it will leave a fee about it wasn't under like a monitor situation, so we're so encouraged because I think the average rating was like 4.7 out of five. Well, for, like everybody who played so like Oh my God, this is amazing. So we kept it going down this route, so we we started with just trivia and because we encouraged by the feedback, we added cards against humanity. And then we added the mean game. But once we have all these games and we kind of push it out, that's when we start to run into some other issues,

which is engagement again, having engagements such a hard thing to attain for any start ups. But it was definitely elusive for us for huddle. What we noticed was number one. It was very difficult to convince these corporate to set up another instance of Huddle after they've left captive. So while they played the game at the escape room and they're really, really enjoyed it, none of them went back to the companies and the champions to set up in instance, at their companies. So that was the first red flight. Second red flag was through an existing relationship. Roman was able to get us into like a media company in Toronto like a small media company in Toronto, and we basically demo the entire product in front of the entire staff for an hour in like a Friday afternoon and had everybody play and everybody loved everybody, had a blast. Everybody was like laughing. It was so much fun.

And after we left, we were monitoring and this was what he set up, right? So after we left, we didn't take anything away like everything was already set up at their office. So we're thinking, OK, this is We've gotta have high engagement from this cause they don't have to set up anything they already played. It's right there. You know how everything works where you played it. But I do any set up, they literally just have to turn the thing on and start playing. So we were track how often they played. And it was very quickly shown to us that their engagement level just kind of decreased very really quickly. I think they played maybe once or twice after we left. But after that,

like nothing. So I think the issue for that cames down to this is a different issue. I think for huddle in particular. I think the amount of content we had on there just simply wasn't enough like we had three games and I think three games may sound like a lot to some of whose building it. But if you're a player, I think you only have three games. You get bored pretty quickly. So, you know, I think at that point it was a matter of right. Like neither of us really have time to dedicate ourselves full time to this. So I don't think Roman fully pulled the plug on this, but it's in hibernation. Let's say that. So I still think that this idea has got a lot of legs, but he just requires the right condition for us. Just focus on it and actually make it grow.

So yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for sharing about. You know, your past ventures, post Saudi. Yeah. And like, I love to just, you know, like that's a good transition into, you know, the travel brief. What you're doing now. I know you know, you are talking about how sphere and huddle were you no more so, like Romans,

brainchild or more select Romans. Ideas compared to yours where you were like, you know, you're you know, either a developer or you were just, like, not really helping about on the business side. Well, I correct me if I'm wrong, but the travel brief is something that you are, you know, one of the founders for yes, I'm not gonna, you know, plague. You like you don't think you're good at,

like, summarizing. I'm not gonna play, get to making you do that. So, like, definitely correct me if I'm wrong here, but from what you send me the travel brief. It's currently a platform for, like, people to share. You know, practical travel, trips, advice, information,

etcetera. And like, it's basically like a group of tourists. But the future rollout is a solution to aggregate and, like, clean up travel data like bus schedules, ticket prices, dress codes of businesses and have, you know, other third party people be able to use this clean data as they need it through, like a company A B I that sound like pretty good.

Yes, I think you did a really good job with some rising It, it probably is gonna confuse a lot of listeners is my guess. It's just because I thought about this a lot. This is my passion projects, but I think of travel brief as the ultimate platform for travel, information, content and data. That's it. So you're spot on. So right now, at this current moment, what travel brief really is is just a website to collect, share and distribute practical travel tips and guides. So we have a small be a growing community of contributors. It's mostly readers at this point, but,

you know, they would share information and how they did certain things at various places across the world. And we really guide our contributors towards practical tips rather than like recommendations of what to do and what to eat, etcetera. And the reason is because I think there's so much information out there already about recommendations, right? Like for any place in the world. There's so many platforms and websites, from trip adviser to bloggers to like Yelp or even Google, like there's so many places you can find out exactly what you could do and what you can eat where you can, like see at these places. I don't think that's where the problem is. I think where the problem is with travel information today is there's not enough places you can go to, And it's not super easy to get up today and accurate information about things like transportation, safety, cultural etiquette,

weather or just generally, how to be like a good tourist or not be a super touristy tourist. Basically all the things that makes a travel experience X well, a site from just that, what you're gonna do and we're gonna eat. So, you know, like our biggest category just to illustrate Ray like our biggest category is transportation. And within that, you know, Transportacion from airport. How do you get in from the airport to the city is one of her biggest self categories. Another really big subcategory is how do you get sim cards at all these different places? So these are, like, super useful information that people would need to use.

I certainly used tons of these information was traveling around the world. But information like this is relatively harder to come by. And there's no good platform right now for people to share, like up to date information around all these practical aspects of traveling. So, you know, we started travel brief myself and my co founder, MENSA we started travel brief basically, on this hypothesis, that's we need a platform to aggregate all these practical travel information. Yeah, and that's what we started. And you know that's the part that's growing super quickly right now, right? So I think I mentioned to in my email to is, you know,

at the turn of the year we had it, what just about get Some months ago, we had about 150,000 monthly page views, 120,000 active users, and we started, you know, 2019 with less than 1000 monthly page views. So it was like a huge growth year for us, and the growth is not slowing down. So I think there's a lot of merit, a lot of people. This information is something that, like real looking for, But to me, I think another challenge that needs to be solved in travel beyond just all these practical information is what about all the travel data, right?

And that's what I want to pave it in the longer term. Not right now. Right now, we're still very much focused on travel content and travel information. But at some point last year, I realized, Wait a minute. Aside from all the content that's human readable, that's good for human consumption. There's also so much travel data that's, you know, both human readable because you can put it anything into, like a chart that's human readable but also can be a lot of benefit to other companies, businesses and APS that require those information, right? Think about like the example that I personally can think of because,

you know, it's something that I've dealt with before is bus schedules. So you have all these intercity buses running in countries like Peru, Bolivia, Morocco, right? I mean, a lot of these countries, you know, unlike the US, where air travel is such a common part of our everyday lives. So we don't think about all these other travel modes. But in most parts, the world's like buses and trains is like the primary way by which people travel. But if you think about these, most of travel,

the information, the data of which bus goes to wear like what is the GPS coordinates off the bus station? What is the schedule? What's the frequency was the price? All these information and data right now is basically kept in various blog's that's not really designed from machine consumption, right? So you may stumble upon this block with this website or this Wordpress you know, thing that you know in HTML rights. This bus departs from here to here, you know, at this hour. But there's no standardization in the format. There's no standardization in the type of content of the data on there. There's no standardization, the representation of time. There's nothing.

There's no structure, there's no organization. There's no standardization any of this information. Which means you can't use this information outside of human consumption, right? Like if I have an app that wants to access the bus schedule of some obscure long distance bus company in Peru, right? Like there's no away from me as an app developer to access that information. Yeah, yeah, right. But that information could be super useful. Maybe I'm building like, I don't know, like a local scavenger hunt App, Ray,

that takes you across different cities. That may require my app to know what the bus schedule lists. You know, that currently is not doable, because my app cannot access that data. And I think there's tons of data like this primarily in transportation, but right, Like I can think of things in safety as well. Like why I have police stations published safety data about which areas which neighborhoods have higher, you know, pickpocketing rates or something onto, like a common platform. And then that platform makes the data accessible to all the other APS and businesses and whomever that needs that data, right? So you find an APP developer, Let's say I want to create like like an app that tells you like a neighborhood like guide,

for example, I would love to have that information I wish neighborhoods to avoid. So I can then plunked into this platform that can tell me exactly which neighborhoods to avoid. And I have a consistent data format that I can access it. So I think there's so many use cases for having a standardization and, you know, a consistent set of AP eyes for not just humans, but for most importantly, for APS and businesses to automatically access and grab all these travel data. That's when sort of another, like lightbulb moments, went off in my head and, like, we don't have to just be about travel information on content, because our mission is to make it super easy to travel around the world, just like if it's the own city.

And that doesn't just limit ourselves travel content. But, you know, if we take a step back, that means all the travel data that's currently just in this soup off Internet out there, like we can start collecting that information and in turn into something more structured. So that's when I realized, I guess when I, you know, dreamed off of turnings or travel brief into something that's more broader than just our current mission. But of course, that, to me, is something that we're gonna do in, like, step to a Step three.

I think right now the problem that we're still trying to solve at this moment, there's still so much work that needs to be done, right? Like we're still at the very, very beginning off our journey of travel grief. That's, you know, I'm not even thinking about executing against, you know, the data part of it right now. Just thinking about how we get the best content, the most up to date content, and how do we get that William is actually exactly

Yeah, I kind of really like that. I mean, like, you really just, like, outlined the phases, but I really love that you guys, you know, like you know that there's both problems and, like, you know, getting information and like a consolidated source, but also having, like, business to be able to use that information. So I like how you guys have.

You know, the consumer facing is, you know, the community of people of like, people who travel to China until you like travel tips, you know, culture tips, but also that, you know, you're transitioning from the consumer to the enterprise solution where you allow APS to, you know, use this data for, like, whatever they need. Yes, so that's like a very,

very noble or like, I definitely wish you good luck there. Thanks. You know, I don't know if you want to travel, you know, like I feel like it's very reminiscent of, like, Airbnb of, You know, I hope I'm not butchering this, but it's like, you know, their models, like, belong anywhere.

And, you know, you're also trying to solve this mission of travel on places and feeling like, you know, not being a very touristy tourist. So, yeah, I wish you and your co founder like you also lots of success. I guess I think you answer this in like the question previous, but it's really resilient of you. Feel like, you know, find a percent since Tito, like, keep founding startups, whether or not they,

you know, they fail or, you know, do well. And I guess just like translating this into a question that I guess is more applicability to our users armed to our listeners. But like, you know, Steve today, Steve of 2020 what would you say? You know, to Steve, circa 2015 2014 like still founding charity. Or, like, you know, Steve working on huddle or Sphere and,

like, I guess, like translating that intellect, the people who are listening like, you know, the founders who are really heads down and, like, they don't know what's gonna happen to their, like, start up or they don't know what happened to their company. I guess in that I'm like it looks just looking for, like, what would you say to these people who are just like, you know, still building their company? And is there any advice, you know, from coming from like a repeat founder

of yourself? Man policy, like, you know, it's like I hate giving advice. Thing sounds really bad. Not because, like I wanna withhold, but just because I feel like everyone's situation is different, Like I just don't think there are some, like universal truths or universal loss out there that you discover and you can just even part your knowledge on other people, cause I think everyone, sir, journey is very different. But if I were to tell my old self what I would tell him all there's so many things. So I think first time foremost, I would tell the little Steve to not be so goal oriented all the time,

so I won't explain a little bit. So I think, as part of my, you know, training at consulting certainly and just part of my personality. I've always been super good about setting objectives and doing whatever it takes to achieve those objectives, and I think that's a good thing in general. But I think as a for a founder that could be very limiting because oftentimes got me very tunnel visioned. You know, I'm thinking back to the time when I was running charity, he often times got me very tunnel, visioned on a very limited number of things that I set out to Dio So you know, I would say, Hey, you know, these are my three things I'm gonna do this month or this week.

And I would spend all my time just executing against and to know everything else because I think everything else is distraction. That was good in a sense that you really helped us get a lot of things done. But we was also not good because he also led me to miss a lot of opportunities. And Roman, this wet come to appreciate about having a co founder is Rome was very different personality. He was mawr kind of receptive to things that are just floating out there. That doesn't necessarily, you know, accomplish any particulate objectives at the time. But as long as you keep engaging with that, he may turn into something and you can't plan for it. It just happened here a the perfect example being the dragons, then we never planned to be on Dragon stand. It was not something that we set out in our mission. Teoh. We're gonna be on Dragon saying,

you know, 2016 or whatever, We never said to do that, but it was just this chance conversation. Hey, he had with one of the producers at one of the random Christmas parties that he went to. I would have never gone to that Christmas party because I was traveling number one. But Toronto, I probably would never gone to that Christmas, Harvey. Guys like, Well, I got so many things to do. I need to finish A, B, C and D.

I don't have time to go to this Christmas party, so I think that's definitely wanted. Advice I'll give to my old self, and it's definitely something I've learning to do right now. I'm actively practicing it. That's number one. I think Number two is Just be calm. I think in general I think, you know, like nothing is ever as bad as it initially seems. And it's also never as good as you know. You hope right there so many situations inch Audi, where it felt like the end of the world's He felt like Oh my God, right, If this doesn't happen, we're screwed is the only solution is to do it this way.

We have to do with this way, but things usually not all the time, but things usually work out and I think I certainly when I was running charity, I certainly experienced too much out say off that emotional roller coaster where, like one day will be like literally Monday morning. I'll be like, Oh my God, everything's awesome like our sales growing. There's, like, 10 just new sign ups just now and then by Tuesday afternoon, I'd be like, Oh, my God, we're gonna crash by the end of the week. It was every little thing that happened.

It was just I would take a linear extrapolation and say, This is we're gonna end up at. But in reality, that's never the case, right? In reality, most things are gonna work out as long as you keep at it. But also like, don't indulge yourself in too much of the optimistic thinking because nothing is also the flip side. Right is nothing's ever as good as you hope it would be. So that's definitely the second thing, and I can go on. I haven't you wanted to year, but, you know, I would just leave it at three.

I think the third thing is, just be honest with yourself, right? It's I think, when you hope things would turn out a certain way. It's very easy to look for any cues in any justifications. That kind of supports the answer you want to see, and a lot of times just helps. Just sleep on something and, you know, you wake up, and when you're not in the zone and think about, does that still make sense when you wake up like, What's your gut feeling about it when you first wake up after you thought about it a lot. And that's the thing I started doing. Is not everything can be solved rationally,

right? Like my approach right now is, I would rationally think through a problem. But then I wouldn't. I would never make a decision right then and there, right, I would think about it a lot and then I was stopped and that would do something else. I literally just go to bed or something, and then a couple of days later, I'll just think about the problem again and try to observe what's my gut feeling after I've already thought about it. So I think that helps me in just being honest with myself, because if it truly is not good, I think like my gut would tell me after I thought about it a lot. Bobby is like your first reaction, right? If you have never thought about it,

don't trust that because, you know, you haven't thought about the pros and cons like you don't even know the factors. But once you've thought about it thoroughly, great, then trust your gut reaction, but not right in. And then you have to take yourself out of the situation. Distract yourself, do think about something else and then come back to it. So I would say those are the three things you know. Like if I could meet my old self and tell him to start doing sooner like I probably would tell those three things by having list goes on.

Yeah, Steve, I definitely think that's like advice. That's good for me. Advice for any other founder, you know, on the face of the planet out there. And it's definitely something that I haven't, you know, heard for the first time. Whether it be, you know, like advice from other founders on the podcast or like other people in general and like, you know, I guess in the hustle bustle of Silicon Valley where they kind of say the same thing of, like, you know,

finding yourself some work, life balance, finding yourself, some not being too, you know, tunnel vision. Finding yourself some way to not be too serious or like impulsive about decisions. Yeah, the final question I have like, I know you know, you made a plug for your friends escape room business earlier on the episode. But if you'd like to, you know, plug yourself, You know where you are socially, where our listeners confined you. Now is

the time, sure. So I'm not super active on social media. But, you know, I think everyone's always welcome to Abdominal Lincoln having a renewable and the main project working on right now is the travel brief, and I can mention that's on a very early stage. Right now, it's growing rapidly. We're hoping to get you about somewhere between 500,000 1,000,000 monthly active readers by the end of the year and grow from there. So, you know, check out travel brief at the travel brief dot com. And, yeah, that's the to channel. So linked in and the travel brief. Anyone who wants to talk to me or wants to email me are welcome to do so.

Absolutely. And I'll definitely link those two, you know, done below. But, Steve, thank you again. Thank you so much for being on. You know, this episode I definitely had a good time. And I think, you know, I learned at least you know, 10 20 things that I'm definitely gonna like. Foot into

my pleasure. Thanks.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. That was another episode of the failure podcast. Thank you for listening. We have a lot of more of these episodes coming and stick around. Thank you for tuning into this episode of the Filori podcast. I've been Brandon Honda Co. And once more I'd like to think our friends over at a KD um, for making this episode possible. If you think you could benefit from a hand in marketing and sales, make sure to check out their tool, which connects businesses with marketing students for three month internships. Redeem your $50 discount just for being a Hillary podcast listener at Philly dot com slash get slash Arcadium.