Hey, what's up dude, how's it going?
What's going on man?
I got a question for you.
It's based on this Washington Post article that I read this past weekend.
Hey, what's going on Josh?
Hey, what's up Josh?
Hey.
Actually, you're in time for a question that I've got for actually both of you.
I just read this Washington Post article this past weekend.
The article is the happiest, least stressful, most meaningful jobs on earth.
It was a survey and it surveyed basically every job and kind of categorized them.
So either of you take this one.
What do you think is the single most stressful, least happy job on earth?
And this is mostly, think of American jobs.
The least happy, most stressful?
I don't know, like a police officer?
A teacher?
It's lawyer.
A lawyer.
Okay.
Okay.
Josh, what do you think is the least stressful and happiest and most meaningful?
I don't know.
Not a teacher, I don't think, because being a teacher is pretty stressful.
I don't know, like being maybe someone that does volunteer work or working with charities
or something.
I'm not sure.
Josh, what do you got?
Children's book author?
Yeah.
Children's book author.
Very anxious.
No, neither of you.
You're not even in the right segment.
It is a lumberjack and or a farmer.
Either of those.
Okay.
Yeah.
People working outside, working with their hands and nature.
I can see that.
It's like, they don't necessarily go into why, but it's like, Cortland, you've read
that book Drive, right?
Which is like one of the motivations behind finding pleasure at work.
And if you think about an attorney, you don't really have that much autonomy, right?
You're kind of like in this big machine, you're kind of disconnected.
It's not very meaningful.
You're playing whatever side of the field you need to play.
But lumberjack farmer, it's extremely purposeful.
You kind of know exactly what you need to do.
I don't know.
Maybe we should all rethink our jobs because technical fields like what we're in also
aren't super high on that list.
I see.
I pulled up the graphic.
It's this Washington Post article called the happiest, least stressful, most meaningful
jobs on earth.
And it's not lumberjack, it's specifically people in the agriculture, logging, and forestry
industry have the highest happiness of any industry and the most meaning and purpose
of any industry and the least stress.
So they want literally every single category, which is pretty crazy.
They do double-click into that and it's lumberjack is among them, lumberjacks and farmers are
the ones that are like.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, and agriculture.
And I think it's honestly, it's like humans, we evolved to be outside in nature and literally
none of these other industries are that, right?
Like public administration, educational services, educational services is the most stressful.
It's the highest on stress and also the second highest on meaning and purpose.
So yeah, it seems it seems crazy.
Maybe we're in the wrong industry.
Makes sense to me.
Yeah.
Like the fact that like the things outside of their control are really literally just
the environment.
So they're like, okay, it's going to rain.
Like no one's, you're not going to stress over, it's like, can't get the job done.
It's raining.
Or it's not raining.
I can't farm today.
Whatever that type of thing is where all these other ones, lawyers or whatever, it's like,
yeah, think of how many people could be pulling you in a direction you don't want to go.
Like the forces of other people, like it's all other people.
Yeah.
Startup founder, like these investors won't give me money.
Like indie hacker, like my users will not pay for my products like that is stress.
It's also like the status game, right?
Like if you're a lumberjack, like people aren't walking around like flashing shiny watches,
like, Hey, you know, when are you going to get your Lamborghini?
Right.
Whereas if you're a lawyer, what was that?
Um, American Psycho.
I don't know if either of you guys saw that movie, but it's like, yeah, they, they all,
everyone in the office like freaks out about like who has the flashiest, most expensive
business card.
Like that's the only thing that characters like obsess over.
Josh, we should introduce you to the audience while we're talking about business cards.
You are Josh Ho, you're an indie hacker and the founder of a company called Referral Rock,
which is very successful.
But what I love about your story is that you didn't just like knock that out of the park
on your first try.
You actually did another business where you sort of tasted defeat.
You went all in on that business, you quit your full time job, et cetera, and you eventually
had to set it down and then you started Referral Rock and now you're crushing it.
You're making, you don't show your exact revenue numbers, but I know you're making more than
$2 million in annual recurring revenue and you started this as completely solo and bootstrapped.
So I'm pretty excited to talk about like how you, how you did that cause that's kind of
where everybody wants to be.
Chang, you want to describe Referral Rock?
I think you read a little bit more about like how it works.
Yeah.
So, so let's say that you run a business, obviously you want to grow the business, you
want to do marketing and the most effective form of marketing is word of mouth, right?
Because like my ads that I put out for my, for my company, like they don't have that
much credibility.
Of course I want you to buy my, my product.
But if someone's best friend refers it, like that's a really high credibility form of marketing.
But the problem is you can't necessarily control when your customers like refer your product
to other people.
And so that's where Referral Rock comes in because if I sign up for Referral Rock, then
I get these tools that help to prompt my users to share the product with their friends.
Like it gives incentives for them to promote the product.
Things like gift cards and PayPal payouts, product giveaways, that kind of thing.
What we kind of call it is like a, like a proactive word of mouth, right?
So the word of mouth is already going to go.
And people of course are like, I want my organic word of mouth.
I want my just general product loops and word of mouth for just people to be talking about
my stuff because it's awesome.
But you know, it's, it's really no different than when you look at marketing automation
and sales enablement and all these types of things.
It's like, how can you now take what was lots of little steps, calling someone, asking for
a referral, emailing, all that type of stuff.
But how do you wrap that into you know, doing some automation around it, doing some proactive
outreach that isn't sleazy, that the whole like, Hey, put your friend's name here.
Or, you know, everyone had that Mary Kay friend or someone that was doing some info marketing
types of stuff.
It's like, okay, great.
This is awesome.
Now put five friends' names in there.
It's like, nah, nah, nah.
Sell out my friends that way.
Right.
So yeah.
I love the idea because I think there's a really simple concept at the core of it that
would be helpful for people to know.
Actually I gave a talk a few years back called how to get lucky.
It's on YouTube.
I talked about how success in any domain often comes down to like, you know, there's luck
component, but you can control your luck.
And one of the components of controlling your luck is literally just asking people to help
you.
Like, I'll tell you a story.
For example, my friend, Linh Thai learned how to code and less than a year later, like
somebody gave her a job offer for like a hundred dollars an hour to like be a contractor.
And a lot of people will be like, Oh, she's so lucky.
You know, like I can't believe like somebody came with that offer.
But what she did was after she learned how to code, she told everybody that she knew
that she had learned how to code and she was available for hire and here's what she could
do.
And she just told like a hundred people that and then suddenly she got quote unquote lucky
that somebody was like, okay, here's a job.
Right.
And I think that's kind of like what referral rock is.
It's basically telling people, Hey, it's not good enough just to build a good product and
hope your customers share it.
Like you actually need to ask them to share it.
Like that can get a lot of people over the edge and here's like a bunch of useful tools
to help you do that better.
Where does your story start?
I mean, you've been an indie hacker for a while, you've been a founder for a while.
How did you get into this?
Cause everybody comes at it from like a different, a different place and very few people I think
end up as successful as you.
So like, how did, how do you think like your life before becoming a founder sort of shaped
how you've approached it?
I mean, I was always sort of the more bet on myself type of mentality person.
Like where, you know, even like in school type of stuff, it was like, Oh, you know,
I could just study a little bit enough to get the B or I could study like 10 times more
or five times more to get the A. And it was just like, eh, it's always optimizing for
like that efficiency.
And then I'll also be like, man, I don't want to do it that way.
I want to, I want to try something else.
I'm willing to, I'm willing to fall on my face and not make the grade because I took
a shot at something else.
So I did a couple of weird things like after college, like I went out to Tahoe and worked
on a ski lift even after I had an engineering degree, just because it was like, eh, you
know what?
I want to, I want to try something else.
It's almost like a, these train tracks set out from society that basically are like,
here's what you need to do.
Like you need to get this grade or you need to get this job.
And somehow you had this confidence of like, actually I could do it this other way and
think it through and not follow the success, like the sort of prescribed train tracks and
it'll still be okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I did take an engineering job eventually.
And so I did do, you know, I did electrical engineering and then I did so, you know, I
got into coding and previous to that and just was working for software companies.
But even alongside that, I started like a car business on the side back when, before
Fast and the Furious made everything really cool.
Well, actually around that time because of it, it was like doing aftermarket car work.
So I had a partner that did all the stuff, but I was like, Ooh, cool.
I can make the website.
I could do all these other things.
So I was doing that while I was having an engineering job as well.
So that's probably my first like entrepreneurial endeavor that was truly kind of outside the
normal day-to-day scope.
That's so interesting to me because I relate to the first part of your story.
I relate to, I was in school, I was kind of a pretty smart guy, but I would phone it in.
Like I have a good buddy to this day and we still talk about how we would like get home.
We were college roommates, we'd get home and we'd like brag about getting an A minus or
B plus and saying like, look, dude, I studied for like 30 minutes while on the bus to that.
Like that was who I was all the way throughout college.
But I didn't have that sense that like, I knew that I didn't want to be on the tracks,
but I didn't have the sense that like there was a place off of the tracks that I could
like take this.
I was like, okay, well eventually I'm going to have to get my shit together, get a nine
to five and like play ball with everyone else.
But you got off the tracks early and it seems like you were already kind of getting into
entrepreneurship and like trying to build your own sites and maybe even make money.
Dude, I remember after college you wanted to, you moved me to San Francisco and you
definitely felt like you had to get a nine to five job, but you also wanted to like write
a book and you spent like four months just writing this book with like no real effort
put into finding a job.
So you had like this like kind of dual personality where you wanted to like not follow the prescribed
path, but you also didn't have a plan for how you're going to finance it.
Exactly.
So you eventually had to get a job, but like you were like, if you could have done it anyway,
you would have just read your book and published it and probably made no money and then had
to get a job.
But like ideally you would have made a lot of money.
I was in the wrong industry.
Like if you want to write a novel, that's not a great business.
If you want to make it a good business, okay, like you could write like thrillers or like
commercial fiction romance novels like with a bunch of like smut and then apparently kill
it these days.
But I was like trying to write like the next James Joyce, you know, Cormac McCarthy, like
high brow stuff that even writing stuff that makes zero dollars, even for the people who
are famous, they are like firefighters on the side.
So like, yeah, it's just that the thing that I chose to be sort of an entrepreneur in is
the kind of thing where there was only a dead end there.
Yeah, to answer your question, Channing, it was it was definitely this like bet on myself
thing.
But I think because I'd seen it before, it wasn't necessarily intentional.
But like my parents, my dad was an engineer, he actually worked at Bell Labs in the early
like Unix days.
So it was kind of cool.
But but so he was always on the tech side.
But seeing all the other activities seeing that like I had, I got burned in my first
corporate intern internship.
So I wanted to work for a really small company.
So that first engineering job, I was like, like, you know, engineer number two.
And so it's interesting seeing that stuff from the ground up and the activity.
So seeing how small that I think the company might have been 20 people at the time.
So seeing that as like, I'm, I'm not that far from the fire, right.
And it's like, I don't think it's that far from here.
And it was.
And that's also what kind of led me again, is like, I think I could do this, actually,
the ideas I'm doing work here, the product things I'm doing work here, if I was like,
out there, I could kind of write the whole enchilada.
Yeah.
Did you did you look up to like any indie hackers or any like founders who were out
there like crushing it because I know a lot of software engineers, like I worked in the
company as sort of a contractor years and years ago.
And I was kind of a freelancer.
But I always wanted to do like another startup.
And I talked to the other engineers.
And they would just look at me with like these big googly eyes, like, how could you go out
and do a startup on your own?
What does that even like?
Like, people aren't necessarily aware that that's a path that they can take?
I'm probably older than you think.
So this is all the stories I'm telling is like, you look like a young guy.
I'm now I'm, I'm in my 40s.
I'm 45.
Okay, yeah, you get 10 years old.
So but it was like, so this was early 2000s when all this stuff was happening.
So I can't even think of what, like the things that inspired me.
I was reading the Who's that the guy that did plenty of fish?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, that he kills like, yeah, so there's like stuff like that, that made you go, Okay,
this is a one person engineer that built a competitor to, you know, match.com and all
these other things.
And he was like raking on Google ads, right?
So but it was this honky rinky dink.net site that was just horrible to look at.
But it, it helped people find dates and whatnot, and just ran it on ads.
So like, that was probably one of the ones I remember going like, Oh, this is this is
possible.
Right?
And, you know, what wasn't even called the indie hacker then, but you know, he's probably
one of the early ones.
Yeah, it was like the Craigslist of dating websites, like hacked together by one person
making like, I think, like, literally 10s of hundreds of millions of dollars looked
like crap.
It was barely even worked.
And like, I think everybody who read that was like, his name is Marcus friend.
Everybody who read that story was like, shit, I could, I could do better than that.
And then probably want to make a dating app that failed.
So how did you, how did you get to the point where you started referral rock?
I mean, referral rock is the business you have right now, you're killing it again, making
over $2 million a year in revenue.
Even just a few years ago, I read an interview that you did where you talked about the path
to getting to $70,000 a month in revenue, which is a huge milestone that I think a lot
of people will love to hit.
How did that process start?
What's the first step you took to even just coming up with the idea for something like
that?
Uh, I mean, it did hit me in a lull, like after I burned out of the first startup, which
we don't have to go into terrible details, but just, you'll, you'll probably know this
story in general because it was a notes app.
I know you joke constantly on the notes, apps, dating apps, to do lists, like stuff like
that, that are just classic traps first, everyone's first itch, right?
So at the, at that time, to be honest, it was, it was competing with, like, it was,
it was launched on the same time Evernote was, so it wasn't terrible.
It was early in the market enough that it wasn't a trope at that time.
It could have worked.
It could have, it could have, but I did get a little bit of funding for that.
I did get some more feet wet in the tech entrepreneurship side.
And also I stumbled into SEO then too.
So like we ranked number one for online notes.
So it was pretty crazy that I understood that, that like, that was my biggest takeaway.
I was like, okay, don't sell to consumers for like trying to be $5 a month, but sell
to businesses, but hey, this SEO thing kind of brought in people automatically.
So let me double down on that.
So that was like hunting for the, that was, became my like framing for it.
It was like sell something to businesses that can do SEO and bring in people that, that
I can do the quote unquote indie hacker dream of just sitting back and building a product
and letting people get in.
So I always have a ton of ideas and it's just about kind of putting them into different
buckets, whether it's throwaway or obviously buying a domain name's that next step.
But this one came in when honestly I was just like watching a car dealership and someone
walked in and said, hey, a friend referred me and I would go, how does that work?
Like you see Dropbox, you see PayPal, you see all the digital ones, how's it work in
the offline world?
So quick Google search and buying a domain, let it sit in my brain for a few months, then
took an old code project and kind of converted it into that.
I like that you said you took a no code project, right?
Because you had a background in as a software engineer.
What was that like even at that step, was that something that you picked up from your
previous company that you, you know, you're just going to kind of quickly get something
out there and not over invest in it.
Oh, actually I said old code, not no code, but your, your point is the same.
So it was like, I took an old project that I had, which was, I forgot what it was even
called, but it was like a, it was sort of a landing page type of thing.
And what I ended up doing was converted that project into referral rock.
So it was basically like a layout for a landing page type of thing.
And I think I actually decided to not even build a database because I was tired of like
building full schemas and then never really getting them off the ground.
So I literally used like a, you know, I think it was like an XML resource file as my quote
unquote database for the first, I think maybe 20 customers or 20, 20 pilot users.
And I used SurveyMonkey as the admin interface.
So they basically said, upload.
I was like, look, you can upload your logo, tell me what you want to, you know, you're,
you want the referral reward to be put all the copy in here.
And then I exported it out, just converted it to an XML file and then just like put it
up on the server.
So that was it.
There was no retention of saving customer data or anything.
It was just like a way to templatize from an old code version that got me out the ground
to have, to see if I can get, you know, 10, 10 people to put up a referral program site.
So what's going through your mind at this point?
Cause I know like, for example, when I started indie hackers, I was just thinking, I want
to make enough money to pay my rent.
And other people, when they start their business, like we just talked to someone a few weeks
ago, who was like, I want to make $5 million a year for my business.
What's going through your mind when you're putting together this like very minimal product
and trying to research how referrals work?
I mean, it was like, how can I, how can I just get people to pay for this, like on a
recurring basis?
So it was not necessarily like a huge mark.
I think at the point in time, this was past the burnout of the last startup.
This is around the time, like I got married, I started having kids.
So I had two kids then very young and I was doing a little bit of software consulting
on the side and just waiting for that next idea to kind of start.
So it was one of those ones where I was still like held up from a financial standpoint by
the, by the consulting work.
So it was not like I needed to make this, make or break this right away, or I had to
go get a regular job or something like that.
So I had enough like consulting income from software development to hold that up.
But I was like, could this be the train that then I don't have to work for other people
anymore and I could just do, just do my own thing.
So that was my friend.
And I'm also curious, like, can you teach us what you learned?
Like I, I've also heard the story of like the Dropbox referral program, there's a lot
of tech businesses that have referral programs, but you said you went to like a car dealership
or something and you learned about their referral programs, which presumably are very different.
And you thought, oh, I could bring this to the, to the digital world.
Like what do brick and mortar businesses do to get this word of mouth referral that like
tech companies don't do that got you so excited?
Well that's what started actually the idea and what I didn't even know at the time, it's,
it stumbled me into like strong positioning, right?
Because the first thing I Google searched after that was like, who's doing it for these
people?
Cause you could find companies like a friend buy or these other ones that would do digital
ones that were very e-commerce based.
And the thing I noticed was like, no one was doing it for all these other ones.
I was like, the mechanic is the same.
It's you're having a person go out there advocating for you.
And as long as you can attribute it to the right person, you can figure out rewards and
that type of stuff.
So I realized there was a gap in the market and no one was doing that.
No one was doing it that they could talk to CRMs.
No one was making it simple enough for a small business versus like e-commerce checkout,
give a friend a coupon, you get a coupon type of stuff.
So when I started in that direction, it led me down all these people asking for different
types of things.
And it made it, made it apparent it didn't have to be just a very transactional type
of thing.
And it led into all kinds of other tunnels, like weird stuff where you, people are like,
I want to add people's name to this.
I want to trade referrals with other people.
And at some point it'd be like, yeah, I, let me, let me hone this down, down a certain
path.
The mechanic is not that much different than the big guys, but when you do look at Dropbox,
what their traits are, it's very tightly coupled to the product, right?
Like the growth they got was, I think it was like, you get, you know, 500 megabytes extra.
I get 500 megabytes extra.
So it's told a story within that.
And then I think their biggest thing is, you know, it became like a, a viral hook for it.
Now that doesn't mean it's viral for everyone.
It's just, you know, that, that, that alignment I think is what, what made it work.
I'm curious how you got even like, you know, even before you got to the point where people
were asking for this feature and that feature and you're, you know, sort of narrowing down
the viral component.
You mentioned that you had some pilot users, like what did you even do to get it into the
hands of pilot users?
How did you know, for example, like which segment of people this might even fit with?
Like what were your next steps after you built like the super dressed down like Excel spreadsheet
as a database version of the, of the app?
I did the things at that time.
I think it was like beta list.
I think I like did a beta list launches, you know, pre, pre product hunt days.
So I did one of those.
I got some people, I started writing like some janky SEO based articles to kind of get
some traffic.
And eventually it just had enough that it was getting maybe five, 10 people signing
up a week of, of general interest.
But the early parts of that was, uh, I was quick to get on the phone with people or get
on a, wasn't even zoom is like WebEx or some other things, mostly because I would get annoyed
with people chatting.
So it'd be like, Oh, how do I do this?
I'm like, ah, let me just show you.
This is so annoying.
Let's just get on a screen share of something.
And that, that became a bigger, a lock because you got to hear what the value meant to people.
And you talk to like, I think one of the bigger first companies I talked to was this water
filtration company.
And a light bulb really went on when they came in and said, Oh yeah, if you can just
get us like three or four referrals, like a month, uh, and we're going to pay $500 per
referral payout to the, to the person that did the referring, like this is, this is going
to be gold.
And I was like, what?
Like you're, and it just, the light came on how much they would be willing to pay for
that.
And then they asked if I could do gift card fulfillment and I'm like, uh, let me get back
to you.
And then coded that in a weekend and then came back with like an integration that could
do the gift card.
So I'm like, I was like, Oh, and we saw the price changed from like a hundred dollars
to like $300.
I'm like, yeah.
They're like, that's Oh, that makes sense.
Cool.
Yeah.
We'll, we'll take that.
It was like, what?
Well, I have to, I have to like highlight this point.
So, and you also mentioned this, uh, you did a, uh, an interview with us and you mentioned
the exact same thing that you didn't like talking and I don't think anyone honestly
does like talking to customers through like a chat widget.
And just out of sheer annoyance, you're like, okay, let me just do like a screen share or
like do a call where I have, it almost sounded like you were like, let me just like streamline
this.
Like you didn't have, it seems a strategy in mind for like building your product.
You're like, let me just make this less annoying.
But then you mentioned that you quadrupled by just having this, these calls, you quadrupled
the amount of people that you converted from a free trial to like them being paid, which
is such a subtle and really important thing because I think a lot of people that are indie
hackers relate to me in the sense that like, I love building cool things.
I don't necessarily love like going and doing customer support and like marketing and talking
to people necessarily.
Right.
Like just make the thing cool and get it out there.
But it seems that transitioning to what a lot of people find to be the most uncomfortable
part was a huge boon for you in the beginning.
Yeah.
And it probably got down to like a different type of annoyance.
Like where was my pain threshold?
It was more painful for me to sit there waiting for them to chat back and like having a single
threaded conversation that it would be to just like, let me just help them and they'll
be done and get out of here.
What about funding in the early days?
Like I assume this was just you doing, wearing every hat as a founder, which you kind of
have to do early on because it's hard to hire and if you don't have a co-founder, it's just
you.
But how did you afford to do this?
Like, did you have a job?
Were you living off of your savings because it's like kind of stressful to run a company
when you like, I mean, you had just gotten married.
I'm sure your wife was like, Hey, you know, like, is this like, what's, what's up with
you financially?
How did you fund all this stuff?
It was from like the, I think I mentioned consulting a little earlier.
So I had, after I, that started burned and then I did some consulting and I started and
I had probably like two or three clients that were, had a steady enough work.
And fortunately enough, like my wife only knew me to never have a real job.
So it was kind of that ongoing joke when she brought me home, it was just like to her,
her parents, it was like, Oh, here's, here's my fiance that, you know, is, is like unemployed.
And at that time I was like working at my own startup and kind of doing some other things.
So I had a knack for at least picking up a couple of relationships and doing some other
coding once people knew my other stuff wasn't working.
So
One of the things I think that I've seen you post about on any hackers and that we talked
about a little bit is that your business is kind of like part of your family now.
You've got a couple of kids, I think, and they've only ever known you as like dad who
works from home on his own indie hacker business, you know, like they have not seen you going
to work, which I think is like a very cool concept.
Like me and Channing, like our mom was also an entrepreneur.
So we grew up basically watching her carve out her own path in the world and like do
her own thing.
And our dad was like a little bit similar.
He was like part of this elite crew of like furniture builders.
There was like 10 of them and he would finish the furniture.
Somebody would design it, somebody would cut it, somebody would build it and they just
did their own thing.
How do you think about that with your kids and your family?
Like, do you want to intentionally set this example for your kids that they can be sort
of their own, you know, entrepreneur?
Do you care?
Do you want them to follow any path?
Because I just, I think this is something that doesn't get talked about enough as entrepreneurs
is like, what do we do with the next generation?
I definitely want them to follow their path, but I also want them to be like, know what's
possible, right?
Like know that.
And I think they're already probably seeing it as a, as a first like case example, because
not only me, but my wife also started her own business as well.
She was a nurse previously.
So she kind of stumbled into that as well.
Like now she has her own yoga business.
So our basement's converted.
She does that.
She does online ones.
She does it converted over the course of the pandemic.
Now she's like a hybrid subscription business.
Like it's pretty cool.
So my kids got to see all that and we'll eventually have to face this argument one day, but like
I'm kind of of the notion that's like, if they don't want to go to college, they don't
have to go to college.
My wife is not on board with that train yet, but, but in terms of like what we're doing
and, and honestly, my, my daughter even just, she's 11 and just started her own YouTube
channel.
Cause she watched a couple of creators like doing crafts and things like that.
It's already seeping in a bit.
And I don't know if it's necessarily from us, but I think she's just actually finding
the things she likes to do and finding like, like, Ooh, I can do that.
We never told her any of that.
It was just like, she wrote down this past October, she's like, my new year's resolution
is to post a video of like a YouTube video a week.
We're like, okay.
I just can't.
It came right.
How old is she?
So she's 11.
Wow.
So you like helping her with the marketing?
No, she doesn't really want any help.
Like, so she's, she's 11.
She wants nothing to do with you guys.
So she's been, you know, right now it's, you know, end of end of January and she's already
has like three videos up.
It's cool.
She takes my old, like GoPro type of thing.
And she does these little ones with all her, like she they're cooking ones now.
So she'll like pick a recipe she bakes and she does like, you know, it might be half
an hour's worth of recording and she's figured out a video editor.
She plays with this, like that default one that comes with windows.
It's just like video, just called literally like video editor.
I've tried to get her to use something else, but she's, she's against that, but she cuts
them up.
She cuts them down to like five minute videos and, and I'm like, Oh, you should you know,
put a thumbnail.
She's like, Nope, don't want to do it.
Like don't want to put a title on it.
Don't want, I'm like, okay, all right, backing up.
So she does all these things on her own and it's, it's pretty cool watching a little creator
in action.
Yeah.
That point about college, I'm like so on board with like kids don't necessarily need to go
to college.
Channing and I have, it was like a friend, a friend of our families who has been having
a lot of trouble in college recently.
And our mom was like, Hey, can you, can you talk to him?
You know, like he's not really doing good in school, like, you know, give him a pep
talk cause like school is so important.
He needs to do great in college and he's racking up all this debt to be in college.
And I started asking about like different parts of his life and it turns out like he's
not in the best shape.
His health is suffering a little bit.
He's pretty lonely, doesn't have a lot of friends.
He's not very happy and he's been dealing with some depression, right?
And everyone in his life is just focused on like school, right?
But he needs to do well in school and it's all about school.
And I'm sitting here thinking like, well, I have a lot of friends who went to great
schools and they are not happy, right?
And like if somebody can like, if you could imagine someone's life as like being much
more well-rounded where they have a lot of friends, they have a great partnership with
somebody, they have very fulfilling relationships, they're healthy, they're mentally healthy
and happy.
And then they like, let's say they work as like a janitor and make, you know, 50k a year.
That's a great life.
If your life is great in every way and you like aren't super focused on your career,
I think that's awesome.
It's weird to me that we as a society get so focused on like judging and assessing the
success of someone's life only along this like professional educational dimension.
Did you mention to him you should maybe look into being a lumberjack?
Well, now after this episode, we have the ace card to send his way.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm not the hacker to you.
Like the fact that you, you know, you've got kids and they're saying you do this thing.
I love working with people that I love to work with, right?
There's this kind of like this sort of mantra that, oh, you know, you've got your hobbies
and your career and your health and your family and you got to like pick two or three of them
because you can't do all of them.
I'm like, well, why can't you just work with the people that you love?
Like I work with my brother.
It's awesome.
I started an Airbnb with my girlfriend.
It's awesome.
I'm just getting kind of all of the things, you know, like one of your kids wants to take
over the family business.
Like that would be cool too because now you're working with people that you love and you're
sort of getting everything rather than just, you know, maybe you're not as happy as a lumberjack,
but like you're pretty happy as insofar as entrepreneurs go, I think if you can work
with the people that you like.
So let's get back to your story because we sort of left off in the beginning where you're
sort of scrappy and you're trying to figure out, you know, how to get this thing off the
ground and you're talking, you're having some wins and some hits.
What happened next?
Like how did you actually scale up to the point where you're making revenue?
Because as I understand it, you spent like quite a long time without any real sales and
with like pretty slow, slow growth, which a lot of founders find themselves in.
How did you sort of get yourself out of those doldrums?
I mean, the slow part was probably more in that early part, like after I started talking
to people on the phone or over webinars and that type of stuff, it was it, the constraints
were mostly on my time.
So I'd like split my days, you know, half had set my schedule to be like, okay.
In Calendly, you can set up and talk to me for this amount of time or that amount of
time.
And every other day there'd be probably like a four hour block.
And then I'd still have to code and do other marketing endeavors, other, you know, advance
the product, make do on the promises I made as a lame salesperson going like, oh yeah,
I could do that.
I'm like, oh crap, now I got to code that.
So it was mostly a constraint on me.
So I did try to start hiring salespeople and eventually I got lucky enough to stumble upon
someone actually, I got really lucky.
So this is probably also often not as normal indie hacker path, but I kind of had a later
co-founder join, right?
So this was definitely, you know, past 10 to 15 K MRR I was doing by myself.
So I could afford somebody to help.
And I found someone that used to be a founder that never kind of got to product market fit,
was coming off his last startup and he hit me at the right time.
He like messaged me on LinkedIn and said, Hey, let's see your, have a sales like job
open and you know, I'm interested.
And I'm like, okay, well, so we talked about it and I was in enough pain after my first
horrible sales hire went wrong that I was like, here, just, can I just route these schedules
to you?
Cause I don't want to go back into queue.
I'm working on other stuff.
I just, if you can handle these, like you're hired, he's like, he joked, he's like, well,
if this works, you know, is some equity on the table.
And I'm like, sure, if you could take, if you could take this pain away, you know, and
he he's a great guy and he still, and so to this day, like, you know, this is five, six
years ago.
So he's still with me as basically my co-founder, but I didn't go on a hunt.
I didn't go put out listings.
I didn't go.
I it's, it found me and right.
Like the luck happens also when you have that surface area, but that was a big unlock that
led to us scaling a sales team, scaling and onboarding and services team.
Cause as we still watched the requests come in and what people needed and were really
adaptive to that, you know, people needed help setting up their program.
So it became an onboarding customer success thing.
We basically were doing inbound sales.
So how do we convert that to go from one sales person to two or three and that type of stuff.
So it really got me early on the ramp of like more of a relying on people as a big part
of it, rather than just pure, you know, self-service and product led types of motions.
Man.
I love that.
I love like the irony of you were looking for a salesperson and then the guy that you
got ultimately sold himself.
Right.
Like, I mean, it, it sounds like, you know, you didn't, you weren't looking for a co-founder
that was, that was really just him upselling.
And so his success at getting the job was also like him proving that he was like worthy
of the job.
Right.
And I didn't know enough about him at that time.
So it was still like, you know, Hey, let's wait three, four months before we like ratify
all this stuff.
But it was like, he proved himself.
So he put his money where his mouth was, you know, and, and it worked.
And I don't know where it would be without him honestly, at that time.
Cause like a lot of the scaling pain, he runted just as much load as I did, um, throughout
kind of since then in terms of more of the people management, more of building up these
other teams where I got to focus on product and marketing, I kind of viewed it as like,
I get to do the bookends and you get to do that kind of messy middle in between.
I think one of the challenges of starting like a SaaS business is that it's typically
takes a long time to get it off the ground.
There's like a kind of a big movement for indie hackers to start with an info product,
like, you know, write an ebook or start building an audience or just like, you know, start
a newsletter, something where you can just start making sales on day one.
Cause all you're doing is writing content.
And if you do SaaS, you know, it's going to be this long slog of a year and a half, two
years before you make any money whatsoever and you can put your job, et cetera.
When you look back on the early days of referral rock, are there things you would have done
differently to sort of ramp up more quickly?
For example, like, would you have had a co-founder from day one or any other decisions you could
have made to just get it going faster?
Honestly, I probably would have gotten a product person faster.
Like, and that was one of the later, like, if you think about having some other people
with like strong leadership, right?
Like I got a product person only probably about two years ago, but I was still fledging
between all the different hats, all the different jobs and probably just neglecting that side
way too much.
Right?
Like it was sort of, we had this machine going of the salespeople selling and the service
people onboarding and all of that stuff, but the product did start to suffer when my time
started to get split.
And I think I have a good design sense, but not a great design sense, or at least even
to stick with it long enough.
So once the product started to get longer, the tooth, right?
So it's V1 UIs and stuff like that.
When the bootstrap themes I picked from back five, seven years ago, it started to look
really dated.
Then it's like, oh, that's going to take some level of rigor to kind of redo those interfaces
and do those types of things.
So I would have focused more on the UI a lot earlier, because honestly, as much as I want
to complain like, hey, it's engineered really well, the scheme is great, the models are
great, but then you go and look and it's like, yeah, but it's like, it could use a paint
job or this looks like that avocado green colored refrigerator or whatever at that point.
So I feel like we've got this gap in your story where on one hand, you had this early
struggling place where you're wearing all the other hats, and then eventually later
you're hiring all these people and perhaps hiring in not the ideal order, but you've
had enough money to basically bring on a team, and this is a bootstrap business.
I think most indie hackers have trouble with getting from point A to point B. How do you
scale up a business from just yourself, you know, you're having these early customer
interviews to the point where you can afford to pay yourself money and be comfortable,
let alone hire anybody else.
And so I'm curious for you, what were some of the milestones that you hit in that period?
What were some of the biggest obstacles you hit going from just you to the point where
you can make your first hire?
For whatever reason, that early SEO seeded enough and enough incoming interest, right?
And I think the fact that I moved that price point up early in the life cycle, like this
was probably six months after charging.
It went from a $59 a month price point to I think like the two cheapest plans, it used
to be like 59, and then within six months, the cheapest play was 150.
And that I learned through the talking to people, so I didn't necessarily need a massive
amount of volume, right?
It was still a steady, I think I mentioned maybe like five, 10 a week, and then it was
like five, 10 a day from SEO, and I also, the early positioning of we were the only
ones doing this type of thing for not ecommerce businesses.
So if you look at the market out there of like, car dealerships, yoga instructors, all
these other things, there were a lot of people that could use a referral program that solutions
didn't exist.
Everyone was building ecommerce checkout coupon-based programs and that type of stuff.
So I think I got lucky in hitting a reasonable amount of unaddressed market space that it
wasn't a brand new category, it was something everyone was familiar with.
But then like, oh, but no one does it for us, and really no one's talking about it.
I got lucky in the area, and then there was enough there, and then moved the price point
up quick enough that I stumbled into something.
So I'm gonna try to just summarize your early story just to make sure you got it.
So essentially, you did a lot of blogging and writing early on that sort of people were
able to find on Google, and so you had this SEO channel where people were sort of automatically
just finding you.
And because you were in this niche that was kind of underserved at the time, you hit this
window where like people weren't really targeting these businesses with referral programs, you
kind of stood out, SEO worked, and then people would come in, you would like literally talk
to them, get them on the phone, show them the product, and sort of do sales early on,
and eventually the engine was working.
You're building the right features that people were asking for, and they were buying directly
from you, and then you sort of jacked up the prices, which is a great move.
Like, what's easier, you know, finding three times as many customers or charging three
times as much?
It's almost always charging two or three times as much.
And that was basically sort of the full story of how you got to the point of, you know,
taking 10K a month by yourself, and as a solo founder, just sort of being able to fund your
business in a self-sustaining way.
And you mentioned that, I don't remember what the exact number was, but you said something
like 10,000 a month or so, and that's the point where you seem like you hit a wall,
where you're like, look, okay, now I'm limited in my extra growth because it's just me doing
this talking, I only have so many hours in the day.
And that's where you were like, you know, trying to make these sales hires, and eventually
the one that sold himself into eventually like a co-founder role.
You found him, right?
Yeah, I had a working thing and I was limited by my own time.
One of the things that, Cortland and I, to make this a little bit personal, one of the
things that I think that we've struggled the most with is I think we're both very good
at wearing all the hats.
Cortland's a great developer, I'm pretty good.
We're both pretty good writers, right?
We're both good at doing a little bit of marketing here and there, and hiring has been the thing
that we struggled with from the very beginning the most.
We've gotten a little bit better at it now, but I'm kind of curious, in a way you got
lucky with that first hire, and since you've grown a bit of a bigger team, has that all
been, your co-founder came on and you're like, ah, you get to take a sigh of relief, and
he handles all the staffing and the hiring, or is that something that you've also kind
of honed your skills?
I'd say we learned it together.
We both, at that time, as we were growing through those phases, I was still building
up the marketing team.
We had content writers, I had developers that reported to me and I hired and whatnot.
He was doing it on that sales side, but we were both doing the sort of do it yourself,
nailed and scale it type of thing, so he was just doing it on one half and I was doing
it on the other.
We were coalescing on how to do this.
I think we both have a good amount of judge of talent, and at that point in time, not
a lot of people were doing the remote job thing, and this was pre-pandemic, so I could
go out there and find some people that were indie hacker types that would be like, yes,
I would love to travel while I work.
I just have the autonomy and freedom, so I'd actually find people that were a couple years
into their career, at least, and wanted the freedom, so they valued the freedom over the
biggest paycheck.
I was able to find people and find people that automatically would work remote.
It was very easy to figure out.
We were always backfilling for the jobs we already did, so we'd know how to be like,
okay, you need to do this.
This is the playbook, and they were more experienced people, so it wasn't training someone just
strictly out of school.
Most of the time, the most success we had were people that had done it before but wanted
to flip into remote work and were responsible enough and that type of thing.
I think that was a big key, was that level of experience and wanted to have that autonomy.
I'm curious if there was a playbook that you were following of any type, because there
was such a thing as the referral industry where you could look at other companies and
figure out, here's how it works, here's who's killing it in the space, here's who's not,
here's what we need to do.
I think it helped that when I was working for other people, so I did work for a decent
amount of years, like five or six years for a company, and then was a manager and did
hire people and do interviews and things like that.
That was five, eight years previous to that, so I think that did help kind of know elements
of those types of playbooks.
I think one of the interesting things is at some point, you got to like 70K a month in
revenue, it's over $800,000 a year, it's an amazing sort of accomplishment.
Now you're well over twice that, which is a place that not very many indie hackers get
to.
What do you think are some of the key takeaways for how you, I guess, changed running your
business from point A to point B?
How do you grow from a pretty big business to a pretty huge business?
Is it different than the early stages?
It's definitely trying to continue to work with the people that are doing more of the
dirty work.
So it was putting more process in place for people than it was just me, because before
you could cowboy a lot of stuff and run around and do what you were interested in and that
type of thing.
It required a lot more process, it required a lot more documentation, big uses of Wikis
and Confluence and how someone should work a certain board, it was no longer just you
just working your own to-do list.
So I think those pieces added up and it was something I always enjoyed, like my last role
was technically like director of technical operations.
So I would go up and set up systems for people across the company, so whether it was using
a ticketing system to use as a workflow system for a company and different types of things
like that.
I'm really curious, I want to hear the breakdown of your tools and the stuff you use, because
right now with IndieHackers, we're just on Notion, we just write everything in Notion,
it's very informal, we have literally a list of documents that are reverse chronologically
ordered by the last time they were updated or typed in, and so generally if there's something
I want to know that Channing did or I did or someone that we work with did, I just look
to see the most recent document.
I don't think that probably scales beyond five or ten people, so what are you using?
You mentioned Confluence, what else keeps a team together?
Asana is probably our main working workflow area, and we've kept the whole company on
that and mostly I think it was important when we were small, because I could see exactly
what's going on and doing the many hat thing and many team thing, not having to switch
into ten different systems is like a massive time save, and getting people to align to
use the tools in the same way so the patterns are the same, like people use what looks more
like the Kanban style board and move things from left to right, you don't have someone
else moving things from right to left or using a different style type of board, so that was
a huge thing and we still do it, like our dev team uses it, the dev team doesn't use
like a Jira or other things, all kinds of other potential tools they could use, but
everyone uses Asana, so having the whole company at this point, which is like 18 people, all
using a similar style workflow, so everyone gets notifications the same way, so that's
like the main workflow, and then we also use Slack, and Confluence is anything that kind
of has a longer duration, so it's like company policies or larger written up product specs
and designs and things like that, but those are really the main tools, we don't have much
internal email, if it's related to a project, it should be in Asana, and that also keeps
our Slack relatively clean as well, so.
Nice.
Funny story, I started a startup back in 2012, called like Siaosto, and it was like a very
generic productivity tool, like use this for your company to track tasks and documents,
and it was going okay, I think we were making like four or five grand a month in revenue,
it was just me and one other guy, my co-founder, and we got an acquisition offer, and it was
from Asana, and this had to be like, God, I don't know, like 2012 or something, and
so we went and we met with Justin Rosenstein, the founder, and I was all excited, because
we hadn't really done shit, you know, we had been working on this for like eight months,
it was very early, and he was flattering us, and talking about how they were so impressed
with what we built and what we had done, and you know, they wanted to acquire us, and then
they interviewed us, and we just whiffed the interview, so, they set us up with like some
engineers and like the head of marketing or something, and interviewed both of us, and
then they were like, you know what, we're actually not interested, good luck guys, and
so we didn't get any Asana stock, and they went on to IPO, and eventually we were tens
of billions of dollars, and we made zero, but it's good to hear that you're using Asana.
I was actually really curious about that, I have to say, like what was the aspiration
when they reached out to you, were you like, oh my God, like, you know, we're getting rescued,
like we were a sinking ship, like, and they want to bring us on board, like, did you feel
like, oh, you know, like this was a competitor, so were you like, yeah, but they were like
a legit competitor, we had to raise like no money, they raised like tens of millions,
and they had all these, at the time they had all these crazy ideas about reinventing the
way applications are built, and the way that people work, and everybody on earth is going
to use Asana, from the largest companies down toward, you know, the smallest, like your
cleaning lady is going to come and check off tasks, and it was like very, very like, you
know, and so I was just flattered that like I was getting to meet this guy, and you know,
he had anything to do with us, or even knew who we were, and you know, and I was hoping
that we would make, you know, a boatload of money in the process, and also be like sort
of validated that we had started a startup that had succeeded, and so it was like very
inspiring and flattering that like we went through that process, and then very crushing
to have it result in literally nothing, just a waste of time.
I remember, I remember you were flattered enough to the point where you would pick up
some of their business practices, and you kind of like would reflect on maybe incorporating
them, so I remember this like very specific detail, because you talked about them enough,
that Asana used to have this thing where everyone would come in to the office, and like one
of the first things they would do is they'd have like a 10-minute company meditation session.
I remember none of this.
I just blotted it all out from my mind, and it's like dead to me, and I remember zero
effects.
Josh, would you ever sell your company?
Have you ever thought about like the end game?
Is this like a lifelong project?
I've thought about it.
I don't know, I view it as like there's two tracks in my brain, so there's like kind of
what we're doing now, which is customer referrals and whatnot, but I do think it could be a
bigger thing, so I don't know at what point that jumps the tracks from just a very purely
purpose-built, it's technically like a horizontal SaaS, because it applies to like all kinds
of different businesses, but where it's just really it's one solution type of thing.
I have bigger aspirations that it could be this advocacy hub of all kinds of things.
Could it do reviews?
Could it do all these things?
If we're tapping into that, aligning with a CRM or whatever, like what else could we
do that is helping a business like really do more things with their advocates?
I don't know if it'll ever make that, right?
It sort of becomes a bigger platform play, it's probably bigger like maybe I should raise
money if I wanted to go for that type of thing, but right now, it's humming along.
You mentioned the big revenue number, but I also have a lot of staff, so it's like the
value is that we keep growing it and we are building something that is hopefully going
to be a longer standing, but I could see selling it.
I could see now like the interesting part versus when I first got started is you could
sell parts of it, right?
You could sell 10%, I have PE people reaching out and saying, hey, we just want to take
a small stake, or you hear the Wistia stories, you hear there's all kinds of these other
options to do partial PE buyouts or it's not necessarily just like Google buys you or something
like that.
I think there's a lot of options.
It also does make some decent profits, but not in a way that I'm not buying brand new
houses or anything.
You don't have a private jet yet?
No, no, I just keep reinvesting it in honestly and looking at all the layoffs and all these
other things.
We've never done a layoff, I want to keep it that way.
I kind of just slow and steady, but I also keep a decent amount of money in the business.
I don't think of it as my own money and taking out and having to put it in.
I never want to have to take money out of the business and then reinsert it out of my
personal money.
There's a decent, I would say nest egg in there to help fuel bad times and fuel growth.
It doesn't have to make me feel like I'm spending $20,000 on ads.
It's all house money to me in there.
The referral rock nest egg is referral rock's nest egg.
At that point, if I decide to exit, that's a different thing.
I'm still having fun, so that's kind of my other marker.
I was going to ask you, how do you feel personally as a founder having gone to this point?
Are you happy?
Are you sad?
Do you feel fulfilled?
Do you feel like you're in the thick of the challenge?
You're right where a lot of people want to be, and so it's like, how do you feel emotionally
on a day-to-day basis?
If you asked me three months ago, it would have been a different answer.
I'll say last year was a little rough, 2022.
There was realized a couple of little things, which is there's just natural turnover.
People want to leave.
We had senior people that were here for two plus years, and naturally, they want to change
jobs.
It wasn't for a lack of opportunity because we're like, hey, do you want to learn this?
Do you want to learn to do product stuff?
Do you want to do these things?
Some people don't, and that's okay.
They're like, well, I'm a great integrations person.
I could go on and sell this, my same skill set to someone else that has another business
that has a higher ACB and basically get paid more.
There's a limit to what we could pay that that skill is valued based off of what we
make off of customers.
We had two senior people on the services team leave within two months, and all the knowledge
drained.
All of a sudden, you're training new people.
There was definitely some rough patches this year on retraining, and that was tiring because
I got on some calls.
You have pulled people.
I had that great product manager I mentioned before.
He got pulled in, and he was doing integration calls.
You don't want to pay your product manager to go do integration calls, but at a small
team size, everyone's pulling, and you need to go dig out of that.
I'd say for probably about five to six months last year, there was a lot of slogging and
retracking back to the getting your hands dirty type of stuff.
What about now?
Last year, tough.
I'm doing a lot better.
After that, it was definitely tiring, and we reloaded.
It took time.
We went back on the hiring hunt, trained new people.
The people eventually take two, three months to get fully up to speed, taking on customers
and things like that, but no, it's in a better place.
It's honestly a better place than it was a year ago, but it took that amount of time.
As I got to get away from that, I got to go back into more strategic stuff, product planning
stuff, the deep work fun stuff that we all want to do and move the bigger ball forward
than necessarily be in the dirty work.
My headspace is definitely a lot better in it, but it took some time to get there.
You're on the happy side of a quote that I just came across a couple of days ago.
The quote is that there's this building, and there's a door on the sign.
The door says, everything you need to be a hero.
A lot of people open this door, but then they back away.
When they don't see any equipment inside, only a bunch of horrible situations.
You've just come through the horrible situations.
You've been doing this for well over 10 years, it seems, and you've seen all parts of it.
A lot of people that listen to this are just getting started.
What advice do you have for people who haven't gone through all of those horrible experiences
and learned all those lessons?
Honestly, the biggest thing I would say that I think helped me break out quicker was I
started out dogfooding, but got away from it pretty quick.
I know it's a common, great place to start advice, like using your own product, being
your own customer, all that stuff.
Once that flip switched of the value is subjective, it's not about how I value it and seeing,
I talked about that water filtration company that a referral to them was worth 10 grand.
It just blew my mind, but it was like, oh, but they're not the only ones.
Getting out of dog food mode and realizing I'm not building the product for me anymore,
I'm not building, and it's like the customers I'm talking to are not me, there are all these
other things that are, it's hard to get rid of those because that's what got you there.
That grit of like, hey, I have this dream, I have this dogmatism, this point of view
that I'm going to build XYZ in a way that I want to build it.
That I think is the biggest thing that I've seen where people get often stuck too long.
They hear that trope advice of dogfooding, which is great at the beginning, or they stick
with their convictions too long.
I want to be the indie hacker that doesn't do marketing, that joke when they're like,
I don't do any marketing.
You're talking on indie hackers, two people, that kind of is marketing, or you're posting
in forums, that's marketing, but they're like, oh, you mean you don't want to do paid ads.
Okay, but really, what is that?
You're going to let your dogmatism about that stop you from that type of thing.
Get outside your head, hopefully talk to more people, but those were the biggest unlocks
for me that I stumbled upon.
I love that.
Yeah.
I think you just summed it up really well.
Get outside of your own head, right?
In your situation, to sum it up, it's like, number one, dogfooding is great.
You get going, but when you really want to get from zero to one or one to two, actually
talk to other people.
In your situation, that was calls and actually getting in front of your customers and seeing
what else was out there, and also just actually marketing.
Steve Blank has a phrase for this.
It's called get out of the building.
Same thing.
You're building for yourself.
Yeah, exactly.
Get out of the building.
Talk to other customers, and you will learn a bunch of stuff, including the potential
that hey, people will pay 100 times more for this than you might have guessed.
I love that advice.
It's a good reason to talk to people and actually do marketing.
Josh, really appreciate having you.
Thanks for sharing your story.
Can you let listeners know where they can go to basically learn more about you and Referral
Rock and anything else you got going on?
I know you've got a couple of podcasts, too.
If you want to talk to me, I would say kind of on Twitter still.
I used to be more active, but since the Elon days, I've been a little less on there.
I am posting more things on Substack.
You can just look up Josh.
I'm on Substack.
There are some things there.
Referralrock.com, you can find us for any referral marketing related stuff.
Then, yeah, I have a buddy podcast, like Ride Along Style, also with a SaaS founder called
Searching for SaaS, just kind of like you guys talking weekly and whatnot, but one of
those ones that's just kind of fun to just talk about what's going on.
All right.
Thanks again, Josh, for coming on.
Awesome.
Great talking.
Awesome.
Thanks for inviting me.
I'll see you next time.