Kris Rudeegraap, Founder & CEO of Sendoso | How to Fuel Revenue & Drive Modern Sales

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Remember, Game Grow Retain on the HubSpot Podcast Network. Today, my guest is Chris Rudigrap. He is the co-founder and CEO of Sindoso, the leading sending platform. Chris has more than a decade of sales experience and has spent time at talk desk, the app stone, and Pekora. During that time, he discovered that creating meaningful engagements through direct mail and gifting was an effective way to drive demand and increase sales, which helped inspire the idea for Sindoso. So, what did Chris and myself speak about? We spoke about his origin story, how we started Sindoso, why he jumped into entrepreneurship after he quit the game once. At what point did Chris decide to move from working for a company into going full-time entrepreneur? We spoke about some tips and ideas and lessons for launching MVPs. We spoke about how he took Sindoso to market and how he got his first customers. We spoke about which point should a founder migrate from the sales function to focusing on higher level vision for a company. We also spoke about some sales lessons that Chris has figured out through his career that he implemented at Sindoso and what he means by co-selling. And then lastly, the vision that Chris has for Sindoso and why every entrepreneur has to have a vision and how Chris basically defined his vision for the company. And then lastly, the decision-making process that Chris goes through when deciding what new initiatives to take on and why his decision-making process has been so integral to the success and the growth of his company. So let's jump right into this. This is Chris Rudigrap, the founder and CEO of Sindoso. To give you a little context, I'm Chris Rudigrap, the CEO and co-founder of Sindoso. I started Sindoso about five years ago. Prior to that, it's been about 10 years in software sales. I got my entrepreneur bug in college actually, so I started a company called All Student Rentals in college, made it easy for students to find housing, play other rent online, find roommates, edit up selling that into a company in San Francisco, and then work my way through a handful of different startups in mostly account executive roles. To where my last company, prior to starting, it was a company called TalkDesk and it was there where I was an AE and I found myself sending out a gazillion emails but wanting to figure out how I could be a little more creative and add some new touch points to my outreach. So I started to write handwritten notes. I grabbed swag from our swag closet and shipped it out. I'd even go on Amazon to find quirky gifts to ship to me. Then I shipped it back out to the prospect and all worked really well but was just intensely time consuming and just kind of hard to do. So I just dreamed up one day, why isn't there a platform that allows me to click and send something. And here we are today. So Sindoso, you don't know, we are a sending platform, makes it easy for other companies to send out, you know, direct mail, corporate gifts, handwritten notes, you name it, send anything out, part software, part fulfillment centers, and you can send it out through HubSpot or other tech stack tools he is. Very cool, man. Okay, so this is like your second iteration of entrepreneurship. So you had one successful venture exit, then you just jumped into corporate AE and now back to Sindoso. So why jump back into entrepreneurship after one exit was something that you've always wanted to do. Yes, and so I'd say that first exit was mildly successful, like I wasn't able to buy a yacht or an island or anything. So it was a nice taste of success and made me feel good, but you know, it wasn't, you know, monumental wealth creation. It was also, you know, we were on about 15 employees when we exited, so rather small and I really felt like I didn't know enough to do it again. I wanted to learn from other entrepreneurs, see how other companies scaled and being kind of a part of that, but not being the sole purpose responsible for that. So I was kind of a secret entrepreneur and training, so to speak, watching other entrepreneurs and seeing what to do, what not to do. And then kind of at the back of my mind, I was always kind of thinking about what's the big pain point problem that I can solve. And I remember one of the things I used to do, I had this email address who was 365 ideas at gmail.com and I would, you know, try to train myself to be like, what is a nasty pain that I'm experiencing today trying to get in that habit of figuring out what's the biggest next thing that I could start, but you know, took me eight years per say to the land on Sindoso and that kind of just happened. So yeah, but what, so walk me through what, what just happened means because I think everybody, I think a lot of people are in roles, a lot of people who listen to this podcast probably in like SDR AE roles and like, wow, I wish I could start a company that solves a pain point in my job that I'm already experiencing, but it's not even, it's not even easy to pinpoint that. So what do you, what do you mean by just happened? Was this side hustle? Did you go get a tech, like a technical founder? Are you a developer? I have no idea how you started. So yeah, yeah, so you know, I think that the point of the 365 ideas mentioned is that I try to train myself to think about pain points and I think that's something that's hard enough to do. You know, you go through your day to day and you might feel it's hard to paint to pinpoint problems that you could solve. So I think, you know, scenario one is how do you get better at problem identification and then also sleeping on it and not like, you know, one hour after you find a problem like quit your job. It's like, hey, I would, you know, email myself these ideas and check back in like months later and being like, that was dumb, that was dumb, that was dumb. And, you know, so there's a bit of that, I think it's step zero, which is how do you get better at pain point identification? Some people just land on it because they're in a certain industry and this is, you know, basically how it starts out is I felt the pain of pack and boxes mixing that with like, hey, this could be easier. And then the kind of the aha moment came on and then that's when I had to go into, okay, how do I start a company mode? And for me, I have a sales background, you know, graduated with a business degree in marketing. And, but I did know that there's sites and tools out there that can kind of get you to the next step. So actually my first iteration was just drawing things, drawing my idea for the software to send stuff in on paper, then transferring them online through some mockup tool. And the original version was actually called coffee center.com. So that was like MVP version one of Sandoza. And it was really a sales force app that I could click about in sales force and send a Starbucks coffee. And there was a digitally gift. And so that was like, I think mentally entrepreneurs are like, oh, I want to solve this problem. Like, oh, this is too big of a problem. I have no idea where to start. Like, I'm just going to not start because it's overwhelming. So for me, it was like, what's the least overwhelming thing that I can actually do and conceptualize? And so coffee center was that. And, you know, drop the mockups found someone on Upwork for five grand and found an engineer that could build it for me. And so cost me five grand. I got a sales force app, a website. And now I've got coffee center going. And for six dollars, you can buy a credit to send a five dollar stuff Starbucks coffee gift card. That was kind of the model. And just told my friends about it. I started using it colleagues used it. And pretty quickly there was tens of thousands of people using it, including, you know, my current co founder now, Braden, who was using it and was another AE and was like, this is awesome. I knew him from college. She ended up just kind of using it by by way of hearing about it. And then we were drinking beers one day and we should send more stuff. And then I ended up quitting my job at talk desk to say, okay, I'm going to figure out warehousing and logistics and build that. I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode, Manscaped. I want you to set your New Year's resolution with good intentions. I want you to set a resolution that you can actually keep enjoying the four million men worldwide who trust Manscaped. 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What was the point when you actually quit your job to jump into Sendozo full time? Yeah, so it worked out well where my co-founder, Braden. So probably I had coffee sender going as like a night weekends. By the way, that's a really cool. In and of itself, that's such a useful tool for a sales rep. Yeah, so that was pretty cool. It was, you know, paying, you know, beer money and then sums. That was kind of the original goal is just like, can I pay my beer and rent from this? And it was doing hundreds of thousands of dollars and maybe the course of like six-ish months. Braden, my co-founder, was at a kind of a crossroads at his last job that he could quit. And they were already kind of being sold off. So it was like good timing. So we actually quit his job about three months prior to me. So he was working on coffee sender full time. While I was like, no, this is not a, you know, a billion dollar idea. I can't quit my job and making, you know, 250 as a sales rep like be crazy to quit. And then it just started to snowball and I started to see more success with it. And I said, hey, this is my chance. My wife got behind me and said, hey, if you go and create a platform, you know, at the time we didn't know the name was said, no. So but if you can go build that, like, let's try it. What's the worst that could happen? In my eyes, I was, you know, a rock star AE. I could always go back to being an AE. I, you know, I could sell anything in my opinion. I think I had the confidence there. And so I basically just was like waited till one of the quarters ends. I think sales quitting and sales is tough because there's always like, I got another deal that's illegal. Like, what could I quit? So I just put a date in the sand instead of right, you know, it was end of Q3 2016. And I said, I'm going to quit today. I'm going to quit that date and I'm going to work backwards. And you know, my CEO at my last company was was also open to that. And he's an advisor now. And quit that day. Then it got back to square zero where I had no money really coming in. We decided to kill coffee sender. And then I had to go back to figuring out, okay, let me sketch up what sendosos going to look like and I spent probably nine months being, you know, product engineering person building the infrastructure and new software. Okay, so nine months. So, so what was the, what was the day when you actually took sendoso to market? How, what was the MVP of sendoso? Like you actually had like a pre MVP. So what was the first launch sendoso? Yeah, so that was about the summer of 2017. And we had a platform we could log in, create a user, set the user up with some budget. We had a, you know, a myriad of different things that you could send on demand. We had all the gift cards, so not just Starbucks, but any gift card. And then we had our first warehouse was in Chinatown in Las Vegas. And so we had this little warehouse probably a size of a bedroom. And we turned the lights on and said, hey, anyone can sign up. You know, we'll source stuff for you. We have some stuff available on demand. And or you can send us swag that you have in your office to our warehouse. We'll organize it, put it online for you. So you can virtually see what inventory you have left. And then you can click a button in Salesforce and HubSpot. We had a Marquetto. We had a couple other integrations. And you could, you know, I think sales often outreach. We had kind of hacky integrations with them before they even knew what an integration was. So we were like their first integration partners because we had built this like Chrome extension that put a button in their platform. And it overlaid it. And so they were getting like support and customer success questions about Sudoso. And that ended up driving us to be one of the first launch partners on stage at both their conferences like two or two or so years ago. That's awesome. So you built up. You built basically forced them. You moved that you forced our hand to build out this. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So envy. So what are some MVP lessons that you could you could talk to the audience about that you experienced. You had the first MVP. Then you sort of had like another sendo. So MVP. Was it too early? Was it too late? Was it just right? What are some things people just think about? Yeah. So what are the things that I did is like there's a ton of ideas that we got that I had that my co-founder had that we started to get from customers. So we really wanted to like what's the what is the best product we can get out that will work and then let's backlog all the other features and come back to them. And we constantly were like taking out things like what's the best thing we could ever build and then let's take out everything that you know is going to take time and effort and delay us from launching. So I think some entrepreneurs will kind of feature creep and add a million things and like let's just get something there that we can start getting customer feedback on. So I think that was important is just like you know drawing a line in the sand and going for it. I think with you do that a lot by the way that's smart. Yeah very smart. Yeah. So that was big. I think you know ultimately we then need to figure out you know from an MVP perspective you know for us we are in you know an outsourced model in the beginning where we we so it was like how do we how do we conceptually budget for this. And so we had kind of like what's the MVP and then how are we going to start budgeting hours thereafter. So I know some co-founders will have an engineer where there's maybe not that hard cost but if you you find an outsourced agency to help you you know we budgeting was an important part of the early days so we didn't go through all of our money because we were bootstrapped we were using our own money and some of the money from the coffee center project. So I think budgeting in the early days for engineering case backs. Yeah so I think those are the my lessons was really get something the market and then then you got a kind of test you know besides product market fit like what's the pricing model and how does that fit. And start to build on that to then getting to a place where you can test to see if you could even like hire salespeople and have a sales you know a cactl TV ratio or you know can you hire SDRs do you have you know what's your price point to afford that as part of your your cact so then it became a less about focus on product market fit and more of like go to market fit. 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So you're so just to describe some terms so customer acquisition costs. up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance. Okay, so as you're okay, so you're so just to describe some terms so customer acquisition costs. You're LTV's lifetime value and then if you aren't in sales if you're if you're not in the sales ring of the SDR sales development rep and all these these things are just important metrics for success as you're taking a product to market. So you you were trying to remove as many features that weren't mission critical as possible you figured out not only product market fit but go to market fit. That's I think that's the term you use which is I like that a lot. Okay, so how did you scale up and and sendoso was you mentioned potentially hiring SDR so it's not pure SaaS play you obviously have some sort of mid or enterprise marketplace as well. So how did you first sell sendoso to the market? Yeah, so my co founder I both being in sales just immediately started reaching out to prospects. So it was like, okay, let's build our target list. Let's enrich that list and let's outbound that list. We, you know, did your typical multi touch outbound and got meetings demos and closed customers. And so we our pricing model was a, you know, a SaaS annual subscription in the very beginning for the first couple months it was a month to month. We quickly realized that we could be needed to go annual. We also, you know, we're able to kind of up our prices after a few months to as we realized we were significantly under priced. We also had the benefit of hiring like a really awesome COO early on. She was like one of our first first investors turned employee. So she was analyzing like, okay, you're selling this way too cheap. You're not going to be able to forward, you know, to scale. And so once we kind of right sized pricing and, you know, we realize that we could outbound and get meetings and closed deals. We then said, okay, let's hire a couple of these in a couple SDRs and see if we can have other people who are not the founders sell. And then that was like, once that started working, then I think it was more like we knew we had something because then you can figure out formulas there after the poor fuel in the fire, which is ultimately, you know, raising venture capital. So then you can hire people ahead of, you know, profits and then scale out faster. What, at what point do you think in a company should you migrate the sales function from the founder to a sales team? I think as early as possible, to be honest, oh well, I'd say it in two parts. One is founders should always be selling. So I still sell today. But as soon as you can in the early days, I think it's important to realize that someone else, you need to, in order to be successful, you need to figure out if another human can get in there and actually sell the product. And in a way that, you know, founders are overly passionate. They'll do anything. You might not even be getting paid as a founder. And so like, of course, you can get a customer for a cheap amount of money and you're not paying yourself and, you know, that you're talking to, you know, your ex colleagues boss, like you hack together your first couple dozen customers. And I think it's important to hack those together because then you have customer feedback. You have maybe some case studies. You have some references. But as soon as you checkbox all of those things, it's, you need to immediately hire MIIs, SDRs and AEs to prove that you can have a sales model. And, and I just want to, and I also want to understand, because we didn't even really, we kind of touched on the pain point that Sendozo sells. I want to like double down on that because obviously you having a lot of experience as an account executive and, and using basically manual manually sending out items as part of the sales process. You have probably a fairly significant understanding of what's broken in sales and why people should even bother. I should have touched on this in the beginning. I apologize. But why people should even bother using physical items as part of an outbound sales campaign because not every team just, this is not like status quo. Yeah. This is not that every team does this either. And I think that's an important thing to chat about too. So let's even talk about like a couple, a couple of sales lessons that you that you learned that Sendozo is solving for that you've probably implemented as an AE that you're using as you're probably I'm assuming your own team is using to, to scale Sendozo. Yeah. A hundred percent. We use Sendozo more than anyone. So I think as an AE, you know, some of the areas that are even true today was that, you know, you have to think about this kind of buyer experience and kind of multi-touch ways to get in contact with somebody. And that involves email, phone call, SMS, video, LinkedIn, you know, direct mail, Sendozo gifts, you know, everything that you can do to get in front of somebody is going to help you better your chances. And I think it's a semi numbers game in that regards where it's like what are what's the optimal way that you can get somebody to talk to you and break through the noise. And if you're only doing email, then you're missing out. If you're only doing email and social, you're missing out. So once you incorporate, you know, Sendozo and it gives you just another shot on goal and sales is all about, you know, as many shots on goals as you can. That being said, I think the other thing that we're seeing in sales is just the evolution and advancements of just tech in general and automation and everything else. And so one of the things that I believe Sendozo does as well as it helps reps be more creative too. And I think creativity is one of those soft skills that doesn't get talked about a lot. But you know, it can help differentiate you from another competitor with a similar product in that, can you build better rapport with that prospect? Can you send them something more unique that is memorable and, you know, they choose you, the person, not, you know, the company product. So I think that's also becoming ever more true in that, you know, maybe 10 years ago, when I was in sales, even before outreach and sales, I was one of the first like, yes, swear and tout app users and like, that was like a secret weapon for me is like, I like and automate things like not no one else can. And so now it's over automated. Yeah. And so now it's like, okay, let's take a step backwards and like, how do we read, you know, humanize the sales process and personalize. And so that's, that's one of the inspirations for starting Sendozo. I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode express VPN. Now I know most of you are probably thinking, why don't I just go incognito mode? Well, let me tell you something incognito mode does not hide your activity. It doesn't matter what mode you use or how many times you delete your browsing history, your internet service provider can still see every single website you've ever visited. 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So protect your online activity today with the VPN that was rated number one by business insider, visit my exclusive link express VPN dot com slash success story and you can get three months free with a one year package that's express VPN dot com slash success story express VPN dot com slash success story to learn more. And how do you how do you track the ROI on because I say I'm a VP sales hero I want to send I want to send these gifts, but I need to make sure that I'm tracking the ROI on sending this dollar value item. So do you have, for example, metrics or case, even like a story you can tell stories are great, you know, the ROI on sending a certain dollar value item to a customer are these things opened more often all the all the things that a digital marketer would think through or or you know when you when you track like a traditional sales campaign that you can easily check open rates, click through rates conversion rates. Yeah, so I'd say one for specific like case studies and exact data points, we've got like 50 cases on our website, so check it out there if you want to read into the specific details, but at a high level, you know, you're correct, like digital marketer, we kind of take that offline kind of black box, what's happening and turn it into more of like a digital marketing channel. So whenever anything sent it automatically tracks back to, you know, HubSpot sales force. So now there's a paper trail, which previously really wasn't there, you know, when I was back in the day pack my own box, I wasn't like logging tasks in sales force, it was another extra effort. So now everything's automatically tracked that data then can with attribution modeling can see if it's last touch or whatever attribution you use weighted average attribution, you can start to see, okay, we sent them this and then two days later, an opportunity was created. And so you can start putting the puzzle pieces together that way and track ROI. There's also ROI of like, if I'm doing this myself back when I was in sales, like, okay, I'm going to spend it two hours of my day doing this. Should I be packing boxes and sourcing things or should I be selling? And so there's an ROI of like the time of that rep, which is, you know, super crucial time you can't get back. And then there's other ROI that we kind of have a Costco model in terms that we can buy at bulk and pass those costs along to our customers. So we can buy things, ship things way cheaper than you could individually. So there's an overall ROI on just like the costs of goods and services. Amazing. Okay. And a couple other things that I hear you speak about often that I thought would be good lessons to teach over. You speak about co-selling with CEOs often. Walk me through that. And what's the strategy for that if you're trying to sell to, I guess, mid or enterprise? Yeah. So given my sales background, I think I've never stopped selling. Even though you have to do a million things. I think whatever I can help our SDR AE team, I am all about that. And so I'm really trying to empower my team to think about co-selling. And so that could be the AE working with me. And then I will then reach out and collaborate with executives at that prospect. I have a huge advisor network. There's about 100 plus advisors. And so, you know, our AE SDR or even our account management team can leverage me to then use one of our advisors to help break into account. So that's useful. And so I think more than more than ever, I'm involved in deals and especially kind of the enterprise ones. You kind of just the theme that you keep coming back to is like the CE should never stop being engaged or involved in the sales process. Yeah. With that too, I mean, outside of just the sales process, I think you're kind of always selling even to customers or learning from customers or expanding customers. So, you know, earlier this year, I did a 95 customer virtual road show. Last year, I did about the same. The year before I was in person, which I was only able to get to maybe 20 or 30. But this year, because it was virtual, I met with 95 of our customers for about a half hour each and learned a lot there and was, you know, learning and getting feedback. But also, Salon, you know, where's the expansion opportunities? You know, where other areas that we can help our customers use our platform and grow more. And how do you use how do you use that feedback for your business, your sales, your sales process, your product? Yeah. So, you know, basically I'll take a ton of notes. I'll record the call and transcribe and take notes. And after each one, you know, put together things that I can then say, hey, this information is useful for our product and design team. This information is useful for a product marketing team. This information is useful for our, you know, AE team or expansion team. And so basically just trying to then action on him it out. And so that different departments can learn from each customer interaction. Is that is that something that permeates your culture, meaning does every executive on your team build a feedback loop into their particular business unit? I would say others join me or others are doing this more of the customer facing functions like our maybe our CTO is not doing as many customer road shows as I am. But I think I have my unique background in wanting to talk to customers, being in sales, you know, building the product puts me at a really perfect place for, you know, talking product, talking expansion, talking use case, talking, you know, customer success. And then I can kind of distill that out. Okay, I mean, and that's obviously, you know, led to some some measure of success. So where is where is sendoso today in terms of as a company? What are your, you can talk figures not specific revenue numbers. I'd like, what is your vision for the company and how long it is going to take you to get there? Yeah, so just kind of size. So we've about 450 employees. We've raised about 55 million in funding. We'll see this year about 100 million spent on our platform. And we'll, you know, be in kind of the 2030 million range in terms of ARR. So just going to give you some points there. We, we see this being a huge, you know, multi billion dollar public company one day. And so we're just getting started. That's amazing, man. First of all, congratulations. I didn't realize that you were that, that you were that large. It's very, very impressive. And for you, I was going to, you know, just for, for you, this is like your first, I, not first, this is like, well, it is. It's your first like very large entrepreneurial success, even though like you've been, you have like a, you're like a, a one, like every single time that you come up to, to bat, like you're, you're killing it. Like you never strike out with startup so far, which is actually not normal. So that's a good thing. Well, I've definitely incubated different ideas in my brain that I just pulled them gone. So I think it's, that's helped me in my efforts in that, you know, I just didn't like jump into something just because it was my first idea. Yeah, it's, it's actually, I love that, that incubation idea and that 365 idea thing that you were doing, I think that's very smart because I think it just like qualifies out a ton of really shitty ideas. Yeah, that you would have had to have tried and failed. Exactly. And for you, what is your strategy process, future growth, steering the ship decision making process as you grow, Sendo, so do you have a specific framework that you follow? Is it mentorship? Is it, what is, what is it? I think it's a mix of a lot of things. I think it's one, it's, you know, a mix of, you know, having a vision that people can get behind, you know, okay, ours and, you know, in ways that you can track the success of the company going forward. It's, you know, always thinking about company culture and making us the best fun place to work. You know, always trying to hire and inspire and grow the team is kind of people are the foundation for everything. So, you know, and I think it's hard work, but I think about it as like a marathon on a sprint. So you've also got to, you know, live life, but, you know, this is going to be a long, a long game. I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode HubSpot. 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Learn more about how you can transform your customer experience with a HubSpot CRM platform at HubSpot.com. How have you managed COVID? Were you already fully virtual before or was that something you had to figure out? We weren't fully virtual before but we did have three offices which when we were a 50 person company, we were already having three different offices and three different locations. That already drove more collaboration than probably most companies and when there are 50 employees all in the same office. So we already had collaboration and zoom in everything else in our blood. So when we then as we scaled and I think we hit COVID we were about 150 employees. So we've actually grown pretty substantially, maybe added about 300 people since COVID started. But we already had remote collaboration in our blood so it was not too hard for us to then just fully go remote. We also kind of day one our executive teams and investors kind of got put our heads together and so for the first couple weeks or month there was more rigor around what the heck is this, how are we going to survive this. But then we saw some big tailwinds from it and we are actually a solution that benefited from COVID in terms of like people remote. So how do you send things to people, all these field sales reps are now inside, how do they build rapport with prospects, how do we do these field events that are now all digital, how do we onboard new employees with swag. So you know we definitely quickly started creating content and thought leadership and features for our product that benefited from whatever one was facing. And in terms of the future I you know question for future of the industry future of sales, are there any things that you see that are interesting you and how we sell and how we communicate with customers that are going to trend in the next say five years that are different than now. I'd say the biggest thing is just there's just going to be an onslaught of technology that sales people will use I think if you look back 10 years ago it was like oh I use sales force that's like the one tool I use like oh maybe you used maybe your early adopter and you use it yes wear a tap or maybe you used like a zoom in for or something like you were maybe lucky to do that. And so now I think they'll be you know if you look into the next five years there might be you know 50 tools a sales person could use and you really have to take that as a competitive advantage and figure out how are you as an SDR and A or an AM like good at using technology and learning it and you know mastering it. I think I was I tried to master sales force 10 years ago and I could run reports and find leads that no one else was working and like that was this some of my secret sauce but like now how to use all these other tools so I think that's one is just the onslaught of tools and being good at using them and then I think two is some of those soft skills that you know automation you know can't. Yes you know really control which like creativity and some of those areas of you know skills that you build as a sales person will be ever more important. And and I guess one I want to I want to do a rapid fire just to pull some career insights from you but one last question that I wanted to ask one question that you would ask somebody who's in your position now when you were starting out in sales. I would probably ask like maybe what you're what like draw me your org chart. I think it's really interesting to see you know from a company from zero people to now 450 how your org chart grows and one of all these different roles you need a hire for and when and that's been something that's been unique to learn and so I think like that would be a question that would be like. You know really interesting to understand. And then also where would people reach out to you if they want to connect with you Sendozo what's your favorite social or email or website. Yeah you can always find more information on sendozo and sendozo.com you can email me personally Chris it's kris at sendozo.com. You find me on LinkedIn and I'm happy to chat love talking with other entrepreneurs A's you know happy to get pitched a news you know cool tech software that someone's come up with love hearing about the newest things. Awesome. Okay. What was the what was the biggest challenge that you overcame in your journey and how did you overcome it? Probably the biggest thing it was really just making that jump from having hundreds of thousands of dollars going into my bank account to zero and quitting my job I think as it is there's always there's always more money to have you had like the next week the next deal close and so I just had to say if it all been a you know I can make zero money and hopefully the longer term I'll make you know way more. That's it that's it that's like psychologically that's tough. Yeah. That's very tough. And all you know I didn't mention this before but you know whenever you leave a company like you know that there's going to be like a battle for commissions that are going to be paid out like in like six months you know what I mean so that's. All right if you had one person has probably been a few but if you had one person who had a major impact on your life who was it and what did they teach you. Yeah so I would say one of the most one of the packed things I remember was an entrepreneur in Chico's name was Chris Friedland he started a company called build build.com and when I was had my startup at when I was in school at Chico State University he was very inspirational and seeing his success like talking to someone in a you know in his office at a company that was doing hundreds of millions and revenue and was like wow I could be him kind of thing. And so I think that was an area that was very inspiring me to then you know see that I could make them do this one day. Very good. Very good. If you could tell your 20 year old self one thing what would it be. Buy Bitcoin? That's just my answer all the time. We're not working anymore. No I'd probably just say like do what you're doing I feel like I back when I was 20 I still had the mindset of like I want to become an entrepreneur I want to go big like you know startups are cool. Like I'm going to figure this out and I'm going to have fun and so I think I wouldn't change my mindset or anything. Okay cool. And then a source it could be a book could be a podcast you'd recommend people go check out that you've enjoyed. Yeah I've got a couple podcasts I love I love snacks daily I love acquired how I built this those are my favorite ones. Awesome and then most important question last question rather not most important but last question what is success mean to you. I think success is happiness you know if you're happy then and then you're successful and you know for me happiness comes with starting a company and you know being successful that way. But you know for an SDR listening it might be hitting hitting your meeting goals for the week and that's success so I think for me happiness and what makes you happy. If you're not happy hitting your goals then you're doing the wrong thing. Yeah very good man very good I love that okay that's it that's all I got. you