Nicolas Vandenberghe, CEO of Chili Piper | The Playbook For Success

Welcome to the success story podcast. I'm your host Scott and I'm very happy to be speaking with Nicholas. Oh, actually, you know what I should double check. Nicholas Vandenberg. Vandenberg. Okay. Good, good. I always I always check just to make sure I don't miss for now. Thank you for joining me on another episode of the success story podcast where we speak with incredible leaders and mentors who have achieved success through trials, tribulations, wins and losses. I'm your host Scott and today we're going to be sitting down with Nicholas Vandenberg who is the CEO and co-founder of Chili Piper. Now Nicholas has an outstanding career in business obviously coming from selling newspapers in the streets of Paris to receiving his MBA at Stanford. He has started and sold three tech companies with each over 65 employees and 11 million revenue. He's ran sales teams for two billion dollar telecom telecom firms. He's worked with companies to the extent of Google. So obviously the fortune 100's selling into that space. In 2016 he co-founded his fourth startup, which we're going to talk about today. Chili Piper and he is really a pioneer in buyer enablement and sales conversion. The company is fully distributed leveraging global talent with employees in 28 cities in 12 and 12 countries. It's a scheduling platform and some brand names that are using it right now. So into it, Square, Twilio and over 300 current customers worldwide. Now Nicholas Bootstrap Chili Piper passed two million annual recurring revenue before attracting any sort of seed funding. So this is something that he's built out entirely from the ground up on his own. So a whole bunch of accolades on your resume. Thanks for joining us and maybe do a better job than me at telling your own story. Thanks for having me. No, that sounds about right, yeah. Let me show everybody who would be able to tell I'm originally French. I grew up in the South of France. My plan was to travel around the world. I spent a year here and there. So I decided that it applied to business called the US. I landed in Stanford with the plan to go next to Hong Kong. And when I got to Stanford, a classmate of mine called Steve Jefferson invited Steve Jobs to come to talk to us. And Steve came, sat on the floor at the time he was running a company called Next. And the joke was he was going next to nowhere. So he was very humble, not like the last year Steve Jobs at the time he was struggling. Like we all do entrepreneurs at some stage. And when I heard a method, that's what I want to be when I grew up. At the time, you know, it wasn't the superhero way. It was just a very determined tech entrepreneur. And I thought, this is such a cool life and actually create products and bring them to market. And so I scrapped my Hong Kong plans and stayed in the Bay Area. And as soon as I graduated, I started a company. And as fate would have it, my partner in my first company was John Sculling. So Steve Jobs nemesis, completely, randomly. It's just I was introduced to him when he was CEO of Apple, he had some ideas, some technologies, and we decided to go and business together. So that has been a funny twist in my start. And ever since I've been doing tech companies, you mentioned a three successful build and exits. And the tech world. For a while, I thought I'd become a venture capitalist because, you know, that's what entrepreneurs become when they grow up. So just stick on the other side and say, well, don't you try harder? Like these days, I eventually say, yeah, I think entrepreneurs need to cut their salaries, you know, I'm thinking, oh yeah, how about you, cut your salary, you know. Show me how you do it. Send me your screenshot. But anyway, that wasn't for me. So I went back to create a new company, as you mentioned, early 2016, focused on sales and technology salespeople. What I had experienced is that, as you mentioned, a part of experience, I'd run a sales team for telco companies. I was helping a friend build a telco company. And I was amazed that when I put everybody on Salesforce, there was a big resistance to using Salesforce. And, you know, here often people say, I don't pay you your commission if the deal is not in Salesforce. And I thought it's crazy because, you know, my daughter, I don't say, I don't give you your allowance if you don't use your iPhone, you know. I won't give you an answer if you continue using your iPhone so much. So this is going to change. I mean, digital technology is going to happen to you sales. And when you think that and you know, to put everything, well, I'm going to do it. So that's how I got started. I love sales. As you mentioned, I did fund my undergrad studies with sales jobs, including saying newspapers. I re-enjoyed it because I did very well at it. You know, I sold everybody four to one in the three. So I thought this is perfect. I'm going to do something that I'm really passionate about at the right time. And hence GDP first started. So you now let's let's bring it to you went through like your career is extensive. So do you have any sort of like the three companies that you had before Chili Piper? I want to speak about Chili Piper, but I want to speak about the three companies as well. When you went into these, you were successful in all of them. Did you have some sort of strategy or mindset that allows you to build out companies? Is it just passion that drives you? What drives you to build out these successful companies? So they are to simplify two types of serial entrepreneurs. They are serial entrepreneurs who have a strong, strongly expertise in a particular problem and they typically technical entrepreneurs. And they just come up with new IDs along that problem. So that's not me. My three companies were very different. The first one was consumer software or John Scully, so it was consumer marketing. My second one was e-commerce, B2B, and the third one was biometrics, Facebook recognition. So as you can see, very diverse. All over the map. Yes, all over the map you could say. Yes. So obviously, you're right. The main community is this drive and passion that I want to bring to market a new product. Every time is a new challenge, the consumer software is all about distribution. How can we get distribution? In the e-commerce, it was an online solution. There was a B2B model. The biometrics was yet another competitive and animal dealing with government and security. So the one thing that they do have in common is in all of them, I had to figure out the right product for the right market. So what everybody knows is product market fit, which is a key thing. And once you've got a sense for product market fit, you need to figure out the distribution. So you need to have a way to distribute your product that's going to scale. And that product market fit, I think, is something that relies on a certain talent, this ability to... Some people are calling it visionary and for the longer term, say, what visionary sounds like somebody who's on LSD and so... You know, I've talked too much job, so I'm a visionary. But I think if you think of a market vision more in the sense of market intelligence, that is, you understand what's motivating people and what problem they have, that's a key to product market fit. So I would say, do you answer your questions, what's coming success for sure? The drive matters, but this other piece is this ability to understand markets and the willingness to dig into them and look at the data and interview people and talk to a lot of potential customers. That market intelligence is definitely a key success factor in doing startups. I think that it's something that I don't know if it's purposeful that you found that you have a passion for or it could have been accidental because like you mentioned, you know, three startups, yeah, you could be a VC, but you dove into a fourth one. So why did you decide to continually build new things when you could have taken a break, taken a step back? So I did take a break, a long break. I worked on my tennis, I'd cheap on my shoulder that I didn't go to the level where I wanted to when I was in college. So in my 40s, I think, I went back on, I mean, I'm at to our stuff, but anyway, I took some time off. By the end of the day, you say, okay, now it's time to go back to work. For me, it's, there's nothing I'd rather do. I mean, other than five any time, there's nothing I'd rather do than working on these new companies and products and go to markets, it's just a super fun stuff. So that it's just, it's like a musician, you say, I have a great quote for that. In a music, in the film, Frieda Kado, you see a Salma Hayeku plays Frieda Kado, go to Diego Rivera and say, Diego, I want you to look at my paintings and tell me if it's worth for me to continue, should I continue or should I stop? Am I talented enough of the painter? And the answer is it has a, this is worthless for me to look at your paintings because if you have it in you, you will do it whatever I say and if you don't have it in you, then you should stop already. And that's how it feels, it feels, it's entrepreneurship, if you have it in you, that's what you're going to do, that's what I'm going to do and I'm going to do it. So it was just a matter of good opportunity. And as I mentioned, tool for salespeople was a super exciting opportunity for me. Look, this thing is going to change. So it's happening, right? I mean, somebody's keeping track of how many tools, new tools, they are for salespeople and it was like 200, four years ago, I think, then 300, 500, no, it's 800 new new companies doing this for sales day. So I'm not the only one who's seen it. No, no, you're not the only one who's seen it. I agree because actually, I'm going to let you keep going, but I want to just bring up a point that I read on on the chili pepper website. And it was the change in what a salesperson is from somebody who was, yeah, like a wine and dine type, you know, extroverted, like almost like death of a salesman type salesman. And now the salesman is, you know, incredibly aggressive revenue targets always on, always connected, leveraging tech, leveraging automation, like all these different toolsets. So the life of a salesperson is difficult. It's very difficult. And the expectations are exceedingly just just being pushed onto sales individuals. And I don't want to go too much down the path of, like, you know, the issues that are that I see in today's sales environment all the way from, like, entry level all the way through to management director, VP and how we manage and how we motivate and the value we give to salespeople, but you're right. Like the sales landscape is changing. So there's a lot of these tools and for good reason too, because I think people need them to survive, really, to be quite honest. Yeah, you're right. It's got a lot more competitive for salespeople. And if they don't endorse and adopt the tools, they're going to be left behind, as for sure. Yeah. So what is, so chili paper, let's speak a little bit about what problems, what problems is it solving? Yeah, a very simple problem. So simple that when we study that that's going to be right, I cannot be the only one who see that problem. But in some of these, it was a case. B2B marketing, B2B companies spend a lot of money in marketing to bring traffic to their website. Then they work hard to get them to engage. So field of form and say, request a meeting with us, talk to sales. And when the prospects field of form and submit the form, he or she gets a thank you page that says, thank you, somebody's going to call you. And then they left wondering where who's going to call me and when. So it happened to me when I wanted to buy LinkedIn navigator from my team. And I went to LinkedIn website, I submitted the form, and I guess somebody's going to call you. And now we claim that nobody had called me. He turned out somebody did call me. It was a four or eight number. And I didn't pick up because I don't know anybody in four or eight. At least I didn't know this number. And so I missed that call. It turned out companies lose more than half the pipeline to that process of somebody calling back, but by now it's too late. And that didn't make sense to me. So we built what we call a concierge for your website. So it's a little JavaScript. When the prospects are being the form in real time, we take the data, we qualify the prospect. So we make sure it's a valid prospect. Then we find the right rep that should be in touch with that person. We dial the rep, we dial the prospect they connected. And if the rep is not available, we can retrieve the calendar's availability of the rep, display them to the prospect and say, here, pick a time. Either way, the prospect is an instant qualification that they either on the phone with the right person or the time schedule for that for the with this person. And the magic happened, the conversion rate double, which we expect. So the people, the people no longer lose their pipeline and they go from typically the industry, but Barry are pretty GDP per is 40% conversion, which means that companies lose more than that. There are 60 out of 100 people who want to talk to them. And with GDP per, you get to 80 to 90%. So you double from 40% to an 80 to 90 and we're still working on this extra 10% that we don't want to lose, but at least now we we have a reasonable conversion rate. So that's what Cili Pepper does. It's called Concierge. We, as you mentioned, know we have a lot of very visible companies as customers. And around that, so we do much more than scheduling, we connect by phone, we follow up, we we send emails for those who haven't booked the 10% to catch this next person. We are very well known for scheduling and still because we do a really good job of presenting these options and doing it in a clever way. So typically companies say, hey, I want all my teams to use Cili Pepper for scheduling because they do such a good job with it. So we have had a net revenue retention of 140% because companies just extend us to the other teams and they always find a way to create new ways to use us. For example, Forester is a big customer. They use us to book meetings with the analysts, which is their core business. And there's a lot going on around that process. You have to open a Salesforce case, then you have to assign to the right analysts, maybe more than one analyst, you have to combine their availability, you have the customer success rep to attend the meeting, you have to update Salesforce afterwards. So the whole bunch of things that need to happen and we do it in up the shelf in one step. So that's business. We've been doubling it over a year and it's relatively easy to sell solution because the RRI is so obvious. Now, it turns out that people don't actually make decisions based on RRI. So I should qualify that statement. If people just decided on RRI, Salesforce process would be 30 seconds. It turns out people have more other concerns like how much time does it take to deploy? Do they need to change my process? And that's why our sales team is doing a really good job in handling these concerns. But the solution benefit is very clear. You know, it's funny because it's solved it again. It's another automating tool, but it's not. It's like, I think a lot of automation tools, sales automation tools are focused on reaching the customer. So how do you send the most amount of emails to the most people? How do you connect to the most people on LinkedIn or whatnot? But this is just basically removing all the administrative tasks and the manual tasks from after you bring that lead in, which I don't know the stats, but I do know that I've seen studies on how many other percentage of time that sales reps don't actually spend on selling. So this is just another, I really actually enjoy. I saw that it was a scheduling tool. I didn't realize it had the phone component. I think the phone component is a very, I've never heard of that piece before where you have that automatic connection between the sales rep and the prospect. So what do you, like, what results do you see when, because you said you don't sell an ROI, but that's fine. You can sell on, you can sell a little bit on ROI. So I wish I could say on an alright, because the alright is so strong. It's more like buyers don't buy on an alright. It's surprising, but it's true. Or at least they buy on a more broadly evaluated ROI than we know. So it's said differently. You go to a buyer and say, is there a way you're going to get typically these comforts you say they won't believe you and won't make them buy. I have fair enough, so you have to do a bit more work. Now, there's, so the product itself makes a ton of sense. But I want to, I want to, I want to sort of pick your brain because, like, you know, your Forex entrepreneur, so there's obviously business lessons that you've learned that are agnostic of product and industry. So when you bring something like this to market, you know, you've brought this to market successfully, but there's also a strategy you've employed where you're using a fully distributed workforce, which I thought was very interesting, too. Why did you, why did you choose to do that? Because now it works well with what we're dealing with right now. But traditionally, that's not something that a lot of people do. Because in January 2016, I thought what if a virus happens? And then we need to work from home. I say, okay, let's do it. I'm just kidding. I know there were two reasons why we did that. The first reason, and I want to say, I say, we, my wife Alina is my co-founder. She was running, she had very senior positions running product at Bloomberg and Pearson. And eventually, she wanted also to cut teeth in the entrepreneur world. So we started the company together. And we have this fundamental belief that there are smart and talented people everywhere. Often, I find that people are a bit naive about that aspect of life. They'll say, oh, the Russians are like these, the Chinese are like that. The Brazilians are like, you know, and we also sort of cliché. Actually, also funny joke, but it's clichés. But what we find in that there are talented people everywhere in Russia, in China, in Brazil, in the US, in the other places. And so our first principles say, let's find them wherever they are. And let's start restrict wind brooking right now. Our pool of talent to brookling makes no sense when it's an entire world out there. So that was the number one reason. Let's get access to talent everywhere. And the second reason is, now is 2020. A lot of work is done in the computer and can be done online. As a result, you don't have to be in a practical place to do your work. You can be anywhere. And Adina and I love traveling. We love being in different places. Every summer, I spent at least a month in Europe, in France, and at least even more like five to six weeks. And I want to be free to do that. And if I want to be free to that, I want my employees to be free to that. I want them to live where they feel happy. So that's the second reason. Say, we hire whoever you are and then you go wherever you want and you leave the life you want, as long as you are productive. Every tool needed to be productive remotely. So it's working individually. And the other thing that I wanted to touch on to that makes a lot of sense. It was actually before I go on to the marketing and take to market of this of chili Piper. Was it difficult to build that out or have you had experience like doing this before with previous companies? I had experience working with multiple locations. So I had experience with an office in Paris, an office in San Francisco, or this kind of configuration. So I could tell that you can work remotely. I've never gone fully distributed. Actually, you mentioned 20 cities. No, we 40 to people in 36 cities. I think we've grown since we last. So 42 people, 36 cities, 16 countries. A joke that we just hired a guy in London and we said, can you go somewhere more exotic because London does that look so good. We have a guy in Medellin in Colombia. So he sends us screenshots that are so beautiful that three other people decide to go there and actually do it before the virus is removed. Yeah, it was a high quarter because with the largest number of people over there. So it's completely transparent to us where people are. And it works the same. I don't even know when I get on a call with somebody with a person is and the work gets done the same way. I just wanted to highlight that because there are companies that do distribute it. A lot of them don't and a lot of them had to modernize for what they're dealing with with coronavirus right now. But the fact that you've done it so successfully and that you advertise the fact that you've done it successfully, I think it's something that people can learn from because I know that like the landscape of what a professional environment is changing. And I think more companies have to understand that they have to enable people to basically do what you're doing for the reasons you're saying. I just like that point a lot. The one thing I wanted to discuss. So again, you've taken the four companies to market. They're all they've all been very different. But you obviously have some idea. You said product market fit. You find that product market fit. So how do you find that product market fit? Do you have like a process or whatnot? And then how do you take the product to market, agnostic of industry? How do you have a process that can move me over the years? It's based on an acronym. And that acronym is Bags. Bags? I've never heard that one. That's because I haven't written my book yet. Yeah. What's that? What's I do? It's successful. You will. It's the ideas in policies. Age of product market fit. Your product has to be the best alternative for the goal of a segment. E-A-G-S. Let's work it backwards. The first thing is segment. By that is that you have to pick your segment of users. So it can be super broad. You can say I'm going to go after all the teenagers and do Snapchat. It can be super narrow and you can say I'm going to go after the enterprise 1000, the financial controller and the enterprise 1000 company and these people at this particular goal. So the one is what goal is highly important to your segment and either poorly served or at least you have the hypothesis that you're going to serve it better. And you're going to serve it better. What you're going to do is a better alternative for that goal. I mentioned it in terms of better alternative. Often people say what pain and you're addressing what pain and you're addressing. And I often make the point that when the iPhone came up, I was on the Sony Ericsson and I loved my Sony Ericsson and I had no pain. It was wonderful. But when I saw the iPhone I said, wow, I want that, right? It's just no pain. It's just the thing was so much done better. It was just such a better alternative. And you use it. That's so much a better alternative. So very often companies show up and they're just a better alternative. It's the case with Slack. When Slack came up, I was on the HIP chat. I don't know if you familiar with HIP chat, but it's a communication system like like Slack done by Atlassian. It was quite, quite well. We were quite happy. And then Slack showed up and said, oh, yeah, that's better. There's no questions better. And if it's better, it's worse that you switch. I remember Gmail when I was on the kind God knows what the email client and people say, well, try Gmail. And you go to Gmail and say, oh, my God, it's better. So there's nothing wrong with hotmail, right? There is nothing wrong with hotmail. I'll just people move the Gmail. Yeah. Well, there was nothing wrong except that the search was here. And there was a storage and then Gmail goes up there. Look at that search. It's very fun. That's amazing. And they went with it. So that's the key thing. The product market fit is the best alternative for the goal of a segment. The hard part, they are two hard parts with that. I think it's very segment easy, right? You can decide which segment you're going after. The first hard part is identify a goal. It sounds silly, but it's actually not never too clear whether people really have a goal. There's a really good book about that call. My mom's test where, you know, the user gets his entrepreneur and he goes, she's going to say, mom, I'm going to do a recipe book. And the mom says, that's awesome. I'd love a recipe book. And then you look at it and say, well, there's a few really have a goal of finding recipes. And what evidence do I have that? So let's look, does my mom currently at recipes somewhere? And the other is no. So she doesn't have that goal, right? She doesn't look for recipes because she just doesn't have that goal. So often you ask people, oh, yeah, yeah, but they don't really have that goal. So a particular goal or it's hard to identify clearly what the goal is. That's difficulty number one. Difficulties number two is once you've identified a good goal, you build an alternative that you think is better, but the actual evaluation of whether is better is super tricky, right? So, for example, or is it important or a concierge product? The alternative today, people submit the form and SGR sells people follow up. Instead, the submit the form we connect in real time. Is that a better alternative for the goal of converting this traffic into opportunity? In this case, yes, we do an AB test. We see it works. It's important. Now is a mistake, an example with teams, Microsoft teams, they go after Slack, they do a new product. Is Microsoft team a better alternative? Well, that's super tricky, right? Because they have copied some features, they have some other, they're there, I think. And sometimes you can just lose because you've done something good, but it's just not a better alternative. And you think it's better because it's your baby and you love using it, but the rest of the market evaluate differently in the result, don't give credit to your product. So, that's a framework. That's how we're going to have to the initial products achieve paper with this framework. As I mentioned, sometimes it is younger than others. If you do B2C, it's typically harder. It's very subtle, right? Finding the better chance for president is very hard. In B2B, it can be done better. For example, when I did my biometrics company, I had an inventor and there was a benchmark on how reliable the face recognition was. Right? So, I didn't have to convince people that it's so nice on my product behavior. We did the benchmark. We scored everybody. I went to the Department of Homeland Security and said, look, you can have this level of security with all that much better. And it was an overrainer. So, sometimes it's easier than others. And the B2C is typically harder, which is why you see a lot of failure in the B2C space in the tech at the top of the ship. And also, huge successors, because if you do succeed to do something better, then the market is massive. And you go fast like Snapchat did and TikTok and you know, these apps. So, that's the framework. And I think it's the lifelong learning to keep improving one's skills about product market It's a very simple framework. And if you look at it from a 30,000-foot view, but it's probably very difficult to actually implement. But the concept is very easy. Just make better things. Now, how do you make those things? It's a bit more to it, but yeah, that's right. Exactly. But you'd be amazed. A simple framework can help. Like some of them will say, I'm a great ID. I'm going to do I don't know. A new solution to do this and say, what do you have any evidence that there's a segment whose goal is this to do this, right? And which segment is it? Already that narrows down the possibilities of what you can do. And then it works. No, I love it. I wanted to ask a couple more questions just about your insights over the over your years at your companies and whatnot. But before I move off the topic with ChilliPite, Rose, or anything else that you wanted to bring up that we didn't discuss? Well, on the products side, I do want to bring up the fact that it's a non-going process. So, you know, we did this concierge solution, it worked, we're selling, but then we keep asking ourselves what else, what else can we do, right? So, we're about to release in private beta a new solution, along the same line of these simple IDs and why didn't people think of it earlier? And the idea is to be able to comment in emails. So, you work with a team, you get an email from your customers and you want to ping somebody and say, hey, can you help me with that? Or you're the head of a team, right? So, you're going to have your reps and it's very timely. Right now, I get tons of pings from my reps saying, hey, they're asking for a special favor, right? Because although they affected this way, they want the leaders to do something different for them. So, you constantly have to address your exception, but you want the full context. Right, if the reps as you, they need to delay the start date, we do agree to it. You want the full context. And so, what we do is that we syndicate email threads, we share the email threads. So, for you, you'd say, one of your reps pings, you'll see all the threads of all the extensor information and then you're able to be very valuable advice and make the right decision because it's full context. So, it's the idea to share email threads among people and let them comment and discuss around them. We're going to bring that to market in three weeks. We call it collaborative inbox. It's extension in Gmail and soon in outlook to let people comment in their Gmail. We also have our own inbox where people can do a few more things. And we went with the same bag of things, right? Which segment sells people? What is their goal is to provide the best answer to their customers in their email, the most appropriate answer and persecuting the right decision faster. How to do that with sharing of email threads and commenting on them? Now, the problem, the problem like that, how did you come to the conclusion that this was something that you had to solve? That's what I really am interested in because I understand it. It makes sense. But what was the thing? What was the straw that broke the camel's back? He said, I can't deal with this anymore. And then that prompted this brainstorming session or whatever. How did that happen? So, let me say, in the case of concierge or existing products, the way it came that I talked to a lot of people, they told me I'm converting a 40 person, then that hit me that it was mistaken. You can't possibly lose 60 of you. So, I saw the problem and I think let's find a solution. So, it was an engineering challenge to find a solution, but the problem was clear. In this case of a collaborative inbox, it's not the same because nobody came to me and said, I'm losing 60 of my emails, right? So, it was not a problem with the test solution. It was more of this concept of a better alternative and not to answer to your question, how did you come up with that solution? First, we thought we have to do better in boxes. The category of things that the earth people need in an inbox are not well served. That was the criteria. Because it seems odd that my mother, who is 90, used the same tool as you use Gmail, right? To do what you do professionally in what she does as a matter. So, some I think that is very odd. So, that came from that different angle. In a sense, we were looking for a problem, which is often very dangerous, right? You imagine problems. But that's how we got started. We said, what things could be helpful? So, we started exploring the, for example, integration with CRM, which is quite obvious, to give more context to the email. That makes sense. Obviously, taking action on the email is serving a task. So, say, creating a task on the email. So, a little idea is like that. And then we came up with the idea, say, well, how about the idea to be able to ping somebody on that particular email? But that would be helpful. So, that's how it came up. We were exploring ways that we could improve, and we came up with that one. And what we did is that we deployed in general only. So, say, is it true? That is a better term. And we use it non-stop, right? I have a whole sheet of comments in questions from Chilean box, we call it Chilean box. And so, that problem to be true. You're in a prime market for that too, because everybody's trying to figure a way to collaborate, right? So, all these collaboration tools are so important now. And I think that as we come out of coronavirus and hopefully life gets a little bit back to normal. I think the whole ecosystem of collaboration tools is going to become that much more important, because you're going to have people that are going to push back on having to work in office after they've been enabled to work from home and whatnot. So, yeah, it's very timely and it makes a ton of sense. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, I have a couple. I thank you for bringing that up because I like that. And I do like the point that it's sometimes, it's sometimes dangerous to look for a problem, but if you know enough about your market and you can sort of think through, that's why I also find why the most successful entrepreneurs are people that come from their own industry. I think that most are not all, but I think most are people that come from their own industry and they're solving a problem they already understand. Now, you just you just have the ability to find problems in industries that that you may have not grown up in, but still that's that really is the that's the way to be successful and pretty sure as an entrepreneur. Yeah, it's of course, it's it's more likely succeed if you really know your industry, your problem and your solution, bring it up question. Yeah, no, that's very good. A couple questions like I guess life questions is probably the best way to put them. What would you one lesson that you would tell your younger self, your 20-year-old self that would sort of take you to where you were either quicker or or help you along the way? Yeah, I say just go for it earlier, you know, I became entrepreneur, I think I was 28. So it's reasonably early, but if I know that would have been done it earlier, so I have more confidence in yourself, but do your homework. So when I look at the things the way where some problem of fail is it's always because I didn't do my homework, but by that I mean I didn't research enough, the market that didn't talk to enough people that didn't go and gather enough data. And data sounds abstract, but it's really good to your homework and the reality, make sure that you've talked to a lot of customers, don't fool yourself, make sure you're objective. So the combination of the two, which is in one hand, have more confidence, but then don't earn the confidence in yourself by doing the homework. I love it. Where do you go to learn? Do you have a mentor or a person or do you have a book that you recommend, podcast? What's your go-to resource? Books, I go to books and then I do a lot of research on my own. So podcast is relatively new. So to me, to me, because I don't, so one of the great thing about working remotely is that we don't have any commute, we don't get in the car for 45 minutes in the morning. So a lot of people recently podcasted in their car in their chance. So now I've got into podcast and I love it and I'm glad that you have put together your podcast. It's awesome. Well, you don't know. So this is not an invitation to promote my podcast. I want to just look straight. Thank you. Just finding that you can learn a lot from podcasts. So my source of information is diverse in that way. Books, podcasts, online reading. Do you have like a title that you would recommend to people that you read? These days we at Tea Pepper, we are spending a lot of time on the book by Chris Boss, called Never Speed the Difference. Yes. Because it has a really good and then it's called a job around why people make certain decisions, how to get them on the right track. So that's a strong one. But there are a lot of them, right? There's so much we need to learn all together. So yeah, I think that's the overall lesson is to just keep something ongoing if it's a podcast book, whatever, just have that. For me, I've actually, I've gravitated more towards podcasts because I find them easier and they're bite size and they don't take as much commitment to consume. And you get access to all these incredible people quite quickly. But I've also, you know, these books that I love and I've read, never split the difference by Chris Boss. And the hostage negotiator turns sales coach, whatever, I love it. How do people connect with you or chili pepper if they want to reach out? Yeah. They can just come to our website, chilipepper.com. It's a play on what, right? So it's not pepper, it's pepper. And then if they want to connect with me, so I know it's going to sound crazy, but I was always on the quest of more productivity. I want to be more productive. And so I try all bunch of to-do lists. And I found that my to-list kept increasing instead of decreasing. So there's more and more things. So I decided to start another company and do my own to-do list with a twist with a focus on achieving. And so the idea that we went live a couple of weeks ago is called Gypsy Time, Gypsy Time. And what it does is it helps you, when you get to a task, it helps you focus. So it's closed down on your tabs, it gets you focused. And when you finish, it will reopen your tabs and take you back where we are. So if you, at the other place, where you can find me on the internet, if you go to Gypsy Time, that website, this is a tool I'm using to be more productive and everybody can try it. Gypsy Time is spelled G-I-P-S-Y, it's a spelling of Gypsy, it's a world bunch of possible ways to spell Gypsy, and that's the way which was GypsyTime.com. How did you get the motivation for the name? Is there a story behind and I'm curious, I said there is a story behind my wife, Felina, is from Romania, right? There's a lot of Gypsies over there. And we, we had a little baby and so as it looks like a Gypsy, but of course the Gypsy is actually a subset. So it was a joke on her, it was a joke on her. I think the Gypsy is going to help me to style it. The premise is smart. You know about flow state and those concepts, just being able to be hyper focused, that's exactly what you're doing. Some of the ideas you bring are very, very smart. And there are things that we all try and do, but we've never found products for. I think that you have an app that closes down my tabs and shuts off all the things. I have to do that myself or else I don't get any work done. So yeah, that's right. Yeah, very good, very good. So that's all I got. So thank you very much. I really appreciate the chat. So having me know my pleasure. So just to close it off, this has been another episode of the success story podcast. If you haven't already, please like, subscribe, share with all your friends, families, peer co-workers. You can always leave us a rating. Any rating is fine as long as it includes five stars. And if you haven't already, you can catch this podcast wherever you can download or stream podcasts and you can also watch it on YouTube. Thanks again for listening. This is Scott signing off. Have a great week. Have a productive week and we'll speak again soon. Bye now.