A Candid Conversation on Hiring Employees and Growing a Software Company

Right before we hit record, you were telling me about hiring, right? And how difficult it's been. Can you talk about that? Like, why is it hard? What are you guys doing? Talk to me, let's talk about hiring. It's extremely freaking difficult. Yeah, it is. And there's kind of a lot of rabbit holes that we can actually jump down this because, um, so one, I guess, kind of give you background. So we started maybe not even six months ago. I came on pretty much full time three months ago. Now I'm the acting CMO. And in that role as a startup, it's kind of a unique spot, especially in a software startup, because you basically get no resources. Whereas then you go to an established kind of firm or a company like marketing is very heralded, right? Like the marketing department, whatever it needs, it gets like the last budget that is cut is marketing. And a startup is kind of an inverse, right? Because ultimately you don't want to spend money if people don't like the product. So we're searching for this product market fit that we've finally found. But now there's this weird transition limbo period of like, you're the CMO, but also now you've got to hire up a team, but you also have to keep the marketing department afloat while you're hiring up a team. And so there's just like all these things going, but at the same time, you can't go too far on the let's hire everybody up because the economics just don't work because you don't know if the product's going to work. And so you're just caught in this weird chicken and egg problem that basically everybody I've been talking to senior, everybody goes through. It's just kind of the nature of the beast that a startup, but that's kind of that transition for me has been really interesting to understand what operates. So my whole career has essentially been like a high level IC where I'm, I'm basically just crushing out stuff, high level strategy, high levels, but not necessarily the same thing as an executive. And what makes us successful executive is so much different. Uh, we're both sports guys. Like mostly when you think of a sports captain, the, you instantly think of it, they're like, it's prominence, right? It's like the most proficient person on the team is usually the captain. Whereas now that I'm in this kind of executive role, I understand, Oh man, like you can have people that don't have like clinical high technical proficiencies, but they're incredible leaders. They can hire up and skill up a team really quickly and get moving. And quite frankly, I had a little bit of disdain. I'm not talking about like glorified middle managers. I'm just talking about like true leaders that might not be quote unquote proficient in coding or something like that. And that's the background I came from where, again, that's how I always kind of labeled people's. That's how the hierarchy worked for me. Like, are you technically proficient in X, Y, or Z or in your vertical? And so now I'm finding like, there is so much value to these soft skills where I always thought there was a little bit of fluff on some of the executive pay and now I'm realizing it's really challenging to hire up a team, the scope of the team, to keep everybody operating on the same page, to build the processes, to do all these things. Whereas, um, just being the best player on the team, I think is a lot easier than being the team captain. Yeah, dude. Agreed. All right. So three things. So for context, uh, Rob has the CMO of triple well, and we're gonna talk about triple well a bit later, but just for context, CEO of triple whale. Incredible business. We'll talk about that in a minute. I want to, I want to ask you a few questions about hiring. And then I want to share kind of some of my experience with kind of what we're doing. So with you guys, um, are you posting job listings on LinkedIn, AngelList, Twitter yourself? You know, are you working with recruiters? Are you doing both? Um, like, how are you actually approaching, you know, sourcing candidates to interview and who's doing the interviewing? Yeah. So great questions and great questions. So first it's fairly new. We're hiring up the team fairly quickly. Right now it's literally a notion doc. I whipped up with all the details and then my email to, um, send it to us. And so that's something where we need to get probably some more firepower behind it. Um, so I love to hear kind of what you guys are doing in your solutions. Um, and the other thing too, is we are hired in Austin only. Um, so we, um, to kind of give you guys some color about triple well, triple whales, HQ is in Columbus, Ohio. And that's where the co-founders and the majority of the team works out of. Um, then all of our dev team is in Jerusalem and then our AI team is in Moscow. So, um, we want to build out hubs around certain proficiencies. And so Austin kind of just made a lot of sense to build I'm here. And then also alignment of it's a really awesome city, especially in that kind of marketing, fun, creative style. Um, so we're building out the hub here. So that does restrict a little bit. Cause I, another kind of tangent, you said it was okay for tangent. So I was a huge work from home guy. Like I was always a very big proponent of work from home. And now that I've been doing it for about four years. So, um, I used to work at whole foods and then I moved to an agency that was out of New York. So I basically worked from home there. And then I had my own agency that I basically worked from home and there's certain things like my personality. I have a hard time turning off sometimes. Um, and so I don't have any forcing functions when I work at home, like outside of my fiance, like telling me she loves me and interrupting me all the time, which I love, but it's just the nature of the beast. Cause she, she runs her own little vintage, um, shop out of the house. And so I'm excited. We just got a new office, um, uh, right downtown Austin and a really cool spot. And so I'm actually excited to get, get back into anyways, to land the plane. One of the things is we want to build a team in Austin for that very reason to have some kind of shoulder to shoulder brushings of kind of just that idea sex of, you know, you just have just this random thoughts like, Oh man, it's just so much easier to capture that. And I don't necessarily even know if it's possible, even on video. Like I think there's just something to being in the same room and obviously if the economics don't work and there's definitely ways to run distributed teams, um, and this is just, you know, I get to choose since I'm the same own, so this is just our preference to. Um, have everybody in Austin. So the too long didn't read there is it makes it even more challenging because we can only grab from that talent set. And the other thing is we're hiring a, you know, a mid to senior role where most of these people have jobs, like they don't, they're not looking for employment. And so it's like this, this gets into, you know, some, some different roles where it's, it's not necessarily a non-consumption market. It's like these people are already fulfilled. And so how do you move them? And then not only that we want to hire now and those people usually, you know, you're going to give two weeks to 30 days notice sometimes. And then there's a lot of moving parts that, um, I have not had to really brush against yet. So it's kind of all the inner machinations of building the department. Yeah. Let's, let's break this down. So let's start kind of the most recent piece you mentioned. You mentioned like the folks that are mid to senior, right. That they're doing other things. Like, what are these, where are the good people at? Like, are they moving from corporate or agencies to freelance? Are they starting their own agencies? Do these folks run brands? Like from everything that you're seeing, like, where are these folks, what are they doing and why don't they want to leave what they're doing? Uh, the, the highest talent people I've seen are people that have moved to their mini agencies where they might be running like three to five clients, but each client's paying them, you know, five grand. And then they have basically no overhead. So they're one, they're just printing money. And then two, it is a diversified income stream. And so quite frankly, like business income is way better just in terms of tax treatment than W2 income. Um, and so without, you know, unless you need access to like financial instruments, like loans, mortgages, such like that W2 incomes, trash, man. And so you get into these people that know what they're doing. They're really happy what they're doing. And that's the reason they left and they're running a smaller show. They have a lot more impact, quote unquote. And so those have been the highest talent people that we've thrown some, you know, decent, decent numbers at them in terms of comp and all that stuff. And they're like, no, thank you. But, um, we're just kind of happy with what we're doing. Um, and then the other people are just kind of entrepreneurs that don't want to give up the, the bet they're already making that they're super talented, which I totally understand. So those are kind of the two rejection types that I've encountered that I would want it if that makes sense. Whereas just there was not much really we could do is just kind of sell them to people that aren't buying. Yeah. What do you, what do you think the future looks like? Do you think it's having to find more junior level folks and just spend more time training and investing in them? Is that option or is it the other option? Like making like an acqui-hire of a, of an agency or a freelance group? Like, what do you, what do you think is going to happen in the future? When I think more of this has happened, right? Like I think marketer, I put out a study, like so many people are starting freelance shops and agencies right now. It's so easy and people want to work for themselves and you make more than one or two clients and you're normally working at an agency or an e-commerce business. You're making just as much, if not more, and you control your schedule. So what do you, what do you think happens in the future? Do you, do you have to start from the ground up and find junior folks and internal level people and just train them and give them the keys to the kingdom? Do you do, you know, acqui-hires? I think those are fantastic questions. And for me, I think it is both of those pathways. And so like triple whale in specific, it's more so, um, where we're at on the business journey, because usually acqui-hire won't come until, you know, the balance sheet's a little more robust. There's kind of a war chest of like, Hey, because essentially acqui-hire to your point is those could pretty much be considered recruiting costs. Like that's ultimately what you do. You're just recruiting this top CEO, CFO, CTO, whatever. Maybe the whole exec team, maybe they have some killer engineers, what have you. And that's just way easier to buy their company than it is to go find these people, interview them, qualify them, get the CEO in the room with them. See if he likes them or CTO, what have you. So I think the acqui-hire route's a really smart route. The challenge there again, is you bump into the entrepreneurial spirit, which sometimes can't be overwhelmed by the capitalistic incentives. The other thing I think is junior skill ups is very appealing to me right now. Um, because I could get a few people at the same time, so I can kind of spread my bets out. Um, the problem is, and so there's always a, but right, like managing people's ******* hard and it's really time consuming. And so the more direct reports you get and not to sound condescending, but the lower those direct report, lower level people, those direct reports are, they're very like go for a yes, yes, ma'am. Yes, sir. Like they're construction workers. Like you tell them what to do and they do it. Whereas when you get into the higher level, they're more like architects where it's like, you can just kind of brain dump on them and they're like, okay, I'll figure it out. Like, and so that's a big bifurcation. And so that's one of the challenges, but I think to your point, you know, maybe that's the bet and you can build some processes and make it a little bit formulaic where you almost build this. It's kind of incubator of talent, which I think every company should be. Um, so yeah, I mean, I think those are definitely two really viable options. There's just a lot of costs. Both of them are super expensive. Um, and the first doesn't net out in terms of short term gains. Like there's going to be longterm gains there, but there's going to be short term pain. And so that's kind of the calculation I'm doing is like, what's a tolerable threshold for the short term amount of loss of productivity? Cause it's going to happen. Um, but is it going to pay off to have that longterm win in the future? Which it will. Cause right now, you know, there are certain systems that aren't scalable and they need to be rebuilt around processes so they can scale. Yeah. It makes sense. All right. One more question on hiring and I'll share a few things kind of on our end and then we'll move on to the next section. So you mentioned kind of notion, right? So you're building out like the job descriptions in notion. What, what happens from there? Are you personally messaging it to people you think would be a good fit? Are you posting that on Twitter and running spend behind it? Like what happens after you create the job description? How do you actually find the candidates? Yeah. So ultimately right now it's been the OG posting in all the kind of job forums. I know all the Slack groups I'm a part of and kind of that first wave of seeing what we can move the needle. We'll probably end up putting some spend behind it and you know, worst case scenario, it might not be something where there, the couple of positions that we're looking to hire, um, head of content, head of growth, holler at me. Um, are kind of high enough level that would warrant a recruiter. Um, so that's something that we're probably not opposed to as well. So, um, but in terms of other things, I mean, LinkedIn again is something that I haven't tried. I don't know why I'm such a LinkedIn Luddite. I don't, I don't know why I'm just so like, I don't know. It just feels so faux pas, doesn't it? But it's so good. Like I see Chris, uh, meet over at cross net, crushes it on there. You do a decent job on that. It's decent. I don't know why I ---- on it so much. I don't know why I spend too much time on Twitter. Everyone on Twitter is a LinkedIn hater. It's actually like a, not a horrible, I don't know. Maybe I'm going to get ---- for it, but it's not a horrible network. I think there's a lot of, if I'm going to be honest, I think it's one of the, like, if there's any arbitrage to be had, it's probably that, right. That are tick tock. Like you can win on anybody can kind of win on tick tock. I mean, there's a few LinkedIn incumbents, but it's not like Instagram or Facebook or Facebook in specific and Instagram really to like, you're not breaking into those explore feeds very easily. Like it's going to be a big challenge. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It's interesting. So on, on our end, so my little brother Carson, who I think you may, may or may not know, he was doing like some freelance recruiting for us and he was helping us find no candidates for like a marketing role and a design role in a copywriting role, but he was still in college. So we wanted to hire him full time to work for us because we were scaling to that point where we needed someone in full time and we, we use Carson then to find a recruiter. So it's kind of like this meta thing of using a recruiter, a recruiter. We brought in this, this girl who's just been fantastic. She's also taken on things like HR and whatnot. And as we're scaling, there's like all of these laws and these regulations that you need and all this healthcare stuff. So it's, it's been a lot. We had to transition to like platform for like payroll. And we kind of like put our big boy and big girl pants on this year and it grew up. And I don't want to say corporatized cause I don't really like that, but really kind of like official type of thing. And we've since like, since she started six or eight months ago, we've made like 30 or 40 higher. So literally having someone that's like obsessed and dedicated to like a full time HR recruiting role has been huge. And she now has two or three other folks on her team that are like junior mid-level kind of recruiting admin type folks. And that for us has been a game changer, like bringing someone in to just literally handle, you know, back office things and scout kind of going through the internet, hosting JDs. Um, and we have so many job descriptions up and we were hitting LinkedIn and I was posting social and hit my newsletter so much that I ended up using like a personal job board. There's this company called pallet that has like the ability for folks to use job boards. So I've got one and Nick Sharma's got one and there's a couple other folks in the space. I need to jump. So it's almost like I made a job board for my community and we keep filling now jobs from it. And I get Nick Shackelford to post and this, that, and the other. So it's been kind of interesting. So I think like the learnings for us there was as it makes sense, like bringing in someone to handle and manage it full time is really important because you as a CMO of the company, you've got so many other things that you need to be doing, like doing the HR and the recruiting as a full time job in and of itself. So you go from doing like 40 to 60 hours, at least of the CMO type stuff. Now you have to put another 10, 30 hours in on the HR stuff. And then week after week, you're burnt out. Right? So those are kind of like some of the things, uh, for us. And obviously I think having a personal brand, right? Like me and Nick are fortunate to have that show you guys and the guys at triple whale. Like some of your guys' growth has been like some of the most insane growth I've ever seen, like in SAS and Shopify, like in general, I want to talk about that in one second. So I think for you guys, like people know about you guys. It's like, it's crazy how, you know, viral and how often you guys are being mentioned, you know, on, on Twitter, which I guess, unless you have any questions, I want to kind of move to that, that section of like growth, like how the heck are you guys doing what you're doing? Yeah. Um, yeah, I guess just to land the plane, I'm totally with you. And so we, we actually just brought on a, um, head of HR. So that's something I need to lean into. And then I didn't even think about, um, the kind of exclusive job boards as well. Um, again, that's a really good idea. The, uh, what else can I say? No, I mean, that's kind of the path. There's just been more stuff to do than hands to do it, but I love where your head's at. That's exactly the way to go. And there's a certain aspect and I'll stop babbling. But, um, again, another kind of naivete that I had at the IC level was just like hiring is easy. It's just, it's so hard. It's so time consuming. It's like, now I understand why there's like actual proper recruitment departments at these corporations and these big businesses, because it is just a headache and quite frankly, it's a huge value add or value loss to the company. Like if you bring in shitty people, dude, it can ruin good teams and vice versa. And so, um, yeah, I'm totally with you on that. Sick. All right. Let's talk about triple L. Um, I really quickly, like in a 30 second overview, I want you to explain what it is, and then I want to kind of talk about like, how did you land there? Like, how did you personally land there? Were you a user of the platform? Did you just see it on Twitter? And you're like, man, this is sick. I've noticed X, Y, and Z that they can improve. Like how, how did that happen? What is triple whale and how did you end up there? Yeah. So I'll address the first question. So triple whales, the operating system for e-commerce. So ultimately what we're doing is we're aggregating all of your data sources. We're blending that data. We're doing some sophisticated analysis on top of that data. So you can see cohorting, you can see LTVs. Um, and then on top of that, we've built an attribution tool. So there's triple whale and then there's triple whale with attribution. And that attribution is, um, excuse me, fueled by our triple pixel. And so that's our first party pixel. And so ultimately it's one login, one dashboard, all the metrics, and then it's also on mobile. So, um, it's basically freeing people from all these really bad ad managers. Um, and then also doing a bunch of blended data, um, which kind of sucks to do if you ever play around in data studio and stuff, it can get become a headache. Sick. Yeah. You guys have built something really special. Our, our paid team, you know, loves you guys and uses you guys religiously. So really, really cool stuff there. How did, how did your journey, you know, kind of cross paths with, with those guys? Yeah. So, um, kind of, I guess just to give you a little color, I actually, so I went, actually went to school for economics. I wanted to be an investment banker at one point in time. Um, and then I got really into technology while I was at a university. I went to Indiana university Hoosiers. Um, and while I was there, I got really into tech. So I started building websites. I started coding iPhone apps. I started AWS stuff just as nerdy as you got. Um, and then I want to start making money. And I realized that, uh, building somebody's cash register isn't as valuable as putting money in their cash register. And so I could ask for way more money when I was making people money versus building a website is, you know, inherently a value add, but not like explicitly because you still need customers. You still need all this stuff anyways. Um, so then I got into marketing and I started just doing, I was into photography at the time and so doing eBooks with a friend that was really big on Instagram and yoga. Um, so we crushed it there and that's kind of how I cut my teeth into ads. Then I started doing, uh, luxury real estate. So, uh, I was doing all the paid media for a luxury real estate firm here in Austin, and then I moved to whole foods. So doing all the paid media in the recruitment vertical there. Um, and then I went to an agency where I spent boatloads of money and we kind of laugh about it, no offense, but we'd call it LA math where, um, there was just some really, when growth at all costs is the kind of directive, you can see some, it's a very unique economics, put it that way, but got to spend a ton of money, learned a ton about, um, mobile app installs. Um, that was primarily the kind of clients we were working with, got to work with a bunch of really, um, big, big clients spent a bunch of money and then went off and did my own agency. And that's kind of where the triple whale kind of engagement started. Seeing them on Twitter, AJ, AJ and I would kind of banter back and forth. I saw kind of the product velocity and how they're launching and all this cool stuff. And I came from a Google data studio, kind of super metrics. I roll my own again, kind of super nerdy stuff. And I was showing AJ kind of what I was running. He's like, Hey, I can beat that. And then we kind of just started going back and forth with it. Um, and then ultimately they offered me, um, uh, opportunity to be part of the first round. So it was actually my first private investment. So that was really cool. Um, and then from that, it kind of just went into a. Pretty much honeymoon phase to explore, like what this would look like. And then in October we kind of hit the guns, a blazing, and then it's kind of been all, all downhill since, as they say, just swimming around and in chaos, making money, launching amazing features. Um, and the community that we're building has been like just some of the, I would put like a triple whale, like either whale mailer or triple whaler up against anybody. I mean, they're just the sweetest, smartest, like most empathetic, understanding, awesome people. It's been a, been cool to see what. Kind of the product is attractive because a lot of them are like hardcore capitalists like me. Right. And so it's, it's nice to see, like, there's a, there's some humanity behind it. Um, so it's been really cool. And AJ and Max have been really awesome in terms of giving me a lot of leeway in terms of what we're doing with our brand identity, where we're kind of this, like. The way I try and position this, it's almost this like college professor with the, the shoulder patches, but also smokes, weeds, not condescending, like really knowledgeable, but at the same time, kind of a kale and cigarettes where it's like, don't take yourself too serious, man, life is too short. Like none of this ---- really matters anyways. Like it's, you know, all kind of what we need. And so having all of that has really manifested and it's like, I think anyways, like a really fun approachable, but yet, um, value add brand where, you know, like when you're getting whale mail, you're going to get a really well thought out editorial and it's not going to be like all jokes, but at the same time, I might slip some poison references in there or some means and stuff. And so, I don't know. I just think that humor has been lost in academia and in education a lot. And I think that humor is one of the fastest ways people learn, because what happens with humor is you let people take their guard down. They're not going to be judged. It's not going to be, you don't know what Murr is Chase, or you don't know what Poe is. Like who knows who learns like that? Nobody learns like that, but you can crack a joke or it just makes things. Um, I think Ronald Reagan, good old Ronnie Reagan's, um, politics aside, he was one of the most brilliant orators and he actually had little cards with jokes on them and that's how he would always kind of like break the ice. Cause he just, and he just understood the power of humor. And so I think there's a lot lost in that in education. And so that's kind of where Triple L has been really fun to see because it's ultimately an education content play in terms of marketing. And so it's been really fun to have that, um, buy-in from the leaders there and being able to kind of morph into something that's, I think, really fun and approachable, almost like the Mr. Rogers of marketing. Yeah, I love it. So to kind of quickly recap your own personal journey with Triple L, and then I want to talk about growth. It sounds like you kind of were either a super user slash kind of someone that was just giving feedback and kind of poking holes at things and kind of showing what you're doing and then comparing notes. It sounds like you first actually became an angel investor in the company, and then you actually became, you know, a co-founding member of, you know, an executive employee, whatever the right word is. And kind of ever since I've been building the rocket ship with the guys. That's awesome. Um, let's talk about the rocket ship that you guys have been building. Is the growth, is it organic? Is it a mix of organic and paid? Like, how are you guys doing what you're doing? Like, you know, how are you getting people to share on Twitter and post screenshots? Is that something that you're prompting or literally the community is taking everything that you guys have done and just running with it and growing the business for you? Yeah. So I would say if it was percentage split, probably 80% organic, maybe 10% influence or kind of partnership and then 10% paid. And the paid is ultimately just, um, uh, defensive Google ad buys, whereas just kind of keeping it, keeping people off of our kind of branded keywords. So like it is paid per se, but it's not in anyways, um, super low levels there. So, yeah, I mean, ultimately what I told AJ, I think the big thesis is, is just community content and education. Like if we can make people better skilled up and people make more money from the and then if they adopt the platform or they see how easy it is to make more money for themselves, like it's always been around value add for the community and value generation. And quite frankly, like it's hard to understand, but like exponentials and compounding is like not very intuitive, but like that's exactly what content is. And so like there was, you know, a month or so of just like me screaming into a black hole, but you got to bite down on the mouthpiece. You got to send, send the newsletters out. You got to post the podcast. You got to do all this stuff. And then finally something clicks and then finally something takes hold and then another thing takes hold and another thing takes hold. And so it's just been for me making sure everything we're doing is aligned in terms of education, value generation, and also how can we give people other stories and deliverables that they can then show off? So I think we did a good job with our triple pixel launch where we made a really cool floppy disk, kind of almost entity looking style stuff. And so being, being able to give people better on ramps to the community, that's a big 2022 initiative for us. We're starting the whale sanctuary where it'll be our community of all the triple whalers. And so, but in terms of, I mean, honestly, outside of the processes and stuff, like we got lucky, we hit a really good niche. We had a really bunch of like awesome partners like you and we partnered with some other big people, Shaq, Jason, a lot of really hitters in the space, but not partnered in the way of like mercenary, but partnered in the way like value for value. And you guys had communities and then we had a community that we wanted to build that would also align with the community you already have. And so there was a lot of symbiotic relationships that weren't built off of strict economics. And I think that again, it's hard to do if you don't have either the money or that, you know, like everybody wants to hire Oprah, of course, but at the same time, is that the longterm goal of the company? No, like would cash on Oprah be great for a short term bump? Sure. But then we get a bunch of group honors where it's, we wanted to have this radial growth where we can really delight that 20 to 30% of people. The next 20% will come, the next 20% will come, but we didn't want to get caught. I think there's a lot of when you serve everyone, you serve no one kind of stuff. And I think there's some wisdom to that, where we have a very defined niche right now, where if you want to be the best marketer, you should read our stuff. And then if you want to be the most proficient marketer in terms of deploying your paid media, one of the easiest ways to cut down on all that mental cognitive load is to use triple whale. And so that's kind of the thesis in a nutshell. And then what about like the, the invite only, right? So I think the app still requires an invite code. We talk about like, I guess the psychology behind that, the pros and the cons behind that, like, has that been a big growth lever? Let's, let's talk about like wait lists invite only. Was that intentional? Was that kind of a growth hack that was unintentional? Do you share any learnings on kind of that piece? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So we are currently a wait list only, but we will be changing that shortly. That's a function of two things. One to your point, like you want to get inside the club that has, so like this is actually a, a club, I mean like literal club dance club. Yeah. Yada. Um, like you would do that and you'd see this huge line outside and then you finally get in, there's nobody in the club and you're like, what the hell? And it's kind of the same, same cognitive trick there. Um, but it's also to, to make sure that people are so trust is our number one thing. We want to make sure that people trust our data and trust the platform. And so there's a certain aspect of just scaling so fast, especially as we bring, and we have some larger stores and kind of like 70 million to a hundred million dollar run rates where you start to start to hit up into some kind of edge cases where you're just pulling a lot of data, especially in terms of our attribution tool of a triple pixel. Um, and so it was a function of two things. One, definitely for promotion, but two, there was a certain aspect of, we wanted to control the supply to ensure that the quality was ubiquitous and amazing and over serving everyone, um, versus kind of just throwing out a clunky thing that breaks all the time. Right on. Makes sense. A couple of the last questions I have and things I want to talk about is like either through the data that you kind of have access to, or maybe just through, you know, working with clients or stuff on Twitter, um, any big trends or learnings that you could see either through the data, um, that happened kind of recently in Q4 that are going to be kind of indicating towards Q1, like the only thoughts in your mind of like what you're seeing pros or cons things that people should be doing more of paying attention to, I guess, just some best practices or tips based off of historical things or kind of things that are coming on the growth side, on the supply chain side, any way you want to take it. Yeah. So I think the biggest macro thing that I've seen, and it's not necessarily kind of like a statistical trend, it's more so like a meme is that people are starting to get hip to profit. And so people are really starting to understand like not every dollar is created equal. Um, especially when you're using paid media to promote said product. Um, so I've seen a really big uptick on people learning about Poaz, people understanding gross profit, and honestly, even looking at like net profit per order, um, which is pretty granular stuff. Um, so that has been kind of something that has been really interesting to me because I've been in media buying for a really long time and I can't think of profit being mentioned once until this last maybe year to six months where now it's kind of starting to proliferate and people are really starting to get hip to like, it's not really about revenue watching, but ultimately like cashflow is king, but kind of net net profit cashflow or free cashflow is really king. And so that has been really interesting. Um, I saw mixed data, but for the most part, starting your black Friday was actually a good thing, but your black Friday, so on the net it was more volume, but your black Friday was smaller than previous, if that makes sense, which would net out, so you say you start your sale on Monday versus Wednesday. So like last year it was Wednesdays and this year it was Monday on the net. If you take Monday to Sunday as your black Friday of cyber Monday week, or I guess including Monday, excuse me. So take Monday to Monday. Um, that was bigger if you started earlier, but your black Friday, black Friday, proper comparison year over year was smaller. Does that make sense? Yeah. So the net was better if you started bigger, but your black Friday was smaller. Um, who's another other interesting stuff we saw? Um, so I know you, you guys have some Clavio analytics and I think you guys are not supporting SMS, any interesting stats on retention, obviously I think SMS adoption has been through the roof. I don't know if you have anything interesting points there, anything on the email side that you're seeing. There is some stuff that I was doing. So we have a really fancy and not to turn this into a product pitch, but a fancy cohorting tool. And what you can do is roll up those cohorts by LTV cumulative. And then you can actually look by discount code. And so a few things that I saw one, um, getting people on your email list obviously matters and I can actually quantify or for all the stores I sit across, I can actually quantify and show you how much it matters. So that's a huge, huge thing. So hire chase or hire somebody like chase. It's huge, huge deal. Um, but that's not really like a huge revelation. It's more of a verified thesis. Um, but the second thing was there was cohorts for a few clients where they were actually terrible cohorts, but then black Friday hit. So these were black Friday, cyber Monday from last year and then black Friday hit and they all paid up. And so it's not that they were necessarily horrible clients that I actually netted out decent value, but it's about a 10, 11 month payback period. So you could, you know, maybe that is necessarily not a great client because that's a really long time to wait. And they're buying again at a discount, even though it's calculated into the LTV. But, um, it's still was interesting to me to see that those kinds of people, I guess, just sit the shop. Um, but that was fascinating as well. So who are those people? Like we, I mean, we see the exact same thing with our customers too. And we specifically target them around the same period of time because they do buy again. But like, I've never asked myself, I've never looked like who in the world are these people? Like, why do they not engage? Or why do they not buy? Are they doing this on every brand that they're a part of? Like, is that the only time they shop with the whole year? I don't know. They're like the never nudes from Arrested Development. I don't know. I guess they exist, but I, I haven't yet built a thesis around that. That's the only thing I can think of is, uh, you know, essentially people that buy like the winter coat on sale in the summer to wait like six months to wear it. Like, I don't know. I mean, and again, that's why I'm not super bearish or bullish on black Friday, cyber Monday ads in general. Depending on the economics, usually I'll just overspend up until black Friday and then just float the, float the rest of the month because I'm just, I don't know, I think the Groupon effect, there's definitely some value to black Friday, cyber Monday, not denigrating that I was a bit more of a. Kind of Luddite in that sense where I was, I thought this year was going to be horrible and it absolutely wasn't. It was totally fine. Um, so there's definitely something there. I just think when I think of black Friday, cyber Monday, not to take a soapbox here, but there's just, I think two things you need to make sure it's a money grab. So with that money grab, make it as efficient as possible. Um, don't be handing out ads to people that are already going to buy. Um, and then the second thing is. You're going to pull a lot of sales forward from December. And so what you need to do is try and concentrate on like higher LTV products or like subscriptions or stuff like that, where you can then internalize that, um, LTV in that customer. Cause if not, you're going to get that one purchase. And then you paid all that money for them to purchase, but they're never going to engage with your brand again. So that was, that's kind of my little black Friday, cyber Monday spiel. Sorry. Yeah, dude. No, this is great. This is fire. I think that's a good place to wrap. Uh, where can people find you personally? I'm guessing probably you on Twitter and then where can people find triple whale on social and then triple whales website? What are the three places for those? You get a whale social triple whale website. Love it. So, uh, me, I'm at Robert Ray Hill, R a B a H R a H I L on the bird app. And then if you want to get involved in triple whale, you can go to try triple well.com, uh, join the wait list there. And then we also have an amazing newsletter called whale mail that was referenced earlier. You can sign up on our Twitter page. It's at try triple whale and right there, smash the subscribe button right on the Twitter page. And, uh, off you go. You'll be into the Twitter universe or the triple well universe. Sweet, man. This was killer. I appreciate you. Awesome. Thanks so much, Chase.