Cleeng Revenue (2024)

[00:00] Quick context. This was recorded March twenty eighth and twenty ninth. So a couple weeks ago at my live event, saasopen.com. We had a thousand software CEOs there. If you missed it, we hope to see at the next one, September fifth and sixth in New York City, saasopen.com. But for now, let's jump into the recording. [00:22] >> To give a bit of context of what we've been trying to achieve. So we started in 2011 as an organization. We've been going fairly slow up until twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen, building the product carefully, trying to shape it to serve the client that we want to serve and just cover this in a sec. And then from 2021, started to accelerate, and now we really see the acceleration, so that's in revenue. But of course, to sustain that [00:53] >> acceleration, and we are focusing on the enterprise B2B space, we were more long tail historically, but now we focus more on the enterprise B2B. We had also to recruit quite some staff. So that's part of the challenges that we were facing, you know, to organize this properly and to continue to manage the engagement of the team and manage the proper throughput of the organization. [01:14] >> With very briefly. So Cling, specialized in subscriber retention for video platforms. We work with the likes of well, you see some of the clients here. Our largest client is actually the NFL in The U. S. So you guys here, I'm sure you know. Some are in the telco industry, some are more like traditional broadcasters. So we help sell video subscriptions. We are kind of CRM platform for video subscription, but what we do. We manage about 35,000,000 [01:43] >> accounts, 5,000,000,000 in gross billing. So we became quite sizable nowadays. [01:50] >> And so what are some of these key learnings? And I'm sure you've been hearing some of these learnings in the past day, in the past few hours. Some people are repeating kind of the same, but there are also a few nuances. So I was happy that I could share maybe things that are a bit different. So one thing, it's often a dilemma, especially with investors. Are there investors in that group here? Yeah. Okay. There's a few [02:15] >> investors. So investors, especially in the early days, we always look at, what's your time? You know? What's your time? What's your time? And you need to expand very fast, and it needs to be sufficiently large. Otherwise, it's not worth investing. So you have the tendency quite quickly to go maybe a bit too far on what you can target. It's easy to stretch a software, but actually it's hard to stretch the sales and to stretch the experience [02:43] >> and marketing and these type of activities. So one thing I think that we've been doing pretty well is to continue to focus very much on our vertical, so the media and entertainment vertical, and not to try other verticals. Often we speak about gaming, for example, it's very similar. At the end, it's subscription type of business. We speak about some form of IoT that will be also fairly similar. But we really refrained from going there, and we [03:09] >> doubled down on the vertical that we are in, and I think it was a very good choice. [03:17] >> The second important learning is adapting your pricing policy. If there's one thing that we've learned over the years is that pricing is never exactly right. [03:33] >> We started as a long tail platform. We used to sell licenses at EUR 99 a month. That's how we really started ten years ago. And then we started to charge for certain components. So in our case, we charge per user here. So on top of the license, you would say, how many subscribers do you have? And then you pay a small fee per subscriber. That's the only metric that we use. We use a tiered model. So [04:02] >> you commit at a certain level and then you have various tiers. Big benefit of this is that you don't need to renegotiate a contract if your client is over performing. This is always a huge amount of [04:15] >> time and a bit of frustration also for the client because it's overperforming. And now it's saying, oh, but I'm paying too much. Let's say you've committed at $100,000 and you achieved $200,000 So of course, you want to recalibrate your fees accordingly. But if you haven't embedded this in your contract, you need to renegotiate the contract. If you work on a tiering base, then it's way easier. You just get to the next tier, and then you don't [04:39] >> need to renegotiate anything. [04:42] >> Market focus, of course, now we are enterprise sales. We are really like Tier one. And to my surprise, we can continue to claim larger fees for our clients. So even though we work still on a per user basis, since we go after clients with potentially millions of users, you end up with an AR of 1,000,000 or more with certain clients. And of course, when you start to charge €1,000,000 per year as software, you feel like, well, [05:14] >> holy shit, we make it. [05:17] >> You have to adapt your strategy. I'm sure, well, some of you guys may be familiar with so loss leader, basically, you you become extremely aggressive. Scheming, you you try to get the most out out out of all of this. Scorseshelf is that you feel like, okay, I'm gonna be aggressive for a certain time until I penetrate the market, get market share and then I will increase it or premium, which is more the positioning that we have [05:40] >> today. If you're okay, I have high margin, I'll try to maintain them while it lasts and then my drop later. And then some other considerations. So I've been sharing a few parameters related to pricing, but I really feel that pricing is important that you constantly optimize it for the target group of users that you want to go after. And it was definitely a key learning from selling $200,000 of ACV to $1,000,000 plus of ACV, of course, [06:10] >> it's a very different type of pricing. [06:15] >> The third element that was a big learning, and it's been learning I think for the past ten years to be honest. We always neglected a little bit the customer success aspect and the retention aspect. We tend to always chase the new clients and you organize yourself. You spend a lot of effort about acquisition and growth strategies of marketing. You invest in customer success, but you may not invest at the same level of attention as you would [06:46] >> do [06:48] >> for the acquisition part. But you quickly realize that once you get that $5,000,000 to $10,000,000 of revenue, I mean, if you have a leaky bucket, you know, I love this image of the leaky bucket. If you sign $5,000,000 a year, but you lose like two or three every year, I mean, there's no way you can get to $10.15, or 20,000,000. So very important to to invest in customer success to to to structure while that team. It [07:15] >> it's maybe the most complex. I've learned that it's maybe the most complex role in an organization. Why is it the most complex role? Because I simulate that a good account manager is like a CEO. You need to know about sales. You need to be able to negotiate with your clients. You need to know very well your product because your client is asking, okay, but how do I use this product? How do I generate the right value [07:37] >> from it? You may need to be able to answer some technical questions from these clients once in a while. And you need to, well, sell properly the value propositions, marketing and so on. So very difficult to develop the right profiles there. So start early, in my view, to get the right guys. It's certainly one area where we've been doing good from a net dollar retention, we are 120%, 130%. But from a staffing standpoint, we still have [08:07] >> high rotation, and we still struggle a little bit to staff properly that organization. [08:18] >> Surprisingly, especially after the the point number three, is that as we as we grew, we we hired a specialist of customer success and customer retention coming from IBM. She's been doing this for very long. And about two years ago, we said, okay, now we need to become customer centric. And you guys are telling you are not enough customer centric. You are product centric. You are, well, to some extent, financial centric and these type of things, but [08:45] >> you are not sufficiently customer centric. Well, guess what? By becoming customer centric, we were moving, to my liking at least, way too much as a solution integrator or system integrator type of company. You start to get the account management team coming to you and say, hey. Yeah. But, you know, this client is really looking for that service or they are looking for that kind of extension. It's not exactly what we want. But if we don't do [09:13] >> this, we may lose them. So it's very important you start to develop it. And then you are, like, torn in between to feel like, oh, what shall we do? You know? Shall we really pay attention to everything that the client is asking for? Or do we keep our course? Of course, we listen to to their requirements, but we need to adapt a little bit, let's say, our messaging toward that client to say, sure, dear clients, let's [09:35] >> work together. Let's figure out a solution. I love the Amazon Web Services work backwards. I don't know if you guys are familiar with the work backward model. So, basically, they ask clients, okay, what do you want us to do? So clients will say, well, I'd love to develop this and this and this. It's okay. Why don't we work together on it? But they really say we develop together that service as part of our product stack. That's [10:02] >> And literally how they started the AWS. Right? Some clients were coming to them saying, you have this mega infrastructure that you don't use, expect at Christmas and New Year. Why don't you start to sell it to us, you know, in, I don't know, January and February? And that's how we started to develop AWS. So that was a good model. But it's something to continue to to watch out because especially when you have a client that is [10:23] >> spending you 1,000,000 a year, to my earlier point, when it starts to say, need this and that, well, you kind of say, sure. You know, we're gonna develop it. So finding that right balance was, was definitely an important learning. [10:44] >> The fifth, important learning is, [10:49] >> don't listen to the financial, CRMs, and sorry for my, broken English, maybe a French expression. But as you start to grow and accelerate properly, around that stage, we started to get a lot more interest from investors, including our own investors saying, well, yes, but we should bring potentially some more companies to support that development. And luckily, we said, no, okay, we want to stabilize first the organization. We want to continue to grow at a controlled pace [11:25] >> so that we make sure that we don't do big mistakes, which is more or less what has been happening here. And actually, the growth has been very good at that level. And because we've been controlling that pace, well, mechanically, we became more profitable. And I feel that we reduced the amount of risk that we could have taken if we would have raised, let's say, 10,000,000 or 20,000,000 of money at that time. At the same time and [11:51] >> last year, I was presenting here as well. I don't know, always end up in the finance, what I really I'm not a financier, far from it, but okay, so be it. So last year, how when we raised money, so we raised money in 2018, how we almost killed the company in 2019. This was quite incredible because the investors came in 2018. They say, guys, okay, go invest and we don't give you monies for you to keep [12:20] >> that money at the bank. You need to spend it there. And then in 2020, when COVID started, it's not about actually, you guys have been spending like crazy. This is not the right thing to do. Okay. We need to basically fold the company. You know these stories? Okay. Well, good. I'm happy I'm not alone in that case. [12:42] >> So manage this carefully. Take your own decision as a founder. So I'm luckily still a founder. It's certainly more difficult if you've been an appointed CEO. But if you're a founder, I think you have massive leverage with the strategy of the organization. And yes, do what you think is the best for the employees, best for your clients and continue to grow in that model. [13:11] >> One that I haven't heard so much actually today, while I'm a big believer in organization optimization. So just to put some context before launching Cling now fourteen years ago, thirteen years ago, I used to work in big organization. I was at Philips. I was at Apple for some time, in the computer space. And I think I've made a bit of a specialization back then in terms of e business team organization and how do you scale an [13:44] >> organization when you are growing like 50100%. [13:48] >> I think too often, we assume that, let's say, we design an organization today, a, you tend to assume you design it for today, but actually today is already gone. You know, if if you grow 40%, I mean, already tomorrow it's obsolete what you've been doing today. So you need to design an organization more for like six to twelve months. That's for sure. But also to say to your teams, guys, we may have spent two months. Usually, [14:17] >> it's about a two month cycle to optimize like the tech team or the sales team. [14:24] >> And then we feel like, okay, well, now we are done for the next three, four years. And then like two years later or two and half years later, come back and say, actually, your organization does a bit of flows. So we need to reorganize it a little bit, you know, to fine tune some elements. I really think that's super important because as you grow in terms of staff, you blurry the roles and responsibilities. So then you [14:50] >> start to have a lot of people which are asking, yeah, but you know, used to do this and now there's another guy that is doing kind of the same, who takes the decisions. We we we start to have more people in meetings. So usually when you are a small team, you have like meetings with, three, four people and that's that's perfect. And then you grow the organization, you start to have meetings with like eight, ten, 12 [15:13] >> people if you like what. So it's it's really surprising. So once you get to that stage, it's it's a sign you need to reorganize. If the meeting goes too big, it's not because, okay, people just want to have more people in meeting. It's because the roles and responsibilities aren't clear. So you you reoptimize a little bit your organization. You clarify the roles and responsibilities so to continue to achieve the the right speed and throughput, not just [15:41] >> at the function level. So like tech and marketing and sales, but more at the project level, which tends to be often, you know, intertwined type of organization. You have a sales guy, a PM, a solution engineer and group of developers potentially. So it's very important that they are properly integrated to here. [16:04] >> Seven is it might be something that we repeat often, but it's been certainly where I've been spending the most time in the last twenty four months. I was really scared, but as we grow and to put things in perspective between bit of staff that is leaving and the new staff that came in. You saw the graph earlier. So now we are 140 people. About 50% of the organization is new in the last twelve, eighteen months twelve, [16:34] >> fourteen months. So one big risk I see is, of course, you know, especially when you bring some new managers. We have a new new CFO, new head of customer success, new CEO. You know, they all bring you know, these are smart people. You know, these are senior people. They are at the management level with with you. So they they themselves bring, you know, their their own learnings and experience, and they try to shift or adapt, you [16:59] >> know, some of of your culture, which has some good, of course, sides. But you also don't want to lose what has been, let's say, the historical culture of your organization. So these four pillars here, we built them in 2013, 'fourteen. So really ten years ago, very much at the very beginning of the organization, we were trying to figure out, okay, but what makes us stand out? You know, how do we sell to a new employee who [17:23] >> we are? And these are our main, let's say, pillars of the culture. And I've been spending a hell of a time to make sure that we do maintain that culture of well, these values, so that we can continue to grow to the next stage and avoid further mistakes. [17:46] >> Eight is a little bit what we are doing here. It's the only conference I do in the year, but I love the opportunity to meet with more CEOs and CFOs and CEOs, guys who went through the similar struggles as I did because it's been a long and painful journey in many dimension. Learned from other industries also. Was speaking about pricing. I was speaking about market focus. Large part of the reorganization on pricing is when we signed [18:19] >> Looker, when we signed Salesforce. Now you really go deep as a CEO to understand, okay, but why Salesforce is billing like this? Why Looker is billing like this? Why AWS is being like this? And then you you try to think, What's the correlation between how we do it to how I do it? And where are the gaps? If it succeeded, you know, if they succeeded in that domain, there's certainly ways that also I can learn quite [18:41] >> a bit from them. So learn from others, very important, but I guess that's why we are all here together. [18:49] >> The nine is and that's why I didn't follow the template sent by Saisopen and I hope nobody will report me, is avoid boredom. One thing that we see also a little bit related to the culture is that when you move from like fifty, sixty people that we are there at the beginning of the organization, so we really went into battle together, you know, we were in the trenches and, you know, we were fighting and da da [19:12] >> da. And then you have a bunch of people which are coming in and then it become a bit more corporate, like, okay, follow the processes. I'm the first one to advocate for that, right? So that's a bit of the dilemma. You advocate to follow standards. And at the same time, you said, no, guys, okay, go outside. And if you need to spend some money to invite some clients, okay, go for it. Don't ask permission for like [19:32] >> your free papers to be signed. So very important to, I think, resist the temptation of a form of bureaucratic model as you grow. And again, 100 employees is not like Microsoft size, but it already starts to wait on our capacity to decide effectively. [19:51] >> And that's about it. So it's past twenty minutes. I've been sharing the nine key learnings, but I'm happy to take also a few questions if you guys have. [20:02] Yes. Thanks, Jill. Give Jill a hand, please. [20:09] What quick question before we bring Jeff on stage. Any questions? No. I'm good. I'll grab Jill after. Alright. Thanks, Jill. Appreciate it. Thank you. Hey, [20:23] folks. If we haven't met yet, my name is Nathan Latka. I launched and sold my first software company back in 2015 and went on to write a book about it, which you guys made a Wall Street Journal bestseller purchasing over 30,000 copies. Thank you so much for that. After the book, I launched this show and one went on to create founderpath.com. I raised a large fund to do non dilutive deals with B2B software founders. So far, [20:50] we've invested in over 400 software founders totaling $150,000,000 Here in 2024, we're doing three to four new deals per week. So if you're looking for capital and don't wanna give up equity, go sign up at founderpath.com for free to get your offer.

thanks for joining on this Friday afternoon so um yeah quick story about our past four years it's been as always a bit of a bumpy ride many of you here our Founders so you certainly know what I'm talking about am I pleased to share some of the learnings that we had because I think some of it can be beneficial for any of you raising money or facing a bit of a challenging situation so that's what I'm trying to share first I'll start with how the fundraising almost killed us that's literally what what happened at that moment we raised money we were super happy but actually it turned out not to be the best best choice in our life surprisingly and this may have happened to some of you how kovid actually saved us so in the early days of kovid we were very scared but actually it turned out to be more of a positive and then sharing a few lesson learns from from that experience so first about the company evolution is quite an old company if we could say so it's a 12 years old company founded myself with free over colleagues for many years we haven't been doing much it's rating quite a bit I used to work for Apple for uh five years at the very beginning of iTunes The Genesis of cling was actually to put iTunes as a white label so the intent was really to provide the solution of selling your digital content providing customer care managing the payment that was really what we were providing when we launched we were multimedia and in end of 2014 we started to focus on the video space but where it started to improve quite a bit in 18 we took a pivot to concentrate purely on subscriber management within the video space so if you think about peacock here in the US Netflix like type of service that's basically the type of services that we would power and then while you see the recent growth and the acceleration so the story for today is starting here in 2018 we had like decent growth for like four years so finally we were able to raise some money which is a really what what we did in 18 raised 5 million Euros which was very substantial for us prior to that we only raised 1.5 million so a fairly small amount we were largely bootstrapped uh as soon as we got that money the investors told us guys you need to go and spend that money you need to hire a lot of people you need to increase your marketing spend uh it's very important you achieve you know your fifty eight hundred percent uh sorry your 50 to 80 percent growth um uh you need to do this in a short time frame so you start to go run and you spend the cash as much as you can um but unfortunately uh one of the investors the one that came in actually in 18 we are facing a few challenges in in 19 and they tell us look guys we'd like to do an exit at the time where we started to spend like crazy so how does it look very concretely but the official announcement so a great moment I think for for those of you who had a chance to raise money I think it's it's a moment of relief because you've been bootstrapping and and working you know with a very limited resource finally you get proper means to accelerate your business so finally you do your nice press release and you have a big party and you are ready to go uh why we raise that money but today is the positioning of the company at least to explain a little bit we wanted to build that subscriber retention solution and we established this very well nowadays and that's why we got that group so that was really the Mandate from the fundraising uh you get management of your subscribers and we developed a very unique stack uh for the analytics and the combination of the two is what makes us quite unique inside the industry so we started to invest in this and that's how basically well a very simplified view of the p l would look like mostly looking at uh at Opex and losses in that case we've never been really losing a lot of money but of course you know as you raise with an investor you start to spend way more substantially so you see that you go deep into the red and it starts to be scary of course you know you start to burn 200k at the time we were running about 200 km off so even if okay you raised 5 million actually you realize that the 200k most of burn won't bring you very long until you run out of cash um and because of that we end up like 2019 so just like 18 months after raising funds this is one of my message you know end of the year 29th of December you start to freak out you know you're not been sleeping very well for quite a few nights already and you start to spin the story to say look guys you know this is not all perfect we are sorry but actually there is some growth uh there is some potential we are executing on our strategy but we are running out of money it's obvious um so what do we want to do do we want to continue yes or no uh or do we stop the company and to show our cios we were about stopping the company and how risky that time was um this is a mail that I wrote to um accountants because in Europe you know there's a bit of Regulation associated with bankruptcy especially if you're a founder and you write your accountants okay what happens you know from a pure liability standpoint if you crush the company and I can tell you this is very painful and I wish that none of you have to experience this because you really realize that okay you've been putting about eight years of efforts my wife is a co-founder in the business and you feel like okay potentially in three weeks all of this will be over and I will have to carry that Legacy in the future so it really turned back to the fundraising into a situation where it was a bit shitty the investor says you know what actually we have an offer on the table to acquisite company for 14 million euros um and all of them are saying wow actually this is a pretty good deal you guys should take it because anyways the company is crashing but when we do the math and we see that for the four Founders that we wear that's more or less what we would end up with luckily working through apple and a few other activities in my life I did make a bit of cash before so I said no this is not a good deal you know what if we crush the company we crush it all together and that's it um so the investors were a bit taken by surprise because we felt like no no let's do it nicely and so on I said no I'm the CEO I'm still owning 22 of the organization with the rest of the founders and the friends and family we are close to 50 and we are close to 50 today so we said no either we crash all together or we continue all together and actually that paid off because we re-injected a little bit of cash just to help survive for the remaining six months but we told us okay it's the last time what we do this and your driver take an exit that's where comes the second chapter of the story when we got that offer at 14 this was like in Feb March 20 and suddenly uh kovit kicks in we cannot do the due diligence because we were outside of Europe so all of this is slowing down everybody also was in doubt what would happen you know to the industry and how many companies would react so the process is slowing down we were also doing everything we could to slow it down we start to optimize our business and it's very similar I don't know if some of you saw the president of GL earlier uh metadata.io very similar process to look at our pnl and show some of the examples of what we did how you can optimize your Opex and and cost and how did we actually re-accelerated the business after that so here you see basically the two key metrics I guess what you you monitor as a as a business one is revenue one is Opex one visit with RMR and no backs and you realize actually running a business is fairly simple uh these two lines needs to be at the same level or ideally the revenue is higher than Opex so you see more or less a gap between these two clearly the red one September 19 is wire and the blue one um this is March 20 so this is a covet period and you see basically but the two by September 20 starts to be at the same level I we become wreck even at that moment so how did it how did we do and what's maybe the the main part of the preszone I realized I could have split this in a bit further slides we really did it in three main programs and but that simple almost to improve greatly uh your your Runway as an organization first and this was driven by kovid and personally uh have been you know managing teams for for quite a while in many different types of organizations I would never have thought that we could work in a fully remote model we were fairly loose and open as an organization to let people work a day potentially two a week from home but at no point I would believe but it would be possible to run a business 100 remote but luckily we had teams in so I'm based in the Netherlands our main r d Center is in Poland we have a large team in Manila in the Philippines for all the sales qualification process and some of the customer care processes and we have a distributed team in the US so we were already largely working remote we didn't fully realize it but we were on on Google workspace we were using Dropbox we were using let's say all of these kind of tools of Skype and chat and the rest so we were largely already operating as remote but the moment you decide to move from you are largely operating remote to you go 100 remote you can save so much money honestly if you guys need to save money this is a larger spark potentially of the saving that came from you can so all travel instantly and at that time we we are just forced to do it but all the little trips you know that everybody is doing here and there uh you do save you know a lot it goes pretty fast we stopped renting office so a lot of people were not going out of the office and we were still carrying the office he said but why do we keep an office uh let's stop having offices so we only kept here we have an office on 115 Broadway but it's an office for two people um it's largely we use it as a mailbox and we can still use the wework card to go in different locations but we don't anymore let's say pay for the heavy office so this was quite substantial no more perks like the food you know everything everybody you know the HR team was always yeah you know wow it's important you know we the fridge is always food and services but actually we fill up the fridge on Monday we throw half of the fridge on Wednesday and we throw the rest of the fridge on Friday and then we refill it up on Monday so not a lot of money maybe like 300 Euro a week and at the end of the day you know this just adds up and more of this does that um so that was an environment we started to do and we still do to this day we started to do a uh every two weeks there is a first day call um but we call tunnels and these have proved extremely extremely effective you know get often questions how do you keep you know the bonding and and what was really I'm quite I think uh social oriented the way we we deal with with the team and one of the big weakness I felt about remote is but nobody will think they work for cling right they will work for whatever desk they are at home but how do we have this sense of belonging to the organization and the way we created the sense of belonging was through this bi-weekly bi-monthly tunnels so how does it work with the town hall basically usually I do like 10 minutes in row about state of the business or some important messages to pass and then we invite about two to four guest speakers from different fields of the organization so sometimes we speak about the product and because there's a new product release sometimes we may speak about new clients but we signed and then people start to go okay this is a new client this is how we work and so on and this is why it's a school clients we run mini interviews we have a bit of format when did you join what do you do what people don't know about you so suddenly if you do this every week every two weeks you actually rotate quite a bit we have now 100 people in the organization uh but by doing this you you do rotate quite a bit and everybody gets some exposure and that's how let's say we kept let's say the cohesion we are very limited uh staffed all over and I think a big part of this was associated with with the tunnel execution and the last Point related to working remote is that we also financed for for many teams we we allocated at that time we did it a few times but typically it's a it's a location of 450 euros but we said to people okay you can buy anything you want that helps you do your business at all and because we had about uh so back then it was 20 people now it's 30 people in in Manila can tell you most of them they both an air conditioner because when they were working at the office they had Airco at the office but as we work from home their homes didn't have Echo and we were so happy to be able to buy an echo and to bring the echo for the rest of their family that was living in the house and because of that you know we have very limited turnover inside the team so you really give the tools for these people to to work better and this was a fairly small amount you know 450. so that was one part of working remote the second part what we've been doing and this has been also executed fast and it went better when we could have anticipated is the so-called uh well work from home was what everybody knew but we say actually it's work family and health this is what is most important in that period work is what we said we commit but nobody will get fired because of covet and this created also the Collision inside the organization to say okay thank you we appreciate that of course we were all scared but we said our commitment nobody gets fired if somebody wants to move okay we can move but nobody gets fired it's a counterpart of that is that we had to reduce our packs and we've asked everybody to reduce the salary by 20 well between eight to twenty percent so of course this was a bit bit of a hit but when you felt like guys I saw we have a bit of a fraternity approach and we all do a bit of an effort or we'll have to fire 20 of the people you know it's it's one way or the other it cannot just happen both ways and actually everybody we were let's talk about 65 everybody but two employees didn't accept that voluntary salary reduction that was really interesting to see that stop external Services more what seems to be a no-brainer so that was a workbot so second part was about the family and we really wanted to create not only with the team in in inside but also with their own families to say okay if you guys need anything go back to the core example you could get this circle we try to help each other we recruited you know a few people uh but we are close to France and this type of things so that helped create that Bond and because people were staying at home and like all of you guys I'm sure you have a lot of Engineers you know Engineers are not very uh sometimes you know Health Centric or we are not always pay attention to to their well-being so we started to give cooking tips and fitness coaching and stuff of things and this really helped also and last but not least is that okay we just need to sign one big deal per year so to succeed so we started to simplify everything make it a lot easier to to focus on limited resource on this one objective get a loan from A bank and we got the loan at the worst time it was in June 20 uh went pretty fast make sure the platform works so very limited priorities from Pure business running so these were the main main activities um so basically we were back to bootstrapping that's the way I would mention it we did not rely anymore on investors and that was a change of mindset which to this day we still carry I don't want anymore to rely on the investors because it creates a wrong Behavior as you build your organization you really want to build good proper organization focus on the business metrics focus on your clients of course remove all the nice to have concentrate on the must do create that unique culture through the tunnels and then the rest and believe in yourself you know to the point about saying no to the investors and say okay if we crash we all crash together but it was a very good learning and the the change of all of this at least just to illustrate you know there's a benefit so that's what I was representing that was the worst case almost going bankrupt here and investor saying okay well you'd rather let go and that's how things have turned out so luckily a we didn't sell and be we didn't crash so it was a kind of story so to do a quick wrap never underst underestimate your power as a Founder very often you you read all these things you know about TechCrunch and all the rest well yes investors and Co and investors can be great they really help optimize our processes but I think at the end of the day you are the one to run the show um what you do is for your business and the employees of your organization and keep on tracking your key metrics at the end there's so few and that's easy to do thank you all right thanks Jill great comeback story appreciate it thank you any questions I'm happy to address after yeah if there's a question while uh Joe gets miked up here yeah go ahead all right very good uh it's a very fair point I think it's uh what we've been for long working more on on mid-sized deals like at uh 50k average deal size uh your early average deal size now some of our deals are in the million range so let's but it's it's kind of easier to I think the mid-tail continues to flow but somehow from a mindset standpoint we don't want anymore to concentrate so much on this kind of mid-tail because this we became quite good and I think you're certainly right to say we need to be careful and to continue to be diligent as a closing rules but we feel that especially as a SAS when you go more up Marquette you get into an opportunity to sign way bigger deal than you ever thought and and we keep on signing larger and larger you know so we move from 60k 200k million and now we we're in the multi-million software deals so which I would never afford to client would pay multi-million for software but all right thanks a lot Jill appreciate it