#185 Sitemate's Hartley Pike: Mum’s Support and Rugby Dreams to 'SaaS'ifying the Built World with No-Code Software Globally

Hi, I'm Vittit, the founder and host of this podcast, The High Flies. Hi, I'm Hartley, founder and CEO of Site Mate. I was saying to you just leading up to this, I'm really excited for this one, because I believe this is your second ever public interview, is that right? Second ever, second ever podcast. I did get interviewed for Channel 9 news once on the side of the road standing on a construction site. That was actually during start mate. We were interviewed on our first customers project. So yeah, I guess you could count that a little slot on Channel 9. They probably don't have the best SEO because when I searched you up, they didn't come up. So I did not find that. No, I tried to save the video for later, but we lost it. What if we could reimagine the traditional notion of a high flyer? Hey friends, welcome back or welcome to the High Flies podcast. Where we do reimagine a high flyer, showcase the brightest and most relatable role models and companies and their journey from sunrise to today. As one of the premier products in our curiosity center, the lineup providing on demand intelligence to help you be one percent better every single day. I'm your host, Vittitagol, and let's have some fun. Thanks to you, this podcast continues to rank in the global top 10 podcasts by both Spotify and Apple podcasts for the past two years running. And we hope you're enjoying our catalog of 170 plus episodes since we launched in 2020 featuring relatable role models from around the world, often appearing in their first ever in depth public conversation. Our listeners have called this podcast as a meticulously researched audiobiography unveiling the extraordinary lives and decisions of the most remarkable individuals and companies from around the world. My guest this week is Hartley Pike in this episode 185 in a very rare public interview. Hartley is the co-founder and CEO of SiteMate. And SiteMate builds software products for the built world, with over 2,000 customers and one 15 employees across both remote roles, as well as five offices in Melbourne, Sydney, London, Vancouver, and Toronto. Hartley grew up on the central coast of Nizath Wells with his mother, a big influence in his life, who worked as a beautician. And as he says, his rugby manager, his father ran a waterproofing and concreting subcontracting business, which meant Hartley was immersed in the construction world from a young age, as he says, starting to work on the tools at age 15, Hartley shares his passion for rugby and dreams of playing him professionally, but eventually finding his way into the construction industry. Funly through connections he made at his rugby club. I was fascinated to hear some of Hartley's SiteMate team describe him as particular, unique, and individual. But you need to find out whether the straights were evident in high school. And Hartley shares the bold decision to leave a stable career at Landlease, including the funny story behind his resignation, and how a chipmunk shoulder motivated him. In this conversation, we unpack Hartley's transition from construction to startups in tech, including how he launched SiteMate, originally named Construction Cloud. As a university assignment, which he now refers to as the Instagram for construction, and also how he met his co-founder Sam and how their roles have evolved while managing the challenges of the early years, but also their growth since then, and monumental growth, which you will find out about shortly. I loved asking Hartley to share how they built a startup culture with some of the best diversity stats in the country. We discussed building and enterprise sales muscle, tackling user perceptions in the construction and built environment industries, key distribution strategies, both for Australia and globally. And his ranking of critical success factors, I think every business has being distribution, team, product, monetization, and customer retention. He also shares why focusing on customer preaching can reduce the need for investor meetings, and he discusses and unpacks his unique approach to international expansion and the secret source that's helped him grow beyond Australia and into Canada, Europe, and the US. It's that time to explore your curiosity, please enjoy. Let's start with that traditional opening questions Hartley to set the scene. Where were you born and where do you live now? So born in Sydney, Australia, where I live now, I feel we were just talking about a suitcase. I live out of a suitcase or at least I have done for the last 10 or 11 months. Yeah, I'm split across Sydney, North America, and Europe, the three offices for work, home base, and family and personal. Yeah, it's particularly topical because the episode that just came out episode 183 with John Michelle, he calls himself the human of the world because he doesn't like to attach himself to one place. And yeah, like you said, a vagabond. So maybe that's the phrasing you can start using. We've joined the episodes with the vagabonds. And from a work perspective, quick, fun facts, what was your first job and what do you do now? My first job, I guess you could call it my first job. In primary school, I used to go across the road. There was a milk bar before they became obsolete in Australia when, I guess, the wave of sort of 7/11s was spread across the country. I used to crush boxes, cardboard boxes for the milk bar across the road when I would have been like seven or eight years old for a two-dollar coin. I would just go and stomp on the boxes and the old lady who owned the milk bar would, she was too old to do it. So she'd give me two dollar coins each time. And then I'd spend the money at her shop. So for her, it was like, it was genius. So yeah, I guess you could call that. Yeah, right. You were seven. I think that might be the earliest first job. Any of I guess you've mentioned today. I guess it depends on your definition of the job. I didn't definitely didn't sign any employment agreement, but I was getting paid for it and I spent my wages real quick in her shop right after. I like it. And how would you describe your role now? So yeah, now I'm a founder, CEO of SiteMate. I was actually just talking to someone about a story where, you know, when you fly back into Sydney and you have to fill in one of those little yellow slips as you cross the border, you know, and it asks you what your occupation is. I, whenever I come home and enter the country, I still write engineer as my occupation. Like I can't bring myself to write like entrepreneur or CEO, you know, or technology or anything like that. I still itself as an engineer, you know, even though we're seven, seven years in on the journey. So yeah, my role is obviously CEO of SiteMate and I'm, you know, one of the two founders, but I guess I'm still an engineer and we're just now engineering the company. That's fascinating. Why don't we double click on that for a second rather than coming back to it? What do you think are the differences between an engineer and a CEO of a company? Well, from my perspective, there shouldn't be a lot, but I think a lot of companies could do with a little more engineering in their leadership because you can often, yeah, solve problems before they happen if you just think about things carefully and take care with the way, you know, you're building things. Yeah, there's obviously more aspects to the CEO role around, you know, communication and leadership and setting the vision and some strategic aspects, but, you know, you only really need to spend five, maybe 10% of your time on those activities, especially during startup and scale up. Most of the rest of the time is just building and it's pretty handy to be an engineer when you're building. There are some threads which are unique to the CEO role, but given how much you need to be building, I feel like there's a lot of overlap. We're just engineering work and principles. I'm really fascinated by this topic, so let's come back to this when we talk about site-made in a bit. And hardly as you know, the purpose of this show is to reimagine a high-flyer. Is there a high-flyer you know who you feel hasn't got the recognition that is Earth? Well, I guess I wanted to ask you as the founder of the podcast, what's your definition of a high-flyer? So, classic engineering answer. We did like, yeah, I'm asking a question until I know, what's your definition of it? I appreciate you asking. So, in short, I think a lot of high-flyers in society are recognized for their titles, which often are titles that people hold for a finite period of time. Jamia High Flyer, and that's why I call this podcast a high-flyer, is to reimagine that concept and celebrate relatable role models, one, and two people that have had an impact on society and are recognized for who they are or what they've done. not just for title their holds. That to me is a high flyer. So yeah, who do you think so high flyer that you know could be work or life? Good question. I feel like Australia in particular is doing like a reasonably good job at producing genuine role models. So it might not be the answer you're expecting, but I think, I mean, a couple of locals, although I don't feel like a local anymore. I haven't been in Australia for 12 months. You know, I think someone like Dylan, I think his surname is Dylan Orkut, you know, the Paralympian tennis player, a little bit of a comedian. It just brings like great awareness to people with disabilities and that part of the population and getting folks involved and excited about it. I feel like Ned Brockman just brought a whole lot of attention to running in general and we've just seen the proliferation of running clubs, run clubs spread for all types of purposes. There are, you know, well there's obviously the start mate community run club. I think there are, you know, other just general groups. I think there are even like dating run clubs now. Yeah, I don't know if you could put all that down to Ned. But yeah, I mean, those are a couple of Australian, I guess, high flyers in my mind who, you know, they just get out and do it before they've got the title. Let's wind back the clock. Then go back to your Sunrise as I call it each childhood because I think that really sets the scene for who you are today. And in my view, what are your memories of the environment you grew up in? So yeah, I grew up in Sydney. Primary school was all in and around Sydney. Just working at the milk, crashing the boxes. And then probably the first inflection point was my mum. So I grew up with my mum all the way through, you know, to till late teens, early 20s. Mum, it was just mum and I living together and we moved to the central coast north of Sydney on the beaches, Terrible and near near Gosford, Evoka, Wombrough, just for a sea change. And yeah, the lifestyle on the central coast was awesome. Like by the beach, you know, we used to go to the beach for school sport, do surfing, you know, great crowd on the coast. Everybody's very down to earth, laid back, you know, made good friends, you know, that I've got for life now from that group. Yeah, life was pretty straight forward, really. We didn't have a lot, like we didn't live in, you know, like I've never lived in a house that I've owned. So it was, you know, it was relatively simple, but played a lot of rugby growing up. That was my first passion, you know, went through like some of the representative teams. And yeah, that was, I guess rugby taught me, whoa, it was a passion, I guess you would say, and taught me discipline or unlocked discipline, you know, in terms of just like preparation for games, you know, training, like not going out and partying before the game on the weekend. Well, I've actually been told you don't drink, is that true? I went through a period of about four and a half, five years where I didn't drink a drop. Nowadays, I do drink occasionally, but it's rare. Like it's, you know, yeah, maybe a handful of times per year, something like that. Yeah, there was a period where it was like five years called Turkey. Just going back to rugby, like it was also the teamwork aspect and like playing as part of a team, which I learned through rugby. So yeah, rugby was, was the passion, the goal, you know, if you'd asked me when I was 18, you know, my goal would have been to be a professional rugby player. Did you try and have a go at that? Yeah, to some degree, like I played, you know, through some representative teams growing up, and then when I finished high school, I went down to Canberra for a year. I got accepted into UTS in Sydney, the University of Technology, Sydney, but I deferred it for one year, went down to Canberra, you know, played some club games down there, you know, tried, tried pressing in with the Brumbies Academy, but then I actually got a back injury while, while I was down there. So yeah, that kind of pulled the hand breaks up pretty quick, and I ended up coming back to Sydney, picking up my engineering degree, and then I played actually one more one more year of rugby in Sydney when I got back for Gordon, which is one of the local rugby clubs in Sydney, and it was actually through the club that I got an introduction to a guy called Jamie Egan, who was working for, it was a company called Abby Group, which then got acquired by Lenless, the building company, to form their civil infrastructure division, and that was how I got into infrastructure and construction. So it was a very winding path of, yeah, rugby through childhood, then down to Canberra, coming back because of an injury, and then through the club network, I got into civil engineering and construction, which is what I was studying, and then, yeah, by the start of my second year of university, I was working out on site building roads, bridges, tunnels, and I had, I'd given up, you know, rugby at that stage, and I was focused on trying to rehabilitate my lower back injury and take it. Yeah. If it gives you any solace, I've been nursing a lower back injury the last two weeks. I never tried to play rugby though, but for me it was tennis, tennis was my dream growing up, and in some ways it still is, I'm a bit, I don't think I can do it anymore now, but tennis was my equivalent to rugby, and yeah, to your point, it taught me so much. And I wish I appreciated the learning from sport more. I don't know about you, but I think as I get older, I appreciate what relevant sport has in terms of the points you mentioned, mindset or discipline, but I think as a kid, it was just get out of the house and have a hit and get some exercise and come back home. I didn't think about it anymore than that. And then your mum, I'm fascinated by that point. That's so wonderful. I've got a wonderful relationship with my mum and I think mum's are truly the high flies, right? Do you question her? Who are high flies? I think mum's, do you mind sharing what she did for work? Yeah, I've had a few different, so mum was trained as a beautician, which clearly paid off my shiny mug. Yes, mum was a beautician, and then, you know, to be honest, for a few years, she was effectively my full-time rugby manager, cutting me around all over the country to different stadiums and games and training and gym sessions. There was a couple of years where it was pretty intense because we were moving until some of the, it wasn't professional at that stage, but some of the representative teams where you've got basically running all year. And then, once I moved on from rugby, yeah, she moved into the medical space, you know, running, you know, working clinics, practices and those sorts of things. Well, one of the things that I'm really fascinated by Hartley is you were kind enough to share a document with me where your team described you in three words. And I'm curious what these the same words that your high school teachers described you. So one of them that stood out, there's so many, but one that stood out is particular unique individual, three words, particular comma unique comma individual. And I find that fascinating, just the choice of words, particular slash unique slash individual. Would your high school teachers have described you like that? I don't think so. I would say, yeah, maybe the individual part, but I feel like some aspects of, you know, I guess my personality or traits have definitely been forged since then. I don't think I was the sort of, yeah, the characteristics which, you know, you may dig into a little more based on, you know, speaking with the team or researching. Yeah, there was definitely a period of time where I feel like some of those things were forged versus, you know, given it, given at birth, if that makes sense. Yeah. That makes complete sense. So you referenced earlier that you went to university and studied construction engineering. Yeah. What was the jumping off point post that? So I finished it. Yeah, I finished the degree, but basically what happened was at UTS in Sydney, they have a sandwich degree where you actually start work usually in your second or third year of study. So I, you know, I did my degree, which was five and a half, I was five year degree. I actually finished six months early. And then, you know, I was working for most of the degree as well. So by the time the degree finished, I already had three or four years experience. And I went straight into a job with Lennese's engineering division, which again, that came off the back of the introduction from the Gordon regular manager that I had. And then yeah, it was, it was only, I only worked, you know, full time post uni for maybe a year, 18 months. And then the site made journey began. Okay, interesting. I mean, I'm sure there's a lot of building blocks within that because I feel in hindsight, it's easy to say that's how it began, right? But what about the construction industry, particularly attracted you? Because I don't know, I get the sense it's a very specialized industry. And it's not like I studied commerce and I've always been a generalist. To me, that's something that you do by choice is you go into such a specialized industry. How do you reflect on what was the attraction to that industry? So it's probably the other thread of, yeah, the family story growing up. so my dad started his own business in construction. So he had a water proofing, concrete repair, epoxy flooring, subcontracting business. So he was a subcontractor in the construction industry, primarily building works, some civil infrastructure. So I grew up working on the tools with my dad from about 15 or 16 years old. So I would, you know, I would study at school in the, you know, in the terms and then in the school holidays, I would, you know, go down to Sydney and work with dad and be on the tools. So that kind of exposed me to the industry, you know, in sort of a baby steps fashion. And then when the rugby career didn't really play out, you know, which was the 18 year old heartless, you know, probably dream, you know, I thought, well, I'm interested in construction and engineering because I've learned about it through, you know, through my dad's business, but I didn't want to take over my dad's business. He wanted me to, you know, ask me, we spoke about it, but, yeah, I didn't, I liked the industry, but I didn't really want to go into subcontracting specifically. And, yeah, also didn't want to, you know, work that closely with family, at least not initially. So I thought, yeah, I'd go into, to civil structural engineering instead of, yeah, instead of, you know, taking over dad's business. Now I can tell you, I've got a few friends who work at Len Lee's and life seems pretty good. They go to this fancy office, they dress up well. They seem to have the luxuries of money taken care. You could have gone down that part. You decided to take the harder part, which is consider starting your own thing. I'm curious what we are seeing in the world. I think this was 2015, 16 around that time, broadly, right? What we're seeing in the world, what information we're consuming and what ultimately gave you the confidence to leave a good career path. So a quick side story, which you will find funny, was I remember the day I resigned from Len Lee's. My direct line manager was not surprised. His name was Andrew Banks. He was running the tunneling site we're working on. He knew we were like, I was tinkering around. We were building this thing on the side. He was a great support and definitely went above and beyond for giving me a bit of freedom to do that whilst I was still employed. So he knew it was coming, but I resigned. And I think the Len Lee's HR department was a little bit surprised. And I got a phone call from one of the HR team and she picks up the phone, calls me, and she's giving me this lecture like, what are you going to do? Starting your own thing, that's very risky. You only just finished university a year ago. How do you know what you're doing? It's very risky. What if it doesn't work? And I remember I was on the phone. I was just walking around. I was like, I was doing these ones. I was holding the phone away from my ear, just waiting for it to stop yapping. And then I said, yeah, it's right. I've thought about it. We'll figure it out. And then she was like, okay, cool. And then sent an email and did the paperwork. But it was just funny because I guess, yeah, I wish I could show her a photo of the team now. I was going to say, is that in some ways? For me, I think those people like that, I could call it a chip on your shoulder. I definitely have a chip in my shoulder and they drive me. They probably don't follow me on social media or care about what I'm up to. But I always always, but sometimes I'll think about that person or the high school teacher and go, oh, you didn't think I could do it. But look, I've actually done it. Is that drive you? Yeah, yeah, definitely. I've got a, I've got hips of those little chips and I actually have a note, a page in my journal where like every time, particularly when I get them from investors, then I actually write them down name like which firm and I guess what was the cynical view. Obviously, if they give like constructive guidance, I that doesn't make it. It's when they're, it's when they're like blindly dismissive. Those are the real good chips to keep. If they just say, if they just say no, but they're like really deep in their thought about why and they're super constructive, like those aren't. They're not chips on the shoulder. Those ones are actually helpful. It's the, yeah, it's the ones that throw just, you know, comments out there, like I won't name any names, but one Australian investor that told me we would never get past 40k in MRR and I think we now add 40k in MRR or more. I think we have every month this year or there about every, for sort of so good. Yeah, you bumped into that investor since. No, because they're too early. They're the small Friday, right? Well, they might listen to this and hopefully they'll reach out and apologize, which I think is also the humility required to be an investor, right? There's so many wrong decisions made. But okay, so you talked about the landlies, the phone call experience. I believe in my research, there are two other things that were critical at that point, right? So I think you replied to startmate. You were still in your full-time job. Correct me if I'm wrong. And two is your name of your company. So it wasn't called sitemate from the start. I think it was called construction cloud, is that right? Yeah, yeah, correct. So it's construction cloud and then you were still in your job and you applied to startmate. Yeah, exactly. So I startmate. Why was data entry point into entrepreneurship? Did someone suggest it? Yeah, they did. So we had two customers and I was still working out on site and I was also one of our users. So this is like this weird situation where I had I basically sold out, you know, our MVP to my employer like on a contract whilst I was still employed as like a graduate engineer. It was like a yeah, it was a really weird structure, but it ended up, you know, working pretty well. So we got those first two customers and then yeah, that's what led into startmate. So through, you know, through an angel investor networking event, we met a guy called David Kenny, who was one of the early startmate mentors and investors from some of the original programs and has been since. And yeah, David, you know, brought us through, we were doing a small angel round so that I could quit my job. And then he said, hey, why don't you like apply for this thing called startmate at the same time? And I remember going on the website and it was like, it was a super early days of startmate. And I just went on and it was like, I remember seeing like Mike and Scott as mentors from Atlassian and I think there was Nick Holmes Accord that was like, I just knew like a few of the faces and a few of the names. And yeah, anyway, then we apply and it's not like Scott and Mike from Atlassian, it's Nick Crocker who's running it. I'm like, what is Mike and Scott? Who's this guy? So yeah, that was how we got into startmate. It was through through David Kenny. And then yeah, we got accepted. We closed a small angel round with Sydney Angels. The, you know, we formed a syndicate of about 10 angels. And yeah, I guess it was a good night for the members of Sydney Angels that night because I was doing the calculations the other day. I think, I think those early Angels now are on a, I think it's like a 40 or 50 X multiple from that Sydney Angels. But also they deserve it, right? Do you point out to you about shipping the shoulder? The first believers matters so much. 100% and they've probably had, you know, nine other investments not go anywhere. The outlier has to pay it back. Yeah, it's been a fantastic journey. A couple of our angels in particular, yeah, the company wouldn't have survived without without them. I want to come to site mate in particular in a moment, particularly the problem you saw before that is I think one of the things that I speak to a lot of founders about that doesn't get spoken about as much on podcasts like this is the transition into becoming an entrepreneur and actually learning how the startup tech space works. Even the investment acronyms, I speak to founders all the time and they've got no idea how this even works like they're like evaluation, seed, series A, what is all this? Who are the investors? Like they've never heard of start mate or blackbird or any of them. Now that you've got the benefit hindsight, can you share what that transition period was like? How did you learn about the industry and how did you make yourself comfortable in those first couple of years? Well, two quick comments, which is I definitely wasn't comfortable. I had no idea what I was doing. I mean, start mate was critical for that. That's where we learned the lingo. We learned how to operate in this. So yeah, start mate was probably the best cauldron of fire. We went over to San Francisco. That was a game changer. So that sort of covers the investment piece on the becoming a founder. I feel like no one should really have the goal of becoming a founder. Like you should only become a founder if it tears itself out of you. I mean, I'm sorry to clarify, like we're talking about not like solo, you know, consulting businesses, you know, solo partners like small business owners like that. That's not the kind of founder that I'm referring to here. I'm talking about the, you know, start up into scale up, you know, chewing glass for seven years, you know, task growth. Yeah, like it's a they're not the same thing. Yeah, this pathway, like you really don't want to sign up for it unless it's something that you can't not do it basically because it's the only way you're going to survive because it's just know. not what it looks like from the outside. - Totally, 100% true. And talk about the story of how you met your co-founder. - So I was studying at UTS. I had a bunch of engineering buddies and we actually had to submit an assignment. So this is actually a funny story that I haven't spoken about a lot, which is, I made actually started as a university assignment, which is like we had to write a business plan and my idea for the business plan was like, it was funny, we used to call it like Instagram for construction. So it was like photo, video, multimedia, management for construction sites. And anyway, as part of the business plan, we needed some design work done. Like we needed to show like what the web application would look like, what the mobile application would look like. And one of my colleagues, like one of my engineering buddies, he said, "Hey, I've got this like my best mate from high school." He's at UTS as well, but he's a designer. And he just finished designing a couple of apps for some other startups. And I said, "Oh, fantastic, let's grab a beer." So when grabbed a beer, my buddy Chris introduced me to Sam, who's now my co-founder. And we sat down, we went to a German snitzelhouse near UTS. And I explained to Sam the vision like we talked about Instagram like having this timeline, where it just pulls together all the construction site multimedia. And anyway, Sam was like, "Yeah, cool, sounds is sounds easy." We set a meeting for seven days later, and then sat down, Sam plugged in his laptop, put it up on the big screen, and it was just like, it was like within seconds, it became real, just by looking at Sam's designs. And I say, like the company didn't start when we incorporated the company started when Sam plugged in his laptop, and we got to see it for the first time. And that was the moment where I was like, "Oh, like now it's real." Even though we haven't built anything, even though we don't have any customers, we don't have any revenue, it's like, now because we have a design, it exists, like it's an object. And we now have a vision that you can see, even though it's changed drastically since then. And that was just in one of the meeting rooms at the UTS engineering building in the basement. And also I believe, Sam, like you talked really about the engineer C, your role that you've had. I think you've had that from the start, right, where Sam's roles have evolved over time. Yeah, yeah, Sam's, I mean, both of our roles have evolved, but Sam's titles have evolved as well, and mine's remained consistent, although we've both kind of gone through, you know, a similar amount of turbulence and a roller coaster journey with our roles. Yeah, there was a period of time where, you know, Sam would be onboarding customers as like a customer's access manager, and then he'd be designing the product to fix their problems straight after the meeting. Overall, he's always remained threaded in product strategy and design, and as the company's gotten bigger, I've been able to take the kind of less like strategic work off of his plate and just really, you know, narrow his energy into product strategy. And, you know, now, Sam is effectively, you know, the vessel of executing the product strategy internally, you know, from me to certain parts of the product and engine org, but particularly upstream, where we're working on, you know, the new products coming through, and then our CTO Tim handles downstream. We have a whole product, an engine org split between scaling products and upstream product strategy, where we're, you know, steering the wheel on what's next. - So because of your engineering background, was that the first part of the team that you built after you raised that small engine round? - Yeah, yeah, it was all software engineering through the engine round, and then, you know, we had a really difficult few years to begin with. There was, you know, between 2017 and 2019, like my personal bank balance went below zero three times. - Because you were funding the company? - No, because we could only afford to pay ourselves bare minimum. - Of course. - Like it was, you know, every dollar of capital had to go into software engineers and stretching it like as far as we could. We were barely paying ourselves anything, you know, no one would back us like we had angel investors do like another angel round. And then in 2019, we had the sheer water Tim come on board through Zach, which was a game changer. Like we stabilized with a CTO and really got the engineering firepower on track. And then, yeah, in 2020, actually end of 2021, Blackbird led the seed round, which was, it was a late seed, like we were like four years in to get to the seed round, because we had to fight just to survive for so long. - How did you survive? I think to that point earlier, a lot of people could throw in the towel and you could go back to your lendless job, right? And go, if this is just not worth it, go back, get a good salary, build a life, particularly because you probably saw you talked about your primary school and high school friends, they're probably going on holidays, potentially buying their first house, and yeah, you are grinding it out. And maybe even your mom's going, "Hardly, what are you doing with your life?" What gave you that belief to keep at it? - Well, Sam and I had a vision of what we believed, the industry needed. And even though we didn't have a lot, the users and the customers that we did have were just stretching the product to the limit, using it in ways that we didn't anticipate that the product was crashing due to usage, like the servers were overloaded, they were breaking the interface 'cause they were trying to do things that we didn't expect. And Sam and I were just looking at each other and we were like, "If we can just get another five software engineers and just build these next two or three things, like this is going to explode." So the end of users, that's what kept us going. If people were not using the product, we would have just given up and you should. If you're a founder and like you're wondering whether you should pursue something or not, to me, the best way to answer the question is like, "What are your users telling you?" If it's hard, but they're calling for more, like they want more and you're hungry, and the only constraint is that you can't give them more faster, then you just have to find a way to survive and get through and like you will eventually. But if you're like wondering whether you should continue and no one's using the thing that you've built or no one's interested in using it, then like 100% like to pack it up on the spot and you know, try something else. That there's nothing worse than kind of people wasting their energy on things that people don't want or need. - Hmm, in my view, so I've worked at a few early stage startups myself and as you said, eating glass and enjoy helping founders in a small capacity. I think there's five broad areas the best companies have, being product, distribution, monetization, retention, team, those five broad, I'm sure there's others that you might disagree with. And before that, of course, is a clear problem, right? So maybe we start there, paint a picture of the problem that you're solving, particularly someone like me who's a complete novice. I've got no idea of the construction industry, explain the problem at its bare bones. So first to clarify, yes, site-made operates across what we call the built world. So it's infrastructure construction, building, but we also operate in industrial manufacturing, energy and some facilities as well. So it's broader than just construction or the construction business. And effectively, what's happened to these industries is, you know, in the early 2000s, these industries transitioned from faxing information around engineering drawings, documents, reports to the file storage era, which is what we refer to it as. So they joined the cloud in an early stage. And that was where the likes of AConnect's team binder, which was an AConnect's competitor and has now been acquired. ProCore was also founded around the same time. And effectively, like the early versions of those products were pretty similar, which was basically like Dropbox style functionality, but on steroids, where you could create a central repository of files for a project. And then there was collaboration workflows to approve documents and control them, as well as some communication. And that sort of era of the file storage, you know, type platforms was, you know, basically the dominant sort of theory until COVID hit. And then when COVID hit, you know, these industries, which are predominantly based around people physically working out in the field, COVID just broke all of their operations overnight, because like people couldn't physically pass things around anymore, they couldn't transfer information, you know, back to the office easily, because no one was at the office. COVID was a catalyst for, you know, in our view, waking up the, the built world to, types of technology that other verticals had been adopting probably five or ten years before. And now what's happened is the industries have shifted into what we call now is the database era where companies operating in the built world are much more concerned about the access to their data, capturing the data, the cleanliness of the data, and automation and smarts versus files and documents like PDF, some word docs, and things like that. Of course, in many use cases, those things are still important, but things are changing so drastically that they really need better access and control over their data. And that's where SlightMade is coming in, which is we basically build SaaS tools for the built world, and each of our products is designed to be best in class in each of the categories. Customers have typically had one or two pathways that they can go, which is they can pick a bunch of niche apps that do all these different things, a time sheet app for this or quality app for that or a safety app over here or a daily reporting app that's in the one path or the other path is, they speak to a vendor and it's all, we'll do absolutely everything you could ever need, and of course, most of the time, it does one or two things well and the rest, not so much. SlightMade is in the middle where we have multiple products. It's like the Atlassian brand architecture. So customers can pick and choose which products they want and need, and we don't mind. If they just use one, that's fine, that's all they need, but we've got certain product strategy in place to solve multiple problems over time, but without each product becoming bloated. What was your first product? Our first product was Dash Pivot, which is, you can think about it as like a verticalized version of air table or notion type functionality. So it's a no-code product, it's a no-code platform where you can, customers can basically build their own custom systems to consolidate like multiple different types of apps into one place. So it has formulas, so you can build sort of complex calculations inside of your forms and documents. You can build a time sheet, a daily report, a safety inspection, a QA document, and then we have customers that build things that we never expected. So it's all no-code, it's extremely flexible, and yet it's like the Trojan horse at the moment. To double click on some of your points about the construction industry, I've met a lot of founders in that built environment, typologies, hardly, built environment industry, a couple of perceptions that I've come across, and I just spoke to founder yesterday, solving payments for the space you're in, is one is the assumption that it's a very enterprise led, and two is a lot of behavioral changes still required on the client user customer side. I'm curious, do you agree or disagree with those two perceptions? I agree and disagree at the same time, which is, I mean, at the end of the day, people in the built world are still people, they're not a different species, they don't like wasting their time, they don't like, they don't like double entering data. So if they're hesitating against something, it's probably just because you don't understand the dynamics at play around how that affects them and their work, because there are lots of different parties involved, sometimes even things that seem basic, like visibility controls can have quite serious implications. So yeah, from what we've seen, there's, I mean, of course, you have some, you know, you have some users that are hesitant to go digital, but you also have sales people that work in companies that refuse to use sales force. So I don't really know how that's any different, and yeah, we view it the same way. I think it's massively over exaggerated, and the problem has been the quality of the products provided to the industry, not the people in the industry, and what about the perception that it's heavily enterprise-led when it comes to sales? Is that true? It depends on the product category. So your experience with your products? No, ours can go bottom up, bottom's up, but we will have products in future which can only go top down. So it really depends on the category that the particular product is in, yeah, for financial products, it's not a collaboration product, you can't penetrate bottoms up, yeah, it just depends on the category. It's definitely incorrect as a blanket statement. Hmm. To talk more broadly about that, I said one of the critical things in my view, a company needs a distribution and then go to market. I'm curious in the early days what was that, what were those raw ingredients for distribution and how has it evolved over time to help you grow to the machine you're at now? Yeah, I would rank distribution first over team, sorry, first below team. So team always first and then because unless you have the team, you can't build distribution. So you put product after distribution? Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Okay. I mean, actually, to me, there's the same, if you get it right. What depends what do you go to market strategy is some company for product sales itself, some companies you need to sales team, as you know. Well, it's more than that as well because it ties into, yeah, it ties into, you know, how, like, what kind of surface area does it open up from a, from an SEO perspective? How many categories can it play in? Yeah, even before it gets into the actual execution arm of the go to market, product and distribution are pretty closely linked. But yeah, back to your point, yeah, we turned on the top of the funnel in 2018 after three years, four years of basically no growth. And when we rebranded from construction cloud to site mate, as you mentioned before, we launched on Monday, the 6th of August, 2018. That was the day that we rebranded. And from that month up until now, which is what, over six years of months, we've grown every single month consecutively without, without missing a month. And that, yeah, that was all just down to the distribution model kicking in. Did you have a sales team early on that you invested in? No, I was, I sold our first three million in ARR myself because we couldn't afford sales people. And then what was that inflection to realize that you need to delegate and have someone else help you? We had too many leads coming in other countries. So we brought London online because it was the, it was just easier to do demos at night to the UK, rather than get up at 4 a.m. for the U.S. That was the only reason we went to Europe. It was just easier to stay awake late at night than get up early. But there was a period of time where Lance, who, who was, he joined as a head of marketing, went VP of marketing, VP of revenue, general manager, and as of 1st January, he's going into the CMO role. There was a period of time where he was waking up at, you know, 5 a.m. doing SDR calls to North America. I would get up at 506 to do demos. And then we'd have breakfast and then we'd do, he would do calls and, and I would do demos to the APAC region. And then we'd have dinner and then he'd do calls to Europe and I'd do demos to Europe at night. And we did that for nearly two years after near death moments and drove that initial kind of two or three million in ARR. And then Sam, my co-founder, was our customer success manager doing onboarding. And that was the V1 of our go-to-market team. It was just the three of us doing like 14, 15 hours a day because we, we couldn't afford to hire anyone and we were covering three geographies and, yeah, leads into where I am now with North America. I mean, you talked about A.K. and actually Ali Jasper has been on the podcast in the past and there's something he spoke about very bluntly is that founders should be more involved in sales because they learn the product and customer empathy. I think it's something that's again underappreciated where it's everyone wants to be the CEO and do the investor work and the strategy work. But if you're not on the ground, you can't do the other stuff. So I'm really curious you talked to Ali about being an engineer. Sales is a learned skill in my view, but a lot of it is practice and falling down and getting back up. I'm sure you've had many knocks along the way. What's been the biggest learning in sales for you? The biggest learning, like everything became easier when I stopped trying to sell and just focused on the product and focused on helping people and just like asking really good questions. Do you give me an example? What did that look like? Let's say without a meeting with me, I'm a potential customer. What would you ask me in that meeting? So we typically start off by asking questions, we call it in like a vertical structure. So we basically don't pitch at the start of a demo. We spend the first. I mean, it's pretty common in discovery, but you're really trying to get to a root problem. You know, I might say, hey, if you did, you know, as a starting point, I'm just curious to understand like a little bit more about, you know, the business, the team, like who are your typical clients, what kind of work do you usually do? you know, and then just get them to talk about what they do and then move into, hey, okay, so I understand like what you're doing, who your clients are, like what does a typical job look like, but what does your team look like to deliver that? Is it all internal? Do you use any external folks? Do you have any partnerships, any contractors? And then they, you know, they're going to more detail. And then at the, at the bottom, you know, we go into, okay, so like how do your systems fit into all of this? So we don't really get to talking about systems until kind of the third layer down. But by that stage, we understand like what they do, who they work with, their team structure. So when they're talking about software and systems and problems, like it's in the context of what we've just learned. And it just means that when we then go into talking about, you know, possible solutions, if we are a good fit, we can be really specific. And it's, hey, like you told me like this thing that's like really, you know, really specific to your business. This is how it would work for you versus just like you start the Zoom meeting, you turn on screen share, you go through a slide deck and you're like, we are the number one leader in blah, blah, blah. And you're like, you're trying to jam it down. People's threats. Hmm. I think the one you talked earlier, broadly, about some of the challenges in the Australian tech ecosystem. One that I noticed a lot is there's not enough focus on customer pitching. I mean, there's a lot of focus on investor pitching. And they're, I hate investor pitching, but they're quite different, right? Would you agree? Like the customer, that's not called pitch customer conversation and an investor conversation is two very different conversations because their goals are very different. If you, the way I think about it is if you do 100x more customer pitches than investor meetings, then you'll need to do 100x less investor meetings to be successful because, because you're going to understand the customer so much better, you're going to make a better product. The business is going to be stronger and you're going to need to talk to just net less investors to get people excited. So it's just, it's just like where do you spend your time? You can either spend your time talking to investors, trying to convince them why this is worth doing or talking to customers, figuring out what they want, building it, making a great company, and then most of the times you don't even need to talk to investors, they're trying to talk to you. So it's just a time allocation question. That's the way I think about it. I agree. Okay, let's talk about monetization and retention. Again, we could spend hours on this, but let's cover some of the headline messages here, particularly because I found out in my research that you were almost like two capital efficient at the start, like you were profitable early on and some of your investors said, is that a good thing? So maybe unpacked how you thought about monetization and business model. Yeah, so we've been through some waves. So in the very early days when things were tough, we definitely weren't cash flow positive because we didn't have anything. And then through those periods where we had to fight for survival where I mentioned, you know, it was just three of us like two founders and Lance, who's almost a founder now, you know, at that stage, we then did become cash flow positive because we didn't have a go to market team, but we were growing quite quickly. So our overheads were pretty low, but we were just pumping all the money back into product and engineering. And we almost were a little bit scarred by getting rejected by some of the investors when things weren't going very well. You know, when we went back to do our seed round, yeah, we were basically cash flow positive. And it was because, like, I wanted the ability to walk away because I was a bit scarred from the early pitches where I felt like, you know, we weren't in control of our endestiny. And then, yeah, and then we, you know, we we ramped up investments after, you know, Blackbird came on board during the seed round. And then, yeah, the last 12 months, we've been, you know, back in a state of burn because we've been making some large investments in North America, you know, where it was for frontal assault on North America at the moment, you know, into the second office out of likely there's going to be four. So yeah, now we're in a different state. But the company's a very different beast to what it was back then. So we know exactly what the investment is going to do. I want to come to go to market internationally in just a moment, but on the business model, how does it work just broadly? So do customers tend to sign a 12 month subscription? And then your goal is to drive retention and upsell? No, so our customers range from, you know, one person on a credit card paying 30 bucks a month up to, up to, you know, enterprises in the hundreds of thousands per annum. So the spectrum is large. And we segment those pretty tightly. But we're really flexible on the commercials, like most customers start off month to month, some a month to month forever, they just pay on a credit card every month. But you know, most, once you cross a certain size, most will do a pilot, like they'll start off on a pilot for three to six months, and then switch to, you know, one, two, three year subscription. And we do have some customers on five years as well. There's quite a few on a long term. Oh, that must be nice. Yeah, I mean, all of our pricing is standardized and it's on the website. And, you know, there are just standard discount levers built in for a length of term. And yeah, we don't have a single account that's not on like our standard pricing. Nothing is, nothing is custom. Yeah. Let's talk about a couple of more things and then we'll close with the rapid fire sprint. So a couple of topics that I'd love to get your thoughts on is your international expansion one. And then two is culture slash how you scaled yourself as a founder and you were kind of not to share some of the team feedback with me. And I think there's some really quirky aspects in there that might people might get a laugh out of. So on the international expansion, one thing that you said to me the other day that I found really intriguing is you said you went against some of the advice your investors gave you unpacked that statement for me. Yeah. So it specifically relates to North America. And I feel like there's a lot of downward pressure on founders about North America in general. And a lot of the time I believe it's from people that haven't actually done it. So that's always a concern. But at least from what I've seen and you know you may have seen this as well, the general consensus for Aussie founders going to the US seems to be we're going to do the US. You pick an office location like San Francisco, Denver, Austin, New York. Those are probably the main four. We're going to go there. We're going to do the US and then it's all going to work magically and we can build this like massive US sales machine. And I'm like, well, number one, there's 400 million people. And I feel like we're taking an Aussie go-to-market approach, which is you just need one office in APEC because there's only 25, 30 million people. And we're trying to we're trying to apply this like Aussie mindset to the US. And after spending a bit of time here, I'm like, if you don't go like big on the US, you're not going to make it dense because there's too much going on. Of course, there are some companies like Canva, probably the best example, but they're probably the best example at most things. Safety culture did it really well early on, which was just like the consumer grade distribution. If you have like proper consumer grade distribution, I think that does change everything or at least the changes things quite early on. And we have like close to consumer grade distribution, but we're a little more skewed towards turning it into a B2B engine. Yeah, once you go into that B2B engine territory and you're not actually trying to pursue like consumer grade penetration, you know, you need to attack it full frontal assault in order to get you know, serious results in my view. You know, our approach at what we're in the middle of right now is, you know, I've broken up North America into four regions, North America West, North America Central, North America East, North and then East South. And I'm effectively just on a drive to build all four one after the other and it's six to nine months in each one. And I'll just keep going until they're all done. A cynic might hear that Hadley and Goethe sounds well and good now, but early on you wouldn't have known this inside right? You would have explored and you would have tried and tested and made a few mistakes. Is that true in your case? Did you have to try and finally reach this strategy that succeeds in expansion? Not really, because we have the inbound engine. So we were like pulled into North America regardless. And now it's just like aligning the top of the funnel to supply into each of the four regions, but still with the same core engine. So no, we haven't stopped and started or shut down any particular region. Yeah. Okay, that's good. Good. Good. Good as to you. That's awesome. Now, let's move into culture. Man, everyone I speak to goes site made culture is awesome. Site made is so amazing. The glass to reviews are very good. How did you build this culture? What is behind the magic? It's a good question. To be honest, I actually think it's quite simple, which is, you know, maybe it relates back to the story I told you at the start, which is, I don't, I still view myself as an engineer. I know my job is CEO and I know I'm an entrepreneur, but I guess that's not how I classify myself. And I just think that proliferates into sort of all areas, which is everybody is just very down to earth, hard working, low ego, and we're just like, we're just building and getting stuff done, making it happen. Do you still interview every hire? Almost in almost everyone. And I'm actually ramping it back up again now. So the question then is how do you maintain this culture going forward, right? As you said, you've tripled your team. You've now got different geographies, different time zones, different just views of the world, the way even the way Americans think about the world compared to the Aussies is so different in terms of ambition and such, right? How do you maintain that culture going forward? It is helping with go-to-market having me establish each of those core regions, because I can, you know, I can set the DNA right from the get-go. You know, North America, West Coast, East Coast, when I get to Central, you know, so that is definitely helping. And it, to be honest, it's a big part of it. And then we have a, you know, we have a calendar where the company runs on a cadence with the monthly all hands, quarterly kickoffs for go-to-market, annual offsite, where we bring the whole team together, you know, so we just had our third annual offsite, which was, which was in Vietnam, and there was, yeah, about 120 there, and it's just electric energy, you know, great fun, yeah, big vibes. So yeah, there's a lot of, yeah, and then there's a big writing culture internally, like, you know, I leverage blog posts in compliance to give color to the values and flush things out a little more. So yeah, there's a few little bit spaces. Writing seems to be a common thread. You might know Henry at Midnex. He came on the pod, Ease and Martex, and not quite in your space, but also fast growing business. And he talked about writing being interesting and lucky in an interview process, where that's, I mean, most companies do it, but a case study, and often it's instead of a PowerPoint, it's a written case study, and you've got to present it in a, you know, I think an essay format that they use as something, which is really interesting. Yeah, but I want to read out some of the comments that some of your team have said, and there's some of these are really quirky. So nothing negative is such. I sent you an site mate because of how hardly impacted the interview. I was really impressed that 45% of employees at this point were female. Now that is hard to maintain. I don't know if you've done that consciously, or if that's just been a byproduct of the people you've hired have been female. What advice would you give to other founders on how to move the dial on gender? Because I think that's a very topical conversation in tech around the world. Yeah, so we made a couple of intentional changes when we were about 10 or 12 people full time. But since then, it's been primarily organic. You know, the basic stuff that we added early on, you know, this is going back like five, six years, was just like, yeah, basic parental leave policies or not basic policies, but basic in the fact of establishing them. So there was a couple of those just practicalities which we had just never done that we did early. And then, yes, since then, it's been interesting. I feel like the reason it's evolving this way is an unintended byproduct of the company's values. Like site mates, very transparent, and I was going to say I know, but I think it's more like I've learned. I feel like women thrive in transparency. And I think we've seen that. And just to give you an example, like all of our compensation levels and bands are public internally. So it's actually impossible at site meet for a man to be paid more than a woman to do the same role. And I just think like women, I think everybody appreciates it, but I think, you know, given some of the statistics that seem to go around every now and then, about, you know, pay gaps and things, yeah, I think women just appreciate it. I mean, we have to we'd have to ask them to be sure, but I think that's one of the things. But it's more than just the, you know, the pay, it's just like all the policies transparent access to information is transparent. Everything is very structured, very organized. And I feel like women thrive at site mate in like non-political environments. I feel like men you know, cowboys the bro clubs, you know, those kinds of cultures create environments where men thrive, where you need, you know, big, big egos, big energy, whereas at site mate, it's very much say less and do more. And I think women can express themselves, you know, professionally, when they don't have to spend energy dealing with politics and big egos. That's not to say there's no cowgirls out there either. I mean, what I would I've learned at least that when there's humans, there's politics, right? It's just people are ambitious and everyone's got pride and everyone's got a reputation they want to have that just leads to dynamics. Yeah, but I would say it's very quiet internally. That sort of stuff like that's good. It's very rare that there's any sort of me. I mean, of course, there's little things day to day, but not on a larger scale. So yeah, those are a couple of the aspects. I also don't think it's that complicated either. Like when the, you know, when international women's day comes around every year, like I, you know, and there's companies with like cupcakes and, you know, making a big show and dance about it. And I'm like, why don't you just spend the energy like fixing the pay gap and like removing all the bullshit and, you know, throw the cupcakes in the bin? Because I don't think, I don't think women want cupcakes. And it shouldn't be one day a year, right? It's like, why would you celebrate someone just one day a year? You should celebrate them every day. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, I think I can say this because I think Virtue Signaling is a real challenge. I know a lot of companies in the Australian ecosystem that I won name that will put out great marketing and perhaps pictures of people in their website, but those people aren't supported internally. And I wish that when I'm sure you speak to your founder peers and there's everyone knows who those companies are. And that is I think an opportunity for us to improve on. And hopefully we see that more. I said, I want to ask you about how you've grown as founder. I feel like this statement might summarize it well. And maybe you can unpack it. So verbatim comment from your team. I don't want him as in hardly, I don't want hardly to lose his edge. I don't really want him to change in one way, but if he doesn't adapt and change as this company grows, life will get harder and harder for him. That I think is the holy grail of any human being, right? Particularly found as with human beings as you get older in life and more experience. Can you keep your edge, the strengths, but can you grow? How do you think about that? It's extremely difficult. This is the area which like I don't know the answer because I've never you know every year that goes by. So I will never run a 50 person company. Okay, the next year, never run a 100 person company. Yeah. Yeah. In 12 months, it'll be I've never run a 200 person company. So I don't know like every year that goes by, it's I'm figuring it out and just adjusting along the way. But I again, I just see myself as architect of the system, architect of the engine. And you know, like I've only started writing in the last 12 months, like I launched our first blog post internally, you know, 12 months ago, just under 12 months ago, and now we have five, and they become like kind of artifacts like that that people refer to to make decisions. So it's been a way that I've been able to scale myself without needing to be involved in all of those discussions. So it's just like looking for those kinds of opportunities based on the, you know, where they're constrained in the system is to untangle it and, you know, scale to the next stage. And also the fact that you're willing to do a 360 review, I think speaks for itself. Right, a lot of people probably don't want to hear this feedback. Wait, I want to hear this feedback from their team. Well, again, I think about it like a system as well. The only way to make it better is to know what's working, know what's not working. So I just take those as inputs and it's okay. All of these things, this part of the system is breaking. Let's fix this and the other part, let's keep doing more of that. So just do you know when to ignore the feedback? Because that is equally as hard, right? Where someone might, or a few people in the team might say, hey, hardly change this, but actually that feedback might be wrong. Yeah, again, I just look at it as inputs and then you have to put it through a processing system to figure out what do you do with it? Sometimes the comments are based on, you know, the perspective of where it's coming from. So the root cause might be to fix something else so that piece of feedback just doesn't even come in the first place. So, yeah, again, it's just processing. You just have to, you just have to peel it back and figure out, like, is that the actual problem? Or is it because of, you know, another underlying or related thing? Yeah, yeah. Something that came up on this point just quickly in the last episode I released was the concept of micro-alignments. I don't know if you've come across that, and this was John Michelle, the former CTO at last year in Shopify, and he also an engineer at trade. And he said, he didn't set up weekly meetings. As in, he did have meetings, but he always said to his team, don't wait for those meetings. Micro-alignments, like, he wanted messages from his team a couple of times a week before that one-on-one meeting. And also, he wanted them to give him homework at the end of the meeting. I encourage you to listen to that episode where he goes into a lot of, like, interesting insights of how he scaled, like, a 3, 4,000 people team without waiting for one-on-ones. Yeah, we, Cymead has very few meetings where I haven't heard the phrase before, but we're effectively operating a micro-alignment machine. Yeah, nice. So it makes sense. I can definitely align with that. I want to move into Rapidfire Sprint to close us out, but before I do anything I haven't asked that you want to touch on? No, let's go into the Rapidfire. All right. Is there one non-work investment, ideally, of time and energy that you consider the best in your life? I might have an interesting answer here. As a learning source, YouTube, actually, in the last 12 to 18 months, I used to read a lot of books, but I found in the last 12 to 18 months, like, as things have started evolving so quickly, like, books. I mean, of course, if you're learning about, like, a core underlying concept, it can be good, but most of my learning now is coming from YouTube, and most of the videos that I watch are days old or weeks old, and it's often, like, listening to a lot of other founders, you know, investors, product builders, you know, some global stuff to understand what's going on. So that's been a shift to where I'm learning from, which is really created urgency in my own mind about what we need to be working on and where our priorities are based on, you know, where the world is going at the living edge. YouTube's algorithm is crazy good. I always run into tab overload where I open so many tabs with so many interesting videos, and then I go with just-- Actually, I have-- I'm logged in on my Google account with my personal email and my work email. I explicitly split my viewing between those two accounts so that the algorithm, things based on which profile I'm using, and I'll use the thumbs up and the not interested options, like, quite aggressively to optimize-- So my personal account, it's just like a lot of background music, and, you know, just random bits, like some sport, like some rugby stuff, and it's basically rugby and music. That's pretty much the two things on my personal account. And then, yeah, if I switch, like, it's crazy. Like, it looks like you're looking at two different products, but it's just the two sides of the algorithm. Yeah. Multi-pro filing has been super powerful. Yeah. One interview question you love asking perspective candidates. If you think back on your entire life journey, what was the period of time where you worked the hardest and why? Nice. The answer's very fascinating. It requires a lot of introspection, right? Yeah. Deep reflection, yeah. And it's also-- It's not just work-related. It could be a university project, could be a side project, could be a personal project, and then I usually follow it up with similar-- similar frame, but shifting gears, again, reflecting on your entire life journey to date. What's the best single piece of work you've ever done? Mm-hmm. Also fascinating. One thing you'd like to learn in the next six months? For good question. It could be life or work. We're working on a new enterprise muscle, which we have an enterprise team and an enterprise motion at the moment, but we're splitting the enterprise team into two stages. One to focus on, like, penetrating accounts, because we're bottoms up into enterprise. But the second tier is almost like traditional sales, but we're already embedded within the accounts. So it's like going outbound, but warm bound, because they're already a customer in all these different parts of their organization. And we basically need to build the traditional enterprise sales muscle to complement the current enterprise motion that we have. And yeah, I just-- it's just not an area that I feel as comfortable, as like talking to a small business owner or even a medium-sized business, or a project team within a larger enterprise or a department, you know, at that level of kind of, you know, aligning with enterprise strategies is just a different sort of discussion. I feel comfortable from a product perspective, but just like, you don't do a demo to them. I don't think, because you don't really care about the demo. So it's like, what do you do at that level? Yeah. I actually recently interviewed a lady called Stevie Case. She's the chief revenue officer at Vanta, and she scaled Twilio from 200 million to something ridiculous. And she spoke about exactly this concept, that evolution. So you spoke about YouTube videos and podcasts. I find that topic fascinating. The go-to-market sales revenue optimization as the company grows, particularly in the US. I think there's a lot more depth of insights that just doesn't have, unfortunately. So I'm sure you'll find a lot out there. Last one is there one pet peeve you have that really annoys you. About myself? A pet peeve about others or behaviors that really annoy you. It could be something. All right. Okay. Like I'm investing more in someone than they're investing in themselves, I basically switch off straight away. Do you mean if you're, let's say if I work in your team, if you're having to hold my hand all the time? No, not even, well, that's a problem. But I mean, if I'm just like more excited about like that person like learning something or like trying to write. Hey, try this. I'm like, I wouldn't even say pushing them, like pushing them is not the right word. So what you're saying is you'd rather say if your team's listening to this, they should come to you. If they want to do a upskilling course as an example, instead of you saying, "Hey, Vettit, here's a course you should try, hey, you'd rather I come to you and say, hardly, here's what I want to do it and build a case and like be proactive." No, even better would just be to say that they've done it and send the expense claim. Okay. All right. Good. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Nice. Yeah. But it needs to be, obviously, assuming it's not a, you know, yeah, Harvard, correct, correct, correct, correct, yeah, just do it. Just do it. Yeah. Yeah. I like that. Just do it. Well, that brings us to a finished line. Hardly Pike. Love doing this one. And thank you for sharing your insights and talk soon. Thanks for it. Thanks for listening through. That's the end of my conversation with Hardly Pike, co-founder and CEO of SiteMate in this episode 185. Grateful that he came on the show for a very rare public interview. This conversation has, you know, like every one of our episodes is unrehearsed and no questions a shared prior. A few parts of this conversation that really stuck with me include his upbringing with his mum and the influence she had, the challenges getting SiteMate off the ground and how he thinks about the five areas that I think are critical to every successful company, product, distribution, team, business model and customer retention. We covered each one in detail. I hope you enjoyed this one. As always, all my details and the show notes. If you want to get in touch anytime, especially if you want to recommend future guests or even partner with us as a sponsor brand and join the likes of KPMG, Vanta, Habitsmith, Free Hills, The Waiting Shooter Entrepreneurship, and more. My email is in the show notes. Catch you soon.