206. Turning Mixed LEGO Bricks Into a VC-Backed AI Startup: €1.5M Raised, Benefits of Iterative Fundraising, Real-World Complexity of Building Hardware & a New Frontier in Circular Tech w/ Ilya Malkin (Sort A Brick)

People, both children and adults, they even have a name for adults who play with toys. Kidults, they call them. These two large segments, they really drive the LEGO financial performance really well. Venture ecosystem is geared up towards funding software businesses, for sure. All the playbooks, all the multiples, almost everything is better suited to match the software. So with hardware and physical products, it's harder. However, maybe I have some kind of, I don't know, trauma from my childhood, but I always wanted to stand out and do something that nobody in their proper mind did. To be honest, we're still entering the seed phase, so the valuation is still like, whatever, the magic. So there is no real math behind it. Everything that you plan on the technological side will take many times longer. It will consume much more money and it will be more prone to unbelievably random factors that will affect you on the way. And when you are dealing with hardware, it's even multiplied. Hello friends, we're back with another episode of Pursuit of Scrappiness podcast. Whether building a business or running a team or just starting out in your career, we're here to bring you scrappy and actionable insights to help you become more productive. My name is Janusz Eps as always, and with me as always, Mr. Ulis Tarot counts as well. Hey. Hi man. Before we start, quick reminder. Follow us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, helps more than you know. In exchange to that, you will find over 200 episodes already. We're covering all sorts of topics you need to become scrappier and better version of yourself in life or in business. And there's plenty to explore if this is your first episode. So you go to the catalog, scroll back, 200 over 200 episodes there. Plus, by following us, you will also be the first one to know when a new episode drops every Tuesday. So yeah, open your Spotify, open your Apple Podcasts app, please, and click the follow button. That will be very great. We'll be very thankful. Thank you. Now, if you've been a listener to Pursuit of Scrappiness podcast, you will kind of notice a pattern that, of course, most founders we've featured have chosen to build products that are purely software, purely digital products. It's just, you know, the composition of businesses in Baltics mostly. But there are some that are not afraid to step out into the real world as well and to have this physical component into their business. And for a very good reason. I mean, we, the consumers, we still exist in the analog brick and mortar and offline realm and world, at least for now, for a few years with the speed of AI changes probably. But yeah, our existence still requires a lot of services, and those services need to be built, orchestrated by also some digital components. So no wonder there are countless opportunities that founders are still exploring in this space. And one such founder is with us today. He has chosen to build his business on the back of a problem that a lot of us have actually faced. Maybe not recently, maybe recently. I don't know about your hobbies. But if you have kids, then probably quite recently. So yeah, you'll understand in one second what I mean. But first, let me welcome here Ilya Malkin, co-founder of Sorterbrick. Hey. Hi, guys. Thanks for having me. Sorterbrick is a willingness-based startup. They raised over 1 million euros pre-seed around the end of last year, and they use AI-powered computer vision to analyze and sort mixed LEGO bricks that are sent in by customers, and then they can identify which sets can be built from those. You know, when you kind of have a lot of sets mixed together, it kind of gets a bit complicated. So their service basically gives new life to previously unused LEGO collections that might be just there. So today you can expect to learn how turning a box of old LEGOs into a startup became one of Lithuania's most creative circular economy startups. Also how the founders used iterative fundraising to pressure test also and sharpen the product, and what other founders can steal from their playbook. Also hidden cost of fundraising. That's a very big topic that we also sometimes discuss. And what really it takes to build a startup that touches the physical world. There's a lot of scanning, shipping, warehouses, and all involved. Like I mentioned, most choose to just go for software. A lot to cover. Yeah, I was about to point out that it sounds like a lot to cover. A busy day today. Okay, we originally start with some kind of questions about sometimes how the business was built and how it started, but like LEGOs, of course, everyone can relate to it. Just tell us briefly how did this idea come to you and when did you realize it actually can be a business? Yes, so in my previous life, professional life, I was a management consultant. So once I exited my previous job, so my colleagues, they decided to buy me out. I was just in search for something new and it appeared that this new idea was right in front of me. I have three kids and the oldest one, he's really true fan of LEGO. So I just saw that we already ran out of space for LEGO sets that he had built. And of course, our wallet also was suffering a lot because LEGO is quite expensive toy. So we decided that maybe we need to start resorting all those mixed bricks because some of the bricks they are standing on the shelves in form of models, but most of them they end up in the bins mixed with other bricks. So we started doing that and surprise, surprise, we didn't succeed because it's too tedious, too hard. I mean, there were so many different bricks and that's it. I was thinking maybe there is a service to do this because I was willing to pay for that. And I didn't find a service, none in Lithuania, none anywhere in the world. I was really honestly surprised to be frank with you. And I thought that it couldn't be possible that nobody came up with this idea because it's so simple. So like laying on the surface. But I mean, I did my research and as a management consultant, I know how to do researches. So it took me, I don't know, maybe half a year easily like doing the research and drafting, let's say, a financial plan. And yeah, right after that, I saw that there is a huge potential because of the sheer number of Lego bricks that is around, because of the popularity of the toy. And the third thing, because of the overall trend for sustainability. And yeah, people just don't want to buy new things if they could reuse those that they already have. So, yeah, that's how Sorcerer's Brick idea was conceived. Yeah. And actually, you touch it like overall industry and trends. What's happening? What did you find globally about Legos, for example? Do kids still play with physical toys as much as they did back in, I don't know, the 90s, which is when I grew up. And also Lego is, of course, a very popular toy then. Or is digital replacing it or is it under a threat or not? Oh, yeah. I mean, everybody is under threat right now, but Lego is really holding up. So I was also very surprised about their financial performance. So I think that during last 10 years, more or less, their overall growth rate was about 10% a year. And they're already like a multi-billion dollar business. So they are doing super cool. And they are growing much faster than the overall toy market. That's quite surprising. So it means that people, both children and adults, they even have a name for those who play with toys. Kidults, they call them. So, yeah, these two large segments, they really drive the Lego financial performance really well. And now there's even a technology category like Lego tech companies, right? You're not the only ones out there doing something with Legos, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The market is very large. Although, you see, it's driven by a single producer of bricks. Of course, we have many much smaller competitors from China, from Europe also. In US, Mega Bloks, it was a big hit for a long time, but still Lego is for sure dominating the ring. Yeah, it's actually one of those, the brand of the... There are similar toys, but I think kids even say like, I don't want that, I want Legos. I mean, yeah, interesting. Maybe we have to cover also Kidults in some of the episodes. Maybe a lot of opportunities for entrepreneurs to work with Kidults. Yeah, well, we touched it in the intro, building business that's not only digital. So you also, you know, you have this component that these bricks, you need to collect them, send them somewhere. When you pitch this idea to your friends or investors, right? There must have been some kind of questions about like, why don't you just do something purely digital? Like, you know, everything involving real world is harder. Is it so? And how did you, you know, answer these and how did you feel about these? I'm just trying to encourage other founders who might be considering something like this. Yeah, you're absolutely right. So let's say the overall, I would say, venture ecosystem is geared up towards funding software businesses, for sure. All the playbooks, all the multiples, like almost everything is just better suited to match the software. So with hardware and physical products, it's harder. However, maybe I have some kind of, I don't know, trauma from my childhood, but I always wanted to stand out and do something that nobody like in their proper mind did. So I thought that maybe if we start building something that is perceived as very hard, then if we succeed in building it, then it would be super hard for anybody to replicate. Because like, who could be as crazy as we are? So that was the intent behind this business. And generally, of course, people are still challenging us. And we are actually open for challenging on, let's say, finding the engine of growth in this physical business, because we are venture backed already. So we raised 1.5 million already euros. And of course, our investors, they are looking for returns. And we cannot possibly return them something that is similar to, let's say, current AI startups that are growing revenues like whatever out of the roof. But it's not always about just the sheer numbers. It's also about the defendability. So in our case, what we are doing is quite hard and sophisticated in terms of technology. So we are building our own machinery. We experiment a lot with optics, with computer vision. Of course, we also build some software. But to replicate that, you really need to have a very strong team, a lot of money and time. So it's not always about the team and money. You still need time to experiment because there are so many nuances in this kind of simple business as it could appear on the surface. Actually, when you came to investors with this business idea, do they know how to value these businesses compared to just typical playbook, which are used for software? Or did you encounter a lot of discussions where you said, like, valuation is actually higher, you guys are not looking at it the right way? To be honest, we were very lucky with our investors so far. So of course, we were sometimes overly optimistic in our, let's say, thoughts about how much our business could be valued. But we found the common ground quite quickly. So, I mean, to be honest, we are still in, like, entering the seed phase. So the valuation is still like, whatever, the magic. So there is no real math behind it. There are some, of course, projections. So we are trying to, let's say, project the ideal scenario, the, let's say, most realistic. We don't project the worst case scenario because it's quite clear. We go out of the business. But in these scenarios that look good, it seems that all the premises, all the assumptions, they're kind of realistic. So it means that when we discuss these assumptions with our investors, they kind of, yeah, yeah, yeah, it could happen. So when all the assumptions line up, it means that kind of you really have a chance to build this business into a hundred million dollar, euro, whatever. So, yeah. So then the discussion about valuation probably is pushed to another round when we will start generating a lot of revenue. And then we will be probably matched against this revenue, against Unita Comics. It will be, for sure, harder for us. But for now, we are still in this honeymoon phase, I would say. Interesting question to always ask is, like, before you started, like you said, you were not afraid to take on challenges. What things about building a software slash also physical world business, what things did you predict right and what things did you learn that you didn't know? Maybe some things that turned out to be harder or easier. So since I had no technological background before starting it, I'm very fortunate to have a very strong technical colleagues. But in a hard way, I've learned that everything that you plan on the technological side will take, like, many times longer. It will consume much more money and it will be, like, more prone to unbelievably random factors that will affect you on your way. And when you are dealing with hardware, it's even multiplied. Because, like, in software, you could really iterate very fast, like, I don't know, ship weekly even. But with hardware, we're talking, like, I mean, in an ideal world, maybe quarters. In our case, we are talking about half a year, like six months. That's our regular, let's say, period where we can build something, test something and roll it out. So, yeah, it's just so much slower. And then for this slower pace, you must adapt with your fundraising as well because you still have a burn rate to accommodate. So it means that you will need more money, not only because hardware costs quite a lot to build, not only in terms of just human resources, but also, of course, you have components. You have to build those, you know, to buy all those, whatever, mechanical things, electrical things. And so, yeah, so the key thing is that it's very also, yeah, money consuming. You mentioned you came in not from a technical side. What do you think now? Was it advantage for you or disadvantage? Meaning, like, maybe if you would have known these things, you would not want to even start. What do you think about that? Absolutely. I think that's why many technical people, they started doing... I mean, there is so many pet projects, like hobby projects of LEGO sorters. If you look up YouTube, you'll find like, I don't know, a dozen of it at least. And usually they are built by technical enthusiasts. And as far as I'm concerned, they stop somewhere when they build it from LEGO usually also because it's cool. But they stop it because they see how challenging it is. And I was ignorant for quite a long... I'm still quite ignorant, I would say, in these terms. So I'm still optimistic that we are going to build it. And we already have prototypes that are working. So we proved that major unknowns are already known for us. So we are providing service. We're still unprofitable, of course. We are, you know, doing it at a loss. But it's all going well so far. So yeah, just if I would be more knowledgeable, I think it would be much harder for me. Let's say you would be put in a position to advise some kind of group of just starting founders who want to build something similar in the space. What would be a few things you would tell them to check or to research before they start some kind of similar business to what you are doing? Similar, you mean in the hardware space? Something like that? Where you have both hardware and software, yeah. Physical world and digital. I mean, one of the most important thing is for sure to be able to gather a really strong team. So the first thing I would do right after I polish the idea, because, of course, if you are the founder, if you are even the solo founder at the beginning and you're looking for co-founders, you need to really be able to sell on your idea. So that means that you need to be prepared. So we need to answer major questions about market, about competitors, about projections. I mean, all this stuff. So you need to sell first to the co-founders or maybe to your friends who will fund you for initial periods of time. But still, you need to be very good in selling the idea. But right next, the key thing is just to be sure that you can assemble the really strong team. I cannot stress it more. It's very important and it's very hard. It's hard because if you are not somebody with a super cool proven track record of whatever, three exits or two exits behind your back, and I'm not. I mean, I came from consulting. Of course, I sold my business, but it was not like, you know, software exit with many, many, many zeros. And it's really hard to convince A players to join a team. So you start with the best people you can get and then you just build it. And it's hard. So yeah, people, I think you need to look for right people to join a team. That's the key. How does it overall? Like I think, yeah, the investors, employees, of course, everyone would say prefer like, I want to invest in a founder who already had one or two exits. I want to work for a founder who wants to have one or two exits, right? It's like these guys who have that background have, of course, an advantage. What do you do to compete? Like you said, like, how do you do sell a vision? Are you more generous with equity? What are the ways how you can convince? Or maybe you look for talent in places where they don't look, because I guess they also are looking for somebody with a background from a big company or something. And maybe you can find talent in places where they won't look. I once heard the interview where Gwyneth Paltrow, I don't know if you know this actress, very famous one. She told that she was so lucky to be, I mean, she didn't call herself beautiful, but we know she's a very pretty woman. And she told that throughout all her life, she really saw how people are willing to help her in a ways that probably she wouldn't get if she wouldn't be so famous or maybe pretty. So I would say it's the same with the founders with previous exits. So kind of everybody leaning towards doing what they want, VCs are calling them. And if you have no such experience, such track record, it doesn't mean that you won't get the same results. You can do this, but you will just need to grind much more. So it means that to reach the same results, you will need to work like, I don't know, X time more. You need to have X time more job interviews with potential co-founders before you find the right one. And probably the advice here I give for myself, and it's quite hard actually to follow, is not to settle with mediocre results somewhere. Just continue pursuing something that really in your mind looks like ideal. Although some people say that it's better done than perfect. Of course, but balance is somewhere closer to perfect, I would say. But it's not good advice, Sam, that you don't stop grinding. But in this early stage, it's also a bit hard to measure or determine what's good, what's great, what's excellent. Do you have some kind of like, what did you use in this initial stage evaluating people? Like, if they don't also have, you know, the background of building two successful hardware technology companies or well-known products, how do you determine who are these A players? I do mistakes. But, I mean, general rule of thumb is that you, of course, still have some tools that you can employ. You can talk with people who work with them. You could, you know, just evaluate probably not the technical competence, because you are not technical, sadly, yourself. At least I am not. But you can evaluate the value, values of the person. You can see if you have a fit, if you have a chemistry between you, because definitely as early employees you need to have this. So, but all of these things are quite intangible. So, yeah. So you just follow your, I would say, instincts. And then once you have data in terms of, for example, person's performance, so you... It works actually not only for hiring people, I think. It works for almost all of the decisions you make in the beginning of your venture. So you are guided by your gut feeling in the beginning. And that's what I was talking in the beginning. So you need to be able to sell on your vision and it means that if you want to sell something you need to really be convinced yourself. At least that's my rule of thumb. And if you are convinced, if you can foresee the future, so I can imagine how I want the business to look like in five and ten years, then kind of I have a feeling whether something is going right or wrong even in the beginning. But then once I have data, because I have started something crawling, then you switch from gut feeling to data and it guides you much better, usually. Being a business in the, you know, with the real world part where you have to send stuff, are you affected at all at the moment by what's going on in the world? Tariff wars, uncertainties, I know some kind of things with logistics. How are you viewing those processes or it's not really that dangerous for you? Actually for us it's awesome. I hate to say it, but we like it. Because what we are working on, we are working on reusing the stuff that was already sold. And usually in each single market, whether you take European Union, US, Germany, any other country large enough, you have a huge amount of stuff that is laying somewhere unused. So it's like really enough for you to be just reusing the, for example, in our case, LEGO bricks that have been sold within the market. And I would say that these tariffs, they work, I mean, we will see what happens, but generally speaking, the higher the tariffs, the higher the prices, the higher the prices, more people will be willing to switch to alternative. It means reusing what they already have. So, yeah, I mean, in this case, the general trend is very positive for any kind of e-commerce business. Good to know. That is a good point. In terms of strategic decisions you have made when building the business, have there been a situation where, for example, there was a decision you have to make that didn't make maybe a lot of logical sense at the time, but intuitively you felt like, you know, it's the right decision. And then it was proven to be like right and critical. If you can recall, have there been any such moments? And what did it, you know, what can it teach others and what did it teach you? There are so many of such kind of decisions and it's even hard to pick one, but I would say that maybe, and I think you mentioned it in the beginning, the mode of our fundraising was one of the, let's say, not very conventional decisions that we've made. So it means that we decided that we need to raise money in this pre-seed stage in separate tranches and tie them to some kind of knowledge that we obtain, because in the very beginning, when we started in 2023, we had only really rough idea, so we didn't test market, because we were thinking a lot about how can we approach customers and test their, for example, willingness to pay. But since the product is physical, we, to be honest, didn't really come up with the idea how to test it, because either we need to do everything by hand and doing by hand, like sorting Lego into sets is close to impossible without computer vision aid, at least. And we didn't have it before, so we decided that, okay, we will rely on our intuition in terms of market. We will raise, let's say, the reasonable amount that we can raise easily, and we really easily raised the first tranche of close to, I mean, I think it was like 700,000. And then we will start working on getting deeper into the technology. First of all, of course, building this computer vision stack so we could simulate service and go out to the customers and show them how it will look like actually, and then gather information from the market. And to be honest, it worked well, so we started really, let's say, talking to customers and taking their orders only in the end of 2024, so like a year and a half after we started the company. And the demand was, yeah, as we expected, it was quite high, so it worked well. Hopefully, it will go further. I just read this last week, there was a lot of coverage for this case where AI, supposedly AI company, turned out to be 700 people doing the manual work, and I'm just thinking maybe you have, you can do this as well, maybe with Brics, if nothing else works. I think that there was a joke that was almost an urban myth that behind every successful company, there is a large amount of people just doing it manually. But I mean, we are not hiding it. The approach we take with building our business is we start with completely manual process, except for one, recognition of Brics, because recognition is impossible. There are so many of them. Thousands, thousands of bricks, so we automated recognition, but all the rest of the stuff we did by hand, and right now we are commissioning our conveyor, so it will really bring our efficiency like four, five times X, but it's still not the end game, so we still have a lot to do with the efficiency of the conveyor itself, because there are so many different variations, but still you need to, because this process was not available, nobody did it before, so we needed to just understand how to do this, and it's the cheapest way to, it's not actually, yeah, we did it not because of our will to test market, but mostly because we needed to build the processes within the company, because once you, in order to optimize something, you first need to have it unoptimized, so we build it manual, and then we automate those steps that are most heavy on manual work, and yeah, and that's the way, and we'll optimize and automate it all the way to full automation. Yeah, the more you describe, it sounds like if you guys crack this and go through it, it's obviously very hard, but if you do it, and then, for example, Lego itself, and you know, you see the trend with companies like Patagonia, they also want to get share of re-commerce as well, right, so in that sense, it may be easier for them to buy a company such as yours instead of trying to reinvent it themselves. You're absolutely right. The key question here is what will be the intent behind potential acquisition, whether the intent will be to develop it further to really serve people and the planet, or to just have a potential roadblock under your control. So it's always, yeah, yeah, this is your word, yeah. Now, on fundraising, in your recent LinkedIn post, I read that you mentioned your iterative fundraising approach. It kind of created this natural reality check with investors, allow you to kind of get the sense of market. Maybe can you share how it worked, maybe with example, where you were, where you learned something that you'd, okay, now we need to change this, we need to pivot or we need to sharpen our approach based on the feedback that you got in fundraising? Yep. So we started fundraising, first of all, we invested our own money, quite a sensible amount, so I think this was also kind of unconventional, because we decide, I thought that maybe if we have a skin in the game, it will be much more sensible for us to ask for money from other investors. And it really worked when people found out that we've put our money first, then it was much easier for them to trust that we are serious about what we do. But yeah, as I mentioned, the first trench, let's say, sub round was fairly easy. So we raised from people we knew mostly, and yeah, it was quite okay. And then we start building and in more or less nine months, when we were close to running out of money, not yet running out of money, but close to, we decided that we need to, and we actually build a computer vision stack already. And we've had our first machines that were prototypes very, very early, I would say even mockups. And we went out and start fundraising. And we've, we started to get questions that we were not able to answer yet. So the questions about the market, because as I mentioned, we worked almost exclusively on technology side. And we tried to explain that, guys, the market is here, like, look at all those billions of euros spent on Lego each year. But not a lot of, let's say, investors, they were very much excited about it. And they told us that, guys, you need to, yeah, just have another iteration around customers. And yeah, we did it. And also we, but we, we still, we, we, we had the support from our early investors. So they put some more money. So we've got the second trench that got us going for, yeah, more or less nine more months. And during this time, we, we started serving the customers. So we've got all this prerequisites that were needed. And we, yeah, we've kind of built everything that we were thinking the way to build. And we raised the last part and it was also pretty easy, actually. So the hard one was in the middle, in the middle when we got slapped in the face, because we didn't think that it would be so hard. We were kind of relaxed after the first fundraising that were very smooth and it was much harder. So it's like a sandwich. Yeah. Easy, easy, hard. It's still unconventional to hear that it was easy or it wasn't a complete struggle, I guess, what other founders have found that to be the case. Is it also, where did you raise from? Did you raise in Lithuania, Baltics or, you know, what's the fundraising situation for overall for startups? What do you, what do you feel in, where were we in June, 2025? So what my observation, we raised everything from Lithuania. So 1.5 million, I mean, the rest, super small checks came from Latvia, actually through the syndicates, but generally speaking, it's all Lithuanian money. So the general observation is that, first of all, of course, our experience and that the thing that we, me and my co-founders are experienced and quite, I mean, connected in business actually made the difference. And when I'm saying it was easy, it wasn't so easy, but it was not so hard and brutal as sometimes you hear. And probably because we have a track record, not in startups, but in other industries and people trust us. And so I think the trust is the key component here. And that's why when we were talking with other funds from outside of Lithuania, with people who don't know us, they were much more reluctant and they're still. And now we are getting ready for seed round, the much larger one, 3 million. And we started to discuss with the international funds. And of course, yeah, then we are asked to bring much more data and much more proof. So that's, that's, that's all right. That's the way it is. But, but yeah, if you have the potential to really become a large company, then they're interested. And of course, if you can prove that you've already delivered what you promised. So. Well, another thing I think also mentioned in the post, but we also touched on in the intro, this hidden cost of fundraising from a founder. Can you describe what it, what, what maybe some people don't see or don't understand or overlook about this, what it takes from a founder and what it, what's the opportunity cost for the business while founders is busy raising? To be honest, I like raising a lot. That's probably strange, but it gives me a really strong incentive to align all the company around bringing itself to the milestone desired. And to really, I mean, for me, fundraising acts like a constant reality check. So it means that when you are sitting in your room with your friends or with your co-founders and you have a lot of money, so that could, like, for example, you know, take you to somewhere in two years, I think that there is a very strong risk that you will just be incentivized not to go out and just build something you imagine is cool. But when you are raising in such a small amounts of money, I mean, they're not small, but they cannot take you very far. Then it means that you always going out telling your story and you get the feedback. Of course, not all of the feedback is accepted. That's the, that's my job. That's the job of the team we have. So we filter the feedback we will get and we decide which, which, which comments are sensible, which are maybe not very much relevant to us. And then, yeah, we just use it as a tool to discipline us and to always as a cold shower to, you know, bring us to our senses, to prioritize what is most important. And in this case, since investors, they are dealing and talking with startups like every day. First of all, they don't have a time to go too deep. That's for sure. So you shouldn't expect to get a super insightful advice from an investor because it's not what they do. But still, you can get some very interesting feedbacks and you can work on them. So, so, yeah, this time that you invest and it requires a lot of time. I think it's, it's, it's, it's, it's amazing because it gives you this opportunity to be grounded. So it's more like a hidden, hidden revenue instead of hidden cost of fundraising. It takes time, but it gives you definitely, it gives you a benefit that is not usually associated with the process. Good point. But in terms of just being able to focus on the business, did you find it challenging or you had a team that, that could, you know, do the operational work on day to day while you were talking to investors and building pitch decks and. First of all, in our case, I didn't build pitch decks alone. So since we have a quite diverse team, so I engaged all key members. So the people who work with product and people who work with computer vision is with mechanics. So just, yeah, it just, it just looked like a strategic sessions, let's say. So we talk about the future. I was asking the question, so guys, we need to promise something. What are we going to achieve in two years with, let's say, three millions in our pocket? Let's think about it. Let's think what we want to achieve in three years without those money. I mean, just generally. And then, yeah, each of the departments, each of the co-founders, they took their share of bringing this, let's say, part of the vision on the table. And then we work to harmonize them. So this process took a lot. But once you are done with building your strategy and forming a pitch deck, then discussions with investors, actually, they're not taking so much time. Because I mean, we were trying not to waste our time on cold calling people just with the, you know, wishing to be lucky of hitting somewhere. So we were using the warm introductions and we were searching people who are we approaching. So it means that, yeah, we didn't spend too much time talking. We spent quite a lot of time preparing. But preparation is, as you mentioned, is very beneficial in itself. So yeah. And one more thing to ask, well, you've been building this for several years and there must be a lot of, you know, moments where things are uncertain, challenging. In those moments, are there any kind of guiding principles or kind of life lessons that you apply that help you to, you know, see the light at the end of the tunnel, see moving forward whenever there's a challenge or uncertainty, any kind of things you learn that you remind yourself that, you know, how to move forward? First of all, I think that, yeah, I just trying to never give up in any situation. And it's just a personal trait. It's probably not very easy to learn, but throughout my life, I've learned it the hard way, I would say. And that's one thing. And always look for solutions because I'm pretty believer in the idea that there is no situation without at least a couple of possible solutions. So one more interesting thing that actually I realized pretty, I mean, I was, I was, I was having it somewhere back in my mind, but I was able to formulate it very recently is that it's probably very important to forget your, uh, it's might sound strange, but forget your dignity. So it means that forget her ego. So because there are so many people who are telling themselves that, okay, I'm not going to do this. So I'm not going to take this napkin from the floor of the toilet because we have a cleaner for that. No, really? Why? I mean, if it's here, you just take it. So it means that there is no job I cannot do if needed. There is no task that is below my dignity. So I can do anything that is needed to bring me to results. It's not very easy. It's kind of maybe even controversial, but I think this is, uh, this is a way you achieve something great. Yeah. Very, very good point to end on. Uh, thanks a lot. It really was, was awesome conversation, a lot of insights and, uh, yeah, I'm sure a lot of people learned also one or two or three or five things from, from this conversation. So we have very, very happy to have you on board to share those insights. Thanks. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. To the listeners. We see you again. Um, I know in a short while. Thank you. Thank you guys. Bye. Bye. If you liked this show, remember to leave us a rating or review. It helps other people to discover the pursuit of scrappiness.