Bootstrapped to $6.7M ARR and an Exit to Quizlet in 2 Years – Brett Bauman & Zack Hargett, Coconote

Welcome to the subclub podcast. A show dedicated to the best practices for building and growing app businesses. We sit down with the entrepreneurs, investors and builders behind the most successful apps in the world to learn from their successes and failures. Subclub is brought to you by RevenueCat. Thousands of the world's best apps trust RevenueCat to power in app purchases, manage customers and grow revenue across iOS, Android and the web. You can learn more at RevenueCat.com. Let's get into the show. Hello, I'm your host David Bernard. And with me today, RevenueCat CEO Jacob Eiting. Our guests today are Brett Bauman and Zach Hargit, co-founders of CocoaNote, an AI-powered note-taking app that was recently acquired by Quizlet. On the podcast, we talk with Zach and Brett about hitting a million dollars in ARR in four months with no pay ads. Why trial extensions beat discounts for saving cancellations? And why you should be hiring content creators, not influencers. Zach, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast today. You got a David, thanks for having me. And Brett, nice to have you as well. Happy to be here. Jacob, back on the pod. With a four person pod, my commentation budget is cut in half. So you may not hear that much from me. But who wants to hear from me anyway? These guys got the story to tell, so. They have a great story. I always find that I have you on the, for the color commentary and feel free to interrupt and interject to get the color commentary going. I'm going to kind of spoil the ending, but I think this is going to be in the title anyway. Brett and Zach, you founded CocoaNote not too long ago, what about two years ago? And got it to 6.7 million in ARR and then just sold to Quizlet. So quite a story for a bootstrapped app to go so quickly to that much ARR and then to sell to such a big storied company in the subscription app space. So I wanted to kick it off just with the story of, you know, when exactly was it and how did CocoaNote come together? I think we'd take it back to 2022. I had just shut down my last startup which raised venture capital. We were a consumer product studio. We were building for high school students and college students. So I really thought most often of my little sister, Emma, my step sister, Emma, who is in high school and then going into college right around then. So it was 2022. I was tinkering around with a Chrome extension which summarized blog posts and YouTube videos because frankly I didn't want to watch, you know, an hour long YouTube video. I really just wanted like the two, three Senate summary and same thing with blog posts right. I came across a lot of blog posts that I wanted to read, but I didn't want to, you know, spend 30 minutes reading it. I just wanted the summary to see if I wanted to dig deeper. And then Brett and I started tinkering on a way to replace Siri with back then GPT 4 in 2023. That's always going to ask. So the summarizations, those were like the first like using LLM's to do summaries which was like fair very novel in in 22 right exactly 23. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Back then I believe it was still GPT 3 or some version of GPT 3. Something which worked, but it's nothing like what we have today. Yeah. For sure. And yeah, Brett and I started tinkering and I think we realized the power of voice. We, you know, we're thinking about summarization from the Chrome extension that I was kind of hacking on. And then we saw the success of some note takers that were more business focused, but we didn't think people were really taking it seriously. And so something that comes to my mind is like a great Charlie Munger quote, which is simple ideas taken seriously. We kind of came to this simple idea that this could be great for college students and we committed about two years ago. So how did the two of you meet and you were both at LLM, but you didn't overlap. So how did you meet and how did you decide to build that together? Yeah. So, Zach was there before I was and we basically just worked with the same people and I was on the mobile team. Zach did all kinds of things at LLM being there earlier than me and helped get the mobile team started. But Zach, I feel like it was at like the off site one time in LA. Zach was still coming to off sites, even though he didn't work there anymore for some reason. And some of our like mutual friends were just like you guys should you guys should meet and and we did and that's kind of the how it started. Yeah. That's pretty cool. Jacob is there an unofficial policy if I ever leave revenue cat. Do I get invited or I just get the boo how does that work? I don't think I would get the ability to leave revenue cat. That's the thing. I didn't know you guys were loom alums. Obviously like massive fans still daily active. That's like such a great interesting product right and that makes a lot sense on how that sets you up for this project right. It's like some organization note taking info collection and I think so much what works great about loom is like recording a video you can do with quick time player right. So it's like in some ways not that complicated, but loom makes it an amazing product out of it right and it's mostly the dressing right and like the interfacing and like the delivery. So seems like there's a real parallel here between you know coconut and and loom. I think not a lot of people pick up on that, but it is kind of loom on easy mode a little bit recording audio and uploading it and some practicing it and all that. I just want to say my favorite part of that night. Absolutely. I think it was an elephant a Brett and Santa Monica and I was living like a couple blocks away. I won't say who to protect the innocent, but someone was like you know looked at Brett looked at me and was like you two should meet and I'm not going to be part of this like I'm going to walk away because I I shouldn't know about what you guys talk about. That's why ex employees are not invited off sites. So I think the you know the universe if you put out startup vibes and you know I don't know the universe has a way of like making things work out was it like you to just really hit it off like these kind of found a stories are so fascinating to me like how did two people get together to build these things like did you hit it off and then like Hey, let's just build something together because it sounds like you started building before you actually built coconut I might interject and just say like you know obviously choosing co founders is like a super fraught thing and like there's probably as many failures way, probably more fairly like most startup early stage are failures are because of co founder mismatch like they do sometimes get labeled other things but most of the time it's like co founders just weren't the right combo. But like if you haven't worked with somebody directly I would say both coming through the same all moderns the same organization certainly is like the next best thing right because you at least know you've passed through like a similar cultural filter and also like this is under under appreciated probably is that you have a shared social network to right so you have like outside of the financial alignment that you have starting a company you kind of have an incentive not to screw the other person because like you have similar friends right so you like you don't want to like mess up you know there's there's more in it than just like the time right there's like. There's like there's a lot more connection but it's super hard I mean I don't want to take over the podcast but like I think this is one of the like the hardest problems you can get right in starting a company I think there's kind of an obvious complimentary skill set right so rights background is making apps. My background is making apps but I'm not especially technical and so me having a design and product background which is what I did at Loon and then as a first time founder realizing that if you build it they will not come you have to level up marketing and so I had to get relatively decent at marketing in my first startup and then Brett with an engineering background but does so much more than just engineering I think there was like a very obvious skill set match and the last thing I'll say there I'd be curious here what Brett has to say about this I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I was mostly like you know bugging Brett like you know hey I have this idea I'd love to execute on this and it's him being like well maybe I don't know we'll see and then you know eventually I bugged him to do one and then the next and then we were just kind of hacking and iterating and you know thankfully he said yes. So you met you headed off you figured out you wanted to build something together you started tinkering with the the Siri thing but then tell us the story of like when you realize like coconut was what you were going to build and and how you got that to launch. So yeah like I mentioned I've been building a lot for Emma which is this archetype that I had in my head is my little sister she was entering college as a first year civil engineering major she still is a civil engineer. So we were thinking about this we're thinking a lot about how can we you know summarize things help people learn it's kind of a mishmash of things and then we arrived at coconut there were some apps not iOS apps but actually web apps that were out there on the market doing a similar thing but they weren't taking it seriously and so we just decided to execute on it I would say one of the things that we did really really well in hindsight is get momentum as soon as possible. So we had a free trial from day one but we were in effect charging from day one and this is where you know this will play out over the course of two years David Jacob my fascination with checking the revenue cat chart led to my wife to have basically an intervention like Zach I think you have a problem you check this thing way too often and it started from basically day one because we were trying to get you know momentum as quickly as possible. One way to look at momentum would be you know something on mixed panel so like usage and retention and very important metrics but there's nothing quite like the dopamine high of realizing you're creating something valuable to the world and people are returning captured some of it. - Exactly. - There's a hard to debate, something that is being done there. You can have a lot of useless mixed panel events, right? I've always thought about this, like I don't intentionally, in some ways, don't wanna create fidget spinners for app founders, right? Like some sort of just addiction. But I also think that like, hey, starting and building, I think is intense. And it takes like a ridiculous amount of focus. I think they're, you know, much of the detriment of the loved ones in your life. Like checking that thing frequently, just not the worst thing in the world, right? You have to stare at it every day. Was it on the mobile app? Was that, was that, was that, because the mobile app I think came out like halfway probably through. - I was checking mobile web. I always had a phone call. - Oh, web, okay. - Yeah, yeah. - Go ahead. - Yeah, the mobile app we release is like, we really weaponized the push notification addiction for people, so anyway. - The widget even, yeah. - Yeah, so it's my official like search in general's warning to like, you know, you can adjust your notification settings. You don't have to get a notification and check your thing every single time. But, you know, if you wanna get acquired by Quizlet, maybe you do, I don't know. - How long were you over working on it before the April 2024 launch? - Not super long. We really wanted to scope it down and launch something quickly and basic. And I would say we achieved that in it. Like sort of worked, I mean, launched, you know, but that was fine. There's a lot about it, honestly, that looks the same today as it did back then, which is, which is cool, but there was plenty of like audio recordings getting lost and things like that. - I guess, you know, it kind of feels like, this is one of those cases where new fundamental technology breakthrough, like this wouldn't have been an app you could have built two years prior, right? - Totally, yeah. - And so you guys, there's a huge first movers advantage, right, to getting this. And this would have been very early. I remember around this time looking for like casual, note-taking apps, like there were some of them, I forget like they've all like cycled in and out already for yeah, like the business context. And I was like, man, it'd be nice if I could just set this on the table, you know, when I'm meeting with somebody in person. But yeah, how much of the product improvement, did you guys just kind of get for free as like the models progressed over those two years? Was it substantial? Did the product just get better and cheaper to like operate every two months as the model shipped or was it like a lot of like product development fixing and harness building? - Definitely both. I mean, you know, adding new features, building things as new capabilities come out. - Oh right, adapting to new functionalities. - Yeah, yeah, that's something we still do today. And that could be like building a podcast that you can create. So you're kind of going from audio to text to a summary and then back to audio again in a shorter form. - It would be weird to just listen to your lecture again, right? Maybe? I don't know, that's funny, that there's demand for that. - Yeah, I think it gives people some safety knowing that they can listen to it again and like kind of zone out or if they want to replay something. - Oh, interesting, like in the moment, people are relaxed more. Like so your app is providing, even when their recording is happening, you're providing value because like they just have the peace of mind that this is recorded, I can like reference it later, like all of this things. That's I guess obvious when you say it, but like, you think of app value being delivered when an app is used, right? And I guess the app is being used at that point but not in a consumptive way, right? It's just, it's like doing its job passively, which is cool. - Right, right, they're recording it to really come back later and use what they're getting right now. And it's something we discovered from feedback when things will go wrong and realize how much trust they're giving us. - Oh yeah, that's a bad moment. - Losing it, yeah. - Losing it recording, how. - One of the best things that we did, we just asked our customers, how would you describe CocoNote? And a great majority of them, it was shocking how consistent this was. They used CocoNote to never miss a key detail. And that is exactly what we put in the first app store preview screen. And so I think one of the cool things that we did with CocoNote that I had never done in the past is listen to how your customers describe your product and then say that back to them. Right, there are parallels here with even presidential campaigns or government, you know, position campaigns where you're listening to what resonates with your voter base and then you're saying it back to them. And I think that's in part what a good marketer does. - That's fascinating. I was just thinking I actually had a version of this in the '90s by having this amazing study group. And it like what I did, I didn't take notes. Two girls that I would take every class with who were in my same degree plan would take meticulous notes. And then we'd have study groups together where I was like chill listening, getting the bigger concepts. They were taking notes. I was more relaxed. And then our study sessions were incredible. So like you basically productize what I liked lucked into the classic group project hangar on. - To get it monetized. (laughing) - That's a good point though. You know what I mean? Like, I mean, okay, we talk about technology as like deflationary, right? And like, it's a weird, 'cause you didn't pay to be part of a study group, right? But you were lucky to have that. You had to put energy to put that together. It's difficult to like find the right people and all that stuff. - And I was bringing that up to the point Brett was saying about like being able to be relaxed during the session and really listen, how's value? And like, it was valuable. I wasn't just to hang around. Like there was value to them for me to like bringing contacts that they missed because they were frantically taking notes. - More brains are better than one. Whether they run on a GPU or not. - Yeah, yeah. So like, that's what's so cool. It's like, and for those who don't, aren't fully familiar with the product, you record lectures like in high school college and then it generates notes, flashcards, quizzes, podcasts, games, mind maps, like it generates all this other content. And that's kind of what we were doing in this study group in the '90s. - Well, that's human effort, right? Which goes back to the deflationary point, right? Like this technology just like free money. It's free real estate, right? It's free, obviously, very, very cheap compared to like the alternative. - In those early days, what were the key like insights and product unlocks that took you, 'cause it sounds like you got some initial launch traction, but what were those like stepping stone moments that really kind of like kept taking it to that next level? - Well, there's something that I look for in consumer apps and trying to understand why they've been so successful. And I look at ones like ladder or all trails or Strava. And I think that they all associate with like a person's identity. And then it's something that they repeat frequently, whether it's like running or weightlifting. And to us, we felt like we were capturing a student's identity and going to class and recording is something you do daily or a few times a week. And that was a big thing for us is trying to find something that not just brings value, but you do it like in an often and repeated way. And you build up this like also just this corpus, over time, right of like, you know, especially if like subsequent classes, like physics one, two, three, you can now go back and reference physics two. You get all this like lock in, right? Which is really powerful in terms of like retention and things like that. - Totally. - Let's type into growth. How did you promote the launch and like what attraction look like out of the gate? - Yeah, so on the growth marketing side, we, as I mentioned before, we wanted to get traction. There's a great quote by I think Sam Altman, right? Which is momentum is like oxygen for a startup. So you want to get as much momentum as soon as possible. And I know in some way I'm stating the obvious, but there are very clear trade offs, right? In some cases, you delay a launch. In some cases, you want to perfect certain flows or perfect this and that. Maybe you delay your launch because of hiring, whatever. I think the thing that we got really, really right from the start is we wanted to get as much momentum as possible as quickly as possible. Because momentum is like oxygen. You just feed off of that momentum and it lets you put more and more energy and more and more cash if you need to into the company to keep it growing. So in the early days, it was very obvious that we were going to use social media to grow. I think we live in this really interesting time where it does not matter generally speaking how many followers you have on short form video. It just matters if you make great content. And so we were trying everything in the beginning. I have some interesting stories. I don't know if I should share them, but maybe we can circle back to those early days. I mean, it is like a true grind, right? And it feels good to be part of that game. But we were trying everything we could. And then I would say we worked with, you know, easily 30 content creators of various types in the early days. I would say in the first two months. And really three of them ended up making a huge difference. One of them in particular ran the main cocoa note.app account and generated hundreds of millions of views. And I think I could speak for Brett on this. We're very lucky to have worked with him and started working with him very early on because he was a key part of our growth. I know you guys don't want to say it, but that was Mr. Beast. Give me a few listening. We'd love to work with you. (laughing) So I was going to ask the model there. Were you two ever dancing on a TikTok? Did you like trying a first party stuff yourself? Or did you go straight to like, hey, we're just going to like identify creators and have them run. And like, that's in a self-a-process, right? You're like trying different creators and seeing who's good. How did you, how did you do it? - I think Brett danced on TikTok a couple of times and we got banned. And so then we had to figure out what else to do. - It was that good. - Yeah. So we were not dancing on TikTok, but we were definitely talking to a lot of creators and studying like what's working in the market. Plenty of learnings, I'd say on the growth side, I don't know if this is exactly relevant, but some timeline there. Within 45 days, we had crossed 100,000 ARR, within four months, we crossed a million. And then within five months, we had crossed two million. And so we just had more and more capital, more and more confidence to reinvest into the company, to keep growing and keep working with creators. - Did you guys, I mean, this gets into cash flow questions, but being boosted up, I think it's very interesting. But like, did you at all infuse cash in at all? or I guess maybe by the way, I'm not taking any money out. for yourselves or anything like that. It's a flywheel, but there's a minimum buy-in to get scale for these. How did you manage that? - Yeah, it's been a both of what you said, both of adding some in. And it's really slow in the beginning on Apple. Like the delay of so long. - When you get paid. - Yeah, and we need to got that com/payouts. I don't know if we have that set up yet, but we're working on a product there. - It's really slow in the beginning, especially if you then try to recognize your revenue on a cruel basis and things like that, which we had to learn. And it's a good way to descend into madness. - That's what that means. - Yeah. - Yeah. So we put in a bit both in the beginning to get things going and then we really don't have even today much of a free tier. You can use it a little bit before you start a free trial, but that helped as well. - Did cogs of produce, like the LLM calls and all that stuff, was that material for you guys? Were you had to consider it or was there enough of a spread? It didn't really matter. - Not really. I think in the beginning we didn't pay much attention to it, always felt like it'd be a good problem to have if we ended up having that problem. And then as we grew, there's like startup plans you can get on in the first year. We credits, things like that. And then as we rolled off of those, we did make some decisions to be more cost efficient, but it was overall totally fine. - Yeah, you have to figure in like the giving away tokens at the beginning of an experience as just part of your CAC kind of, right? It's like you have to give that away. I think too many people, again, it's like, yeah, maybe Zach having gone through a venture back, you kind of had the model of capital equals growth, 'cause I think I see sometimes with bootstrapped, but David's bootstrapped a lot of things. But because the dip in below the zero is into your personal money, there tends to be a real hesitance, right? And it's almost easier to bet. I mean, it's why a lot of people always venture, and I don't think it's a bad reason too, is it's easier to spend somebody else's money. It really is, right? And there's good and bad things about that. The good things being is you're a little bit regretted, protected, or whatever, and all those, but like, you know, from the bootstrapper side, I think sometimes, you know, like people are hesitant, and not even in like, I'm gonna spend a hundred came my own money, like that's a big swing. But even like, oh, I can't even ship a product with negative gross margins, or even like, even like risk my gross margins, 'cause oh my god, what's gonna happen, right? And I think that can make you make some really suboptimal decisions, right? If you're too concerned about whether to, or like almost everything gets cheaper at scale, right? Like as you get bigger, one, you figure out how to make it cheaper, models are deflationary, like, or models are getting cheaper. So even like today's functionality will just be half the cost in a year. When the time comes, yeah, it's a flip side in computer science, they would say, no premature optimization, that's totally true in companies too, like don't optimize at the beginning. So that's really interesting. So you guys had like very low cogs, maybe higher than like, an app that didn't have any AI, like backing, but not something that was a concern. And then you just, you just started the flywheel with a little bit of your own cash to like get it going. And then, and then did it just, was it just like, pull out, reinvest, pull out, reinvest, like cycle, all the way up? Was it with it fairly smooth? Or how did the, how did the scaling go? Yeah, yeah, I would say so. We were able to just continue working out of the app store revenue stripe as well. We have an Android app now. And one interesting thing is that like the audio transcription costs are actually more than the LLM generally. And so that's like one that might be surprising. But even there, like the local models are getting really good. And I think that if we were starting from scratch, we could probably use that. Yeah, I mean, I guess it's like, you only need, you need good transcription quality, not like perfect, maybe, right? Like, especially if the LLM is probably, you know, it's going to know, it's going to know the professor didn't say fish, right? Or something like that's going to do a pretty good job of like fixing that, I would imagine. Jacob, one thing to add on to this in terms of the finances is that we were very mindful of the financial, you know, structure from basically day one. We knew we'd have to invest some up front. And it was, you know, around 10,000 maybe each that we had to invest up front to get things off the ground. But pretty much every month from inception to the acquisition, we were around 50% EBITDA margins. And so we really tried to be lean. And then to your point around raising or reinvesting, there are absolutely trade-offs. One of the reasons why I think we're so excited to now be under Quizlet is that we can think longer term. We can make longer term decisions without this, you know, make believe 50% EBITDA. Yeah, exactly. And so I think your ability to think long term is definitely influenced by your capital structure, your capital situation. And so I'm very happy to have had that. And then on the other side of it, right, it is really nice to have the cash flow. So that financial discipline, I think, led us to have cash flow kind of throughout, which was nice. Let's go back to process. So because I think a lot of folks will be interested. And so you each put in around 10K. How did you reach out to those first creators? Were you just finding people on TikTok and then DMing them and, you know, were those early ones paid? Did you do any kind of referral? Like how did you get that flywheel going? 'Cause so many people listening to this podcast, you know, are trying to figure that out. It was an absolute grind in the beginning, 'cause you're just trying to find the channel that works, right, and then you just want to exploit, may not be the right word, but you want to double down and you really want to spam more or less that channel until you reach the limit. We were reaching out all the above, David. So we were reaching out to creators through, if they had an email in their bio, funny observation here. If you reach out to a content creator, I have my opinions on influencers that we can circle back to. But if you reach out to a content creator, and their email is, you know, it's at sunsetagency.com or something, any agency sounding, you're too late, those agencies exist to eliminate the alpha that you are trying to create. Okay, so they are almost always going to take more than they give in terms of the value that they provide to the company. They are always exceptions, 100%, but generally speaking, that's been my observation. - Probably a lot of like mid-tier creators too, who like here, oh, I have an agency and they get it, and it's actually like value destructive for them. - Totally. - Yeah, absolutely. If they have a Gmail in their bio, and they have, you know, five, 10K followers, good engagement, that's great. That's a really nice sweet spot. And these numbers are very flexible, but whenever social media switched over from a follower graph to an interest graph and with a 4U page and algorithmic distribution, the number of followers you have matters less and less, right? The quality of the content you create matters a ton. So in at Scout, my last startup, the product studio, our first TikTok got 8 million views. We'd never posted to the account before, but we got 8 million views. It drove 150,000 signups over a two day period. I think at that time, this was 2021, if we were an app, not a website, I think we would have been number one in the app store. And so I learned the value of great content, posted on TikTok at that time. And so we knew that that would be the case. It was just a matter of how do we get there? - So that's what you meant about content creator. And I noticed you chose your words very carefully. They're content creator, not influencers. So the strategy wasn't to find an influencer, how to an audience, the strategy was find a content creator who produces great content. - 100%. Yeah, couldn't have said it better myself. - One of the struggles with UGC and this playbook is generating content that converts versus generating content that just gets a bunch of views. And then depending on how you're paying the creators, if you're paying on a view basis, they can really rack up the bill, doing just funny TikToks that get attention, but then don't convert. How did you address that both financially and then also in kind of learning what did convert and kind of incentivizing that kind of content? - Yeah, a couple of things come to mind. One is being hands on with the content creation team. So today our content team is about 25 people, 25 part time creators are all contractors. Throughout the lifespan of coconut preoccupation, we were between five and 10, maybe at the very most, we had 12 content creators. And so we kept a very small team. I worked with everyone closely, I met with everyone one to one. I would say some of our competitors and some people or some founders that are building out similar creator programs approach it very, very differently. So we always had the mentality, great quote by Brian Cheskey, who I look up to very much as I could design background CEO. He says we wanna build the Navy SEALs, not the Navy. And we had that approach with our team overall and especially on the content team. So get to know every single one of the creators, make sure you spend time with them, make sure you're enabling them with what creative actually works and letting them know what converts. It's not a perfect science, but when you have a video getting 20, 30 million views, you know what impact it has, right? Because you know exactly when it's going viral and then you can measure on those couple of days that it's going viral, what impact did it have down funnel? And so I think it's just a matter of like spending time with the content team, making sure they know what converts, what doesn't convert. And at the end of the day, what we found is that if you frame your product as a novel toy, people are gonna treat it like a toy. They do not want to pay for that thing. They are, you know, for better or for worse, I think people are very entitled that if something digital it should be free, right? It should probably subsidize by a lot of the venture stuff built in the last 10, 15 years. But if you frame it as a solution to a problem, then people are much more willing to pay. It attracts a higher willingness to pay customer. - I know you have a few stories related to that. Like there's one video that got 41 million views, 4.5 million likes, like massively viral video, but that didn't convert. I mean, I would imagine you had quite a few of those, any lessons of like why that one didn't convert specifically? I think it goes to framing your product as a novel toy and not a solution to a problem. So we were experimenting with something called pdf2brainron.com, which we've sent since sunset. And we kind of thought a Brett put it in a really nice way. It would be kind of like a Trojan horse. And so you can picture this as, "Hey, I have this really long pdf and I don't want to read it." Or there's this really long video or lecture recorded, whatever it may be. And I want to consume it in a way that is more familiar to me. And so we put a voiceover with a background kind of Minecraft parkour video. It was one of several things that you could put in the background. And you know, true brain rot, it gets roasted online, but people absolutely loved it. But one of the things that we learned is that that is a toy and it's not something that people are going to pay for. So I think it has a place and a product suite, but it's definitely not the thing that's going to move the needle in terms of revenue traction. Do you have this in coconut at all? Can I brain rot? My pdf's just like, you know, bespoke, nice, tasteful brain rot. Do you know what I mean? Like nature, like a nature video side by side or something like this? It's not there right now, but you know, I think we just need to tidy up some of the product and we can bring it back. I mean, this is off topic. I think I might done any like research on this because like it just like took off this like thing of like split screening all these videos, right? I mean, I used to work with a bunch of like animators and stuff. And they would always have like a video up on the side. And like the thesis I always had is like, you had something engaging or verbal center, like listening to something or watching something, so that you're drawing center. Yeah, I don't know if it's real or not. Neurology. But this is almost the inverse, right? Where it's like have something engaging your visual center, like your visual distraction, whatever, so that you're like verbal center can like listen and actually take in the content. We've slapped this like brain rot label on it sort of like, which is, it's funny, right? But like there's probably actually some at least a research worthy neurological benefit to it potentially. Like if the people like it, right? And they go, you're putting actual content in there. It's like, you know, so what's the harm? Right? What's the harm? I do think there's something there, Jacob. I'll plug one of our drops, one of our products in a feature is speedreadit.com. We saw a demo on Twitter X and it was a way to read, you know, I would say significantly faster than you can if you're just reading a document or a PDF, right? By doing, I figured with the methods called like, where the words they centered and like slides across exactly. And to your point, Jacob, one of the things that they do in the demo is they play classical music in the background. And so we kind of made our own, I think using 11 labs and with something that occupies some part of the brain. And you're right, absolutely be amazing to have more scientific research on this. But the intuition and the like observed experience with this is very much if some parts of your brain are satisfied or occupied, then you're much more likely to be able to concentrate on something else, right? Maybe the words that are in front of you. So we do a lot of experiments like that. That's funny. Yeah, the labeling of it as brain rot is like maybe a disservice, right? [laughs] True. But I know it is interesting that those didn't convert well. You learn those kind of lessons around what didn't convert any takeaways from what did. I mean, you know, you've shared the high level, but like more specifically, you know, were you better demonstrating the product in the video with their better hooks? Like, what were the things that convert? Because I mean, that's what's so tough right now with UGC is to actually produce those like converting videos and hooks. Yeah. I think at a high level, you want to make sure that your product is seen as a solution to an existing problem. Or as Brett mentioned, it resonates deeply at an identity level. So I am fit, therefore, I am going to use ladder as an example, or I am a runner, so I'm going to use runner or Strava. And so you want content that is more identity-focused, building brand affinity within a certain audience or market and/or shows your product as a solution to a problem. And those broadly speaking are what we see the most that the best conversion with. So much of what you did was UGC and trying to go viral, but did you take any of those videos and turn them into paid and did you do any paid, you know, as you grew? We tried and we don't do it anymore. I think that it's something that I would like to try again, but under our model, you know, like what would have been success for us was being first first purchase profitable on the ads. And we weren't able to get there. I think that looking back, you know, there it could be part of like the market that you're advertising towards. But it also could be that it's, I don't know Zach I'm curious what you think of this, but I feel like neither of us like took a ton of ownership there to really like spend like more than half our time or more than half our time on it. And so we kind of just like slowly didn't get anywhere. And if we did it again, I feel like we could figure it out. You kind of need, I mean, maybe not a full-time person, but like, I mean, you should always be kind of doing growth and product at all at the same time, right? And so you can split that up. Maybe each of you is doing half-growth, half-product or one person doing product, one person doing growth or engineering and product. However you must split it. But like I always felt I've very similar experience for performance, performance marketing. It's like, Zach, if you didn't do the like creator marketing, you probably could have dedicated the time and got deep on it and all that stuff. But I think that's why I don't know how much this is true now, but like, you know, people shipping in India up and the first thing they do is like, okay, just up Facebook ads and like whatever. And it's like, you might not, you know, one, the spends you got to do to get the good data, the attention it's going to take. It's like, that should not be the first tool you grab for it. I think I think you do see that channel is much more controllable, like much more, probably if you find it much more efficient. I know this might be true broadly for all growth channels. Like, there's very few growth channels that you can half-ass. If you want them to work, like you got to try, you know, everybody's trying, right? So if you're not trying, it's like you're not going to, you're not going to be able to break through. Yeah. And I would say if you're just starting out and you don't know where your customers hang out online, that's bad news. Why would you start running ads that indicates some lack of fundamental knowledge that you should have as a founder? Like, if you don't know where your customers are hanging out online, that's bad news. To rest question, it was certainly under explored. I think it's hard. We worked with some very good and solid people, but it's hard outsourcing some things to an agency. Because I think the incentives, generally speaking of an agency, I heard someone put it this way, is like, you know, they will do enough to keep you happy, but they're never going to be as invested. And so I think aligning incentives in some really sharp way around performance marketing is a good idea. One thing that surprised me is we always thought you could just pour fuel on the fire. So those videos that are getting 30 million views, let's assume they convert, well, well, let's just run ads behind it. Why would it not work just as well? Surprisingly, that wasn't really our experience. That when we worked with an outside agency to do clips, so we would have basically be role and raw videos that were unedited from the same content team that was posting. And then we would upload that into a Google Drive and share that with a clip agency. They would chop it up and kind of make something specific to performance marketing that those as a creative that cohort outperformed our more organic approach. I found that really interesting because I always assume you could just pour fuel on the fire. With that said, we still really weren't able to get ads to work. And it's something that I think we can invest in in the future. Targeting students, I imagine, made that especially hard. I'm honestly surprised at the whole story of Cocoa Note. In that college students and high school students are famously hard to monetize. So let's dig into how did you get kids to pay for your app? And what was the price? And did you experiment with pricing? Yeah, great question. Definitely did a lot of experimentation. I think we've tried to always have something running. Even at launch, we were testing, like, should there be a free trial or not. The college student archetype, I would say, didn't really get to us. We didn't want that to limit us from charging a lot of money. We wanted to be a premium product and be seen as a premium product. I think Zach and I just start product builders who feel like we want to put something out that has a lot of craft and charge for it is part of it. Probably also not knowing what our costs would be is what was also part of it. So we put the app out charging $99 per year and 1999 per month. I think around like 80% of people subscribe to the annual tier. So we push that pretty hard. And I think part of like the price to is we want to be seen as premium so that we also are seen as as reliable. I kind of like talked about it a little bit earlier, but there's a huge amount of trust you have to gain to get someone to like stop writing their notes and instead trust that you will like take care of it because they're going to have to be, you know, take an exam on it either way. And I think that the premium feeling helps with that to believe that we're not going to lose their recording. Yeah, I think it's a, I mean, I don't know, David, you probably have a better sense, but just in terms of like the utilities for students, not that that's full what you guys are, but like that's a high price point. I think if the ones in my head, I can think of off the top. It's like third of that maybe for an annual, right? Like 50 would be high, which, you know, I don't know if it works. It works, right? It's also nice that in terms of like not having it's being so levered on adsbend, right? Usually allows you to go cheaper, but I don't know. I mean, I'm in your boot shop. but it's better to have fewer higher paying customers. It really is. Maybe this was mentioned, but there was no freemium, right? So after a week, can I keep using it anyway? Or am I done? - Yeah, you hit on a good few good things there. You can make one note for free without starting a trial, and that's it. - Basically a hard paywall, not quite, but essentially a hard paywall. - Yeah, and we even, I mean, one of our early experiments, like we launched it, 99, 99, but one of our early tests was raising it to 129, and we saw the magical, like, more users and more revenues at the same time. And so that's what we've been for most of it. But I do think we are one of the more expensive options on the market, and to some of the reliability stuff, like you can go into the cheaper options and start recording audio and like get a phone call and lose your recording, you know, like Apple does not make it super easy to do this in a reliable way. It's really not like a meeting note taker on Zoom, where you like probably have perfect Wi-Fi, and you're like computer is taking care of it. - Well, it's session-based. Like you're actively engaged in it, right? Like it's like PC mostly. I mean, Zoom on the phone doesn't work very well, right? It does have software from those things. Like if you get a phone call or something, it'll kick you out and cancel your video and things like that. - That's tricky. At AV session, audio, whatever, the Apple APIs for this are not a dream, having no personal experience. So, like getting those right, somebody's gonna roast me 'cause I probably use the wrong framework name. It's probably changed five times. But obviously optimizing your price testing, there's some of that. But like most of your pricing authority just comes from a really good product. You know, it's just something that like people will pay for and and scarcity, right? It's like, is there a comparable alternative? And if the answer is no, you have a lot of, you know, really good products are hard to make, right? So if it's a rare thing, if you made a really great product, the rare thing, you can charge a lot for it because it's just not anywhere. I think we've seen this in AI tools generally, like two years ago, there was only like one model that was really, really good. And they had a lot of pricing authority. And now there's like other comparable models, right? And we've talked about the prices are going down, right? It's a very classic, economic supply demand, which is interesting too, 'cause like, did you see, I'm sure somebody like caught onto your guys' game and was like, oh, we're gonna make no, no, no, to do something, right? Like somebody trying to like fast follow you. There's gotta be hundreds, like there's, there's coconut, like with an R at the end. There's one that's just like a different fruit instead of a coconut. There's all kinds of clans out there. You know, I'm sure it impacts us, right? But they are kind of just like mosquitoes in a way, you know, like they're not taking themselves seriously. - I'm sure it impacts you, but you may not be that negative, right? It may be such that those are like lead gen or like I've do this all the time. Come in, I have a need. I try the premium app. It's like 100 and whatever. I'm like, oh, I just need it for like, it's much for I, and then I go to the second tier and I'm like, this sucks. I'm gonna go back and like try the good one. It's not always directly competitive, right? That's only true in markets of a true commodity, right? And apps, I don't even think there's any exceptions. Like apps are not true commodities, right? They can get close, but like there's always some difference. And to some degree, commodities are not true commodities, right? Unless they pass through some very normal, very strong regulation process. So yeah, I think like just generally, it's probably helps more than hurt would be my guess. 'Cause they're also spending on ads probably, right? And those users are gonna see that, they're gonna search Cocoa Noter and they're gonna see you number two. They're gonna be like, wait, this one looks less sketchy. I wonder if some of that pricing power also just came from positioning and positioning as a tool for students. You know, we've talked about this a lot on a podcast. Like, you know, ladder in the health and fitness industry, they're charging $130 a year in an industry where it's $130 a month to go to a nice gym and like $130 an hour for a trainer. And for college students, I mean, paying $40, $50, $100,000 a year to go to school. And then this is $130 a year. I did see one of your ads was like, my friend's mom got her the tap Cocoa Noter. Did you kind of position it of like, you know, bug your parents to help pay for this? Or was there any of that that you did find successful? - Yes, especially in the early days, a good portion of our videos that are going viral on our Instagram were around, you know, my mom just changed my life. And so we did spend a good portion of the early days. - That's for other moms. So that's not for the student, right? Like you have a student video that's like, my mom changed my life and then you see other mom being like, oh, I want to change my Pukum's life, right? - That was much the thinking. I mean, I used to say this to our creators all the time. I said, imagine you're on campus at, you know, student orientation. And you see a daughter and her mom, right? And the daughter is just starting college and our moms are with her. And I said, hey, I would like you to go offer a note taker, something that's going to help improve your grades and, you know, make sure you never miss a detail and lecture, et cetera. I help you study, be a personalized study coach, et cetera. And it's $130 to do it. Who are you going to ask? I think the obvious answer is you're going to ask the mom, right? And so early on we were very keen on marketing to moms. I think we since like taking a step back. And by the way, these are not mutually exclusive. There's a big overlap. It's finding who the buyer in the most intended is, right? And you can have good marketing to whoever might be a need, right? I wonder how many app developers get stuck down the route of like, oh, I have to like advertise to the primary user of the product, right? And that may or may not be the decision maker in a purchase. David, to your broader question around monetization, just two quick things to add on that are a little bit higher level. One, great majority of our customers are lifelong learners. And so they may be quote unquote non-traditional students. Brett and I have talked to a lot of our customers that are not in the quote unquote traditional 18 to 22 or 23-year-old college student age. They could be studying for something that's not at an accredited university. They could be at a university, but outside of that age range, any number of derivatives there. Always amazing to talk to customers that are just making it happen. Second thing is that I'm very glad, again, it's not very tactical, but I'm very glad we ignored traditional conventional wisdom. I have a lot of smart friends that if I would have gone to with the idea for coconut, they would have said, no one's going to buy this, right? You're targeting college students, right? And I'm so glad we did not do that. I think in the early days of an idea, you can almost imagine it like a seed. And you want to like shelter it from a lot of harm, right? So that it can at least sprout. Because in hindsight, it's like, oh, this was amazing, congrats. But only with the benefit of hindsight to those smart people say that whenever it starts out, they will always gravitate towards the reason it will not work. And I think a much better framework is what happens if it does work, right? What impact can we have on our customers, what economic value can we create, et cetera? So I'm very glad we did that. Yeah, I mean, that's exactly why I asked the question. And what I would have thought externally, just having heard from so many. But it's like, I mean, it's like my app, a weather app. Like college students are not going to pay for weather app. And so a lot of the conventional wisdom around what people will and won't pay for is form based on totally different products. And so when you come to the market with a unique value prop with a brand new product that's enabled by AI in a way that you could never create this product before, it's like you've unlocked demand for that in a way that nobody else had and can charge a premium for it. So yeah, it's really cool. One thing on there is like, we are aware that like, it's expensive and that there are students at the end of the day and we want Cokeno to be available to as many students as possible. And it kind of goes back to what Zach was saying earlier around being able to think longer term under Quizzleit and stay tuned on that. But I think that we'll be able to get Cokeno into more people's hands in the future. That's awesome. One of the keys in converting folks who saw this UGC video is nailing the onboarding. What were some of the lessons you learned in getting people in and convincing them of the value and eventually getting them to start that free trial? Yeah, I think that there's kind of like a meta at this point for consumer apps of have a long onboarding and then hitting with a hard paywall or basically get someone to start a trial within the first session, honestly, if not 24 hours. And we have always had like a decent onboarding but we hadn't spent a ton of time optimizing it. And we ran a test trying to basically double the length. I think our onboarding is 15 screens or something. I remember when we started talking to Quizzleit team that something that they commented on. I mean, it really works. Like, it really works to get people a bit more invested into what they're doing and feel like it's more personalized, show them some social proof. And it increased our trial start by a 16%, which we already felt like it was pretty good. And so to continue to raise it was awesome. And it's one of those things that continues to compound. What's funny is, like as an engineer, whenever you start a new product, you kind of like build the login screen first and you kind of need it to start playing around with things. And then it ends up staying there. They're on the rest of the product. But one of the nice things about being it, like there's not always a lot of nice things about being in Apple and Google's walls. But one of the nice things is you actually don't really need to create an account to make a purchase because you're already signed into your Apple or Google account. So I think the biggest win that we had was moving log in to after the paywall, basically at the end of onboarding. It's very interesting. There's some, I think revenuecat.com makes this pretty easy. But that is tricky, right? Like being able to take a payment before you have an identity marker, being able to associate those. There's a bunch of. plumbing we do to make that possible. And that introduces a lot of complexity now. Because now, which is there, no matter where you put it, is that the Apple purchase state and the account state are not the same thing, which isn't the case when you control the entire purchase payments flow, like you would if you were doing Stripe on the web or something like this. It is a big advantage, right? Users don't have to think about it, and I'll pull out a credit card. It's like they know it's secure. Yeah, they've kind of already done the double tap to pay at that point. So the double tap to sign in. I think we were seeing 10% drop off by having log in being the very first screen. Were you capturing any contact details before that? No, this is just like you download the app and open it and now you're forced to create an account. Well, once people do start that free trial and as a hard paywall, keeping them and having them convert is that next big key. What were the unlocks there for helping people convert? And any stats around your trial start and trial conversion rates that you want to share? I feel like web and e-commerce have had a really big lead when it comes to this stuff, like the real optimizations and the benefits of being outside of Apple's walls. It's more like the wild west of what you can do. And we wanted to try some cancellation flows there on our website. And there's the standard asking questions about why they're canceling things like that. And we were able to retain 25% of people from canceling, which we felt was pretty big. And to do that, we tried three things. One of them is your standard discount offerers. You get 30% off if you stay or something like that. Another one is pausing. So because we have students, as our users, they come may or June, they don't want to keep paying over the summer. And so we thought we could try pausing for three months. And then the last one was trial extensions. And this is one that I haven't seen that much. But basically if you're on a free trial and you had a canceled, then we basically say, do you just need more time and offer them seven more days? And that was the most successful one by far. And it really keeps people on that auto renew. And I think it's so hard to get them back onto auto renew once they leave. But that was a big one for us. And I think there's a way to actually do this on Apple and Google now too. And so I'm going to be exploring that. Apple does now have it in limited beta right now. And you have to ask for it and get approved and everything like that. But it's a retention offers in App Store settings. Like when they're actually outside of your app trying to cancel, you can now like show a screen and offer a discount and things like that. I don't actually don't know off the top of my head what all you can do. I think it's only a discount. I don't think you can add additional trial. Are you all doing any of that inside the app as well? Like do you have inside settings where people go to like look for cancellation inside the app or is that only on the web that you're seeing those wins and doing that? - It's only on the web. It's also in the app if you subscribe through Stripe. And then we can just show it in a web view. But yeah, that's the one that I still want to bring to the mobile. - Yeah, it's harder to do with Apple payments, but we're trying. Well, as we wrap up, I did want to like actually talk through the acquisition. How did that start? What was the process? Did they reach out to you? You reach out to them? Did you talk to a banker about selling a broker? - Quizlet actually reached out. I would say we were only a few months old and we were talking to with Quizlet. I remember when Brett first brought to me, he was like, hey, someone reached out. Should we take this call? And I said, you know, I'd rather not just say we're heads down building. We'd been around for a couple of months like what could possibly come of that. And I think Brett literally slept on it and he came back and said, I'd really like to take the call. Like let's just see what's going on. I don't know. Some people know what they want to do with the company when they started. Some people don't. Was this like prediscussed at all? Did you be like, hey, we want to build this and sell this? Hey, we just want to see this. Did you have those discussions or was it more open ended? - I would say we had a healthy outlook and we didn't have our blinders on. We had conversations with handful of companies. Eventually when we kind of committed to going down this path, it was taking up a good bit of time. And that's the one thing that I would say to other founders if you're getting inbound and you're really weighing the options here of acquisition, I would say make sure you keep your eye on the ball 'cause the moment you take your eye off the ball, they're going to, that will reflect negatively in the ongoing conversations. We'll say that. And so the moment we kind of said, hey, we're going to take this seriously, but we want to keep our energy focused on building and growing the product. We worked with an investment bank. We worked with a partner named Chris Park at a creative partners and they were really great to work with. And then they kind of led the process from there. So we actually got back in touch with Quizlet through the investment baker. So we built a relationship with Quizlet and we've really loved, I think there's a lot of mission overlapped for what it's worth. Something that we haven't covered. It said, "Koko notes mission is to give learner superpowers." And that is not the explicit mission of Quizlet, but I would say in spirit, it is very, very similar. Learners can be of all ages. For me, one of the things that I love about our mission statement is that we acknowledge on the superpowers front, it is intentionally vague. The foundational LLM or AI model providers are doing amazing work and we have no right to compete with them. So we want to recognize that and our job is to basically tailor the foundational work that's being done, the amazing foundational work, turn it into a superpower for learners. And so while that isn't the explicit mission of Quizlet, it's very much in spirit, I would say, the mission in some way is shape or form of Quizlet. And so we're able to think much longer term, a lot of things kind of overlapped and thankfully the deal closed in December of last year. Yeah, I mean, I have to imagine just having like mission alignment. Also, I mean, I've speak as a Quizlet user in a watcher for a long time. It's a great company, right? They have good brand, they have good products, right? It makes it a lot easier to kind of swallow the idea of like your baby going someplace else. And obviously like the integration work, which I'm sure you're doing now. And like all of that stuff is like, it's not just a dollar. In very rare cases, it's a dollar, a dollar is in a signature and it's over, right? Like there's a partnership that will take many years, right? As this plays out, but like from, okay, we're gonna do this or we're seriously thinking about it till like close to deal. Like how long did that last for you guys? It was kind of running in the background throughout the year, throughout last year. I mean, there's different like phases. There's the talking phase, then there's the Netflixing phase, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's that, but also with the banker, like the banker's preparing things on their end and stuff like that, where we're not really like actively doing anything and they're just getting ready to reach out to people. So it was, I felt like a long time to be honest. There's a long time, it took your whole company's two years in change, right? So like, it's half of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Chris was kind of our third co-founder a little bit. That's great. Tell me of them cutting too deep. Did you keep it between the two of you or did like the rest of the team know or like how did you manage that for that period of time? Yeah, yeah. We kept it between us. It felt like the kind of thing where, you know, we ourselves were not banking on anything happening, you know? Like we didn't want to feel like it was in the bag or anything like that. And so we wouldn't want to share it. Yeah, it can be a real distraction. Like just literally like you start counting your money or whatever, you know, even if, especially if you don't know what the deal is going to shape like, right? You just start imagining and whatever. I'm even sure for you guys it was, even if you managed it well, probably took a lot of mental force to kind of keep compartmentalized and keep leading the business. And so you managed to keep growing through that whole period that you were very happy with. Yeah, totally. I don't think we have the metrics pulled up, but revenue grew quite a bit. I would say roughly doubled throughout that time. Jacob, I think you may appreciate this. My wife didn't even know. Much less the folks on the team. Wow, that's a commitment. Yeah, it is. I would never be able to hold that line. (laughing) And so, yeah, she knew we were talking with QuizLip but she had no knowledge of like, you know, where the process stood. I think it's smart. Because you're like not letting it leak out apart your mind, right? You're just being like, for sure. Keeping it compartmentalized and be like, "Hey, this is just this little thing. "I'm not gonna treat it like a thing until it's real, right?" And getting a spouse overly, you know, excited and like, it's hard enough as an individual, not letting it distract you of like, "Oh, the money's coming." And like, "What am I gonna do with the money?" And like, "Oh, it's gonna be such a relief." I mean, there's so many like emotions tied into it. And then with another person, then all their emotions get tied into it. Any baggage they have about like, money and security and everything else like that. Like, it's a very emotional thing. - Okay, Zach, did they find out like, after close? Like, there was some point that you told of that this deal was gonna happen, right? - Yeah, this is it. - I mean, no. (laughing) - Yeah, have you told them, are they gonna find out on the pod? From the pod? - Yeah, well, I wouldn't send her a sub-pod. I'm kidding. - It's not really your bad. - The story is, it's pretty funny. We were driving from North Carolina, so it was right before the holidays. And we were driving from North Carolina where I'm from originally, so we were visiting my family up to Connecticut to see my wife's family. And I was day one of the flu, so I felt terrible. It was one of the worst drives of my life. So yeah, you know, Brad and I were talking and we were kind of waiting for things to really close, IE the wire. And so yeah, when it happened, I pulled over into a Taco Bell parking lot and I told my wife and we celebrated with Taco Bell. She cried out of it. - And that was the first moment she had heard of it. - She was familiar, but she wasn't familiar with like where things stood. So she knew something was, you know, going on, she knew we flew out to San Francisco and met with a Quizlet team. - A lot of people listening to this podcast, but I'd say everybody has a life outside of sub-club podcasts that are silly little apps. - You know what I mean? Like how those integrate and these things, like the spouse, And the people around us, like they influence the stuff and like how we interact with them really matters And like your psychology bleeds into their psychology and back and forth and I think it doesn't get talked about much Like most not many people have been through this early on I started reaching out to you know founder CEOs to talk about In the process and kind of how they handled it how they thought about it people that have been through it You know successfully whatever and one of the best pieces of advice I got is you know I think a great leader shelters other people and so people on the team our engineers content creators They didn't know about it until the day of close It's not that we were withholding information because we didn't want them to know it's that we wanted to shield them Nothing happened yet and these things fall apart in the last week Totally a signal to noise and I think it's the same thing You know with my wife that it was just like a signal to noise I wanted to shelter her from that but I think the way you know she reacted was a very much like the founder if you guys have seen that The McDonald's movie exactly yeah, clearly we're not you know co-cogonotes not McDonald's But I think there's there are similar emotions from going through it from failing time and time again Into finally having something that a lot of people dream of and to be partner with a company like Quizzle It's a really fantastic moment to share. How is your life? It's been different like mentally as founders stuff like pre and post like maybe in ways you expected and maybe in ways you didn't On my side, I think I focus on my health more. I'm not a parent yet and hopefully that is in my future from my life And I but I assume parents have a similar mentality where you take care of your baby you take care of your child more So before you take care of yourself like you can go without and your baby is the one that you want to see flourish and You know, I guess it's probably the best analogy that that Coco note was my baby our baby not to be weird Brett But you know, it's like it's something that you care so deeply about that you make sacrifices with yourself and Unfortunate I had some weird like health things come up in the last couple years and I'm more or less ignored them But I think I've been able to focus on that debt in the software world right? You took a little debt on health debt. It's a real thing I mean, especially if you know there's like some sort of like liquidity event or even not some sort of event some sort of thing That's like like one way door, you know, those trade-offs make sense, right? I think the similar calculation for people who are holding for a long time like that's also important right if you if you didn't Sell if you wasn't gonna change the operating model and how you guys are operating At some point you would have to address that right whether or not the company sold or not right? So it just kind of changes the timing on these things which I guess Kind of fits into the exact the point you're making earlier about like just how it allows you to change your outlook like being Sort of like attached to a larger larger organization. I'm sure there's obviously synergies between the products and like those very interesting Collaborations to go on but also just having like being attached to a larger resource pool like lets you be a little more ambitious Let you be a little more like long-term and stuff like that which I think it's that's the bullcase for selling to a good a well-lined company Right is like you can actually you are actually hoping to have a net net market positive merger right so that both parties are actually worth more like after it and those are some of the reasons why right if there is a Wave of M&A with AI native apps Very few founders will be able to talk about the deal terms be it they're not comfortable or I would say more likely because they don't Want the corp dev team or whatever the acquire or doesn't want that information out there. There's lots of reasons for both parties to not talk about it Yeah, it's very understandable. I still think it's great that you guys and I've been sharing with us and and other founders too and and things like this because Yeah, I mean Zach you kind of hit on it like you can as a founder you can go out and find those stories if you know and you can network But like it's it's I don't think talked about enough. Yeah, that's also such a niche topic like there's probably a couple thousand people For whom they'll go through this experience at any given period and in the shape that you guys have gone through But I mean obviously like many people listen to this podcast aspire to do that And I do it's one path right and I think there won't be another sort of quiet like coconut But there will be others that that are similar right and so it's good to get these written down and out there Yeah, yeah, thank you so much for sharing. I think it's a great place to wrap up You know what a what a great story and and thank you both for like being so open to share and congrats Did I say congrats at the beginning like congrats What a what a cool congrats to both to quizzlet as well. I'm sure they're listening like what a get you know good for them good for you guys Anything else you all want to share is we're wrapping up. I know being part of quizzlet now you've probably had some More people you want in the hire and think you're wanting to do with the app anything you want to shout out there Yeah, yeah sure I mean first. Thank you guys so much for having us on we're huge fans of everything that you guys do Zach and I are part of quizzlet and quizzets hiring across product design engineering all of that I specifically think that I'm hoping I can find an iOS engineer out of this podcast. This is a great audience Yeah, you meet my friend Ah, I'm very good at it. Yeah, so I'm continuing to work on the coconut engineering team but also the subscription growth in general at quizzlet and so if anyone is interested in commenting and building paywalls for quizzlet were one of the biggest freemium consumer apps out there we've got We can run experiments that add a million dollars of revenue per year and it's a lot of fun and we're looking for for iOS engineers Well, congrats again, and thanks so much for joining us. This was a lot of fun. I appreciate y'all. Thank you guys. Thank you Thanks so much for listening If you have a minute, please leave a review in your favorite podcast player You can also stop by chat.subplub.com to join our private community (upbeat music)