The Kiwi Fitness App Making $80 Million Per Year - Adam El-Agez on ‘The Conqueror Challenges’

This is an iHard Radio New Zealand podcast. This week on Business In Between, we hear the incredible story of how Kiwi entrepreneur turned an idea for a fitness goal-setting app into a global business with customers in over 150 countries and revenue exceeding $80 million a year. It's the story of Adam Ella Giz and his app called The Conqueror. Adam started his fitness goal-setting app in 2012, after 10 years of being an entrepreneur with limited success. The idea was relatively simple, instead of just going for a run, walk or ride or swim, you're working towards a virtual fitness goal immersed in community and with a tangible race medal delivered on completion. But after six years and hundreds of thousands of dollars, the app was floundering. All the signs were pointing to giving up altogether, and he even started getting his CV together and applying for jobs. But in a bizarre series of events, in 2019, he ended up hiring a marketing whiz who lived in Romania to run the digital marketing. Raul, the Romanian, immediately started growing sales, and from an annual revenue of under 100k, they grew to 2 million in the first year. The next year they did 40 million and 75 million in the following two, having secured licensing agreements with the Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Star Wars and Harry Potter. The business has now expanded globally with around 70 staff in six countries with customers in over 150 countries. Adam's story and the growth of his company is insane. We talk about navigating a cyber attack, how they built their Facebook community with 378,000 people in it, which has dubbed the kindest place on the internet, licensing challenges from the world's biggest franchise, and why they were spending $250,000 a day on marketing. This story will blow your mind, and it's the first time it's been told. Come for the storytelling and stay for Adam's brilliant business lessons at the end. This is an app not to be missed. Lastly, before we get into it, there's a really exciting opportunity available to sponsor the show. I could be talking about your business right now. If this interests you, please get in touch. Also please follow and subscribe to this business and between channel and your podcast app. We've got big plans to grow the space of following, liking, subscribing, and all that stuff means the world to us. Enjoy. Adam, Ella Gezz, welcome to Business and Between. Great to be here. We're very excited to have you here. We sent out a message on our social channels last week asking for New Zealand's best untold business stories. We were pretty overwhelmed with responses, but yours caught our eye. I'm so stoked to get the chance to tell your story for the first time. Yeah, first time telling it publicly. It has all the traits of a goodie. The failure, the resilience, the belief, the blow up, and the reflections. I wanted to zoom out, really, and talk about the present because quite recently you've stepped back from the business you've built and from what I understand having a bit of new time. Is this a good time to reflect? Oh, definitely. I've been doing plenty of that. There's so much to reflect on, so just sort of doing it in bits and pieces and yeah, it's been really, it's been weird, but it's been good and yeah, it's nice just to be able to focus on a bit of lifestyle rather than get up in the morning and just straight into work. Very specifically. So you're told on the base. You've driven over the kindness to Hamilton today. What's been going through your mind as you've been heading here? It's been quite the journey, actually. Not just on the road, but in my head just going through the whole sequence of events and what's played out and just remembering stuff as well, stuff that I hadn't really thought of for a while. So it's all kind of come back up to the surface and it's been cool. Yeah, I wish the drive was longer actually. So in prep for this set, I asked you for some info on your story and you sent through I think eight helpful bits which we're going to work through throughout the episode. So I should say helpful bits for entrepreneurs. And I wanted to start with number four and you know, we kind of got dive straight into it. Number four is you don't deserve to be successful, you're not special. Make shit happen yourself, don't wait for it to happen because of some belief that it's your destiny. Can you tell us what you meant by that? Well pretty much exactly that. I think it's pretty easy to get into the trap that people maybe think about too highly of themselves, that they think that they deserve to be successful just based on who they are or maybe what they've done in the past. And I just don't believe in that. I don't really believe in sort of destiny and things like that. I think you just go out and you make the life you want rather than it just sort of falls into place. And that kind of rolls around to what you do with your day to day. But I think more importantly, like actually where you point yourself. And most people, if they point themselves in the right direction, will probably end up getting there. And that's not because they're special. That's just because they're pointed themselves in the right direction and they work towards getting there. These like reflections you've sent through and how you've spoken then, is that the combination of you know, 20 years in your business journey? Have these become crystallised more recently or have you always had this sort of wisdom? I think I've already always thought like that. 20 years of business, most of which was either poor or mediocre, but you build a resilience to it. You start to not feel like you are very special. So yeah, I think it's just, it's a combination of experiencing it and then popping out the other side and reflecting on it that you've kind of formulated that sort of the thing. And I think it's also hopeful message to people is that you don't need to be special. You don't need to, you know, you don't even need to be educated, you just need to be actually focusing on the right things and heading where you want to go rather than kind of where you don't want to go. One of the things that's really interesting in the research for this is that there's kind of common themes in terms of language that have come through. One was resilience, another one high trust. It's interesting that these are already coming through just in these opening exchanges. Yeah. And rhetoric, I guess, is something that you just live. Yeah. So yeah, resilience, for sure, I didn't really realise that as I was going through it, but I think looking back on it, high trust, definitely my business partner and I just have the most insanely high trust relationship ever. And I would also sort of add on to that sort of just a bit of a conviction that if you just keep going, you'll get where you want to go, you just got to keep going. It's such a good tease, by the way, in this little intro, we've got to get to these nuggets at the end, but we've got a hell of a story to tell first. So I want to go back to the start, grew up in the neckie, dad was a doctor, mum was a nurse. So a lot of the time we talk to these successful entrepreneurs and they have influence from their parents who are business owners, but that wasn't the case for you, right? Oh, complete opposite. My dad, especially one of me did, grew up and get a safe secure job, he'd be gutted that I'm not a doctor or accountant or a lawyer. And I was pretty useless at school, C's get degrees at uni, did, yeah, studied PE and that's when I started showing interest in being an entrepreneur and I think it was quite distressing for my parents to see, you know, my journey with in and out of businesses and then not really knowing much about it because I think if they knew too much, that actually freaked out about what was going on and they didn't actually realise the extent of the success of the Conqueror for quite a while as well, for probably two years after it became quite successful and it's only really been recently, probably even in the last year that they've learnt, maybe only when they listen to this, yeah, yeah, shit, yeah, yeah, when I bought my dad a 200,000 dollar can then, he was like, fuck, what's going on here, you know, and it's funny because now my mum is actually a Conqueror as well, so she takes on the challenges and she's stoked to receive the medals and she gets to have the founder put the medal over her neck as well as things, she's pretty, she's pretty stoked, it's pretty cool that, yeah, someone like my mum which is kind of, yeah, pretty perfect audience for our product, somebody just wants to keep moving for health reasons, is a user of the app as well, so that's pretty cool. Just looping back, so you started down the path of, I guess, what you'd call a stable traditional career, right? As a teacher? Yeah, so I went to uni did PE at Otago, then came up here, came up to the bay to teacher's college for a year, and then I got a job teaching at Cutty-Cutty College, teaching PE and health, and some science, bizarrely, and I enjoyed teaching, like I really love the kids, so so much fun, teaching PE is awesome because all your naughty kids are, you good kids in PE, there's a lot of paperwork, there's a lot of meetings, there's a lot of crap that goes on with teaching and teachers just do unbelievable amount of workload, but I started, in my second year, I started my first company, and it was a little fundraising supply company, just these little scratchy cards that people would buy and use to fundraise, and I started that, and I was doing that when I got home from school, and then my phone was ringing all the time at school and I had lunchtime and intervals, I was just basically working in the business, I'd get home and I'd work four hours, and then I was like, I kind of have to give this teaching up to get into this business, so I left teaching after three years, and just pursued a whole bunch of different businesses along the way, so I think I've had something like 11 different businesses, probably I think even more than that, if you count the little side hustles that you do for like two weeks. Can I just jump in and this scratchy fundraiser is such an interesting place to start? Where did that idea pop into here? Yeah, so as I was teaching, I was also coaching, I was coaching volleyball team, and my volleyball team needed to fundraise, and I was looking around at all the fundraising products online and going, oh, those are shit, those are shit, and I found these scratchy cards, and that were in America, and I thought these things look really good, they basically scratchy cards that you take around and you give to your friends, and they scratch off a circle underneath the circles and amount printed like $50 cents a dollar, $2.3, and if I give it to you and you scratch off $2, then you give me $2, as a donation. Oh, yeah, it's like a reverse instinct, Kiwi, yeah, that's awesome, but it caps the amount that you're actually donating to the person at a small amount, and if you want to give more, then you can just keep scratching, you know, so grandma can scratch away and give you 20 bucks. And so I wanted to do this for my volleyball team, but I couldn't get them from America, so I looked around in New Zealand, couldn't find them in New Zealand, so I said, I'll just make them myself, just cardboard and scratchy, so I designed them up, and I could, yeah, I've learnt about websites and stuff, so I put a website together, then I went to order some from the printer, and that only let me order 2,000 as a minimum, and I need to 20, so I was like, shit, I'll be able to get these, I'll be able to sell them someone else. So I ordered 2,000, my team used them, they did really well out of them, like amazing, and I was like, this is awesome, great product, so yeah, put the website together and launched it, and then just sold them from there and then just keep selling them, and hate the schools and sports teams mostly used them, and yeah, it was a good little cash earner. This way of thinking, you know, started coming up with an idea and following through on it. Did you pick that up from anywhere? Were you listening, were you listening to podcasts or reading, or did you have friends that were in the background, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think I got into the idea of business in my last year of uni, and my brother actually gave me the Robert K. Saki books cash flow quadrant and Rich Dad pulled it, and I also happened to go overseas to Finland for one student exchange that went my last year, so I was over there in Finland, which is just such a step outside of your comfort zone, amazing experience, that's probably one of the best years of my life, but I was also on this kind of starting this big business, kind of exploring money and how to invest and stuff like that. So that kind of, yeah, mindset came from that year in Finland, and then I came back, did that year of uni training, teacher's training, and then I actually got into real estate investing as my first thing, and I bought my first house before I even got my first paycheck, which was bizarre as well, so it's been quite an organic long process to get into business and investing, so it started with real estate, and then once you know real estate pretty well, then businesses just to flow on from that property tax, because that we kind of got into. So after real estate, because I was buying houses, I found a need for a like a text message service for property, and so we created this app called Property Text, which was before its time, like it was actually really terrible timing, it was at that phase where texting was just something that kids did, you know, your parents didn't, your parents had phones, but texting was just a stupid thing that kids did, it was starting to become a thing that adults did, and also a roasting market, so real estate agents didn't actually need to try and attract buyers, because they just needed to get out, get listings, you know, when a roasting market is, the houses just sell themselves, so it was a terrible, it was a good idea at a terrible time, yeah. I want to link us up to my virtual mission, to get there, I want to go through some of these businesses, so I've got fast fundraising New Zealand seven years, aqua plus five years, Property Text two years, student refunds one, nine years ago, yeah, well, the question is like across this decade we'll have a long that was, like what did you actually learn, looking back now, because we're about to tell a story of how you built this incredible thing, and what did you learn from, would you consider them failures with their lessons there? I don't think you can really consider anything failure if you learn from it, right? And there were definitely lots of learnings, I learned a lot of hard skills, so I learnt how to build websites, I learnt my way around ad platforms like Google ads, just doing it all myself, being familiar with it, lay even things like, you know, with aqua plus, it was heavy logistics operations, so I learnt how to, you know, get bottles of water all around New Zealand, and import stuff, and just that whole supply chain and a management side of things as well, so every business had its own sort of unique set of like hard skills and experiences, but also then you're building up the mental kind of capacity for just spotting ideas and opportunities and just taking action, rather than just sitting around thinking about things and whether you should do them or not. I think when you're young and you don't have kids and you don't have a mortgage, you can just swing the bets so hard, and who cares, you just eat baked beans for a month if it doesn't work out, you know, because there's no consequence of this, so I think when you're young you just you've got to take lots more risks. What, do you remember the point at which you thought I'm out of teaching now, I'm going to go on business? Yep. Yep. What was that? I think it was because I was just getting too busy, my fundraising company and also it started property tax at the time, was just starting to take up too much time, it was becoming exhausting, and I was also becoming a shit teacher because of it, sorry guys. Was there any, was there a fear or trepidation of leaving that solid paycheck, a little bit, but not really, it was more excitement and more of an opportunity to do another solid paycheck either. That's not that solid of a paycheck. I really did enjoy teaching though, so it was definitely, I was going to go from being in front a lot of people at a school with cool kids and good colleagues to working in a room in a house with no one and working with slippers, you know, so that wasn't that cool, that was a bit of a, you know, there was quite lonely and I missed the people side of things, but it was also quite an exciting time because, you know, I got to work in a full time and that's what I think we all want to do, you know, like you guys are the same, wanting to just get stuck into it and not have other things getting you way. We'll be right back after this short break. Take us to the genesis of my virtual mission, how did this idea come about? Yeah, so the idea, how the idea came about, so, so me and my wife, we bought a treadmill, and I was actually here idea to stick a map of New Zealand on the wall and every time she went for like a walk, she would, you know, the old school maps they have distance markers between each location, and so she would just mark on the map, like how far she thought she had gone, so if you went for a 5k walk, she'd mark it on the map and she ended up walking the length of the North Island, I think at least, and I started doing it as well and I was like, oh yeah, this is okay, but I'm not really into like recording it with a pen and paper and a notebook and all of the sort of stuff, so there must be an app for this somewhere, so when looking online, and I found a bunch of people who were doing the same sort of thing, you know, with their treadmills and maps and stuff, and then I saw Macdonald to have done a tech version of it, slightly sort of different, but same sort of concept, but I couldn't really find anything that I could use, and so I foolishly I thought, oh, I'll build it for self. It should look, looks pretty easy, and so yeah, that's what I did, I'll be taut it off down to the local web development company in Toadonga, and they spec'd up the job, and I just kind of went ahead with it and built it from there. It sounds like such a number eight wire kiwi mentality, but time-staff it for us in terms of technology. We were apps, we were we at that stage. So that was 2012, so the iPhone came out in 2008, I think, so we were pretty new, but the app store was there, apps were like ridiculously cheap, remember the days you could buy like it getting that for like 99 cents, now they probably won 12 bucks a month for the same thing, you know. So it was very, it was fast growing, there was a lot of hype around apps, yeah, so it was an interesting time, it's actually a lot of tech companies who were founded around that time, 2012, 2013, whenever I read stuff about tech companies, it was really interesting, it was usually like often it's that around that era. So I think there's a lot of just job blows like me, you know, just going, coming up with ideas for an app and then wanting to do it, and I think development was a lot cheaper back then as well. Developments just so expensive now, like it, and you need so many people, and it's just a huge industry, you know, it's just grown so much. Was it as easy as just having an idea for an app? So a lot of people always talk about the idea, like they focus on the idea and do you need an idea, and I always think the idea is actually less important than most people think. The most important thing is how you execute it, you know, like searching the internet is not really a great idea is it, yeah, but Google did all right out of it, you know. People connecting with other people on the internet, it's not really, it's not rocket science, you know, and Facebook's done pretty, pretty well. So the idea, I think, is less important than the, how you turn that idea into an experience. And the other thing with ideas, because I get a lot of people coming and asking me for maybe a feedback on their idea, and I've got an idea for an app, I've got an idea for an app is like such a common thing from people, and I love talking to people about it, but, you know, they'll come in and say, no, I forgot, I don't know, like a cat dating app or something, right? And they think they're in the pet niche, you know, or the dating niche, it's like, no, you're a tech company, you know, you've got to be your tech company, I don't care if it's cats or financial services, it's tech that you're doing, and I think that is a, it's a pretty hefty arena to play in, with tech, it's, it's, it's specializing, it's expensive, and yeah, you can't need to know what you're doing, which I didn't. So you've got an idea and you go in for it, and what's the timeline here with my virtual mission and the medals, because the medals are such a huge part of this, right? Like we did that. Yeah. So my virtual mission launched, and it was where you could, yeah, so when I launch my virtual mission, the, the first thing that happened is I got a cease and to cease from underama. Oh, really? Because I called it map my mission to begin with, and they, there was a suite of apps called map my run, map my walk, map my ride, and during the construction of my virtual mission or map my mission at the time, underama had bought all of those apps, and then when I launched and I launched this map, my mission, they just were like, nah, it's too close to our, to our. How quickly was that in from them? Oh, I was like three weeks after I launched. Wow. Yeah. So the first thing I had to do pretty much after launching was do a full rebrand, it's not what you want to spend your money on, you know, face a cease and to system a legal challenge from underama. So, so I did the rebrand, which was sucked. And then, yeah, so my virtual mission was a platform where you could create your own pathway on a map. So you could do it anywhere. So some people, you know, wanted to do around their hometown or whatever, but it meant that the user had to create the pathway, which was a bit clunky, you had to click points on the map and draw it up to create the pathway, and it was, it was a pretty clunky experience. And then people, people just weren't really using the app, and I just couldn't get anyone to, you know, to get into it. So I was trying to work out ways, I should, you know, how I could grow this, and I still focusing on it being my virtual mission where people could have a custom pathway. And then, I actually had this group come in, this lady contacted me and said she wanted to do it for her workplace, do a challenge for her workplace, and I was like, oh, yeah. So I got on the call, she wanted to have a call, and I was like, oh, fitness app, I know to call, you know. So I had a call with her, and she was mentioning this thing called corporate wellness. And I'd never heard of corporate wellness, you know, and it's a huge, huge industry in the States, and it's where companies, you know, do all these corporate, these wellness initiatives for their staff, fitness activities, health, mental health staff. Are we talking about step challenges and all that step challenges? This is back in, you know, 2014, '15, so that sort of stuff is in New Zealand now, but at the time there was not really anything like that happening in workplaces. So I kind of learned about this whole industry called corporate wellness, and yeah, and they did a challenge, and they did it really, like, really well, and they succeeded pretty well. I was like, this looks pretty good, pretty promising, so are we looking for, you know, how to get into corporate wellness? So I did this Google search for, you know, corporate wellness ideas, and I came across this blog, and it was like 135 corporate wellness ideas for your company. And I just, a spare of the moment, ping the guy, a message that author on LinkedIn and said, "Hey, man, this is what I've got. Would you feature it on your, on your blog?" And he replied, and he said, "Look, this is great. I've seen the same place, seen some pictures, and he put it up on his blog. So he put it up on his blog, and then the next morning, I woke up, and I've just got all these inquiries from all these companies. Really hard work to deal with. I was making some revenue out of it, but I knew it was a good direction, and I started focusing on, like, corporate clients, and that kept a bit of revenue coming in and kept me alive. And then you're getting back to your Christian Steve out of the turn to the medals. It wasn't enough. The corporate amount of stuff wasn't enough for me to, to kind of, you know, survive. It was just keeping the servers on really. And then I was sitting around on Instagram one day, just probably wasting time, and I was looking at, like, people in the newsfeed, and I saw a lot of people were proudly showing off their race medals, so they'd done, like, a 5K or a marathon, or whatever. And they were, you know, they were on Instagram, showing themselves with their picture of their real shitty-ass race medal, and I was like, "Man, these medals are so lame, you just run a fucking marathon, and they've given you this crappy thing to represent it." I was like, "That's terrible." And I was like, "Well, maybe if we did really good medals, something that people would actually like, and put them at the end of, like, preset challenges, so, see Route 66, or LinkedIn, New Zealand, or, you know, Inca Trail, or something like that, and actually packaged it as kind of like a virtual race, even though it's not against anyone, that you do incrementally over time, with every run that you do, and then at the end of it you get a medal. I thought, "Well, maybe that could be a good kind of pivot to get people to sign up for this thing." So that's how the medals came about, and that was the birth of the Conqueror, so the Conqueror was a series of preset fitness challenges, so we've got about 100 in our portfolio ranging from, yeah, short ones to really long ones, people take, you know, anywhere from like a week to two years to complete their challenge, and, yeah, along with the medals, we managed to put things in during the journey, a person, so for a person say, doing Route 66, it's like 2,000 miles or something, every time they get to say a new city, they get a postcard, a virtual postcard from that city, gives them information about that city, and we just sort of build out some content, build out content from there around, you know, making their experience a bit more immersive, then we added some charity partners where every 20% of the pathway that you complete we plant, like a real tree on behalf of that person, and, or we removed 10 plastic bottles from entering the ocean with our partner charities that do that sort of work, so just added motivation for people to, you know, keep going and help themselves with fitness, but also make a bit of a difference with, you know, trees and plastic, and yeah, that was the, that was how the conqueror sort of started, but when the conqueror launched it was also shit. Is it you coming up with all those value ads? Yeah, almost didn't launch with the postcards, it was the last minute thing, I was looking at the offering going, oh, I need something else here, you know, like a person's going to start this and there's a big gap between when they start, when they finish like, I need to fill it with something, so that they stay engaged, and yeah, I came up with this idea for postcards, and yeah, that'd be a really good, yeah, it was a really good idea, it was just a random thought really. And where's your market for this stuff? US, UK, Canada, Germany, because we have German translation, and Australia, they're probably at biggest markets. Because when you finish a marathon, all the medals are in one place that you get given at the end of that, so how are you getting these, which are, yeah, clunky things, how are you getting them all over the place? Well, yeah, so originally, because I was, you know, the only one in the company, so I was doing everything, I would package them up. I pretty much just get an A4 piece of card and wrap them in that cardboard, and then I would put them in a DL envelope, and I'd shove them into the mail system in New Zealand, because I couldn't send a medal to anywhere in the world for $2.20, because you could just buy like a host of Stanford anywhere in the world. You're not actually supposed to put physical products in envelopes and put them in the mail, but I was like, oh, hopefully, they were getting through, so I was like, oh, sweet, you know, just keep this up, because $2.20, the next cheapest option was $20 bucks, and it just kills it at $20 bucks, you can't make a sale of the shipping's $20. And we were too small for a way too small for like a 3PL, like a pickpick and dispatch place to bother with. But as we were growing, I was throwing more and more of these envelopes with heavy medals into the postage system. And so one point, I was like, I mean, we have to actually drive around town and distribute these evenly into postboxes, because the post is going to turn up, and he's going to get his bag of mail, it's going to be so heavy, he's going to climb, climb, climb, and he's going to be like, this is not good, and I'll get found out, and that would be the end of it. So, so we're doing that for a while, sorry about that in New Zealand post, but thanks also, because that literally was the only way we could get those to people. And I just had them in my garage, I was a packaging them up in my garage, so, and sending them out. And then it was so wild. I begged a, like a distribution of 3PL agent in the US to take me on as a customer, and he was like, man, we only really do, you know, like you have to be doing like a 100 a month, 100 units a month, it's like a minimum. And well, it wasn't really doing that, and I was like, that's all right man, I promised, you know, we're going to grow this thing, I was like, one, it was just like real, real cheesy, I was like, one day we're going to be your biggest client. And did you, did you become? Yeah, yeah, yeah, and, and so he took a chance on this, and that was wicked, so yeah, managed to, managed to get them in the nick of time, because we were really growing quickly at that point, and managed to just get them in the nick of time, and better packaging, and then to a US distribution center, and then they get sent round the world from there. And now we've got distribution centers in multiple countries, the US, UK, and, and the Netherlands. Okay, before we get to the, the blow up in the good times, I actually want to talk about some of the hard times, if that's all right. I've taken this from a memo that you sent the company after you step down as CEO, and I want to read a paragraph, and it's, here I was in my late 30s, divorced two kids living on a friend's houseboat and about to throw my last remaining funds into a business that had been failing for the last five years on a hunch that I was still onto something. So can you tell us, I mean, we've sort of, you know, we're moving around into the metals and things, but like how hard was that period? And in the divorce, I know that it allowed you to sort of reinvest in the company, but talk us about your mindset through that period. Yeah, I mean, everyone goes through tough times, you know, and that was just a extremely tough time. It's, anyone who's been through divorce, it's, you know, especially with kids, it's, it's not great. And then, you know, at a failing business on top of that, you know, started to get rust on my CV together to, you know, to see if I could get a job somewhere and you've got a parent saying, you know, get a job, get a job. So yeah, it was a bit of a low. There's no doubt about that, but I just think I kept on coming back to the users that I did have were really getting a lot of benefit from it. And I could see that. We had a Facebook group of people who were just, that post, that just post lovely things on their Facebook about, in this group, about how it's helping them and that's helping with their mental health. And I was getting people pinging me on like, you know, like Facebook or LinkedIn and just telling me their story and about how the products really helped them. And, you know, people literally saying that, yeah, you've helped save their life. And it's pretty powerful. And I was like, man, I can't really just give up on this. The idea, I think, is good. It's helping people. That's definitely helping people. And I knew that I think I just had this belief that I wasn't far away from cracking it. I just needed to work out how to get customers and how to get enough customers just even just to keep going. So this group was super positive and it kind of kept me positive about it as well. And enough for me to just, you know, to want to lock in. The other side of it is if you give up your lock in your loss, you know, and I had put in hundreds of thousands of dollars into this and I was on my last, you know, like last few dollars. And if I gave up, the second hand market for failed fitness apps, it's not very strong. You know, you can't just go and sell it on, you know, and someone's going to buy it off of you. It's like a trucking company. Yeah, if you start a trucking company and you fail, you sell your trucks and you make your money back, you know, some of your money back. So, yeah, it was sort of a bit trapped, but I also had some pretty strong belief that the product was good. And I just needed to find a way to get it in front of people. I think this is a really good time to introduce Raul who we're going to speak about soon. But we reached out to him in prep for this and sort of asked him, you know, what made you different as a leader? What made you good? What made you successful? And I want to read what he said. He said, if you think about what he went through from coming up with the idea, starting the company back in 2013 through all the failure he had to deal with every single year, you know, 2014, 2015, 2016, he runs out of money, even takes money from friends and family, he pivots the product, he pivots the company, he fails again, he loses everything. All that failure to keep your belief in your idea and grit your teeth and stay in the game for so long. It's just astonishing that he kept doing that for six years until we started collaborating. Like, I would have personally quit maybe a quarter of the way into that journey that he had. So he taught me this lesson that sometimes it's just enough to stay in the game and at some point something's going to happen. Of course, your product needs to be good too, but that's where the belief plays a big role. That's cool and this more to come from Raul. I guess this is maybe the time to talk about how it turned into the conqueror and how you pulled yourself out of what we just spoke about. Yeah, so it was definitely getting down to pretty empty barrel of money and also just kind of getting sick of it as well going, I'd just been through so many cycles of failures. I'd been through so many agencies, marketing agencies because I knew it was marketing that was what I needed to turn this around, but I was getting these negative signals that it also wasn't marketing because I had so many marketing agencies have a goal at it and fail. With every marketing agency, they talk it up, talk it up, we're going to do this, we're going to do that, it's going to be great and your product's great and it's going to sell and you know, prepare yourself for this massive flux of customers. And then it just wouldn't happen. The first day you'd look at it and go, I didn't do anything there and then it was a week and I was like, oh, yeah, still going backwards and then they're going, oh, we need more data, we need to spend more money on ads so we get more data so we can tweak it. You go through the cycle and I'd been through that a couple of times and it had been terrible and just lost money and then I just had to quit with them and they're telling you now we just need to keep going about, you know, I just sit and I have to pull the pin and so I was on my last roll of the dice because I couldn't, I don't have any more money and I really did have to do something decisive and I was like, well, I need to spend this money on actual ads themselves. I can't just go out and get another agency and so I was like, I need to learn how to do ads. So I went to this group and it was a group called Facebook ad buyers and at the time it had 90,000 people in the group. It was a big Facebook group and I was just on there and I was just reading posts and then I saw this post from this guy called Rull and he was just posting some really cool content around Facebook ads and I was like, oh cool, I'm going to, you know, I liked his post and because of the Facebook algorithm picked up that I liked his post, when Rull posted again, you know, week later it showed, it came up in my news feed and then Rull and I was like, shot man, you know, on his post and then I kept on saying his content and I was like, I'm going to hit this guy up and I'm going to say, see if he'll teach me how to run his ads, run my ads. And so he was in the group, he was just new to the group and he was looking to start his own Facebook ads agency. So he was looking to, you know, promoters, skills and then shelf of skills and then attract customers. That's why he was there. And so I hit him up and we had a call and I told him about the product and it's a fairly complex product to explain to someone, you know, at medals, you know, incremental journey, the sort of stuff. So I was wondering that because I've been telling people you're coming on and I'm like, oh, what does he do? I still can't tell people. What is your elevator pitch? If you've got a, my worst, my worst case scenario, someone asked me what I'd do for the first time. So I said, hey, yeah, I don't have elevator pitch and I'm not going to try and talk about it. So you know, go to the website as you would about a, well, wait, if you do go to the website, man, that thing follows you all around now. It's really, really effective. There's no escape. No, like it's all over my feet on every platform. Well, just sign up for you. Yeah, I hide the ads, I hide the ads if you want. Yeah, so you're going to random do it. Yeah, if that's random do it in Romania. And I wanted to learn off of how to run ads, but he wanted customers for his agency. So there was a bit of a mismatch there and he didn't really understand the product and then I sort of said to him, well, maybe you could run the ads. And as soon as I said that, I was like, come on, man, you know, this is exactly what you said you wouldn't do. You can't spend money on a retainer and paying some guy to run your ads again. This is not good. And then so I was having doubts. And then Raul wanted to open book his, he wanted a client that was willing to open book their ad account, which is a pretty big deal for a client because it means that everyone can see all your metrics or what's going on, what you're spending, what your results are. If you were sensitive about that information, you probably wouldn't want, you know, someone on Facebook just doing it live and open booking it to the world essentially. So he was struggling to find people that wanted to willing to do that. Why would he want to do that? To show that he was legit legit and wasn't just fudging all his results. So he had to do it live, you know, because there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of heroes in that industry. You think that they're amazing and they can just photo shop stuff and, you know, make things look really good and, you know, show good results. But so Raul wanted to counter that. Show his real skills and just do it in a live environment with an open book, a real, real case study. No, I wanted to do it. But I was like, I couldn't give a fuck if someone sees this. You know, there's, I've got nothing to hide. I've got nothing good in my ad account. So I'm like, yeah, I'll do that. And so yeah, we had a bit of back-and-forth and we both walked away saying, nah, it's not a good fit because they didn't really understand the product either. And then we both came back and we said, look, let's just give it a go. All right, let's just see how things go. So Adam, the retainer and, yeah, he did a couple of weeks work to get things set up, how we wanted them to be set up, get the ads set up and creatives and stuff like that. And I think we went live and, yeah, I remember waking up in the morning and checking my phone and I was like, oh, yeah, we've made some sales today. That's awesome. We're definitely bumping sales and going to have a look at the Facebook ad account and I'm like, oh, those results look really good, you know? And then I was like, oh, yeah, that's cool. And then just every day from there, it was just like ramping up, ramping up, ramping up. So his performance was just spectacular. And turns out he's one of the best digital marketers in the world. That's such a great, that's such a great throwaway line from Blake. I met a guy on the internet. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, just randomly bumped into him on the internet. So, you know, so that was awesome. And so digging in on this time, because this is exhilarating, right? Like the business has taken a U-turn. You all of a sudden see and holy shit, this thing's taken off. Yeah, like what does that look like? Do you have anyone to share that with other than row? Like inside, are you starting to see what it's going to turn into? Not really at the start. I was in denial for a long time. You know, I didn't want to get too excited. I was like, oh, yeah, this is cool, but you know, we've got it's got a last and I don't want to get too excited. I also had to deal with the fallout, which was, you know, more medals, more supply chain logistics, just everything was ramping up. And I was the only one dealing with it. So I was doing customer support. It's a huge increase in customer support inquiries. And so I said, you know, hire a guy to help me with customer support and then hire another, he hired a friend of his to help with customer support. And then we kind of blew up and then they went from two people to 40 people like in a couple of weeks. And so our customer support just scaled massively. And everything's having really, really quickly. So I don't actually have a lot of time to think or reflect or that's what I wanted to say. What is your work life balance? Like are you just all in at this point and is it stressful as well? Awesome. It's awesome. Yeah. That was awesome. Was it stressful? I don't remember feeling stressed. I remember feeling quite exhilarated and pumped. Like it's, you know, seven years of not things going very well at all, the odd win here and there to just seeing it grow every single day. And you know, he's like, I think we were doing like five K a month to begin with. And then he's like, man, and one day we're going to bed, you know, next month we're going to do 25 grand. I'm like, for crazy, you know, you're crazy. And now I'm going to do 200 grand a day. It's like, you know, it's just so mental. Have you met him in real life at this stage? So we hit one phone call and a video call or a video call. Okay. So, you know, he's a real person. Yeah. Our first ever contact was a video, was a couple of messages over Facebook Messenger and then a video call. And then we didn't have any calls or videos, video calls for I think like over a year, well over a year. We were just all on Messenger. So our entire chat history of that day of that era is still recorded in our Messenger. Have you ever looked back at it? Little bits of it. Yeah. So he told us about this period. He's like, so we started working in July and the previous month he did 8,000 New Zealand dollars in revenue. Nine months later, we were doing over two million in revenue. And throughout that period, I don't think we had a single call that we were just texting on Messenger. A couple of messages once in a while. And I was like, hey Adam, I want to triple the spend. I was like, all right. Yeah, it was a really weird time. But it's, yeah, it's, I had, yeah, it was actually quite good having someone on the other side of the world, different time zones who you didn't get trapped in endless meetings with. You know, you can waste a lot of time just meeting with people and talking. So we had to have our communications really concise and they were only happening to like at the either ends of the day. So you kind of couldn't fuck around with like just random stuff. Hey bro, it's up wasted. Yeah, wasting time. It was like ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. And also the trust comes into it. So I just trusted him massively. He didn't really need to ask for too much permissions. I didn't need to ask much from him. We were just going about, he was, he was marketing it and scaling it. And I was just dealing with the fallout, growing, you know, the customer support, getting the logistics sorted out the metals that supply it. So that was in late 2019. We met and started growing it. And then we had new years, which was like a huge selling time for us, because you know, new year, new year kind of fitness is big. It also comes after a huge run into Christmas with Q4 marketing spending, which, which all ends at Christmas. And so anyone goes on holiday. So the sort of playing field for ads is really really, really good around then. We did a huge new year. It's our first New Year's year that we did. We really sold heaps of challenges. And it was really exciting. And then COVID happened. And it didn't happen to the world. It happened to China. And no one really around the world knew what COVID was in those early days. They maybe heard about it. And it was this thing that was happening in China. And how metals are made in China. And so we sell challenges before we actually have the metals. Because we've got a time between when a person starts a challenge and when they finish it and then we need to send them their medals. So we can kind of order our medals as we require them with a sort of two, three week turnaround. But what happened was China shut down. And we couldn't get our medals. So we just had thousands of new customers who are just finishing their challenges. And we couldn't give them their medal. And we had to tell them it was because of this virus that was in China, which to the average American is not good enough excuse or reason. And so to begin with, because COVID was pretty good for our industry and pretty good for our company. But to begin with, COVID was an absolute nightmare because everything was shut. We couldn't get medals. And no one would believe us as to the reason why they just thought we were scammers. It's all our reviews. People were like, "Oh, scammers, they don't even have the medals." Yeah, what is your message there? Because they've paid for service and they're not getting it. Did you say it's coming? Just be patient. We had a huge win out of all of that. We have a huge lesson as well. And good lesson for everyone is when you have Shikko wrong, you front foot it as quickly as you can and as thoroughly as you can and you just communicate as often as you can to people. And they will mostly be really reasonable about it. If you let them discover the problem and that's when they can get pissed off. So we had people who didn't know that they weren't going to get a medal. And we hit them all up every customer and said, "This is what we're facing. This is the problem." And it's likely that you're not going to be able to get your medal. So after we'll definitely get it to you. And if you want to refund, we're willing to give you one. And we thought we're going to be slaughtered with three funds, but we hardly had any. And actually the negative people were very small percentage of people were negative. But if we just let it fall over and just people were like, "Where the hell's my medal?" And then we came up with this COVID reason. I think people would have hated us. So we've actually taken that lesson right through because we've had heaps of things go wrong, tech, all sorts of all manner of things, been hacked, all sorts of stuff. And if you front foot it and you be honest and give people options, then most people are really happy just to support you and just wait. And so that's what I am. So you get past that initial COVID roadblock and then it seems like perfect, because no one can hang out if it wants to do these fitness challenges. They've got their phone that can go out. Yeah, it was sort of unbelievable timing. I don't really want to paint COVID as a positive thing, because it's so hard for so many people. But it definitely made people the people couldn't do in person events. People couldn't go to the gym. All people could do was go for a walk. And so and be inside. And so if you're inside on your phone and there we are. And so so many people found us out of COVID. And we did a, yeah, we had it with pretty solid year. We grew from 2 million to 40 million in a year, which was pretty good money. It's solid in anyone. I think that's all right. And then fuck it. Yeah. And so we were a bit worried that we were going to be a COVID spike. You know, we knew that we had grown quickly before COVID. It gave us a lot of confidence that we're on the right path no matter what. But we did get a huge spike in COVID and we were concerned that it was going to die away. And it did sort of die away. But then we grew massively from from there as well. So yeah, it's good to be just not a flash in the pan from COVID. You threw something kind of as a throwaway line just before, which is something that always kind of buzzes around online businesses. But it's like cyber attack. And is all of your information digitally there? Like how what are your guardrails for that sort of stuff? Yeah. So yeah, turns out that security and privacy are pretty important. As it turns out. And to be honest, we do a really good job of being compliant and both security and privacy. Now that we've got sort of proper people and processes and place. And we've grown really quickly. But we've also bought on expertise and stuff and things like that. So we're in a really good place with it. Yeah, we did have a bit of a cyber attack. If you want me to tell you tell you this through about why he's in there. So I can't remember when it was but it's quite a few years ago. And Andrew, who's the lead web developer and he's the guy who originally actually built the very first line of code. He needs to work to the company. He's our CTO. And in the middle of the night, we had this person try and run like a cyber attack on us. And Andrew got up in the middle of the night to the news. Yeah, I get a phone call, you know, we're under attack. And it's dramatic, isn't it? Who's cool? I don't know. He's got a phone call. So, you know, you're agitated in the middle of the night. He gets up. He puts his cape on. And he just goes to work. And he's like literally battling this attacker life on like trying to do all this attack is trying to do all this stuff. And Andrew's trying to block off of doing it like genuinely like. Yeah. And so what this attacker was doing, right? Is that found out that they so they created a mass number of accounts. They created 500 accounts. And they then worked out a way using our like URL parameters, you know, the bit in the top there type in that they could access all of these all of our challenges because they were numbered numerically. And so, you know, challenge number one challenge, you had 352 and 353. And they could find those pages, which is you couldn't really find those pages anywhere else on the site. But if you just change the URL to a different number, then you'd end up with a different challenge page. And that's where people, that's where people are participating in the challenge because it is also on the web as well as an app. And so this hacker signed up and they, you know, there's first name and last name and stuff like that. And so they put their first name as come fuck me and their last name as @pofuck.com, right? And then they went around to all of these challenges, the challenge pages. And they liked, you know, everyone's activities in their newsfeed. And so we had just on boarded a Catholic girls school as a group. I wanted to do a group challenge. And all of these girls were, you know, quite new to the platform. They've been on it for like three days and they were really, you know, the teachers were super sensitive around, you know, privacy and, yeah, because they're going to be posting pictures themselves exercising and we're like, nah, it's, you know, it's only the, people can't find the page. And so when this guy went around with all of these things and like all of these posts, when you get a like on something, you also get a notification. So these Catholic school girls were getting a notification that said, come fuck me @pofuck.com, like it to your activity. Yeah, it's not a good look for you, but it's nice. And every one of our corporate wellness clients also got that as well. So it was a real low point in our journey and it taught us a big lesson. We fixed all of that up. But I guess someone just randomly targeted you. Yeah, wonder why. I don't know what the end game was. Yeah, like as you tell me the story, I'm thinking who's sitting there going, you know what I'm going to do today? Yeah, off to the concrete. I don't know. Because you're all over their Facebook feed. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know what the end game was. It was to try and get us in a position where we had to pay them or just to piss us off. And someone was just doing for fun or whatever. But it was, yeah, it was a pretty, pretty bad time. And Bri, my partner, she, she, she was working in the cook around the side of the company at the time. So she was dealing with it all. And so she had to kind of front foot all of that fall out. And we just took the same approach to it. And we were just honest and communicated a lot. And we, you know, apologised and offered them a refund. And the guy's about lost his job, the guy who was, the teacher who was organising it all, he just about lost his job. But then everyone just came round to it and we're just, we're satisfied with what we've done to remedy it. And, you know, our response to it all. And they actually forgave us, which I guess is with their nature. And, you know, thankfully. And they end up doing another challenge of this as well. I loved it. So I was kind of weird, you know, to go through that from start to finish. And it's such a contrast to the community you've built up online, which I've heard is, it was described as like the kindest place on the internet. And your numbers are huge, right? Like your Facebook community has about 400,000 people in it. Can you tell us about the importance of that? Was that always in mind when you started that you needed to get a community bill? No, I think that's one of the things that you hear and at the time with social media, you know, it was, there was buzzwords around community, build community and things like that. And so I did intentionally want to build a community, but I didn't intentionally think it was going to work out the way that it did. And so these were open with the community. We started it because I felt like we should start it. And it's just a place where, you know, if you sign up for a challenge and you get access to this private Facebook group and you can post your progress and things like that. And what I started noticing in the group was that it was a really positive place to be. And there was so many people telling their stories and posting their pictures. And you know how on the internet, it's your negativity always triumphs, positivity. And so there's all these decades in there as well going, you know, just just being negative. And I was like, I was just kicking them out. I was like, now we're just going to create like a super race of positive people. And just by two thing out, people who were trolls or just being really negative towards others. And so yeah. So what ended up happening was we just created a place where it was really positive. And then what happened was that people started to feel safe there. And so that post, you know, more sensitive content and that open up. And and it was and that that'd always be met with positivity. So we kind of grew and then it just self-governance. And so the whole group just doesn't tolerate negativity towards others. And it just took on a life of its own. We've got amazing moderators and community leaders who run that now. But yeah, it sort of all started from just not tolerating negativity. It's like, this is my space. I'm literally just coming in and troll troll away others who are struggling away with their life, you know. So yeah, this place just blew up. And it's still pretty, it's hard to, you know, 400,000 people. It's hard to, you know, continue to be, you know, always just positive. But, but, yeah, we've definitely a pretty special place. We like to consider it as the most positive place on the internet. Because you got about half a million on Instagram as well. Like, did that all just come in through COVID? Like, was there a big explosion in America or something? How did you get so many followers so quickly? Yeah, I mean, just from our growth of sales, you know, people, people sign up and then they join the, yeah, like our Facebook page or Instagram or join our community. And yeah, that's pretty much it. We also licensed things like Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Star Wars and things like that. And so you get just big boosts of numbers when, you know, we're different, we're reaching different audiences through those, those different types of products. How do you go about licensing those massive franchises? Yeah, well, turns out you just email them. Really? Yeah, so I kind of just woke up, I had this idea, like I recommend you do a Lord of the Rings challenge. So how do you, you know, how do you license Lord of the Rings? So just go to Google and go, you know, how to license Lord of the Rings. And I get to a website and it says, we actually said, you know, if you want to license the rights to the movies, you email, it was like Info or Warner Brothers. If you want to license the rights to the books, you email this, this other one, it was, it was like LOTR, I don't know. Yeah, I was in middle of the internet. Oh, fuck, I don't know. You license something else to do. And so I, yeah, I knew that emailing Info or Warner Brothers was going to get me nowhere, you know. So I actually deliberately emailed the wrong place. So email the place that does the licensing for the books because I thought I'm probably going to response from them. And so emailing sent this person and they came back and they said, next day, and he said, oh, yeah, it sounds like you want to license the rights to the movies, not the books. He's the email address that was Info or Warner Brothers or something, something real generic. And so I messaged him back and I said, oh, how could you give us like a contact, maybe an Asia Pacific that I could, you know, a person, a person. Yeah. And so he came back and gave me this guy, Tommy's email, he's an Australia, and I emailed Tommy the pitch, which was just like a, you know, five page PDF document with a bit of info about the company and what we wanted to do with him. And within 15 minutes he responded and he said, this is awesome. Let's get on a call. Half an hour later we're on a call and we're pretty much set. We're going to do it. And then from there, yeah, lawyers got involved and there's you know, negotiations and license agreements and all that. But yeah, I think the kind of lesson is that you never far away from, you know, that far away from something big that can change the course of your business, you know, like one email, a conversation going for a walk thinking of an idea, these can all just happen like any day of the week, you know, you're not really that far away from it. I think a lot of people think they're super far away from success. How did you know that was it just accumulated knowledge that you needed to actually get a person to, to switch that idea to? Yeah, I think so. I think just business experience, you know, if you just put an email out into the, you know, to a generic email address, you're probably not going to find the right people. I wanted to speak with someone, yeah, local and I wanted to try and actually just take a different path in. It was funny because I think last year or the year before, our general manager, Carol, she went, she was in Las Vegas at a licensing expo and she had a bit of time to spare. So she went to like a presentation on, you know, how to get into licensing when you're new. And so she was in this room and the presenter was saying, well, what you, you should never do is just try and get the big, the big one straight away, you know, don't try and license Disney stuff. Don't try license Warner stuff. You got to start small. You've got to prove your model. You've got to prove that you're a good licensey. You know, you can't just jump into the big time. No one, no one just jumps in from nothing to lucky. I didn't get it. I guess it was pretty, yeah, we pretty much just jumped straight in and and we did Lord of the Rings, which was amazing. Yeah, it was always double deck. And sorry, once you, once you tip one of those dominoes on on a big franchise like that, is it a case of the rest, just for the rest just for because Star Wars, I'm loving it. Star Wars in front of me and like that, was that any different to Lord of the Rings? They all just, they all just, yeah, one just lead to another, which lead to another. Yeah, we did, we did a bunch of stuff with Warner and then we approached Disney and yeah, we did Star Wars with Disney. Then we've got Harry Potter, which we just launched recently as well, which was, which was really successful. Yeah, but it just, I think we're a really good company to deal with, you know, we've got great people, great team of people. And I think the world loves Kiwis as well, something that Kiwis businesses should try and embrace more. If you're going to go global, you're already in at an advantage. You might see it as a disadvantage because we're so isolated, but everyone loves Kiwis. So, and if you're a good company to deal with and you kind of get back to people and you adhere to their guidelines and things like that, then we get to round that, for us, we get to round that where we're pretty slick operation in terms of adhering to their requirements. And that's what they want. There's two points I want to get to and you can tackle them in what order, I'm not sure the timelines, but they both speak to sort of the explosion and growth in the company. And one is sort of refounding the company and role becoming an equal partner in how you decided on that. And the other one is this story that he's asked you to tell about the credit card situation, where things were growing so fast that you kind of had to get about a million credit cards. Yeah, so, yeah, so Raul, Raul was working originally just as a contractor, I guess, a marketing agency. And he was doing amazing work and things were just going so well. We were growing really quickly. And I think I have to think a little bit of resentment probably built up that he was doing all this work. I knew that I'd created the product and that was important as well, but he was doing all this marketing work and that was what was moving the needle. And so I think he got to a point where it just wasn't really working working out for him, it wasn't really within his best interest anymore. And I don't think he wanted to just be paid more. But he didn't ask if he could join the company. And so we were looking at a scenario where he was going to step away and I was just going to go off on my own and I was looking at that going, man, you know, I don't really want that either. So I just, I said to him, hey man, just he has half the company and we'll be co-founders and we re-found the company together. And I consider him a co-founder. I don't think he considers himself one, but I do. And yeah, we kind of just went from there as business partners, we ended up being 50/50. That is a huge call, right? That is worth millions and millions and millions. Yeah, $100. Was it an overnight thing? Like did you spend much time thinking about that? Was it just the right thing to, in your gut, you knew it was the right thing to do? I definitely knew it was the right thing to do. It was the best decision I've ever made, you know, like I've never made it more impactful decision. It just felt right. I wanted him to be my business partner and I didn't want to lose him. And I knew we could do, you know, continue to do cool shit together. So yeah, he just became a half-aider in the company. I think that kind of bloke bloom away a bit as well. Have you physically met him by this stage? No, genuinely. No, we didn't meet each other. Not press the flesh, not shook hands. Are you joking or are you legit? I have since, but at that point, no. Yeah. Wow. That is some high trials. Yeah, they come out to New Zealand, Rowland, about just 10 came out to New Zealand a few years ago. That's when we first met in Christchurch and we did a tour of the South Island together, which was awesome. It was weird because he was way shorter than I thought. You know what it's like when you meet someone? Yeah. Yeah. Holy hell. So is this the credit card thing after this? Yeah, so then in our second New Year's, I think it's 2021-2022 New Year's. So the one after COVID, yeah. We were approaching this New Year's period and we knew that, you know, this is a really good selling time for us and we wanted to maximize it. And so we had an ad account and we were capping out the amount we could spend on an ad account. So we had to go and get 20 ad accounts set up. So we had a set up 20 ad accounts, Facebook ad accounts, and then we had to get credit cards. So I would have like 25 credit cards from the bank. They were like, "Wow, it's going this. Those are deep massively. Like, oh, since business is falling over, they want 25 credit cards. How many staff have you got on site with two?" It was a few, probably like four or five of us at the time. And so we got all these credit cards and loaded them up to our Facebook ad accounts and then we were like, you know, hitting the go button and we're spending so much on Facebook ads. And we didn't realize that with a new ad account, when you reach a billing threshold, they charge your card and a new ad account has a really low billing threshold, like $2 is where it starts. So for every $2 an ad spend, we were getting a transaction on our card. And so we were having like tens of thousands of transactions just happening all the time. And the bank was just freaking out, thinking that all our cards had been stolen and been used all over the place. And so they had the fraud team ringing me constantly, just 24/7, just asking me, "Is this you guys? We need a cheque with the merchant IDs?" And like, you know, just give them approval. Yeah, just keep going. I'm like, "Oh, it's fine, agnus. We're just trying to spend 250 grand today on ads." Yeah, kind of Romania is doing it. Yeah, no, it's all good, you know? She's just going, "What the hell?" But yeah, it was a chaotic time, for sure. And I look back at that time, probably the most hectic time as well. Just, yeah, just so much volume of everything happening and just craziness. Does your relationship with money change? You talk about $250,000 a day in ads, like, this is so far removed from where you were a few years ago. Like, how does it change your approach to money? Yeah, it's a really, really bizarre thing to be, you know, I guess, you know. I was a maximum working for families, tax credits, and tried to buy a house. And I couldn't even afford $150,000 a house, you know? And marriage broke up and I went out. And, you know, to go from that to speaking out these sort of massive numbers is just so bizarre. And it's really, it's something that I've just really struggled to kind of wrap my head around how I can, you know, this can be happening and how big these numbers are and just how used to it, I've become. And then stepping back a bit and going, that's just so weird, you know? Like, $250,000 a day on ads is just crazy, you know? Not when you look at my feed. Yeah, that's a sense. Yeah. And then I think of, like, companies that have 5,000 employees and turn over billions of dollars and you're like, man, their bloody ads fends and it just revenue coming in is mind-boggling. I don't understand how people have, you know, hundreds and thousands of staff, it's just, you know, I just don't understand how they get to that point. So how did your head count start to increase as the company got more successful? Yeah, so we grew, we're really lean for a long time. And, you know, quite a lot of heroes, you know, in the company that are just doing lots of different work, taking on putting on different hats, just getting stuck in, you know? Managing areas, doing things outside of their comfort zones, doing things outside of their skill sets. And then we mature and then we start to bring in sort of more, you know, expertise and then have management. And then that's sort of when I sort of wanted to step away because, you know, I'm an entrepreneur, I'm not a manager. And a lot of entrepreneurs come with management skills, a lot of entrepreneurs come with leadership skills, a lot of, you know, entrepreneurs come with these, all of these additional skills, but I didn't really have many or any of those. And the business just started becoming too complex. And I just ended up dealing with all of the shit problems that no one else could. So yeah, tax, GDPR, privacy, yeah, just all of this, all the staff and staff grievances, you know, all the sort of stuff. And I said, yeah, I'd wake up in the morning. I'm sure you guys like this at the moment. You wake up in the morning. First thing you want to do is check it, you know, open your laptop, see what's happened and, you know, get stuck in the work, whereas I was, you know, I was like that, but then I turned into getting out of the morning. The last thing I wanted to do was open my laptop. I'd open at 10 o'clock and I would just go be like, oh, you know, I was known around the office as the sire because I would just be like constantly going, oh, well, you know, and that's what I was like, oh, I'm not enjoying this anymore because my skills are not valued in the company anymore, you know, and that's just a good honest look at, you know, my skills and what I'd bought to the company and what I was giving to the company at that time. And I was just surplus to requirements. So that's an interesting reality check to go through from ideation and being hands-on doing absolutely everything to the point of the realization of being like, I'm not, I'm not the guy anymore. Yeah, I'm actually hindering the company, you know, like poor leadership, disorganization, is a real hindrance to a company, especially if you're leading it. So it's definitely being honest with yourself. And I'm not embarrassed about that either. Like, I'm happy that I could reach that decision by myself, like no one had to push me out either. And it was good to step away. And it was good to, you know, Rale, you know, we said to short your IR CEO and he was keen to take over a CEO, so I was keen for him to do that as well. And so that's what we did. And now he's the CEO. So, you know, if you look at his story, he's gone from wanting to, you know, we're here in an agency to wanting to start his own agency to, you know, joining this New Zealander and and blight up a company and then becoming the CEO. And you're a multinational as well, right? You've got role in Romania. You've got parts in Nicaragua? Yes, so our customer service agents are all in Nicaragua and some other parts of Central America. We've got people in Singapore, the UK, yeah, and a non-descript building in the mouth. I'm told, we don't even have a sign. Unbranded building. Yeah, we've just not got around to it. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know why we just haven't got around to it. And we also like to kind of fly under the radar, but, you know, yeah, we advertise on Facebook that's a happy place. Tell us top line if you can wear things right. So, you know, you went from 8K to 2000, to 40 mil. I think I had 75 mil a year and revenue and then maybe it sort of plateaued. Is that kind of the numbers that you're working with at the moment? Yes, so we, you know, we went from 100K year to two million, so we 20x the company. And then we 20x to the next year as well, so we went from two to 40. Then we had a pretty stable year, somewhere in the 40s, and we went to 75. I think it was actually just shy of 80. And then we went backwards a little bit. And now we're kind of pushing forwards past that with some of these other license challenges. So pushing past 80. Yeah. And some business award recognition recently as well. Yeah, it was it was the first time I couldn't get a general manager. It was like, oh, come on guys, we've got to try and do something here, you know, we've done pretty well. We should probably enter like a business awards that we entered. It was the NZTE International Business Awards. And we ended up winning. It was the growth in online sales award. So yeah, that was cool. It was a good bit of recognition. With the judges like, who the fuck are these guys? And where the fuck have they been this whole time? Probably. Yeah, yeah, probably. Yeah, we had, I mean, you know, the discussions after that were pretty great. I don't think half people believed it. So, you know, hell, I know not the elevator pitch, but what has been the magic of why it has grown to the place it is? Is it the vision of the quest? Is it the medals? Is it the support that you've given in the community? Is it just a combination? Is it one thing? Yeah, it's definitely a combination. I think the product actually is pretty good. It helps people. And it helps people with a big problem. And that problem exists for like almost everyone. Everyone wants to move more. Everyone knows that exercise is important. It's important for your physical health and your mental health. So we're sort of solving a really, really big global problem. So the product's really good. The business model is epic. So we make a sale. Then we don't have any cost associated with that sale for potentially up to two years. So your kind of cash flow position is really amazing. So, compared to like a normal business, we normally would have, you make a sale, you send it the next day, you've got to have the product in stock. So we don't have to have the product in stock. We carry like millions and millions of medals at any one time, but we don't have enough medals for everyone. And we're in the future. So business model is really, really favourable. You carry millions of medals in a warehouse. Yeah. Yeah. Just boxes of them. Yeah. Creates of them. So there's a really good, strong business model, which wasn't really by design. It just sort of happened to be how our business worked. So good idea, good business model, and then the technology is like, it's pretty good. I wouldn't say that was the tech is just the platform that we deliver the challenge on, but we have advanced that pretty significantly now. So the barrier to entry is pretty high now. For over COVID, I think we had like 30 competitors just pop up, but they didn't have the tech. And you can't really get the tech quickly, and it's very, very expensive. So there's some barriers to entry, which gives it a bit of a moat, which is which is also pretty good, but I think you combine that with the world best in class marketing, and that's what's kind of really driven the customer acquisition. Yeah, it's epic, man. I'm looking forward to getting into some of these sort of tips, but I just before we do, I want to bring in Bree. Bree is a friend of mine, I know from sort of back in the day. But I asked her about what stage of the journey was Adam on when you guys first met, and she was like, "Oh, we went out on this first date, and he was telling me about some app that he'd built, and automatically asking in red flag, what the fuck is this? Who is this guy?" But I want to bring her in, because whenever you talk to successful people, it's the stability behind and the influence that they have, which really helps you succeed. But for her to go through the journey with you two, other guy who had been struggling with this thing, and to see where you're at now, what a ride for her to be on with you? Yeah, totally. We met when I was at my probably lowest point in terms of this business, and I think she must have just been thinking, what is the product, because it is hard to explain, and what's this guy doing in his bloody garage, packaging these things up, and asking me to help him throw them into mailboxes around town. She's been there to see the crazy growth, and I guess it's been the closest person to me to see that and go through that with me. She's a bit of an entrepreneur herself, so we have a pretty common interest in business, and I have helped her out with heaps of entrepreneur stuff, and she's been a great sounding board, and a great help, and then she also dropped everything she was doing, and worked in the business when we needed help because of COVID. We had so many inquiries of corporate wellness people wanting to do fitness challenges for their staff over that COVID period. So she picked all of that up, and we went through the bizanis, and we were sitting in our campervan, and her parents drive away, and one on the tyre, one kind of new year's eve period, and we're just both on our laptops, just slamming out customer support, because we went all pile into customer support, and that's the middle of the night, and then we had to get out the next morning, and just kind of at call-round appearance, and then I was like, "Oh, yeah, we've got good night, yeah, let's. " You've got high school mates working on the business as well. How cool is that to have people that you genuinely get on with sharing in this success? Yeah, we've got an amazing team of, I actually also have a girl who has to teach at Catechetta College, she works with the company as well, so yeah, got some mates, and we were just this ragtag bunch of guys working out of a first office, was an airport hanger, which the ceiling came down, and the side of the room, you couldn't even stand in it, but we'd have interviews for staff and things like that, and better spend awesome journey, is it's not been easy? Like I've actually lost like a really good friend out of this as well, who was working for the company, and the relationship just didn't work out as the business grew, and matured, and that was natural stink, you know. We start to see the human side of having to progress your business, but yeah, those early days were pretty cool. All right, I'm keen to, I'm really excited to tuck into this, now that we've got sort of the story told, and you can sort of reference back to any part to the journey you want, but one of the subheads you sent through is position yourself to get lucky, and you talked about the significant factor that luck has played in the success of the conqueror, and you've given three examples that I want to work through. One is the original quote to build the app was way underquoted, and if the guy Andrew, who I know has been a really important part of this journey, he had given you the real price, you probably wouldn't have done it, none of this would have happened. Yeah, none of it would have happened, it would have been too expensive, and I just would have gone on out and do something else, so just got lucky there, you know, and there's so many instances of just getting lucky, and you can kind of look at luck and go, "Ah, you know, a guy just got lucky." We got lucky with COVID, it's horrible to say that in the face of what went down for most people, but that was in the scope of the context of our business, was a lucky break, but COVID wouldn't have been lucky for us if we didn't have an app. I was in the position to get lucky from a whole range of different angles, lucky just messaging people and getting responses from them in the right timings, but none of that luck happens if you're not in the position to get lucky, you know, I think sitting around waiting to win Lotto is the only way most people can get lucky in order to get money, you know, and so I just put myself in position as often as I can for luck before my way, because just random coincidence will mean that you will end up with some lucky things happen, if you're there to be lucky. The other one you had is, when you're at your lowest, a huge multinational agency hit you up out of the blue asking you to quote a custom virtual challenge job, which kind of, again, pulled you through. Yeah, so there was at a time when I was working on trying to figure out how to grow the conqueror, because I'm at a launch, but not really done very well, and the Corber Wellness side of things was ticking over, and then I had this massive global agency, I didn't actually know who they were. They came in and they wanted this customized virtual challenge platform, and I've had so many of these come in over the years, and it's like, "Oh, we won this, we want that," and there's quite a big process involved in quoting the job, and I didn't want to, well, can be bothered quoting it, and I didn't want to waste Andrew's time as well. He was working on other stuff, and I didn't want him to switch to quoting this job. So I kind of wanted this agency just to go away, and I actually pretty much said we can't do this, and then they came back and said, "Oh, could you just please put together a quote?" And so I said, "I won't give you a quote." So I gave them this, like, "Hey, all Mary!" So ridiculous. They just go back and say, "Oh, you would like to go ahead." Or what? You know? Like, what the hell? And we delivered the work. It was a really good project. We actually did really, really well, and they were happy. We got paid, and we kept the servers running for a few extra months, so it was just bizarre, you know, like, just comes walking in through the door. Just looping back as well to dealing with multi-nationals, and I can't take my eyes off the medals that are on the table with these big franchises, but then do you, because I'm a Star Wars nerd, and a bit of a Game of Thrones nerd as well. When you get end users starting the challenges, how much into the weeds do people get about, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, Endor is closer to the desert planet of Tatooine versus Hoff, and you guys are wrong. Did people get into that, and that is getting into the weeds massively, massively. So with Lord of the Rings, we were super conscious about that, and so we actually ended up hiring like a Lord of the Rings expert who was pretty much full-time advising us on what we needed to, to not fuck it up. Yeah. Again, we also had to translate, so with Lord of the Rings, we had to translate the journey from the Shire to Mount Doom, where to translate that into a distance, and there's various, and everyone, as everyone knows, if they just got on the Eagles, at the start, they would have saved the whole like the movie. Extra $50, but you can get an air of your Eagles. You must add on the fitness part, so yeah, so there was a lot of that, a lot of research, a lot of exactly what you, you know, just said before around, you know, this star, that you know, closer here, there, this is the story, and there's, you know, that's what makes I guess the universe is quite cool, is that people can really get into them deeply, and that was what we, you know, our theory was there's so many deep fans for these titles, especially Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, that if we can create a product around those franchises, then we're opening ourselves up to a whole new audience, so yeah, that's pretty much what's happened. Okay, I've got seven business lessons to finish us off. I'm going to just give the top line, give as much as little as you want, but these are really good. So number one, you're usually way closer to success than you feel like you are. Yeah, I think that's going back to, you know, it can just come from an email, from, to email the right person at the right time. Things can just change, it might not be something that blows your company up, but it might just put you on a different, a different pathway or introduce you to something else. It could be that you go for a walk and you just think of a new idea that changes how you approach something, and you've got to be open to that. So if you're negative and thinking that you're so far away from success, then that'll just probably be true. But if you're open to the idea that tomorrow, you could be on path to like a really successful business, even just the start of that path, then you're more likely to see it when it comes. And that kind of bleeds into number two, which is keep the faith in your product idea, but always be totally honest about how good or bad your product is. Yeah, I get a lot of people come to me with their ideas for all sorts of businesses, and sometimes really good products don't make good businesses. The unit economics just don't work. People just aren't willing to pay the amount that you need them to pay to actually, you know, to make money out of the product. So that one, you know, you've got to be honest about is it might be a good product might, but it might not be a good business. The same with the product, you know, especially ideas for apps, they can often look really good in your head, and you can think how amazing that'd be for the world. But, you know, when you get the middle reality, are they really solving a problem? Is it actually something that people want or is it a bit of fluff content that they don't, you know, doesn't actually really solve a problem? And so you've got to reexamine that, I think a lot, and be honest and brutal, and don't listen to the people who like you, you know, because they're going to tell you that it's great, because I don't want to offend you, you know. So just trying to be constantly re-examining that. And if, I think from my point of view, you know, if you really do have that strong conviction in belief in the product, then you've got to keep going. Let lens itself to number three, which will be super aware of your cognitive bias towards things that support your existing opinion on something or rejecting information that goes against it. So everyone does this. It's so hard to not, you know, in every aspect of your life, on all your opinions on everything, politics, etc. Is that, yeah, you're so much more open to things that support something you really believe in, and that's super dangerous, especially in business, because if you just hear, you know, reaffirming things and ignore the other things because they don't support your idea, say that your product's good or, you know, that you're doing things a certain way, and that's a good way to do them. If you're ignoring the negative signals, then I think you can go down a bit of a rabbit hole and be in a bit of a trap and then just be delusional. I'm interested in this next one, because, you know, we've been chatting nearly 90 minutes, and you're an incredibly competent, go-getting problem solver, but if I can do it in 20 years, then the average person can probably do it in 5 to 10. What do you mean? I think, yeah, I mean, I don't really see myself as being like super clever or smart. I'm not very organised, and it's simply just a matter of pointing in the direction I want, you want to go. So, if you want to be somewhere, you've got to head in that direction, and I think so many people just aren't really heading in that direction. They're heading in an almost opposite direction. And so 20 years is a long time to become successful, to become an overnight success, you know, and I think it doesn't need that amount of time. You don't need to go, "Oh, look at that guy, well, I haven't got 20 years to get there." And that's true, I don't think you don't need 20 years, you probably don't need 10. I think at the average person, if they put themselves in the right direction and work towards it, can probably do it in much less than that. There's piece of examples of that as well. Success in wealth is preferable to not having wealth, but that's all it is. You still have similar struggles because your baseline moves. Yeah, and that's definitely a realisation that I've come to experience, is that, you know, everyone's wanting to increase their wealth, and I think a lot of people think, including me, that it's going to fix all your problems and your life's going to be really easy and sweet. And I think having a certain level of wealth is definitely preferable to not having it. There's no doubt about that. But you still face pretty similar struggles. It's still hard to go to the gym, it's still hard to eat healthy. You still have normal relationships stuff. Stuff, your life just continues as it is normal and almost for everyone. You get to do some new things and the shifting baselines is, you know, you just get you two used to it. I guess an example of that is I used to go on a surf trip like every five years and now I go on one every, you know, maybe two a year. And if I don't get to go on two a year, then I'm as pissed off as if I didn't get to go on every five years. It's the same feeling. So your baseline shift and you've got to be aware of that. And I think you've got to just try and be actually just grateful for what you do have. And rather than focusing on what you don't have, you know, with kind of covered this one a little bit, there might be a new angle on it. Having an idea for an app is only a tiny part of what you need. Creating an app is creating a tech business and there's no escaping that. And that's just, you know, you're not in the industry of your app, you're in the tech industry and a lot of people with their ideas for an app, they want to really focus on the idea and talk about how good the idea is and I'm not a good judge of anyone's idea, you know, like it could be a good idea, it could be shit idea, I don't know. But, you know, they have to realise that if you want to do an app, you have to accept that you're also starting a tech company. And that involves being able to speak the language, to engage with tech people, have the budget and be prepared for it. Otherwise, because it's not all, you know, it's not about just talking about the future and the vision for the app. It's about getting into the, you're getting into the weeds and having to figure out some pretty complex stuff from tech point of view. Well, last one, if you build it, they won't come. You need to have a very clear path to customer acquisition and be real about how much it's going to cost to acquire a customer. Yep, so, you know, that's a huge lesson from my point of view is I just built this thing and thought, oh, you know, people start using it, then more people start using it. There's a real confusion between distribution and marketing. I think for a lot of people is that you think an app, it can be live and global in, you know, minutes after you publish it to the store and that there's billions of people on the store available and they can download your app and, you know, it'll be successful. But it just doesn't work like that. You know, that's distribution. But people need to find your app or, and the only way you can really do that is to promote it somehow. And there's a cost to promoting it. So you have to know what your cost to acquire a customer is. In our case, the cost to acquire our customer is actually higher than the customer's first purchase. So we spend more to acquire the customer than what they pay us. But we have so much data that we know that our average customer purchases, you know, a certain number of challenges. So our lifetime value is higher. But you need to know that. And at the start, when you're, you know, I'm trying to acquire customers and you see that the cost is higher than the sale price. It's a terrible metric to be staring in your face like, we're losing money. Every time we get a customer, we're losing money. And so you need a bit of faith that, you know, or you need a business model when you need to know that your numbers are going to, your lifetime value of your client is where your customer is going to sustain your business. Otherwise, you're not going to have a business. Told you the end was going to be good, eh? Yeah, he's a heart man. I am going to start wrapping us up. But I want to reflect on what's the time frame since you've stepped away from CEO and a little lesser with the company. Yeah, so March 2023. So the other year, year and a half, year and a half. Yeah. And so where you at, I know you kind of, I think, Brie might have joked that he's got an idea for an app, but are you at the point where you're starting to think about what's next or what is your mindset? Yeah, definitely. I'm open to thinking about what's next for sure. It's a very weird space to be in. And yeah, I'm not sure what I'll get into. I'd like to get into something maybe with, you know, the conqueror is amazing because it helps people. And I think I've got a real kick out of the fact that it's actually a good product that helps people. So I think that's important for me. I want to do something that's useful. That's got to be the driver at this point, right? Like we're spoken about the company's making 80 million dollars a year. Money is not the, it's got to serve more of a purpose for you to, it is a weird place to be in because it's like, well, why, why should I do anything? Yeah, I actually enjoying my time off. I wanted to give myself three months to decide what I was going to do next. So it's turned into 18 months and people told me I'd get depressed and be really bored. But to be honest, I've kind of enjoyed it, you know, it's been, it's been, it's been weird, but it's been enjoyable. And it's nice not having any pressure to have to move into the next thing. And whatever the next thing is, yeah, I just, I don't probably want to start something from scratch, I don't think, probably like to join in with someone. Yeah, we've got a bunch of plans within the company as well that to expand the company into maybe doing different product lines and even entirely new businesses. So that's pretty exciting. And I'm still involved in the company, not day to day, but from a kind of, you know, just complain about things if I say that. Is that with a conqueror adventures kind of fits in as well? Yeah, so the conqueror adventures. So the guy runs that fill is a good friend of mine. He run, he's had a career in running tours, our bound tours and bound tours from, you know, into New Zealand and then out to other parts of the world. And then, yeah, during COVID was pretty tough time for his industry. So we teamed up and we were like, well, we've got a whole bunch of conquerors who have virtually been to these locations. So let's do some tours, real life tours to some of our virtual locations. And then see if some people from the conqueror want to come along and actually visit those places. So a really cool story would be, you know, we talked about like our idea of customer. It's like someone who maybe was maybe a little bit overweight and they took on say the the Inca Trail virtual challenge. It's the first time they've ever done any exercise and they do it at home on their treadmill and then they get their medal and they're really stoked and, you know, they've turned their life around and for the positive and they've attributed the success to partly to the conqueror. And then they also go and do the real Inca Trail with the conqueror adventures and they get to complete the real Inca Trail because they've, you know, they built up the stamina to be able to do it and it kind of completes the circle from virtual to real. So that's how the conqueror adventures was born and it's a pretty small operation, but we definitely, yeah, full runs tours into New Zealand, but also around the world to those other locations. That's pretty cool, pretty cool little story. This whole thing is pretty cool. So I can't believe that you haven't told it before, right? This is kind of like we spoke before we started about how it might end up being a quite therapeutic and reflecting on everything as kind of a cool space. How has it been talking through it? Yeah, it's good. I don't know why I've been reluctant to talk about it. I don't know if it's been reluctant, so I think it's more just been just not really got around to it and not really had the opportunity to, so voicing it out loud because you talk to, you know, you hear it and you hear it, but voicing it out loud makes it sound pretty crazy as well. But yeah, now it's been been therapeutic. It's in civilian voices. It is like I was super excited. I had obviously majority of people who would suggest listening to this had no idea and then in researching it just became incredibly excited about hearing it firsthand. Does it, like, do you bump into people at restaurants or bars around the world and they go, "What do you do?" And then you kind of launch into like a variation. I'm trying to avoid that all castes. Yeah, but yeah, what do you do? I don't think I've ever bumped into just a random person who's also been a conqueror, you know? Really? So we're like over a million customers, but that's not a lot of people in the world, you know what I mean? So just randomly bumping. I know lots of people who have done it and friends of friends and things like that, but we actually a couple of years ago, when I was sort of, I was actually quite a few years ago, when I was doing the deliveries still, there was an adress and it was in Papamoa, which was like where I live. And I was like, "Oh, I'd really love to go around and hand deliver this. I'll come there door and be like, "Hey, here's your medal." Because I would have thought that buying from an American company for sure. That's a bit creepy. You shouldn't have done it. It's a bit creepy for you now, I didn't do it. What's the, is there an upper limit? What's the old, do you know the oldest person that's ever done a challenge? Well, into their 90s. So we have a, you know, a personality in our Facebook group called Rok Jane. And she is like mid 90s and she does, her son does the posting on the Facebook page, but she's there with her medal and sends a bit of a message to the group. And it's amazing that group. You know, a person can post a picture of themselves holding their medal and tell a little story like Rok Jane and 3,000 people will like it and 500 people will comment, you know, positive comments and imagine that when you're 90 and you're a social media star, you know. So it's pretty cool and that happens daily in our group. Yeah, people just get massive support and encouragement and that has actually become part of the product as well, is that you sign up for this thing, you do the challenge, you get the bad all, you get the postcards, you know, you get the content, you do the, the trees and the bottles and you join this group and the group. She is you on and it strangers, you know, from around the world. It's so cool creating something which has that, it helps people. You know, like you could have created an app and it's kind of, like, it does really well, but the fact that it actually gets people out exercising and it builds community, it's like, yeah, it's so good. Yeah, it's definitely a pretty good product and I think I've learned that that's something that I need, you know, it's a nice to work on a product like that because and we actually attract staff who want to work in, you know, more meaningful industries. So we've had, you know, staff have come from like, you know, Kiwi Fruit and you know, Kiwi Fruit Tech and it's like, there's nothing wrong with that, but it's not purpose, not very much purpose driven to be trying to, you know, get a bit more efficiency out of growing Kiwi Fruit. Yeah. So we kind of have a chance to attract staff that appeal, that social appeal is there. And then we, you know, trying to behave well as corporate citizens as well and we've, like we raised, I think it was, like, it was over $700,000 for the Ukraine humanitarian crisis that occurred at the start of the invasion. And that was just our community. We put together a challenge in like two days and our community responded by entering it and we donated everything to save the children and the Red Cross. Amazing. Yeah. So, you know, get to get to do those, those feel good things as well, but all of that comes from a really good business model and having the free cash to be able to do that because otherwise you can't do it. Whole thing's been bloody brilliant, mate. Thank you so much for coming in and sharing it all with us. I've loved the whole thing and I've learned so much from it. So, yeah, thanks, Shaney, yeah, anything. Yeah, incredible insights. And I think the most inspiring thing is that you seem like just an ordinary dude that has turned this amazing thing, but so worthwhile as well. I can understand how you get personal satisfaction from creating something that is doing such good in the world as well. Thanks guys. That's been in therapeutic. Yeah. Yeah. I appreciate the chance to tell the story. Last one, we can we find all this stuff if we're looking online. The conqueror dot com. Easy. In our research for this episode, we spoke to Raoul the Romanian, who is now the CEO at the conqueror. Well, to be precise, we voiced note of each other. And we thought Raoul's description of what made Adam different and successful was so good that we're going to play it and its entirety now. Enjoy it. Alright, so here are three things that I think makes Adam a very special person. It's his resilience. His high trust and his problem solving. So I want to start with with resilience because it is probably the thing that I've never seen in anyone else to that degree. If you think about what he went through from starting, you know, coming up with that year, starting a company back in 2013, through all the failure he had to deal with every single year, you know, 2014, 2015, 2016. He runs out of money. He even takes money from friends and family. He pivots the product. He pivots the company. He fails again. He loses everything. All that failure, you know, to keep your belief in your idea and just, you know, grind your teeth and stay in the game for so long after again, trying so many things, you know, putting so many effort, trying different methods, you know. It is just astonishing that he kept doing that for six years until we started collaborating. I would have personally quit almost like maybe a quarter in the journey that he had. So he really taught me this lesson of, you know, sometimes it's just enough to stay in the game and at some point something is going to happen. Of course, if your product is good, but that's, you know, where the belief part plays a big role. So the second thing that makes him especially his high trust. He's a very high trust leader. It is wild to think back to like 2019, 2020. So we started working in July and the previous month, he did 8,000 AZD revenue. Nine months later, we were doing over two million AZD in revenue. And throughout that period, I don't think we had a single call. Like we were just texting on messenger, you know, a couple of messages once in a while. And I was like, "Hey Adam, I want to triple the spend." And he'd be like, "Oh sure, give it a go." And even then in 2020, when we totally exploded, when COVID spread all over the world, the calls that he made back then, you know, we would take random people that we both found. And we would give them an insane amount of responsibility. And, you know, total control, total autonomy over very big areas of the business. And that's how we managed to grow so fast in such a fast time, you know. You'd see someone, you'd think they're great, and you'd just give them, you know, you'd trust them completely to make the best call in that situation. And I've seen that happen with him again and again. He has so many stories about it. It's like one of the craziest one is when I think he found some freelancers from Latin America to help us with customer support. Like we're getting so many emails every day. He couldn't do it anymore. So we hired some people from Latin America. And then when COVID happened, they couldn't do it anymore. And he basically went and told them, "Hey guys, if you can set up a structure, go and recruit as many people as you can." And he's fine. You know, we made like a compensation mechanism. And overnight, just like that, he gave the total control to, you know, create this department from scratch, you know, three months fast word. I think there were already like 15 people working in our customer support team. And they've built one of the most amazing and praised customer support teams out there. So he's high trust without it, for sure, we couldn't have skills as fast. And the last thing that I think makes him great is his problem solving. And what's special about his problem solving is how well he managed to adapt it, no matter the situation we were in. You know, whether we're talking about dealing with a very small supplier to negotiating a big contract with Warner Brothers, you know, he goes into the situation. He asks the right questions, you know, he gets the right data. He creates clarity for everyone and focuses everyone else on, you know, the key point, the main bottleneck in that situation. And, you know, he might not give the solution itself himself, but he helps other people, you know, he makes this clarity in everyone else and focuses them on the right path. And because of that, I think we didn't had any big fuck ups, you know, throughout so many years. Like we would just chat about any sort of, you know, big problem or crisis or opportunities that we have. And we would be able to react in, you know, a good way to that. And to think how much you need to adapt, you know, how much you're thinking in your mindset needs to change from when you're working with like thousands of dollars and you're working with like two, three people to working with 20 people, we're working with 60 people. And, you know, you go from working to with like tens of thousands, hundreds of thousand dollars, a million dollars. Like some people just simply cannot make that shift. You know, you think the same as you did back when you were much smaller. And that's obviously you're going to make mistakes. You're going to, you know, care about the wrong risks. You're going to look at the wrong opportunities. And with Adam, I feel like at any stage, at any given stage, we were in, we managed to really care about the most important thing at that given step. You know, so, yeah, we had a very very focused approach throughout the whole journey. So those are the three things that I think, you know, really making special and without those, we wouldn't have been able to grow so fast and so smooth throughout this period of time.