This 1st-time founder raised $4M, kept the team to 5 people—& just raised a $28M Series A. | Parker Gilbert, Co-Founder of Numeric

So listen man, I mean I was reading because you just raised it 28 million dollars series A from from mental ventures massive series A and I was reading your story and I'm like, hey, so this guy you know as far as I can tell the first time founder started this like three and a half years ago you know just a few months before you raised like a six million dollar seed round seems like you raised like four million out of the gate in 21. So I was like I got to get this guy on and just figure out like what is he doing right because I'm sure there's a lot of people that would love to be in your shoes so again thanks for thanks for topping on welcome to the product market fit show brought to you by mistrol a seed stitch firm based in Canada I'm Pablo I'm a founder turned VC my goal is to help early stage founders like you find product market fit Parker welcome to the show thanks Pablo yeah I appreciate it you know and I'm excited chat I think there's there's plenty of things we've we've done really well and then we've made a whole pile of mistakes too maybe just so we get really specific like people that are outside like the counting world take breaks which everybody will know about like who in bracks does what with numeric uh so the the corporate accounting team and then some folks in the finance team will use numeric it really starts on it on kind of it ongoing continuous basis which is numeric is designed to pull in their underlying financial data and then start flagging things in kind of an observability type way where maybe they're issues you know you're missing certain metadata fields you need things to be coded to certain departments or locations or vendors um flying if they're sort of things that a well you know are kind of discrepancies and anomalies all the way then into tracking okay well what is everything that we need to now do at the end of the period to close the books there's all sorts of adjustments all sorts of reconciliation the sign-offs are important because you know there is a control level and an element of making sure that everything's tracked and organized and then we'll get into kind of the synthesis of that information so okay now that we've kind of completed all of the work to to make sure that you know for October all the financial records are in place they're all correct they'll look good um then we'll start to actually use tools and we use a lot of AI to help teams describe okay what changed why did it change what are the drivers how do we then disseminate that kind of into the org you know whether it's internally or externally so our sweet spot is sort of the ongoing accounting into you know the taking that data and then using it uh for for various business purposes and how did you kind of come up with this in the first place yeah so I had kind of an interesting road getting into this space I uh I joined a startup which uh it was an it is an amazing business hearth uh which it was founded by Anthony Gone and and Joe Lawnsdale I joined as the first finance hire right around the series eight uh and I didn't have any finance background whatsoever so I was a bit of a kind of odd hire but the philosophy of the company which I really appreciated into something we we care a lot here today is like you know the goal is like hire people who are you know high slope eager to learn eager to work their tail off and I think that's a great approach in many finance roles is like a lot of this is you can figure it out um especially if you're willing to go through it yourself at it and so showed up and actually the first week the first project announced was like okay we actually have to go get through a financial audit we worked in in a very regulated space we had to provide audited financials to a number of state uh kind of governments and so uh I'd never done any accounting any audit prep work uh but was told immediately like okay first few months like that is your full job your full job is just like clean bill of health you know no material deficiencies uh and then pretty quickly learned like the accounting was a mess you know we had like we were not we were so far away from being ready to produce produce audited financials and uh and that was an amazing learning process and uh I really appreciate the fact that we had some like very patient auditors and you know they'd be in our office every day uh for months uh and I would just spend the time in a conference room with them you know trying to stay like at most 24 hours ahead of whatever they were working on and that was like such a great way to like have a crash course in accounting you know and like really go through the process of understanding okay what does it actually look like to make sure that everything you know that a company owns and and how the business operates is actually you know correct and controlled and kind of ready for you know a very stringent level of of you know reporting requirements and so you know went through that process that then turned into hiring out an accounting and finance team you know building our first operating models going through and and actually kind of managing an acquisition we made going through and managing lots of new business lines we were spinning up and just had an awesome experience doing it and I think you know that the company and kind of the growth curve that we're on we're such a we're such a sweet spot for people to sell like startups to sell software into and so we would kind of get hit up all the time from different vendors and folks starting companies looking to sell into the office of the CFO and my perspective was at the time was that it felt like there were a lot of people selling products for you know forecasting for the sort of more like forward leaning FPNA functions but there wasn't a whole lot that was really compelling in the accounting space which was like the last thing I personally wanted to do you know it's like I hated the fact that you know for oftentimes half of a month you know we would be spending our time just making sure the data is correct and reconciling things and making sure we're ready what is that community example like what does that look like like you say making sure it's correct reconciling that's like what for example yeah that might be you know as simple as like making sure all the data from your bank account is actually in your accounting system and correctly coded to making sure that revenue recognition you know for software businesses you have to sort of typically record you know the recognized revenue versus you know your deferred revenue so you know oftentimes that looks like piles of spreadsheets lots of calculations lots of taking you know data from one system manually entering it into another and then still making sure everything actually looks good and some of the most annoying parts are like you may think you're finished with something as simple as like you know hey we're gonna go depreciate our fixed assets we're gonna go sign off on it but then all of a sudden someone else on your team goes and posts a bill everything's out of whack now a sudden you've just spent a whole bunch of time you know sort of on on work which is unexpectedly changed where there's issues you're trying to do all this work as quickly as possible which which tends to be a lot of different workflows and it gets it gets messy so you have the idea it's like you know the hype time of like 2021 my understanding is you raised you know solid kind of I think 4 million seed kind of right out of the gate what was that was that process like so I mean I was really fortunate to have you know an incredible boss you know at the company I was at hearth Anthony who was really supportive of me wanting to go do this and sort of you know go start a company as my next juncture and so I really love this act that like way before I left to go do this you know we spoke about it we talked about how do I make sure the experience at hearth that I'm having is best aligned to go start a business and then started this kind of on nights and weekends with my two co founders so I started this company with two former colleagues of mine and classmates of mine at Duke Andrew Biel and Anthony Alvarnas and we started kind of tinkering away on this just you know on nights and weekends and and kind of you know talking to a lot of different controllers and thinking you out the space and you know trying to go sort of assess like was this a good idea you know how did you do that I think the first step was like you know me saying I had this problem you know like we haven't figured out how to solve this we're not excited by the solutions you know on the market and I think Andrew and Anthony in many ways are like very skeptical you know they were like okay well like just because you haven't figured out this problem like maybe later stage companies have you know maybe no one else is like you and you're just doing something wrong or different so in many ways like like with a healthy level of skepticism it was like great let's go talk to you know a couple dozen accounting teams let's go talk to companies at different stages let's go reach out to folks and just do pure research of understanding like how have other folks solve these problems what do they think and that sort of like started just the ball rolling of okay well like definitely like other people definitely have this problem you know other people are are excited about you know how we're thinking about the problem even with no designs or anything just you can if you can have a conversation and sort of get someone excited by a little bit of the vision and the way you're thinking about a problem you can start to you know understand okay as it's resonating or not and I think I think that part is critical so maybe just to go like a little bit deeper on it how many of those calls did you did you do and how did you set up those conversations you know how much of it was pitching your vision and how much of it was like truly high level open-ended questions about problems they add and about this specifically my thing is as we probably talked with somewhere from 30 to 40 different accounting teams over the course of you know two months something like that ballpark and I think those those conversations kind of at first started with like totally just open-ended questions and I think probably over the course of those months started to get more and more practical as we went and as we learned things to then the point being like oh by the end of it like we actually have figmas greens we have like some prototypes we're actually starting to you know get into the question of like way more detailed questions of does this make sense how do you think about this like what if what if the product looked this way or that way for how many months did you and your co-founders work on the side probably like five months roughly yeah always kind of the thing that made you that made you jump in I think there were three catalysts I think one we start we signed up some customers built a prototype and they started using the product and then wanting things and you know I think my you know Andrew my technical co-founder felt the brunt of it I mean he was responsible for maintaining a product that people were using and paying for and had a paying customers while you're doing this on the side okay yeah and and they were like they they were rightly like demanding things but you know we all had full-time jobs that we took very seriously and you know there's kind of a very natural break point where it was like oh we actually can't like we're struggling to do this you know while we while we kind of put our best efforts forward in our full-time rules and then we got really excited you know it's like it's one of those things were all of a sudden you start to do this and you spend time with these customers and prospective customers and this is a very natural like pull of oh man this is like really engaging this is like I'm going to sleep thinking about how to make the product a little better you know and I think and then I think the third thing was we just felt like the more it's time we spent in this space we just [BLANK_AUDIO] like the space was more broken than we even realized initially. And so it was kind of really excited that if you can solve these problems really foundationally, this is a really big important business to build here. And so I think it was kind of that combination of those items which made us think, man, this would be a really exciting opportunity to go full-time on, to go really invest in and to go hopefully build a career around. How soon after you quit, did you go out and raise that first-precision round? That round actually got raised right after we quit, but before we had actually even know, I think in at least mine, if not all of our circumstances, it actually left our prior jobs. What was that process? Did that just kind of come to you or did you run a process for it? Very quickly, after giving notice, an investor gave us a term sheet preemptively to go lead that round. We then took a couple of meetings. Someone you knew or just kind of met? Someone who was in our network and someone who we had met after a meeting or two, that was not even intended to go be fundraising meetings. Got really excited about the space. Got excited about what we did, offered us terms to lead around. We then met with a handful of folks who we had connections with or folks we were excited to go spend time with and then sort of wrapped up a process in a couple days. Cool. So now's where we get to the meat of it because in a sense, you've done, well, hard, really the easy part, which is like the research, the pre-seed funding, kind of the setup. Now you've got paying customers, I mean, getting them to cross-line is hard, but building a product that they truly love that then spreads is the part where most people kind of get stuck. So walk me through that phase of it. How did you set it up? Now that you're full-time and you have resources, well, we're kind of main moves. Did you mean? I do think this is totally felt like this is when the hard work really started. The first piece is felt pretty straightforward to then going from the, okay, we have some a handful, half a dozen, maybe 10 early customers to, okay, how do you start to really build traction and momentum and the real like intellectually honest perspective that you have a fit that is valuable and meaningful and the right metrics and instincts that everything looks good. I think from our perspective, we really wanted to focus as much of our efforts entirely around feeling like the customer engagement was exceptional. We wanted folks to really deeply understand why they were using it, what value they were getting out of it. For the first, probably close to a year of the company, I couldn't give you the exact months, but probably close to a year, it really was a team of four or five, maybe six people max, where we were just solely focused on having this early cohort of customers building a product for them, understanding the problems and trying to really deeply get to conviction of like, okay, we've really found a fit that we're really just excited about and that it feels foundational. I think there's obviously a balance to get right, but once you start the sales and marketing process, you can't stop it. Everything gets harder to change, harder to turn. That's what I was going to ask. You raised $4 million. It's a decent amount of money to have a five person team. It seems like it was by design, but how did you think through that and how did you convince? That's another thing I hear sometimes, well, the investors want me to move faster or whatever. How did you align everybody on? Let's be small and nimble until we've got the thing. I think in a very practical way, we were very understanding the fact. We raised more money more quickly than we expected to. We're necessarily intended to. Because someone gives you the money doesn't mean you should go spend it. Also, there's a very real perspective. It's like spending money does not move things faster in many, many circumstances. I think, yeah, really focused on the core things that would truly felt like product market fit seeking. I do think there were lessons in hindsight where looking back, I think there were places we probably could have spent some money to move faster. I actually think that's like, there were places today that I think we made mistakes on the inverse, which is like, where do you be more aggressive? Or do you pull forward certain investments to try and move quicker? I think we were probably almost like too conservative in a couple of circumstances. But I also think those are things you can come back from versus spending all of your money. Turns out, very hard to come back from. Or even just building out a sales team much harder to go pivot the business, reorient things, focus on different areas. There's a balance to find there, which is how do you both invest in the things that you need to go prove as quickly as possible and get ahead of what's coming while also, you know, kind of staying as lean as you possibly can. What's your number one like KPI? What are you most worried about, especially during that year because this is where I find so many things tend to go wrong. Once you start having customers, it's so hard not to care strictly about growing revenue. Like just growing revenue. If you want to grow revenue, you probably should spend against it. You should land more, and then you hire more bodies. And then you kind of, as you said, like it takes its own momentum and you can't really stop it. And if you go on a tray, it's just really hard to pull back. Seems like you didn't do that. So I'm curious, like, what was top of mind for you during that first year that you were obsessing about? Yeah, I mean, I think we were obsessed with, you know, both quantitative and qualitatively feeling like we were delivering a really significant amount of value to our customers, whether that came through in product metrics around, you know, the different work they were completing in the product, different workflows, they were telling us were important. You know, a lot of the metrics we track around like, how do we improve folks time to close? How do we improve their accuracy? So really sort of understanding and kind of coming to a perspective on, okay, what are the metrics that, if we're delivering to our clients, you know, we're providing the right level of value in ROI on the money we're asking them to spend with us. And, you know, if you don't figure that out, like nothing else really matters, you know, and there are lots of circumstances where companies go grow revenue like crazy prematurely before they find that type of fit. And that was something that like we really did not want to go do. And so that first year was really entirely around, you know, having this awesome early cohort of customers, like we were really fortunate. We had, you know, 20, 30 companies working with us, you know, using our product, giving us feedback. And that was hard work. You know, we would get Slack messages from customers telling us like, your product is too slow. You know, I cannot do this thing I need to do. And, you know, we would just be focused every day on making sure we were making the product a little bit better, incrementally improving things, listening to their feedback and trying to as, as it is true as sense as possible, feel real conviction that, you know, we were delivering upon what they expected us. Walk me through that because my assumption had been that you had maybe like five or ten design partners, but you had more like 20 to 30 customers. Yeah. Well, I would say like, I mean, while we weren't going in like hiring sales reps and sort of hitting the pavement on like selling, we were still also meeting with prospective customers, get it, you know, like like we were doing work on the margin of going and signing up new businesses, but it wasn't, you know, that would have ranked, you know, fifth on a list of five priorities as opposed to, you know, maybe the second priority or even first priority right that it might be, you know, in different cycle of the business. So we were sort of incrementally adding customers here there, but it was very much in a like early cohort of, you know, somewhere between a design partner and a paying customer, like they were paying like we didn't sign up anyone who wasn't willing to pay for the software. We did do all monthly subscriptions, which we really liked as they like intensity culture driving element of the business every month. It was awesome, even though it was painful to know that our biggest customers could all quit and walk away if they didn't feel like they were seeing what they wanted to see it. So you purposely didn't lock them up to like year long contracts or two year contracts. Yeah, we had plenty of customers who wanted to pay us for a year and we would go back and say, nope, like we, here's what we use to sign up customers today. It is a monthly agreement with this price tag and everyone conforms to that today. And that was a great way to really build a culture, which was like just intense, you know, you know, I think like I think everyone, it's very easy to sort of rationalize why you're going to fix a churn problem a year from now and not do anything about it. You know, as much as like as much as you'd like to think like you could look at the data, you could look at the metrics and kind of understand, you know, where is there a problem, where is there a great engagement, where is there where, where is there not? I think the reality is like people just don't do that, you know, you kick the problem down the road, you go focus on something different and then all of a sudden you get to the end of an annual contract and you act surprised, you know, that like a customer's churning, even though like you kind of knew the whole time that they weren't getting out of the like they weren't doing with the product what you needed to do to like deliver, deliver the service. So the inverse is like if you just keep the month to month contract, the old time like every month is a renewal for all of your customers, like there's no way to avoid, you know, problems or potential issues on, you know, are those customer satisfied? You know, that did change. There came a point in time where all of a sudden, you know, I think kind of as you exit some of those basic product market fifth questions of like, oh, we actually feel really confident. We understand from our customers, why do they love the product? You know, what do they think they're getting out of it? What does good engagement look like? Then all of a sudden you start to shift and say, okay, cool, let's go start signing annual contracts. Let's go start, you know, now there's actually a benefit of getting the cash upfront, of getting the investment of kind of just conforming to away companies oftentimes just want to buy software and make those investments. But I think in the early days for our business, it was really helpful to not do that. I do think like it's important to recognize like every product is going to be different too. It's like there's like we have a very cyclical monthly cadence to our product usage. You know, people use it every month. There's certain times they tend to use it more than less. They use it as they lead up to a close, they use it during a close. So our product is a very natural like engagement pattern around this cadence, but there are plenty of products that won't, you know, there are plenty like an annual comp review maybe happens once a year. So if your product is designed to go fix that problem like you might not want to offer monthly contracts because you know The the cycle is actually six months away You know, so it will depend I think as well on just sort of like the nature of the product is to you know How you think about that feedback loop and what is the tightest feedback loop you can get? I think so but I think what you're talking about is really thinking from first principles in the sense of even when it comes to your pricing How do you set up pricing to align with whatever your objective is like if your later stage your objective is you know a better J curve better cash collection whatever then the upfront payments of cash make total sense But if your objective is fast iterations and like just finding product market fit and tuning then actually the forcing function of a customer having to kind of re decide let's say every month even if it might lead to more turn in the interim is Long-term more helpful because you're just getting so much more insights Faster and your entire team is so much more motivated that you end up in a better place, you know down the road And if you have the you know if you're not bootstrapped or whatever and you can do it. It's something you should do And I think I don't think that most people in most early-seater founders think about Pricing that way it's usually more like you know what are others doing right or how can I get the most cash and time up for For as long as possible which again like that strategy makes sense at some point But I don't know that it makes sense in the early days Walk me through this really quickly like what what kind of contracts like what was your average customer paying at that point Is it a hundred bucks a month a thousand a month like what kind of what's the ballpark a ballpark a thousand a month? You know a hundred to dollars a month into into thousands like just heading on the rough sort of size But we kept everything really simple really Clean they were all just like Yeah, sort of you know hundreds to to like maybe a thousand a month And then I have to ask and especially in that first year I mean if you look at just like crunch base in this absolute lot of companies like it just looks like you know up to the right like you know The thing just worked and it was like right and I'm curious especially in that first year because I assume that was when any challenges like what were some of the main challenges Do you have any like punch to the face moments where things didn't look as clean? Let's say as you might have hoped you know I think this business and and most businesses You know a lot of persistence is required and there are a lot of times that do not feel easy And I definitely think like you know a big moment for us was was kind of making this transition from Okay, like our all of our priorities are around what are our current customers look like? How is the engagement how do we feel really good about it? And you know it was a really natural period of time where all of a sudden just really felt like things were clicking It felt like we sufficiently developed the product, you know, which takes time doesn't happen overnight You know felt like you could see in the metrics, but also even more importantly just talking with customers You could see their eyes light up talking about certain features you could you could just hear the genuineness of like Oh my god, I love it because that I can do this bit of numeric now I can double click into this account see the data manipulate it do my task go back to my other work And you'd see it in like bugs where it's like you'd see a bug get an you know reported that something isn't working and then like You hear from 10 customers pretty quickly and you realize like oh snap like they're really using that feature like They're really relying on it like they're not happy if something isn't working and so it sort of wants to this period where we started to really feel that signal in that hole But then you know you have to go build a very different muscle, which is how do you go sell and market the product and You know I a great product does not just sell itself and so that was definitely like a challenge to then go figure out okay Well, how do we now go? Start to think about marketing and building you know do an engine function How do we get in front of the right people at the right time? How do we run a really great sales process? You know I had not candidly sold much of anything prior to this experience and then was our sales rep You know selling the product and making you know rookie mistakes and and learning as we go about okay How do we start to translate you know what we feel like is really working with our customers into you know a really healthy Sort of revenue growth and sort of sales and marketing effort and I do think that's something that we learned a ton about But was not did didn't just work from day one They required making a lot of mistakes it required losing deals it required you know What are some of those like you remember any specific that still kind of haught you a little bit like any big deals missed or any big mistakes The you made or your team made around kind of that that go to market motion Ah, I Guess I think I think I've made like every sales mistake in the in the books and like You know and my goal is obviously was just like try and not make the same mistake twice But just be learning all the time and it's the same way we hire for people now in the sales team This is with that same mentality, but May may may need every basic mistake, you know, I think like there's one that stood out worried We're trying to sell a sort of like pre IPO company and they asked how many people we had on the team at numeric And I think I said like six and their accounting team had dozens of people on it And you could just tell like you could just tell all the air was sucked out of the room at that point and it was like Clearly you had sort of step thought you'd said something which like you know and then immediately get the feedback after the meeting Which is like yeah, we're not gonna work with you. You're too small, you know, and you know We don't we don't think this would be you guys would be like you know the right partner for us today And there's a lot of the things where it's like how do you communicate trust a comfort with working with you? How do you really transparent about what that looks like? You know how do you build the sort of relationships like selling into the office of the CFO is not necessarily a place where like It is just riddled with early adopters who want to go work with a five person startup. That's like not you know This is you know, there's real risk real compliance real importance of making sure the product works efficiently well and has everything they need and so a lot of a lot of like the learnings We're about how do you get people comfortable with you? How do you run a really clean sales cycle? How do you communicate externally? What's what you're hearing and and those snippets and the sound bites and the excitement? Yeah, it was hard work. It was hard work But you know it was also something where it just felt like very clear It's like you can get better at this every day. You know, these are problems that people have solved There's a lot of learning you can go do from how other companies have Whether it's hiring sales rep doing reps doing demand gen, you know marketing like there's a lot of there's a lot of lessons You can go take from people and and your goal should just be like learn faster You know move quicker and and kind of get through those sort of painful bits and and that was a lot of fun to then go into the next waves of You know feeling like you're starting to structure and understand what the sales process looks like and what it takes to get a deal closed And what are the risks about a deal following the part and they fall apart at every stage? So how do you be more proactive in understanding of what those things look like and how do you then start to train other people so they can sort of manage the process and Just such a privilege to get to go through that experience and and start to Have enough data points to see what it looks like and understand how you build off And walk me through the other thing is around part of my outfit like you're talking about signals from the product that it's really working like when it comes to ROI What are the key pieces of ROI that you're that you're selling and that you're Delivering on is it that time to close is it something else? Yeah, I think there's I think there's a number of different components about how we we measure value I think the most tangible and simplest one is is really around Okay, if you've got 10 people on your accounting team taking you x days to close and we're gonna go cut that down by y Let's talk about what value does that create? You know when you walk into what it's costing you to spend your team doing this work That's a very simple way of kind of backing into it quickly and is it so let me let me drill on that because like sometimes a lot of people like Talk about this time say thing right like if you do my thing we'll say be 30 minutes and a lot of times it's the softer kind of ROI What do you think in your case made it as? compelling as it seems to be since you're having that adoption is it because it's not just oh My people can work on something else, but it's also this like Time to close like time to close. I feel like is an accepted KPI let's say for the finance team Is that why you are tying to that or like I guess what's your thoughts on that? I think for for companies in a certain size and stage It's really top of mind and I think you know You obviously want to find folks where this is a real you know burning problem and it really is something they want to go Go solve it's you know like we will meet with some companies and they're like this is my KPI for the quarter is go from 10 days to seven days and like Oh, and that that is like what I'm getting comped on measured on you know It could be we want to go public in an order to public Here's what we have to do and there really aren't exceptions around what these timelines or standards look like and so There is like a you know, it is sort of understanding like where is that best fit? You know a lot of our early customers were much smaller than our customers that we now you know kind of have today on and sort of look at like our Our best ICP and that's pretty natural right you sort of start to feel like okay Well these customers that are maybe earlier stage startups. They've got one or two people on their team Yes, they're using the product they like the products But is there willingness to pay and this pain quite as big well actually look this team of 30 accountants like has a really big problem You know there and so it definitely you start you know start to explore different sizes and states But I you know, I'm drilling on this because I find for me at least like this is just From my observations like this is so important is what is already atop of mine KPI for your ICP and Do you actually address that in a meaningful way like that not only that puts you in a place where my experience is they can't Ignore you they have to because if you if somebody's like measured on you know or or their main key for the for the year is going from two weeks to one Week time to close Let's just say and you come in and you're like hey on average We decreased time plus by 50 percent how can they not take the 15-minute call and then if you actually have case studies and enough proof points around it How can they not try it out? It just kind of like Eases your funnel more than it would if you just went and you said you've got 10 people on your finance team They spend two hours a week on clothes or whatever it is their time is worth 100 bucks an hour So I save you two thousand dollars a month like is that is that true in your experience that that there's a big difference You two are not so much honestly I think a lot of the learnings are like different people think about the ROI and like both of those camps and it's on you as Sort of the you know running the sales process to understand what's gonna move the needle for you and how are you thinking about it and how that he sort of makes. the most compelling pitch against it. I think we'll see both. We'll see some people where there's a real like KPI driven mandate by a team, a really compelling event, a really sort of like timely reason. You'll also see others where, yeah, you can completely convince someone, this is a good idea by discussing the value of efficiency and of time and of saving the team. And there's all sorts of general sort of challenges at the accounting industry faces as well, where there are fewer accountants in the industry every year and the number of new accountants is going down and like they're really in demand. So it's actually, you really need to think about attracting and retaining the best talents, kind of to my personal experience. I really do genuinely believe it is. Like you should go automate the most recurring, most mundane problems first because it frees I've ever run to go do the really compelling things. So I think we see the range in sales processes in terms of what's top of mind. But what's really important is like building that relationship in that trust that, you're gonna be a partner and go solve these problems. And you might not know when the timing is right. I think like it's really hard, you know, outside in to understand when you're looking at a company and a prospect, like it is now the right time for them to buy an America. Like I don't know, maybe. And so I've kind of view our role of the sales team is very much like a steward, you know, sort of servant perspective of sales. You know, our job should be show up to a meeting, be useful, provide context about what we do, be very happy to tell people if it's not the right fit, you know, figure out other ways we could be helpful. You know, and just try and be useful and kind of trust the fact that those things will pay off in the long run. And that if and when the timing is right, for someone to go prioritize this, their next quarter is KPIs, you know, all of a sudden this is now a top priority. They're gonna think of us, you know, they're gonna be excited to kind of circle back. And we're gonna have been useful in the process and built that relationship. And there's part of these things that, you know, you're never gonna be able to like always be perfect in terms of timing. So you might as well go make the most of every single engagement and you'll put your best forward at all times and genuinely like sales should be useful. You should be providing value. You should be, you should be doing things in your marketing, in your sales activities that are genuinely making, you know, not just your existing customers, but prospective ones. - So, welcome you through, maybe just give me a sense of like ramp, like, you know, you spend the first year so you have maybe 20, 30 customers, 20, 30 K, MR-ish, how, how, and that's what, like mid 22 or something like that, like what kind of happens from there? Are we talking 2X, like a 5X, like a complete explosion, 10X, like what kind of, what transpires on the customer? - So it's probably took us, you know, another than, you know, six months or so of hiring up our team and more, doing a lot of testing on the go-to-market, doing a lot of experiments in different ways of understanding how do we go start to build that muscle? And then it really was 2023 where we, you know, kind of we started to just see during the, you know, the calendar year of 2023, like all the metrics just moving in the way that, you know, get us excited, get our investors excited, sort of start to feel like, oh man, you've kind of, you've started to, you know, sort of run a business, you've started to see, you know, the right signals from how do you generate leads to close deals to, you know, see renewals, like all those pieces, you just started to see that, a really healthy level of growth. - How many customers did you have now? - We have hundreds of companies that use the product today. - Awesome, and then maybe the last question is just like, on the series A, like, I mean, that's, I think the median series A is like 10 million, this is 28, so, it's pretty out loud series A, like, what's the story around there? How did that happen? - You know, the series A, like, name is, you know, it's kind of hand-wavy right in terms of like, what does it actually mean? It's kind of a demarcation of like certain milestones, but it's also like sequential, so, you know, we hadn't raised an A, so this round was always gonna be kind of an A, even though our milestones and, you know, metrics might look very different than a, you know, sort of like typical sort of company at the series A, you know, like GROC, right? Elon Musk company raised what, multi-billion dollar series A, like, you know, there's only so much you can kind of read into it. I think we've been very intentional and thoughtful about how we raise money, who we work from, how we build those relationships and approach it, and I think there are lots of, you know, founders and folks who have success with very different strategies, but I do think like what is very consistent is people are usually pretty intentional about how do they wanna go raise money, how do they wanna go, you know, do they wanna go do a lot of work up front, do they only wanna fundraise during a certain period of time? Like, like, all sorts of strategies can be successful, and I think for us, what it was was being very intentional, but how do we wanna go build those relationships and find great people who are excited about the space who think similarly about the vision and where we want this business to go, and then are excited to be a part of it and, you know, kind of, you know, finance the business today, and hopefully, you know, long into the future. - But you went in like, ran a full process to kind of close this round, or was it also in no? - This was, so, men live in just let this round, who was an existing investor on our cap table. So they had invested, you know, in the safe that we had raised prior, and so, this was not a round that we ran a process around. - Well, let's end it there. I'll close on the two questions I was close on. The first one is, when did you feel like you'd found true product market fit? - I think there were, I think there were, there were a handful of calls with customers where you could just tell the level of excitement around the product was, was, was higher than it had ever been before, you know, with the new set of features we launched, you could just, you could just hear the excitement, and you're like, wow, that it feels different. It feels different than the excitement or satisfaction that we'd heard prior, and, you know, that was a real demarcation for me, which was like, oh man, like, we should go, we should go sell this thing. Like, we should go, we should go push harder. Like, we figured out something here that's really clicking in a way that is unique and different, and, you know, is really deeply resonating with customers. So it was less metrics-based. It wasn't like a certain milestone. It was much more around the like, and my mind, the kind of qualitative experience, talking with our customers, and hearing what's resonating, and how genuine it felt. Perfect. And then the last question, like, if I remember back to when I started my first startup, it was probably the fastest learning curve I've ever gone through. I imagine it was, it's been similar for you. Like, if you could go back four years with some piece of advice, kind of for your younger self, what might that be? Yeah, I think, I think a lot of this has been an effort in continuing to be more and more confident in the fact that like, you can go sell these problems. And in many ways, like, you should just go focus on the top problem today and get to the next one tomorrow. And, you know, I think there's a real, like, a real kind of beauty to some extent, and being short-sighted, and just being able to really, really narrow down. And so I think, I think my advice to my younger self would just be to do exactly that, to focus on learning quickly, and to enjoy the process, and to prioritize hiring just the best people, and the people you're gonna really enjoy working around, because this stuff is so hard. And, you know, what has made this an awesome experience for me personally has been, has been getting the chance to show up to work every day with people who I respect, who I'm learning from myself, who are doing things in the right way, and are kind of propelling their careers now, and accomplishing new things for themselves. And that's what has made this really rewarding to me. Parker has been a pleasure having you in the show. Thanks for jumping on. Thanks, Pablo. I appreciate it. I just gave you content that you liked so much. You actually listened to the end. And guess what, you didn't pay a single dollar. Not only that, I didn't even put any ads in your face. So you just got a bunch of content for free. 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