Unleashing your Zilla with Hartley Pike, co-founder of Sitemate

One day when you grow up you'll just be like stomping around and causing mayhem for a whole bunch of companies that you're scared of right now because you think they're big and they're undefeatable. And one day you'll be there, got so much bearing down their buildings. That's Harley Park, the co-founder and CEO of Site Mate and this is Wild Hearts. Welcome to season three of Wild Hearts, I'm your host Mason Yates. And this is the podcast dedicated to revealing the secrets and the founders looking to change the world. Today I'll be interviewing Harley Park, the co-founder and CEO of Site Mate. It is a business that exists to enable the human race to build roads, bridges and buildings faster than we build software. So at the end of every pitch investors weigh in with their loves and concerns and one comment in particular stood out like a sore thumb. Nicky Shivak, one of the founders of Blackbird Road, that Hartley is the kind of personality that Blackbird exists to help and was originally set up to find. In this episode, Hartley vulnerably shares the principles he's leaned on as he dove into the ambiguous darkness of founding a company, how the greatest strengths of Site Mate originally look like the greatest weaknesses and the tactics. Site Mate has leaned on to build products, firewall class talent and how they are internationalizing a product led inside sales motion business. I can't wait for you to listen to this episode. Here is my conversation with Harley. Why don't you take us back to receiving the approval that you've made into Site Mate? What was that like? Great question. I actually hadn't resigned from my day job at that point. We were waiting to see if we got in and whether or not it was going to become a full-time venture, so to speak. So I remember getting it and yeah, we spoke to David Kenny who is one of the startmate mentors and has been around, I think, since the first cohort. And yeah, super, super excited about getting in and also somewhat daunting with the prospect of yeah quitting my day job as an engineer working out on site and yeah, about to go into very unfamiliar waters and head over to San Francisco. So yeah, daunting was probably the best word to describe it. Yes, sir. What was what was that like? It was overall amazing experience. I would almost say jarring as well would probably be one way of describing it like the incline on the learning curve was just immense. And I remember about halfway through the trip, you know, we sort of sat down and almost just like processed what we just learned in the last two days and it felt like, you know, a mini lifetime of learnings crammed into sticks meetings back to back over two days that rocker had booked in and had us walking all over San Francisco just office to office door to door going to all of these meetings. It really just, you know, opened our eyes to sort of what's possible and I think it was good being like physically removed from the Australian ecosystem for a period of time as well. Out of 10 if you would look at your professional experiences to date, how would that rank as potentially the most shocking or jarring out of them all. The way I think about it is like inflection points in either the company or your thinking there have been a few inflection points, maybe half a dozen also over the last few years and I can't think of a larger inflection point that was created in such a short amount of time. There have been others that you know took maybe a little bit of time to sort of think about and then a just thinking and sort of take action based on that yeah as said the gradient on the curve, you know, instead of just like a 10 degree improvement it's you know like a 45 degree angle like you're going at one direction and then just bang you know. There's a new direction you're heading so yeah pretty immense as I said like the magnitude of that inflection in terms of the angle on the curve even just from the thinking you know it took a while for the results to come through in the business but you know the thinking was changed almost instantly and then it just took time for that to trickle through which yeah obviously blackbird is very aware of in that moment. Did you know you were hanging off a cliff or is it like I've now seen a few data points in hindsight that was that was definitely an inflection point because obviously when you're there it's it's very ambiguous and unclear well I feel like that trip and in particular one meeting with crocker where. Nick Crocker by general. Yeah sorry. They're on a name to name basis. It's been this is just a name we're on surname basis well yeah Nick was it was his first and last or at least last to date start make or. So yeah we're in startup house which is a place I think it's now shut down unfortunately but it was awesome just like this super cheap accommodation with a whole bunch of scrappy founders. It's a good question it was almost like the bottom of the journey like it was kind of where we bottomed out was like in this room in startup house. Crocker sitting there giving us a dnm about the future and sort of what we're going to do and it was quite painful and then from then on it sort of it went up and I can't think of like a harder conversation that we've had. So yeah as I said like from there it really improved and it was just due to that change in the thinking can you share the conversation it was. You know two weeks before that meeting I was working out on site as like a construction site engineer and Nick basically sat us down and asked us who was running the show and. Gavis a 101 in founding team responsibilities and having a hard conversation about who's going to do what and you know also sort of tying that into like people's titles and things like that which I've noticed I think especially with a lot of Australian founding teams they seem to be bad at having that conversation about titles and responsibilities and. You see a lot of like co CEO structures coming out of Australia and I think it's because they're not sitting down and having that conversation and realizing that one person having one title versus another is an important discussion to have and can actually. Accelerate the team by a great deal of magnitude if you really clarify who is going to do what and I think a lot of people store because they don't have that conversation so yeah we we had that combo and I was kind of in pasta syndrome and Nick Nick essentially sat me down and was like you're the CEO and I was like I kept in what you know whatever you say I'm just a construction engineer or at least I was two weeks ago. And that kind of just changed my whole mindset and then it took you know probably 12 months or so for that change to come in full effect and then you know from the day that we sort of I guess announced my role changing like we've we've grown every month consecutively for like nearly five years and before that we were flatlining for two and a half or so so yeah that single conversation you know you can almost draw it back like all the way back to that conversation. I guess you had a different vantage point during that period what were you able to see that you weren't able to see before. It really came from I mean there was those discussions with Nick and then there was probably maybe three or four other founders or founding teams that we met and this sort of you know ties into a couple of the sort of operating principles that I've got which we'll cover as we go. You know it's probably Mike and Alan from up guard Gindo from happy co Casey and Chris from bug crowd when we went to their office in SF and and probably Rory as well that those sort of four teams all had similar themes and and it was really just like opening my eyes and our eyes up to up towards possible and I guess instilling some reality but also some confidence. And you know one of the things that Nick really drove into us during the cohort was something he calls intellectual honesty I don't know if he still talks about it these days or if it's if it's is one of his buzz words these days but it was good and it worked and it's kind of self explanatory but you know it really just helped us understand where we were this is where we thought we were and there was a very big difference between those things. And you know having that sort of honesty and just realizing okay we actually don't know very much at all and these you know these other Aussie founders are over here and they've you know they've shown us what's possible and it came down to you know a lot of it was how to get to product market fit not so much like a playbook but just like how to think about it and how to iterate on it and you know how to sell when you don't have anything to sell and sort of how to use that mechanism to to then get to product market fit. That was kind of a recurring theme of all of those meetings I want to get on to some of those lessons but to go down a bit deeper when you were facing the abyss and there's that moment of realization or I guess the intellectual honesty of where you think you were and where you actually are what was giving you the confidence to keep going that you were actually onto something here. Definitely evolved almost the day we got back from San Francisco like we landed and we essentially through all of our prior product thinking not in the bin but almost in the bin or sort of pushed it to the side and the approach that we took as a said from essentially. the day we landed was we just started designing and sort of rapid prototyping and then we'd go out. Sam and I would actually had to borrow my mum's car because neither of us had a car at the time. So we borrowed my mum's car and we drove around to sites and essentially just showed people designs of ideas which were kind of loosely connected to our MVP at the time that was running like we had two or three customers but a lot of them were sort of tangential directions that we could take and yeah we just drove around different sites with you know we do like three or four sites in a day show people concepts and just look at their facial reactions and sort of see what resonated and essentially just tell them it's real it's ready and it was just clicked through this was before Figma so it was we're using a tool called Invision and proto.io and yeah we just clicked through and just like repeat that and we did it for about two months like we actually stopped work on our MVP for a couple of months like didn't work on it at all no features no improvements just froze it and and iterated based on what we'd learned and then we essentially reached a point where we'd had enough meetings that we feel like we'd sort of uncovered what the opportunity is for what is now like our first product - pivot and then we changed the whole direction of the company to sort of drive in that path. What was the relationship that you built with Rory and propeller the up guard founders happy co-Francis as well I should mention from propeller yeah and how did that help you during the start mate program? Yeah all of them was slightly different relationships with like Mike and Alan as an example from up guard that was very like how to sell and the mindset around sales and go to market I remember leaving that meeting almost sort of in tears of laughter because Mike was just so intense and just like it was just like getting slapped in the face for like half an hour straight it was relentless but I loved it like the the energy was awesome and I think he could just tell that we had something there but we just needed you know the band-aid pulled off so so that was intense but unreal. With Jindo he the sort of rapid prototyping approach that I described was actually you know what he shared about how he discovered the opportunity for happy co- it was you know he had some designs on an on an iPad and would just go to like some real estate and like flick through and like pretend that the app functioned and like press button but he would actually just swipe screen to go to the next design so we essentially just you know mimic that and yeah with Rory it was sort of more personal like it was working through the team challenges that we had and the relationship with Rory probably carried through the deepest you know post start mate also because we were both based in Sydney so there was a little bit more face-to-face coffee catcher ups and the like and yeah that's sort of now ventuated to just helping out you know advising on the board and just being a a person to call. Internally I don't know when you found this out but every month we'd receive your monthly update with Nick making a comment about you being heartzilla when you found that out what about me to you and share what heartzilla means to everyone listening. Yeah good question my relationship with Nick was awesome but also interesting because on one hand Nick sort of instilled this really deep belief personally but because we were still working through some of the broader challenges he also had some magic concerns on the business side so yeah I think where where heartzilla came from is really just that sort of deep personal growth opportunity or or at least seeing early signs of that personal growth and like I think everybody has it but you kind of need the ingredients to unlock it and it's it's sort of a combination of caring deeply like caring so deeply about a space that time almost becomes irrelevant and that's sort of what happened to us was like I just knew it was probably going to take like 18 months or a couple of years to like fix the problems because they were just so deep in our original founding team and sort of what we had to overcome and yeah as I said like time almost became irrelevant and we just knew that pushing through that would sort of get to the side and and a couple of you know transformational key highs sort of helped along the way there. So yeah I think like where the heartzilla and the zilla analogy comes from as said is the depth of the personal care and then how quickly and how big an individual can potentially grow and sort of like the team around them and I remember Nick you know we were sitting in services going he sort of just instilled this seed of thought in my head which was like one day when you grow up you'll just be like stomping around and like causing mayhem for a whole bunch of companies that you're scared of right now because you think they're big and they're they're undefeatable and one day you know you'll be there Godzilla like and peering down their buildings and that was kind of the the seed of thought and it just stuck right and and then it just grew and grew and grew we're probably still a fraction of that vision but making progress and you mentioned there was an 18 to 24 month period where you were going through that journey of personal growth to the extent that you feel comfortable sharing can you reveal some of those challenges that you went through yeah I mean the challenges were broad and varied and constant but a couple of sort of principles that I had that sort of helped us get through that period the first one I have a name for it so it's it's called day lighting where the analogy comes from is if you fall over and graze you know your knee or your elbow it will hurt and then a scab will grow over and that the fastest way to heal a scab is through sunlight or daylight sometimes putting bandages and a bandaid can actually slow it down and you know you probably know that because like when you get your your arm wet if there's a scab under a like it it softens up and then it takes it takes longer to heal sorry about the visceral detail but it's you know it's sort of relevant to the analogy so so yeah if you put it in sunlight it accelerates the time to heal drastically and that was kind of the way that I looked at us at that early stage was we had basically wounds in the business all over the place there was multiple and the process to fixing those was essentially well we're going to send in a monthly update and we started doing it I think it was in May 2018 so we're going to do a monthly update and we're never going to miss a month just regardless like it's just something we do like if we don't do it you know the business doesn't exist basically and there's going to be no filter like it's just going to show all the scabs and the daylight was just putting it out there it's it's not necessarily that like showing investors or showing shareholders is the daylight it's just the fact that it's transparent and it's really hard at the start you know scabs don't heal straight away it's not like you put it in the sun and then like 10 seconds later it's it's healed but each month it sort of stays there for a while but then you get to about the fourth or the fifth or the sixth month of just like continuously reporting this bad thing and eventually it goes away because you just know in the back of your head that if I don't do something about this this week next month when I send this update I'm going to have a report on this bad thing again and it feels really hard the first two or three months because you just know like you're not actually making any progress against fixing it and some of them are harder than others you know you have big wounds and small wounds and similar analogy and that's what we've done and we continued those updates you know not just to Nick Kroger but to you know all of our sort of key stakeholders and shareholders so yeah that's probably the number one principle and then the second which sort of ties into the reference to the relationship with Rory is one that's called drafting so it also starts with D no link there kind of like it's convenient it's convenient by lighting and drafting yeah so drafting comes from really sort of any kind of motorsport something like Nazcar or the V8s would be like the best reference essentially like aerodynamics so like when you're racing a high speed vehicle race car drivers will often sit behind the car in front of them and catch their draft and then the car in front basically takes the brunt of the force from the wind which is quite a lot when you're moving at a high speed and that creates a sort of pseudo shield behind that first vehicle and the cars behind will try and tuck like as close to it and it's the same kind of analogy like finding someone who is sort of one two three years ahead of you in your journey you know they're sort of taking the brunt of the force they're the ones that are learning like all the things for the first time or ideally they have someone in front of them and then you have this kind of chain reaction of people drafting one another you know in my head Rory was kind of like in the car in front and we sort of learn a lot I think the key thing is like there needs to be relevance like ideally you know they they have some sort of overlap in like the business model or the type of business some sort of like loose target customer overlap would be good as well and you can just think about that as like a shape thing if your vehicle is the shape of a circle and the current front of you is the shape of a triangle the draft effect probably isn't going to be as strong whereas if like your circle and they're a circle or as close to as possible you know then it's going to be maximum impact on the aerodynamics and it's kind of the similar structure like if you're in B2B and you try and find someone who's in consumer yeah they'll probably have like some general help like maybe some hiring stuff and things but it's not going to be as good So yeah, that's just a good like analogy to think about it. I love that. And I mean, there was actually one of the reasons why I started Wild Hearts. Because I felt that there was so many podcasts out there that were sort of interviewing people who was so far removed from what life was like in the day to day today. And it was like interviewing and listening to people that they're like successful after the fact and it was like interviewing and getting the chance to interview people like you. Where it's like your six months to a year ahead of people before they raised their first funding round. And it just makes these stories so much clearer. So thank you for sharing those two principles because I absolutely love them. Why don't you talk about the best product lesson you built during that start mate period or just after that unlocked your thinking? Good question. This one probably owes credit to the time that we had with Ginder Lee from Happy Co in San Francisco. I think if I had to boil it down, what really hit us was how much we learned watching people in their environment. There's so many like articles these days about best practices product management, how to do user research, which I think are all true, but it's all like relative advice, right? If you're a scaling product team, then like yeah, you need to start to introduce like best practices and product management. And once your product matures, you do need to do research about new markets and things like that. But when you're pre-product market fit, which is also quite a large gray area and it's kind of just described by you know, you'll know when it happens. But when you are pre-product market fit and the symptoms of that is sort of no one's really like using the thing that you build. No one really wants the thing that you build. The only people that will sort of take meetings with you is other founders and people that also aren't in product market fit. There's like a few sort of symptoms and the thing that we learned was just like just build staff on a screen. It doesn't actually have to work like don't spend any time coding or doing development and just go and show people and like see what they think. And it's very, very subjective, but you just need to do it over dozens if not hundreds of times and you'll eventually gain this level of understanding about the space that you're targeting or you'll uncover another adjacent space and something else will happen. And that just forms your initial hypothesis and the depth of that understanding. And we try and do it now for new products that we're starting like we don't really have a sophisticated process. We just go and see people and talk to them about a topic and just just keep talking to them. And that's where it kind of comes down to the skill of the founders and the product thinking and the only way to get better at that is just to understand patterns and then sort of be able to reapply them in ways that they might not have been done before. So that probably best summarizes the product thinking from the early stages. And you know, now that we're getting bigger, I'm kind of like, oh, like I wish we could just do it that way still. But we are needing to introduce more structure. Why can't you? You can, but the product strategy has to support the new discovery phase. Like if your product is sort of monolithic where it's kind of like everything in one, then users and customers will always be anchored to what they know. Whereas if you have a brand and product architecture, which is sort of centered around, in our case, you know, it's best in class tools, sort of all nested under site. Mate, the benefit of that as we're growing, we're finding is it allows us as a company to like start a new initiative that is sort of adjacent, but also decoupled from what's working already and just explore green fields without any sort of tiebacks to what we have right now. Obviously, there needs to be logical tiebacks, but from a discovery perspective, it just keeps it like really open. And yeah, that's one thing that we're finding is working well. Before we move on to that next step of the journey, what was the best lesson or takeaway from the first few highs that you made? Well, the best lessons was probably from the first few bowed highs. And then how we reapply those for the great ones. Yeah, we went through a really hard hiring stage. There was a period of time where I basically had to become the interim CTO. And that probably lasted maybe 12, 18 months. And we cycled through maybe three or four like failed engineering highs. And we eventually just kept improving and iterating on our process. And we now have this quite insane hiring flow where the first sort of three steps of the process are completely automated. We've just built out a team in Vancouver. We closed four roles in less than 30 days with no recruiters involved. And they're all like superstars. It was 100% inbound because we failed so hard with those first few highs and just had to really course correct on the model. And also the experience now like 95% of people who go through the flow with us, even if they don't get a job have a positive experience. So we have like automated feedback checks at all of the steps. So it's kind of like an engineering over correction. Like we just stumbled so hard at the start. And then my sort of inner engineering brand just like went into overdrive of our life. How do we just like architect this whole flow so that we find the best people everybody has a good experience. Everybody gets a response. Everybody gets feedback. And it just cuts weeks off the process for you know what a traditional hiring flow would look like. We've tried recruiters a couple of times. But yeah, this kind of philosophically it just seems like it sort of doesn't align with like our general hiring model. It just sort of goes against yeah, a lot of the things that we know are working. What's an example of hey, we found an error B. This is how we solve the system to improve it and D the consequence of that change. Yeah, good question. So I can the first one that came to mind again because of like very painful lessons learned. We have a policy which is when we do a reference check like it needs to be with a direct manager. So like it can't just be like up here or someone you manage like it has to be the person that you reported to. And if it's not, we just won't continue. It doesn't have to be a current manager. So like, you know, if you have a job, you're not going to ask you to like tell your current manager, but like it has to be a previous manager for a previous role. And we had one candidate in particular who went through like four or five stages, got to the end, and then we asked for it. And yeah, they essentially had a dummy spit because we were being so explicit about who it needed to be. And then they sort of went unresponsive and like self-adjected themselves from the process, which was fine from outside. But yeah, then went on like a massive glass door rant about the whole thing. And it was kind of funny because we're like a 10 person company. We didn't even have a glass door profile like they went to. Yeah, they had to create it for us. And so that was the experience and it was super painful. But like again, still for lining that then created our profile, which now is like glowing because of how engineered everything is and sort of everybody gets a response. And then the correction that we made, we kind of had most of the infrastructure. So the correction was, well, let's do like a loom video by whoever is going to manage the person that successfully gets the job. That's the first thing they see when they get the application. And then we have some slides that runs them through like our five or six step process. And then we tell them in the video, we do a reference check and like it needs to be from your previous manager. So just make sure you have you have it ready. If you get to like stage story or four. And now like everybody comments on the video like we do the application form and everybody's like, oh my god, like I've never seen like a video from the person that's going to manage me as like the first step in the process, introducing the company. Yeah. And it kind of ties into like a broader philosophy that we're starting to build out, which is sort of like managing the company like you manage your product. You have an onboarding flow. If you have a product or you have new users, you know, trying to light them at that stage. You have, you know, acquisition activation retention, referral, what we're kind of building all these levers. It even comes down into like remuneration, transparency and things like that is, you know, most SaaS companies sort of have their pricing available on the website. And we've even thought like, well, what if we just put like our levels up on the website and like some of our policies and procedures. So, you know, we're just marketing the company as if it's a product, which ultimately it is like that's, you know, where people come and work. So yeah, there's that sort of like a, we could probably talk about that for like an hour. I'm obsessed with that idea. We're kind of like organically headed into that direction. And we're just sort of slowly like layering on more and more. And like companies have bugs as well. So like, that was a bug right. Like we didn't really look at it as a problem that that person didn't have a reference. It was like, well, it's a bug because we didn't tell them that they needed it in advance. So that's a bum we can fix. And then you just tweak the flow. What was the trigger for the round? Why did you decide to raise capital? We were cash flow break even for about six or nine months heading into the round. And we were just looking at what we wanted to do and weighing up. How long it was going to take us to do those things organically versus pouring fuel on the fire. Basically, the growth was really efficient because of the top of the funnel. We've been doing sort of like, found a lid sales for two and a half three years, like all through the pandemic. And we were kind of capping out at like the capacity there because there's like, there's only so many minutes in a day is to like you can talk to prospects and customers. So there was a little bit of like a stealing. But we could have, you know, organically pulled ourselves out of that. And and sort of still scaled it. But yeah, it just felt like the right time, like we'd had almost three years of turnaround momentum contrasting those early start-mate days that we spoke about earlier. And it just felt like the right time would cross to few really good revenue milestones. The entire funnel was and still is like super efficient. And yeah, that was when you and I had that impromptu chat, like Jeff's and metrics that I can compare us against. 'Cause I honestly, I hadn't even thought about raising for like a couple of years 'cause we were just so focused on execution. And I was like, oh, I was just like punch out numbers in and sort of see where we stand. And yeah, like sort of five out of the seven were sort of world class. So I was like, oh, seems like worth having some combos. - Yeah, I remember seeing it was like, "Hey, we should definitely catch up." (laughing) - Yeah, it wasn't terribly well planned out. It kind of just eventuated from execution and then comparing some metrics and syncing, "Oh yeah, time, timing seems good." And yeah, in hindsight, timing was good relative to like how Q1 and Q2 of this year went with the public markets. So yeah, snuck it in just in time. - Time is everything. Where is site meta now? Tell us about the vision that you have and what you're focusing on. - I guess our sort of fundamental beliefs, our engineers in the built world, in future will operate in a similar way to how technology teams operate today. They'll all be using best in class tools, real time, highly configurable, faster deploy, that are sort of seamlessly interconnected. There are also some like industry specific opportunities with that kind of how analogy wise, like JIRA as a project management tool sort of has like a deeper level of connection to the code base and things like that. There are some sort of like parallels that you can draw, you know, once that sort of initial layer is built and being used. But yeah, that's essentially what it comes down to. And I think that perspective is just extremely unique to site mate because of the founding team journey. Essentially just come out of the industry, construction engineer, designer, and then spent, you know, three years learning about technology and sort of learning how to build technology teams and learning how we need to work and finding the best technology talent and people to work with. Yeah, I'd be lying if I said that that experience of like me needing to become our CTO and like I hated it at the time. Like I thought it was the most challenging thing ever, but it's now feels like a blessing because that experience of like me needing to learn at technology at such a deep level to rebuild the company is almost like a part of the reason why our vision is what it is because I now understand it and understand the opportunity 'cause we've had to do it ourselves. And it was almost good that we didn't have a CTO there for a couple of years 'cause if we did, like if we just brought in like some awesome CTO, you know, as soon as we had that founding team challenge, I wouldn't have been as personally exposed to all of that and they might have just nailed it, but then nailing it might have actually meant like a not as good outcome in terms of the product strategy because it was kind of that struggle that sort of informed it. So that's sort of where we sit right now in terms of the thinking and sort of what we're building towards in sort of like the last 20 years, you know, you had the rise of it. Last year, obviously, primarily Giro and Confluence for sort of developers and technology teams and then, you know, it would have been maybe half a dozen years after that sort of early days. Like Asana came online for desk workers and that sort of real time collaboration. And you know, it just feel like the built world is sort of forgotten about and they're all just most of the times stuck using these sort of bloated all in one systems that you just don't see any technology engineering teams using so-called all in one systems 'cause they've just been eradicated because people don't like using them. They're often sort of sales led. So it's just like bolt on feature after feature after feature based on what, you know, some salesperson is closing like a 200 grand deal for and then it doesn't get thought about like it doesn't become part of the product architecture and there's no sort of intentional thinking behind it. It's all just like reactive light. Yeah, yeah, we need to do this because this customer asked about it, whereas, you know, without go to market, we've kind of tried to structure it so that there's always endless opportunity for our go to market team. And when you have that, it creates an environment which encourages them to say no because you actually forced them to find the best people to work with and that dynamic is monumental for the product and engineering team because it means that we can sort of stick through to the vision. We lose opportunities all the time where people are like, oh, if you build this like we'll come on board and we just say no. We'll later tell them like, does it align with the vision or not and if it does, we'll tell them and tell them to come back and check. If it doesn't, we'll just say like no, we're not even going that direction. Maybe go have a look at this or this. And yeah, it's just having constant excess of opportunity. It has some challenges, but it also means you can take the pressure off the go to market team to have to like put themselves in situations where they need to like, you know, stretch the product to its limit or beyond its limit and create this like massive reactive chain reaction internally. Yeah, it's just classic sort of like sales led pressure on product and engineering versus product and engineering leading the way and then the go to market team just sort of finding the best fits for what we have right now and then just constantly layering on more and sort of like slicing, you know, each chunk of functionality like one by one by one. There has been the status quo that you simply can't get software into the built world just because of how dynamic and non-digital it is. What was your journey of measuring customer love and how do you measure it today and how much of your time is spent thinking about that, especially with respect to what are you building next? Yeah, there's probably a few things to touch on here. I mean, it kind of draws back to the Zilla, the heart Zilla analogy, which is, you know, everything that I thought was a weakness at the start has actually turned out to be at least my biggest strengths, which, you know, a lot of it directly correlates with like the company's biggest strengths, not all of it, but there's a fair chunk. And that again sort of ties into that, you know, your question, which is, you know, we believe that like there are a lot of consultants that write reports about construction in the built world. And I slow to adopt technology. And we've, and like it's just these people that are like sitting in suits in like some office, like probably charging, probably getting paid by someone. I don't know who way too much money to just look at numbers and come up with this opinion piece about an industry. And the data is probably true, but the reason for it, we believe is wrong. We haven't seen any indication that people in the built world are a different species of human than like the rest of the population. Like they all hate wasting time. They all like things that are easy to use. They all don't like double handling information. They all like having real time information. Like there's still people. It's just we believe it's just they've been misunderstood. And they've been, they've been sold to by salespeople and people trying to sort of target verticals. And like having a construction vertical strategy and all of these grand plans, whereas I'm just an engineer trying to make things that I feel like would have been handy. And Sam is a designer. And we just like obsess about the product architecture and sort of like the overall strategy and how it's all going to fit together. And we've had to develop the other skills, which we're now getting better at. And then yeah, sort of coupled with that really hard period where we both had to step up and become technology people and learn and sort of go through that tough couple of years. And that has just even further sort of fueled the division in this direction. Does that answer your question? In part, but I want to develop it more, but do it in a different way, which is holding a mirror up. What was some of those biggest weaknesses? And how have you now reframed it such that they're the biggest strengths? For example, like no go to market experience. I wouldn't have even been able to tell you what go to market was when we landed in San Francisco. No sales experience, like no product management experience, like no software experience, like all the fundamentals that you would think you probably need to know these things in order to like start a successful technology company. Those were all just, I wouldn't even say weaknesses, like they just didn't even exist. There was no spectrum. But having a fresh perspective, we've essentially formed our own view on those things. And a lot of the time with like a heavy engineering mindset and a heavy sort of efficiency and people do it that way. Oh, that seems weird. Like let's just do it this way. It seems way better. For example, like marketing and sales, you go to a region, you set up an office, you hire SDRs who do code calling and like territory based breakdown. And then you have a unique value proposition, then you target your ideal customer profile. Whereas we were just like, oh, like what if we just got like bucket loads of people to come to our website and then sign up. And then we just call them and see if they're a good fit. And that was what we did. And we now basically, we don't spend even this month, maybe a couple of thousand bucks on Google ads or something. And that's like supporting three regional, fully stacked go-to-market teams. So that's just one example. And there are others that are sort of like, hey, even the product, right? Like traditional approach in our space is like, customers don't want to use lots of tools. Like they want this all in one. solution and they want, you know, they don't want to deal with a lot of vendors and some of these things are true, which we agree with some of them not. So like, yeah, you've just got to be this platform that like does everything for all of them. And then like you go and talk to the user base of these products and they're just like, oh, no, we only use like 10% of it. We just use this thing over here and we don't actually touch all of that or we tried to use that and we hated it because it didn't even work. And then this salesperson came out and tried to sell me bolt-hons to buy more of their products. Whereas, where does like, okay, like, what if we have a tool for this and it's just like, it's the best tool if you want to do those things. And then like, we've got another tool for this and it's the best tool if you want to do that. And, you know, they'll talk to each other and there'll be some overlap. But you can either use one or the other. If you don't need both, we're not going to sell you both. Whatever you need, you can just use that or that it's up to you. There are some operational challenges in order to support that architecture. You need global authentication. You need like aggregated billing to still sort of get some of those one vendor benefits that the market does want. But yeah, just like fundamentally sort of different perspectives and fresh perspectives and and now like even just those two examples like those are some of the biggest reasons for growth at the moment. And it's just things that like if you'd asked me back in San Francisco, like, I would have said like, oh, that's our biggest weaknesses. But actually, as Crocker planted that seed of thought, you're just an egg at that stage and you just need to hatch into the Zilla and then go stomp around the city and cause mayhem. 100%. The fascinating thing about your stories that there's just so many incredible traits. I have a fresh view about the world. I have no idea how I'm going to do it, but I'm not going to make any excuses. I'm just going to get after a month after month after month and then your rate of learning is just rapidly increasing and we call it internally a learn at all. And you just have this like sergeant attitude about you where you just want to solve problem after problem for the built world. And I just love your story so much. So I'm glad we could share it today. Me too. The only other thing you asked about was the MPS and like the customer love story. That's right. I remember asking you during your pitch. Yeah, the infamous NPS chart. It's almost better than the MRR chart. Yeah. I mean, that's such a good point. Yeah. It's kind of started low and now it's high. Yeah. So it was it was a negative like back in like 2017. It has anything. MPS wasn't great. And it kind of like it hurt me personally because I was like damn. These are people that I didn't used to work with all of our users, but feel like I was giving myself like about MPS score. Because like that was me. So yeah, it was kind of like taking not offense to it, but like taking it personally. The MPS was more just like a proxy measure of the whole journey that we've spoken about. It wasn't like a thing in its own right. It's just a good reflection of all of the staff you and I have spoken about. We cracked 50 like it's now sort of nudging on 60, which I'm sure you've seen a few MPS numbers. Like it's pretty up there once you sort of go over 56 years usually considered world class. So yeah, it's really just like tied that whole journey together and is also like a good indication of the broader opportunity that we see here, which is around the whole dynamic being flipped on its head from sales let approach to product let approach with sort of highly enabled go to market team. Later on top of that, which is just in sort of constant over supply of opportunity, which then creates positive downstream tension with product to just always just align to the vision and don't get pulled in light random directions, which can just really derail a company and sort of create this Frankenstein product. I should can you spell that out a bit more. So talk about your go to market in the context of internationalizing oftentimes have seen a mistake where someone will go into another country. There's no pipeline bill. There's no customers there, but they assume that the way will be the same as it is over here. But talk about yours because I think it's a really good case study on how to internationalize well. I mean, again, it kind of depends on your product like some products can't really be self service or like sales assist. So yeah, there are some caveats as like it is very much like an it depends scenario. But yeah, generally speaking, what we've seen and like talking to a lot of sales candidates. And I feel like a lot of especially in the last two or three years, there's just been this excess supply of capital. I believe it's made like a lot of founders lazy and people just higher sales people and go to market teams and expect them to create something out of nothing. And we kind of have this philosophy, Lance and I who's every big marketing, which is like, we don't ask anyone in our go to market team to do something that we haven't done personally. If you have that philosophy, it really helps just avoid like major failures because you just have this intuitive gut feel about like what's actually achievable. And as you said, relatively common, just like get a bunch of cash set up an office, high-res the hours first, like get them to sort of call your target market and then sort of book in some demos. But like if you haven't done that personally as the founder, like how do you expect someone else to do it? I know maybe they will be able to, but just statistically probably not as likely. Whereas, yes, so we're just kind of going like, oh, what if we just had some demand there first and then like we could just call them from Sydney, like just wake up early in the morning. So like Lance and I used to do six a.m. every then five a.m. which is really bad, but like six a.m. to you know 8 a.m. We just like spend a couple of hours just heed call North American leads and I do the demos and we just did that for like a couple of years and you know got like an initial customer base and just learned and now we're in a stage like we've got North American go to market team ramping up at the moment. If they question like whether or not is something is going to work we just say yeah, we'll because like we've done it and we know actually we hold all the records and you guys need to break the records now. So as said like that mindset, you know, you can probably apply it to your nuances, but if you just try and do something first yourself and just see it can save you tens of thousands potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in just like making these wild assumptions about sort of what's possible. But it's not wild assumptions is probably take away. I love that. Hardly thank you so much for joining us in wild hearts. Thanks, Mace. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode. If you left with more energy than when you started, we'd be super grateful. If you'd like to subscribe, or review, even share it with a friend in case you want to keep in touch, share feedback or even a pitch deck. I'll leave my blank card in the show notes for you to get in touch. Thank you so much for listening once again and we'll see you in a couple of weeks. Godspeed.