Taking Flight with Rory Buchanan

[00:00:00] Speaker A: I see a lot of people focusing on like a very small niche hobby project that they work on part time. It's not a VC backable business. Don't think small just for the sake of making it easy, like think really big. And I think it's something that we're quite guilty of and, and don't think that it's for some special elite. Break your frame and build something cool. [00:00:27] Speaker B: So. Hey everyone, welcome to the Ideas to Impact podcast. Thanks a lot for joining us today. Today, really excited to welcome Rory in. So thanks so much for taking the time to come and join us today. [00:00:36] Speaker A: Oh good. Glad to be here. [00:00:37] Speaker B: Yeah, really looking forward to the conversation. Like I've known you for about a year now. I think we met after like, well, we met in some little Mexican restaurant after you've been in Milton Keynes all day hanging out with one of your early customers and you spent the day coming back on the train and then. [00:00:54] Speaker A: Came straight for tapas, came straight for. [00:00:56] Speaker B: Tacos or something like that. I. Yeah, so that was good fun. But just in this episode we're going to hear about your sort of story on the way to finding Ask Vinny and how everything's been going and what the kind of future focus is for you. So I guess without going any deeper into that just now, do you want to give a quick intro to yourself and to your company? [00:01:16] Speaker A: Yeah, of course. So my name's Rory, I'm the founder, one of the founders of Askvinny. I've got a co founder, Johnny, who stays down in London that I started the business with. He's from Milton Keynes, which is what kind of helped us get that early customer you mentioned. AskFini is AI driven property automation service. So we have customers who have large real estate portfolios all over the uk, Spain, Germany, Italy and they have lots of operations that go into getting a person from initial interest to moving into a property, all the in life operations and then getting them finally moved out. Our tech comes in, uses some AI, some automation stuff and just makes that all possible with significantly less manpower. And that's what we're about. So we've been going for about close to a year and a half ish Now, I don't really know when the official starting point is because we kept on pivoting. We've come from just like a WhatsApp number that would help you fix your boiler all the way to a full B2B SaaS offering for enterprise customers. So about a year and a half I'd say we initially founded a company out of an incubator called Antler, which is a really good experience we can talk about more later. Since then, we've gone on to raise a second round of venture capital funding from some fantastic investors. And yeah, we absolutely have been loving the journey. It's been fantastic. [00:02:41] Speaker B: Yeah, nice. It's really cool to hear how much it's evolved as well in a year and a half, which is no time at all to go from a WhatsApp number, an answering service or whatever, to the full experience and the full journey. Property management. [00:02:56] Speaker A: I think that's one thing that we're pretty good at is, is quickly identifying what works and what doesn't work. So we initially started out with that WhatsApp based boiler triage solution and we had a really positive experience there. I think within a couple of hours of having this idea, we were revenue positive, we were making money, because all we did was we took this number and we posted on social links. Then we got people to, to get in touch with us and we're making money. But then we quickly realize, okay, within maybe the same amount of time we've been doing the whole idea for to a couple more hours, this isn't going to give us unit economics that we need. Let's pivot. Okay, how can we make this bigger? Then we might be changed and we put this out to B2B and then we realized, oh, when you have a point solution, people aren't going to pay the big bucks for it. They want a full encompassing solution rather than just one thing. So we pivoted again, we made it even bigger and we've just done that a number of different times and I think that's really helped us learn super, super fast. And I think that's like our secret sauce, I guess. [00:03:58] Speaker B: Yeah, just constantly listening to what the customers need and then responding to that. And I guess that came across when we first met because you'd spent, I think a couple of days down in Milton Keynes just with the customer learning exactly what was working, what wasn't, what you needed to think about. And I thought that really stood out to me was just how much you were doing that every single day. Because I mean, Milton Keynes is not close. It's not the easiest place to, to from up here. [00:04:20] Speaker A: No, it's worth the effort. Effort though. So we, the, the customer that we have in Milton Keynes really bought into our journey. So much so that they became an investor in the company as well in our last round. And they basically just said to us, hey, have the, of all the branches that I operate, come in, sit with the team, listen to them, come to our daily meetings and it's just like open book. We, we could learn whatever we needed to. And I think we were rewarded massively because of the amount of time that we spent there. Johnny's there right now. He's there for today. Typically we're still doing one day a week with these customers. With the newer customers that we brought on, we don't need to spend as long with them because we've got to a point now where we kind of understand what's broken, understand how we can fix it and we've got that next level of maturity that we don't have to guess so much or do so much discovery, but we're still super close to our customers. If there's ever anything that ever, ever have a dull moment, how can I speak to more customers? That's like my goal thing. Every job that I've had, I've always thought like, you never become worse at your job just by speaking to a customer, always become better. And yeah, that's, that's why we spend so much time in Milton Keynes. It's a great place. It's like it's just far outside London enough that the rents are somewhat affordable. You can still commute in 30 minutes. So like works for me. It's an absolute booming town, kind of economically, like lots of people are moving in there. Lots of like build to rent property there. So super, super loc, beyond just our customer. [00:05:51] Speaker B: Yeah, nice. And I mean amazing access to have. So it makes sense to keep going back there and making sure that you keep that learning going. You touched on a couple of things there that I'd love to dig into because it's that mindset of continuous discovery early on and you know, where did that kind of come from? You know your sort of history before Ask Vinny. You've worked at some amazing companies, you know, the fastest, I think still the fastest growing B2B SaaS company ever in Deal. You know, before that you were Bulb, I think as well, and Trustpilot as well for a. So in terms of that experience, they were either scaling really rapidly or had already scaled really well internationally. What did you kind of learn there that has sort of shaped how you approach then finding your own company? [00:06:38] Speaker A: I think when I think of Bulb, it was probably one of the best experiences that you could ask for. Coming out of university, I actually did a law degree and then quickly found out that I didn't really like doing law. But that was after I graduated. So I Was like, right, how can I, how can I get away from this, this, this world? And I ran away to London. I was quite interested in the climate. So fancy joining this cool startup called Bulb. And it was amazing place. They hired really talented graduates to deliver the impactful mission. And it was really like a lot of fun to be there. I joined when I think, I think there was 30 staff and left when there was over a thousand, joined when there was a couple, maybe 10, 20,000 customers left when there was 2 million. So I really saw that the hypergrowth happening there. I think one of the stories that kind of illustrates what I learned most there is when I joined, I joined just in customer service, so I did a law degree, but I had no idea about product technology, engineering design, like the kind of pillars of building software, and I had no idea about that. So I was just in customer service. But I had this drive to solve problems and a lot of those problems could be solved by understanding the data. What were our members doing? How were they behaving, what was their customer service tickets, what were they saying, what features did they want that was there somewhere? But just accessing it and digesting that information was a couple of steps away. It was hidden in these big databases that we had. And B2C companies have millions of rows of data. There's a lot there, but you just have to do stuff to understand it. And nobody at Bulb was looking at the data in the way that I wanted to at the time. Just people were too busy with other things. So I started tinkering and I taught myself SQL, which is like how to query a database. And I was like, wow, it's so straightforward, this coding. And I just learned to scratch my own itch because nobody else was going to do it for me. And then one day I had this problem where I wanted to actually stitch two databases together, and that relied on Python. And somebody said that to me, but again, nobody was going to do it for me. So I taught myself Python and I just worked out how to do it and made it happen. And I think that attitude of just like, whatever needs to happen, just get it done, if that means the hard way is teaching yourself how to solve that problem yourself or convincing other people to do it for you, or just pushing things forward on your own, no matter what, is what I learned most at Bulb. And I've done it every company I've worked at since. Like, if I want to do something, chances are I'll make it happen. And if you're a start, if you're A startup founder. I think that's one of the most valuable lessons you can learn early on at Deal, Again, an amazing place to work. The main takeaway that I took from that is just speeds over everything. You can have a really poor customer experience in terms of the product that you're actually offering them. Which sometimes, like this morning, it feels like when you have all these fires going on. But if you're the most responsive supplier that somebody has, they've got a problem. You're there, you've got them, WhatsApp, Slack, you're talking to them constantly. If you're looking for new customers and you're the friendliest, brightest, most energetic person that they have ever dealt with when it comes to buying software, they're nine out of 10 times you're going to win. And it speeds over absolutely everything. If a customer has a problem, chances are, I'll fix it. I'll stay up to 3, 4, 5am in the morning trying to fix these things because I know how much that helps. Some people say that you shouldn't necessarily just do something because a customer asked for it. Totally valid. But our perception is if a customer wants something, there's a need there. We need to uncover it and fix it as soon as possible. Every aspect of Deal in that sense, I've carried over to, to Vinnie. Yeah. So I think those are my two, like, big lessons, like take personal responsibility and just get things done and to be the fastest person to respond to customers and get things done. [00:10:40] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think that's a great insight in there and that, like, it's okay for things to go wrong. You know, things are meant to go wrong. They go wrong when your company's turning over £1. They go wrong when you're turning over 100 billion. You know, like, as you say, it's how, how quickly can you respond, make someone feel valued and whatever the right way of doing that is for your industry is so important. I think that's, that's really cool to hear because, you know, were walking in here, you were talking about some of the challenges you're having now growing Vinny, because you've grown really, really quickly and you're prioritizing that speed of growth and focusing there. But I guess what you know from all those experiences you had then early on at Bulb, and there's a lot in there that you were almost running things yourself within your own, within the department that you were in, within Bulb, and then you've applied that wherever you've gone. Was that really the impetus to get Started on your own or was there something else that led you to start your own company? [00:11:29] Speaker A: I think if I'm brutally honest, the reason that I started something my own is because I realized that I was running these products, these teams within these existing companies. I was like, damn, I'm making so much money for these other people. And it's like, great. I have the solid foundation of the product they've already built, but I think that I can take the exact same ethos I have there and apply it to my own company. And I want to do that for a long time. I think there's always been like a niggling feeling inside me that, you know, I want to go and start something one day. And that's always been the dream. And I think for lots of people that I speak to anyway, who are, you know, still in full time employment, that is the dream. Not everybody. And it's not like the default path. Just like nothing's the default path, but there's a lot of people who are just like on the precipice, waiting for that perfect moment to jump ship and be like, yeah, I want to pursue this thing that I've been thinking about for a very long time. And that was me for two years. And the fact when I was going to leave my last company, it was like, you know, we were going to potentially, the company was going to IPO very soon, had a lot of stock that I could sell to be quite lucrative. I just had to hang around for a couple more months, a couple more years. And at the end of the day, I had to make a decision myself. I had to have a conversation myself that was like, you know, I could wait or I could just jump and I could just go now. And the most valuable thing that you have is time. You know, I could still be in a company or I can now have started my own, be where I am, and hopefully had some level of success with Vinnie. And I think just forcing yourself to get started is super, super valuable, I think. Yeah, just, just go, just do something. And that was what tipped me over the edge. Just like it needs to happen now. [00:13:10] Speaker B: Yeah, that's really cool to hear. And I guess if you look back at that now, you know, it off. [00:13:15] Speaker A: But even if it hadn't paid off, I think it would have still like a kind of the company hadn't been a success. I think it would have still been valuable for my driving myself forward personally. [00:13:26] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I think it's a great insight because there's nothing holding you back. You always feel like you might have some kind of. What's it called, a golden handcuff or something that means you can't do something, but you can always go and do that. And it's just when you decide that you want to put that time and effort into that, and it's a huge effort that you do, but it pays off even if it doesn't work out, because everything you learn there. The way I was approached it when I. When I did the similar thing where I started my company, I was on holiday in Australia. I read the Phil Knight book, Shoe Dog, and I came back, left my job immediately. I returned from the holiday, put my notes in. I was just like, there's only, as you say, so much time. You might die in a month's time. Who knows? Hopefully not. So I was like, if I die, I want to make sure I'm gonna die doing something that I'm really enjoying, that I'm really sort of trying to push forward. And it is hard and uncomfortable. Ultimately, my thing fell down. I learned more from that than I would have if I'd paid to go on some course somewhere. You know, you just learn every single lesson that you can from that experience, and then you can apply that wherever you want to going forward. [00:14:27] Speaker A: Yeah. And statistically, the most likely thing to happen with Vinny at the moment is still to go through the floor. That's just what happens to startups. And we think we're going to do our best to prevent that. But there's no outcome where I don't feel like, A, if I want to go back to a job, I'm not more employable, or B, if I want to start something else, I'm going to be better equipped to do that than I was previously. It's. It's. It's the best thing I've ever done. And I'll never look back on it. Despite the late nights, the stress, the crying, the fires, the like. Yeah, it's massively worth it. [00:14:58] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:14:58] Speaker A: And I think any. Anyone that I speak to that. Sorry, anyone wants to speak to me about it, like, no, I'm super passionate about just, like, encouraging them to be a little bit irresponsible and just be like, let that rationality that says, let's sit in my, like, comfortable office job, just let it go for a minute and just jump and just try. And I think it's just. Yeah, I'm a massive advocate for it. [00:15:20] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:15:20] Speaker A: But recklessness. [00:15:22] Speaker B: Yeah, But I think as well as that, recklessness is guided towards listening to customers. What do customers Want focusing in on that and like you say, then responding to that as fast as you can. [00:15:30] Speaker A: Yeah. And getting started, I think the like with Vinnie there is almost when we started out and we were doing this like WhatsApp number that would help you triage issues with your boiler. It's not a problem space I'm necessarily in love with, but it's okay. It's like it's got enough of a hook there that getting started could go somewhere. And I was just open to every avenue that that could evolve into, you know, I was open to testing things out. Let's see how we make money off of it. Let's see how we grow it. Let's see how we get B2B customers. Okay, let's pivot. Let's pivot. Like the most important thing as you get started. I think one of the, in the early days when we actually went through an incubator and it was a really rewarding experience. We can talk about it more in a sec. But I was surrounded by all these people who on paper looked like excellent co founders. And that's the whole value prop of Antler is like find somebody who you can start a business with. These were, you know, they had worked at the biggest banks in the world, they worked at FAANG companies like these kind of bigger SaaS offerings and anybody would be lucky to find a company with them. But I was sitting back looking at the room and they were all kind of in this like analysis paralysis stage where they were like thinking, okay, how, how can I speak to a customer today? Or how can I get an intro? Or should I start sending LinkedIn messages? Or let me think of a business plan. And that is definitely one way to approach starting your business. I then looked at my now co founder Johnny, who had grabbed an iPad. He'd been out on the street. He just spoke to people there and then and started asking for feedback. And it was that like bias for action that eventually meant that I abandoned my previous plans and said I'm going to co found this company with you because you're getting started and that's the most viable thing. And you know, we've not looked back since and many of those other companies are much, much earlier than us in terms of like maturity. And I think put it all down to that. Just get started. [00:17:32] Speaker B: Yeah, I guess you can, you can't always build that in either. You know, some of that is instinct from the founders who are just going to be focused on that from day one. [00:17:39] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:17:40] Speaker B: So I didn't really, I thought you had gone, I mean, we can jump into a little bit now. But I didn't realize you hadn't co founded the company with Johnny by that point. So had you gone into that experience on your own? [00:17:51] Speaker A: Johnny and I have been friends since, boy, I actually. And I hired him there and he was great. We got on well together and we have a lot of mutual friends. So it was just nice for like 10 years or so we've been in the group chats together and whatnot. And then one day we were like. I said, look, I'm really, I want to get started. I want to get started on this idea that I have independent of Johnny. He wasn't even in the picture. I sat in a group chat and they were all, I should apply for this thing called Antler. It's like a great place you can go and you can just get started and there's some benefits to doing it. You get a stipend. De risks it even further. And I was like, great, I'm going to apply. And then Johnny at the time wasn't loving the job that he had and he said, I'm going to join too. He was in property tech before them, so he applied too and got in independently. And I said, oh great, you're here and we're good friends. And we actually said from the outset, let's not take it off the table. But we're not really here to work with each other because we've done it before in the past and you know, it's just looking for something a bit different. In fact, he even said, I'm never working in Proptech again. That was what he said when we, when we started the company. He's like, I don't want to work in proptech. And he had his reasons for it. He'd been there for a long time and I think he wanted something different. Plus he saw some of the unit economics in the space that weren't necessarily as attractive as other spaces. So there was a bunch of different reasons for it. Thankfully, we now overcome those challenges, I think. But I think this realization that looking around us and only seeing a lot of people stalling or failing to get started was the thing that eventually drew us together more. And we eventually decided Pivot. He went to Proptech, we started working together and we did very well at Antlers. So yeah, it's a bit of a roundabout story. We could maybe have done it without Antler, but I guess we needed that space to be like, oh no, this is actually a really good option. [00:20:01] Speaker B: Well, it's funny you go into that and as you say, one of Antler's big sort of value propositions is that co founder matching thing. You go into that and then co found with somebody you've known for 10 years. [00:20:11] Speaker A: Don't get me wrong, there have been some successful pairings out of Antler, both in my cohort and the cohorts before but there's also been some like skeletons in the closet that weren't, you know, known about from, from day one or even after the investment was granted. There's, there's been some problems that have happened as a result. I think when I look at some of the dynamics between those teams like if I, you know, if I get frustrated to Johnny like I'll just tell him to off, I'll just like tell them to shut up and like I, I can like have that really honest feedback with them or if it's 3:00 in the morning, I need to speak to someone and get something sorted, I'll just pick up the phone and call them. Where the thing, when you kind of manufacture like rapid, deep relationship, it can lead to not so positive outcomes. And that's why, you know, I, if I was going to start another company I would probably start within my own network first before looking into some of these like strangers basically. But I'm sure that there can be like successful pairings there too. [00:21:19] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I think that's, I mean it's going to be different for everyone how everyone wants to do their own thing but I, you know, I'm with you. If you've got that long standing relationship with somebody, you've got a level of trust, a level of communication that you don't have to establish. Whereas if you make a pairing with somebody on day one, you're having to figure out how do I talk to this person. It'd be like getting married on day one. You know, you've got, then figure out all that stuff over the first couple of months that might be fine but after those first three months things are going to start breaking down and when you're, as you say, when you start fighting fires, you've got problems, you're up till 5am, everybody's tired and starting to get a little bit burnt out. You need to have that kind of really, really great connection with who you're going through that with so that you can, you can keep going and succeed. [00:22:00] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. I think when I'm at the edge, Johnny gets me off it and vice versa. It's easy when sales are coming in, clients are closing. It's so, so easy to have a great co founder is when there's not so good things happening. Then you really see the value and you get the confidence that the person you've decided starts company with is the right person. [00:22:20] Speaker B: Yeah. And I guess because you knew Johnny for so long, did you go into that and put any, you know, clear, you know like a finders agreement in place or something like that? Were you pretty explicit on roles responsibilities or did you just let that kind of develop as you built this? [00:22:37] Speaker A: So Johnny has a product background as well. So he's worked with, he's built software in a product manager role for a number of years. And proptech I've done pretty much the same but lean more towards technical. We never put anything strictly in place but particularly for the early days, investors often want to see like who's the technical guy, who's the guy that does sales and we made a bit of a division of responsibility just to make that clear for outsiders that I'm the CTO more technical person, he's a CEO and a more sales focused person just to really help that become clear. But in reality we're, we're very similar in skill sets. We can both he good, he'd go and hold. He went holiday two weeks ago and I was doing sales calls and jumping into code and he has like vice versa. So we never really set out strongly and I think that that flexibility has been really good. You know, we've not had to to force who does what so much in any kind of founders agreement. But what I will say is like once we see, like once we see traction in a particular space, for example Johnny on the sales side we, I try and maximize the time on him doing the things that he's good at. So whilst like I can lean into sales, I've started recently said to Johnny, hey, like if there's any time that you're not doing sales at the moment, just let me know and I'll pick up that task. Because there becomes a point when you realize that the most important thing the CEO can do is close deals. Anytime that he's not doing that ultimately is going to be a waste at this early stage in my opinion. We want to grow and the only time we grow is when people are selling. And if he's not selling, he's doing payroll, he's doing operations, he's doing marketing, he's doing these things that like he is good and he is possible too and maybe is in the CEO's role somewhat. But if he's not closing deals then it's not, it's. We're not growing the company. So whilst the like, if you were to ask us it's a very like 5050 split, we've come to the realization that he does sales all the time, I do everything else or offload it onto somebody else. And that's not me to say that I do more work than him or he does more work than me. It's just like he does as much work as me, but he only does on sales and getting people through that funnel. And that's it, that's all he focuses on. [00:24:56] Speaker B: Yeah, I think, I mean that goes back to what you said you learned from Deal in terms of just go fast, grow, just get customers in, figure out the problems, the challenges, what they need and go from there. And the only way to do that is to really point resource at it. If you've got like, as you say, you're the person who, you want to be responsible for that, you know, muddying up their day with other things, then that's, you know, 30% productivity loss is potentially a big, big number from terms of potential customers. [00:25:21] Speaker A: Yeah, I've got two points on that. So the first is if you're a founder, you've never worked in a fast growth startup in the past. You might not realize that every fast growth startup is feeling the pain of growing faster than their product is. Software engineering is always a bottleneck and it's expected that your product doesn't work exactly as you're onboarding your customers, you're always building the plane whilst you're taking off, always. So you need to be comfortable that that's going to happen. We've just taken it to the extreme by saying, put your foot down on the sails. We're going to feel this pain and we're going to grow and we're going to make up for it after the fact. Second, we've actually doubled down on that acceleration. We tried hiring a bunch of different people, but to help us go even faster, we hired a bdr, someone who just does the cold outbound for us. So that Johnny can not only just focus on sales, but he only focuses on the part of sales which is when they've already booked a demo to signing a contract. So that whole prospecting piece has been taken off his plate. So you can imagine we now have somebody 40 hours per week focus only on sales, only on closing customers. That is the best thing we've done for our customer this year. We were dripping through customers in Q4 last year maybe got one per month. I think last month we closed four, and we're on track to double that this month. It's night and day. And don't get me wrong, maybe the plane falls apart when we get to altitude and the plane falls apart. And certainly it's going to feel like that for a while, but we're comfortable being uncomfortable there. I know you asked about roles and responsibilities, but I went a bit of a tangent about sales. [00:27:10] Speaker B: But I think you went into it in a greater level of detail than that question was ever going to get there. I think there's so much in there, and I think if you think about other finders, the early stage that, you know, we speak to quite a lot, I don't think it's. I don't think that's natural for everybody to think about sales in that way. You know, they'll think about, I want to stop doing sales as quickly as I can, or I need somebody in to do this continuously. But they don't think about breaking up that sales funnel process into. There's this part over here which has essentially some wasted time in it, and it's really hard. It's going to be slow. And there's this point here where we can really make a difference and improve conversion rate. And I don't know that everybody thinks about that. I think that's a great insight for. For people to think about how do they break their own sales process down into something like that if they can? Because quite often that early hire is pointed to, we need to be moving faster in product or engineering or something like that. But actually, like you say, maybe you just need to take something that you think comes when you're 50, 60 people and put it in when you're, you know, 10, 11, I think sales. [00:28:14] Speaker A: So there's two points in that. First, like sales is a product in itself. Make sure that you have a good CRM with all your leads. Set it. Understand how people get from one stage to the next stage, what data points you need on each deal to be able to track the points that you just highlighted. And then you can start to identify bottlenecks in the process. And that's how we got to where we are today with the kind of velocity we're at. We've gone from just like Johnny having an inbox full of people wanting things maybe, to a very clear process for how these people get in. And this is how we get people out. And the one caveat that I should say to that is the reason that we knew that we were ready to spend so much time on sales was because we found ourselves getting into a pattern on the demos that we're doing rather ad hoc before where everybody kind of wanted the same thing. It was a bit fuzzy, but everybody, the shape of what customers wanted was the same. The things that Johnny was saying was kind of the same. The, the artifacts that he was using were kind of the same. The pitch deck was the same. So we were like, okay, there is some repeatability in this process. So if we have the tools and the artifacts that we need to put our foot down on the gas and we should see benefits. If you were to try and do that beforehand, if you were to say, okay, let's go hard on sales and like promise customers whatever they want randomly, then you're potentially going to end up with multiple planes taking off at the same time, none of which work. We have one plane, at least we have one plane. That analogy is kind of getting torn to shreds, but you get the idea. We knew we had something customers wanted and we were building in that direction and selling in that direction very quickly. [00:29:55] Speaker B: Yeah. And I suppose one part of that is you say it's like a kind of product on its own. When you have customers that join you early on, when your product is smaller in scope and then your product grows, was that a natural adoption for that set of customers or was that another kind of sales mechanism to look at your existing base and say we've got to start upselling some of this stuff to them? Or. Yeah, was that natural? [00:30:16] Speaker A: It was always a plan. So there are, in our market in particular, there is a point solution for everything. So there is great tools for maintenance only, great tools for onboarding customers, great tools for listing properties, great property management systems, all these stuff. All these things exist and we know that there's demand for all of those things. But often what we see is that the tech behind those existing systems doesn't really automate as far as we can. It doesn't really take the human out the loop as far as we can now with artificial intelligence and some of the automations that we can deliver. So we knew demand was always there and the plan was always to go from offering just like a point solution to something that was all encompassing. And again, a lesson that I took from Deal is like if you can obviously expand the scope of your product, the more value you can extract and deliver for customers. Deal started with contractor only products, but then if you're hiring contractors, chances are you need to hire employees, so they offer that too. If you're hiring employees, chances are you need visas, so they offer that too. If you're hiring employees or contractors, chances are you need tech, like IT equipment, so they offer that too. And expanding your product out that way allows them to increase the average content revenue drastically. So that's exactly what we're doing. We started with maintenance, which we saw was one of the biggest challenges for property managers. Then we talked about, okay, so where else are they spending a lot of their time? Well, about 20% of it is onboarding tenants. So how can we get somebody moved into a property without any human intervention? That was our next challenge, and that's what we've done. Now, next thing is, okay, how do you get someone moved out? So we have the whole process automated, which previously would take five, six people, depending on the size of your book. And that was always planned. Yeah. [00:32:07] Speaker B: And I guess the customer that came in on day one is worth whatever at that point, and two years down the road, they're worth 10 times that. [00:32:13] Speaker A: Yeah. We structure our contracts in the way that we only charge based on the value that we deliver. So we actually between each of those features or problems that we solve, and our contract is very much like, it's X for this feature, per unit, per month. X per this feature, per unit per month. So that even if we didn't have that solution today baked into the contract that we had already had signed was scoped to grow. So there was no renegotiation from our end to like, okay, now you pay us double every month because we delivered this feature. It was just like, yep, you already signed to this. Already agreed, had a conversation, and we agreed three months ago we would deliver this feature for you. So customers are already on board. So we've actually already validated our roadmap for the next year, which is why we can put our foot in the gas so much with sales, because we can drag and drop that and also set expectations correctly. [00:33:04] Speaker B: Yeah. And I guess it helps you validate that roadmap as well, because if you got huge pushback at the contract signing stage, you would then dig into that. How does that feature look? Or what would make you pay for that kind of thing? Or actually, if it's not that, what is it that's missing that you can kind of go and pay for? It's a nice way to approach that, I guess. One thing let's. We've gone massively on a tangent on the ad. This was the kind of section. It's a great conversation. One thing I just wanted to wrap up that section on antler around was. I think you gave a. You know, you had loads of insights into that experience. Is there anything you would specifically say to somebody who was thinking about going through a similar early stage program to help them get the most out of that experience? [00:33:47] Speaker A: The obvious one is to go all in and just make sure that it's not like I don't think it works so well when it's like a part time thing or it's like you know, 10 hours per week. If you really want to start a company, I think you need to be doing in excess of 40, 50 hours per week to really. Sorry, that's actually too generalist. If you want to start a high growth startup, you need to be doing more than like the regular Joe is in a week. So spending a small portion of time in an incubator per week probably isn't going to cut no mustard. So I would definitely start with that. I think the second thing is just make sure you understand if it is a VC backed accelerator or somewhere that you're going to get some capital out of on the back, just make sure that that's like the journey that you're on board for. VC capital is super attractive because it can help you move quickly and a lot of his accelerators like hone you into raising capital and pushing you down that VC route. But bear in mind it's not the only way to build a business. But if you go through this accelerator, that's the way that you're going to be pushed to build a business. So just make sure that you go in, eyes open, understand that's what you're doing and I think it's an excellent path to choose otherwise I wouldn't be here and having raised subsequent rounds. But just make sure you're aware of that going into it. [00:35:05] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I think that's great. It's really great advice for people to. And I think particularly that fundraising one, which is something that not everybody thinks about. How do you want to build your business and what's the right capital for you to help you build that company and then be really deliberate about that. How are you going to go out and achieve that? What milestones do you have to hit before you're attractive to that capital and so on. I think it's as deliberate as going out and putting your customer plan together. You think about your investors as another target audience just as you think about both sides of your company. [00:35:33] Speaker A: Yeah. And mentally and your energy and like what is it going to take? Like it's for Us. It took, you know, months of back to back phone calls with hundreds of investors that each one of them said no. We have a list of everyone that we spoke to and we spoke to 100, 150 customers, let's say 100 VCs, and we closed about two of them. So 2% close rate. Everyone's saying no. Everyone's saying they weren't good enough. Everyone's saying that the product was rubbish or they didn't see a future in it. But we still went down this path and I think it took a lot out of us at the time. So just like going into it, your eyes open. That is going to be bloody hard. This is not an easy. A small percentage of founders actually raise capital in this way. And you need to know that and be ready for the objections. Yeah, it makes dating look easy. [00:36:29] Speaker B: What kept you going back to that, you know, like, what kept you going back to the next pitch when you'd had, you know, 90 no's essentially and all that sort of stuff? What kept you believing that this was the right product, that this was the right company, the right team and so on that could raise and do it? [00:36:44] Speaker A: A couple of things. Co founder, above everything else. So we were only two when we were. So we came out of Antler and took the somewhat strategic decision to raise another round immediately. Lots of other people will wait a couple of months to get some more traction before going out to raise, but we were like, for some personal reasons, I was having a baby very soon, so I was like, let's get that done, done before the baby comes. And also, just like, we had a realization. The capital we'd raised today wasn't going to get us where we wanted to be for a big company. So we wanted to go out pretty hard on that. I think when we were having those conversations, it only worked because after every no, I was able to go to Jonny and be like, that was a tough one. What did we learn there? Why didn't they invest? How do we pivot? How do we change what we're saying? How do we polish that first interaction so that they're more likely to say yes? What are the next steps that we need to do to drive FOMO or drive a. Yes. How do we push that forward? Or ultimately like, Jonny, I just need a day. I just need to walk away from this. And I think if it wasn't for him, if I was on my own, we wouldn't have raised successfully and vice versa. We just had each other to fall back on. I think that Is so, so key at precede that you have an excellent co founder beyond the team. The team will take you so far, but you need that person there that kept us coming back to it and then ultimately a belief in what we were doing. We had this early customer that had signed up. We knew that he was a somewhat good generalization of what other people in the market looked like. We had letters of intent from other customers. We saw there was market demand for this. The main pushback that we got time and time again was I don't know how big this market is. Property management is sometimes conceived as just something that is like a UK based problem to solve. So our job was essentially to show how big this opportunity could be and we were quite clever and I guess how we solved that. We went overseas, we got letters of intent from international customers, etc. Etc. But it was, you know, it was just that drive that we knew we were onto something, believed in it deeply, had each other, made it work. [00:39:12] Speaker B: Yeah. Nice. And I guess it's interesting to hear as well, you went overseas straight away, you know, just looking at that market as where, where are our target customers and going to, approaching them wherever they were. [00:39:21] Speaker A: Yeah. So the question to ask yourself is not like what? So, so we boiled it down to what is the least amount of work that we need to do that won't become a distraction from our overall strategy to prove to people that we have an international market. So it was like the 8020 rule. Right. What was the easy stuff to do? So it was relatively easy to go over and get a letter of intent from some intent from somebody in one of these other countries. It would be very difficult to actually implement a system before Vinny could even speak Spanish. So we just did the bare minimum to prove that case. And we did that with a couple other things. Some people had questions about how the tech worked, whether it was reliable. Okay, what do we need to do to prove out that it is reliable? We need to run this at some kind of scale. So we had that customer deploying a thousand properties overnight to prove this thing wrong. I mean every objection we got we just had to overcome it. And international was just one of those things. And we're still not like we're still just growing through our customers rather than deliberately targeting international companies at the moment. [00:40:27] Speaker B: Yeah, nice. And I suppose, see in the early days, what did that progress look like for you? So at that point, when you're starting out, the product is evolving a lot. What was that? What was progress for you there? And how's that changed to today. What's that sort of core metric that you focus on now compared to then? [00:40:43] Speaker A: We have two that we track as a bit of a vanity metric. We track properties using Vinny. So we're around about 10,000 on that today, up from 3,000 in January. So we've more than doubled in size since January. We track that because we think that that's a good external metric to show that lots of people are using it and also that we're able to send customers rapidly. The thing that really matters for us, though, in terms of is the product doing what we want it to be doing, is how many times per day are tenants interacting with Vinny and getting the outcome that they want. And that's what we track almost religiously. So whether that's somebody trying to move into a property, Did Vinny successfully handle that task? Has somebody got a maintenance query? Has Vinny successfully handled that task or not? And the delta between those two and making it smaller is ultimately my job. How do I make more successful interactions with Vinny? Some days it goes terribly, some days it goes excellently. It's a real changing game, but we've kind of had to get to that point in the early days. It'll be no surprise that the number one metric for us was just, how can we get more people using the product, Just a pure properties metric. Because until you have usage or people willing to use it, you don't really know how good your product is going to be. So we've kind of evolved from more of like a quantity metric to more of a qualitative metric in the last couple of months. [00:42:07] Speaker B: Yeah. Nice. And I've seen you've been active on LinkedIn a lot recently, talking about some of this stuff, and you can see how much time you are starting to save for the companies that you're then implementing that with. So you clearly are closing that gap in terms of. [00:42:18] Speaker A: We're trying to. We might have. Yeah, we're definitely trying to. We might have spread ourselves quite thin in some areas previously, and we're trying to close the gaps on those areas now. [00:42:31] Speaker B: Yeah, I'd love to dig in a little bit to your approach to finding and engaging early customers. That's often something that we hear at Codebase that people find really challenging. And some of that comes down to your general approach that you've talked about a lot. It's that determination to go out, stand in the street with an iPad and talk to people, ask questions, phone up anybody and have a conversation. But what tactics did you use that you found worked to engage early customers. [00:42:54] Speaker A: In that conversation in the early days. And even now, the number one way that we have of finding new customers is cold outbound on LinkedIn. It is perform. Performs better than any channel. You probably have noticed that we, you mentioned actually that you've seen some of my LinkedIn content recently. We hired like a, a CMO to like start building up the, the, the marketing funnel and try and find more people for that way. We've hired them for like two, three months now. And like it marketing is a bit like a longer burden. Like we're not those leads from someone seeing a video today, but we expect that they'll be somewhere in the funnel three months from now. So the marketing hire was really an investment in the future. Today the number one thing that converts is cold outbound. We have been doing that from day one. I think if you're not getting enough yeses, you're probably not sending enough messages. That's what it boils down to. We track how many messages we send each week. With this new hire that I spoke about, this BDR who's called Ryan. He's great. Shout out to Ryan. I think he sends out close to 500 messages every week, tracks how many people he sends them to, how many people respond to him, how many people accept his connection requests. He tracks that data through from message to demo. And being really deliberate with that high volumes is the number one way to find customers. If you're sending that volume of messages and you're clear about with the copy that you write, the words that you say and those messages and you're constantly adapting slightly and you're still not closing customers, I challenge you that the thing that you're building isn't valuable enough to those customers. One other precursor to that is make sure your customers are on LinkedIn. Maybe it's the wrong industry to be using LinkedIn, but generally if your ICP is there, you're sending a clear message at volume and they're all saying no, the thing you're building is probably wrong. So that's what we've been doing. And it's not like the first message or the first 500 messages that we sent out. We got close to a 1% conversion rate. It was probably like 0.005. But we iterated the message and the product and we learned from that as we went. So we might have been offering this maintenance product and cold outbound at the beginning, but when we realized that that wasn't resonating, we pivoted not just to Cold Outbound, but that filtered through into product as well. So we changed what we were building because we weren't seeing that close rate being high enough from the outset. We are starting to play around with some other channels. The second one that I guess if I had to mention anything was events. So people say, go to these conferences. If you go to a conference in your industry, you'll probably find some good customers. I've actually found that more like the localized events are more effective. So another one of our early customers came from this event I went to called Property Pals and Papa Doms. It's just a, it's just a curry night. It's held by some Scottish landlords and you know, throughout the uk. There's one in Milton Keynes as well. It's like an international event, but it's much more like small net community where you're not going as a salesperson, you're not going to like have a booth and then try and close people and they're in that like, because you're, when you're trying to actively sell people that they're sometimes in a bit of like, I don't want to be sold to mood or I just want to see what's cool mood. You're in a very relaxed environment having a curry. And it just builds relationships with these people on a one to one basis. Most people at that event probably didn't even know I was running a software company until I had finished a meal or had a good conversation. I'd built that relationship with them in advance and then afterwards it just evolved into, oh, okay, so we've had this conversation. Now I know what your problems are. How about we work together and fix it? And for our early customers that was super successful. Yeah, it was, it was the number one way that. And now we're pitching at those events. Now they ask, they invite us to come and like talk about our product. But really in the early days it was just about fight, like outbound. So those are our two existing channels and now we're focusing on like, okay, scale that up and think about how do you fill the pipeline for three months time. Because we are possibly raising another round in the future. So we need to be like, okay, we're not making decisions for today anymore, we're making decisions for the end of summer. Midsummer. [00:47:16] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I mean that is an amazing insight into how you can approach that from the beginning and scale that up. And like you say it's figure out where your customers are and go to those places and whatever that place is, and then do it at volume. And I think, you know, I mean, you must be now getting asked to buy the dinners at these things. [00:47:33] Speaker A: Yeah. Or sponsor it. [00:47:36] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. [00:47:36] Speaker A: These kind of things. And that's fine. That's. That's really. That's a nice ultimate validation that we now have money. So I guess. I guess you want it from there, but. [00:47:44] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I think it's really cool. And it's. That's something that, you know, when we talked, you know, to founders starting out, that I don't think there's always that. That realization that it is that level of scale that you need to be comfortable with and you need to be comfortable with that level of nose being completely ignored, all that stuff. But as you say, that is a great example is how connected sales, marketing, product, all the essentially departments you're running within yourselves are connected. Because every single touch point with a potential customer is an insight that could affect or influence any of those or all of them at the same time. [00:48:23] Speaker A: Which is why I say sales, the product. And your CEO should be doing sales because it's so viable. You have that feedback loop constantly going. [00:48:32] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. And I'd love to jump now a little bit. You've talked about some of the team as you've kind of, as we've been going through, like, how did you. How have you approached kind of hiring and building the team? [00:48:45] Speaker A: We have not invested a whole bunch of time in, like, thinking about how we hire. We have been quite reactionary to what we need to build next. So we need to hire. Okay, we need to hire last Tuesday. Like, we. We're in marketing. Right. Okay. The funnel's looking a bit dry in a couple of months. Like, we need to hire there. We've not really been very proactive with it, so I can't. I can't say that I have too many insights about, like, hiring plans. But what I can definitely talk about is who I look to hire, because I think at an early stage, that's probably one of the kind of key decisions that you're going to make. At some point, you'll have a realization that you need to hire a software engineer, probably. Or. Yeah, I think that should be everybody's first hire, to be honest, because if you've done everything else that I've said, the challenge is going to be how do you deliver that to customers. And product is normally the answer. Or a really great operations person, but you're really looking for somebody that fits one of those job titles. The hiring criteria for that. I don't know if this is PC, so you can cut this out if you like, but we spoke to a potential customer in the early days from one of these big company behemoths. If I said their name, you would know them. Everybody in the UK will know who they are, but I'll save them their blushes here. But they said when you're hiring the acronym that you need to remember is psd and PSD stands for poor. So grew up poor, Smart, someone who's intelligent and D stands for deep desire to get rich. And I think whilst we kind of adapted it slightly, it talks a lot to me about the hunger that you want to find in that first hire that sets them apart from everybody else. They're not somebody who's comfortable that's going to come in and just do what you tell them. It's going to be someone who's very action orientated and just get whatever you need done faster to like a higher degree than you even imagined. Smart. They're even smarter than you. You know, they're, they're, they're better at what you're hiring them for than, than what your skill set is and deep desire to get rich just to make sure their, their motivations are there. Poor. I, I don't, I think that just comes from like a background thing, somebody who can have. The idea is that somebody who had everything given to them in, in the early days maybe doesn't have that same like drive in them that we were looking for. An example of this in practice is that the first hire, lj, he still works for us now. He's fantastic and if he's listening to this, I'll happily tell his whole story. But LJ is, I was on this recruitment website looking for this kind of PSD profile and he was probably the worst on paper candidate that I'd ever seen. His CV was just one of those systems like indeed, where it just like automatically sends you, sends you like a list of their CV and they match your kind of hiring profile based on XYZ characteristics. And like his, his CV was a mess. He was working for somebody else at the time. It's like, like it was like he was texting his friend when he was sending him messages. It was all over the place. And like, no, I think we got super lucky because he was so bad that nobody saw this diamond in the rough. Like so bad. I can't believe it. I can't believe I still took the call with him, but I did because I was just like in that mindset of, okay, I need to get this task done. Here's my booking link. And I booked up like 20 interviews in one day for software engineers. And one of them was this awful, awful candidate called lj. We got on the call, he spoke about how his background, how he grew up, what his ethos is. He spoke about how the previous night he'd been up to 5 o'clock in the morning working on like this product for this other customer. I said to him, oh, sorry, this other client he had, the person he was working for. I said to him, okay, so you're looking to quit that job and then also come and work for us and come back work for us. He's like, no, I'm going to do both. I'm like, but how are you going to have time for both? Like, well, I can work from 8am to 6am in one company and then 6pm till whenever in the morning in another company. I was like, so you're going to be overemployed and you're going to make me pay for the difference in quality by hiring somebody just working for me. And I took the risk. I hired him anyway because of a bunch of different things he'd done to impress me. And he rebuilt the entire product to a much higher quality than I had done. Within a couple of weeks. He had the blueprint, but he just made an awesome, awesome thing. And every other hire that we've done, we've done in the same vein. We've done it based on this deep hunger to drive something forward and execute to really high quality. We hired, we weren't even going to hire for this sales role. Ryan show Ryan again. We're going to hire for somebody in that department this year. I was, I was like, okay, we'll do a bit of a hunt, maybe higher in summer. Sorry. And then I happened to stumble across Ryan on this, like, VA website where I was looking for someone to do some, like, ad hoc tasks for me. I stumbled across him. He told me, he told me about his background. He told me he had his own startup that he was looking to do on the side. He was really young, he's struggling with sales for his own company. And he just really impressed me with his attitude of just like, I want to get stuck in, I want to get this done. So I said to him there, why don't you stop working as a VA and come work for me as a bdr and the rest is history. He now closes deals left, right and center and books demo left, right and center. And I think it's just like being open to that opportunity, but also just seeing that this person is just like the exact hiring profile that we're looking for. We can't afford to not hire him right now because he is going to level up the company. So, yeah, bit of a tangent, but that's everything I know about hiring, pretty much. [00:54:42] Speaker B: No, I think, again, there's so much in there, and it's about getting to the root. You mentioned that framework that you had been shared, and it's ultimately picking out those things that really matter to you because you're setting the culture for the company. You're putting that what you want that to be, and you want to make sure every single hire that you bring in fits that profile. And I think the great thing in there is that that never comes across on paper, ever. You might get some technical expertise or some understanding of history and things, but until you go and have that conversation like you had with lj, you never, ever get that understanding. And then you're going to always have to take a chance. I remember when we met, we met for a coffee probably about six months ago. I think that was about the time you must have been hiring him because that was that big, you know. Well, this would be longer, actually, probably eight months. Not that that matters anyway, but like, it was that big question of, like, how do you make sure you get that right, you know, because that's such an important hire and things like that. But actually, there's always going to have to be an element of trust. And just the fact that you're going to have to put trust in that and see if it works or not. [00:55:45] Speaker A: And you can walk away from any decision. It's a big decision. But you can also change your mind. You can hire fast and you can also fire fast. That I would have let LG go if he wasn't performing. And I knew that from the outset, and I was very honest with him from the outset that that would happen. But I didn't need to because he was great. The other thing to be comfortable with is, from my perspective, that first Engineering hire doesn't necessarily need to become your CTO or become your VP of Engineering. They just need to be a really solid ic, somebody who can crank out code to high quality and will do anything to get that done. You don't need to have this plan for them that they need to be the perfect hire that you find from day one. And you shouldn't let that halt progress either. You shouldn't say, okay, I'm Going to start building the product when I find my CTO or when I find this senior engineering hire, hire someone to start building the product today and then hire on top of them. Not an issue at all. [00:56:40] Speaker B: Yeah, nice. And where do you sit? There's been loads of conversation recently about as all these sort of codesys tools improve, it seems like literally monthly, they're getting better and better. Where do you sit on the. If you think about the team going forward, where do you sit in terms of. They're going to be a nice assist as we build out. Like a largely, I suppose like traditional team, a team that we've seen over the past versus we are going to have a fully autonomous product engineering 24 hour team that's listening to what customers needs, putting those sort of features in place, releasing continuously. Where do you kind of sit on that scale at the moment? [00:57:20] Speaker A: Firmly in the middle. So we have quite a unique position to be in. So whilst I'm CTO of Vinnie, my background is somewhat technical, but I've never worked as a software engineer professionally. Nobody other than Vinny has paid me to do that today and my background is product. So what I'm good at is speaking to customers, understanding what they need and then traditionally translating that into requirements to an engineering team and then getting them to deliver that pace. What I think tools like Lovable, Cursor, all these AI tools have allowed me to do is take that one step further. When I'm on a call with a customer, I can go to them, say, okay, so help me understand what it is you need. Okay, great. I call them back three hours later with a working prototype that I've just spun up on Cursor, spun up on Lovable on these kind of sites and been able to put something in their hands that works very quickly. And it's just a fraction of what we'd offer. Maybe one feature, one small change, but having that in their hands allows them to say, oh yeah, but I'd rather this button was there or when that happens, this should happen. And it allows me to get a deeper prototype for every customer requirement before we build anything and get it to such a position that JIRA tickets are almost a thing of the past. Now I just use here's a prototype, go and emulate that in our production code. What I found today is that whilst these tools are pretty good at maybe some bug fixes or creating entire code bases themselves where they know the entire context of a product, they are not good at being deployed in existing large code bases and getting things right. Every time, especially when you have things like cicd, migrations, database operations, all this kind of stuff happening. They're not there yet. So I typically take that prototype, hand it to engineering, talk them through what was being built, and then the engineers will build that exact feature they're using. Some of them are more skeptical than others, but some of them are using AI tools to help squash bugs quickly, help make small changes quickly, but certainly never to develop whole features within our production application. It's just not there yet. If it gets there in the future, of course we'll adopt that technology. And I think some of the big companies like faang are fully expecting that to happen. I think Meta wants to hire 20%, have 20% of the code written by AI in the next year or something. If they're doing that, we'll do that. We're going to copy the best. But today it's not there yet. But it's a really interesting part in a design cycle. Something funny, we are trying to move into the enterprise market and offer more to bigger companies. And the thing that we had already built, Venny, as a product does not suit 90% of their needs. But on a sales demo, I was like, okay, I'm not turning this down. We've just been offered a demo of one of the largest players in the market. I'm not going to say unfortunately, maybe it's my shame, but I'm not going to say no to that potential customer. So I'm going to say, rather than pitch them a product, I'm going to pitch them a prototype. Biggest players in the game. I'm going to say, hey, we built this as an illustration of what we're working towards. Does it solve problems for you? And the sales call is much less about, like, here's a solution. Are you willing to buy it? It's like we would be willing to buy it if it did X, Y and Z. So not just as like a existing customer thing, but it's a really useful tool on sales calls and it's helped close deals because they can already see themselves using it. It may not exist today, but they know that. They know it's a prototype. And then eventually if they sign a big contract, we'll build into the product. So we're using it extensively for making sure we nail requirements and help us close deals. [01:01:01] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's amazing. It goes right back to what you said at the beginning about being obsessed with discovery and always using any interaction you can to do that kind of job. And also the speed at which you can use some of these tools to pull together a prototype and go back to a customer and say, we spoke three hours ago. Like, you say, what do you think? I think a lot of people think that's got to be. You step back for a couple of weeks, you think about it, you pull together something, you think about actually fully implementing something. But actually that customer is just going to be impressed by how quickly you listen to them, how well you listen to them, and how much that potential solution fits their requirements. That can be enough to get them over the line in half a day. [01:01:39] Speaker A: Yeah. And even do on a call with a client, even be on a call with them, be like, hey, have you heard of this fun thing like cursor or lovable? Let's build stuff together and see if we work. Because at this stage, a lot of our customers are buying into the vision anyway. They're buying into me and Johnny and they're buying into what we're building in the future. Not like they know that. That we're not at the end destination yet. That's fine. So they are open to us brainstorming with them and making these fun ideas with them and bring them along that journey. In fact, that's what they want. It's not like they're open to it, actually. So, yeah, if somebody had an idea for something, I'd phone them. I'd say, hey, let's go through this, let's make it. And then I'll see when I can fit that on the roadmap to actually build it. [01:02:22] Speaker B: Yeah. Nice. [01:02:24] Speaker A: I've got one additional thought. I spoke before about just getting started and just doing something, but I think the most rewarding outcome from that is that I've been able to break my frame. And Johnny says this phrase all the time. But in the past, the idea of closing a deal for 100 bucks a month, 200 bucks per month, that's. Wow, that's huge. In the past, the idea of raising a modest venture capital round has been quite amazing to me. In the past, speaking to VC has been quite a daunting experience that the venture capitalists are seeing as these geniuses that know everything and they're across the whole market and really hard to impress and such a small portion of people actually managed to raise off of them. But this whole process of building Vinny has taught me to break my frame of what you actually think is achievable and just like, be a bit shameless, but like nothing is. It seems super cheesy, but like nothing is not possible. If you just are willing to accept that it might happen. And I think that's a, like, that's the same approach that we took every time, especially with our last raise, the amount that we raised. I was like, I saw in the bank account one day, I was like, what the, Like, I don't know, I've never seen that much money in one place before. And it really brought home to me. We just pushed and pushed and pushed and we didn't think that oh, that's too much or that's not enough or I can't achieve that because I'm not the special friendly VC type person. It's possible. And I think that's like, I wish I learned it sooner. I wish I learned it five years ago, 10 years ago. This path is for anybody who wants it, not just this given elite. [01:04:11] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's me. If anybody listening takes one thing away from that, I think that is the thing to take away. But I love the concept as well. Break the frame. Yeah, that's great. One thing I wanted to come back to quickly because you mentioned, you know, when you came out of Antler and decided to raise, you had a, you know, kid coming. So it's a kind of, it's an inflection point of like, how do we keep this going and on both sides. And I think, you know, this has been in the media a lot recently about like work life balance when you're starting out. And Reid Hoffman, I think it was, they were recirculating stuff he said last year about that. And when you talk about 40, 50 hour weeks, it often goes way beyond that. Right. Because you're often, it depends what's on fire and how you've got to approach that. You know, how do you approach that having a young family and stuff like that just now. [01:04:57] Speaker A: Sometimes a fire is my family, you know what I mean? I have the most supportive partner in the world. In fact, we found out that we're having a baby in week two of Antler. And I said at that point, look, I've just left a very nice job. I'll go back if you want. And she said no. She saw that I'd wanted this for, for a long time and kind of pushed me to continue doing it. So yeah, I got to say that from the outset. But the, yeah, and I think the times when I come home and I'm almost burnt out and I've been working these crazy hours per week, like the person I turn to is her. And I don't think it'd be possible without that. Or, I mean, you'll probably have an equivalent, which is either your partner or your parents or whoever. Everyone needs that kind of support system in place, no matter how tough it gets. I think, how do I balance? I'm not very good at balancing time. I think even when I'm not working, I'm thinking about work. And Emma can recognize that she'll see when I'm in this work mode. In fact, one of my friends saw me walking down the street the other day and they're like, yeah, you were definitely thinking about something to do with work. And it just happens with the baby. I've had to kind of start deliberately carving out time so that if I work from the morning to the evening, there's a definite protected family time there of two, three hours. Then I bath and then I put them to bed. Then I can go back to work if I need to do anything afterwards. Just because if you don't, then you'll constantly think about work and you'll never make time and then you'll miss out on so, so much. So it's difficult. And I think, I hope that it'll get easier and I hope that I can start to shift off some of these responsibilities to other people in the future. But at the same time, like, building a startup is hard, having a family is hard, doing hard things is hard. And I'm not naive to think that something. I'm not one for complaining that much. So even if something is very difficult, I'm struggling to find balance between work life and family life. I'll just make it happen. Same thing. You know what I mean? It just has to happen. [01:07:04] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's a nice way, you know, like, I always looked at it as work is part of your life. Right. So it's like all those things you've just got, as you say, if the family's on fire, you time to focus on that fire. And then as you say, you make time to focus on the stuff that you need to do to keep your life going. And the work is the part of that as well. So. [01:07:21] Speaker A: And ultimately, at the end of the day, if even when I was working for my past companies as an employee, I'd be working very similar, like hours for them. So for me, it's not a trade off between working less, it's just working for who. [01:07:41] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:07:42] Speaker A: So, you know, and then you work out, okay, who do you want to work for? Yourself or somebody else? And it's an easy option. Yeah. So, yeah, I don't see it as Like a sacrifice per se. [01:07:52] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm with you completely. Like if that's who you are, essentially that doesn't change. No matter what you're doing. You could go and work in something totally different. And I think I would certainly still approach things in the same way. It's just who you are as a person, I think. And like you say, who do you want to make money for? [01:08:10] Speaker A: Me, absolutely. Me and my shareholders. [01:08:13] Speaker B: Yeah, Good. Correction. I'd love to jump just to how you've engaged with Codebase and techscaler support and things like that. Just get a little bit about your experience. I know you've spoken a lot with Andrew McGinley who's, you know, one of our entrepreneurs in residence here over the past few months. Can you just give a quick overview of, you know, what support that's kind of brought to you and how that's maybe changed as you've been building. Vinnie, what you found really valuable. [01:08:39] Speaker A: Yeah, I could go off on so many tangents here, but for me it's when we rate. Antler is a London based accelerator. So I again with the ethos of getting things done, I moved to London for 10 weeks to complete this course and we raised out of London. My founders are international. Sorry, my founder lives in. My co founder lives in London. My employees live all over the world. We're in like a remote first company. The. I don't really have a network or I previously didn't really have a network of people that I could talk to within Scotland. People are in the same ethos, etc. I think the. I kind of found code base looking for that community. I think I stumbled across it initially because our mutual friend James called you as like. As like you work here and that you had like a really good experience of the company and you initially like you were just generally help. Sorry, the Ian show. Yeah, no, but you're initially very helpful in just like the like soft touch approach, like introducing me to like mutual connections. There's like a great WhatsApp group that I'm now part of and there's a lot of community for there and I found people that I can connect with. So it's not just like the direct code base help that I've had. It's like those kind of second level things that they've been really supportive. Andrew in particular though where like my engagement of him kind of stepped up a little bit recently I found out that he lives in the same town as me. So it's like create crazy serendipity which is Just outside Edinburgh. He's been really useful in terms of. We've met up a couple times just for brainstorming in terms of when I'm making these strategic hires about marketing and thinking about how do we best spend every marketing dollar. We've been going back and forth and sparring on what the best way to do that is. And he's been super helpful there because he's been there and done that. He's seen that go well and seen that go badly. He's scaled teams, he's seen all the bruises before. And just to have someone that's a good friend, kind of like I have advisors everywhere, Adler, all our investors, my co founders, other people in. I have lots of people giving me advice. But what's different about Andrew is I can go for a coffee with him. He's local, you know, I can sit down. He's been there, no bs, just like very to the point, super friendly. He's introduced me to customers. So I think we've had three customers come my way because of, because of Andrew investors we were ramping up to do around recently. He introduced me to somebody who could help the dd. Yeah, it just feels like a very, no, no expectation, super helpful organization. That's how I experience it. And most of that's been delivered through Andrew. But I know there's all these mechanisms in place to help him do that. [01:11:32] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean that's really cool to hear. I mean one, one thing that I'm expecting will be he's looking for some kind of a commission on these sales. [01:11:37] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, we do pay them 50% and you pay me to be here today as well. [01:11:43] Speaker B: No, I think it's really cool though because that's exactly how we want some of this support to be is, you know. Yes, there are fixed courses and things like that that can support people at different stages. But the thing is what's right for the founder, what's right for the company, when you need something that there's something there that you can kind of try and get. So it's cool at that. You've sort of had that experience there. [01:12:05] Speaker A: Yeah. And it's felt very natural. I just had a thought, pinged it to Andrew, got the support back. Yeah. [01:12:11] Speaker B: Nice, nice. Yeah. Cool. And I guess just to walk back to that WhatsApp group, that's a bunch of founders in Scotland. Just for anybody that doesn't know, I think the criteria to get in is full time founder of a tech company based in Scotland. I think that's it. [01:12:26] Speaker A: Great. [01:12:26] Speaker B: So yeah, full Time. [01:12:28] Speaker A: Exactly. [01:12:28] Speaker B: I think you've got to be working on it full time. I think that's the thing. But as you say, it's a great community. There's loads of founders in there, there's load of X finders, there's loads of operators, angel investors, these sorts of things I think all within that group. And it's just a really supportive community of people that are building and like minded people as well, which is cool. [01:12:47] Speaker A: It helps you open, like broaden your horizons as well. I kind of came back from the London bubble and I was like, ah, there's nobody building cool stuff in Scotland. And maybe just like it was my own naivety really, but then getting added to this group, I was like, wow, there's like so many awesome people building amazing companies within Scotland. They have problems like I do, they're doing awesome stuff. Like it's just a really supportive place to be. [01:13:15] Speaker B: Yeah, nice, I guess. What's sort of the future for Asfini? So like if we go into, you know, you've talked a lot about what the focus is now, what you're working towards, what does success look like for you in the next sort of three months, then 12 months and kind of beyond that. [01:13:29] Speaker A: So we are growing rapidly and we're trying to make sure that we're doing that in the right direction more and more every day. So we have hopefully settled on what we think will be our final icp. So we've been jumping around all these different kinds of buyers and recently we've come across one that we think is okay. We've got a really clear product that we can sell over and over again to the same people. We can scale it and we can also grow revenue. Kind of all the things that we've spoken about this podcast and we're not product market fit per se, but I guess we're like customer problem fit. We know what people's problems are and we have a rough idea of how to solve them. And that's after a year, it's bloody hard. So we definitely don't have all the answers after that time, but we definitely have a validated problem and the outline of a solution. So the next three months for me is building the products strongly in that direction to serve more of their needs. Make sure that it's just like a really tight experience from start to end. Some of the common challenges you have with AI are there. Like the usability of the platform is improved. All these kind of improvements that we're hearing from our customers are just shipped and done and we have that really solid foundation as we do that. Jonny will continue to focus on sales. So again, we know what, what problems they have, we build a better product in that direction, we should be able to close deals faster. We're looking more at the enterprise side of things as well as we move into that. So that is a kind of bigger volume per customer, increased ACV per customer. So deals might take longer, they might need to do more to get them through the hoops. But at the end of the day, that's all he's focusing on again is that nailing that ICP and getting more of them. We're about 10,000 properties at the moment. We, we've always said that we want to get to about 20,000 before we do our seed, which is like a bit of a, kind of just like where the numbers might need to be for, to raise in the UK for the next round. So we'll probably aim to have. Well, we'd be aiming to have 20,000 sometime in the middle of this year anyway. So from a fundraising perspective, we'll probably also kick that off some point then. And then the rationale behind raising is to double down on some of these, on two things. One is we want to continue to broaden our product suite. We want to be the kind of all encompassing solution for property management, replacing a lot of the incumbent softwares that are out there. And to do that obviously need significant R and D. So that'll be one part of the hire, the raise, the rationale for it. The second part is to scale that hopefully proven model of finding and recruiting customers. Maybe we get another Ryan, maybe we get a German Ryan, maybe we get a German Johnny. We get these kind of additional. When we know we can fill their days with leads. Okay, how do we scale that up? It'd be the obvious thing to do. It's time to go. And that's really what the raise would be, is be like, okay, we've got something, let's go, let's scale it faster. So that's probably the six month horizon. Twelve months, don't know. I'll let you know how the end of this day goes first and then we'll work out what 12 months looks like. But that, that's the rough shape of it. Team size probably will grow a little bit. We're not looking to triple, quadruple in size necessarily next couple of months. But I would like more support on the operational side. We're hiring a founders associate at the moment and then in the R and D hires. [01:17:09] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, nice I think something really jumped out to me in there when you're talking 10,000 properties on the platform, not a product market fit yet. And I think when, when I talk to a lot of companies here, some, and it obviously depends, Every industry is different, every size of customer is different. But having problem solution fit to some level doesn't mean you've got product market fit like you say. I think it's really important to have that distinction because that really focuses. That should help inform what you focus on over the next little period of time. [01:17:39] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think if you've got. It's easy to kid yourself right. Like that you right at the beginning of this, you asked me what metrics I focus on and I think it'd be easy to kid ourselves to say, okay, our number one metric of number of properties in the platform illustrates that we have product market fit. No, that means that people will buy what we're selling because they have a problem. The true solution comes in making sure that the tasks that we're giving Vinny A solves a tenant problem, the end use of our software, but then B delivers the ROI that our customers are now expecting, which is a decrease in the time that each of their employees had to spend on the tasks that they were previously doing. So I think we're quite strict about the data that we collect to make sure that we can track this. And we're not kidding ourselves. We're intellectually honest as to whether or not we're there or not. And I think if everything goes to plan, which it won't, then maybe the end of this year we could be looked to have some more like a clearer vision of what product market fit looks like. But yeah, we're not there yet. [01:18:49] Speaker B: Yeah. And did you always know that about the data or is that something you've learned over time over the last year and a half? [01:18:53] Speaker A: Yeah. The great thing about like having this is our first time as founders, but I've worked at hyperscalers for like a number of them. Johnny's worked in proptech and we've definitely taken advantage of a lot of those lessons going into this. For example, I joked at the beginning that Johnny didn't want to go into prop tech. And the rationale was because margins are historically low and there's never been a really big exit in the space. So as a new founder, it's not the best way to go. If you know you're not going to sell for that much and you're not going to make that much money, you're not going to do that. But because we knew that on the way in, we designed our revenue and product model around solving those problems. Similarly, on the data side, I've seen every company I work for pretty much has some problem with data integrity at some point and then it always feels like you don't know what you need until it's too late. We have done a bit of thinking about how do we track and monitor the important metrics from the outset and not done anything complex, just made sure we had that consideration when building database models, et cetera, that we can build out what we need to. So nothing too complex, but just make sure that if you're either you know yourself, what you're building ahead of time, how to avoid some problems, or you can get advice from somebody who's been there and done that in the industry, it goes a long way. [01:20:14] Speaker B: Yeah, nice. Yeah. So just like a couple of kind of final questions to wrap up and things. What are the kind of main things you're paying attention to at the moment to make sure that you know that they don't slow you down, you know, whatever that might be. If it's internal stuff, external stuff, whatever it is. [01:20:29] Speaker A: The trade off between engineering and operations is something that keeps me awake at night, which doesn't seem obvious and it kind of goes back to my experiences in previous companies. But also just like how to build a plane whilst it's taking off. Engineering is always the bottleneck. And if you wait for engineering to perfect a solution, then you'll always be behind what your customers need. Need. We like Fang, like all the big unicorns in Silicon Valley, we have an operational product that fulfills the part where our tech isn't quite there yet. And that's important, critical, and customers don't care whether it's tech or operations driven most of the time, as long as the output and the customer experience is the same. What keeps me awake and I think slows us down is how do we make sure that we optimize from what tech we should build and what operations we should build and how do we fulfill both of those things. It's really easy to build a dashboard that does nothing but send a message to your ops team to do X. That's super easy to do and it means you could ship a feature in a day, but likely there's like you're relying on humans. The time to turn around is really slow the customer. You got human error in there a lot. It's also really the perfect solution is to build a fully end to end automated product, but that's going to take you a month minimum. Even if it seems like a small feature, it's never a small feature. It's going to take you a long, long time. So I see it as like a balance between those two things and if you get that balance right, you can ship quickly and have the desired customer outcome. So I think that's probably what I think is slowing us down the most at the moment. We've maybe erred on the side of building too much. We have a really kick ass product but at the end of the day I think we could have built it in half the time if we had taken some sacrifices on maybe an additional operational hire, for example, to fill some of the gaps that took us the 80 20, the 20 of the 80 20. If we had hired somebody there to do that. I think that's the thing I'm paying most attention to hiring. Whilst we don't have necessarily. I said we didn't have a plan there at the moment, I think that is somewhat slowing us down. We've made the mistake in the past of hiring too late. I hired LJ when I, when we signed up a customer the same, the same day pretty much I hired the next two, probably each of them a month after we should have, which meant that we were always on the back foot. Onboarding if you have the cash. Onboarding takes time. Getting up to speed takes time. Delivering value takes time. We should really be hiring a couple of months ahead of where we need to be. If we don't do that now, when we do go and raise the next round, it'll be like, okay, so now you're going to start fundraising, now you're going to start hiring. We'll start seeing impact from this fundraise in a couple of months where I'd much rather say, hey, we've got this stellar list of people that have just started. Give us the cash and we'll go really fast. So that's the flip side. Maybe as we become a bigger company that becomes more of a blocker. [01:23:41] Speaker B: Yeah, I guess the value lag gets bigger the bigger you become. [01:23:45] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. [01:23:47] Speaker B: What are some of the best and worst bits of advice you've received as a founder so far? You don't have to name drop anyone. [01:23:54] Speaker A: Yeah, worst. I don't think anybody's really given me this advice per se, but it's just something that I've observed is that people I see a lot, and this is just a style thing, I see a lot of people focusing on like a very small niche Hobby project that they work on part time and whilst that can work as like a model, it's not a VC backable business in my opinion. Like, I love side projects. Like when I worked at previous places, me and Johnny ran side projects all together. We ran agencies, run small like features and things like this on the side and they've got a time and a place. But if you want to build a really big business, go all in and don't, like, don't hold back and build something small, give out your whole attention. And a lot of people, it's not advice I've been given but, but I think some of the wisdom from people is to build something small, get a whole lot of traction, try and get like an inkling of traction and then you're ready to scale or to raise. Whereas what Johnny and I did was, I guess, build something small, prove it, a bit of traction, get commitments or an indication of the bigger traction that you can build and raise on the promise and the idea and the size rather than like what you've actually done. Maybe if. Another way to phrase that is like, if you're going out to raise and you're post revenue, it's really easy for someone to push back and say, ah, okay, Your revenue's at 5k per month, but we would only invest if it was a 6K. Whereas if you're going to them and you're saying, you know, we're really pre revenue, but we have like all this opportunity, look how big the market is here we have these less than 10. This is how we know it's a problem that this is how we know we can scale internationally. It's much harder for them to make a quantitative decision on whether or not your pound value is high enough or low enough. And I think being comfortable to raise in that position is probably some of the best advice I got earlier on from a bloke that works at Antler. And then finally, just one more piece of advice and I still don't know if we've done this enough. We're working in the property management space, so it's not building rockets, but if you want to build a rocket, go and build a rocket. It's like, don't think small just for the sake of making it easy, like think really big. And I think it's something that we're quite guilty of in many ecosystems. I've seen it in London, I've seen it in Scotland. It's like not it crosses borders, but like if you want to like build a big company, build A big company don't, you know, mess around in the middle and don't think that it's for some special elite. Break your frame and build something cool. [01:26:45] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's amazing advice. And the one place I've seen that where there is no ceiling on that ambition is out in San Francisco. You know, when you go there and you speak to people and they are thinking about things that are 30 years ahead, you know, things don't even exist yet and they're thinking about how do I build a business for 30 years time and what the world is going to look like at that point. And I mentioned this on the last time we did one of these podcasts where. But the amount of people you go out to and speak to there and they're like, I'm stuck in a million annual recurring revenue. I'm going nowhere. And it's like, you know, when you think about that as the baseline of I'm really stuck. I'm not going anywhere compared to what some of the conversations you have in other ecosystems are. It's just so vastly different on that where people are focused on what they're looking and working towards. [01:27:29] Speaker A: I think the other thing that I love about, I've got a really good friend, Megan, who is American to all her brilliance, but the one thing I love about any American I interact with is just like default enthusiasm and energy. And I think that really translates into what people are building in startup land. Create serendipity for yourself, be outgoing, network chat, be energetic. Just to create your own luck through that infectious attitude. I think it's something that we could do better at here and as well like supporting each other. Like, I'm not saying there isn't like a, there's a lack of this in Scotland per se, but like I, if you, if some like. So you pitched me like a startup idea a couple of weeks ago, I maybe in the past I would have tried to like validate the revenue model or try and work out how you know specifically you're going to, why this won't work. But my default position is always now to anyone who said, because I'm a START founder now. So everyone tells me their ideas, my default position is always say, well, what a great idea when you're getting started. [01:28:37] Speaker B: Yeah, right. [01:28:38] Speaker A: And I think I told you to start tomorrow or whatever because like, just like support other people, push them forward. Be enthusiastic, be energetic. I think is one of the best things you can do for somebody. Even if the idea is terrible, if that person quits their job to Go work on something terrible. I think that's cooler than somebody working on like a full time job for something they don't like. [01:28:55] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think in that as well. Right. So like you don't know what's necessarily the problem that that space has from the. Unless you've got like domain expertise, you've got all that experience in there. Like you need to go and speak to those people before you figure it out. So and I think this goes right back to what you said at the start. You've got the boiler based, you know, essentially like WhatsApp chat. That's a way in, that's a way to start that conversation with those people. That conversation happens now over the next year and a half and now you are where you are. That doesn't happen if you don't go and start that there. So I think anybody that has something, me included, right. Like I will get there at some point again because it's infectious. I love it. It's when I've had the most fun in my entire life. It's when I've run my own companies. I will get back to that at some point. It's just about when. Well, that's getting way too much into the me thing. But for everybody else it's just about, I think what you said earlier, don't hold back, break your frame, Figure out what you want to go and do and just go and do it. Start the conversation, see how it evolves. Make sure that you're adaptable to how that evolves and how you go out and build it. But just start and, and get going. [01:30:01] Speaker A: Absolutely. [01:30:02] Speaker B: Yeah. I love it. I'll be pitching you more things in. [01:30:05] Speaker A: The coming months and I'll always say yes. That's it. I don't know that's what you want. But. [01:30:10] Speaker B: Well, just whenever anyone says yes, I mean, you've got to go and think about it more. It's better when somebody's like, no, that's terrible. [01:30:15] Speaker A: You can just ignore it. People's iPhones are full of notes and ideas that they've never worked on. And I think it's just like go and start. Like just pick one and go. [01:30:23] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:30:23] Speaker A: And then you probably, you'll find like one of them doesn't work so you try something else. [01:30:28] Speaker B: But yeah, yeah. And also like go and try. Andrew always talks about this, like, go and try and sell it. You know, why stop? You know, lots of people think, sometimes think like I've got going to say this is what my idea is. What's your feedback to that try and close it in the first, you know, first meet, you know, like just say, look, I'm building this. This is where we are now. This is where we're going to get to. Are you in? And just see what the feedback is to that. Because what I've noticed in the past again as well is you go in, you get all that great feedback. People tell you what they would buy. That's not the same as them buying it. So you've got to try and bring the actual action of purchasing it as close to that kind of conversation as you can. Otherwise you design something, build something, go out, try and sell it to them and yeah, but I wouldn't pay that much for it or I wouldn't actually pay to solve that problem. So it's how you get that balance right. And, and doing that early on is the best way. [01:31:17] Speaker A: I think I could speak forever about selling in that way. You should be charging more than what you think it's worth. You should be like, have some crazy high version of your product, you think nobody will ever pay and see if you can close it. Make sure that before you start building people sign a contract, make sure they actually have the intention of. We could have a whole night hour on. [01:31:40] Speaker B: Yeah, and it's great. I mean we were at a conference last month and one of the guys, I forget what company was from, it was based out of Dublin and he was talking about the US market and everybody will go on about how great the US market is as a consumer market or a market selling to business or consumer based. And this was particularly a B2B SaaS company. And he was like, it's not because it's big, it's not because there's lots of people there. It's because people are willing to pay lots of money for their problems to be solved. It is a market that is a wee bit different to other markets around the world where there is more focus on price or procurement or things like that. From his experience over in the U.S. it was like people want their problem solved really well, really quickly and they will pay well for that. That's why they're a great consumer market. [01:32:24] Speaker A: It's not without its challenges for sure, but absolutely. I think when I was still toying around with. I've got one other friend who's actually quite negative on the prop tech space. When I told him I'd raised around to, to to build something in that space, he said, right, what to do with that money is just pack up, move to move to San Francisco, do anything Else apart from build this proptech company and you'll make more money, just go to networking events, just go chat to people. And he said you'll make more money just chatting to people. And with that, in that, like off site or in that, in that move than you will selling this, this product. And like I like to prove him wrong on, on the actual revenue model from our side. But it's just that like you can have conversations which turn into revenue and product and customers much easier than you can in the uk, I feel. [01:33:15] Speaker B: Yeah, I think I totally agree from everything I've seen from over there. I mean, not the most supportive comments. [01:33:24] Speaker A: He's a former. So he exited his prop tech business previously for like 40 million. So he's been there, done that, made a lot of money. He sees a value in what we're building. But he's just like the hoops that you have to go through to get there are like, I mean we're probably going to go over time if I start going into that tangent, but like why would you sell to a property manager when you can sell to like a software engineer? Right. Like they're more tech first, they're more tech savvy, they're more open to buying all these kind of dynamics. [01:33:54] Speaker B: Yeah. Second, last question. What would you say to somebody considering joining a code based run program like Tightscaler? [01:34:01] Speaker A: Do it. I don't see why you wouldn't really. Techscaler is clearly very accessible. I've talked with Andrew, you people that have been there, done that. But just getting in a room with people who are in the same headspace. Think about starting a company. Starting a company have been there. It's infectious. Kind of like we say it's like one of the few places where you might get over or close to that US enthusiasm that we've maybe been speaking about. Everything is possible within these rooms and I think there's probably a lot of people. Like, if you're already listening to this podcast and you're already trying to make your decision as to Whether to join Techscaler based on me answering this question, then you should 100% already have joined Techscaler because there's just some weird niggling doubt somewhere in your mind that it's not going to pay off. It will, absolutely. [01:34:47] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think we kind of touched on this earlier, but there's lots of people around Scotland that are building great companies and you don't hear about them all the time because they're focused on building their companies, but there are great communities around and they're not all through Techscaler. That WhatsApp group is a great example of a bunch of really amazing founders and company builders and there are people like that all over the place. So you can go out and find those communities and become part of them. And a great way in can be Techscaler. A great way in can be all the other organizations that support. But one of the best ways is also just chatting to people. Go to an event, have a conversation with another founder. What have you found that helps you with this? Or I've got this problem and that can bring you into a whole different world that you didn't even know kind of existed? [01:35:27] Speaker A: Scotland is full of these undercover industries that only exist here. People come here for great specific tourism, for the fishing industry, for the whiskey industry. It's a bit of a tangent, but some of the people, some of the best founders that I know are building tech enabled marketplaces or solutions in these very specific Scottish industries. There's so much opportunity here that people just maybe don't see because those founders are away building a business. Just go out and make your own luck and work on what you're good at. [01:35:56] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:35:56] Speaker A: Awesome. [01:35:57] Speaker B: Right, last one, where can listeners find out about Ask Vinny and do you have any kind of specific asks for the audience? [01:36:05] Speaker A: Askfini.com askfinny.uk we're in both domains, LinkedIn. You check me out. Rory Buchanan. There's also lots of great content there. My co founder Johnny Su is also on there, but that's the best place to get in touch. What else would you like to know? [01:36:22] Speaker B: Sorry, just if you had any asks like if you're hiring investment partnerships. [01:36:27] Speaker A: So if you meet with the criteria that I illustrated previously and want to become a founder's associate where it's kind of hands on operational, day to day stuff but also exposure to things like fundraising, then we're in the market, you can reach out to me there. Additionally, if you work for a property management company at the moment and you see that their customer service is poor or they are struggling to complete the day to day operations because of lack of manpower, then I think I have a solution for you. So please reach out. Happy to chat. [01:37:01] Speaker B: Nice. And is LinkedIn Rory actual Rory or is that Vinny in another guy's? [01:37:06] Speaker A: I cannot connect. [01:37:09] Speaker B: Thanks so much Rory for coming in. That's been a great chat, so helpful. I really appreciate you taking the time. [01:37:13] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, love to it.