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And welcome back to another episode of talking with experts podcast with your host, Chris countin, the expert Whisperer in this week's episode, I bring on rich white, the CEO of Fathom dot video to talk about how he partnered with the zoom and ranks now as the number one app on Zoom marketplace, Fathom video has been well received by many users, including myself. And actually I share some feedback directly with rich on the call. And by investors around the world like zoom Reddit Sprout Social product, latest twitch and Y Combinator. This is a serious startup which you need to pay attention to enrich. It's really excited to share more about it with you today. So enjoy, and I'll speak to you at the end. Yeah, so So I know you've had quite a bit of funding. And you've got some serious investors behind you and yc Combinator, which I'm kind of ignorant to because I don't know that much about them. But I'd like to know, I know you've had lots of funding. But what are you doing with that funding? How are you distributing that out? And are you continuing to chase funding?
Yeah, I think at this stage of the game, most of funding goes back into you know, the team, right? You know, we have a pretty senior team or a 12 person team. And our team, basically, they only really have two disciplines that are competing, right? It's like product engineering, and then customer support customer success. And I think we've invested very heavily in both those dimensions earlier than I think most startups do. Because we kind of look at like, this is a very technical product. And I'm a big fan of like, you know, best product wins the day, the more and more of these days, right? It's not the 80s where the best marketing campaign wins the day. And on the other side of the ball, I think, I think most companies tragically like under invest in like customer support and customer care and customer success, especially at early phase and especially when they're a free product like we are right up free products equal, like terrible support. And so we wanted to kind of change that. I think that's a huge, like a huge strategic opportunity. So we've invested a lot in both those dimensions with funding.
Yeah. So is the focus then now, just because I know you've got some applications on LinkedIn for jobs is, is that something you're driving forward? You're looking for more positions in those areas, engineering product and customer success, partner success?
Yep. Especially, obviously an engineering, right. Like it's very technical product, which makes it kind of fun, right? Like, I have a technical background, I haven't been allowed to write code in years, but I've been, you know, understand enough to be dangerous properly to my team. But yeah, there's a lot of technical depth to this product and to the product roadmap. And so you know, finding good, and we're an all senior team, which I think is also kind of unique, and kind of the benefit of, you know, being not your first startup, right, you can kind of go find folks you've worked with before that were amazing, like, Hey, we're putting a band together here. And, you know, we start from scratch. And I think that was one of the most fun parts about this version of the video game playing. It's like starting with like a great raid group, right with, like, you know, all the best mages and Paladin sort of thing from day one has been really fun.
So on that, what is the roadmap for you in terms of building out that team?
In terms like product roadmap or organizational
roadmap? Organizational?
I mean, I think, you know, it's startups tend to be step functions, right. And so I think we're kind of getting on top of the current step, right, where we've got a full person team, it's about 5050, at this point, engineering versus, you know, Customer Care. And so we'll continue to scale that up a little bit. And there's probably an inflection point soon, where we will look at bringing on some other disciplines, you know, actually bringing someone to do marketing so it's not just me and some outside folks. So bring in some, you know, right now I am pm, and product designer, with an assist from an external firm. So like we probably look to like, generally try to cleave things off of my plate, because as time goes on my plate tends to get, you know, where things get stuck, right. We want to stop that from happening.
Yeah, when I am looking from an outside perspective, I haven't even asked you what Fathom is but let's go on to that. Next. I know that I'm just looking, you're very, you're very hands on CEO. So is that something you advise other startups to be? The founders to be more hands on with with the growth?
I mean, I think in the first, you know, in the early days, yeah, sub 10 people, sub 20 People you kind of have to be right. I mean, that's supposedly your your superpowers like, Oh, you're good at some of one of these stark dimensions really well, and you'd stay in that dimension. Mine happens to be product, something very engaged on product of yours is sales, you should say engage in sales, right. So like, I think it's one of the things we're like, you know, if you're a product CEO, bringing in product person was your third hire is kind of a weird thing to do. Right? Like, you need to be the best person in that role, at least for the first 20 hires, in my opinion.
Yeah, yeah. So for for those that are listening. Can you can you explain a little bit more Fathom is? Yeah, sure. Yeah.
So Fathom is a free app or zoom. And really, what we're trying to solve is, I think it's like, I love having conversations on zoom with people, I love talking to prospects, talking to customers, I would talk to people like yourself, what I hate doing is trying to like, while I'm having a conversation, like, heard, we type out some notes, right, or like write something down on pen and paper, because I'm kind of single threaded, like when when my, when I start typing on the keyboard, like my mouth starts moving, the conversation just kind of grinds to a halt. It's really awkward. And it's just like, really stressful, right? And what I found was, my notes, were never that good. Like, I actually think I did a pretty good job. But like, I would take notes during the call, I'd have like a five minute window after the call where I had to like, Rush and like, clean up the notes from that make sense? And then I go back two weeks later and be like, wait, what exactly does this one mean, right? And more more problematically, I try to like, share with my team, like, oh, I have these five conversations. And here's what I learned out of them. And there's just like this huge, kind of like telephone game gap here, right? Between experience you have having conversation, you know, first person firsthand versus getting these kind of like, here's six bullet points that I learned across two hours conversations. And so Fathom is a free app, presume we real time record, transcribe and I like highlight portions of the call. So the goal is like, I don't have to be sitting and take notes. By here's something I just like, click a button fathom, and like, say that part of the conversation interesting, or come back to it later, we can automatically fill out your CRM for you from that information. We can, you know, take a clip, if you want to take a clip from a call and be like, Oh, Chris, it's something really smart here. Let me grab this 32nd clip. And rather than giving you a bullet point, and like CRM, or notes, I can check, here's the clip of Chris Haynes really smart thing or this piece of product feedback. And so it really allows everyone on your teams to have kind of that first person like experience with what's hap, like with what customers are saying. And it's, it's been a really fun product, because it's like, again, as you can tell, it's something that solves a problem for myself. And, you know, turns out a decent number other people as well. Yeah,
there's just so many benefits to it, because I've used it myself. And I found that on the call that was a lot more engaged with the person that was on the other side, because my head wasn't down taking notes. And I could then still just click to say this was a great point, make a little note about what it is if I wanted to, and then end it, or it would automatically end when I when I started talking, which is amazing. I've got a few feature requests. Can I can I go? Yes. So as a podcast, I have some other videos that were recorded on video but not live. Can I upload videos to fathom and have it transcribed? Or is it just more like recording and transcript?
Not yet, but we're working on like, how do we allow you to import? Because yeah, most folks have recording now it's become sort of a kind of a, you know, there's a lot of people are doing it, right? Even zoom has built in. People want to bring their kind of libraries with them. So we're working on that we don't have that yet,
unfortunately. So that's great. Then a live streaming feature. So like, you can livestream via zoom. Is that something that's available for transcription as well? fathom.
Oh, interesting. Yeah, like in terms of like, I want a live feed of the transcript, while the while the call is happening. That's also a thing where like, we do that we actually have that information. We just don't expose anyone real time because right now it was you know, I think for your audience, it makes sense to go and watch the transcript as the things happening. But for you, you might want to watch the transcript while you're trying to talk to someone. Yeah, so we have had some people ask for that. I think there's also some really interesting like one way mirror type things where how can someone in a business setting you know, kind of audit a call without actually joining the call, right? Oh, like I'm a sales manager. I want to like you know, jump in and see what's happening with this call. Because I just saw I just got the slack notification that like a competitor name got mentioned. I wanted to like audit this call without like disrupting the call by join. Yeah. So we're looking at some stuff like that,
then, because I know that I've watched that demo video when you went and joined and how it integrates well, with Slack and HubSpot, and automatically synced when you make it a little bit of a change to the note goes straight into HubSpot that's in genius. And I've got to praise you, because I'm going to be using Fathom for life. Whatever payment plan you bring out,
I mean, that was a big insight we had early on was like we is that, you know, it's kind of like on his job to be done, right? Like, if I just give you a recording, you can take your notes, that's great. But like, where do those notes generally end up? They end up in your CRM, or you're trying to like, share something in the slack? And so, like building those last mile bridges, we found those are like our killer features, right? Yeah. Especially folks in sales, where they're like, Oh, I've got after every call, I have to like log this in. And now they don't have to do that shocking. It's filled in. Kind of it's Yeah, gives people back a lot of time.
This, there's so much time wasted, I guess. Yeah. Using Fathom now, it's gonna save me a lot of time as partner Success Manager, but then, like, I have to collect NPS surveys. And rather doing that manually, it can just be through a zoom call, and then straight into that setup that workflow for that. So that is, is that something you're doing work workflows with? Fab them as well?
No, not yet. We are working on what's our what's our next version, or team version that has more of these types of things. But what you're describing is very common in terms of people nowadays, like, you know, the same way my team doesn't really believe my notes, right? Like your customers don't believe like testimonials anymore, like these written kind of, here's a poll quote, right. We all know how the poll quote game is played. And so it's also we're seeing a lot of people use it for like, let's pull out kind of testimonials from live calls, right? Like, share that either internally or externally, right big with our homepage, or testimonials, or people just like off the cuff talking about Batum while on a zoom call with one of our CSMs.
Right, so that's exactly what I did for Casper.
Yeah, exactly. Right. So yeah, so like, they should take this, they should take that snip it out, they'll share with their team, you know, next, you know, it'll be all over the internet. Right? So yeah, it's kind of cool, right, like really lowers the bar for it, that kind of content creation.
And that's what I liked about being able to clip a specific section of the call, and then to share that specific video with Arthas. Ingenious, where do you want to take the product and the design in the next few years? What, what's the roadmap, roadmap? And what are you willing to share?
Yeah, I mean, I think in broad strokes, like we were concentrating, like, how can you know, we can work backwards? Like, what can tech do today? And how can we apply that to like, make it like less stressful to run a meeting, right? How do we give you like, how do we make basically a Zoom meeting better than an in person meeting, it's constant, how I'm thinking about it, right? And so like, taking away the note taking thing is one part, we recently added some features where it will like, warn you in the meetings about the end, or about the what we're gonna do a new thing once like, Oh, your meetings run over. And not only your meeting run over, but like the next your next meeting has already started, right? Like, you need to jump on to that. We have another nice feature. It's like warns you if you monologue, right? If I if you talk for like two minutes without anyone else talking like a little like warning, sort of thing about like, what can tech do to just like, make us make us feel more comfortable? Like we're on a ton of these calls, right? How can I take more work off the human in this situation? And what the human do what they do best, which is have a human human conversation and just do that kind of detective work you're generally doing on calls, right? So it's one dimension. And then the other dimension is, you know, we have a lot of people, surprisingly, right. Like, we tend to have someone at a company sign up and use it. And then we see it spread to other people in the work. And so thinking more about how can we be relevant? You know, what are the features you need, when you've got the your entire team on the platform, easy to manage? How do we make it easy to find interesting things from your colleagues? Right? How do we become kind of this like, interesting knowledge base in of itself? about like, what your customers are saying?
Yeah, on and then that is your focus to more go the enterprise route and onboard companies or your users, mainly the small to small business owners, small to medium sized businesses.
I mean, I think everyone has a challenge with with, you know, this, this problem, right? Like, like trying to take notes while trying to have conversation. So we kind of look at ourselves some more to like zoom itself, where it's used by a whole different, a whole bunch of different folks. Right? And that's kind of how we look at this as well, right? Obviously, there's some unique opportunities with like, businesses and stuff, especially teams using it. But I think you get down to the individual user. You know, we see people that are like, life coaches have the same challenges. salespeople have the same challenges, consultants have the same challenge. Like it's pretty consistent, right? So we want to stay current, we want to become kind of one of those, like ubiquitous tools that everyone uses.
And you've, you've been able to do that because of this free use at the moment. Is the plan to do a lifetime deal or have a monthly subscription. When is that coming?
Yeah, I mean, I think we're looking at like, how, like, we're okay, coming from options for monetization. But I think one of the core things is like, we're always gonna be keeping a free product. I think that's really important, right? I think, you know, the plg motion, like, though, give people value first, get them up and running. It's like, just so powerful and so disruptive. No one else in our space is doing that, right. Like you look at whether you're looking at like the bigger enterprise tools like gong or or getting smaller tools like otter, they all basically monetize you from day one. And so you have to make it you have to make them this this like leap of faith being like, oh, yeah, yes, maybe it's a trial, but like, am I gonna commit to this? Because like, it is kind of like a, you know, a second brain sort of thing, right? Like, you don't want to say commit this thing, and then find out oh, crap, now I've got my stuff fragmented across multiple tools. Right. And so I think that's kind of advantage of, of committing, like we are to like being having a free offering.
Do you think there's an issue with that, and then having it free, but then bringing out a paid version, maybe turning people off? Or because you mentioned keeping it free forever?
We I think we you know, my Alaska user voice we start off completely free. And then we did a number of different ways to like, monetize people, right? monetize, like, you know, a premium versions or whatnot. So I learned a lot from that about that. And honestly, we're not because we didn't always do that super well, right. It is a very delicate, like balancing act. But I did do like, at this point, we learned a lot about how to, like, balance those two things out so that you, you know, we're seeing you news, like you have a free thing. But like everyone, everyone's pretty savvy now. Right? Everyone knows, everyone kind of like can tell when you're free thing is like not really. Like, it's a trap, right? Like, it's like, Oh, I like I can tell that like am I actually need to use this thing. It's yeah, I'm going to quickly bump into some limits or something like that. And that kind of like, undermines I think, the value of sharing out your friends like check out school for anything. So we have some plans. I think there's a couple of dimensions we can go. We haven't yet figured it out, though.
Yeah, that's interesting. So from your experience with user voice, what are kind of some of the big lessons that you learned that you've bought into fathom?
Oh, gosh, I mean, I don't think how many hours do we have left? You know, it's, I feel like it's so different doing it kind of the second time around. I always like to use a lot of like videogame analogies. And I feel like it's like playing an old video game. And you kind of remember where like, the good shield is in this castle. And the good sword is in that that dungeon sort of thing? Because I think the challenge when you're first we're getting started, right? There's like two challenges. One is like you have no network. So it's hard to go find good people to work with you. Because you, you have no reputation, right? So like, that's one that's really challenging. Not much you can do about that. Second challenge is just gonna like you don't know, you'll know. Right? Like, I go back 1015 years, starting user voice, I knew how to like write software. I didn't know anything about marketing and or selling it. I didn't even know what these terms meant. I don't even know what the options were. Right. And so I think the really killer thing from the two is like, I've like done enough marketing done over sales then enough with like, bunch of different go to market strategies to be like, Oh, I understand now what they'll like these are, these are actually multiple choice questions. It felt like, like, basically essay answer questions before now they feel like multiple choice. And the multiple choice is, it's much more obvious now. Because I can be like, Oh, well, we're doing this, this and this. So therefore, this is probably the right like, team composition. And it's probably the right go to market and this probably the right mark, like, you just move a lot faster, because you've you kind of know what levers to pull. And so I think that's kind of the big thing. Yeah, also, the started game has changed so much from a funding perspective, from a go to market perspective, like dramatically in the last 15 years. So there's some of that as a part of the the value of joining a group like Y Combinator was I have some levers to pull are but the tactics change almost like year year, even like quarter to quarter in terms of what's going to work in terms of go to market. And you really that's kind of nice to give align yourself with a group where you join some sort of incubator type thing where you now have a lot of peers that are in you know, they're not competitive, but in the arena at the same time and you're kind of comparing notes because the one thing I would say is like when it comes to like go to market or marketing by the time it's in a book, it no longer works like time everyone knows marketing is is weird kind of zero sum game I go to market is by the time everyone knows to do the thing. It just no longer works, right? So if you like what's the new thing that no Like, only 1% of what we're doing right now. And that's where you get that through peer to peer.
And how do you how do you collect that information? Or do that use a feedback if you're Bootstrap?
I mean, you mean like, how do I get feedback from peers? Or how do I get feedback from from customers?
So from from your instance, you scratch your own itch and built your product, turn it into reality, you had the experience, and you knew what options to take terms of finding? Investors, and you had a good team because of your track record. But for somebody who was starting out, but had that technical expertise,
yeah, yeah, it well, you know, we actually did do a lot of user research. Like, yes, there was like the seed of a thing, or it's like, this is I have this problem, I want to solve it. But we did a lot of user research. We're like, Do other people have this problem? Does their problem looks similar to mine? How is it different? We, you know, and did some of like yams reach out to my network, to a lot of basically actually paying people to talk to me. So use a platform called user interviews, which is a fantastic platform where you can go on and say, I want to talk to 50 people with this background, or you know, in this locale, and here, I'm gonna pay him X dollars for a 20 minute conversation. And like, you can get you can get smart really fast on on kind of a market like that. And I think that's a, you know, you mentioned Bootstrap. And you know, that's not free. But there are probably cheaper ways to do that, right? Like you can go to Yeah, you can find the right communities online and say, like, Hey, I'm trying to help you with this problem. I'm trying to build a solution. People love to talk about their problems, right? Like, I was paying people to do it. But I'm pretty sure if you ask nicely, people would love to talk to you for 15 minutes about a problem they're having in just the off chance, you might solve that problem for them one day, right? Like I've done it myself, where I'm like, I have tons of problems. I wish someone will just build some software to fix I'd be happy to talk to you for 15 minutes about my specific like, incarnation that problem, if I think that might solve it in the future. So I just think this yeah, there's a lot of clever ways to do it. But yeah, we did. Literally hundreds of user research calls before we wrote any code, really?
And then before you actually launched because it was only recently, like, last year? Yeah. Did you have a bunch of users that you use you like sign the NDA contract? They worked on the product, and they gave you feedback before actually going on to the marketplace?
Yeah, we didn't. I mean, we had a very, like, close, we're close beta for a long time, right. So like, you know, we were kind of in this, we're really kind of like a closed beta for like six to seven months before we ever launched even eight months. And it was one of these, right? We would invite people in, we would ask them, like, kind of like, don't tell anyone about this. Right? I think we had them sign NDAs. But whatever, right? Do us a favor, and like it was generally a network folks or friends of friends sort of thing. And we put a couple 100 people through that. And I think it was, you know, we knew we were ready when we saw like, oh, we added more people. And they stick around. They don't run this run this bug and like, give up after week one or week two sort of thing. And so So yeah, so we did like a lot of user research upfront. And then it actually took us a long time to get to a version where it like actually was sticky enough that users kept coming back to it. Right. And mainly because like, again, it's a very technical product. So you know, if this thing, if you hire Fathom to like, be your second brain and it fails you wants you might not do you know, like your your tolerance for this thing, screwing up is actually really low. So it took us a long time to kind of like really get something that is, is very solid. And I think there's other a lot of other people in the space, you know, talk to like, what do you think of this competitor that competitors like, oh, it's super buggy. And so it's like, okay, if your competitors are buggy, that also means everyone's now afraid you're gonna be buggy. So now the bar is even higher than it was before. Yeah. So. So yeah, so we did use research. And then probably eight months of like, private beta testing, probably a couple 100 people. But in the end, it was really like 60 people that kind of stuck with us. And then that's when we realized, Ah, okay, this cohort is actually the retention was pretty good. Like, we're in a good place to launch.
And how many users would you say you have roundabout? Now? It's no, I
mean, probably probably on a public podcast. I shouldn't be. Oh, yeah. Okay. Many, many 1000s of users at this point.
Yes. And zoom has definitely been your best friend with the partner fund. How did that conversation go? Was it another cold email or?
Actually, I mean, we got into the Zoom apps program with a cold email to the program wait after spending a lot of time trying to get an intro. I was really able to email this guy and see it and hope for the best and thankfully, his name is Andrew Ross Ross has been amazing for us. At zoom, and they've just been, you know, we I think that was the second thing that broke really well, like really good for us, right, like, first solving a problem that like, you know you have, but we still have this big go to market problem and we're trying to figure it out. We had some ideas, but then this zoom app marketplace came along, oh, my gosh, what are like, unique opportunity, you don't generally get to get out on the ground floor of like, marketplaces for, you know, consumer needs with hundreds of millions of users, right. And so we made it very intentional decision, like, we are going to, you know, be like a Remora on that shark, right, like, we are going to, like, attach ourselves to it so that they don't even know where they end. And we began sort of thing. And it's, it's, you know, and obviously, we raise money from zoom apps fund. And so it's one of the things, we built a lot of relationships with them, we intentionally got a bunch of investors that had good connections with Zoom. And so we made that like a core kind of like, strategy pillar, like, let's get really tight with Zoom, or product perspective, from a corporate perspective from, you know, partnerships perspective, like all sorts of things, and it's gone very, very well.
Is that an exclusive partnership? Or are you looking for other opportunities to be on marketplaces?
No, we're exclusive to zoom. I mean, I think we did our research early on found that like, for the groups of people were generally targeting zoom had like 80 plus percent of the market. Yeah. And that was also like a huge simplifying assumption, right? Like, I think one things with startups is, you're always trying to figure out like, what's the, like, 10% solution I can make, which is like, 80% of value, right? And so we saw a bunch of other people in space, try to integrate with every one of these different tools. And we're Oh, you know, 510 years ago, you'd have to because no one had kind of like a dominant market position. But now it's like, oh, my gosh, we're going to build into zoom in that gets 80% of market, great. We're not building, we've got a bunch of other stuff. We can go build, we don't need to go build a bigger market. Right.
So when you appeared on Product Hunt, and G two was it? What kind of feedback did you get from them? And what changes did you make at that point?
Your Product Hunt? Is is like a really interesting side quest in this like startup video game, right? Like, I actually don't think I realized how impactful that platform was until we went on to it. And it's fishing. It's like, own mini. It's like its own mini game, right? Like, you've got to launch to figure out when you want to launch you need to figure out how to like Marshal people up vote you you've got to like, you know, it's it's really interesting. It's like, it really is like this mini game between, like loading screens on the big game, right. But like it, you know, I think we learned kind of indirectly because it generated a ton of signups for us, right your product of the day, I think we were number two for our week, we were pretty salty about that. We were number two for the week, we were like number three for the month or something. But we also like top three for the year in the AI category, which is pretty cool. So like it's driven a lot of signups. It's also driven on signups from like really good early adopter users, right? Like kind of folks like yourself that are like product people themselves. And we were talking about this before the call, how nice it is still, like in the early phase, you get all these other early adopters, and they have really good ideas. Again, going back to why we invest in customer cares, because we really want all that feedback. And so, you know, I wouldn't say the product launch necessarily directly taught us anything, but we've got a bunch of users that have become huge advocates for us, and have given us a lot of like, really like amazing insights and like, oh my gosh, we didn't think about that feature. We should go do that.
Yeah, it's great to be just around more just SAS buyers, people that are enthusiastic about tech and want to be your brand ambassador. And that's why I like working at AppSumo another marketplace. But since you are exclusive on Zoom, and we're not gonna have that conversation. But would you would would, would you ever consider listing on AppSumo as a free option? Just get more Yeah.
You know, do we want to go build out a bunch of like integration, other video platforms? No, like, not necessarily. Like, I have a lot of really good engineers, we have a huge backlog of really cool stuff we're going to build. But we've also done a lot with I think just partnerships in general. Probably one of our strategic pillars is zoom. The other one is just partnerships in general. I think you know, we've got a good partnership with with closed CRM, we got a good partnership with HubSpot. We've we've got a bunch of things where it's like, hey, we, you know, someone's got an audience or distribution. We've got a product that it's going to Yeah, it's kind of a win win for both. So absolutely have that conversation. Awesome.
That's great. Well, let me see if there's anything else in my notes that
is very thorough
research. Yeah. So it's yeah. Oh, in terms of data because you know, you we are recording and clean Insights, feedback. How long did you keep this data for? And where is it stored? And where does it go?
Yeah, I mean, we we kind of Rashid multicloud. So we're kind of like partially on AWS and partly Porsche and GCP. One things also you need to fathom is like, if you record any recordings and have them stay on top of them, and definitely, like, I think there's a lot of other platforms like, oh, they, they delete them after 30 days or something. But we were going to keep your recordings, right. Like, we've seen, like people, they want to go back something six months ago, but every six months, I check in with this customer. And gosh, I don't remember at all what our conversation was six months ago, when we go watch the last 10 minutes of that call right now. I always pick up right where I left off. So yeah, so like data security, like data retention, like all that stuff. So one hand, we do a lot of that because we know like to kind of contract with users. And we do a ton around security and privacy because that's the other thing we've seen, right? We did, we did our sock two, which is kind of like the gold standard of like security auditing. We did that before we even launched, because we knew this was gonna be an important, like an important thing for for users. Right?
Yeah. Awesome. That's, that's answered my question there. And thank you for thank you for sharing so much. Today, what I wanted to go back to quickly if we've got time as from because my audiences, mainly startups and other SAS buyers, what advice would you have for them in terms of your journey? Any any takeaways that would help them make progression?
Yeah, I mean, I think the two things are gonna go back to or I can, like, be a joiner, like, I feel like the best thing to have done or when I joined someone else's single, you're kind of like, check my ego and like, join some other thing that was like, you know, philosophical assignments, or whatever, like aligned with what I wanted to do. Or I like, when I'm away to like, fold someone else into something I was working on. I said, some open source projects, where it's like, I wouldn't found everyone that was doing something similar to like, why are we competing with like, work on this together? We're trying to solve the same problem, right? And then I had some other situations where like, you know, someone's working on something that I wanted to work on. Rejecting, like, hey, like, I was thinking about this myself, do you have room on your room on your team sort of thing. And that kind of leads in second thing, which is like a lot of the best things in my career have come from cold emails. I mentioned the thing with Zoom. But I really got my my startup, my start in startups by like cold emailing Justin Kahn cheer who went on to kind of do Twitch to like, join their startup before Twitch, and like, it was just a random cold email back and I want to work on what you're working on. I think I can be an addition to your team. And so I'm constantly surprised by how often people do do cold emails, right? Like, and good cold emails, right? There's a bunch of lazy cold emails, right? But like the ones, like kind of like your notes, right? Like, you could tell this person actually did some research and they're reaching out to you, not you and 60 other people, right? So those events are things be a joiner. And don't be afraid to like, you know, think someone cold.
Yeah, I like that. And we've got a connection because when app see what we're doing that Black Friday fund, last year, I could tell that they were there was a bit of a backlog and I just offered my help for free. Just because I wanted to get into tech. I was a bit of X chef wanting to get into tech, didn't know how to, but I just saw an opportunity. I asked them to be on my podcast. And then one thing led to another, they hired me so that was a cold email story. I think that's where we should end the call because your time is very precious. And thank you so much for today's chat on talk with experts podcast. How can people learn more about fathom? And yourself and how do they create free account today?
Yeah, I think you just put in the crawl here but yeah, go Fathom dot video slash pod. We do have a waitlist. So if you go that link, you will skip the waitlist, you get them completely for free. You can download install in western minute probably. And if you'd like to reach out to me, I'm on LinkedIn. Feel free to message me on LinkedIn.
Awesome, brilliant. Take care. Thank you, Chris. Thank you
