Hi, hi. How are you? Yeah, great. Thanks. Good to meet. Good
to meet you as well.
Thanks. Thanks for taking the time. Magda. Magda was raving about you guys. I was in London with her a couple of weeks ago, and she said I just had to meet you guys. So it's great to great to connect.
Nice. Yeah, Magda is great. Yeah, they run a very quick, quick round for us last year and and we've been working with the bulletin team for the last last nine months now. Great. Yeah, how are you are you raising from them? Or so? I
had a software business previously, so I can give you a bit of background on me so so Hugh of Flanagan, born raised in Dublin, lived in a whole bunch of different places, San Francisco and Haiti and lots of lots of wild and wonderful places back in Dublin. Now, I had a software business before we started, kind of 2017 2018 we built an audio AI co pilot for frontline or blue collar workers. The concept being that people that worked on their feet, their eyes and hands were busy, they were left out of all the benefits of technology. So today, going to work, 80% of everybody going to work in the world today works on their feet. They get 1% of venture technology investment, so just kind of paints that. So the first kind of product we launched was, was this AI audio, you know, co pilot solution. It was kind of similar to something like Siri, but it was able to tell you what work you were supposed to do, how you're supposed to do it, when you were supposed to do it, and just manage the entire work across a large frontline team. We raised a couple million dollars and launched that product. As we found back then, voice was just so nascent. I mean, Siri on your phone is still pretty shit. And so what we had built was an engine to really understand everything that every blue collar worker was supposed to be doing at any point in time. So we were able to take off the voice and and deliver what was, in the end, pretty crude work management solution that just you know, helped all these teams to become more efficient. So so we sold to hotels, healthcare, manufacturing, food production. A lot of the use cases was actually around sanitization and cleaning, because was around covid times and so Mandarin Oriental that their hotel group used just for all of their housekeeping teams we sell to hospitals for their operating theater process teams and all of that sort of stuff. So, so that's what we built. We sold that business in 2021 which was and also makes it for myself, my co founder, not venture scale but but certainly life changing for us. We did a bunch of lockup time and non compete time. And there were, there were kind of cracking into our second business. So I've known Magda for maybe six years, so, for a long time, and so, so I just grabbed a coffee with her, and she was, she was writing about you guys. I think what they your, your deal with them isn't announced, right? Yeah, correct. When are you going to do that? Are you? You're, you're,
I don't know. Every time I think about it, it just becomes a massive distraction. And I see like, zero benefit in it, and yet everyone else wants me to do it, and so we were going to do it now and then, like, my head of marketing was just focused too much on it. And I got on this call and there's like, six people from an agency and two people from Bolton, and I'm like, we just focus on the wrong fucking thing. Like, this is, this is not, you know, from everything I've heard, the best thing it does is tee you up for the next round, rather than get you customers, necessarily, and so, so, yeah, I think at some point, probably in the next, in the next, sort of six months or
so, yeah, I found the only other benefit that ever came from announcing fundraising was if You were trying to drive a bit of inbound hiring, you know, if you're trying to fill some roles, it was kind of helpful, particularly with the name like boulderton. But, yes, but, I mean, you're about nine months down the road now, so that's, that's past awesome moment. So yeah. So back to thought would be worth kind of chatting. I mean, we're kind of looking at an adjacent space. We're dealing with support content, but not targeting support teams. Obviously familiar with what you guys have done, and actually kind of ethos wise, it's similar, because it's born out of a similar frustration for us and how we're building our product from that, you know, disparity between the demo and then the value that you get out of the product, and how that just never seems to join up. Yeah, what we're targeting is to start really broad. I mean, you know, just, just to begin with, to give you a little bit of background. And we don't, we don't go into all this detail with everybody, but, with the founder of your caliber, be awesome to get your views, but basically solving the problem that is just impossibly hard to keep on top of everything that's happening inside of business. And so SaaS overload now just means that businesses have 10 to hundreds of systems trying to keep track of things. Information is scattered across all these various systems, documents, people, it's impossible to find it. The vast majority of people in organizations don't go to bother. Don't even bother going to try find the information they need. And the primary use case that we're that we're starting with this customer support feedback.
So really simple, not for support teams in house, correct
for basically, for everybody else. So as you know, for product leaders and for engineering leaders and design leaders answering questions like, what are what are customers saying on the latest release, or how do customers feel about this new feature that we've launched?
Or my friend runs a company that does this exact thing. Here you go, and I can tell you what, what, what I think they struggled with. It doesn't solve for that use case, but it basically hooks into systems to grab together things like that. Like tell me about today's incident and and how it works and stuff. Does that kind of look like, technically, what you're thinking about,
yeah, so for the first use case that we're targeting is, you know, which is customer feedback, we connect into to all the various places that customer feedback happens. So it's emails, it's recorded calls, it's sport tickets, it's private research shops. We take that and then we can do two things. We're trying to be as close to zero effort as possible, because I believe that people don't want to work in any more SaaS applications. You know, everyone Rolls Royce when they say, Hey, we've bought another tool, and it's like, okay, great. And they need to learn this and use it, and it doesn't really work. So we're kind of indexing on two very, very simple interaction methods to begin with. First is just simple question and answer. So you know, what are customers saying in the last 30 days? What are prospects on Gong calls telling us about our pricing? You know, specific questions that people have, but today, they take the days and weeks to answer those questions, because the information is scattered everywhere, if to crawl through all this information straight away, the second way, again, even more simple than just asking a question, is, once all your sources are connected, you tell us what you work on. In future, we'll actually connect to what you work on, so we can understand through linear or sound or whatever, and then we just deliver any updates on those topics to your inbox every week or every day. So if you are a engineering lead and you're working on integrations, any feedback related integrations that come in from any of the various sources in the business, we'll just deliver to your inbox every Friday morning. Yeah, so try to make it really as simple as possible when we get started. I've bootstrapped this, you know, and self funded this for the last couple of months. We've built the earliest version. But it's really about, okay, what's the smallest, simplest way that we can start to solve this problem? Because, as we learned before, systems only get more complex over time. So if we can start in the simplest possible point, that's where, that's where I'm kind of interested in. But yeah, it sounds like you're really familiar with the space it. It looks like those Italian, Italian guys are kind of, kind of trying to supplant, to glean, are they?
Yeah, so they, this is why I think the space is quite interesting. Because I've seen like I've known David for, for years and years. And they started with the technical problem, and then haven't really managed to surface out the use case. And they got, like, really stuck there and and whereas if you think about hook, I kind of started with the we solved the business problem, because that's where we'll get the ROI, and then we'll figure out how we build what we need to build afterwards that they're like a bunch of engineers, so they're like, hey, we need to fix enterprise search, but they haven't managed to figure out how to monetize it consistently. And I think that they are going too broad, because you know, you're trying to solve 10 different, vastly different problems. You're not going to learn how to sell it and so, so yeah, it's literally gleam. So it's on prem. We'll search through your your SharePoint, your notion, etc, etc. So more work than than what you're thinking about and more specific. But then the upside that they've got is that this is really hard for organizations to pull this information together, because it's sensitive on prem and so, so if they crack it then, then, then, in the right use cases, they have got stuff. I think that the question I would have is, just, do you think the customer feedback space is valuable enough? Because it's, I get the problem, and by the way, like we have gone and I first bought it because we used to have arguments about what a customer said on about product. So at least this is like pre product. This is like four months into the company, you know, we've raised the pre seed, and we'd come off a call from a customer and have two different views of what they said. And I was like, we need to record every fucking call, because this will destroy our company if we can't accurately understand what customers want. And so, so So I get it, I just wonder how much people would pay for it as a pay, because I would only really pay for it if, like my engineers came to me and said, I need this because I can't work. And then, even then I it just feels a little bit, and this might just be, you know, you haven't come with value prop. I haven't worked it out yet. It feels like it's a, it's a couple of grand a year, rather than a than a 20, 3050, grand a year. Thing
that actually probably is where it starts, and I'm kind of comfortable with that. What we spoken a couple of 100 CEOs or CPOs in the last couple of months, and the main insight that we get from all of those, the CEOs just want to actually understand what's happening in the understand what's happening in their business. They're telling us, like spending more on bi they're spending more on analytics, like they've loaded up on that and actually staring into these various areas in their business. It's complete black box. Customer Feedback being one, you know, sales updates or transaction updates being another team productivity, like, What the fuck are people actually working on? What are they doing? What's getting shipped? Like, all of these areas, they just desperately want to know what's actually happening.
Yeah. So I can understand with those the latter two, yeah, for me, because as soon as you start to say, that's why I said, I'd be more interested, the engineers came to me, because if they said, Hey, we can ship 20% more things, but I'm like, well, 20% times a team of eight is, like, 1.4 headcount. So no problem. It's gonna if it's gonna cost you 30k go and do it, yeah? Whereas on the customer feedback thing, I feel that it's a, it's a, it's a weird, intangible pain,
yeah, and sometimes the ROI can be delayed, right? So I tell you something today, basically feedback. You spend three months getting together and roadmapping and ideating and then shipping something it can be delayed. The reason that we're starting there is because every company and every leader that we speak to wants to be more customer centric, but they don't know how to do it. And it's actually tech technically an easier place for us to start, right? Because once you start to get into T productivity, you need to start to understand, you know, you need to connect. It's more complex systems. When you want to get into dealer transaction updates again, you need to, you know, you're connecting them back into CRMs and so, so as we see the other use cases, it's the same initial data sources as customer feedback, plus some and so that's what required there as a means to just proving out that, hey, you know, having something very, very low effort that just tells you what's going on is valuable. And here's all these other use cases that might build over time. Yeah,
well, is that we, we did a pilot once with this company called Air focus. They're like products board and and I think they solve for a similar value case in a completely different way, like, it's based on input to type in what customers are telling you, and we'll help you, like, draw it up into a part where map. But I think they really struggle to to get into decent sized deals. So they did a lot of the plg stuff, which is like $25 a month signing online. And people kind of stayed. Some people left, but I think they struggled to get any any bigger than that. And like I said, I think it's just because there, there's a it's hard to tangibly put a value on it. I like the sales one more, and I don't mean from a personal perspective, just from having taken a look out to market. I think one of the things that bulletin found very attractive about us, and now I find very attractive about us, because it means we need to look after less customers, is we went big very early in terms of deal size. So like, our first couple of deals were like 30, 40k and then deal number three was 100k and now our ACV is about 55k and we're, we're trying to lift it to about 60 to 70k and the simple reason is that we just tackle like a very clear value case, which is we're making more revenue, and we'll, we'll save you headcount. So give us a cost of a headcount, or half a headcount, and will and will will help you. The other thing, by the way, that I pushed my friend on and they, I don't know if they managed to get down this route. I used to run it support at Credit Suisse. I did it for eight years, and we would spend, like, an infinite amount of money on making that team more efficient, because the the amount of the amount we're spending on as a bank was in the hundreds of millions, if not seeing like, you know, a billion a year, on, on just IT ops people and one of one of the products we were trying to file. And we just never got conviction that it was worth spending money on a proof of concept. Was something which, which basically said, we'll look at other support tickets and tell you which one's the most likely one to be the solution. And you know, that would have been like a multi 100k possibly multi million thing for us, because it was like, great, we can just wipe out, like, you know, 50 heads of one go because you get smarter people, they're more efficient. And so I think that that whole, like, productivity use case around support and engineering can be very valuable in the enterprise just because of the scale. Yeah,
so what? So? So the the thesis was it would look at every single sport ticket that comes in and tell you which one is one worth focusing on. It would
it would tell you when you get a ticket. This one's the one most likely related to the what? So this has happened before, yeah, and this is probably the one that it that it was about, because the challenge we had was, like, you get caught up at two o'clock and something's gone down, and you're like, Oh, I can't remember when was the last time someone worked on it. The documents are crap. Our support tickets generally were quite good because they were reviewed. But searching for support tickets was a was a real nightmare. You didn't know what to search for, and so the idea was that they used, and you know, this was 2015 so you didn't even have llms. Then they used, like, basic things, such as, who raised it, some of the keywords that they'd indexed to suggest other tickets. I like that that, and I think that's also quite interesting in the engineering world, because engineers aren't very good at passing on knowledge. And like, we have this problem today, which is when we have a problem, how do we know the last time that we solved that problem, and where is this start? And that like that is a, is a, is 100 grand problem for us, because it the number of times that it that it just kills us when we're like, we did this thing for a customer, sales loft, we can't remember why. It's not been documented. People have moved on, and now with that, was that, like, literally going through slack messages, looking at query, SQL queries to be like, could that have been the thing that does it? This is why I'm really interested in the in the productivity thing, because I think you start to solve, like, really chunky problems.
Yeah, and I think that's what you're describing, is exactly, I think, in how we start to unlock much bigger accounts, it actually comes from, we connect all the sources that's that's actually fine. It's actually understanding internally what people are working on, and then you can, you know, closely correlate issues and work that's been done, questions that team, that people across the team are having a work that's been done, you can start to deliver every single person across the team kind of much more highly curated content, be it feedback, be it other sorts of internal information that helps them in their work. Technically, quite complex to build, and we need someone like wagta to give us loads of money to do it, but, but I agree. I think that's interesting. And then, like, when you add in CRM world on top of that, it just adds another, you know, World of complexity because of their data structures, and they all hold that as much. Yeah,
I think also that the slack world is quite interesting. I don't know if it's if it's something you thought about, but, like, I think one big problem we have is actually this stuff doesn't exist anywhere like it exists in a ticket. But, you know, I'm the perfect example of someone that's just terrible at tickets, but I will have big, long rants on Slack about this thing. Can someone go and get in touch with sales, lock and like? And I think that that's where there's some interesting stuff that you can start to bring around. Like there was something that was done timing was quite similar, because that's how I look for it today. And I I always think, by the way, the best ideas are ones where people are trying to solve it in house, in some ways, like right now, in some really happy way. And for me, that that solution is like, Oh, someone's pinged me about something. So now I'm I won't look at Zendesk. I look at Slack because I have no idea how to search Zendesk. Yeah. And then someone will probably point me to a linear ticket that tends to be kept a bit more updated, because the engineers really love using it. But that whole process is very manual and but like I said, I think it's less about feedback, because I think that the feedback tends to be quite structured and quite clear to us anyway. I think it is more about problems, because that when you have problems, that's when the clock's ticking and customers pissed off and like things hurt, and so I think that's where it's easier to start thinking about why we would pay money for something, versus Yeah, versus building new stuff.
Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, Slack is one we've done an integration with stack. It's It's horrible to integrate with just their whole structure and documentation. Everything is nasty also, but the fact that conversations don't in slacks world, don't have a clear Start and End, and such as, you know, pulling in content and understanding the content, how far messages back are relevant, and all of that, all of that sort of stuff, just becomes difficult to difficult to work with. But slack definitely seems to be a place where a lot of this shit is going wrong and where a lot of hacky, terrible ways of solving even the customer feedback use case are happening. So virtually every customer that we speak to that uses slack tell us that, oh yeah, we've got this thing where we've got this automated bot, and once a day, at 10am we post in some customer feedback, and the whole company gets to see it. It's great. It's like, that's tokenistic. It's not providing any value to anybody, and it's just adding to the noise of what's going on so that. So there are some interesting kind of existing ways that people are trying to do this stuff inside. How, how early into your journey were you guys clear on the Hey, make more revenue, cut support count? Was that, was that just the goal from day one? Yeah,
yeah, I got so I was a solo founder, and I raised pre product when I started, and I I knew I wanted to solve in this space, and I'd solve this problem in the same way before at my previous job, just when I started to do research, I realized that everybody else wanted some way of solving this problem. And so I was like, Oh, great. Well, I've done that before, so I know, I know how that works. And also it's, like, technically quite hard, because you need to go through mountains of product data, and so people just avoid solving in that way. And so I knew that, I knew that you I knew that value case. What I would say is, it changes based upon the market a lot. And so, like, two years ago, people didn't care about cut and churn or saving money, like I would get CROs and I like, I just need to find a way to make more revenue. And then last year, what changed was, I thought crash happened. People care about cutting churn. They didn't. They were like, well, churn is going to happen. What I care about now is I've got half the headcount to run more accounts, so I need a new way to do stuff. And actually, that became the accelerant. And then now people are back to, like, thinking about stuff. So I think, I think it changes quite a lot, especially, I guess, in the software industry, because that's been been quite, quite mental over the last couple of years. But, but, yeah, I think, I think the three have always remained the same. I think what's different is that the importance of those things has moved from a VP level problem to a C level problem, and so it's much easier for us now to get into, like, CEOs and CFOs, and they get it, like, the last couple of deals we closed, we actually PG the CEO, so we called cold, called the president of outreach, and he was like, oh, yeah, this is the problem we've got right now. And we closed that deal. And then we got, we had another one where we emailed the president of a public company, and he forwarded onto his team. Was like, oh, yeah, we need to get this, get this in. And it helps because it drives urgency. And those were both six figure, six figure deals for us.
Yeah, interesting. I mean, it's helpful. Once you move up to the highest average person in the organization, right? It's like that just makes your life so much easier. And that's why we're really focusing on CEOs right now and helping to just unlock, you know, unlock that black box of everything that's happening across teams and starting with, starting with feedback. Okay, interesting. So any advice when we conscious of your time, I know you, you have a lot on any any advice for us as we start to kind of figure our way through that value, that ROI thing, anything you've learned like,
I mean, look, you kind of done the founder journey before, so I probably can't tell you anything new or interesting. I think I found a few things. I found that design partners are are going to be different to your eventual customers. Because I always thought, like, why we'll get these design partners and they're going to pay us loads of money, we're going to solve a big problem for them, and then, like, the reality is, no one who's got an important problem is going to use some like, two bit startup from London that doesn't have a product and has some JPEGs. And so I think I found that design partners work because they they give you data, they'll give you feedback. They did pay us, but like, the reality is they didn't have a problem to solve, because if they did, they they would have picked up a real vendor and then, but like, we basically went for free design partners convert them to paying grab a paying customer called, I think we did that for a free proof of concept and then try and land a bigger customer, which is when we got sales loft. And that was number three. And as soon as we got sales loft, like everything changed for us, because if we had a lot of credibility from the big customer, and what was important is the alternative to hook for sales loft was building it in house, right? So it became very easy to, like, justify the ROI and and to explain why, why it was, why it was 100k and actually, I ended up hiring out our customer there, and she told us afterwards, she was like, when you guys said it was 100k we all laughed, because we thought was a bargain. And obviously we're sat there going, like, this is going to change our lives, yeah, and so and so. I think, I think the journey is like just figuring out what, where, where, where is the money, and what are people willing to pay money for, and then build along the way, which is why I think, I think I get the the let's go along the journey of building for something easier and then something harder later on? Yeah, I think it's just important not to trap yourself into something that that might not monetize as easy as you want to totally
and we're super conscious of that. There's like, we found 18 different companies building like automated customer feedback platforms, and they're ultimately building for PM. And so you can just see the journey in every single one of them. They thought, Okay, we've built all the ways to automate customer feedback. Fuck how do we start to secure bigger ACBS? Let's just build pm tooling on top. That's it. Let's just replace product board. And they all go in that direction. They actually don't spend their time building sophisticated technology to mine huge data sets for it, for like, insightful content that can help people, be it productivity data, be it customer feedback data, be it sales data, they actually then start to focus all of their time and all this additional tool and actually the content that they mine and produce is crap.
This is literally what happens in our space. So you have these, like, Customer Success platforms, of which gain sites the leader. And what happens is that people want to solve our problem. The problem is, is it's like, really hard, because we say we'll go live in 28 days. You know, we're speaking to like, one of our prospects, right? Is like, Yeah, great. We have a petabyte of data that we want you to go through. And as soon as people start looking at that, they're like, well, there's no way we can so they go for them the easier problem, which is, like, create a CRM for post sales, which is what gains, like planet vitally to tango. And like, I see a new company every quarter raising to solve that problem. And I think what's important is this is where we, like, really held our ground on. We've got to solve our problem differently, and we're not going to be a CS platform like we don't even know what we call ourselves today. Still, like the way that I describe it to people, if I'm speaking of CRO is gainside gives you a second CRM, and all of those other companies do, but you don't need a second CRM. What you were missing was intelligence from your product data to inform you on what you should be focused on. The same way that Gong has solved that for sales, because sales is conversational, we've sold that for post sales because post sales is all in the in the product data. And what's interesting with positioning like that is that they got it and they then saw this as, in their head, its own category. And we actually ended up having three or four customers that bought us on top of Gainsight. So bought Gainsight, but then still spent 50 to 100k on us. And it was an important thing for me to get there, because it's, it's, um, some advice I got from other founders was you need to be able to find a wedge where people will buy you as well as the incumbent product. Then what you do with the incumbent product is up to you, but until you get to that space, you're not going to get anywhere, because you're always going to be fighting and they're going to be better. And it's funny, because I got that feedback from customers early when I was trying to be a better CSP, they were like, but they say that they do what you do, but you say you don't do what what they do. So it sounds like they're better. And that's where we just went, right? We're gonna, we're gonna go really hard on like, yes, we solve for the same value problem. We just do it differently. They built a second, CRM, yeah, an intelligent platform that tells you where you should focus on what you should do. And I think that was a really important like, yeah, it probably took us about two and a half years that that journey from early sort of MVP, very, very early MVP to messaging, probably two years I think,
okay, okay, that's really helpful. I mean, yeah, we're saying we're seeing ourselves on that exact same fucking path because
don't, don't go to that other thing, and because, and the way I describe it to my team is, I use Tesla because it's, it's a change that's happened in our lifetimes. And it's like, if you think about Tesla, 2012 2013 no one wants to buy an electric car because they look like shit. They can't hold charge, blah, blah, blah. And an easy thing for Tesla to have done would have been say, hey, we listen to all the feedbacks. We put a petrol cap on it. Then you put a petrol cap on it. It's now a hybrid, and every other car manufacturer has got one. And so what they thought about was, Oh, hey. Well, the reason people want a petrol cap is that they're worried about driving long distances, and so what we'll do is we'll build this Supercharger network everywhere, and we'll do auto driving. So then it's even easier for them to go to these places, and until they solve for the problem, but they've kept their thing of like, it has to be 100% electric, it has to be the fastest car in the world. It has to be self driving. And then eventually you're at a point where no one else can catch up because they were all like, Aha, idiots. They weren't like, no one needed that problem. Yeah,
yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Interesting, awesome. Well, we're, we're, we're, we're very early. I mean, you know, there's kind of couple of us working on and as I said, we kind of found funding it ourselves. We are working with some design partners, as you say, that are kind of helping us to give the feedback. It'd be interesting. I don't know if there's anybody in your business that actually deals predominantly just in customer feedback right now, or, like, who kind of owns that?
Yeah, I would say it's probably, we don't have a product manager, but we have a design, design lead, like he was at Zen cargo before, as the head of design, and then joined us as a designer. But he's way more than that, and so I would probably speak to him, and, you know, and look at if he thinks that there's that there's a problem worth solving here, and whenever we talk to people about design partners, I think that's the main thing. Otherwise, like, I've been on the other side of it ends up being a waste of time. If it's just a nice to have that, then, for sure, like, we're happy to help out. But I would connect you with Tom and speak to him. He's also just brought in linear and it's quite opinionated on systems and how we do stuff. So he'll, he'll tell you, what, what, what, what he thinks nice.
We're just, we're just pushing our linear integration this week. So, so, yeah, so if possible, talk to Tom. That'd be, that'd be awesome. Would really appreciate it.
Sounds good. And then is there any other intros I can make for you? What about things like VCE funds? We've got a few others on our cap table that might be of interest. Yeah. So
we're not raising right now. We should be in about a month, so I'll be back in London towards the end of the month. So we'd love to come and come meet you in person, and then we can grab a coffee and see if I make sense on that
one. Yeah. The, do you know local blood? Yeah? Well,
I know of them. I met them years ago, but I haven't been in contact with
them recently. So they, they were a pre seed, and they're very, very good at this at this stage. And so I would, I would definitely recommend them. And the other couple of funds. We have a we have a fund called dig ventures on our cat table, which is the family office of MuleSoft founder. Yeah, they're fine and like that. I think they're a good name to have. They'll make interest to other funds. I don't think they'll do anything groundbreaking, but I think local globe for sure you should, you should chat to if only because I think they just have, they have a lot of experience of, like, this pre product or very, very early product. Yeah, they're comfortable at that stage. Yeah. And they'll tell you, like that they're not, they'll tell you what they'll help you with and what they won't help you with. I mean, they were very upfront to me, which is like, look, we, you know, we've, we've got 250 investments. We can't spend a huge amount of time on them, but here's, here's how we're going to support you, which is, there's a WhatsApp group with 250 founders on it. And a lot of what people learn is through that, and that's been actually very helpful. And there's, like, all of these other resources that we've set up, plus, here's the teams that we've got, we've got light speed on our cap table as well. I would say in Europe, at your stage, I probably just wouldn't go for them. And the reason being, I think that that they don't have a support system in Europe. And so every question that you ask them for is like, you get you speak to all in San Francisco, and he's like, Oh yeah, I know I had a data in New York. And you're like, sure, but it's like, seven hours on a flight away. Like, how do I solve in London? I think that's why the open globe have been good, and bulletin are exceptional. Like, really do everything that they say, look out for their founders. And I think out of all the funds, bulletin has been by far the best in terms of the the like entrepreneurs and residents that they have like to help you, have actually been really good, I would say, like, we probably have 344, hires that have been interviewed by them, yeah, like, where we wanted them to Be. So like our finance person, our marketing person, our engineering person. So, yeah, yeah, let me know if you need
any interest. How much did you guys rate pre, pre prod?
We raised 2 million pounds, pre product, pre team, but this was in like 2020, so, you know, I have, I have no, no doubt that the covid highs helped me, but I got, I got a million pound term sheet from hummingbird, and then I spoke to another like, I'm sure you've been through this. As soon as I got it, I was like, Great, I'm gonna sign this, because I can't be asked raising money, and I just want to crack on messages to be like, What do I do once I've got a term sheet and and she, she'd helped me quite a bit along the way. I just met her randomly, and she was like, do me a favor. Just speak to local globe. It will help me out, because it means that I'm giving deal flow to them, and they'll make a decision super quick. And then they came back and offered to do I signed that and then, and then, and then moved on. And I was super. They took the full allocation. They took 1.5 and then the other 500 we got through a small fund and some other angels, but they, they would have been happy with the full allocation, just that. Their point law was that, like, we're not going to be super hands on. So go and get the hands on people that you need to help you, and you'll leave an allocation open for them that
they're transparent about that, yeah,
they're very easy to deal with. Like they're like, no bullshit. London based, Saul, the founder of the fund. I mean, I went to him once when we were got a first paying customer, and we used to have these quarterly board meetings. But he was, he wasn't that opinionated in there. And so I went to see him one on one. I just said, Man, I just need you to, like, give me some guidance of what to do. And he just looked at me and goes, Just go and get some big fucking customers, and not these shitty ones that you're trying to go after, because as soon as you've got a few of those, you're going to crack the market and like that. I prefer that directness. I don't, I don't want to, like, be faffing around. And also, these guys have, like, been there and and and done it. He founded them, love film. And then the light speed rounds was $5 million so that was, I think was like 30k in revenue, first customer. And it was the seed round, which I think actually is still happening, maybe with a later stage traction now. And then the boulderton round was $11 million and we were at 500k in revenue. And so I think the round size was okay, but they moved a lot earlier than others wanted to. Probably got, you know, 15 now, but like for me, it was just they were willing to move quickly. They did the round in like 12 days. And I'm a solid founder, so I was like, great, get it done. Move on. Yeah, yeah. And by the way, I think that that has always that was really important to me at the local globe. So when I first started to raise people like, go and speak to top tier funds, I had no idea what that meant, right, other than like, typing in top tier funds and you had a list. And so when I spoke to local globe, I really didn't know anything about them. And the only, the absolutely only reason that I went for them is that they offered me more money. There was nothing else at all. But what was really interesting is then, when I went to get other angels on board, almost everyone gave me this, like, weird, unexpected reaction, where they were like, Oh, if local globes on board, I'm in. I don't need to hear anything about it. And I was like, Oh, this is like, why do people think so highly of this fun? And then, interestingly, when I went for the Lightspeed round, the same thing happened there, which was Lightspeed was like, I went to meet them before I was raising, I was in your state. You're, like, the place you are now, where you were thinking about it. You want to get the docs together, but you want to sound people out. Sound people out and probably raise a little bit of interest. And I went to meet them in person, and they gave me a term sheet that day, without a deck, without seeing the product. And I think a big part of it was that they knew the community quite well. So they knew local globe, they knew Ross, who was the MuleSoft founder, and then bulletin move relatively quickly, and they knew Lightspeed and local globe. And I think these things really help with just getting the next round like you. If, if all else goes to shit, you'll probably be able to get, like, some shit DC to invest because they want to be on the same tax table as bulletin and Lightspeed and local globe, yeah. And so I'm, I didn't care about it on the first round, but on the second and third, especially the third, I was like, if bulletin are in, I would be very flexible on terms, because reputation is incredible, and I know that that will mean bigger things for us in the future. Yeah, well, I
wonder, like, we're very early for Bolton right now. But I mean, it could be an interesting time. They just raised a fresh new fund, so it's a perfect time for them to go a bit earlier. Obviously, have an existing relationship, and this is my second twist of the knife, so maybe, maybe it might make sense. But God, yeah, a local coalition combo right now would be, would be perfect. 3 million pounds in Bangladesh. Off you go. Especially
because the what I think if you bring in bulletin maybe as a second three or a co lead, you end up with a like someone to lead your A later on, be quite helpful. Yeah.
The only issue is, if they don't right, like, but, but that's fine,
and I wouldn't, I wouldn't get too strung up about that. We had problems with Lightspeed on that, not because the challenge Lightspeed have in Europe, for example, is that, like all of the powers in San Francisco and so when they want to do stuff in Europe, it's like a big, drawn out bureaucratic process. For example, even to do their pro rata on our Series A they had to hold an investment committee, and I had to go and go and attend. But as soon as I attended the and I attended this call, and like no one, there was like, one guy listening. Everyone else was like, doing other work. As soon as I attended and pitched them, like Julie, our partner, called me up, and she was like, I've been basically told in no uncertain terms, like, I have to, like, aggressively, make sure that we get our pro rata. And they're all, like, super impressed. And so, like, the problem is that they can't move that quickly. And so I have experienced that. But yeah, I think, I think the main brand definitely does help. Interesting, interesting. And yeah, if you want me to connect you to to local globe. Just let me know the person I deal with there is guy called mish.
Mish, yeah, okay, cool. I'll check him out. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I mean, that would be fantastic. I want to do that right when we're ready to have that conversation, so that we make the best use of that intro. Thank you very much, mate. It's awesome to meet you. I really appreciate your time, and I'm delighted Magda connects with us, and hopefully we get to meet in person in a couple of weeks.
Awesome you too. Hey.
One of the things,
one thing I forgot to mention, I thought about when you were coming up, I don't know, are you facing many questions around data security, on the on the support data?
No, but before we could even look at any of the data, everyone made a sign. NDAs was the only thing that happened. But we're not actually getting too many questions on it.
B find out what that problem is like, and the reason that I say this is we found since chat GPT, people ask lots and lots and lots of questions about about any data that's used for anything AI related. Now we only use numbers. We're like, we look at number of users that use this feature, and so we always go back with
amplitude or something like that.
Yeah. Like we connect to Pendo, or we connect to that snowflake and we pull it in. But people get really, especially the bigger companies, get really nervous about this, this language data, and it's worth just thinking about that in the context of, like, how, probably, how you're going to build so to give you an idea, we're just doing some we architecture now, and we are probably going to encrypt each customer's data with individual keys, because that's come up more than a couple of times. And we are also finding, with some of our recent implementations, like outreach and cognizant, that there's like a resistance to, they signed the contract, but then there was a resistance to giving us any data. So I would, I would then just keep an eye on it, like you'll find a way around it, but it's, it's becoming a painful problem for us. And the other thing that I would recommend is go and get soft to as soon as you raise so we used banter, and we just got it straight away, because you passed all of the security people straight away. Yeah, and it's weird because they, they don't have a problem with it. It's like, the legal and privacy people that, then, like, our customers, haven't consented to, like, send this data to purpose. Yeah,
yeah, we're even seeing that now, because we connect to Gong and so we pull in every Gong conversation, and people are frustrated with this because Gong transcripts are shit, and we're trying to make them better for them, but actually sometimes they mismark the calls, and we get a shitload of internal like management call or, you know, Team sales meeting calls for the discussing pipeline. By nature of our system, I could go in then and ask a question, like, Hey, what are management saying in their meeting? If we have that content, we could surface that to everybody else in the organization. So do, like, and we haven't solved this yet, but like, I know that's going to be a big problem is because, like, we need to be very, very careful about all the conversational data that we pull in and who we display that to whether,
yeah, I think that the thing that helped us, for sure was, was SOC two, being very flexible. I'm like, you know, people said you need to do these, like, five things. And we could do them. We just did them, like, you know, having MDM on our devices and all that kind of stuff. And then the other thing that was quite interesting, as we've gone upstream, we signed our first public company. This company called on 24 and their GC like, stepped in and stopped the deal, and was like, why are we giving all of our revenue data to this tiny company in London? And what they ended up accepting was to be named on our insurance policy as a beneficiary and to increase the caps. And so that's another thing to like think about, which is when insurance does seem to help, and it's now helped on a second deal, which is why they think we're crap, but they're okay because we've got, like, a big insurer, and there's the $5 million liability thing, because I'm guessing, as you handle more data, you're going to be facing like, the same the same challenges,
did your lawyer?
No, I did. I think I was like, sat frustrated having a couple of glasses of wine one night, and I was like, Oh my God, if that worry is about us being small, why can't we give them insurance as a thing? Yeah. And then we spoke to our broker, and they gave us a list of things that people suggest. That people suggest, and then we suggested it to them, and they they signed two days later.
That's That's awesome. Nice one, cool. So good to so good to meet you. Thank you so much for your time. I'll come back to you when, I mean, when I'm in town, and when that makes sense, if possible to speak to Tom in the in the interim, that'd be fantastic. Yeah, yeah,
I'll connect you with Tom Awesome. Thank you. Cheers. You.
