Good afternoon. I'm Danny Creighton, one of the managing editors here at TechCrunch. And I'm hoping you're enjoying early stage. I am thrilled to host this panel on bootstrapping one of the most common topics where we getting from founders in the last couple of years. Today, we have two panelists, Toko wattana, the CEO and founder of countly. And Blake Bartlett, the partner at OpenView. ventures. I believe you're headquartered up in Boston? Is that correct? Blake, you got it. Great. So we're going to start this panel off of the q&a, Blake and Toby, we're going to talk to each other about their experience connecting together first on a seed round. And then most recently, on 350 million, I guess you'd call it a series A, although, at this point, the letter sort of don't make any sense anymore. And then we're going to open up the questions, the floor to questions from the audience, you can use a slider app, as with all the sessions today, to ask questions to me. And we'll be presenting those in the second half of the session. So like, why don't you kick us off?
Yeah, thank
you, Danny. So we're gonna start initially by talking about funding calendly in the early days, and a little bit of the the approach that Hope has taken with his team so so maybe Toba as a starting point, how did you decide to fund calendly? Back in the earliest days, when you're first getting it off the ground?
Yes. So I, when I had the idea for county, I was eager to get started. And, you know, like a lot of founders, you just have this like paranoia around like, if I don't do this, you know, somebody else is going to do it. And so the quickest path to getting started for me was to fund it myself. And I have so much conviction in the idea that what I did was I migrated my 401k took all the money out of it, took out some small loans through Lending Club maxed out credit cards. And that's how I got started.
And did you know that you always wanted to bootstrap? Or did you sort of discover that as a strategy you preferred later on?
Yeah, I knew that I waited bootstrap, mostly because I felt like, you know, I wanted to control my destiny. Right? You know, in a lot of ways. I also felt like, I guess you could say, mostly to, to control my destiny. And I, I had no intention of ever raising. But so you
did end up raising a small round, a seed round, which Danny had mentioned. So how did you go through that calculus of raising that round, and then, you know, deciding who to raise it from I know, Atlanta ventures was one of the lead investors there. So walk us through the calculus and the decision making process there.
Yeah. So like I said, I started a business, you know, I bootstrap and had no intention of raising. What happened though, is I ran out of money. My plan very quickly, so the app ended up launching in the fall of 2013. So let's call it September, or so, by December of 2013. We've signed up a number of 1000 users, and across so many different industries and so many roles, and they were loving the product right into their schedule. omnius. But at the same time, they had a lot of feedback about how the product can be better. And, you know, just being eager to please those customers. And just really seeing how big the opportunity could be, I realized that it was gonna be very tough for me to continue finding the business, through my, through my, through my commissions, because at the time, I was actually still working my full time job. And so I decided that I needed to go big, and I needed to raise capital to do so. And I got, I found a David Cummings from the Atlanta tech village. So for those who may not know David Cummins, he's the founder of par dot, which is, which he sold to Salesforce in the 2012, or shorter timeframe. And then after you exited that business, he started Atlanta tech village, which is the largest startup hub in Atlanta. And so I got connected to David turns out he was actually using somebody Atlanta tech village where he's using calendly tweeted about how, you know how it was great that this company in the tech related started as products, David called we live it, we got connected. And what I really liked about David, when I connected with him was first and foremost, he was a user of the product, right? So before calendly, he was using a competitive products, which you know, will be one name on this call. And he saw what County was doing, and he thought it was a simpler. He thought it was a simpler and it was easier to use, right? So he was a user of the product. I like the fact that he was a successful entrepreneur himself, right. So he really understands the no just really felt like I learned a lot from him, and just really the empathy that he would have for another founder. And then the other thing that's, you know, that's at the time that mattered a lot was when David and I connected Kelly was pre revenue, so there was really no revenue. And most of the angel investors that I connected were that I connected with an Atlanta were really hung up on the fact that totally had no revenue. And he saw, he saw that the product was actually loved and loved and used by the existing users. That if we wanted to monetize, we actually have the ability to monetize very, very quickly. And so he just, he just got it. And that's, that's how we ended up working together.
Yeah, those those were the earlier days, back when freemium was, was less obvious. There was this question about, well, if it's free, how are you ever gonna make money? I'm not gonna invest. But David side, so so that's great. So that's kind of the path he went down and some of the decisions that you made, you know, on funding the business. But bootstrapping is easier said than done. You can't just declare bootstrapping, and then it just magically happens, you actually have to go and execute it. So I'm curious, you know, how is your approach to building the products your approach to go to market? How is that enabled? The bootstrapping model?
Yeah. So I think of you know, in general, I think a product led growth, right, as a great equalizer. So my background, before I started colonies, I worked in enterprise software sales. My very first enterprise software sales was in the mid 2000s, working for IBM. And one of the things that really fascinated me during my time at IBM was IBM is this at the time, the biggest tech company in the world, massive brand, big blue has been around for a long time. But inevitably, we would go into these competitive situations where we wouldn't be competing against solar winds, which, at that time, solar wind was it was a tiny company. And I was just really fascinated by how did solar winds get into this position in which it can be competing with IBM on a deal. And if you and really what they did was just self serve, right? So instead of really selling top down, like we were selling to the CIOs, it really empower the network admins to adopt the product very easily on their website. And as a result, right, they were without the brand and the budget and the of IBM, they were a nice competitive deal. So I've always been fascinated by by self service, and bottoms up adoption, because I saw how this tiny company was able to challenge this the 800 pound gorilla in this space by adopting this strategy. And in a lot of ways, that's really what calendly did, right. So, you know, bootstrapping, for us is really one started with self serve. Right. So making it easy for anybody who here who has a need for the product to ever sign up with zero friction and living them sorted out itself. For us it also, taking the self serve approach also means you have to build a product that's ultimately more usable for your users, right. So the easier it is for the party. For you know, if self service, your profit forces you just to build a more loving product, because you know, that you can rely on the human to convert people. So that's the kind of the first pillar for us the second pillar forces virality. Right.
The
county started in, you know, with very zero market and with not very zero, with or with no marketing at all can begin to take off. So the initial users were in higher education, very quickly moved to the commercial sector. And all of that was because of virality of the product. And then, so seeing that we just began to invest more into virality. So the combination of self serve, which is incredibly capital efficient, because you don't need only sales people, and also the virality, instead of spending a bunch of dollars on on advertising, you can really rely on the virality product and rely on the network of the users to really propagate tip enough to enable distribute distribution, just those are the two things that really allowed us to be successful. And then the third thing itself is the general product strategy. Right? So as we know, as we obviously saw the success of virality, we worked on the traditional things most people most product companies do, which is how do you optimize that virality funnel so that you can improve the viral coefficient, but the only thing I think we did that still helps today is, is a complimentary product strategy. Right? So for us, when commonly enter the market, there were a bunch of, you know, incumbents in the space, and most of them have taken more or less a vertical approach, right? So focus on the health and beauty business, for example, maybe focused specifically on service businesses, what can we did to really enhance virality? Let's build the most horizontal scaling platform you can, right so through a combination of that virality and addition decision to build a product that serves all roles in all industries very well. Those three things really accelerated growth in a very, very capital efficient way.
Your description of product led growth there it leads me to you know, one of the things that I will say about plg a lot of times is that it's all about D laboring the growth engine behind your product, and when you d labor, you also lower the cost and you make the business much more capital efficient. You mentioned ability for self serve to be much more capital efficient than an army of sales reps. And also user driven growth and virality being much more efficient than lots of paid marketing or a large marketing team. So that's kind of about the cost side of product lead growth and how that enables bootstrapping. Now, there's also a few things that you and I have talked about, about the revenue side of what else product like growth sort of enables in terms of capturing more revenue? What are some examples kind of in real life for calendly? as to what that looks like?
Yeah, a really good example, there would be International, right. So fast forward to today, but 30% 30% of calories revenue come from outside United States, that's in spite of the fact that we don't have a single employee outside the United States, we don't have a single marketer, we don't have a single product person. We don't have a country, GM, we only have a single office. And by the way, like, that's been the case for most of the company's history, right. So it's a 30%. Today, but very early on, it was you know, even from the early days in which we started generating revenue, it always represented about double double digits of our of our, of our revenue. And just really comes into like the efficiency of the of the of this of product, like growth between the self service capabilities, and also virality. So the early days, we probably was, was only in English, right. And even then we were, we got a, you know, significant portion of our revenue from outside the United States. And since then, we've localized experience in a number of different ways. And there's still work for us to do, and today represents an even greater percentage of our, of our revenue. So you compare that to the typical against a typical, the traditional model. And once you have to go make all those investments, maybe it takes you a year or two for those investments to pay off. For us, we've been able to go global on day one, just because of the the product lead growth approach. And yeah,
I like that ability that you don't have to decide. Now as the day when we're going international with self service, you're just kind of international, from day one, right? You know, come one come all, we can serve anybody, we can convert anybody. And that sort of allows you to capture more revenue at the top of the funnel.
Absolutely. And just one more thing and efficiency that I think is also worth mentioning is for us, at the time that we're doing, when we're doing a million in recurring revenue, we only had six employees, right. So we were doing about 150k, in ARR per per employee, fast forward to today that efficiencies actually grown today, it's about double that. It's sort of like that, you know, we've just been reaping the benefit of that at scale. And we want to, we want to see that continue.
So that's the that's the how of bootstrapping. So you decided you wanted to bootstrap. And then you took this product led approach, which allows you to have more capital efficient approach to building the business, and also allows you to capture more revenue at the top of the funnel. So you have more revenue, less cost to service, the revenue, and that enables bootstrapping, and that enables the, the path that you've taken. So that's great. But you've recently made a decision to switch gears a little bit, right? Going from effectively bootstrap to very much not $350 million round, so go big or go home. But walk us through that calculus, kind of how did you make that decision to to raise because you didn't need to the company's profitable, it was an opportunistic decision. So how did you go through that calculus and decision making process?
Yeah, it was a number of different a number of different, I guess events kind of contributed to the moment to that moment, I think, first and foremost, he says, we saw the opportunity over the last so many years, there's just there's, there's a very, very special opportunity to to create something really amazing for users, or customers and employees, and want to be able to do that. And so our, our you know, our vision, and the way we think about commonly is not, let's build a company, flip it in two, three years, we want to create a long lasting business and truly, you know, advance our mission. And so as you begin to think about that, what additional capital allows us to do is just place even bigger events than we've been placing so far. So that was a lot of what spurred the, the capital raise. The other thing is just, you know, the journeys, you know, if your vision is to build this, you know, a very successful company that lasts a long time for your customers and your employees.
You need all the partners
you can along the way, like the path to building a massive company is not an easy one, right? And so, you want to align yourself with the best partners who can open doors that you can open who can provide insights that you don't have yourself and, and an open view has done that and that's the that's how we ended up getting to that point in which we did it and I guess maybe the point again to is that, you know, with, given the success of the company, you know, have prior to this big massive fundraise it also put the company in a position in which you can raise in on terms that are very friendly to, to the company, right. And there's, you know, it begins to take away the reasons why you don't do it, right. So it really felt like a no brainer to do it just given all those three things.
Yeah, a lot of people will point to the VC hamster wheel. And so a lot of times you raise your next round, because you have to, you're looking at the runway, you're looking at your burn rate and all these things, and you have to raise and so you get the best partner you can at that time. But if you're not burning, and runway isn't a thing, runway is infinite, because you're profitable and cash in the bank, it allows you to be opportunistic, and say, solve for the partner solve for the time solve for the terms that best suit you as the founder invested the business what you're trying to accomplish, which makes a lot of sense to me. So as you now have been on both sides of the equation, bootstrapped and then now not bootstrapped, you kind of look back at the experience you've had, you know, what's the advice you'd give to your younger self, or if there's founders in the audience, right now they're thinking they want to take the bootstrap path, they see the path that you've taken, or the path that MailChimp has taken or Zapier and say, I want to do that. What advice do you have for them? And how do you do it effectively?
Yeah, there's a lot there to think about. But I think in the final analysis, like I would, I am very happy with the way things turned out with Camila sequence, the way in which we approach it, I'm really glad that we didn't raise too much money early on, because I think what it forced us to do is really come up with a, with a sustainable, sustainable business model, it created. It created a capital efficient business, because we knew that we had to kill what we eat, so to speak, right. And then, and then fast forward to now. I look, now that we've taken on, we've raised a massive round, I also see the difference and how I guess I see how it allows us to think even bigger than we were thinking before. And no matter how you may think you're thinking big, but there's a difference between. But I guess for me, I found that, you know, it just screws up to think even longer determined to think even bigger, and that cannot be minimized the value of that. And so I sit down my advice to my advice to anybody that's out there is, is to follow, I guess maybe not to you know, to be open minded about what makes the most sense to raise capital just because of just because of, you know, FOMO just because you know, the VCs are knocking on your door. And conversely, don't remain bootstrap just because you want to have all the control, you know, really step back and think about what's best for your customers, what's best for your users, what's best for your employees, how do you create the best outcome for those people? And in light, I guide you guide your decision. And I think hopefully, accountant Lee's a, you know, example is a case for the hybrid approach.
That what? Exactly. And this is my last question, and I know that we're gonna have some questions from from the audience as well. But you know, you have over the years, received an ungodly amount of interest from VCs, you know, countless emails in your inbox, and everybody wanting to sort of grab a coffee or bend your ear for a while and trade notes. How did you approach filtering through that, you know, what stood out to you about VCs that you would engage with? And VCs that, that you might not? And, and I'm asking because you know, again, if a founders in the audience and thinking, do I respond to everybody? Do I engage with everybody? Do I say no to everybody? How do I sort of build the right number of relationships and pick it? So how did you decide that? And what stands out to you from one VC versus another?
Yeah, so a few things from me. And I think this maybe goes back to how you and I first connected.
And you know why it took the meeting? I think value is important, right? So you're, by definition, founders and CEOs of early stage businesses, there's no shortage of things that can go and do and serve to really like the people who caught my attention are people who really provided value on day one, right? So whether it's in terms of it's all the common things, right, you're struggling with. As your business is growing, finding the right talent is always you know, difficult finding customers, but you can never find to make too many customers, right? So the people who come to who come to the table, meet with them. To help helping with that. I know those people always stood out to me, people will help in terms of challenging my thinking, right people I can learn from right so it just made me think you have it all figured out. But you think you're pursuing the most effective strategy when somebody when somebody I really love people who can, you know, help me see something, see even maybe think even bigger than I was thinking. So really love value and people who bring valuable insight, I guess, insights and knowledge to the table? And also philosophical alignment, right? Do they? Are they looking to either be thinking long term? Or are they just looking for? To invest in flip the business? Are they really thinking about building a massive, massive business around for a very long time? Are they? Are they empathetic to the struggles of a business, right? So they bring in, they support you in all the right ways. And those are some of the things that I would recommend. And I guess, if you're not in a hurry to raise, I think building on building the relationship way, much in advance of a raise is always best. So you can get really good a chance to see you know, how a potential partner brings all these things to the table?
Yeah, that values alignment, that vision alignment, and somebody who actually brings something to the table more than capital is incredibly important, and being able to do it on your own terms, because you bootstrap, so that's great. Yeah, awesome. I know that will bring Danny into into the conversation here and get some questions from him and the audience. like to thank you so much for that. And we've had already a dozen questions. So a ton of ton of folks reaching out with with ideas. If you want to participate, please feel free to go into the slideshow app, our wonderful new york based writer, Anthony Ha is curating those questions for me, send them along. But there's a couple of major categories. So when I started with bootstrapping, that there were a bunch of questions about product led growth. But but on the bootstrapping question, I mean, I hope you're in sort of the one of these unique contexts where, you know, I think for a lot of folks people think of bootstrap is well, you can't raise venture capital. So therefore, I bootstrap, because that was the only alternative to continue building a company. And you're the sort of where hybrid where you sort of did both, you raised this pre seed, use it to sort of get the company underway, and then you just held out for a number of years and didn't raise. And I think the question is, is like, you know, how did you first get that, you know, round done? You talked about a little bit of the story of Atlanta, but how did you decide to raise a pre seed and then decide not to continue raising funding after that?
Yeah, so I never really enjoyed the process of raising money.
I wonder why.
I never enjoyed the process of raising money. And so even. So once I raised a seed round, I was really determined to make sure that was the last round that I ever raised. I told myself that. And so what it meant was I became hyper focused on our customers and really listening to them. And it just really allowed us to make very efficient decisions, right, which ended up being the mean that in a very short amount of sorry, one other thing to mention is because we were because I didn't want to raise ever again after that round, it also, it also kind of forced the conversation around, what's the business model here? How soon do you generate revenue. And through a combination of those things, we ended up generating revenue much faster than even I projected, we became much profit, we became profitable, much faster than I than I ever anticipated. And so because of all those things, we really just didn't really need to raise, listen to a lot of people over the years to to make sure that I was not thinking that I was missing out. But there was no, there was no real reason to and I'm the kind of person I'd love to go solve a problem that exists not not a fictional one, or were perceived one, or just, you know, or just reacting to FOMO, if you will.
But that was Jared Thomas's question, and then I want to talk about something about Elizabeth Cruz in the audience brought up which is you've talked about efficiency a lot. And and, you know, obviously, everyone loves efficiency, you know, not spending money that is wasted, and just increasing your cap without changing your LTV. But there is always a trade off at some point around efficiency versus speed. And particularly for a company like calendly, where there is a legitimate network effect, as people are invited onto the platform, they use calendly, they spread it to their friends, there's a real opportunity to become the calendar hub for the entire world for scheduling and appointments and whatnot. When did you, you know, have you ever sort of questioned all the way through like saying, God, you know, we're super efficient? Why not just raise that extra marginal dollar? Because we're actually spending it really well. Unlike all of our competitors on like every other category in venture, we can actually use the money.
Yeah. So we've never we didn't think about that. We've never decided not to raise money just because we wanted to avoid doing that. The thing, the reasons we did raise monies we didn't necessarily Keep in mind, the business has been profitable for a long time. Right. And so for us, we've always had capital to deploy, but we just didn't really find we didn't always have, you know, specific initiatives or investments that we make with incremental capital. And that's really what we've been raising it there's no, there was no clear way to at the time, right. There's no clear way to accelerate the growth through investments. And so that's really what got the decision, not just a, not just a, you know, refusal to raise capital at all costs. I mean, looking, knowing what I know now, like, if I look back to some of the investments, we didn't make it 50 years ago, I'm sure there are probably some we could have accelerated. But those weren't necessarily because of a lack of capital, I would say it's probably lack of awareness, or maybe there's opportunities weren't validated in all those. So those are the biggest reasons why.
Yeah, please go one thing, one thing I would jump into to add with there is that, you know, when when you run into a, you know, for me, as a VC when I run into a profitable business, a lot of times the question is, why is the business profitable? Is the business profitable? Because it's been, everything's been run on a shoestring budget, and nobody works there? Or is it profitable, because there's a business model advantage, there's something that sustainably and scalable generates profits as the company gets larger, because one keeps going. The other one, the second, you start hiring people, the profits go down. And Kelly's in a position where it's that scalable model that drives the profits. And so then every month, you see the cash balance go up. And so before you think about raising money outside of what the business generates itself, you need to think about do I spend the cash that the business is generating? And and then do I need more beyond that? So I think that's kind of some of the dynamic when you have a business that generates sort of the dynamics, like calendly sees one more question from the audience on bootstrapping, and then we'll move over to the plg. But the DNA Hello. Salazar asks, did bootstrapping allow you to be more flexible in building a company? Right? Because if you were to raise venture capital, you'd have this money in the bank, you could hire different folks who would quickly staff up change things, potentially lay folks off as you sort of adjust the structure. But obviously, with the ficient bootstrap company, you have to spend money very wisely very carefully. Do you think that empowered you to be more flexible and to iterate faster? Or? Or was that was a hindrance?
Absolutely. So I was definitely say that it could get to the end. So I think it's maybe this goes a little too, like what I believe efficiency, efficiency, to me is just maniacal prioritization. And, and again, I think that's one of the things I really served as well, when you have a finite amount of resources, and you make significant progress with those finite resources, it really forces you to prioritize maniacally. And in terms of the customers you serve, in terms of the problems you solve, how you solve them, and all these different things. And so when I look at some of the reasons why I think we we did really well, I think it's because we prioritize very effectively until today, one of our values as a company is focused widely, right? So we believe very much in that in terms of flexibility, absolutely, in the sense that no, one of the things I really love about VCs is they see so many businesses, right, because they're, you know, because there's they sit on so many rows evaluating so many differences. There's so many businesses, and so they see a lot of patterns around how companies skill and grow really fast to capture an opportunity. And I think that's incredibly valuable. But I also think, sometimes the, the advice they provide can be generic to just based on other businesses they've seen, and not necessarily what the customers in a certain market want. And so for us, the fact that we do raise a lot of institutional capital really meant that we could build the product and the company that our users and our customers wanting value, as opposed to artificially growing the business at a rate or pursuing or solving problems that are really important to our customers and our users. Right. So that's what I would say is like, it really gives us the flexibility to solve to solve what's most important to our users and customers. As opposed to chasing an artificial, artificially contrived number, right?
So Well, I'm going to pivot the conversation over to plg. And Blake, I know, you've invested in a couple of these companies. You're a bit of a thought leader in this. I think you're also if I recall, in expensify, and a variety of other major companies. But I'm curious when you look at a company that follows product led growth, you know, what sort of metrics How do you evaluate a business here? How do you know it's good? Well, I think for for product lead growth, to me, there's two main things. It's the product and the distribution model, and they need to be tightly aligned took spoke to some of this but I think first and foremost looking for this even outside of metrics, it's just how is the business built and on the product front, the product is built, the jobs to be done so to speak, are oriented towards the actual user of the product, not their boss, right. SAS historically was built for the boss because the boss owns the the budget for that department. So if you're building a sales tool, build for the VP of sales, and then hopefully the A's will, you know, go along with it. But now with product lead growth, you're actually building for that user. In this illustration, you're building for the AP, and they're paying or the SDR, the CSM, or whatever it is. And then eventually, you can build the things on top that the boss cares about the admin panel, and the, you know, KPIs and all that kind of stuff. But it comes after you've added that end user value. So orienting the product, the jobs to be done towards the user, not the budget holder first. And then secondly, that the distribution model actually works for those end users, which end users don't want to talk to sales end users want frictionless self service. And so the customer journey begins with self service usually has freemium in there as well, because you don't want to swipe a credit card, before you've actually kicked the tires. And so that product plus distribution oriented towards the same persona, which the user of the product versus the executive that that user works for, is the first and foremost important thing. So I'm always filtering things through that. And then you still look at the traditional SAS metrics. And if it's plg, being done, right, with strong product market fit, the metrics tend to look better than your average SAS, because of what we were talking about earlier, in terms of the D labeling of the growth engine, the ability to capture additional revenue without additional marginal expense. In total, along the same lines, when you think about the metrics that are most important to calculate the metrics, you pay attention to the KPIs, you know, what comes to mind is sort of your top three or four.
Yeah, so signups, obviously, meeting scheduled, right. meeting scheduled, is incredibly important. Because one, I think it means that we're selling, we're delivering the value that we promised our users are able to use the product, successfully scheduled meetings, and we're looking for that, our share of that to grow over time. Incidentally, for us, that same metric is also what drives growth for us, right. So when we're scheduling meetings, our existing users are happy. And it also means to refer new users to us. And then, you know, the fact that I look at his activation, right, how well we, how well do we do at onboarding new users and getting them to realize the value of the product? And then the fourth is revenue. So in our history, like, what we've actually found is that when, when meetings happened, right, and activation happens, those are actually the two leading indicators of success in the business leaders get scheduled news get activated. Revenue follows revenue.
I want to take a question from the audience, Osiris, Julian, as you know, attribution is really hard in growth, marketing, in general, a lot of load in product lead growth, it's hard sometimes to attribute to a particular ad network or how a customer comes in, or, you know, maybe 10, folks got a calendly invite. And then on the ninth when they finally came in, you know, why is that? How do you think about, you know, kind of elucidating in the organization, you know, the attribution of a particular lead a particular conversion? For calendly.
Yeah, so on the lead side, no difference, or, you know, what's getting above my paygrade. Now, on the user side, a couple of things, we look at it, there's no, there's no one key way to guys, we're going to look at it. So we look at it in a couple of different ways. We look at the number of people who sign up for an account directly after scheduling in the economy user, right is one way that we look at it. The other thing that we look at is look at what percentage of users so that, you can think of that it was like last touch attribution. So that's one way in which we look at that we look at the percentage of within also look at the percentage of newly signed up users that are scheduled with the calendar user at some point, right? So you schedule with the calendar user a month ago, a year ago, how, what's still longtail conversion, that those are the some of the the most important ways that we we look at it and then we look at we acquire user domain, how well do we expand How well does I use or walk us
into additional
users and additional revenue within the same account? Right. So these are some of the things that we look at on the marketing side or on the on the sales assistant side, it's actually way more complicated. We're revisiting that and like I said, it's it really it really is above my paygrade these days.
And then, similar to this, Graham club, asks, What channels have been most useful for County's growth? Both organic channels and paid?
Yeah, so we don't do a ton of paid. We don't we do almost no paid actually. And this is, this is embarrassing, but we probably started a paid about a year ago. All we're betting on is HR brand terms, right. So you do a search for calendly. There are some competitors who who are betting on that traffic and intercepting traffic that was otherwise bound for commonly. So we had to do the Google Shakedown. So we do we do that. But that's the that's
the apple Shakedown in the Amazon. Exactly.
Exactly. So that's the extent of the paid advertising that we do. tilted day. And obviously, like, we're, we're working incredibly hard to diversify into add additional marketing channels, but virality of the product bar none is still the biggest driver of growth. And really from it. And yes, we're, you know, there are lots of we have partners that, you know, we have referral partners that, you know, you know, do drive signups. We have all these different things, but all of it kind of pales in comparison to the to the virality of the product. And so I say that to say from a marketing standpoint, from a growth standpoint, we actually realized that we can, our best opportunity to move the needle is optimizing, optimizing inbound conversion, right. So at the top of the funnel a lot, but we can do a lot to to convert that traffic at the top of the funnel until, you know, like, from a marketing standpoint, we're mostly focused on inbound conversion, because it's very with the with the virality, the numbers, it's actually very difficult to add any meaningful to increase that meaningfully.
Yeah, I mean, I love that way. I mean, have you experimented with marketing and said, Gee, we're not getting the results we want? Or just, it's so much lower efficiency than compared to our own viral growth? Or what are the things where you just sort of directly said, I don't want to do marketing, you know, go ahead and do it for the brand. But I, you know, I don't want to get involved in all these different marketing channels and all those games.
Yeah. So you know, we. So I laughed, because up until maybe, Polly's marketing team is actually pretty, pretty small today. Right? So we hired a CRM cmo back in November, and we've just now run the marketing team. And, and you'll begin to see the results of that very, very soon here. But historically, like the historically we've had almost no marketing, right, I'm embarrassed to say that in some ways. So I say that to say marketing is in the very early innings Academy, that said, we think that they can have a huge impact. And I don't want to preempt some of the things that are coming, that are going to happen sooner, but I think you'll begin to see some of that in the next few weeks or months.
Great. And then it this is for both of you, one of the anonymous questions, which I guess is sort of obvious, is okay, you have $350 million. He didn't have that before, like, what changes? Do you expand the? Or do you suddenly do pay? Do you start to go into some of these less efficient channels? Like, you know, if it's so efficient? I mean, how do you even spend $350 million?
Well, through a lot of parties,
like once you hear
me happy parties, they're gonna be great, at least that everyone will be on time. Yeah,
so I think like, and I think this, uh, you know, we analysis when we announced around, so all of the, all the cash hasn't gone to the balance sheet, so we have used it to, you know, read in early employees and partially redeem early employees and early investors. So that's that. And then for the rest of the capital. Um, we know that we know that, again, we're building it, that we want to place bigger bets. And that may that may mean some inorganic bets. So far, we haven't found anything that we feel like we have to that we want to add on. But it's probably a matter of time before those things happen, whether it's three months, or 12 months or 18 months, we'll wait and see where we find that we can. There's something complimentary that we can, that allows us to advance our mission.
And then we just have one minute left, but I'm curious. This is from Jonathan woo and will be our last question for this panel. How much have you paid attention to competitors? You know, obviously, calendaring. You have big tech companies, small startups, everyone in between touches the calendar in various ways. Did you pay attention to them as you've grown? And how much do you care about them today? Well, I
probably in the time, we've had this conversation, I'm sure like three calendly competitors have started. So there's no shortage of them. Definitely pay attention to them. But I think more I pay more attention to what our users and our customers want. Right? There is almost, because that's really what matters, right? And there's almost fit. And so I guess, to the extent that I see some of the things I think that our customers are wanting that they do, I think I find that fascinating, but for the most part I focus on on our users and our customers and they are very clear about what they would like to see and encountering. We're working like crazy to make it happen for them. And I think if we do those names will be very, very successful, successful for a long time.
Great. Well, Blake, thank you so much for joining us on this panel on on boots. strapping here at early stage. And folks I hope you enjoy the rest of the program later today.