Ep. 10 How YouMail Had to Reposition Twice After Realizing Potential in Serving Other Markets

Welcome everyone to another episode of Down, But Not Out. Today I'm joined by Alex Quilici,  Alex has a PhD in computer science from UCLA and held multiple roles in several technology  companies before founding YouMail in 2007. YouMail protects consumers enterprises and carriers from  harmful phone calls using its technology that holds over 11 patents their consumer solutions  answer over a billion live calls each year and have over 10 million registered users. Alex,  thanks for being on the show. Thanks for having me. Awesome I don't know if my introduction suffice but would love for you to give a brief background  for the audience well I was a an AI PhD and I went to go become a professor and I watched a  lot of people I knew start companies and have you know really interesting experiences and I decided  I wanted to do that and fortunately I had a great postdoc who's actually Canadian and from Waterloo,  went to Waterloo, and we decided to build a speech recognition system so we decided that  we wanted to build a shopping service that you could just call in and say specialized mountain  bike and the model number and it would tell you what it would what it was you know how much it  cost where you could get it because i was finding it we were all shopping this is before smartphones  we're shopping in stores when we know if we're getting a good deal right so we  we founded that company it evolved quite a bit but AOL bought us about 18 months after we founded it  and we spent a good four five-six years doing services at AOL so the first voicemail to email  service that hit any scale that was us the first big voice recognition service you know  what's the weather like read me my email that was us and I did that for a while and then ultimately  I was going to take some time off and I actually wasn't the founder of email I invested in these  guys who built a little system that seemed to have better voicemail than what the carriers had  that they built themselves in a short period of time and I've been with email ever since  and you imagined AI and I don't want to date you at all but were you an AI before everyone else  was at night before it was really cool yeah well there was an AI winter and I started after the AI  winter when it started to come back so we did natural language systems I actually did a PhD  and how to get a computer to argue right with the idea that you can better help systems by  understanding the intent of a question and trying to have a dialogue so that was you know an early  example of trying to do practical AI leveraging the technology was there then or extending it  so a little bit before it became really cool but it wasn't uncool at the time  okay yeah it's definitely before it's the buzzword right that we all know it as right now exactly  yeah and then that leads you up to you mail as you mentioned you you bought into the company and now  you're the the CEO acting president is that right yeah i mean i'm the ceo of email I've been for  quite some time the story was that you know I like their application I thought that carriers were  ripe for disruption because they're they're all everything they did is so bad right and voicemail  is just sort of another example of it and we've had a lot of experience scaling a voicemail  business at AOL and doing some interesting things especially for small business users so I thought  hey there's probably a market here if we can sell the carriers we can get scale quickly and make a  big difference so I was willing to put a bet in there and one thing led to another and I found  myself running the company within a year and you know raising money and doing the whole thing so  it's funny how how I didn't plan on doing this at all but I'm glad I did when when  was this you mail was started in what year and then 2007 was roughly when I left AOL and went  to email so it's almost 15 years which is an amazing amount of time for for one one company  and yeah and at the time you know if you look back you know people were starting to use  smartphones there's an opportunity to build you know apps and carries had no experience in apps  things were starting to move to the cloud so they weren't all locked up in proprietary systems so  it felt like there were a lot of trends that made it interesting to do communication services better  yeah and how how young was you mail out this time it it was around for a few months it was it was  just you know you know you know you know what they built a prototype they actually spun it out of a  call center company they they didn't like working on the call center they built this thing got  permission to spin it out and start it up and you know didn't really know what they were going to do  but those are the kind of things where you figure hey they'll figure it out. Yeah and YouMail is obviously as I mentioned the intro are doing very well to date walk us through  from 2007 up until your Down, But Not Out moment. So our Down, But Not Out moment came in the first  three years of the company but the idea was we want carriers to adopt this and really simply  we had to build a system that could scale we had to sell a system to carriers we had to get the  carriers to actually deploy it and then we had to get them to pay us so it's kind of a set of steps  and we started with smaller carriers and we had some success of getting them to adopt it  was hard to get them to pay it's hard to get them to scale it and what basically happened  is after two and a half three years we had a sales cycle that was longer than our runway  and so it's like wow this is really hard the carriers if we can get one it's a great thing  it's really hard for a small company to do a deal with a with a wireless carrier especially  with new technology and that led to our down belt down but not out moment where it's like  oh we don't have any cash left or we're going to run out very soon we don't have enough  customers and carriers who have tiny fraction of revenue from the carriers what do we do. And how much money did you raise going into this roughly? So we raised about 7 million in venture capital and angel financing to get there it's a big  project right and another million and a half to two million in debt so we had about nine million  in the first three years to try to build sell and scale what we were going to do  and then you mentioned you would put some of your own cash in there as well mixed very little that  was the typical angel investment to start a little bit more you know to kind of put it in because  that helps get all the other investors say okay if he's putting his money in we'll jump in with more  and you know be more comfortable so at that point I didn't have anything really meaningful in you  now yeah and then what was revenue roughly at that point three years in or how many customers did you  have so what's really interesting is we had almost no revenue from carriers maybe 20 000 a month 15  000 a month if I remember right but the part I hadn't talked about is as part of this whole  process we decided we needed to get a consumer audience up and going so we built a Blackberry app  and Blackberry didn't have voicemail visual voicemail so we built one that was as good as  the iPhone for Blackberry as a prototype and then thought well let's get some consumers on it turned  out we had a million consumers using it even though it wasn't our focus even though we were  folks so myopically focused on chasing carriers a million people had come and downloaded our app  and so we had one and a half two million dollars in revenue we had figured out a few services to  help sell them Blackberry was a good audience at the time there's a lot of small business people  who were willing to pay for things and so you know that's where we sat we had got some money  from the consumer business coming in we weren't paying attention to it and we had you know  almost no money from the carriers and that's what we're really focused on trying to build that  and then cash became tight walk us through kind of once that decision was made that you didn't  have enough runway left for the next few months so so we looked at it and said what are we gonna do  if we keep going we probably have 60 days of cash and then we're going to you know implode we've got  all this debt there's no time to try to sell the company we're probably not in a position to sell  our core business we haven't seen it out we haven't focused on consumers so what do  we do so the first thing we did is we had to ask ourselves do we think there's a real business here  and the answer came back not with carriers there is no carrier business but you know consumers  we're not paying any attention we're not really marketing it we're not doing anything and it's  actually grown into a pretty interesting business I mean we did try to do a premium service that we  could sell to consumers for subscriptions and we built some cool stuff okay the question now is do  we think we can grow the consumer business it's like well if we're just starting a seed company  now and I had a million and a half in revenue in the first year without putting a lot of investment  that's an interesting company right so we said okay we're going to go in that direction first  thing is we're going to pivot and we're going to focus on consumer communications not characters  right number one number two then is well how are we going to fund this thing and the most important  thing was well how long will it take us to get to break even we've got subscription revenue coming  in we're spending I think we're burning a couple hundred thousand dollars a month can we shrink  the burn down enough that we can see a path to break even I think we decided we could get to  break even at a million and a half two million if we're really tight so it's another six months  to a year and then it said okay we need half a million dollars roughly to get to that point  so we recapped the company and the the down but not out moment is all the investors said we're not  going to do this you know you're kind of on your own and i said okay well so then it became down  to am I willing to write a cheque for a quarter of a million dollars or 300 000 whatever it was  and I went back the investors said I'll write a check I'll recap the whole company you guys  can come along with me I don't need a lot from you guys but you guys got to put in money too because  this is what we need to do to get to somewhere interesting and it took some time but with a  plan that was really aggressive at shrinking the company I think we got down to eight people  we got rid of any office which precise this whole thing by what ten years yeah and said let's just  get to stability and then we can look at what we're going to do next right if Blackberry's  got this good market then we can build Android we can build iPhone there's things we can do  by carefully putting money in and we had a great platform it was scaling we had a lot of calls and  I kind of everybody came along and we did that and that was the down but out not out moment was  we realized I had to do three things we had to figure out what we were going to do the pivot we  had to figure out how to shrink to get down to an amount that we could then get funded for and I had  to put in a check and I ended up putting in more checks later on to kind of allow us to grow faster  and move to other places but that was the hard moment and I had to decide also and some of us  either worked for half of a normal salary or almost nothing for a few years  everything we could to get so very few dollars were going out and we we transformed the company  and started growing at a pretty good clip and got eventually got to break even it took us two  years not nine months but you know we did more stuff and got to a pretty interesting place  how many employees were you out before you mentioned you went down to about eight we were  like 25-28 something like that I don't it's been a while but it was it was pretty hard right because  you're losing people some people voluntarily kind of see the writing on the wall and go  other people hey sorry guys we can't we don't have a position anymore for us realizing was there was  not gonna be we couldn't afford marketing we could barely afford customer support we could afford a  bit of development and some qa in order to build the app in order to try to drive customers are  coming in to upgrade and we narrowed our focus really tightly on that for a while one theme that  I've heard about that scale down did you say you got rid of the office we got we got ended up with  an executive suite by an airport that was like a the size of a closet and it had two desks in it  instead of just one and people sort of shared and some people worked remotely we'd use the outside  you know the outside picnic tables to meet and it was like that was it hard to scale down because  you had scaled up with all all these potentially these aspects the indicator liabilities you had  to take care of was it was it hard to scale down or did you find that quite easy it was  difficult I mean some parts are easy because you say we're not going to do carriers anymore then  you don't need your biz dev team you don't need everything that was working for that right it's  just yeah that goes but it is hard it's like well can we support everybody with one customer support  person instead of five or six can we actually just have one developer can we contract out development  you know those kind of questions come up and it was it was pretty it was pretty difficult  some of the management team went so it ended up being me, my CTO, a few developers, QA person,  a couple support people, that was it we really shrunk it down and then you can gradually build  back after that and did the founding team kind of stay during this period did some of them leave  they they'd all all except for one had left within the first year what it turned out it  wasn't a good fit they didn't have the skills we needed for for for growing the company even though  they had a nice idea and the last founding team member left as we were going through all of this  you know transition because at that point it wasn't clear what was going to happen I think  I was pretty optimistic we could get somewhere interesting but you know some of the founding  team said well I need a better job more reliable I want to do something else and  you know that's how it goes right it's tough when you've gone through that that valley. Absolutely and I know it's ten years ago ten plus years ago as you mentioned  do you remember kind of how it was weighing on you personally I'm sure you've gone through it  potentially before or similar with with the other companies or what have you but do you remember how  it weighed on you personally? The biggest thing was sleepless nights as you're going through it  right because your decisions affect other people's lives your decisions affect this baby you've been  working with for a while you've got investors who put money in right, angel investors and vcs, and  so all that stuff comes and it's like you have to make a decision that says am I going to fail and  sometimes it's okay if we've gotten to well we've got no carers got no consumers we've got nowhere  then you just say look it didn't work right and you yeah you turn out the lights but in our case  that million consumers weighed on us right it was sleepless nights but if we just go away these  people aren't going to lose this service they like we've done something really important for them and  let's let's see what we can do and you know the hope was after a year or two we could find our way  and find something that would allow us to scale the business and then kind of restart right treat  it as a company that wasn't founded in 2007 was really founded in 2010 right where as a consumer  company and now let's try to go treat us like a little seed stage thing and then go from there. Yeah, and you've been able to scale back up how many employees are you at now? So we have a team of about 70. But we've used a model that mixes both employees and  contractors and you know outsourcing things where it makes sense we've gotten much smarter  about what's absolutely core to the business kind of forever versus what's tentative we're  exploring we're gonna try something or it's doing maintenance software doesn't need to be done in  the US or Canada it can be done anywhere right so you can move that out to lower costs and have the  most talented developers figure out how to build the new things the things that really matter. And have you raised money since? Are those initial investors still with you? It's actually an interesting story which has another down-and-out moment but oh yes it's a  good transition so we were we were growing the company pretty nicely and all of a sudden two  years later we got hit with four maybe five I'm trying to remember class action lawsuits  so if you've ever had a class-action lawsuit as a company it's really scary right you're just  seeing huge piles of legal fees that are going to hit you but this was twice as bad because they  sued us personally they sued my CTO, they sued me, they sued the board as individuals, and the  story was basically we had a feature where if you call the email user, email would send a text back  to whoever called you with like a link to your website or messaging it kind of pre precise what  you could do on the iPhone where you can just say I'm in a call right we would do this automatically  and it could be a lot smarter so if you're a business person you could drive them to the  website to you know make a calendar appointment so these guys all said oh that's violating CCPA  because the person who called you did not give consent to get that text message so we're going  to sue you for fifteen hundred dollars for every text message you guys have sent out it turned  out we'd sent out about 200 million of them so this was like a trillion dollar loss right right  okay yeah and obviously they're not going to get you know blood out of a turnip but we had this  problem where that just shut us down completely so we had to make a decision there did we just wrap  it up and try to get some cheap settlement so we're done or do we fight it and we decided you  know we're gonna do we're gonna get our expenses down as low as we can find the best lawyer we can  who's relatively cheap and fight this thing and go go talk to the FCC talk to the regulators and say  is this what you intended with CCPA and eventually after three years we got a clean bill of health  that said no no guys it's perfectly legal and so everybody folded and you know we were able to grow  but that was a three-year you know where you're just in neutral you cannot do anything right  you try to keep the business going there's no chance of getting investment zero so i had to  put some money in to help fund it through that stage but we liked what we were doing and what's  really interesting is as we were doing that three years we discovered the robocall problem  so we had a feature in our service where you could play an out of service message to a phone number  that was designed originally to you know the x that's stalking you now  they he or she calls and they hear do to do this number's out of service oh okay I can't bother  you anymore turned out that people were using it for the same phone numbers 800 numbers 312  numbers like the same exact number for huge chunks of our audience we realized this is how they were  blocking calls they let the phone number ring but it hit our platform play the message and the  caller would go away it makes so much sense yeah that makes so much sense and I'd love to say we  were geniuses and we saw that coming we didn't we just looked at the data because I had enough users  and so where I'm going with all this is we decided we're going to pivot to become a robocall blocking  company and a security company and when we did that I was able to raise almost 5 million dollars  from new investors and sort of angels and others in a big crowdsource funding round and we use  at that point we're at two and a half million dollars in revenue we use that to grow from there  and so that that was yet another okay we got a pivot of it voicemail's not really the exciting  thing but the call protection part is we need a little bit of money but we need real money to  grow so let's get real money and you know let's push through we got through the class actions and  you know keep going from there and the interesting thing is that one I don't think we had a choice  right like we really they were going to come after us anyways with what we figured so  we've got to fight this the only way to fight is with a company producing funds that will allow  us to fight it let's keep the thing going and growing yeah and this is roughly 2015 then 2015. Yeah exactly here it's fake yeah and there was no settlement you just got to walk away,  yeah I mean you know there's always a settlement but it was not we didn't have to do anything right  it didn't it was not painful for us and you personally  have to pay the cost of the lawyer do you remember roughly as I mean  in legal defending it company. Yeah and did you have I think  there's a technical word for this been blanking on it personal liability insurance for yourself? Here's a liability insurance first thing is if you're violating a law this doesn't matter and so  since they were accusing a company of violating CCPA which is you know a law plus a regulation  they're like no no you guys are oh [ __ ]. Yeah you know it's like that's when you're  hoping it's like you had a car crash oh no that was your fault we're not paying. Right the first thing they look for right how do they get out of it yeah it sounds like a kind  of like a double trough journey I'm sure there's been others along the way maybe smaller ones but  do you think that those better prepared you for or weathered you for the journey moving forward yeah  it did I mean even the first one it really helped me understand pivoting right you have to be okay  with the pivot and you've got to pivot you can't kind of half pivot and so when that's why we're  going to get into call blocking we really put a big effort into that and really invest money in it  and really started thinking about how to position our company around it to the point now if you go  to the website email is about call protection that is what we are yeah and the fact we do voicemails  just as a way to protect your voicemail box and keep the spam out of there right that's a complete  pivot like it took us a little while but we drank the Kool-Aid we're gonna pivot the other thing I  realized that is that you really need to expect that you're wrong on how much money you need  right you're gonna be optimistic naturally because of the pain of writing checks and having to go  back to investors and so when we raised that you know 5 million that was enough to really  make a difference right it really allowed us to grow it allowed us to do the pivot we were very  you know we spent it wisely which was the third lesson which is spend your money very wisely be  very clear on what the return is going to be try not to have permanent expenses if you can help it  we made a few errors in hiring the wrong person which is tough to get out of but in general  we started getting much better at how we hired we only hired we absolutely needed  we built relationships up with firms that were experts so we didn't have to hire an seo person we  have an seo firm we didn't have to hire a person to do online marketing we worked with an agency so  we started outsourcing a lot of those pieces so we had flexibility and we'd never have to go  through that oh my god I gotta lay off all these employees you know go through that whole process  yeah absolutely the the voicemail part of the business that's still active it's still  going because you said you pivoted away from it it's part of our service but where what  we want to do is essentially you can think of Yuma as ultimately a new phone app right  so we're gonna block calls we're going to keep your voicemail clean and when you make calls we  already do some of this we're going to make sure the phone number you're calling is the right one  right so you're not calling us a fraudulent phone number a fake Citibank or whatever else  and so voicemail is a piece of it but it's a much bigger vision about you know protecting  your ability to make phone calls and then we move to having a second line service so you can get  another phone number for you from email which is set up for businesses again it's the same phone  app lets you do all your email stuff and call on his call and manage your second phone number  it has a virtual receptionist and kind of the features you want if you basically want your  company switchboard to be your cell phone and that's been pretty popular and we see people come  in because they got some robocalls they want to block they realize that we can do some really good  protection and they go I don't mind getting phone service from these guys and so it was a really  nice path all built around protection with our voicemail being a part of it it's really unique  it's cool but that's not the company anymore at some point you mail should shrink our name down  to really small font and put something else as our name because the email part isn't that important  yeah it's just a name at the end of the day right some branding at the end of the day yeah exactly  so you mentioned a few times in there the obviously the double pivot  during those usually what I've seen and what I've gone through is when those moments come up you're  you lay out your options right your three your four your seven options what have you was ever  walking away on the table it was an option we thought about right so you know if i'm gonna  have to write a big check I'm gonna have to get investors to write checks if I'm gonna have to  devote a couple years to get to break even and figure out where this business is gonna go do I  wanna do that or is this just a failure we just didn't make it and i think for us the  reason we didn't go down that path was we had that million Blackberry downloads and we hadn't really  put a lot of effort and that told us hey there's a market and ultimately we've gotten over 10 million  downloads of our service so it's it's really you know grown far beyond that initial audience  and so i think you know walking away is something you've got to consider like legitimately it's on  there and you have to decide if I walk away there you know I could do something else and is there an  opportunity cost or do I really want to work with this and you know the team decided we really like  what we're doing we really think we could make a difference and now we really are we're protecting  people our technology is being used now by carrier networks to find bad guys and get rid of them  built up a whole B2B business on it so we're doing stuff we love right we're  protecting america so i'm really glad we didn't walk away but we seriously thought about it  and obviously you you know talked with the founding team at that time going through these or  are sorry not the founding team the partners that were involved in actively the the the executive  team was was there conversations within any of the employees at either of these moments  i guess more at the beginning of the the first one you said voluntarily some of them kind of saw  yeah we told the employees look we're in trouble right like this these are our options right  and you know we'd like you that certain people said we'd like you to stay with us and go to the  next level here's what we can pay you here's what we can do as we grow we're going to you  know do things better for you but do you want to come along or not and most people came along  actually yeah it was really it's pretty cool  I think founders struggle with that ray like what do you tell the team how much do you tell the team  how honest can you be do you think it was the right decision talking to the team about it i  think you have to be transparent if you're not transparent you're always worried are they gonna  is the team gonna find out something right like or am I yeah you know it's what are your parents  telling your little kid don't tell a lie because it's too hard to keep track of it I would extend  that to you you better be transparent because you can't remember what you told this person or that  person like what you're hiding and what's on the table and we just said look we're losing x dollars  we have this much cash we want to keep going here's how here's the plan to keep going what do  you know what do you think are you are you on are you off right and it worked out yeah pretty well  yeah it's a it's a good story a good good journey along the way a good down but not out to moment  two of them along the path and now YouMail's doing great stuff and over 70 employees as you mentioned  11 patents touch on that quick actually I think we're up to 13. So one of the things we learned  is there was there's another patent lawsuit that actually hit us in the middle of all this which  was a minor down but not out but we learned that we had to have some real defensive protection  with pat so that people couldn't just sue us claiming something and we didn't have something  where we could sue back right and so we made a big push to patent the interesting parts of  our technology we have some ai that's really good at figuring out the phone number's bad  right like is it misbehaving we had technology that when we had a clip of audio we could compare  it and decide is this illegal is this calling an illegal call do that with AI versus people a  whole bunch of stuff related to that and we said we're gonna patent all this so  nobody can ever just sue us and we're defenseless and we have to figure out you know licensing deal  and so I think patents are really important as a defensive mechanism more than offensive for  startups you're not going to sue somebody and make a million you know a zillion dollars if  you see Microsoft or Google but this is going to make everybody think twice about suing you  if you've got a lot of patents around the core of what you do yeah we one of the other  episodes was about a patent lawsuit and a patent troll that hit this smaller company  at that point with the with the patent and they had to defend it and one of his big lessons and  walk away was if you do have to defend make sure you defend otherwise you're going to be a target  don't just settle right away because they're the blood's in the water they'll come after you after  that and it sounds like you dealt with something similar yeah we we ended up settling just because  we didn't see any other alternative but we found a way to settle on reasonable terms that's a you  know as you knew it as a percentage of revenue and the time period that was left in the patent wasn't  wasn't that long so we sort of just stomach it stomached it and just moved on so that that didn't  even i mean that's I guess in the top three but not in the top two of our trumpet not out  there's that moment where somebody sues you where you just go oh crap now I gotta deal with this  yeah yeah it's gonna be a long six to twenty four months ago you have to deal with it right  exactly I think we got it done in about a year six months to a year yep yeah  all right we're gonna wrap up but you've already shared a lot of lessons and and good takeaways  but anything else for someone that's going through kind of their Down, But Not Out moment or a tough  time in their business i think that one of the things I've learned we didn't talk about is the  down but not out moments come much faster than you think sometimes right it's like you're on a little  bit of a down slope or you see a little danger and then boom it's right in front of you right  so it's like the curve in a row they kind of think the road's curving and also you're going 70 and  there's the curve right what do you do and so i think one of the key things that to help people is  think about what could kill you before it does so don't get to the down-and-out moment it's like you  know three months six months nine months before start looking at do I think there's a down and  out moment out there for me and can I do things to push that out further what can i do you know  it's very easy to be so focused on growing your business yeah yeah we'll get through that we'll  get through that you kind of convince yourself you're going at a faster clip than you are or the  down and out where you're gonna run out of couches further than it might look and it's it's really  tough so ideally you prevent it all the way you can't always do that but try to look further I had  an uncle as a race car driver and we were on the autobahn in Germany and he told me he was looking  like a mile down the road all the time about the car that was going to swerve in or the truck that  might hit his brakes he was looking way out there all the time I think it's a great metaphor for  how you should be doing a startup business you got to be looking a mile or two ahead for that  truck that's going to be slowly curving into your lane when you think you're going 200 miles an hour  yeah I think we see it all the time right when you're when you're growing at a rapid rate it's  hard to contingency planning and look a mile ahead when you're trying to look a few days ahead but it  is very important that you put those contingency plans in place and and have a forward vision  otherwise it'll hit you out of nowhere and much quicker than than you think and it makes it make  you know one of the things for us was we it was good that we put a subscription business together  on the consumer side like we started to hedge the carrier side ahead of making that complete pivot  right oh there's no if we can get you know two percent to pay two bucks that's a decent  amount of money and I think that saved us if we hadn't had that we were done right but we had  no revenue even with a bunch of consumers there's no no way we could have kept going  that's that's an interesting one too because you're almost diversifying and  and taking multiple plays at the same time and seeing what works out right and that's that's a  tough tough thing to do right because that's some for somebody it's a distraction that you're now  doing consumer stuff right instead of the carrier stuff and I think you have to hedge a little bit  but it's being very smart and very selective on where you do the hedging and doing it when  it matters right do it early enough you can't go with two months of cash left going well I guess  we'll create a subscription business I mean it's not it's not going to work yeah I think  the Netflix book from the founder of Netflix how we built no that's not it but he talks about kind  of ruthless prioritization but running those tests as quick as you can so throwing out some tests and  then figuring out what works and then focusing on that it sounds like that's kind of been  what you did whether purposely or kind of just worked out in the end right I think so I think  it's where your intuition is like hey this isn't working what are we gonna do oh maybe it'll work  maybe we can get the deal let's just see if these consumers will pay that would be valuable for the  carrier business right we'll be able to show their paying and then that turns out to be  the saving grace right is the yeah the time ten thousand people are paying us or whatever it was  yeah I think for me it's i like to think that i'm that I'm smart and but sometimes I'm just  fumbling through stumbling through and finding what actually works and what doesn't right you  throw out enough enough tests and you stumble across the the one that actually does something  it's really critical to try different things right I mean you know whether it's normal A/B testing  it's like building an idea someone had that's a little bit different but seems to have potential  in seeing what it does you've got to do some of that because frankly as much as we'd like to think  our vision is the right one it's never the right one even if you look at Zuckerberg with Facebook  or the Google guys they didn't think about the advertising as a way to monetize their search  engine someone else came up with it you know four years later and exactly it's you're gonna end up  on a path that you don't know and i never thought I'd be a security guard running a security company  like that was yeah that's the farthest thing from my mind I'm a communications guy then Telco stuff  and speed track but that's where the market was and that's what we got funneled into over time  yeah you kind of just stumble through until you hit the the one thing that actually works. Yep yep all right, well Alex thank you for your time today that's all for this episode  so thank you for sharing your story with everyone listening I hope you enjoyed this episode  if you did leave us a review also subscribe to the show to be alerted of new episodes and finally  like and share this episode on social media help us spread the word of town but none other bye  everybody thanks again Alex. All right thank you