The Nomics Update

I want to share a little bit about my thoughts on the ShapeShift layoffs. And a lot of empathy I'm having for Erik Voorhees right now. So first off, I think it's pretty cool that he was upfront about these layoffs. There are definitely things that companies can do to not let it leak out to the public that there have been layoffs. There's lot of techniques for doing that, [00:00:30] if you're into HR. And he didn't do it. He didn't do any of that, any obfuscation. He wrote a Medium post about it, and because he wrote a Medium post it was covered by almost all the crypto publications. CoinDesk. The Block, etcetera.

So the headline is that they let 37 employees go. So, if you haven't heard of ShapeShift, which is unlikely if you're in the crypto space. It's a non-custodial [00:01:00] exchange. So, kind of think about exchanges as existing on this continuum between centralized exchanges on one extreme, and decentralized exchanges on another examples of centralized exchanges would be like, Coinbase or Binance. And then on the decentralized extreme, you would have decentralized exchanges like Radar Relay, Paradex, [00:01:30] etcetera. And then there's kind of hybrid decentralized exchanges like IDEX. And if you're interested in decentralized exchanges and the spectrum in general, check out the latest [inaudible 00:01:43] podcast we've done about this. It's a two part series about decentralized exchanges. It's a really deep dive. It's much more professional than this podcast. 

So anyway, they let 37 employees go. And when I read his blog post about doing this, [00:02:00] the thing that stuck out to me was his statement that they made 1,000 mistakes. But the most thematic of them has been lack of focus. And I really can resonate with this. You know, I think this is something that, a mistake I made in the past, and at previous companies. I think if you're a product person, [00:02:30] and you love product, there's a certain joy that comes with launching a product. And, when you launch a product and it has immediate success, like ShapeShift did. I mean, they grew incredibly fast. I think they grew 3000% in 2017.

But when you have that kind of immediate success, you think it's, or you can think it's pretty repeatable, right? That you just got, you got the "It" factor and you can do it again. And again, [00:03:00] and again. So, ShapeShift not only did ShapeShift, which was their core business and brought in almost all of the revenue. They created CoinCap, which is a Nomics competitor, I guess. A CoinMarketCap competitor, etcetera. And so, that was at coincap.io. They purchased KeepKey, which is a hardware wallet. They created a smart contract, [00:03:30] like index fund thing called Prism, which I used. It was really great, I actually liked it quite a bit. 

But they did a bunch of things that weren't essential to their core business, probably 'cause they had a bunch of cashflow, and they could, right? It's fun to create products if you're a product person. And Eric Voorhees is. But I think [00:04:00] that's really hard to scale. I think the first thing that's hard to scale around creating multiple products is just the founding DNA. Like whatever confluence of circumstances and talents and people that led to your existing success, it's generally hard to reproduce. Like most startups fail. And whenever they work, it's a combination of skill and luck and timing and [00:04:30] a whole bunch of other factors, right? To try and do that over and over again with product after product, when you're still a startup, right? Like not when you're at Salesforce size, or Google size. 

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Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

I want to share with you why we shifted away from telegram for our community and for our market data API support. So, the impetus [00:00:30] for this really came when I received an email from an API user who wanted free support via email and we don't offer free support for our API via email. We do it through forums because if we're going to spend some time helping someone who's not paying for the API, we really want it to be documented and searchable and available to everyone else who might be interested in that same problem. 

[00:01:00] Their complaint was that they had a bunch of chat apps and they just didn't want to install telegram. At first I was a little bit like, what do you want for free? The API is pretty dang good. I think the free version we're giving away more than CoinMarketCap is providing with their most expensive plan. I believe that to be true, and actually a lot more.

But then I started thinking about [00:01:30] the mainstreaming of the cryptocurrency movement, and yeah, I think a lot of niche things with early adopters happen on telegram, but most people don't have telegram installed. My parents don't have telegram installed. Everyone I know, doesn't use telegram. It's a fairly niche thing. And it's hard to search. There's not threaded comments. So, [00:02:00] as part of our effort to, I guess, go mainstream or make things more accessible, that's another thing about telegram. It's not very good from a accessibility perspective for users with disabilities and such. 

So anyway, we decided to move to forums. There at forums.nomics.com. It's kind of a ghost land right now. It took a while to get our telegram group going and I think folks in there are people [00:02:30] who are in a bunch of telegram groups and it's easy for them to just hop in a room and leave a comment or ask a question. So far, we've only announced these new forums in telegram, so there's not much happening on our forums. 

So, I wanted to walk you through our thinking a bit to the, what are the pros of telegram? So, telegram is great for folks who are on telegram. They don't have to [00:03:00] log in every time they want to leave a comment or ask a question, it's always running if you're participating in a bunch of groups, and it has the feel of real time. I think that's kind of interesting and something that we've seen a lot recently when it comes to business communications is, the presence of some kind of chat widget on websites and because of that interface, we have this [00:03:30] illusion that we're going to hear back. But most of the time when we leave a message in those little chat apps on websites if it's not support for a product you're paying for, usually, they then ask you to leave your email address, and you got to fill in additional emails or information, and then they tell you that they usually answer within like, five hours or something. So, it's basically the same as email. Perhaps it's a little bit more accessible. 

But anyway, telegram, I think, has the illusion of real time. People seem to think [00:04:00] that they're going to hear back sooner. I guess another pro is that, that we know that at least some people use it that it has a high adoption rate in the crypto community. So, those are the pros of going with telegram.

I think another pro for using telegram is, it's just where some people are. I think when it comes to communities, there's a lot of wisdom behind saying, go to where people naturally [00:04:30] are. There in the martech space, which I was in, the marketing technology space with my last company Leadpages and also Drip, everyone's in Facebook group.

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Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Hey. So this one might be a little bit off topic. Maybe it's not. No, it definitely qualifies as how I define this podcast as my journal. So I want to talk about why in my humble opinion and after years of bad experiences why I think launching [00:00:30] should be a marketing event and not an engineering event. Like, of course, a launch is a marketing event. Everyone gets that. But I think the thing here that's most important is that launching should not be an engineering event.

So I think engineering teams are notoriously bad for no fault of their own. But I'll just say not engineering [00:01:00] teams, engineering projects are notoriously difficult to predict in terms of when something's going to be done. And often I've seen startups and I have done this more times than I can count unfortunately, but oftentimes I've seen companies do things like plan a launch for a given day and maybe the engineering team is 25% done or 50% done or at least they think they are. [00:01:30] And everyone will come up with some date that's perhaps a little bit of a stretch but mostly doable in terms of when they're going to launch something to the market. And a marketing leader will sit down with an engineering leader, and the engineering leader is trying to do a good job. Maybe they just got hired, maybe they've been there for a while and they want to come off as a team player, and they're like, "Okay. We're going to launch this thing on this date." [00:02:00] And they proceed to coordinate around that. 

So heading into kind of the time of thing is about to launch, marketing and engineering gets together, and they're like, "All right. We need to create marketing collateral around this launch. We need screenshots." Well, the screenshots are ... Engineering will come back with like the screenshots are mostly done, but we have some mock ups. So we can create a demo based on this beta version that's on [00:02:30] a developers computer or I don't know, a mock up of the UI in something like envision or whatever they're using. And they'll invest a whole bunch of time in creating a video or marketing collateral around this launch that's scheduled for this date, but the thing isn't quite ready. But you need to create the collateral ahead of time. 

There's all this coordination cost that's incurred, right? Like weekly meetings. All right, is engineering on track? Is marketing on track? [00:03:00] Let's coordinate, and that eats up a bunch of time. All right. What features are we going to say exist in this when it launches? Here all are the features. Next thing you know a week before launch or two weeks before launch, it turns out that some of those features aren't there. Okay. We have to remove them from the video. We have to remove them from the copy or we need to rename this feature because it doesn't do exactly what we thought and it's going [00:03:30] to be out later or some aspect of the new thing is in beta but another aspect isn't that needs to be added to the graphic. There's just all this coordination stuff.

And if you've ever been involved in this, I'm sure you can attest to the fact that it just slows down engineering teams because they have to spend so much time coordinating and educating and providing status updates to marketing around the launch. And if they just use that time [00:04:00] focused on building the thing, it probably would get done a lot faster. 

So at Nomics, for the most part, we try not to use the word launch, right? So I like to say that we're not ...

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Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Man, I really love a boring business. I think boring businesses are really beautiful in a lot of ways for so many reasons. I first started thinking about boring businesses when this person I knew made an absolute killing back in the day. I don't even know if their company is around anymore, but they started what was essentially [00:00:30] Uber for construction type dumpsters in Europe. It was one of those things where it was an old industry. They didn't really use technology. There were no apps. Companies in the space didn't really have a website, and this guy came into the industry, made viral videos, had an app, [00:01:00] had a phone number you could call 24/7, had a website, and really made it easy for anyone to get ... You know those dumpsters you see in the street when they're doing demolish on a house or construction work and they just put everything in these huge dumpsters? That's what they did, right? Not sexy at all. It's not like blockchain. They weren't launching their own token or anything like that. But I [00:01:30] really enjoyed the way he put like this kind of cool wrapper around the space. Came in with really fun branding and brought innovation to this industry that hadn't seen it for a while. That's kind of what got me thinking about this.

And then recently I was contemplating one of the products that I really like a lot, which is Rev, which does the transcribes for the [00:02:00] Flippening Podcast, my other podcast, and they do transcripts for this podcast too. And there's a lot of people that do transcription. If you go to UpWork or Craigslist or anywhere like it's like of a commodity, right? But Rev just kind of took it to the next level. They have over 100,000 paying customers. They've done ... Let's see. [00:02:30] I'm on their website right now. I forgot how many millions upon millions of minutes they've transcribed. But they took this thing that was arguably kind of boring and they just took it to the next level. They have an iOS app that you can just ... Or they have apps on Android. They have a bunch of apps that you can just talk into it and then they send you a transcript back. You can pay more for time stamping. They'll transcribe [00:03:00] it for you in a pretty automated fashion and get you ... Like if you want, you can get a transcript back immediately because they'll have their machine do it, then they'll have their AI do it, and then they'll come in and have a human go over it and make it perfect. They get so many little things right. 

One of the reasons why this podcast is so fast for me to produce is because I record it and then I immediately [00:03:30] drop the audio file into a folder on my computer, like just on my desktop, not on Google Drive or anything. And I have a little automation that runs using their API that just sends the file to Rev and generates an order and has all these settings preselected and the folder just gets populated later with the transcription of the file. I don't even need to log into their website. I just drop it into a folder. [00:04:00] They'll do ... What is it called? They'll do the closed captioning on videos. They'll take any file format. You can just send them the URL of a video, and they'll transcribe it. It's pretty incredible. 

When you're going to checkout, you can enter names of people. It's just incredibly well done. They've got an app that you can just install on your phone, and you can [00:04:30] place calls out of it and then it'll record and transcribe those phone calls for you. Like they just really thought of everything, and the accuracies amazing. One day I got a transcript back from them, and it was fine.

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Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

I get a lot of emails almost I'd say one every 2-3 days from someone that basically says something like, "Hey, I love what you're doing. We should partner. Let's get on the phone to explore." Right? I [00:01:00] never ... it's hard to respond to those, right?

At the very beginning when we were new and just wanted to talk to anyone to get feedback and learn about how other people saw us in the space. I would get on some of these calls and be like, "Okay, what ... how do you want to partner?" They'd say like, "I'm open to anything." Really? You're open to anything? So I [00:02:00] have to come up with the partnership idea. So you want to partner with me and now like I need to pitch you on the ... on what a partnership might look like? So now I just say to folks like, "Okay, cool. I'm open to it. Send me a one-page proposal with as many concretes as possible outlining what you would get, what we would get. Concretely what the exchange of value would be. Is it money? Is it traffic? Is [00:02:30] it visibility? If it is traffic or something like that, what would the form of that take?" 

And almost nobody writes back with a one-page proposal. Even a one paragraph concrete proposal. I don't get this whole like, "Hey, we should do something. Let's hop on the phone." Like who has that much phone time? Who has [00:03:00] that much bandwidth for connections in real time? Probably people who aren't ... who don't have customers. I don't know. I used to have this theory that the Biz Dev career or industry, like basically the main role of folks in Biz Dev, was to tie up time with other people who are in Biz Dev. Like, "Hey, Biz Dev person A at company A is going to Biz Dev person [00:03:30] B at company B and they're just gonna eat up a bunch of each other's time so they can justify their roles."

When you're exchanging money, something fungible or bitcoin or equity or something, when you're trading these things it's very clear how value is exchanged. But when there's a partnership it's like, "All right, what are the specifics? [00:05:00] How long is it gonna last? Is there confidentiality? Is there exclusivity?" Usually you need to get ... you have to have some kind of contract involved, right? So you need to pay, if you're gonna do it right, you have to pay a pretty good commercial contracts attorney and that takes time. 

Usually [00:05:30] it takes hours of meetings, tens of hours and meetings in some cases. And then once it's done, you have to execute it, which means you need to get other people on your team involved and they have to be in alignment. There's so much involved in a really solid partnership. I think even Fortune 500 companies can count on two hands the number of really [00:06:00] important partners that exist for them. So yeah, I think it's just something that most people can consider ... I sent out a Tweet about this the other day and it got a lot of likes. 

Thank you for everyone who liked it. And someone responded to the Tweet, who I used to work with, Kevin Raheja, who runs partnerships or ... [00:06:30] I don't know what his official title ... I think it's maybe director of partnerships at HubSpot. And he responded with a really clear directive, which was 1. Know the partner's business. 2. Have a plan. 3. Be short and clear. 4. Exchange value. And 5. Don't waste time.

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Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

I had some time off during Christmas, and the holidays, and the New Year, and stuff. My family went to California, spent some time in remote desert places, and some dive bars. My parents took the kids for a few days, and my wife and I went and [00:00:30] drove back roads around some of the areas where I grew up in rural Southern California. The deserts and the back roads of that area. I had a lot of fun. 

When I got back, I had a couple days in the office where it was just me working. I think some other people were working as well, but we didn't have any meetings scheduled. [00:01:00] Man, I spent like a half a day ... I even spent a whole day on one of those "days off" just playing with software. Going through my computer, creating shortcuts, optimizing my environment, and I really enjoyed it. It really reminded me of when I was [00:01:30] younger, before the internet was a thing really in a big way, dialing into bulletin board services. I even created a bulletin board service with a friend. Downloading shareware. Playing with different types of utility apps for the computer. 

I started downloading apps from the Mac App Store, and some of them are really good. [00:02:00] There's a program called Be Focused Pro which I was messing with. There's an app for ... I never thought I'd use this kind of thing, but I'm using it. There's an app for tracking your water consumption, and it syncs across all your devices. 

I just had fun playing with software. And I realized, at the end of the day, I'm no longer a kid, but I think in my heart, or whatever, [00:02:30] spiritual, I'm just a kid that likes playing with computers and software. I think that's why I got into product in the first place. That's why I learned to develop, to write code, in the first place. It's not because I'm really in love with the hardcore aspects of software engineering, and infrastructure, and architecture, and all that, although, I'm intellectually [00:03:00] interested in that stuff. But, at the end of the day, I really, really, really love product. It delights me to no end. I love outdoors, and I love hiking and camping, but the part of me that's indoors, just loves just crewing around with software and seeing how different designers and developers solve different UX problems. 

I remember [00:03:30] at my last company, which is still going strong, but I'm no longer there, lead pages. I remember hiring, or interviewing, people for product rolls, and one of my favorite questions to ask them was, "What are some of your favorite apps? What's some software that you just really love playing with?" These were career product people in software, and I was dumbfounded, I was absolutely dumbfounded, [00:04:00] by the number of people that couldn't answer that question. I would often hear that they liked the Mac OS, or super obvious stuff. They liked Google Docs. 

It's just whatever they used at work. It was nothing beyond that. Slack. But often it would be hard for them to even come up with those. The question was, "What's software that really delights you? That you're really getting into these days?" [00:04:30] And almost no one interviewing for that role, could say anything other than they think their phone is well designed, or they like Google Docs, they like Slack. 

Really? You like Slack? Okay. 

I wasn't looking for a replica of me, but I was looking for someone who had this intellectual curiosity around [00:05:00] programs, and software, and how products should be done. They'd make reference to Product Time, sometimes. They'd be like, "Oh, I really like browsing Product Time." I'd be like, "Oh, reallY? What's something that really sticks out on Product Time that you enjoyed playing with?" And they'd be like, "I can't remember. I have a list somewhere." Okay. 

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Website: https://nomics.com

I started thinking about moonshots after speaking with one of our investors Nikhil at CoVenture Crypto. He's a partner there. And I guess the back story on this is Nikhil Kalghatgi met with me and also Ateet from [00:02:30] CoVenture Crypto who runs their quant fund. We met for breakfast when I was in New York, and one of the questions that I like to ask investors is what's the best way to engage you. So Ateet had been helping us out with a bunch of pod related things. He's deep in data all day long. But this was the first time Nikhil and I had met in person, and I posed this question to him. And [00:03:00] he was pretty thoughtful and he responded that he likes to help out portfolio companies with moonshots, right?

And so I was reflecting on that and I emailed Nikhil a little bit later, and said, "Hey, I'd really like to take you up on this offer of helping us define moonshots [00:04:00] as a company." And he sent me back this really thoughtful email to help me prepare for this meeting that we were setting up, and in that email, he outlined nine types of moonshots. So these are ... This is his IP. Thanks, Nikhil. So the first type of moonshot that he describes, the first category are [00:04:30] moonshots that are obviously impossible, right? He put obviously in quotes. These are things that you would like to do but are just obviously something that you can't do. And I think that kind of framing pushes you to think bigger. So that's category number one or type one. 

Type two, moonshot type two are imaginary dream partners. So when you're going [00:05:00] through this exercise and you get to number two, the objective here is to think about a dream partner that doesn't exist and just sort of define what the partnership would be, right? And the objective there is after you've defined them, you actually start looking for real world examples of these imaginary dream partners. 

The third type of moonshot is the brand elevation. So [00:05:30] think huge media partnerships. For us, for Nomics, this might be a partnership with the largest financial publication in the world, right? Providing data to them. Other companies might envision a Super Bowl ad, although that's almost never a good use of ad dollars. But what are some things that you can do that would immediately catapult your brand to the forefront of the space? 

[00:06:00] The fourth type of moonshot is distribution channels or partners, right? So if you're a consumer package good company, this might be getting Walmart or Target or whoever the biggest retailer is in your space to get your product in front of a lot of shoppers.

The fifth category or type is [00:06:30] unique individuals in other sectors who might come and work for you. And I think often there's very fruitful like cross pollination that can be very beneficial to a company when they hire someone who's a leader in a tangential space that comes in and then runs their playbook in your company. That can be really great. I think there's some of the, actually arguably the biggest, [00:07:00] some of the biggest crypto companies are operating not solely in this sort of crypto-native capacity, right? They have connections in banking and Wall Street and stuff like that. 

The sixth type of moonshot is geographical growth. So do you want to expand to Europe or South America, China, whatever. What that might look like hypothetically. 

[00:07:30] The seventh category are partnerships that we talked about. Distributions channels and imaginary dream partners. This would be sort of like actual concrete partnerships. 

The eight category are what might it look...

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Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

It's me reporting you live from the depths of the bear market in the space, and I've been talking to a bunch of investors recently, I mean, I guess that's what I do all day for the most part. But, I am reflecting on the kinds of companies that are getting funded here recently, like companies that are getting funded [00:00:30] not token projects. Although, I haven't seen a lot of token projects getting funded recently, and it seems like the pendulum has swung so in 2017 investing in crypto assets like folks were doing that Andreessen Horowitz was doing it, Union Square Ventures was doing it, other folks were doing it that are not as notable to the media but might be so interesting investors and funds and stuff.

[00:01:00] But what I'm seeing getting funded as of late are companies again, and I'm even seeing examples where funds that were created to invest in crypto assets are now in some cases preferring investing in equity and I think there's a few pieces to this. The first is that equity is sexy again, [00:01:30] equity comes with control or at least voting rights in some cases, it comes with you know if you're a lead investor and you can negotiate the deal, it comes with board seats, and all kinds of things. 

So I think the first thing that I'm seeing is that equity is back, if the company ever sells you can get a piece of that. I think the second thing I'm seeing is that investing in companies with [00:02:00] or projects with live products is back. We've seen a lot of companies raise a lot of money and ship nothing, and we've seen examples of, like basis returning funds back to their customers, I think we're gonna see a lot more, a lot more of that, token projects or at least projects with tokens returning funds back to investors because of [00:02:30] regulatory friction and they can't launch what they thought they were going to launch in a whole bunch of stuff along those lines. I saw a report yesterday, I won't get into that. 

So anyway I think investing in companies with live products that people can use and see, I think that's back. I think the third thing is that investing in companies with revenue, with actual revenue holy crap. [00:03:00] That's back in revenue from delivering a products, not from holding a token in a treasury that's investors have bought because around the promise of the future delivery of something of value, but investing companies with their products is back. 

Finally, investing in teams with real experience is back. I [00:03:30] can't tell you the number of crypto projects I see where the list of team members and it looks really fancy on the surface. So you might see that a bunch of the team members or ex-Coinbase, ex-Google, ex-Airbnb, something similar to that and then you dig into it a little bit more and find out that the Coinbase thing was an internship, and the Google thing maybe they were a project manager [00:04:00] on some experimental team for nine months, and the Airbnb they were I don't know, they were in product. And maybe that was one and half years but certainly never shipped a production line of code, never was responsible for generating bottom line sales.

So there's a whole bunch of people that looked like that, that were on teams of maybe you know founding teams of five or six that were getting [00:04:30] funded. From my vantage point those folks aren't getting funded anymore, which is not surprising and probably how it should be. But there's lots of things . . .

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Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Recently, I've been contemplating the gift of learning patience from longer sales cycles. In a previous life, I come from kind of prosumer, B2B, SaaS world, where a lot of sales were driven by scarcity marketing or incentivizing customers to purchase because [00:00:30] there was perhaps a discount available with a promotion that's going away. Or some bonuses that came if people buy the product by a certain time, and that went away. It has many of the sales characteristics as Groupon, right? There's an offer and then it goes away and if you don't buy it before a deadline, then you don't get the thing. And when you do that, you can predictably drive sales in [00:01:00] markets that have consumer-like properties. 

But in more B2B sales cycles, I've found that a lot of the buying behavior is driven by the customer. And that's how it should be, right? And I've had a few experiences recently that I'm actually kind of grateful for that have taught me that longer sales cycles can indeed end up fairly [00:01:30] fruitful. So I guess the first example that I want to run through is around us raising VC money. One of the VCs we approached told us up front that they were in the process of raising their fund and it would be a while until we heard back from them. And I at first thought this was code for, "We just want to hear your pitch. Maybe get intelligence from the space. But there's [00:02:00] no way on earth that we're going to invest in you." 

So I a little bit begrudgingly gave the pitch, even though I trusted these folks. And after walking them through our business and what we were doing, I didn't hear back from them for a long time. And frankly, I didn't expect to hear back from them. I thought it was a done deal and that it would never happen. And then low and behold, maybe a month and a half [00:02:30] later, I heard back from them and they said, "We're in." I was taken aback. I thought they were going to get on the phone to just provide a rejection but that wasn't the case. And then a little bit later, they actually told me that they wanted to up their investment which I was happy about, because I really liked them. And there wasn't exactly room around but we wanted [00:03:00] to make some for them because we really, really liked them. 

And it was just a really positive experience that proved me wrong about my skepticism. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs tend to be impatient and skeptical. We're used to hearing a lot of rejection, right? I think if you have ambitious goals, you tend to hear more rejections than acceptances I guess. So that's the first example I wanted [00:03:30] to lay out. 

The second example is around our biggest customer to date and they had approached us really before we even officially had our API out of beta and they'd approached us about purchasing our product. And that deal didn't go through. But then a few months later, conversations resumed and [00:04:00] again, things seemed to be really kind of dragging along. And I was patient. I waited and we tried to respond to them as quickly as we could. And three to four months later, that deal closed even though again they initially said they couldn't. That they had gone in another direction. They came back and then something happened. And that was another really positive experience for me. [00:04:30] Again, I'm an impatient person. I'm used to rejection and I think sometimes I can be a little bit skeptical. But again, that resulted in our largest sale to date. 

The third example is around a company that I led the acquisition of at my prior business, Leadpages. We acquired a company called Drip...

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Website: https://nomics.com

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