CXChronicles Podcast 189 with Joel Passen, Co-Founder at Sturdy

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #189  we welcomed Joel Passen, Co-Founder at Sturdy based in Portland, OR. 

Before co-founding Sturdy, a next-gen customer intelligence solution that detects and captures critical signals from everyday customer feedback, Joel served as the Head of Global Sales at Beamery leading enterprise go-to-market teams in the US and UK.

In 2009, Joel co-founded Newton Software, a B2B SaaS company headquartered in San Francisco that was acquired by Paycor (2016).

Prior, Joel co-founded Gravity Technologies, Inc., a company that owned and operated businesses in the talent acquisition industry. He led this bootstrapped company to be named to San Francisco Business Times' Fastest Growing Companies list in 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008.

In this episode, Joel and Adrian chat through how he has tackled The Four CX Pillars: Team,  Tools, Process & Feedback throughout his career + shares some of the tips & tricks that have worked for him across his own customer focused business leader journey.

**Episode #189 Highlight Reel:**

1. Why accidents typically happen at intersections & how to build traffic signals
2. Digesting & leveraging your customer data to build actionable insights
3. Focusing on net-dollar retention (NDR) rates as you scale your business
4. Why revenue & customer success operations is kindling for fire
5. Building signals that drive your customers towards up-sell, cross-sell & retention 
 
Huge thanks to Joel for coming on The CXChronicles Podcast and featuring his work and efforts in pushing the customer experience and customer success space into the future.

Click here to learn more about Joel Passen

Click here to learn more about Sturdy AI

If you enjoy The CXChronicles Podcast, please stop by your favorite podcast player and leave us a review today. This is the easiest way that we can find new listeners, guests and future business leaders to join our customer focused community!

And be sure to grab a copy of our book "The Four CX Pillars To Grow Your Business Now" available on Amazon +  check out the CXChronicles Youtube channel to see all of our customer focused business leader video content + our past podcast episodes!

Reach out to CXC at INFO@cxchronicles.com for more information about how we can help your business make customer happiness a habit!

Transcript

CXChronicles Podcast #189 with Joel Passen, Co-Founder at Sturdy.mp4

Adrian (00:00:00) - All right, guys, thanks so much for listening to another episode of the CX Chronicles podcast. I'm super excited for today's show, guys. We have Joel Passant joining the show. Joel, why don't you say hello to CX Nation, my friend? 

Joel (00:00:21) - Hello folks. Thanks for having me. 

Speaker 1 (00:00:23) - So guys, I'm full candor. Joel and I had the pleasure of meeting at the Big Rig event in Washington, DC for Jern Zero about a month and change ago. 

Speaker 1 (00:00:32) - And I was super pumped to get Joel on the show today, guys, because he and his team at Sturdy are building, number one, a super cool business, but number two, an incredible solution that for our listeners and for our community and for CX and CSers out there that are trying to get some additional help, some additional support, and some additional education and just general knowledge around how to think about data, storytelling through data, understanding insights and what types of possibilities lie within your data. 

Speaker 1 (00:00:59) - Joel is here today to talk about some of the cool stuff they're doing. Plus he's got an awesome background, guys. So Joel, why don't you start off today's show, my friend. Take a couple of minutes at this stage before we even get into all the cool stuff you guys are doing at Sturdy. How did you get into this space, man? How did you find your way into this space? What were some of the stepping stones earlier in your career that led up to you being able to be a part of the team that's building Sturdy? 

Joel (00:01:19) - Yeah, well, again, thanks for having me. I think you actually, and maybe some of you came to Big Rig, which by the way, we give a credit where credit would do, I thought was a good event this year. So this is sort of my, I'm a little bit newer to the CX community in general. My background is more of a CRO background. So probably I was, I tell this funny story. I'm like, would you market yourself off an island? Would you partner yourself off an island? Would you sell yourself off an island or would you CS yourself off an island? 

Joel (00:01:50) - I'm probably the sell yourself, sell yourself off the island guy. 

Speaker 1 (00:01:54) - I like it, man. I like it. 

Joel (00:01:56) - I've owned CS a couple of times and I usually bring in and partner with strong leaders on that front because of their knowledge and their experience while I'm focused on net new. And in this current environment, that's changed a little bit, but you asked about my background. I actually come, I actually have, I have a sorted background. I have a sorted background. 

Speaker 1 (00:02:14) - Let's hear it, brother. 

Joel (00:02:15) - I, it all started when I actually, my first professional job out of, out of college was a technical recruiter. So a lot of my sort of software and fundamental software stuff came from kind of the belly of the beast and having to understand different technical roles and what companies did. And this was right at the precursor of SAS. I'm starting to, I built a big recruiting firm, built it up to about 250 people. We switched the business model from, and this was my first kind of inflection and a subscription revenue. 

Joel (00:02:46) - We flipped the business model of recruiting, which is essentially like super transactional. Like you, this person, you get money. Then you start every month at bagel, right? I basically changed that. And we, we started a BPO or a business process outsourcing where we would go to companies and guarantee with an SLA, how many, how many software engineers we can place at your company. And that was on a subscription business. And I was basically in, I'm actually back in my hometown right now. 

Joel (00:03:12) - I'm doing this podcast from San Francisco where it all started for me. I'm originally, by the way, not too far from where you are. I grew up in Cleveland, but that I digress, but in San Francisco, we were we were doing recruiting for technology companies. And so I would go to VC firms and say, Hey, do you want to do better hiring faster, cheaper, more reliable sign up with a subscription for us? And we would we would play software engineers and technical folks. 

Joel (00:03:36) - And I ended up doing technical and executive search for software companies in the first days of SAS. It's me a little bit later. I'm older than I look. The thing that's kind of cool is we built that business up to about 250 people. We acquired a call center in Utah really blew that business out. It was, we actually ended up exiting that business, but before we did, we were developing some intellectual property to run our business better. For those of you that are unfamiliar with recruiting technology, this was called an applicant tracking system. 

Joel (00:04:08) - I started this company Newton. So in 2008, we exited this big recruiting company, about 250 people, tens of million in revenue and exited this thing and basically walked next door, not too far from where I'm sitting, put up like a photo photograph up on the door, you know, like a handwritten note that said Newton. And we took the intellectual property from that recruiting company, opened a, put up a shingle and started a software company, SAS software company in 2000. I bootstrapped it, never took a dime of funding. 

Joel (00:04:40) - Essentially built this thing up to several million. 

Joel (00:04:46) - Apparently still supposed to say how much the purchase was, but from 2009 to 2016, built this business and then sold that business to Paycore, which is the, at the time was the fourth largest payroll company in the United States, not a publicly traded company. I was brought in right at a time when Goldman Sachs had put about a hundred million dollars into the business. And they were really focused by the way, on retention and LTV. Nice. Payroll is kind of a transactional sport and we were selling, you know, software along with payroll services. 

Joel (00:05:14) - So one of the big projects at Paycore that we helped them, that I helped them with personally, not necessarily what I expected to be doing when I joined Paycore, by the way, I thought I was going to go, you know, do a lot of storytelling and sales enablement and really kind of blow out their sales team, you know, push the growth rate to 40%. As we did several projects where we tried to help with a gross churn rate that was for them quite high. They had a pretty significant no start rate. 

Joel (00:05:41) - So implementation to, you know, the customer journey was failing from the handoff to, from sales to actually go live where they could recognize subscription revenue. 

Speaker 1 (00:05:50) - Yeah. Ton of companies have that too, Joel. Ton of companies struggle with that, that almost like that false starting or that, that missed start where someone thinks they have a qualified lead, qualified opportunity. And for whatever reason, you can't get it to go. You can't get it to move. You can't get it to stick or to adopt. So a lot of, a lot of different companies that are facing that same type of challenge today. 

Joel (00:06:06) - Yeah. One of the throwaway lines for the audience, I mean, what I talk about that I think helps people understand sort of the perils of those handoffs, you know, like if you say, Oh, the sales handoff to CS or implementation is broken. What I like to start and set the stage with is like accidents. They happen at intersections. Accidents happen at intersections and that's what was happening at the time at Paycor. And so, you know, they were on the mend by the time I got in there. 

Joel (00:06:30) - But one of the things that we really realized is they had a dirty data problem. They had 16 different customer databases. They hadn't yet implemented a CSP. They had no sort of data hygiene or data integrity. And that was one of the things that struck me and really stuck with me. So fast forward. I served out my time at Paycor under the acquisition happily. Good folks there. Still, still friendly with a lot of those folks and it's a good company. And I moved on to be an EIR, an entrepreneur in residence with a venture capital firm. 

Joel (00:07:00) - I would do evaluation of technology companies, particularly in the HR tech space and also just pure SaaS. I ended up getting placed into a company based in London, asked to join there and help them double revenue and move it from a founder led sales organization. I was the antagonist move from the founder led sales organization to an enterprise sales organization. We built that up at about 18 months, brought in revenue optimization, our revenue operations, really important. Our CS leader was amazing. 

Joel (00:07:28) - She had CS operations and we had this well-oiled machine that started to build this company toward a trajectory where they are today. And they recently just raised 120 million in a series. So we built a good foundation there. And I'll tell you what, man, what stuck with me is this fundamental problem that we have, which is I think really data-driven problem in organizations that impact how we retain and build longer, more durable client relationships. And that's really what Sturdy is all about. So that's where I'm at today. 

Joel (00:07:57) - I'm happy to talk about that, but that's sort of my background and a very long story. 

Speaker 1 (00:08:02) - Oh no, it's not. Number one, I love it. Thank you for sharing that, Joel. And number two, guys, I was joking with Joel before we started today, but I think like, you know, folks that have been able to see the evolution, the growth, the maturity of a business, of a team, of a set of tech stack, of a set of processes, and then they're able to do it not just once, but then they do it twice and they do it a third time. You know, and Joel, guys, I'm not blowing smoke for Joel here. That is success and that is continuing to build upon your wins. 

Speaker 1 (00:08:30) - And then on top of it, winning is a cultural thing. You start to get good and comfortable at winning. It starts to permeate. You can show other people how to win and you can get other people hooked and excited to winning. And that's really kind of what this is about. So I was pumped to kind of bring that. And then here's the best part. And I do want you to get into Sturdy, Joel. Joel's now on it another time. So I want to, let's kick off, let's kick off the first pillar, Joel, of team. 

Speaker 1 (00:08:53) - I'd love to kind of hear about the team that you're building at Sturdy. Talk a little bit about some of the folks that are coming together to build the Sturdy product. And then I'd love to kind of have you give us a sense for the lay of the land in terms of some of the different roles and the different departments and the different focus areas that your Sturdy team is really kind of building and getting ready to scale into the future with today. 

Joel (00:09:11) - Absolutely. So first thing I would tell you is we start to have a secret sauce when it comes to hiring. So take the fundamental layer. It's like, yes, I want to talk about the teams, but we have a process and this might be something to share with the audience. I think it's really relevant. Remember my background, I come out of recruiting and then a talent acquisition piece of software. And then into payroll, all of these are sort of the intersection of technology and people, right? 

Speaker 1 (00:09:34) - Sure. Totally. 

Joel (00:09:34) - Technology and talent. And so one of the things that we do is we're really thoughtful about delineation of role, like who does what. And then we also are really interested in 

Joel (00:10:46) - And that means that we have to build software like integrations and dashboards and business logic layers and automations like monday.com like automations. But we also have to build data science because one of the things that we use is natural language processing, artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning. So we have a data engineering team, so a software team, kind of a core software team. And then we have a core data engineering team. 

Joel (00:11:10) - And these are the PhDs and the scientists and the people that work with data to restructure it to make sense out of it, to signal on it, create topics out of it. 

Speaker 3 (00:11:19) - And then on the commercial side of the house, and there's also a infosec and dev ops team. 

Joel (00:11:25) - So we have to make certain that we're very secure and that we can privatize data and do all kinds of anonymized data. 

Speaker 3 (00:11:32) - And then on the commercial side of the business, we recently hired a COO that had built a billion dollar business to kind of help us operationalize the science and commercialize it. 

Joel (00:11:43) - And my job is out evangelizing, working with partners, working with our early customers. And then there's a whole product team, product management team. 

Speaker 3 (00:11:52) - So as you would imagine, kind of traditionally found a really heavy engineering focus and now just starting to run. 

Joel (00:12:00) - And there's a great marketer, Alex. So we're adding now commercial people to the business. 

Speaker 1 (00:12:05) - Joel, I love it. I think number one, I'm very appreciative of you kind of giving a really good solid lens for all the different types of subject matter expertise areas, but also the types of people and the types of culture and the types of collaboration that's going to be required to build this. I think if you think about it for many of our listeners, listener and now Joel, like thinking about data structure, data governance, data hygiene, these are things that like, and let's call it as a lot of our listeners, they're growth focused companies, Joel. 

Speaker 1 (00:12:31) - They don't necessarily have a chief information officer or a senior vice president of analytics or a senior vice president of data who's worked at Fortune 500 companies, leveraging tens of millions of data. That's not what we have. We've got people that are building five to $10 million a year companies. They got a hundred, maybe a thousand incredible customers. They got a bunch of different products, a bunch of different services, and they're trying to do the best that they can building a customer journey. 

Speaker 1 (00:12:55) - The number one is going to scale, but the number two is going to create incredible experiences for your customers, your users, your products, that users, and then also your employees or the people that have to serve all these folks. I love that you dug into the different types of folks that you have on the team, because this is a tough space. 

Joel (00:13:08) - This is what I'm getting at. 

Speaker 1 (00:13:09) - It's like getting into helping any organization think about some of that data governance and that data scalability sets or that data scalability roadmap. 

Speaker 3 (00:13:17) - That stuff's hard. 

Speaker 1 (00:13:18) - I got to imagine number one, you get a lot of different opinions, right? There's probably a lot of different opinions that fly around. And then number two, we hear this all the time. I'm going to keep it super simple, but you hear constantly the notion of good data in equals good reporting out or bad data in equals bad reporting out your ability to pull usable, digestible, actionable insights off it. 

Speaker 1 (00:13:39) - I love that you and the team really took that several layers deep into the onion, because you probably knew you were going to navigate a really complex space. How did the first sets of customers or how did some of the early users or your early pioneer adopters, how did you have some of these conversations and how did you start to really set it under the table? How Sturdy was going to come in and help to think about some of those facets around their data governance and just their ability to leverage the insights that were inside of their information. 

Joel (00:14:06) - Yeah. One of the reasons, so here's the fundamental platform for this opinion, and this is merely an opinion, but at Newton, Newton Software was the company that I sold to Paycor that we sold to Paycor. And one of the things that Goldman Sachs realized when they purchased us is that we had a really high NDR rate. We're earning 17 cents on every dollar in a marketplace and our lifetime value of those customers was way higher than most big market SaaS companies. 

Speaker 1 (00:14:33) - And Joe, NDR, just for our listeners, just to make sure that everybody understands exactly what you're talking about right now. 

Joel (00:14:38) - Net dollar retention. So it's not just enough to keep your customers, it's the ability to leverage your customers to simplify this. NDRs is a rate measured in a percentage of essentially the way that you upsell your companies and keep them at the same time minus the churn rate. So it's a good NDR. And I talked about this at the big rig conference in DC with our lovely hosts, the folks at Turn Zero. But I talk about it today, like Twilio and Segment, some of these household names- I remember Snowflake, man. 

Speaker 1 (00:15:11) - Snowflake was the, that was the one that jumped off your chart, Snowflake. 

Joel (00:15:13) - 160 or something like that. By the way, publicly traded companies report their NDR. It's a number that essentially is really important in sort of the valuation of your company. So we could progress, we could talk about that. I talked in that meeting, by the way, if anyone just wants some resources on that. I read a blog by Dave Kellogg, I think it's called the Kell blog. He writes a lot about NDR as a Bay Area analyst and somebody that some of you may know in kind of the CX community. 

Joel (00:15:40) - Kind of keeps a profile, kind of a mat, kind of just good dude and writes interesting stuff. 

Speaker 3 (00:15:45) - But one of the things that we realized early on, and it kind of dawned on us, is like we were maniacal at Newton about keeping customers and managing customers. 

Joel (00:15:53) - And I remember getting in rooms at the time, we had some larger customers like Sunrun, for example, and I'd get into a room and we'd look at health scores on a big monitor. I was on the executive team and I was responsible for Revit. And we'd sit in these rooms with big monitors and we had a great CS person, guy named Jonathan Chouinard. He's in Boston and he'd come into the room and with his team and they'd present the health of customers. And at the time, we didn't even have a CSP. This is kind of before the CSP revolution came about, 2014. 

Speaker 3 (00:16:25) - And it'd be like, okay, so this is green, that's green. 

Joel (00:16:27) - And you start to dive into it and we'd get forensic about it and be like, come back the next week and be like, Sunrun was green two weeks ago. 

Speaker 3 (00:16:34) - Dude, how'd they go to red? How'd they go from green to gone? 

Speaker 1 (00:16:38) - Yeah, right, right, right. 

Speaker 3 (00:16:40) - But in the middle between green and gone, something happened and it kind of like started this trend in the room. Like, okay, like, churn doesn't happen in a vacuum, folks. Like it's a series of feature requests and unhappy comments and bug reports and loss of sponsor and like all of this culmination of things that like really impact the relationship with your customers. Because in SaaS, we spent all this, it's not a consumer relationship. We spent all this time, effort and money to keep customers and take them on a journey and send them things. 

Speaker 3 (00:17:12) - And I'm not belittling any of that. But we were always asking the why, why is this happening? Like what are the, what's the customer saying? And then we started to be like, oh, maybe we'll survey customers like everybody else. 

Joel (00:17:24) - And I'm sure like, I don't want to like piss anyone off listening to the podcast, frankly, or like ruin anybody's day. 

Speaker 3 (00:17:31) - But you know what, frankly, like soliciting information from your customers is not a holistic way to get feedback from them. It's not, they're straw polls. I'm sorry. 

Joel (00:17:42) - I mean, you have some things you can use surveys for, but you know, understanding a predictive intelligence around whether your customer is going to cancel or not. 

Speaker 3 (00:17:50) - Surveys, surveys ain't happening. 

Speaker 1 (00:17:52) - They're not producing. 

Speaker 3 (00:17:54) - Yeah, right. 

Speaker 1 (00:17:54) - It's a part of a much deeper playbook and a much broader set of activities and actions that need to happen from any organization to be able to understand how they can hit a variety of the different elements that are either making people love what they're getting from your product or service, or maybe not like maybe consider other options or consider other competitors who might give them more value. 

Joel (00:18:13) - Yeah. What we were saying, by the way, you familiar with that guy, Fieri? 

Speaker 1 (00:18:16) - Yeah, absolutely. 

Speaker 3 (00:18:18) - Yeah. 

Joel (00:18:18) - Triple D, right? 

Speaker 3 (00:18:19) - We had our own triple D. Like dirty data is a drag is what we kept saying. If you're not for not segmenting our company, you know, our clients, like there was like this emphasis when we get into and Jonathan reacted to this really well. We like green gone. 

Joel (00:18:32) - Got it. 

Speaker 3 (00:18:33) - Like how do we prevent this? It's crazy. 

Speaker 1 (00:18:35) - Yeah. 

Joel (00:18:36) - Yeah. 

Speaker 3 (00:18:36) - Cancellations. You said we stick personally. Yeah. 

Joel (00:18:39) - Like DDD, man, like dirty data is a drag. Like we got to go back and resegment. We got to go and talk to these people. We got to we got to understand them better. We got to listen to our customers better. 

Speaker 3 (00:18:48) - How do we listen to our customers better? 

Joel (00:18:50) - We were and I have presented this in keynote speeches and that sort of thing. 

Speaker 3 (00:18:54) - We ended up being micromanagers. What did the customer say? 

Joel (00:18:57) - Let me see what the customer said. 

Speaker 1 (00:18:59) - Yeah. 

Joel (00:18:59) - And we were trying to infer this empathic notion from the customers, from the language of these customers, from like the conversations, from the recording calls, from their emails. 

Speaker 1 (00:19:07) - Yeah. Sort of the early schedule. Were these tight shirt meetings by any chance? Were these the tight shirt meetings? 

Speaker 3 (00:19:12) - That's an off-color comment. 

Joel (00:19:14) - But as long as we're amongst friends here in the in the community, we call these tight shirt meetings. 

Speaker 3 (00:19:19) - And you know what? 

Joel (00:19:19) - No one liked a tight shirt meeting because it felt like you were coming into the boardroom in this office. 

Speaker 3 (00:19:25) - Yeah. And like we were going to ask the hard questions and it wasn't like, what's their MPS? I didn't care. I wanted to know what they were saying. I wanted to have the unabridged, unbiased, unsolicited feedback. 

Joel (00:19:36) - And by the way, it wasn't just like, are you going to cancel? 

Speaker 3 (00:19:39) - It was like, how do I maintain product market fit? What are they really are telling us? Like, I don't want to know what sales. And by the way, remember, I'm impartial, but I'm kind of a salesperson. 

Joel (00:19:51) - Maybe some of you can tell. 

Speaker 3 (00:19:55) - But the thing that's interesting is like, I didn't want the sales leaders to come into the room. 

Speaker 3 (00:20:00) - We got to have this one feature or I can't get this pipeline. And I didn't want the CS leader to come in and say, we have to have this other features. If we're going to keep customers, I wanted to know what the customer was saying. 

Speaker 1 (00:20:10) - Yeah. 

Joel (00:20:11) - And I didn't want to survey them and get Christmas lists from the loudest customers that are just ready to answer a survey in an email. 

Speaker 1 (00:20:17) - Absolutely. 

Joel (00:20:17) - That was really, again, I think the question kind of started around, like, how did you get this idea for Sturdy or like, how did the Sturdy things start to evolve? 

Speaker 3 (00:20:24) - It was really started to evolve. 

Joel (00:20:25) - Like, I wanted to be able to answer the questions. Why are customers behaving this way? 

Speaker 3 (00:20:30) - Like, for real? 

Speaker 1 (00:20:31) - Yeah. 

Speaker 3 (00:20:32) - And I didn't want to guess at it because it's too important to guess at. 

Speaker 1 (00:20:35) - It is. And the other thing too, is I was joking about the tight shirt meetings, but the reality is, I guarantee you, Joel, 80% of CX and CS leaders out there, they feel that way. And they understand that. And they're going to laugh at that because how often is it that you get pulled into your executive leadership team meeting? They're asking about customer portfolio. They're asking about customer success, health. 

Speaker 1 (00:20:52) - They're asking about who's going to be the, show me the 20% of people that we need to focus on for upsell, cross-sell, revenue expansion this year, this quarter, this month, this week. Like, and that stuff's good. But when you think about it, most CX and CS, we talked about this at Big Reg in DC. A lot of CX and CS leaders don't have RevOps yet. They don't have SalesOps. They don't have, for lack of a better term, guys, they don't have missile defense that gets to show them some of the opportunities on the horizon. 

Speaker 1 (00:21:18) - Maybe doing deep dives within the tools, maybe doing deep dives. And this is where Sturdy comes into play. Deep dive on your data, man. So like, like, like, like, get like having data, do you dirty? Like you got to have somebody on the team or someone in the organization that can actually, that is their job. That is their experience. 

Speaker 1 (00:21:32) - That is their, their expertise where they can solicit and surface insights to be able to guide action, to be able to guide what types of calls to action are going to equal the biggest, highest returns on value for your investment. 

Joel (00:21:43) - And we're going off a little bit of a jam here, but. I remember being one of the venture partners that I worked with, super cool lady, had me go and like, she wanted me to take a job at a company had about 20 million in ARR. They're growing really quickly. They're growing probably 30, 35% conservatively a year. She's like, I want you to go and like, you know, see if you're interested in the job. Like they're going to interview you, but you should interview them. And tell me what you think. 

Joel (00:22:13) - And like the first questions that I asked is a person being interviewed. The job was for a chief revenue officer or CRO. And like the first questions I always ask him, like, you know, talk to me about your customers, talk to me about your, the problem that you're solving, like try to understand outside of the website. Like, you know, obviously warm up the room. Right. And then the next question was like, how do you look at revenue operations? Like what's the underlying fundamental foundation of like, how do you use data to better inform decisions? 

Joel (00:22:38) - Like if I came on board today, what data would be at my disposal so I could understand and get a quick handle on where we're going to achieve our pipeline from. 

Speaker 1 (00:22:45) - Yep. 

Joel (00:22:46) - And I remember like leaving that interview thinking these people would probably never want to hire me because I said, okay, they asked me a question in turn, like who would you want to bring in right away? I'm like, the first person I would hire is my former senior director of revenue operations. Immediately first hire. They're like, you wouldn't hire your, you wouldn't bring your AEs. Like, you know, the people that have performed well for you in multiple companies. I'm like, no, first person I bring is RevOps. 

Joel (00:23:12) - So we can fundamentally blow this thing up and rebuild it. The second thing I would do if you want me to own revenue altogether is I would, I need a CS ops person, or I need this person to straddle CS and sales. And they're like, what about marketing? I'm like, I can do without right now, fundamentally. I can work with that later. That's phase two. I need, I can, I can extract value and revenue from my customers. I know how to do that, but I need the right, I need to know who to go to. 

Speaker 1 (00:23:40) - Yeah. 

Joel (00:23:41) - So, and then I need enablement and then I'll hire salespeople. And I remember the people like looking at me like I was crazy because everybody else had come in and said, well, I could bring in AEs in the east and the west and the south and north and the central. And they talked about, you know, hiring their way to the number. And frankly, I think I can date them my way to the number and then add, add staff as I need that. There's no any variation of role and responsibilities. 

Joel (00:24:04) - It was a wildly unpopular interview, but I remember coming back to the venture partner and like, we're doing that from now on. We're going to go back in. We understand how fundamentally important enablement and rev ops are running operations across the revenue generating categories, which is CS, frankly, and sales. 

Speaker 1 (00:24:20) - And when I hear you say that, Joel, too, it's almost like, it doesn't sound crazy at all to someone like me. Obviously I'm a nerd on the CX and CS. And I think about it a lot and I talk, I get the pleasure of talking with people like you and some of our friends about this stuff, but it's almost like telling somebody, you know what I'm going to build a map and then I'm going to figure out how I'm going to get from the start to the finish. 

Speaker 1 (00:24:38) - And people, anybody that thinks that that's crazy is, you know, a little bit questionable because having that map, having those insights, understanding where the mountains are, where the rivers are, where the planes are against your point of enablement and sales ops and CS ops and revenue operations, just visibility. It provides visibility, but then more importantly, it takes some of your historical and it shows where you've won. It literally shows you where you've won so that you can take a different type of approach for how you're going to try to. 

Speaker 1 (00:25:05) - Point your efforts or point your limited resources or point your initial 30, 60, 90 days, your first 12 months of actions and activities. It's going to yield those new customers, those new users, that new revenue. So I think that's brilliant. Joel, I want to pivot to tools for a second. I'd love to on all this. This is a great segue. 

Speaker 1 (00:25:22) - I'd love to hear you talk for a couple minutes about number one, I would love for you to kind of share some of the things that the Sturdy Tool is doing, but you've worked with a bunch of different companies across a bunch of different spaces and industries. I love to just kind of hear how you think about tools. And I bet you this was one of those other questions for that CRO conversation, but like how a lot of CX and CS leaders today, man, they struggle with this. 

Speaker 1 (00:25:43) - And this is where you and I, we've been rapping for the last month on all these different ideas. There are so many tools and there's so much technology, which is great. And it's a beautiful world to live in. But this becomes one of the big problems for a lot of CX and CS leaders is what tool do I use or what types of tools or how do I know that these are the right tools for my industry or for my space? I'd love to just kind of hear how did you navigate this, man? 

Speaker 1 (00:26:06) - Like as you came across your own journey, how did you kind of think about building your own little tool part of your Joel playbook? 

Joel (00:26:13) - So the comment that I'm going to make that I think is most relevant to our friends and listeners that might pick up and still be tuned in here. 

Speaker 1 (00:26:25) - Hopefully, hopefully there. 

Joel (00:26:27) - I think CS tools, and I'm going to say it like, I think CS tools have missed the mark a little bit. I think it's kind of for me that the lion's share of CS tools are kind of in my mind, kind of CRM 2.0 for post sales. And I'm going to say that in a broad statement and that's a gross generalization. But fundamentally, if you think about it, what's available to me, if I'm a CRO, that's a sales focus CRO. I would say that CS has about 20 percent of the tooling that a sales department has. There might be a lot of options out there. 

Joel (00:27:04) - In reality, most CS teams have 20 percent of the technology that a sales organization or even a product operations organization has. And the function is like, what, 18, 20 years old? Like we've been doing this thing for a while. 

Speaker 1 (00:27:19) - It's a long time, man. 

Joel (00:27:20) - We all know how the origins of this came about. It was support, we moved to relationship management and so on. But I think there's a fundamental hole in sort of the CS text ad today. And by the way, the reason that we're building Sturdy is I think we fill a fundamental hole, which is, yes, you use the time tracking and journey mapping and customer journey email type things and onboarding. And there are all these cool stuff out there. I'm not belittling my peers that are developing cool software, but I think we're missing a layer of intelligence. 

Joel (00:27:53) - And our thesis at Sturdy and this kind of maybe gets into it and I mean the infomercial here, but our thesis is that there is a treasure trove, an enormous body of data that's hiding in plain sight. And there's nothing that plums that data and lifts it out of a dude. I'm asking you a question, put you on the spot. 

Speaker 1 (00:28:13) - Yeah. 

Joel (00:28:15) - In a B2B business with, let's say 20 to 100 million, I know that's a broad swath, but let's talk about the scale ups real quick. What do you think the percentage of communications between the customer and the business is? Where is that treasure trove of data? Like, is it in tickets Adrian? Is it in the back end of your gong or Zoom calls or whatever? Is it in chat? Where do you think it lives? Where is the treasure trove? 

Speaker 1 (00:28:39) - I mean, I think where my brain immediately goes to is there's an abundance of gold sitting inside of emails. So I'll just generically, emails is a place. I guess I would think of your tickets as a secondary place. And then I guess just having spent a lot of time with different companies understanding sort of their telemetry strategy, there's typically a lot of information sitting inside of some of your other communication based activities, whether it's phone calls, text messages, etc. So those would be a few of my immediate thoughts right there. 

Speaker 1 (00:29:06) - You're right. 

Joel (00:29:07) - So you're right. 

Speaker 1 (00:29:11) - Thanks for giving me that. So I got that question. 

Joel (00:29:13) - You got the question right. We'll send you the sturdy vest or whatever our winter swag is so you can wear it on the pod. Between 60 and 65% of your communications, probably folks that are listening to this between 60 and 65% of that is all circling the drain, going away forever in the back end, somebody, some associates, am, csm, erm, whatever you call them, get back into their email boxes. And we never get to aggregate that data and really listen to what the customer is telling us. 

Joel (00:29:43) - And you know, we have some great empathic people that are on the front lines and CS, they're overwhelmed. Because they don't want to do any more zoom calls with us. We don't see them anymore. And if they want a quick hit, they don't want to submit a ticket. So what do they do? They email you once they get your email address. Customers are like, Oh, yo, I hit you up. I got to do this. 

Speaker 1 (00:30:01) - How do I do that? 

Joel (00:30:01) - We have a new executive leader in our such and such HR department. Can I get her an admin license? Ding, ding, ding, you have an executive change, probably time to reach out and resell value and put that person wherever you put that person in your customer journey, but we're missing all of this data that literally is hiding in plain sight. And that's what gets you can tell with the inflection of my voice. 

Speaker 3 (00:30:23) - That's what gets me excited because we're missing like there is a new data frontier for product leaders, CX leaders. We're not even using it. 

Joel (00:30:33) - And that's really what Sturdy is all about as a system of intelligence or a customer intelligence layer. 

Speaker 3 (00:30:36) - We go and get that gobbledygook, unstructured mess that's in the bowels of all of these systems. 

Joel (00:30:46) - We pull it out. 

Speaker 3 (00:30:47) - We restructure it. We analyze it with artificial intelligence, by the way. Artificial intelligence doesn't have to be that creepy or scary. It actually works. And then we surface these insights through automations to the teams and the people in the systems that need this information to be better. 

Joel (00:31:02) - And so what I always tell like other CX tech leaders like I love you. 

Speaker 3 (00:31:07) - You're building all the engagement software. You're building the place that people can easily communicate with customers and engage with them. We're just the data layer that feeds it the intelligence to make it smarter so your people are using the right tone, the right actions and the right and keeping your customers on the right journey to lift your NDR. So full circle, like what's the outcome of all this stuff? Yeah, you've got better relationships with your customers. You keep them longer. 

Joel (00:31:31) - You lift your NDR. It's a revenue generator. So I'm excited about that. 

Speaker 1 (00:31:39) - I absolutely love that number two. Guys, this is a big reason why from pretty much the first day I met Joel, I was completely on to some of the stuff that the Sturdy team is doing because having been a practitioner, I told Joel this, and Joel this is going to sound super familiar from our conversations, but like it's super duper common when you're in these director, these VP of CX and CS roles, these heads of CX and CS roles to maybe get pushback when you think about adding maybe some talent or a new team member or certainly a tool, right? 

Speaker 1 (00:32:07) - Because there's always like, there's always this pushback around, oh, we got to run lean and run mean, and we hired you to figure it out. Why don't you spend a little more time figuring it out? And then we'll talk about the resource part later. And what I learned along my own journey was like, even super well financed startups were like, I would get the pleasure of being able to go hire an analyst. 

Speaker 1 (00:32:25) - I would get the pleasure of being able to get some of the time from our analytics or data science team to be able to like go to Joel's point, what Sturdy is doing, go deep on some of this stuff. Do like actual assessment, do tagging, create buckets, start to see what trends and themes look like. And then finally have the numbers to back it all up. So you're not creating this hypothetical story. You're showing a story based off of where all the numbers are suggesting the main plot lines of the story are. And the reality is this is hard. 

Speaker 1 (00:32:54) - And in the venture capital world, and Joel, I know you know this better than me, but like in the venture capital world, there's this tendency to want to like leverage what you already have, or maybe you can piggyback off of the existing analytics team, or maybe you can leverage some of the historical. And the reality is to Joel's point here, guys, every single week, every single month, every single quarter, those activities continue to mount. 

Speaker 1 (00:33:16) - There's more emails, there's more tickets, there's more phone calls, all of these things that are to Joel's point, throwing off signals. Some of the signals are awesome and good saying, I love your stuff. I love your team. I love your product. I love what you're doing. Some of it's bad. Some of it's bad stuff where it's not happy with adoption, not happy with utilization, community, security sucks, service sucks, support isn't good. Don't like your logo, like stupid, stupid. 

Speaker 1 (00:33:39) - And I'm just coming up with ideas here, but like those signals, it's amazing, Joe, how many CX and CS leaders that are running companies that are over that are north of $10 million of annual recurring revenue. They don't have signal insights on minimally every 30 day period. So then part of why you see CX and CS investments beginning to wane or certain executive leadership team members starting to say, Hey, man, I'm sorry, what are we doing with the CX and CS that was going on here? 

Speaker 1 (00:34:05) - It's because you're not enabling or you're not providing some of that firepower to your CX and CS leadership to be able to show clear signals that actually do equal the ability to upsell cross. So that do equal the ability to give your DevOps or your product team, the go ahead on the top three things that maybe support and CX has known about for the last six months, but you finally have some of the substance or some of the math or some of the science to say, no, it's really those three features. We fixed those three features. 

Speaker 1 (00:34:31) - We think 50% of our churn group might've never turned at all. Or maybe that, or to your point, maybe that executive that had to pipe in and start looking around and stoop around. Maybe they would have liked our solution instead of going back to whatever their, their friendly competitor was at their last job. And they're just bringing their, their last solution into the mix because they know it. And they know that they're going to get some of the changes that fixes that, that come from it. So like, this is huge, man. 

Speaker 1 (00:34:51) - And I think that a lot of CX and CS leaders, if you're not thinking about how you're going to kind of position yourself and your team for success by way of making sure that you've got some type of Ninja or some type of solution like sturdy, helping you to pull out those insights and enrich the information that you're trying to manage back up to your executive leadership team. This is why a lot of CX and CS leaders only hang out of places for two and a half years, right? And then they move on to the next place. 

Joel (00:35:15) - I think there's, I mean, while we're talking about tooling and this might go long, but here, here's some fundamental takeaways that I have that are really actionable. The first thing is you have to have a system of record or a customer database of record that's accurate with clearly segmented roles. So if I were going to start this new CS job, or if I were going to start like a, you know, how do I get started with these things that these guys are talking about on this podcast? 

Joel (00:35:35) - The first thing I can think you, you know, that I think about is customer segmentation, customer segmentation, really understanding your customers. Like what, what part of the journey are they in? Or do you think they're in segmented by ARR segmented by region segmenting them is really important. Because then you can understand some of the trend lines and you can see some of the historical things that have happened to these segments in the past. 

Speaker 3 (00:35:57) - I think the next thing is like, you should have a CRM that does that, but you need a CRM to be able to, I don't care what it is. 

Joel (00:36:05) - I have my predilections. I'm not going to share them with you unless you press me. Like I'm a, I'm a one trick pony on that. Like I have a CRM that's a favorite of mine. I just want it to work and have good data. 

Speaker 1 (00:36:14) - I'm going to put you on the spot. What is your favorite? What is your favorite CRM? What's your go-to CRM in your playbook? 

Joel (00:36:19) - I'm a, I'm a Salesforce person. I wouldn't join a company that didn't have Salesforce. 

Speaker 1 (00:36:25) - Okay. And then this is mainly because of what you've seen along your journey, what you've seen that can leverage, what you've seen it can do for actually orchestrating or managing or bridling all of the information and the activities that occur across an account. Is that right? 

Joel (00:36:37) - Yeah. I mean, fundamentally the reporting and the things that I need, if I'm going to walk into a board meeting and share my forecast as a leader, I just think Salesforce is, and you know, by the way, familiarity might be jading my lens. So some of you like, and I own HubSpot, Sturdy, we use HubSpot for marketing. I use the marketing cloud at Salesforce. So I'm not just like a Salesforce guy or a Salesforce professional. 

Speaker 1 (00:37:04) - Any Salesforce tattoos that we need to know about? 

Joel (00:37:06) - Yeah. 

Speaker 3 (00:37:09) - So let me just, but the, the thing that I would say is like, you really have to, I think the other thing is when you're a CS leader and you rely on Salesforce, you're starting to cross the aisle. 

Joel (00:37:20) - Like I'm really big on this concept and this might not be the time to introduce this and you can cut me off, but the democracy, every, no one in your organization has ever said, I don't want to know more about our customer. 

Speaker 3 (00:37:31) - So the product team wants to know more about the customer. The marketing team wants to know about the customer. Customer advocacy team wants to know about the customer. CX people want to know about the customer. Sales people, one of them, every, no one wants to know about the customer. One of the things that I think we need to do and evolve in the next level of maturity as SaaS companies is we need to democratize data. And every team should share that we're all in. 

Joel (00:37:58) - And everybody said this is a cliche is going to come out and like people are going to probably like, we're all in customer success, man. 

Speaker 3 (00:38:06) - Everybody's in, they are single, by the way, there's two important groups of people in a SaaS organization and it's debatable what's the most important. I think it's probably your people. 

Joel (00:38:20) - I sold that for years. 

Speaker 3 (00:38:21) - Nothing more important in a SaaS company than the sum of your parts, your people. 

Speaker 1 (00:38:26) - They're very, very close. 

Joel (00:38:27) - Not even sure if it's second. 

Speaker 1 (00:38:29) - Are your customers? 

Speaker 3 (00:38:33) - Knowing more about your customers is huge. So why didn't you want to know more about your customer? 

Speaker 1 (00:38:37) - So anyway, no, well, two things to just two quick things on that point. Number one, you know that you're talking to somebody who truly, truly believes that CX and CS in the modern world is a hundred percent a team sport. And I don't care what business you're in, what industry in, I don't care if you're at Fortune 50 or if you're a scrappy little startup that just figured out how to make your first half a million bucks a year. When you take a look across the customer journey, you see every role. 

Speaker 1 (00:39:00) - And even if that role, even if that means you're a founder and you work 10 roles, you see that interplay, or I'm going to go back to what you said earlier in this episode, because it's a brilliant, simple way to think about intersections, man. You see the intersections where people are making left turns. People are making right turns. Some people got green lights, some people got red lights, but the bottom line is the faster you can start to understand where those intersections take place across the journey. 

Speaker 1 (00:39:20) - You can begin to orchestrate areas of accountability, responsibility, authority, and then as you grow, that means, yeah, that means different tranches of leadership, different folks owning different parts of the roles, different sets of KPIs and performance metrics across marketing themselves and customer success. And this is where it starts to get really complex. Don't get me wrong. 

Speaker 1 (00:39:38) - This is, and this is also the way CX and CS is awesome, I think, because for the right types of CX and CSers, it's where we get to see a little bit of everything within the company. I think some of the strongest customer experience leaders in the world, man, they're like one part sales, one part ops, one part tech. 100% they can touch a little bit of all of it and they do have some knowledge around all of it. But, so, Joe. 

Speaker 1 (00:40:00) - We had a bunch of awesome process points here. I want to make sure with the time that we've got left, I want to jump into the fourth filler of feedback because we hit on all this good process stuff, but we've talked a lot about feedback. We've talked about customer feedback. We talked about employee feedback. 

Speaker 1 (00:40:14) - I'd love for you to spend a few minutes just kind of talking about maybe either some examples of like some of the most colorful, helpful, actionable feedback that you've ever been able to see across all these different businesses or even with Sturdy. I'd love for you to spend a minute if you're talking about some of the ways you've kind of managed your customer feedback and how you sort or even their employee feedback. 

Speaker 1 (00:40:33) - Joel, if you want to just think about one story and share one example of some things that work, I'd love to just kind of pick your brain on that pillar of feedback. 

Joel (00:40:39) - I have two concepts that I think are really, really salient here. The first thing is I think our customers every day, so words matter. 

Speaker 1 (00:40:49) - Yep. 

Joel (00:40:50) - And our customers every day in a variety of our users, think about our users. They're giving us the answers to the test every day. 

Speaker 1 (00:40:59) - Yep. 

Joel (00:40:59) - They're sharing with us that what frustrates them, what they don't understand, what they like, that there are other people that need to be involved, that they're not on the right part of their journey or they don't understand where they're at, what value they're supposed to get from this stage of using our SaaS products. They're telling us in reams of data every day. So for every about a million in ARR that you have, you get about 1200 pieces of communication, unique feedback. I think about every conversation as a feedback point. So I'll stop there. 

Joel (00:41:33) - That's really important. We're getting feedback in ways that people I think need to kind of broaden how you look at it. Like we don't do a lot of surveys. We don't do a lot of CSAT and NPS because we actually have tools to listen to our customers. 

Speaker 1 (00:41:46) - Yeah, ongoing listening. 

Joel (00:41:47) - Customers are asking. 

Speaker 1 (00:41:48) - Yes. Yep. 

Joel (00:41:49) - It's just really, really, really, really, really powerful. That's the first thing I would say. It also informs what actions that we take with those customers. So if our customers are giving us the answers to the test in the form of feedback every day, in every single conversation, and now we have tools to listen to them at scale, then we can drive actions and create plays and create playbooks so that our people are spending their time at building better relationships by using that feedback. So that's how I think about it. 

Joel (00:42:18) - The second point that I would make is any feedback, just like they used to say, any marketing is good marketing. So if people like leave comments, I don't know if you can do this on the pot. I didn't see it, but you know, something like the Joel guy is nuts. Don't bring that. I think my CEO and co-founder Steve would be like, yeah, you know, try to make me feel better. I've known. He's like, yeah, you're a little fired up, man, but you know, any feedback is good feedback. Any, any, any marketing is good marketing. 

Joel (00:42:45) - The second point is any feedback is good feedback. So if your customer says, I'm mad at you, I'm really frustrated with this, how this worked, we're in the implementation phase. I'm having second thoughts. What's up with you? This is not how I was sold. 

Speaker 1 (00:42:58) - I don't know how we're going to deliver. 

Joel (00:43:00) - You're going to deliver the value that was promised in this process that we went through. That needs to be escalated to somebody that can then unpack that. And you need to actually make an honest attempt to unpack it. And sometimes those are the best customers you'll ever have. 

Joel (00:43:13) - So what I encourage people to do is like, take the negative feedback, the bad stuff, the uncomfortable stuff, words matter, turn that into something where you might be able to build a better relationship and have an honest conversation with a customer that you've never thought you could have before. I've had some of my best customers in my career. Well, I mean, my SAS journey have been people that I've had a startup that's been contentious where I've been sent in as like the leader. Yep. Go disarm somebody. 

Joel (00:43:37) - And I'm like, you know, probably 80% of the time we messed up. 

Speaker 1 (00:43:40) - Yeah, yeah. We turned something up. 

Joel (00:43:42) - We didn't do what we say we're going to do. And now we've got to get it right. And you know what, those people buy us again somewhere. 

Speaker 1 (00:43:47) - Yeah, yeah. 

Joel (00:43:49) - Customers are giving you feedback every day. And you take the bad. And that's an opportunity. Not necessarily the worst thing that's going to be a part of your day. So you got to have the guts to do it. You got to be brave. 

Speaker 1 (00:44:00) - Absolutely. I think it's funny, man. I think that what, look, there's been a lot of changes with consumer expectations and customer expectations over the years. 

Speaker 1 (00:44:11) - But I do think that there's this one interesting piece of brands and companies and providers who are able to figure out how to how to carefully leverage candor, right? Like to your point, Joe, when you do screw up or when it does hit the fan and you own it as a brand, but then you make you make you make things right by your customers. Not only do you own and acknowledge, then you talk about the potential remediation. 

Speaker 1 (00:44:35) - Maybe there's a little bit of incentivization or greasing because those call to it is sometimes when people get burned or people don't like something, there needs to be something so they feel a little bit better. That's a human. That's a human nature thing, right? And everybody feels that way. But then lastly, what I was gonna say is this. 

Speaker 1 (00:44:48) - So some of the companies that we've been a part of it that we work with it CXE, we help them literally build different ways that they can think about, you know, ways that they could build their own their own versions of you said we acted or things that our customers said this quarter. Here's some of the things that we focused on for the last 90 days or almost like that ping pong. Joel, I was joking with you about the other day. 

Speaker 1 (00:45:08) - It's almost like companies that are really good at setting up the even if something I had to say, I'm being honest, even if it's the illusion of this back and forth, like, hey, we heard all this stuff from you, customer. Here's what we did about it. Here's what we've been hearing from other users and other competitive users. Here's what we're doing for people like that stuff. Modern customers are going to want more of that. 

Speaker 1 (00:45:26) - They're going to work with brands that want to give their dollars over to companies that kind of buy into that and they and they show that. And then on top of it, I just think it's another way of personalizing customer experiences company or sorry consumers want to have personal customer experiences with brands that they're going to invest in that they're going to use for the long haul. So you give me a lot of ideas on some of that. 

Joel (00:45:46) - And it starts with like, I think it's I think if you break things down to its fundamental, just the core. We're asking these people to take a journey with us when we take their money. 

Speaker 1 (00:45:57) - Yeah. 

Joel (00:45:58) - When you sell something. And we've entered a relationship and it's a subscription relationship. And you know what? It's just like if you have a spouse or a partner or whomever, right. Or friends. Sure. Everybody's got a spouse partner. Maybe you have a friend or two. 

Speaker 1 (00:46:13) - Yeah. 

Joel (00:46:14) - You know, what makes you a good friend is listening. What makes you a good partner or spouse or what have you is listening. 

Speaker 1 (00:46:19) - And you know what? 

Joel (00:46:20) - You kind of have to take that and carry it over to your professional life. Like people want to be listened to. And sometimes as a CS leader or as a CRO, like you don't like what the person saying and they're annoying. And, you know, frankly, you sold them something and now you kind of have the responsibility to listen. 

Speaker 1 (00:46:35) - Definitely. 

Joel (00:46:38) - And that's why, you know, not to bring this full circle. I know we're close to out of time, but why we built Sturdy so we could help organizations. It's not even in a CS frame necessarily. It's like, yeah, everybody wants to listen to their customers better. It just so happens that the tools that we have today. Don't necessarily allow us to do that at scale, given the mode that we train, you know, that we we essentially communicate with people in. And that's something that we want to change and solve for. It's like we are frustrated operators. 

Speaker 1 (00:47:07) - Yeah. Yeah. 

Joel (00:47:07) - I'm not trying to build like a CX empire. Maybe that happens. But I'm just a frustrated CRO type guy that wants to be able to better understand our customers because like I don't like cancellations. 

Speaker 1 (00:47:18) - Yep. Yep. Makes your job a whole hell of a lot harder, right? 

Joel (00:47:22) - I'm going to grow faster. 

Speaker 1 (00:47:23) - I'm going to hustle. 

Joel (00:47:24) - I'm not getting any younger. 

Speaker 1 (00:47:25) - No, I get it, man. Joel, this has been an absolute pleasure, brother. I'm super pumped that you came on. Thank you so much for sharing your story. Before I let you go, though, where can people get in touch with you or your team? And then where can people find out more about Sturdy so they can see some of the awesome things that you and the team are working on today? 

Joel (00:47:39) - Absolutely. Love to love to have you. There's some videos on our site. We just got sort of our second second gen marketing up and running at Sturdy.ai. I'm on LinkedIn at Joel Pass and I'm not hard to find. And those are probably the best way. I'm Joel at Sturdy.ai. You can email me if you're ever interested. But thanks for having me. And for being a part of the pod. 

Speaker 1 (00:48:02) - Thanks for sticking with us. 

Joel (00:48:03) - And thanks for having me as part of your community, too. 

Speaker 1 (00:48:06) - One hundred percent, Joel. It's been our absolute pleasure. I'm going to look forward to seeing what you and the team work on next at Sturdy. And I'll look forward to continue this conversation in the future. 

Joel (00:48:14) - Great. 

Speaker 4 (00:48:14) - Thanks for having me.