Shark Tank Secrets: Turning Big Ideas Into Tech Realities With Dmitri Love

Venture capital is a relentless game of adaptation where overnight disruption can wipe out years of systematic progress. Relying on single points of failure in a highly regulated ecosystem will eventually expose vulnerabilities, no matter how much transaction volume your platform supports. In this conversation, we sit down with veteran technology founder Dmitri Love to unpack the unvarnished realities of building, scaling, and exiting software startups.

We sit down to discuss his journey from engineering software on the F-35 program to pitching his crypto micro-investing app Bundil on Shark Tank. We dig deep into tactical pivots, navigating catastrophic liquidity events like the FTX collapse, and the mechanics of turning a marketplace app like Hydrant into a successful corporate acquisition. Dmitri pulls back the curtain on his latest ventures, detailing how he is using automated text interfaces to bypass traditional app stores and building automated data rooms to streamline investor relations.

Even a multi-million dollar exit can be completely drained while funding your next venture. Founders often underestimate the sheer amount of capital required to scale consumer products, the emotional toll of carrying teams through six-month cash droughts, and the discipline it takes to manage investor updates when your business is actively fighting for survival. You will walk away with a grounded framework for structuring equity, a clear understanding of why high agency beats raw talent when hiring, and a systemized view of leveraging tools like Claude to accelerate technical validation.

Subscribe and tune in for new episodes of Big Talk About Small Business with Mark Zweig and Eric Howerton. Each week we focus on practical insights and real-world strategies to grow your business!

Stay Connected: 
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bigtalk.pod/ 
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61564547079280
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/big-talk-about-small-business
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@bigtalkpod
https://www.bigtalkaboutsmallbusiness.com/

Transcript

Shark Tank Cold Open

SPEAKER_04 0:00

I was very, very young. I was also on the TV show Shark Tank, as you probably saw. Yeah. With that.

SPEAKER_03 0:06

So Mr. Wonderful made you an offer. He did. He tried to take my shirt and my shoes and my socks. So you don't think he's really Mr. Wonderful? Is that it? He's a pretty hard-nosed guy.

Dimitri’s Roots And Early Moves

SPEAKER_03 0:24

Hey everybody, we're back. We've got another great episode of Big Talk About Small Business. And I'm sitting here with my guest today, Dimitri Love. It's the first time we've ever met. It's going to be an interesting show. This guy's got quite a background, done a lot of different different stuff, has some very interesting businesses. So how are you doing today, Dimitri?

SPEAKER_04 0:48

I'm doing fantastic. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_03 0:50

Yeah, we're glad that you're here. So tell everybody a little bit about your background. Where'd you grow up? Uh grew up here. Okay. So Roger specifically, or just NWA?

SPEAKER_04 1:02

Yeah, Favil. Okay. Yeah. So uh basically uh fifth grade, I think, through college. I was here. Um and then ended up moving away a little bit. Uh was in Texas for about six years, met my wife, came back in 2021.

SPEAKER_03 1:19

I always say did time in Texas. I did three years at DFW myself. Where were you?

SPEAKER_04 1:25

I did. So started off in Dallas, then I went to uh Fort Worth, and then I went back to Dallas, and then at the end ended up in one of the suburbs. So Flower Mound, if you know.

SPEAKER_03 1:36

Oh, yeah, I know it. I lived in Arlington. My then wife worked in Duncanville and I worked in downtown Fort Worth. Nice. So Arlington kind of sucked, but anyway, it's hot down there. It's soulless down there. I mean, it's just so big and there's so much concrete. Nobody's from there. Nope. It's not like here where we still have some natives around here. Yeah, you go there to work or play or both. Or shop. Or shop, yeah. The shopping is great. North Park Mall, yeah. Yeah, restaurants are pretty good too. Food's great. Yeah. But anyway, so I noticed that you're a left-hander, and uh, so that's I read somewhere that you're seven points uh higher IQ-wise than us right-handers.

SPEAKER_04 2:22

Man, I'm happy to take advantage of it. I uh I I've noticed that there are not a lot of people left-handed. I don't even think about it anymore, but the more I kind of you know do things like this, or I don't really write anymore because we have technology to do that for us. But when I sign something, people are like, oh man, you're left-handed.

SPEAKER_03 2:42

Lefties have a weird way of writing, at least.

SPEAKER_04 2:45

I've seen mine's a little more normal.

SPEAKER_03 2:47

I don't do the like backwards. You know what I'm talking about.

SPEAKER_04 2:50

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_03 2:51

Yeah, mine's like a little more normal. Um well, I've got a big brother who's a lefty, and he was the dean of University of Missouri Medical School, so just that bodes well for lefties.

From Knee Injury To Tech Career

SPEAKER_03 3:03

So tell us a little bit about yourself and your businesses and how you got to where you are.

SPEAKER_04 3:09

Yeah. Um, so we haven't met before, so there's a lot of things you don't know about me.

SPEAKER_03 3:15

Yeah. Um there is. I get my background sheet from the people here in advance of these these uh shows, and and so there was some good stuff in there. But yeah.

SPEAKER_04 3:26

So one thing I'll tell you, I actually grew up when I was in college. Um the first time I knew about you, I saw one of your garages over on South School. Yeah. Um and I was like, who's who's got cars like this?

SPEAKER_03 3:38

So anyway, I'm a big, big lover of cars. But that was my first uh when I got divorced from my second wife. I I moved in over there. Really an apartment in that place. Really? Yeah, and so I could just like get up in the middle of the night and go hammer on my cars and stuff, but anyway.

SPEAKER_04 3:56

So um my background, so I'll kind of break it up into two spots. Um I'll break it up into like a professional background and then um my entrepreneurial background. So uh as a kind of former employee, I kind of worked in all parts of the product life cycle. So started out as a software engineer after college, worked for companies like Lockheed Martin.

SPEAKER_03 4:19

I saw that. I mean, they're the uh with all the UFO talk today, they're always involved in it.

SPEAKER_04 4:25

Of you know, back they always figure out how to backdoor a government contract.

SPEAKER_03 4:30

Exactly. Yeah, Lockheed, and they're supposedly have these great skunk works where they're you know developing stuff that we have no idea what it is.

SPEAKER_04 4:38

Uh what I can tell you is they are pretty cool. Um so I worked on back in the day, I was on the F-35 program, so my team supported the the F-35 and they were uh building some very cool things.

SPEAKER_03 4:50

Um you you you s you got your degree in computer science, or what was it? No, so I was biochemistry. Oh, so and so but you were writing code. How did you make that transition? Uh so I have a whole long story.

SPEAKER_04 5:05

The short version is I used to love to play soccer, and I was trying to play soccer a little too much and had a really bad knee injury, so I tore my ACL, MCL, and most of my meniscus. And it was terrible. Um I was on crutches for like basically a year and a half, two years, physical therapy, all that stuff. Um had a couple surgeries, and then uh during that time, I just like life kind of hit me and I had to figure out what to do. So instead, and I might get, you know, uh roasted a little bit, but instead of graduating, I had about 14 hours left. I quit to go be a software engineer.

SPEAKER_03 5:48

So many smart guys who are entrepreneurs have done that. You're not the first one I've had in here or that I know. You should have heard, you should have heard my family.

SPEAKER_04 5:57

My family called me for weeks, they just thought it was terrible, right? Yeah, and I kind of had to describe it. Like, look, like here's my offer, like, here's the salary. It's a good salary for you know, someone who's 20 years old, like this can't be that bad, right? Um, but ended up working out. So was a software engineer, uh, and then I moved into the other parts of like the technology lifecycle. So I did UIUX design, which is you know making things look really good. And then finally I led product, which is describing and directing the strategy of how things should be built in technology. So uh I did that for all sorts of companies. I built the UI for the full swing golf simulator by Tiger Woods, if you know that. I don't. Um sounds impressive. It was fun. If if there are any golf lovers out there, it was very fun, very fun project. Um, works for MetLife for a little bit. Um I also most recently led product at Walmart in between kind of one of my companies. So I was building um Sparky, which is the AI assistant that serves about a hundred million people across the United States. Um and yeah, it's kind of where I got my roots in technology and how I learned to build really cool things. Um

Building Bundle And Landing Shark Tank

SPEAKER_04 7:19

on the entrepreneurial side, you broke out, yes. I did break out. Uh so I have had three really big companies and a bunch of small ones, a lot of failures, uh, which I love talking about. Uh the first one was a company called Bundle. If I didn't have this jacket on, you'd see it tattooed on my arm. It was B-U-N-D-L. Yeah. B B-U-N-D-I-L. Oh, D-I-L. Okay, sorry. Yeah, it was a funny story about how I got that name. Uh we were trying to figure out a domain name because you know the word bundle is actually relatively uh popular. Yeah so we had to figure out how to you know make the branding work and trademarks and all that stuff. So uh got lucky with D I L, but that was the only option. Um but the app was a uh finance investing app where you could invest your spare change from debit and credit card purchases like this water bottle into cryptocurrency and stocks. So brilliant idea. Thanks, man. Yeah, it was kind of a playoff of Acorns, if you've heard of Acorns, but the key difference was Acorns does um ETFs that they create. And then you say ETFs, I don't oh, electronic fund transfers? No, so they do um a culmination of stocks into a vehicle that you can invest in. So think like an index fund.

SPEAKER_03 8:41

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 8:42

Um, so what Acorns did is they would say here are the best performing stocks based on what our financial analysis people say, uh-huh, and we'll help you microinvest into those kind of indexes.

SPEAKER_03 8:54

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 8:54

And the opportunity I saw is like most people, first of all, don't know what an ETF is. Second of all, uh most people want control over their investments, especially if they're doing it themselves. Um, so we built basically the same platform but for direct asset investing.

SPEAKER_03 9:10

I see.

SPEAKER_04 9:11

Um, it was really cool. I was very, very young. I was also on the TV show Shark Tank, as you probably saw with that.

SPEAKER_03 9:20

So Mr. Wonderful made you an offer. He did. He tried to take my shirt and my shoes and myself. So you don't think he's really Mr. Wonderful? Is that it? He's a pretty hard-nosed guy. He um I think he's a smart guy, but yeah.

SPEAKER_04 9:36

Very smart. I don't, you know, I'm a little careful on like what I say publicly, but he's actually very nice. Uh-huh. Yeah. Um, he's not surprised as mean as he might seem.

SPEAKER_03 9:46

Yeah. Uh I think he's a big musician and wine aficionado and all this stuff, but yeah. Loves wine. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 9:54

He's got his boat, which got him into a little bit of trouble. And uh he at the time loved crypto. He got into a few crypto plays. Um, but yeah, it was a really cool business. Uh ran it for almost six years. We were uh serving about a hundred thousand monthly active users. We were doing about ten million dollars a month transaction volume. Well no.

SPEAKER_03 10:18

Um how did you market that thing? I mean, aside from being on Shark Tank, that probably didn't hurt, right?

SPEAKER_04 10:24

Shark Tank, uh, so what they'll say when you get on Shark Tank, it's uh about a million dollars worth of marketing value, uh, which I didn't believe at the time, but there were so many um different avenues that would pick up the show, and the show would run across like you know, a large period of time.

SPEAKER_03 10:41

And it's still yeah, it's still out there. Yeah, I see it all the time. Clips, galore, and whatever. Yeah, Instagram. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 10:49

They will, oh my goodness, like so many people will flock to a product just because Shark Tank has that sure trust factor, right? Um, so we did that. We also did, I don't know if you're familiar with like, you know, pay-per-click advertising. Sure. Yeah, Facebook, Instagram, um, TikTok didn't exist yet. So did you keep ownership of the whole thing? Uh I had a majority on a ship for a long time, yeah. So we did raise some venture capital.

SPEAKER_03 11:16

What did you use that money for if you already had this thing working? I'm just curious.

Raising Capital Amid Crypto Chaos

SPEAKER_04 11:20

Sounds so good when I talk about it, right? But basically the first three and a half years making nothing. Oh, it's terrible. Was trying to figure out. So at the time, Bundle was building in a landscape that hadn't been regulated or constructed yet. So everybody hated crypto. It got to where crypto was really cool for a second, and then everything crashed, everybody hated it, and then it was cool again, and then it crashed, everybody hated it. So there were a lot of tumultuous times. Um, we also didn't have um this is kind of going into my financial services background, but we didn't have like the regulated infrastructure to support uh transfers and liquidity. So we had to rely on third parties, and the third parties were dying pretty often. So uh it caused us to need some capital. So um over that life cycle raised uh I think it was almost two million bucks for um but hey, you're doing 10 million in transactions a month.

SPEAKER_03 12:24

I mean, that's a pretty good number.

SPEAKER_04 12:26

It's a good number. Uh our percentages were not super high, sure, but it was good volume for sure. Yeah. A lot of people were um using it and you know, microtransactions add up. So um it was a really cool thing to to see. So like usually people swipe their card, debit or credit, you know, five to seven times a day. So people would invest anywhere between 80 and 120 bucks a month. Um but uh it was a really cool thing to see. Um and at the same time, just kind of like moving through this life cycle that I had. Uh, I was building a company called Hydrant with a friend of mine. So while I was at an accelerator building bundle, I met a guy named Dave. And he was like, hey, I need some help building a product. You know, I don't know how to build software, technology, I have this opportunity. Yeah. And I was like, I'll help. Tell me what it is. Yeah. Um, so he had this idea to create a marketplace of firefighters. Uh, because you know, they have a 24 hours on, 48 hours off schedule.

SPEAKER_03 13:36

Sure.

SPEAKER_04 13:36

And wanted to create a way for residents and businesses to hire them for handyman type work. Okay, I like that.

SPEAKER_03 13:42

Really cool. I always have other jobs every five minutes. Yeah. Yeah. Usually they have a trade. They're wallpaper hangers, they're brick masons, they're something. Yep.

SPEAKER_04 13:52

And it was so interesting because I asked him, I was like, how the heck did you notice that? Like, that's such a weird thing to notice. And his brother was a firefighter, actually, and kept asking him, like, hey, can I come help around the house or you got some work for me?

SPEAKER_03 14:05

And finally he was like, All right, let me just there's other ones out there. You see one and you go, there must be others out there like that, right? Exactly. Yeah. I give them what a great idea. So, how'd that work out?

SPEAKER_04 14:17

Uh, really cool business. Um, we it was running for a while, uh a little longer than Bundle, almost seven years, I believe. And then that one actually exited to the Belfort group, so the big restoration company.

SPEAKER_00 14:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 14:32

Um, which was very cool. It's my first exit. Um showed me, you know, what all the years of work can do and turn into a waterfall, which was very exciting. So, what about bundle back on that? How'd you what died a terrible death? Okay. So uh we in one of those life cycles of people hating crypto. Um, had did you ever hear about FTX? Do you know what that was? I don't, I'm sorry. So quick story is there was a huge um crypto liquidity company called FTX. They were an exchange like Coinbase or other ones that you would buy crypto from. Yep. Um, and their founder uh basically scammed a lot of people out of like seven or eight billion dollars.

SPEAKER_03 15:21

What was this guy's name? Sam Bankman Free. Yeah, Sam Bankmanfree, sure. I know what this this is all about. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 15:27

What people don't know about his scam is there were so many companies that relied on FTX for liquidity. That's why you started seeing it reach like Tom Brady, like reach all these celebrities, sure companies that you know you would think wouldn't matter. Yeah. Um, actually, Anthropic, one of the biggest AI companies in the world, got an investment from Sam Bankman-Fried. Um, and what people don't know is like a lot of the smaller companies who relied on FTX, uh, they died because of the liquidity tied up in the scam.

SPEAKER_03 16:01

So interesting success. So you were a victim of Sam Bankman-Fried. Wow.

SPEAKER_04 16:06

I was a victim.

SPEAKER_03 16:06

That's wild.

SPEAKER_04 16:07

Yep. Our liquidity provider had um, I think it was like 60% allocation.

SPEAKER_03 16:12

Holy cow. Okay, sorry, it's crazy stuff like that happens to people.

SPEAKER_04 16:17

It does, yeah. It's um it was good learning, though. It taught me not to have all my eggs in one basket. Uh, it also taught me about uh redundancy in systems. So, you know, as I'm building kind of these new products, I want to make sure I don't rely on one thing that could, you know, yeah, that could take you down.

SPEAKER_03 16:40

Sure. I get it. So you got out of bundle that in a not so great way. Yeah. Um, you had hydrant, that was a successful exit. Yep. Then what?

Hydrant Exit Plus Pease Pause

SPEAKER_04 16:53

Uh so the third company was called Pease. Um, so Pease was a um agentic joint bank account. So this was kind of more of a passion project, didn't go too far, but I did raise some venture capital, so I like talking about it. Um this one I was trying to figure out how to allow couples to join their finances in a slower way. So uh people who are not as traditional as me, you know, I'm very faith-based, I'm Christian.

SPEAKER_03 17:24

Um Yeah, you get married, it's everything that's yours is mine, and everything that's mine is yours. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 17:29

Yep. And most of the world does not think like that. Yeah. Uh, and it actually causes a ton of friction. So, you know, uh money disagreements is one of the leading causes of divorce. Sure. Um, there's just so many friction points um with how couples like manage their money together. So we built a way where, you know, let's say you had Chase, your partner had Bank of America, you could uh split expenses like grant budget together, you had an AI to ask about both your transactions. Thanks, man. Yeah. Uh but you kept your bank account separate. So you would slowly merge them over time.

SPEAKER_00 18:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 18:05

Um, wonderful idea still.

SPEAKER_00 18:08

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_04 18:08

Um, one of the reasons why I kind of put it on pause. I didn't shut it down or anything. Um, I just put it on pause because financial services is so expensive. If you're gonna attack, um basically build a new type of bank, which is what I was doing, um, you need a very, very large sum of dollars to commit to for a very long time.

SPEAKER_03 18:29

So um it's amazing, you know, there's all these ideas out there and businesses that were started to solve that problem. It always fascinates me in terms of like how do the customers find these things unless they get some really great PR. There's so many of them out there that just don't get off the ground. I mean, it's really hard driving people to your own website. You know? I just think people underestimate how difficult that is. Having had a lot of businesses where I was trying to do that and still do.

Distribution, Risk, And The AI Wave

SPEAKER_03 19:04

It is.

SPEAKER_04 19:04

I one of the things that if you're gonna build consumer products, um, if I was gonna, you know, give some random advice to a potential founder out there. It's like have tons and tons of money. That would be my advice.

SPEAKER_03 19:16

Tons of money spend it on advertising, on ads, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 19:20

Or a very unique ability to create virality.

SPEAKER_03 19:25

So exactly. And that's that's a difficult thing to do. It is. It can happen though, clearly.

SPEAKER_04 19:32

It's uh it's something I've studied. Um, I have it's a it's it's something I've studied. It's something that can be learned. Um, it doesn't happen every single time, right? But if you structure how you post, how do you create content, how you do PR, like all of those things create a train that can create virality.

SPEAKER_03 19:53

People are too security conscious. They're too cautious with their marketing. They're afraid to do something that people will say is too radical. It's they don't want to alienate anybody, they don't like to use humor, they don't um that's unprofessional. Um want to be on brand. Yeah, they're they're and and the result is that it's it's boring and it's stale and it goes nowhere. I mean, and it so yeah, but it it's it's hard to do that. I think the attitudes are people play it too safe. I agree.

SPEAKER_04 20:30

I think one of the biggest shifts I've been seeing um in this kind of new consolidation of um uh you know company building is people are are much more willing to take risks.

SPEAKER_03 20:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 20:47

Um there's now that you can be a solo entrepreneur, sit at home with Claude on a laptop and literally build an entire company by yourself, people are like I yeah, I used to hate that term solopreneur.

SPEAKER_03 21:01

I'm like, that's yes, because if it's all tied to you, the thing doesn't really have any value. And entrepreneurship's all about building value in the enterprise that you can extract on exit, not what you suck out along the way. But as you say, with Claude, changing it's a different game. It's just blows my mind, the the uses and the and the outputs. I uh it every day. I I see I see applications for it that yeah kill me. It just take weeks to do what this thing just did in 30 seconds. It's it's my bag to see.

SPEAKER_04 21:35

Yeah. Um a little scary as well.

SPEAKER_03 21:37

Yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER_04 21:39

Yeah. I think we're gonna get flooded with not so great products, um, not so great, you know, actors in the space. Um, but I also think we're gonna get flooded with a ton of value for, you know, the people.

SPEAKER_03 21:53

So my sort of conclusion on all that AI is it's it's it's it's a great Doing tool. It's you still can't replace the human mind for creativity. That's the distinction. It's the creativity aspect. And of course, the relationship aspect that you're never going to be able to use AI to do. Agreed. Yeah, boy, it can do a lot of work and it can be good. I mean, oh yeah. Knowledge work. Yeah. This weekend I had to do a live webinar on Tuesday, and I had to turn out the presentation. I was so busy. I was at one of my businesses up in Indiana, and I just had no time to write this thing at all. So I wrote it all out on Saturday morning or Saturday or Sunday morning. I send it to the company and the marketing director sends it back to me later that day. And I sent it to him and I said, Look, you know, here's my presentation. I go, but I'm no graphic designer. The graph, the the design here, make any changes you want. He sends it back to me and it's perfect. He goes, I just sent it over to Claude.

unknown 22:56

Oh man.

SPEAKER_03 22:57

And it's like, you know, good graphic design, that's takes some skill. I mean, yeah, there's tons of tools that would do stuff for you, but it sucked. And now it's actually good. It's good. Yep. And it's done that fast. It is that's just one use of a zillion of them. I just looked at some market research done and oh my God. 30 minutes before you and I met. I'm like, I can't believe this just came out of Claude. Yeah. What are you uh what are you most excited about with that new capability? Oh gosh, I don't know. I mean, it's great for business planning. It's great for valuing businesses, structuring deals to buy businesses. I mean, yeah. Yeah. I've I I've just it's every day I'm impressed. I mean, I see these things every single day. Which one do you use GPT or Claude the most? I I use GPT, but I see a lot of output from other people with Claude. Yeah. I just haven't found it as easy to use. Yeah. Myself. They do you know different things. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 24:02

Um, their models are tailored for different things.

SPEAKER_03 24:05

So but yeah, I mean these tools, so you can be by yourself. You can have a real business now. It's the bottom line. You can be that has value that you've created.

SPEAKER_04 24:16

Yep. Anyone who has an idea. So, you know, back in the day, everyone would come up to me and be like, Dimitri, I have an idea. Like, can you help me build this app? Right.

SPEAKER_03 24:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 24:25

And I'm like, okay, what's the idea? Um there's a lot of ideas. A lot of ideas, right? Poor execution. Yes. Now, Claude can take your idea, validate it, structure a plan for you. Yeah. Build against that plan. I know. And you're sitting at work or at home watching football or out of the bar drinking a beer, you're doing all this while Claude is building a business for you. And it's it's something. It's something to see.

SPEAKER_03 24:56

Um anyway, I uh Where were we at on my own? Well, we're saying no, we're saying that there's a lot of there's a lot of um how do you get people to your to your business? Um, how do you draw people in? Distribution's a really big thing. But anyway, um so you have um you had these various ventures, then what? Um you told told us about three of them. How did you get to the what you've got right now?

Solving What’s For Dinner By Text

SPEAKER_03 25:26

Uh that's a really good question.

SPEAKER_04 25:28

So while I was at Walmart, um I saw a huge problem in how we consume food, how retail intelligence worked, retail media worked, um, saw some great opportunity. Actually, one of my past investors in peas, um, he was an executive at Walmart, just recently retired to work on this thing with me. Yeah. And he reached out and was like, hey, like, I have an idea. Do you want to build a company? I was like, sure. You know, why why wouldn't I? Right. Um, and the question he kind of postulated was I want to make sure that everybody in America can answer the question, what's for dinner? without having to think about it.

SPEAKER_03 26:11

Yeah. Oh god. So familiar, right?

SPEAKER_04 26:15

So familiar. Everybody asks at 4 p.m.

SPEAKER_03 26:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 26:18

Hey babe, what do we have for dinner? Exactly. Um so I was like, that's fascinating. Let me noodle on it a little bit. Um, we went through a couple iterations and we finally came up with a extremely compelling experience. So the AIs that you use, like GPT or Claude, we built our own and we put it inside of iMessage. So if you have an iPhone, just like you would text me or and I'll show it to you live real quick. Um, just like you would text me or um text a family member, you can text this AI and it'll plan meals for you. It'll find recipes for you. Our agents will literally go shop at Walmart or Instacart, DoorDash, or wherever you shop, Aldi, it doesn't matter. So much better than these subscription boxes. Correct. Yeah, it's like that's actually a a really good train of thinking because we saw some of the success with um, do you remember like HelloFresh? We've tried all of them.

SPEAKER_03 27:24

Yeah. Is you always end up with stuff that you didn't consume and it doesn't work or it's too complex, you don't feel like doing it. You don't want it. Yeah, you don't want it exactly.

SPEAKER_04 27:33

Yep, not limited to options. Yeah. So we kind of took that concept and created one that's bespoke to the household. So if you're keto friendly or you're protein maxing, or you like these types of pasta noodles from Trader Joe's, doesn't matter. The AI can build a meal plan for you. So does it start out by asking you a lot of questions? Uh if you want, you can tell it uh what you have and say, give me a plan, or it can learn about your household. It's completely um flexible.

SPEAKER_03 28:02

So what's this app called?

SPEAKER_04 28:05

Uh so it's literally just a phone number. So you don't have to download an app. So I'll send it to you. Awesome, man. Yep. Um yeah, it's a we we have a thesis. We don't think apps are gonna exist as much anymore. Um so we wanted to build out um an experience that anybody could use for free, you know, inside of their phone. So love it. We hooked it up to a phone number so you can just set it together.

SPEAKER_03 28:29

Creative idea in itself. Yeah. It's been makes total sense. It's been great. Um so that's like that's not even iPhone dependent then, if I just got a phone number.

SPEAKER_04 28:39

Yeah, so we're gonna launch SMS soon. So right now we're doing iMessage because iMessage comes with some really cool things like read receipts and I see you can like see interaction with it.

SPEAKER_03 28:48

Sure.

SPEAKER_04 28:49

Um, SMS takes a little bit more massaging, but we're gonna launch that as well. So anybody literally with a phone number can answer the question. What's for dinner? I love it. So, how do you make money on that?

Contextual Retail Ads That Convert

SPEAKER_04 29:01

Wonderful question. So uh we it's gonna be completely free to the consumer or anybody who uses it. Uh we charge in two ways. So suppliers think um Coca-Cola or Kraft Heinz or Nestle can pay for either retail intelligence, so understanding which households have their product, uh, how they're being consumed, which products they would like to see from them, yeah, which then informs retail media. So sure. The problem I saw while I was in Walmart is retail media, these suppliers, they're spending billions and billions of dollars, like $60 billion a year on really terrible ads. So if you go into Walmart, you might search for toilet paper and see an ad for like Campbell soup or something, right? Highly non-contextual, useless, like who's who's buying Campbell's soup when I'm searching for a toilet paper? So what we do is we service ads during the discovery process. So when you're trying to plan what's for dinner, try to figure out what recipes you want, we will run ads within the ingredients of that recipe.

SPEAKER_03 30:10

Wow, that's gotta be a lot better result you get as a as a product company, right? 100%. Because you know this person's actually shopping for that thing. Yep. Not just like maybe I'll catch them and they want my soup. Yep, the intents there. Yeah. That's a that's a brilliant idea. Love that.

SPEAKER_04 30:28

Yeah, yeah. No, it's we're super excited about it. Um, and I wish my co-founder Creighton was here. He can explain a lot more of the the retail media side, um, because he was an executive at Walmart for like 17 years. So um, but it's we've just gotten wonderful reception. I haven't seen a product like kind of, you know, have the light bulb go off or the light go in somebody's eyes as much as this one before.

SPEAKER_03 30:56

Well, it always seems to me though, with things like that, I mean, so you go out there to potential advertisers and they want to know how many users you have. And you're just starting out. You say you're not gonna have a whole lot of users, right? How did how do you sell that then? Especially to like a big company. Where is it all about the numbers? That is a good question.

SPEAKER_04 31:18

A little bit of a trade secret there.

SPEAKER_03 31:19

Um, there's two things you don't have to tell your trade secrets. Um No, it's okay.

SPEAKER_04 31:23

It's okay. I've I anybody who watches the podcasts, like I love making sure people can learn. So I don't I'm a bad person to withhold information. I'm with you on that.

SPEAKER_03 31:33

I just share everything because I figured they're not all gonna do it anyway. Exactly. And everybody's circumstance is different. Exactly.

SPEAKER_04 31:41

Um, the things that's really important, so we're highly confident to be able to get enough of a user base, five to ten thousand users. That's not that hard. That just costs money, as you mentioned.

SPEAKER_03 31:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 31:53

Um, and we have raised venture capital, so we've got dollars to do that.

SPEAKER_00 31:57

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 31:57

Um, the thing that's really important is how you package and bucket the information. So when you look at um, we'll use Walmart's products. So they have a product called Centilla and they have a product called Walmart Connect. Okay. Those two products kind of serve the intelligence and media arms for Wanna. When you look at a product like that, you can look at the aggregate of spending to get, you know, really low converting results. They're kind of spending on impressions and then they take a percentage of revenue on things that convert. So it's like, hey, take this giant bucket of water and throw it on people.

SPEAKER_03 32:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 32:33

And whoever drinks a drop, we get 2% of that drop.

SPEAKER_03 32:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 32:37

That's typically, I mean, that's the traditional model, right? Traditional model. Yeah. Yeah. Instead, what we do is say, hey, we've got a shot glass of water that we can guarantee gets drank. So you can pay for very explicit information and very explicit conversion. And as we grow, that shot glass is gonna turn into a cup and then eventually a bucket, and then eventually a pool, and then hopefully eventually a lake. Um, so when we're going to pitch these suppliers, and we've got a ton of LOIs already with some really big suppliers, um, we're saying, hey, we're gonna sell you an aggregate of a hundred users or households, we'll call them a hundred households or a thousand households to be able to inform some campaigns so that you can test out the product. And then next year, whenever you're doing your uh budgets for 2027, we want this percent. So we're using this year as like pilots to show the efficacy and the performance. And then 2027, we're gonna say, hey, that $100 million budget you got, we'd like a chunk.

SPEAKER_03 33:44

Makes total sense. You've demonstrated then. It's it's completely um proven.

SPEAKER_04 33:51

The model's proved out. Most industries I've learned painfully um are all about trust. Yeah. So the more trust you can build, the more that you can show that you can execute or provide value, like you mentioned, um, the faster you'll move.

SPEAKER_03 34:07

Yeah. Well, it's it's just like Shark Tank. I mean, every the first question they ask everybody is how much of this have you sold? Yeah. Isn't it? Yeah. How much money have you made? And if it's a lot, they're like, oh, yeah, then they all get interested. If it's like, well, I sold $5,000 worth, they're like, uh, so yeah, that's interesting. So so that's what you're working on

Venture Funding Basics And C-Corps

SPEAKER_03 34:28

now. Now, how do you like put something like that together financially? I mean, you said you've got some VC funding for that. Yep. You got this partner in this thing. How do you engineer all that?

SPEAKER_04 34:43

Um, yeah, so products like this, uh, they are expensive. So, you know, there's the product I was kind of mentioning that someone could build um, you know, at home with their laptop, relatively lower complexity. Whenever you're building something that's gonna scale this fast and this big, you have to do more things, which cost more money. So um we raised a really small kind of like family friends angel round. Um, so past investors um that I know, friends and family of myself and and Creighton. Sure. Um, about $500,000. Okay. Use that uh for about a year to build the base, build the product, um, build out some of the software that we need. And then now we're raising three million. So three million is gonna get us two years worth of runway, um, allow us to build the trade desk to support our suppliers. Um, bring we've got about seven people that are part-time, they're full-time, but they're not W-2 yet. Right. Bring them full-time. Um and then keep it pushing. So do you do you set up a C Corp? Is that how you start this? We are a C Corp. Yeah. Um, yeah, so most venture investors That's all they want. They want C Corps, yeah. They're not gonna invest in an LLC. Yeah, they sometimes, if the S-corp is structured properly, they'll do an S-corp.

SPEAKER_03 36:03

Yeah, but they're not interested in extracting profits along the way. They want the big payoff at the end.

SPEAKER_04 36:08

They want the payout. They sure do. They want you to IPO.

SPEAKER_03 36:12

Yeah, and I I hate LLCs for a million reasons, but I just tricky. There's always problems.

SPEAKER_04 36:20

If you're an L LLC for an individual, I think that's fine. It's okay. Second another person's involved.

SPEAKER_03 36:27

Exactly. That's I mean, that's it. Or if you and I want to do an apartment building in Bentonville and it's gonna be an eight-unit building, and we buy the land together in an LLC, we build the building, we lease it up, and we sell it, and it all happens in two years. That's a temporary vehicle. Yeah, yeah. We we're not but otherwise, it's just drives me crazy though, these attorneys and people who want to start ventures, and they always put them in LLCs to start with. It's just a pet peeve of mine.

SPEAKER_04 36:53

I you're you're right along uh with the industry. I um so back when I was doing bundle, I actually got in a little bit not trouble, but just uh I was trying to raise venture funds and I didn't know what I just told you. Yeah, and I had an LLC. There you go. And they're like, oh, you need to spend this money, convert it, you need to structure your cap table this way, you need to have an option pool, you need to have all these things. So much more flexibility.

SPEAKER_03 37:21

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So anyway, well, that's exciting. Um you're also working on yet something else.

SendUpdates For Founder Investor Emails

SPEAKER_03 37:27

Yeah, so this is one of those sit-at-home with a laptop businesses.

SPEAKER_04 37:32

Okay. Um tell us about that one. So I had a friend, uh, his name is Chris. Um, he moved to uh I think he's in Connecticut now, but he, you know, was here, uh, grew up here a little bit, and he hit me up and was like, hey, I just quit my job. Like, you know, I kind of want to build something. Like, what you got? And I was like, I don't know, let me think about it. Right. One of the things that if my investors see this, I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_03 37:58

Uh that I'm really saying anything you don't want to say.

SPEAKER_04 38:01

No, no, no, no. It's it's a it's a funny thing. Okay. I am really bad, like famously bad at sending investor updates. Yeah. So yeah, I get it. When you raise venture capital, they actually sometimes often have something called information rights. Yeah. So you like are obligated contractually to send updates. Uh I get it. Usually the standard cadence is about once a month. Uh and they would hear from me maybe once a quarter because I would just I'd be busy. I'd be building and trying to figure things out. Absolutely. Been there, got it. Um so I was like, hey, I suck at this. I know a lot of other founders suck at it and have to spend time doing it. Yep. Why not build a software that can do it for you? Right. So we took the concept of um, so I don't know if you're familiar with the concept of an MCP. So Claude, one of the big AI companies, they created this gateway where they can take all sorts of tools, you know, think Google Docs, your software, whatever, doesn't matter the tool, aggregate it to where everybody can connect to it, right? So we built something kind of similar where you can connect all of your tools for your business. So your QuickBooks, your email, your whatever, right? Sure. Um spreadsheets, how you're wherever you're tracking your revenue, like all that stuff. Yep. Um, all of those tools we use NAI to generate insights and they create an email for you and send it off on a cadence that you choose. And you can edit it before it goes out. How do you charge for this? So this one, we're actually still in the middle of discovering. So we've got about 20 customers. Okay. We're in the middle of trying to figure out a good pricing model. So um there's a lot of other things that it can do. We have something called a data room. So, like when you need to show investors documents, um, you put it all with us as well.

SPEAKER_03 39:50

Sure. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 39:50

Um, we've got fundraising pipelines and all sorts of cool things. Yeah, yeah. A lot of the comparable products, if you were to aggregate all the separate tools that do everything that SendUpdates does, um, you'd be paying four to five hundred bucks a month. We're trying to get the price somewhere between one and two hundred bucks a month. Cool. Um, we don't want to charge too much, but we want to make sure that it's enough to cover obviously tokens for the AI because AI is expensive.

SPEAKER_00 40:19

Sure.

SPEAKER_04 40:20

Um, and then all of the connections that we have to support for integrations, which is also expensive. And then um make sure we can make a little bit of profit.

SPEAKER_03 40:30

So that'd be fascinating. I I would love to learn more about that for one of my businesses. Sure. Yeah, I'm happy.

SPEAKER_04 40:36

I'll send you a lot of things. The manufacturing business.

SPEAKER_03 40:38

Yeah, I'll send it to you for free. Yeah, we've got uh hopefully I'm smart enough to figure out how to hook up this connect thing.

SPEAKER_00 40:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 40:44

Because I mean, you you know, just like I'm sitting there thinking about I got cash flow, forecast, and spreadsheets, QuickBooks, of course. In our case, Backbone, which is our MRP system. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but it's manufacturing resource planning. Okay. So basically everything goes in there. A sale goes in there, there's a schedule for production, there's a bill of materials, all the inventories go are tied into that. Yeah. Um, I'm just thinking of various sources of this information.

SPEAKER_04 41:15

We've got insights, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 41:17

Yeah, we've got um, you know, our our CRM.

SPEAKER_04 41:21

Yep. Um and so we've got about 600 integrations. So we've got most of the CRMs. I'm not sure about backbone, so I'm gonna look into that.

SPEAKER_03 41:33

Uh yeah, you probably don't. Well, you might. I mean, it's used by manufacturing companies. You said it's an M MRP. Yeah. Okay. I'm gonna look into that.

SPEAKER_00 41:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 41:43

Um what a cool tool though, because it is a hassle. Yeah. And then you feel guilty about not giving people the information. I don't want to be one of those people who only gives people good news either. Yeah. Okay. Nobody likes that. Lenders don't like that, investors don't like that. That's the other give them the good news and the bad news.

SPEAKER_04 42:04

Yep. That's the other reason why I wanted to build this tool, because you know, I it would it would be one quarter, great news. Yeah. Next quarter, we're dying. Yeah. Next quarter, we survive. Right. Next quarter, we're dying again. Um, so being able to show like the progression of like, you know, how I'm thinking, what steps I'm taking.

SPEAKER_03 42:27

Um that's all that good stuff. Seems to me like you need to hook up with the WeFunder people. Yeah, the crowdfunders. Yeah, because all their companies that are on WeFunder that are raising capital, this would be such a great tool for them, you know, post um raise. Post fun, yeah. To I mean, and they just got, you know, God knows how many companies are on there. Yeah, happy um, because it's a a challenge for us. Again, we got these WeFunder investors, the the list all resides inside WeFunder. On the cap table, it's only one entry. Okay, it's a special purpose vehicle that by that all these WeFunder investors are tied into, but they all got to be informed.

SPEAKER_04 43:09

I didn't know you did a WeFunder campaign.

SPEAKER_03 43:11

Yeah, we did for Janice Motorcycles.

SPEAKER_04 43:14

Yeah, okay. Yeah, that's a good idea.

SPEAKER_03 43:18

So yeah, anyway.

SPEAKER_04 43:20

I'll have to I I never I literally forgot about crowdfunding until you said that. So that's a great idea.

SPEAKER_03 43:25

Well, it just seems like such a great tool for these people if they can get all these things. For sure. Yeah, I might place. I might use you as uh, if you don't mind, use you as a beta tester. Hey yeah. Well, if I like I said, as long as I'm smart enough to figure out how to use this, yeah, I think I don't have an army of implementers that I can pass this over to farm it off to that something that is always difficult.

SPEAKER_04 43:50

So figuring out how to get people um onboarded, understanding like the usefulness of the tool, like there's yeah, really an art. So Like with served, we get the benefit of being able to um text, right? So we can say, hey, here's what you can do, here's how you do it. We can run them down flows in a system like send updates. You're just in a dashboard.

SPEAKER_03 44:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 44:15

And you gotta kind of figure it out. So we're gonna we have a few ways to do onboarding, but we're that's what we're testing out right now because like there's so many things you can do. We kind of want to um guide our users down a pathway so they know what to do, how to do it.

SPEAKER_01 44:31

Ready to level up your show? At podcastvideos.com, we offer industry leading recording and expert marketing to help your show reach more listeners. From creation to distribution, we've got you covered. Visit podcastvideos.com and elevate your podcast today.

SPEAKER_03 44:46

Well, it seems super valuable. I mean, maybe that's gotta be a consulting job at the front end that you charge people something to set it up. I don't know. I'm not you know, maybe that's a big barrier then.

SPEAKER_04 44:58

See that implementation. I'm gonna use you like live for a second just to think about something. We thought about the consulting model. So um a lot of enterprises are struggling with like AI tool implementation. And actually, OpenAI, they're creating an arm to help enterprises do this. So we've considered like getting kind of like a biz dev team. Um, and like in the industry, they call them uh forward-deployed engineers. So it'd be like salesperson and then a sales engineer who can help integrate, set up, build any like custom, you know, connections that are needed. So the platform's working.

SPEAKER_03 45:36

Yeah, I mean, you know you're gonna have that. There's gotta be people out there using stuff that you're not set up to integrate yet. That's a good idea too. But anyway, well it can be great ideas. Hey, well, listen, I'm thrilled. I it's I mean, it seems like you have so many ideas of things that are that are so useful. What I hear from you though, and I and I want this to be a lesson to all our listeners, it's this is a recurring lesson, folks. And that is if you have a problem with something that needs to be solved, odds are other people out there have the same problem. Okay. It's just I see this all the time. I always think about like, you know, I used to be even in the development business and I did a lot of houses. I did more houses in downtown Fayetteville renovations than anybody else, yeah, and sold them at high prices. And I always thought to myself, almost every time, if I was gonna buy this house, what would I want in it? Okay, and then lo and behold, other people kind of like me, yeah, who are older and want somewhere where they can walk to things, and maybe they went to school there, and they want a neighborhood where people go on the front porch and don't all sit in the back decks and they're isolated with a fence around, you know, and lo and behold, they all materialize, you know, boom, they're there. That's awesome. But it's just like you. I mean, you think about all these different things that you've come up with. Now, you the marriage one I can't you can't necessarily identify with that. Yeah, you know, because you combined everything right away. But I mean, talk to somebody who's been married three times or whatever, they're probably thinking differently than somebody who just got hooked up. Yeah. Um, you know, for the first time.

SPEAKER_04 47:21

I have a funny just random story about that. I'm a little crazy in how I do kind of like user interviews. So you'll notice, like, even as we're talking, I'll ask you certain questions to understand, you know, how you think and how you know I might be able to help you best. But when I was building peas, I would literally like go to restaurants and buy people's dinner just so I could ask them, like, hey, how are you guys doing finance? Like, yeah, you get separate, like, you know, so on and so forth. I'm building an app, you know, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 47:48

I'm sure you're really good at that because you're you ask a lot of questions and you're real approachable. You know, it's not gonna be hard for people to open up to you.

SPEAKER_04 47:58

It took me a long time to get there.

SPEAKER_03 48:00

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_04 48:01

I can I I've I've been told I can be a little abrasive, so I'm I'm good. So now, what's your day like?

Work Rhythm, Family, And Hiring

SPEAKER_04 48:08

You're asking all the fun questions. So believe it or not, I'm super allergic to the morning time. Okay. Uh, so I don't get up early. Okay. Um, my kind of power time is afternoon, evening, and late night. So I'll stay up.

SPEAKER_03 48:23

Um I had a business partner like that. Yeah. He only came into the office at 10 o'clock and then he would work till 10 o'clock every night. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I don't know what it is. You didn't even want to talk to him until it was at least noon.

SPEAKER_04 48:37

Yeah. I I don't know what it is. I don't know if my circadian rhythm is just backwards, but I thrive like when it's really late.

SPEAKER_03 48:46

Um whether it's late or it's early, it's the same thing. It's like all this other stuff dies down. All the activities and interruptions of the day fade away. Yeah. And then you can actually focus. I mean, that's a problem for people today.

SPEAKER_04 49:01

Yeah, we've been boxed into this kind of like um the nine to five, the typical enterprise life cycle.

SPEAKER_03 49:08

Uh and you can't ever focus on anything to get any long-term project done. Takes concentrated effort time.

SPEAKER_04 49:17

A long time ago, that I was gonna need to structure my life around um when I'm most productive. So, like similar to you know, the person you just mentioned, like I'm useless in the morning. Luckily, you guys like said this podcast at 11. If it was at nine, I'd be here just like, you know, what did I do again?

SPEAKER_03 49:37

Um so you like to work later. So what else? I mean, do you work seven days a week? What do you do?

SPEAKER_04 49:44

Yeah, so yeah, I'm working on stopping that. That is not good. Yeah. Seven days you need a break. I've learned um because I had a little some some health issues from just grinding too much. Um, but yeah, I will I work in bursts. So one of the things I do to take breaks now, um, I love to play golf. Okay. My son and I play golf now. Uh, so I'll go play golf.

SPEAKER_03 50:09

Get you outside. Yeah. Yep. Get outside. Walking around, doing something different. Yep. Beautiful surroundings. Yep. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 50:17

Calm, you know, focused on one task. That's something else that I'm I'm bad at. I like to focus on multiple things. Um, so I'll usually, you know, wake up, work a little bit, answer emails, have meetings, things like this. Um, maybe go golf, eat lunch with someone, like have some type of dedicated time to do something else. And then I love cigars. So I'll usually by the afternoon I'm sitting somewhere, whether it's a shop or on my uh back patio, uh smoking a cigar and then working a little bit. Uh I'll go get my son from preschool and then my daughter from school. And then um, by the time kind of dinner's set up, things have calmed down. I'm usually back in my office poking around on something until 1 a.m. God love you.

SPEAKER_03 51:04

Yeah that's a different schedule from a lot of people.

SPEAKER_04 51:08

It is. I um and one thing I'll I'll pass on is like don't be afraid to figure out a schedule that works for you. That's one thing I've seen like some of my mentors and some of the people I've seen be just ridiculously successful. They're doing their thing. So like when uh Mark Wahlberg talks about like, oh, I get up at 2 30 in the morning, yeah. He just That's what it works for him. Yeah, that was his time.

SPEAKER_03 51:34

I get up every day, five, sometimes even earlier. It's the same. That's pretty early. That's the way it works for me. I I go to bed early too. Yeah. Okay, that's the thing. But so how does your wife react to like your work day? Uh no, you're asking just like the most fun question. So um well, these are things that all of us who own these businesses kind of figure out. Yeah, we all struggle with, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 52:02

So my wife, absolutely wonderful, um, extremely supportive, um, like ferociously supportive, actually. So for a while, um, she just got back into the workforce because she was tired of staying at home with the kids, but she was a stay-at-home mom for like six years straight. Um and one of the things that worked out and then became a little bit of a superpower is we were able to split time with the kids. So, especially when we had like, you know, babies, um, she would do mornings. Um, and then by the time I got up, we were kind of tag teaming. And then she would go to bed. And if I had to do anything late at night, I could handle it. So it was really good for that. Um, the stressors came. So this year has been good. Last year and the year before, I did a ton of travel because there's not a really good venture landscape here. Um, so I was in San Francisco a lot, I was in New York a lot, um, which was stressful.

SPEAKER_03 53:02

So yeah, then you leave her with the kids, she gets absolutely no break. Yep. Yeah, it's a lot. I've done that myself.

SPEAKER_04 53:10

It's hard. So I would um start in a relationship. It is. So we I balanced, so I learned quickly to balance. Um, so I would bring them with me if I could. Okay. Uh, which is a little bit of a a uh a hack. Bring them, hey, we're gonna go on a trip, you know, eat some good food, do whatever.

SPEAKER_00 53:29

Yep.

SPEAKER_04 53:30

Um go swimming in the hotel pool. Yeah. Uh or I would try to like limit the time that I was gone and then come back and give her a break. Like, hey, go, you know, uh do something, hang out. So if you want to go on a date, we can do that. We'll get a babysitter, whatever you want. So um we made it work, but she's extremely supportive. I mean, I like I think I I'm talking about like all the things that I did, it's really just her being very gracious and and lovely and and supportive.

SPEAKER_03 54:01

So well, you've demonstrated you know what you're doing and and had some successes. Yeah. Okay. That's I think that's a big problem for a lot of entrepreneurs, is they're they may have this crazy, you know, work uh set up where they're working all the time and they're not making any money at various points of time. And you know, it's it's kind of hard to sell that so for very long, you know. Once you demonstrate, hey, there's a big pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Maybe, maybe this will work out. Yeah, then you have a little more credibility, then the the sacrifices along the way may seem more worth it.

SPEAKER_04 54:42

I love that you brought that up because one of the things I love talking about is like failures, right? So um, you know, my wife was able to see successes, right? Sure. But she also saw a lot of failures. There were a lot of times where I'm like, hey, like we're not gonna have income for six months, or hey, like, you know, this is real ugly. All this money I made on an exit, right? I spent it all building another thing. So um, yeah, there's definitely been some tumultuous times. Um yeah, and like I said, just to her credit, like I didn't do anything. She was just extremely supportive. She was like, hey, whatever you want to go for, I'm right there with you. So I live her to death for it. Yeah, she's a great partner. I think that's indicative of like how I think about structuring teams. Like you gotta have a good team, good support system around you.

SPEAKER_03 55:34

So what kind of people do you look for when you are trying to bring somebody on your team? Do you have like a type?

SPEAKER_04 55:41

I have some pillars that I look for. So high agency, so someone who wants to get the job done, um, iterate, continue, move forward. Don't need a lot of attention. Nope.

SPEAKER_03 55:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 55:53

Uh like if they're bugging me more than I bug them, that's usually a good sign. Right. Um, and then high integrity. So again, someone that I can say, hey, here's the direction, here's all your tools, go build a highway or carve out a lane for yourself.

SPEAKER_03 56:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 56:11

Um and then one of the things that's kind of coming up recently, um I kind of like a mix. So like um for individual contributors, so think of like an engineer or um a designer or someone who's specialized in a particular thing. I've found like some of the younger kids that are coming up in this ecosystem, they're sharp, they're hungry, and they're they're they'll they're ready to do anything, which is fantastic.

SPEAKER_03 56:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 56:44

For leaders, when I look for in leaders, um, I've found, and this is kind of like an age-old thing. I probably would have argued against myself, you know, five years ago, but older, maybe they've got a family, like they've had some more experience such that they can pass on the wisdom.

SPEAKER_03 57:02

Yeah, it's funny you're saying that because I've had the come to the same conclusion recently. I either want young people that are highly motivated and extremely intelligent. Maybe they don't know a lot yet, but they are learn fast. Or I like older people who've already done it, they're very responsible, they're not gonna be flaky, they know how to get along with other people. Okay, they're proven. The worst thing to me is like the middle-aged failure. I mean, I'm trying to say, you know, it's like I don't want it's like they're going through a divorce right now, they just had their car repoed, they got a hard luck story. Those are the people I don't want on my team. They got a million problems. They're they got problems with other kids or whatever. They can't focus. Yeah. Okay. They may be a good person, they may be intelligent, they may be capable, but they just have so many personal things that are just like sucking them down. Mind has to be clear, yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_04 58:02

It's it really is true. That's something I look for as well. The the pattern that I see most often will be founders who um try to go work. Uh like myself, like, you know, I've been in situations where I'll go work. Um, and there's a person, if you don't have that high agency and high integrity and you're only thinking about yourself, if you're kind of a founder mentality and you try to go work for someone, you're just gonna use that as like a means to an end, which is bad. So um trying to find those people who have that founder mentality, but again, that high agency, high integrity, such that, you know, hey, if I'm here for whatever time I'm here, I'm gonna give you my all or give you a lot.

SPEAKER_03 58:46

Exactly. Yeah.

How To Reach Dimitri And Wrap

SPEAKER_03 58:47

We've run out of time, unfortunately, but it's really fun talking with you. There's so much great to talk about. Yeah, it's been great. I'll have to come back with my co-founder one of these days. No, that'd be awesome. And we could talk more about the business. What um, so tell everybody if they do want to reach out to you, yeah. What's the best email to use or how best to reach you? Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 59:09

Um, so you can do uh LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn. My name is Dimitri Love. Yep. Yeah. Uh my handles are all Dimitri Love and then bra. So B-R-A-H at the end. And then my email, uh, it's just hello at my first name.my last name. So Dimitri.love.

SPEAKER_03 59:29

Wow, awesome. Yeah. All right. Well, it's been great having you here. I look forward to the next time. And uh until then, much success. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Thank you. And this has been another episode of Big Talk About Small Business.

SPEAKER_02 59:54

Thanks for tuning into this episode of Big Talk About Small Business. If you have any questions or ideas, Rubik's goals, we should head over to our website. W W Wig Talk About Small Business.com. We should head over to our website, we'll come questions.