Building a successful SaaS product with Mark McDermott

In this episode of Delivered,  you can learn about the role of UX, user feedback, product strategy, and leadership in the journey of building a successful SaaS business. 

We sat down with Mark McDermott, a true trailblazer in the digital signage industry. As the co-founder and CEO of ScreenCloud, Mark shares his journey of transforming his company into a globally trusted platform serving over 9000 businesses worldwide.

Key learnings:

• Discover the key business decisions that turned ScreenCloud into a market leader
• Understand the pivotal role of UX and user feedback in shaping a product’s success
• Explore the importance of a customer-centric product strategy and embracing flexibility to drive innovation
• Learn how to get the best results from your product team

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Transcript

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Mark McDermott, welcome to Delivered. Great to have you. 

Hi. Thank you very much for having me. 

It's an absolute pleasure. I'm actually very excited today because I know you are a man that's delivered most things in the digital space over the last 20 years. So yeah, agencies, products, SaaS companies. 

23 years, but who's counting? 

Yeah, I know. 

Good. So rather than me paraphrasing, I'd love to dive in maybe just to you and how Mark McDermott became the CEO of ScreenCloud. What is ScreenCloud? 

Yeah, well I'll start with ScreenCloud because that's probably easier to explain than my checkered history. But ScreenCloud is a B2B SaaS platform for digital signage. So basically think of all the screens you see out in the world. Most people are probably familiar with outdoor advertising screens or screens in quick-serve restaurants like McDonald's, showing menu boards or the screens you see at airports and things like that. So they usually see them in those kind of retail, commercial environments. So we are basically one of the platforms that powers all of those networks of screens, keeps them active, keeps them on, helps customers deliver content there. But we actually focus more on screens that communicate. So we are on usually employee-facing or student-facing screens and anything from universities through to logistics. So kind of think of truck depots or manufacturing, communicating mainly to a desk list or frontline workforce, keeping them up to date with what's going in the company, productivity information, dashboards, things like that. But all through the medium of screens. So that's ScreenCloud in a nutshell. We have 9,000 customers mostly in the USA and the team is 110 and growing and we are probably moving now from being a startup. We started eight years ago into now what I would call a growth stage or a scale-up company. So that's kind of ScreenCloud in a nutshell. In terms of me, as we said, I'll just turn 44 this week. So reflecting on age a bit, so I started my technology career when I left university in the year 2000. I was originally in corporate IT, working for a large consultancy, which ultimately sold to IBM. Then I moved into the web agency world, so did design and build projects and actually started with my two co-founders of Screen Cloud, our own web design agency in 2000 and, well, I started in 2003, but at 2004 we ran that quite successfully. 

Obviously that was just a profitable business. You don't usually get investment for those kind of companies. Picked up quite a lot of good brand names along the way like British Airways and Nestle and Microsoft and BBC, grew that agency to about 30 people and then we started to reinvest the money that we were making in profit from that agency into our own product lines. And we did loads and loads of different products, experiments, some quite successful, some total fails, some few interesting stories. One was worth a hundred million at one point and then eight months later was worth zero. So that's kind of funny, sort of, and painful. 

So a lot of different things along the way. We kind of built some products and startup muscle and then when ScreenCloud came along in 2014, we realized this was a really big opportunity. We saw a gap in the market for what we were doing. We felt we could do, make a big difference in this category. So we decided to go all in on that in 2015. And then in 2017 we sold our agency, sold off some of the other products or shut them down and then focused completely on ScreenCloud and that's kind of where we are today. But a lots and lots of stuff happened in that time. Lots and lots of stuff. 

I appreciate. That's probably a really short synopsis and what I loved is it's not this rainbow-coated like success story. Oh no. It's in pain failures, successes, and actually I think that embodies products general from my experience. And I guess really what you are talking about there is delivering these things to customers. It sounds like you started from maybe a micro point and just scaled and scaled and scaled to now in a global platform and delivering to a mass market. So that must be quite rewarding and challenging and probably painful like you mentioned. 

Oh yeah, I mean just the ScreenCloud story alone has got massive cycles of ups and downs. I mean there's been years where we've been on a crazy growth tear, just incredible. And then years the first year of Covid where most of our customers were forcibly shut and so suddenly what was only ever going up into the right suddenly was going down to the right and not looking as rosy and we had to adjust. And then we've going through this sort of interesting economic time now, which has some challenges on budget and stuff. So I mean all through my career it has been looping cycles of sort of boom and bust to some degree. And actually funnily enough, last week I was invited by an old friend of mine to give a talk to a group of sixth-formers who were just leaving school about this sort of subject and I found it quite hard thing to write. 

I was like, well, how's a 17 year old really going to relate to me and well, what can I tell them that it's going to be useful? So when I reflected on my whole career and everything that's happened, not just to me, just to us and the business and everything, I realized that there is this kind of common looping pattern of things working really well, they're well, there's some kind of like macro shake up, a bit of a shock and a bit of a reset and then having to pick yourself up and go again. But actually often what I noticed optimistically speaking is that out of the back of a lot of the challenges and the problems, whether it be macro, whether they be our own screw ups, I mean there've been a few of them as well. It has paved the way for better things always. And there is this sort of, I guess, I dunno what philosophy exactly it would be, but you have to make room, you have to make space for better things to happen. And sometimes that space is forcibly, forcibly pushed on you and sometimes you have to make some hard decisions and everything looks much more straightforward looking backwards. But when you're facing those decisions it can be pretty daunting. But yeah, there's been a huge amount and ScreenCloud certainly had a few of them. 

And I think from my point of view, the failure point is a really good point to start with here. 95% startups can fail. There's stats around 95% of digital products in the first year. Even things like digital transformation, they can fail as well. It's a painful experience for the people especially. Yeah, I suppose you've gone through that numerous times in different ways, but actually with ScreenCloud you come out with it with a success story and I would love to hear about the kind of key decisions you made as the leader or one of the founders to get you to where you are today. 

Yeah, well I can't take credit for everything just although maybe I can, the only one in the podcast today, but no very much kind of credit goes to my other co-founders and my team as well in some of the good decisions. And I'll take the blame for the bad ones. That's what a good CEO is supposed to do, credit the team and then take the shit. But basically I think where we did well in ScreenCloud where we maybe previously haven't done as well was what I call surfing waves. So that if there's a momentum wave going, now the thing about surfing a wave is even it might fairly easy to spot away, but it's actually not easy to time one. So even if you spot it, you could still screw it up by going too early or too late. So it's kind of a dual thing. 

You've got to see the wave, then you've got time hitting it exactly the right point. And actually going too early is probably worse than going too late because it's very, very painful waiting for the market to catch up with you. You spend a lot of money trying to do that. So back in the day when we started, what we noticed was there was a big change going on in consumer screen hardware. So the screens that you would use at home, mainly driven by the streaming services, effectively saying to the TV screen manufacturers like Samsung, LG, et cetera, your smart TVs just aren't smart enough. They don't run web content or web applications well enough. So we are going to basically build our own little dongles to stick in the side and bypass your crappy OSs. So things like Amazon Fire TV and Google Chromecast where we're becoming really popular now, the idea this is Luke's idea really was, could we leverage this kind of home technology for a business use case because one people understood it, they were using it at home, and two, it's extremely affordable and accessible so you didn't have to suddenly go through this old school reseller channels to try and actually buy this stuff. 

So by basically the kind of main promise was, well if we can make it work, then what we're really saying to people is, look, if it can withstand your Netflix binge, then it can probably work at work too. And most people were like, yeah, that's right. So you know, got past this idea of consumer tech is not good enough for business. And I think that that ship sailed long ago. I mean, think of iPhones, they're basically consumer tech agreed now comfortably usable for business broadly mostly usable business as a dominant device. So that wave was really powerful. And then the incumbents, they didn't surf that wave because they had the innovator's dilemma I suppose you'd call it, which is, well we make really high margin on these professional devices. If we've acknowledge that you can work on that, then we are kind of undercutting ourselves massively and this is where we're making our cash. So it gave us a space to evolve. Our product was very basic really to begin with, and it had a couple of key features that people liked. 

It was real time and it was just also quite nicely designed. We brought a lot of the UX and UI influence of the web and mobile over to a category that hadn't really had a lot of software love. So they liked what they saw, they could see the promise there, and then they really liked that we kind of smashed the CapEx down to very affordable and that was really what got us started. So that was kind of the wave one. But then inevitably those waves, they hit the beach and normally in the form of when other people see what you're doing and they see it being successful, they will also kind of either basically copy it. I mean you see that in social media right now Threads is just a total copy of Twitter just because it's like, all right, that works, let's just do it and let's just have a bigger distribution potentially. 

So other people will come in and you lose what you know, get to surf it for a while, but you, you're kidding yourself if this is going to be it forever, it doesn't work like that, especially if it is relatively copyable, which most software is, and software isn't typically really moat, but other things can be. So the second wave that we've been hitting is kind of more towards this insight that we got really through Covid, which was screens are quite well used in the commercial space, but they're really not very well used in places of work. And if you are a desk list or frontline worker, so someone who doesn't work on a laptop or have an email address or access to a lot of the comms channels that we use every day, they're basically digitally detached. They're in the dark. So the screen is actually the natural interface for digital content to be seen in that environment. 

If you just to ScreenCloud aside and just say what's the most natural digital interface for this environment? I think a TV screen is genuinely it rather than anything else like a shared computer in the corner or whatever. So suddenly you've got this opportunity and then no one really doing it very well. So that's kind of where we're really pushing as our second wave. And that's also powered by things like the Re-industrialization of America back from China and things like there's a Great Resignation was another part of this where it was actually hard to fill these jobs. So you've got these big kind of macro things and you've got to attach to those and surf away, but also acknowledge that there's more ways to come if I haven't overstretch that analogy too far. 

I love it though. And I think you touched on something really important and I think around product-market fit, and it's something I spend a lot of time at doing from the kind strategy point of view, it's like a great product is software and technology, but it's about knowing who it's for, the price point, how you bring that to market. And it sounds like with ScreenCloud you brought that to the market, the right price point to get away that enterprise oversell and find a niche and that kind maybe SME, SMB. 

Yeah, SMB. Yeah, well funnily enough actually, yeah, so we were the low price entry and now there are other sort of copies of ScreenCloud which are now coming in half the price and they hang on the brand terms and it's kind of annoying. Yeah, so there is a bit of a race to the bottom, but I think the smart thing here was that whilst we were on, I mean if you are familiar with the kind of SaaS terminology, the very best SaaS companies when they kind of start to generate revenue, they do the triple, triple, double, double, that's a so tripling in revenue annually, tripling and then doubling and doubling and that is kind of like that's the gold standard for doing SaaS really, really well. And we were on that trajectory pre-Covid, but we actually took the bold decision is whilst we were even tripling in size to actually start rebuilding our whole platform to anticipate the needs of enterprise, knowing that probably the defensive moat around the SMB was going to end up being a race to the bottom on price once they caught up a bit. 

So we kind of got ahead of ourselves and thankfully we did do that. So yeah, you've got to, product-market fit is almost like it's not a single thing. It's like you have it for a period and then you've got to almost anticipate what it's going to be again. So you've got to, you've both catch current product market fit, but you've also got to have one eye down the road for what are the trends that are coming. And I call it this thing core and explore, and it's how we generate generally divide our kind of design and development product resources basically. So 80% goes on core, which is what you're building now, your roadmap and 20% goes on these experimental down-the-road ideas. And right now one of our biggest products, which is our own operating system for screens itself was an explore idea for a first year, for one year just with a couple of developers on it, just working out the viability and testing it a bit with some customers. That's now one of our core. So it does move explore moves into core, it doesn't always do that. We've had other things which have been dropped and not developed further. But yeah, it's a real fine balance. You do feel a bit bipolar sometimes of, but if you put them in those two buckets it kind of helps you think about it. 

Yeah, for sure. I mean I love what you're saying there about actually using discovery to just validate an idea, test it, see if it works before you get to that production or call, is such a smarter way of doing it. And I guess risk, not risk-free, but de-risk it a lot 

Yeah, there will be throwaway products which don't ever really make it, but comparatively it's a relatively low amount of wastage. If you take a cooking analogy, there's always going to be some wastage as you are, you're preparing meal, right? Yes. And I think it's very important to do that and obviously you want to have a reasonable hit rate and not just be exploring really crazy ideas, but a lot of those ideas, they don't come from ideation sessions. They slap you, slap you in the face usually from problems or from customer problems and feedback. And in fact the reason for building our own operating system is just something that in the beginning I would've thought, oh my god, that would be a crazy thing to do. That's way too much for us. Why don't we just use the existing operating systems? Well you have to learn by using those existing operating systems and realizing their faults and their issues. 

And the only real way to overcome it is effectively to do it yourself at certain scale. And actually there after a particularly bad outage, we experienced on one of the platforms where we were really on our knees for about five days and we had no way of really getting any leverage with, it was on the Amazon Fire platform. It wasn't Amazon's fault, but it was, we had no relationship proper relationship going there. We were completely stuck for five days and we thought this could be a real terminal blow. Thankfully, we didn't. But that prompted that exploration of this is just too much risk and if you're building too much on someone else's platform and they're not really engaged on it, then you are really open to so much risk and actually the risk of building yourself suddenly looks much, much less. 

Yeah, I totally agree. And I suppose with that mindset, I guess when you're going through that kind of early stage discovery ideation, how important it is a UX to a product that's on a global scale. And I know from your history you have had an UX agency, so you might have a bit of a insight on that, but for the listeners, how important is that UX kind of story in their product development? 

Well, I have this little phrase, which the best UX is no UX. And what I mean by that is the more invisible the experience feels, the more you can remove and anticipate the better the experience. And I think that's one of where ScreenCloud has been really good. So one of the UX principles was minimal buttons. If you're editing a title, just click on the title and edit it and then press return or whatever and click off it. And it saves rather than have loads of extra kind of cancel, approve, you know, still got buttons there, but buttons do key things and everything else is just drag and drop and kind of click. And it removes everyday workflow, which is what creates the delight in the experience of a product you are using every single day to update content. You'll appreciate those kind of little smoothouts in the workflow, that intuitive kind of anticipatory nature of the UX. So I think that was extremely important. That's something that people, that wasn't in a lot of the legacy systems, it was just buttons everywhere, click, click, click, click, click and that's fine for one round, but often you're maybe uploading and configuring 20 pieces of content at a time that's going to get really laborious. So minimal UI I suppose created the best UX is probably the best way of doing that. 

And I think the other thing was this delight moment that we created, and I've got to credit Luke, my CTO, co-founder for this one. I didn't think, look, the industry norm was that screens would update maybe after five or 15 minutes once you'd updated them and they would eventually the whole system would update. And so that was a history, an industry norm and I wasn't that compelled to change that, but for Luke it was really important to him that when you made an update, the screen updated almost immediately. So he used a Firebase at the time as kind of relatively new technology from Google as this real-time database. And I was like, I thought it was a bit of a gimmick if I'm honest, but customers just loved it. And what I hadn't anticipated was that they're on their laptop, they make a change, and then this test screen, which is probably in the same room as them immediately updates and it's that thought that this is fired up to the cloud back down to the screen and within a couple of seconds or less this real time magic, it feels like magic at your fingertips. 

And that created a moment which just once a customer had seen that I knew I'd closed them and that was Luke's insistence that real time mattered. And honestly he couldn't have been more right. So I think sometimes, so my point really here is that often we think of UX as being wireframes and all that kind of stuff, but actually I emphasize the experience and experience is those magic moments. It's that anticipation, it's that removal of unnecessary steps, which I suppose is more wireframing, but it's not just how it looks and feels is kind of my word emphasize. And if you can create magic in a trial, then you will close customers. 

Love it, great magic done. Yeah, it's that easy, right. I've become a magician. 

In terms of customers in general, how important is customer feedback to you as well? Because I must imagine it's a damning thing at times, but ultimately necessity to create great B2C products. 

Absolutely, yeah, I think there's interesting, I saw an interesting tweet the other day which said the days of ship your first crappy embarrassing product to over. And I sort of agree, I kind of think that actually no one really should ship anything truly embarrassing. And I think the tolerance for terrible first versions is pretty low because low, I mean really life's too short to just be testing out terrible products and have them kind of fail on you. So I think that was a bit of an old trope, but how I think it really should be at the moment is that you should probably hang your first product on a couple of these key philosophies. So what I was talking about, it works in consumer hardware, it's really nice and intuitive in interface and it has this real time magic moment. And then to be honest, the fact it had didn't support vertical screens, didn't support zones, it was only full screen and all of that other stuff, which was kind of table stakes, didn't even work offline originally, which is quite important in that environment. 

But all of that stuff was like to be added and people were fine with that because they could see that your product philosophy stood out as something slightly different. So that bought you the time at that point. Apart from them saying you need to do the table stakes of work, which everyone just kind of usually intuitively knows, then you start getting that feedback loop. And some people can be a bit harsh, especially if they're more like akin, they're kind of some kind of old relationship to the incumbent, they generally will be a bit mocking probably. But to be honest, that's probably not the market you're really going after. You're probably going after a new segment or a segment that's pissed off with them for whatever reason. So their feedback matters. And actually people I think are very respectful in that and you can't hang it too much on one person's opinion obviously, but it's not long before maybe after even four or five chats you start to feel the themes come out. 

And actually recently I felt like especially during the Covid years, we lost a bit of that feedback. We were really just getting more of the bug feedback from support, which again can really bias you towards the people that email support are either the ones experiencing problems and you've got to sort those out or quite often they're trying to push the product roadmap in a way that really suits them. You are much better off actually getting out into people who aren't going to necessarily just contact support and just witness it. And I think in Covid that was really challenging and I think that we lost our way a bit there with what really mattered. And then more recently now I've been able to get back out on the road. I'm spending a lot more time personally and so is our success team and product team in those custom environments. 

And that's where you really start to pick things up, not just from the feedback they give you in the meetings and walking around, but in actually witnessing it. And especially for us, our end user is not someone who's our customer. So people who see the screens aren't people that are buying the licenses to run the screens. Our customer is really IT, internal comms, operations, HR that kind, the communicators who are more like in the corporate office, our end users are those desks workers and frontline workers and we rarely get to speak to them. So it's really interesting for us to be there. So getting out into the real world in into the environment, not just waiting for support tickets to be your customer feedback is super important and everything is easier. It just becomes more clear what really matters and what doesn't. Whereas actually I think in the Covid years we had so many product ideas it was like where to focus. Yeah, yeah, it's quite challenging. 

It's interesting. And I think where I come in with things like strategy and product strategy mainly, I might be biased here because I spend a lot of my time guiding companies trying to chart the way ahead. How important is it with product strategy to have that roadmap, that clarity, and in many ways like a guiding principles that are combining research validation, the business needs and the market needs. I think that's something most companies don't necessarily look at when you think tech, they think we're going to build something, launch it, and it's great. My sensibility is always the other way round. You kind of need that strategy first to know where you're going and de-risk it on the way. How do you feel about that from a SaaS CEO of many years? 

Yeah, I think it's going to all sound a little bit contradictory some of this stuff. So because it is basically you, you're sort of sailing through a fairly kind of narrow street, of getting this successfully right, where you have to have a vision, you have to have a sense of what you are trying to achieve and why that's different. And there was obviously something that drew you towards this and if that honestly was oh, they're making money so I could just do a cheaper version, then that's not a great strategy, but it will work to some degree. So yeah, I mean it's not the most appealing one. 

So you need to have identified something there which you feel is unique, which obviously others maybe have not seen for whatever reason. Maybe they've seen it and they tried it and it didn't work, that is also one outcome, but maybe they just, you know, are coming at it with a different lens. So in our case, I think that it was very interesting. I was looking at what had been historically a hardware driven industry, which is really digital side is really born out of the audio visual industry. So there's still a latent obsession with hardware and less concern with what goes on that screen, more about the screen itself because that's where this has really evolved from. So suddenly coming into that industry and looking at everything through the lens of a web developer, totally just in its nature, it's a totally different outlook on the same problem. 

You're going to prioritize things that they wouldn't even care about. Now you're going to bounce in the middle because there are hardware considerations you basically learn and bump into. So you're going to find that middle, but in that tension, that's where the creativity comes. So yes, you've got to have that initial strategy, but then it has to be adaptable. I'll give you an example. So almost slightly contradicting what I just said about the web developer thing. When we launched our first version, I was into the final bit of testing and I realized I hadn't tested the CMS product we'd built on a mobile and I went on it and it was a disaster. It looked, it just didn't work, it was just terrible. Now in 2015, going into 2016, launching as someone who's claims to be a pretty decent web developer, web products for it not to work on a mobile is sort of humiliation. 

And so I quickly got the team just to make a view that when it got down to the mobile view, it just said not optimize for mobile but it will be soon. And I was thinking, oh my god, I'm going to be torn to shreds. You know what, no one cared. No one ever cared. And actually that version of that product never worked on mobile. And it wasn't until we re-released our new version, that enterprise version in 20 January, 2020, that's the first CMS optimized mobile experience we ever built. So for four years it never happened. Now occasionally a customer would be like WTF, but very, very occasionally one guy on Twitter sort of flamed us for it. He wasn't even a customer though. So who Caress and the marketing website worked on my well, but the product didn't. And it's because basically everyone does the CMS content from a desktop or laptop just, but for me that would've been the biggest priority except no one cared. 

But they really cared about other things like working offline, be able to zone up the screen vertical support, but they cared about actually important stuff and they just didn't care about this. And I thought that was really interesting. So my strategy would've been this has to be the finest web developed product because we are the finest web developers in this industry, in this category. And yet the thing that I probably would've thought was super important, there would've been quite a lot of effort to optimize. No one gave a shit. Sorry, I'm not sure if I'm supposed to swear I'm not allowed to swear. Yeah, but no one cared. No one cared. No one cared. Yeah. 

I love the fact that the one troll on Twitter did care with no relation to the product. 

No, no, no, no, exactly. It was just, again, signal and noise. And that's why it is important where we probably most of the noise comes from your own head and your own team. But actually really it's about really knowing, and I kind of say this thing, you got to understand, you got to understand the reality of your customers rather than project your own opinions onto them. And quite often I think this is probably a challenge when you're doing strategy sessions, we have such entrenched views about what does and doesn't matter that we try and project them too much and go, no, no, this is the right way. Actually quite often it just isn't. We waste so much time on stuff that just doesn't matter. So yeah, the short answer to your question is you've got to have that strategy, that vision and plan, but it has to be loose enough to admit when you're wrong and to deprioritize things, which just don't matter. But you have to still stand a little bit. So it's a bit of an on the fence answer, but that's why it's so hard. 

But I think that's true. And I think when we look at product strategy, we look at it as a guiding principle. It is about you say it is time to get things done and decided quickly to maybe align teams around what is it isn't important. And like you say, no one thinks your products is as important as you because your products and it's your maybe you birthed into the world. And I find from strategy, bringing that to a different team of people is a great way to unlock and facilitate disagreement. What matters, what doesn't matter what the audience thinks. And I guess what we've done in the past for Infinum side is put a strategist at the start of the project throughout that journey and then multiple check-ins just to really reality check with the founders, C-Suite team, where is it going? Does it matter? Is it aligned to your business expectations? I think that is a strong way to help with SaaS or any other type of business, if I'm really honest. 

Yeah, actually reminds me of, well something someone once said to me, I was recently doing some interviews for chair roles for our board, so obviously quite wise and experienced individuals and I mean this one guy said, he goes, you've got to differentiate strategy and plans. Strategy rarely changes and plans change all the time. And this is kind of how you can get around this sort of slightly at odds issue of have this clear strategy but change all the time. And it's by putting them into those two buckets. Because broadly if you think our first strategy was to be direct to customer, working on consumer hardware, super intuitive to use modern web experience like that strategy basically didn't really change. And then the plans of what we would then do changed radically such as mobile support or whatever and things like that. So actually you could almost separate it like that and say like strategy's big, bold, strong vision really only changes when the facts seriously change. And then plans are really these sort of short iterative things that you create to work against that strategy. But they can change all the time as and when feedback happens, shifts in the market, whatever it might be. And maybe that's an easier way of coming to peace with it. 

I love that idea. And if I was a first time entrepreneur looking to deliver digital products or dare I say a digital product studio or just a SaaS product, in your kind of wisdom and final thoughts to bring this to a nice collective wrap up, what would be your advice to that person? 

So is this someone actually trying to their own team or find a team to work with to help build their product? 

That's a good question. So let's say they are going to find a team to build their first digital product to bring some kind of value to their customers. 

Right. Well I've got to experience of being on being that team, the team that would build the first version for quite a few years, this is what we did. And there was a really, really obvious difference between the times that it worked and the times that it didn't work and it really came down to trust. So I think when you go out to market and you look for a team, yeah, obviously you've got to do all of the various amounts of due diligence on their work, their clients references, who the team actually is, levels of experience la la la, do all of the stuff you would do even if you were doing it for a house renovation or something. But once you have committed to that team, that's when you need to stop being really effectively part of that team. You need to trust that team, you need to listen to them, you need to guide them and become more of the product owner. 

And the product owner is really kind of what I try and do internally at ScreenCloud is occasionally I will dictate features, but it's quite rare. But mainly I feel like I represent the customer internally. So I think this person would represent not just the customer but their vision and for what they're trying to do and just keep making sure that all decisions are being made against that reality and that that is going to work much better than what normally people do is they panic and then become micromanagers and start asking for change that button, do that and even start drawing it themselves. That just destroys trust. It destroys, I mean to be honest, you're probably not very good at it anyway. We might have some good ideas, but the reality is it's going to be really messy. So go in and if you want to do all of that really detailed kind of deep dives on the team, do that before you appoint them. 

But once you appoint them, you got to switch that completely and go, right, my job is to be out talking to as many potential customers as possible, gathering as much intel from the market, the positioning, what we're going to do and make sure that that team is working against that honestly. But then also giving them the autonomy to do their best work because people who get into this game do it for the love of building and for the love of creating. And if you stifle that, you just suck the oxygen out the room. And I know it's scary because often that will be your life savings, your friends and family money, your credit cards or whatever that's paying for it. But you've got to get over that, otherwise you're going to have a fail on your hands. 

It's a very poignant and good way to kind of wrap this up. It's protect creativity, let the creative and the experts deliver the product or the service you are hiring 'em to do. And I think most of all, just thank you for sharing your kind of wealth of experience. I appreciate you for being honest about the whole thing. Ups and downs and bits in the middle. 

Pleasure. No, and thank you for having me on and hope there was some useful nuggets for the audience. 

Great, thank Thanks Mark. Thank you. Great. Have a good day. Thanks man. Bye.