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‍[00:00:00] Colin Keeley: Hello, and welcome back. This is Colin Keeley. Here

[00:00:03] Brent Sanders: I'm Brett Sanders

[00:00:05] Colin Keeley: we are two guys buying and building wonderful internet company.

[00:00:09] Brent Sanders: we're changing the name of the podcast. That's the

[00:00:12] Colin Keeley: the acquisitions. Yeah. no longer, we got a bunch of questions or I was getting a lot of questions around like, you guys still focused on creators at all. It's like, not really, like that was kind of a legacy name and we don't have an enormous following yet. So I figured it'd be better to rebrand around something that we're actually talking about.

So indie acquisitions.

[00:00:31] Brent Sanders: I like it. I like the indie part of it. That was the, some of the other names were, I mean, it's hard to name things in general, but like the indie part of it feels hardcore feels like, it feels like we're still, uh, you know, grassroots, which I feel is accurate. You know, that's how I feel about this is like, we're not, you know, a big PE firm or even like a traditional one by any means.

It's, it's very unorthodox. Or at least I'd like to think so.

[00:00:57] Colin Keeley: Yeah. I feel like it's approachable, like acquisitions and mergers and acquisitions. Like that's all, it seems so.

intimidating. And like building empires and corporate raters in India is just like, Hey, you know, other people can do this. It's not like there's words that maybe people don't know. And you know, I'm trying to make it more approachable in my course.

And people could do that, but I think indie encapsulates what we're doing.

[00:01:19] Brent Sanders: Yeah. So I feel like moving forward, got to update everything. I mean, like I said, it's not like we have a huge following, they'll figure it out. but yeah, it, it'll be interesting to see if we start creating again and then we're going to have to balance that because it's like we we've been talking about, Over the last, what year of just like this mix of cashflow versus, uh, investment or, you know, these acquisitions in balancing those two things.

So I wonder if there will be like a pendulum that kind of crosses back and then we start right. When we change the name, we're going to start creating stuff again. I, we, we vowed not to, right?

[00:01:58] Colin Keeley: Yeah. Yeah, I like so creators is mostly like putting content out there and it made sense that we had an audio course business that We're focused on. I want to get back to it. I feel like this year I kind of fell off. Maybe we were working on a couple acquisitions and I just wasn't tweeting. We weren't really podcasting.

I want to get back to it. I feel like once you take time off Twitter, like your distribution just gets crushed. So you don't really lose followers, but Twitter doesn't prioritize your content as much, or it doesn't like distributed. So I was going to next week, like get back to posting things, you know, once a day or a couple of times a week or something like that.

[00:02:36] Brent Sanders: Got it. Yeah. You know, I've had that like urge to, Yeah, better at Twitter. I'll be honest. Like I'm a lurker. Like I read it every now and then, but, uh, yeah, it's you're right. It's a ton of you can't do it. Half-ass you can't do like throw a equip out there once a month and expect anybody to, to see it.

Like, you need to be thoughtful about it. basically have a depth of content that you're distributing. I that's what what's attracting.

[00:03:08] Colin Keeley: Yeah. I feel like Twitter just punished me for taking time off, like, active engagement for the last week or two weeks or something. It must be a criteria. Definitely hurts. And I'm like, feel like I'm starting from a lower point. I also find it just, it's really hard to get back into tweeting once you've like taken time off.

Like once you're in the habit of just firing things off as they come through your head, it's easier to write, but if you don't do it, it's like, I don't even know what am I going to write? What am going to write this thread on? I don't have any ideas.

[00:03:34] Brent Sanders: There you go. Now, now, you know how I feel? I feel, I feel heard. Yeah, it's just not a priority for me right now, but maybe one day, I mean, there is a cool aspect of connecting with people that is encouraging, but I just, I I'll come across a post that pisses me off or bothers me, or like, you know, it's just a backwards place.

It's, it's kind of a dumpster fire. So on that note this week, Elon Musk offered to buy it. He put up, uh, what was the, the bid 41 40 40 something.

[00:04:08] Colin Keeley: Yeah, I don't have it in front of me. 43 ish billion. I think it was like a 30% premium over the current price. but yeah, so Twitter for basically its entire life has been pretty horrible at being a business and just like super powerful as like a product and like public good for the world. it's always been called, I think Zuckerberg said at first a clown car that fell into a gold mine. And that's just such a good description of like, they immediately hit on product market fit and basically didn't improve or touch the product for like 15 years. Like they just worked on stability of keeping things up and running.

[00:04:45] Brent Sanders: Yeah, because it used to shit the bed all the time. And remember the fail well days. And that was like 2006 or something, 2007. I remember. You had that really goofy, the goofy logo and the whale that was, you know, getting, it was showed up a lot. And then they did a major change. They basically implemented some serious scaling changes that, you know, got them to the point that they're on now.

on the engineering side is a hot button issue. It also on the product side, is this, this why isn't there an edit button? And I think that's directly related to why you don't see the fail well is often is like allowing you to, they built a distribution network for, for messages that incredibly complex and high performance to the point where it works, where, you know, presidents and global leaders use it and their messages get out in real time.

Right. And having this, this edit feature that people think, oh, why don't you just, just add the button, put it on the page. It's like, holy shit. How do you then go back through that distribution network and update it? You know, you can delete tweets. So maybe it's just that maybe you can, you know, delete and repost.

This idea that it's within a timeline, it's like trying to rewrite a blockchain, right? It's a, it's like a link list where, you know, it's hard to reorder. So that's the one thing that he's said that I'm like, oh my God, this is the next, you know, self-driving is going to be out or, but it's, it's cool to see that he, he made this offer and I think you would probably improve the product.

I dunno. I can only get better.

[00:06:21] Colin Keeley: Yeah, I don't see how you can't improve it. Like, I mean, their way they make money is their ad products like selling ads and I've used that and I've tried to give them more money. It's the hardest thing in the world to use.

[00:06:34] Brent Sanders: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:06:35] Colin Keeley: it's just impossible. It's crazy that like, this is one core job and they failed so badly at it.

[00:06:42] Brent Sanders: I think it's, you know, so that the criticisms that you see on this platform or around the platform is like the censorship of it or the moderation of it, which is laughable because the scale like you just can't, you need people to do it. You can't build AI that does it. You know, you can't code those things.

When the nuances of speech are involved, like machine learning. it's not that good at scale. You can do it and train it and it can catch maybe some people, but it's going to catch some people that inadvertently get caught up in the, in the censorship, which I think, I really think that's just what the product has been focused on and which is why.

You know, it's a free website that you can go to and talk to anybody. If it's truly remarkable, remarkable, that is still continued to be free and scale to the point that it has. Cause you see like, come on you, you see Donald Trump started his own thing and there was Gavin, there was, there was one other one that, that everyone's going to run to because they were, uh, the right-wingers were getting, uh, You know, muted, or I forget what they call that, where it's like, they're basically getting silenced or deep platform of some sort.

And so, but all these other competitors are popped up and they all fail miserably because they run into the same scaling issues or they were under engineer. I mean, it's, I think they've emphasized a like, Hey, we're just going to build this amazing machine. And now someone's going to come around and monetize it.

But I don't know if it's that simple, cause I think. The beauty of it is this like global broadcast, that ability to broadcast out quickly in real time to everybody. It's just amazing how it's done. And, uh, yeah, that, that's, it's, it's true calling this idea that, , you throw subscriptions on it. I don't, I don't know.

Like I could totally see people wanting to promote content and that also degrading the product. Like, you know, you can pay right now to promote your posts. It does degrade the experience. I get promoted shit in my feet all the time. It's like some guy Hocking, some alternative investments and it's just like, Ugh.

So if you're going to go down that path is I wonder where you go with subscriptions.

[00:08:55] Colin Keeley: Well, I think you could do an ad product. I mean, the targeting is just a Bismal. They have so much information targeting could be a million times better. Like I think you could easily fire most people at Twitter, 90% of people and not lose a lot. And then just bring over people from Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat, or ticktack like every other major social network is just run laps around them and just steal like exactly how their ad platforms.

, I don't think it's crazy to think that this could be significantly more profitable. So that's on the advertising front. I also think you could charge, you know, people like me or people a lot more popular than me on Twitter, like a premium, you can charge a hundred dollars a month for some pro features.

And a lot of people would be really happy to pay for them. ,

[00:09:36] Brent Sanders: Yeah. Like a,

[00:09:37] Colin Keeley: thing is like, messages are just not very good.

[00:09:40] Brent Sanders: yeah, well like a sales navigator, right? Like, uh, give me a search interface. I will literally pay you a hundred. I mean, think of it for like lead generation too. It's like, it can be a very, very, very useful tool. , but the interface in API is, or, you know, however you have to do it. You have to do in a very low level.

, w where right now, and it's like, I feel like LinkedIn did a great job at that. It's like, Hey, we know people want to use this for cold emailing and outreach, and like, we're gonna embrace it and have them pay us. And, you know, you get access to some of these goofy features, but there are ways that you can be spending hundreds.

If not thousands of dollars a month on LinkedIn, people will gladly give you money.

[00:10:22] Colin Keeley: Yeah.

these networks. So that's always the joke of, well, we'll just start your own platform. Like almost no amount of money. It would make that, you know, you could overpower the network effects of Twitter or LinkedIn. Like LinkedIn is a horrible product. , but no one's ever going to dethrone it, at least not for a while.

Like everyone's just on there, the network effects and too powerful. It's too valuable to use. Cause everyone's already there. , my other like off the wall, So if I was Ilan and bought this, I would bring back vine and I would make it a pixel for pixel copy of ticktack like exactly down to everything and launch it as a separate product, a separate app called vine.

And then I would, lobby the U S government is hard as possible spend, like, know, as much money as you can to get tic-tac bat for it's like China connection. I don't know why no one has done that yet. I think that's just like such a no brainer. take the access to a beautiful product. It feels like it's taken over everything, but it probably, or definitely shouldn't exist in us because we can't have our apps in China.

So it would just be fair that way.

[00:11:21] Brent Sanders: Yeah. You know, I loved vine. I don't know if you remember that back in the day, but yeah, I think that somebody needs to bring vine back, just revive it and cause it, it was, I mean, Tik TOK is its own thing and it has its own algorithms. I'll be honest. I haven't spent a whole lot of time just out of fear that like I will succumb to it and just.

You know, everybody that I hear that has like the first experience with it is like hours into it. And it's just like a total suck.

[00:11:49] Colin Keeley: Oh, it's Yeah. Well, way too. Well done, way too addicting. So I downloaded for like a day and deleted, I haven't had it on my phone in like six months, but if you want to see like a very, very well done product, that's probably the best one out there.

[00:12:01] Brent Sanders: Yeah. So cool. You know, Elan's going to, , take over Twitter. What else do you see on.

[00:12:08] Colin Keeley: so the other kind of interesting thing in our space, , so around two years ago, bare metrics is like was the famous indie product made by Josh Pigford. And so it was like a really nice way for. Software founders to look at their analytics. And this was bought by Xenon partners around two years ago, for can't remember it was like four or $5 million.

And Josh has a really nice blog post kind of explaining the whole process and how the deal was structured and everything. And, since then, , so they have just continued to compound done pretty well, but then April 1st they doubled or tripled the prices across the board. And so they went from like, roughly 200,000 MRR to 400,000 MRR basically overnight.

[00:12:55] Brent Sanders: Brilliant.

[00:12:56] Colin Keeley: yeah, it's super interesting. And so the cool thing here is that they're one of the open startups. So all their metrics are public. And so you could see the churn rate and everything in turn was something, it was like 9%, but effectively, , the revenue doubled overnight.

[00:13:13] Brent Sanders: So the revenue doubled. So we're recording it's April 15th. It's good. Friday. It's halfway through the month. They did it on April 1st and just by the numbers, they've doubled revenue. So as of today, it's up 104% average revenue per user is up a hundred, 1%. And the, you know, the run rate as calculated 15 days into it is also, you know, as you'd expect, , User churn, as you mentioned is 6% revenue turns 11%.

The one that strikes me that really tells the tale to me of like, what's going on is the refunds. So the refunds, are up about a hundred percent,

[00:13:48] Colin Keeley: Oh, yeah, that's a good one.

[00:13:50] Brent Sanders: yeah. So, uh, there's also a little bit of an uptick on coupons. So I wonder like the tail there is like, are they couponing fo. Uh, you know, people getting pissed that, you know, maybe they missed as we've raised prices.

You know, sometimes the person that pays the credit card. And reaches out, Hey, I, you know, I didn't know that you guys are doing this. It's like, Hey, we emailed you like over a month ago and sent out multiple notices and they were never received. So the reality of comms and communication around this stuff is super difficult because for a lot of businesses, especially for this type of B2B software, like the end user and the person paying the bill are generally not the same person.

[00:14:30] Colin Keeley: So I looked into how they did it and it was a little slimy. so what they did was they sent an email maybe like two, three months ago saying, Hey, we're updating prices. And if you want to know your new prices, book a 15 minute call with us. So I basically like very few people did that. So a lot of the way a lot of people found out about the price increase was Josh, the former founders tweet that the price increases were happening and people looked in and were like, oh my God, like my, what I'm paying is doubled or tripled from there. And so they did see a bit of a dip because people, because of that tweet, like people saw it, but it seems like overall, I mean, obviously it's enormously successful.

It's still up like a hundred percent.

[00:15:11] Brent Sanders: Yeah. I mean, it just shows the value of this product. So the product, by the way, you don't need it. It's definitely a vitamin. It is a bit of a painkiller, right? It's definitely like, you can. Stripe has, if you're strictly on Stripe, it has like maybe the, the thinnest layer of this for you. We'll tell your MRR to tell you things like turn, this does a little bit, not a little, it does a significantly better job and has a bunch of features on top of that.

So it's like you can run an online business without it and still, you know, know what's going on, but it's a Testament to the value it's providing for folks. So if they're, by the way, these are likely customers that have been on the platform for a couple of years. Right. Like the ones that are, are just not going to turn it.

So it's sticky. It's just proving out that the model is, , , as long as you're continuing to deliver value, you should continuously raise prices.

[00:16:01] Colin Keeley: I think this is probably, if you could ask like, uh, a business owner, one question, like what would happen if you doubled prices overnight? And I think that is such a good way to check. Not whether you're going to do it or not. How much value are you really providing? Like, are you providing that much over the competition that you can double prices.

and people will still pay it like gladly?

, I think it's kind of shocking that the answer seems to be yes here. Cause there are probably five, like ProfitWell is one that comes to mind, like direct competitors to bare metrics. And you think it'd be pretty easy to switch to one of the others, but I don't know. Maybe it's just ingrained in people's like workflow and they're happy to pay it.

[00:16:38] Brent Sanders: Yeah. I mean, there's also to your point, like the, the nature of doing it, might've been a little slimy or maybe like maybe it truly wasn't giving them the benefit of doubt. Maybe it truly is a complex pricing change. And it's like, well, we really need to understand what your needs are. And if you know, we have some flexibility and if you want to talk to us, maybe we can keep your existing price, whatever.

But the other aspect of it is. Understanding that change cost and really pulling on that lever of like, okay, this is going to be an extra, I don't, again, I don't know their price points, like their average revenue. It sounds like it's around 500 a month.

[00:17:16] Colin Keeley: Uh, 2, 2 30 a month, 2 32 a month. Right now it says.

[00:17:21] Brent Sanders: 2 30, 2 a month. Got it. So, you know, the cost for someone to change and, you know, knowing the audience is. If there are companies that are making money online using this tool, they probably factored into, you know, their time or the cost of somebody changing it. And then also having your metrics messed up versus like, all right, we're all making money here.

This is going to take some small margin more. It's like, okay, it's just easier. So just knowing your, your audiences, I think a big part of this, cause I know a handful of businesses that. You changed the price by any amount and it's super sensitive and because the disposition of the end user, for example, in like retail products, it's like changing prices for simple things.

It's, it can be significant. , but for something like this, especially it's an analytics tool. It's, it's sort of a luxury in a sense, like, I don't think people are gonna, if you double or triple the price, I don't think it's that big of a difference, especially because. are so many bigger players. I don't know the space that well, but I would imagine there are bigger players that are just going to cost a lot more, have a setup fee, and it's like, okay, you know, playing against your, your market and just upping the price is generally a, a good, good place to go.

Especially if your business is delivering value, continuing.

[00:18:46] Colin Keeley: Yeah, I wouldn't retract my slimy statement. We actually know the guys at Xenon and I think they're nice guys. They're doing this at a very high level. They're like one of the original software, private equity firms. So I think they're good people. I didn't mean to call them slimy.

[00:18:59] Brent Sanders: Well, it's, it's sort of like the, an anti-pattern, right. It's an anti-pattern at four cancellations, which by the way, like, I, I canceled a DocuSign account the other day and it was like, I had to get on the phone. Okay. And it was literally a 45 minute phone call. Yeah. It was a 45 minute phone call and the gentleman was telling me, and he was very nice, but I don't know.

I just stuck on my headphones and sat there and waited on hold. It took him 45 minutes to cancel the, not even cancel just to downgrade the account. And he was saying, I'm just taking very clear notes on the event now. And like, it made me think that the cancellation wouldn't work. So it's an anti-pattern, it's, it's a thing.

It's a thing people do though. It's sometimes. Due to the product, which is my guests on DocuSign. Is that just a giant legacy hunk of shit? That there is no button for them to downgrade. You have to literally have somebody do it in the database or something awful.

[00:19:54] Colin Keeley: Yeah.

I don't know. I think if you're forceful enough by email, I think he could get out of, I've never have been on the phone to cancel. I would just send, you know, meaner, Armenia emails until they do it for me, probably. , one other thought on this Baremetrics thing. So Yeah, Josh has kind of live-tweeting , this was the former founder as this was all going down and he was like, You want to see people are asking, like, are you bummed?

Like he could have doubled revenue, you know, before selling and sold for twice as much. And he was basically saying no, , because that was like, you know, 90 plus percent of his net worth, and this is kind of a major gamble to take, like just, you know, you don't want to screw up your one huge asset. So it was kind of an example of what, like a win-win situation.

So if you're Xenon, this is one of your many portfolio companies, and you could take this huge risk because the risk reward is clearly worth it for you, but maybe not for an indie developer that hasn't had a big one yet.

[00:20:47] Brent Sanders: Yeah, is, uh, got a lot of flack for his sale price, too, which I found another reason. I was like, fuck Twitter. This is like, it's a bunch of nobody's screaming at this guy. Great outcome. , and the other cool fact, uh, I don't know if it's a Testament to him or his venture capital firm, but like they wrote off his investment.

Let them, I think we talked about this in old podcast, but let them pocket the winnings, which is totally rad for like, you know, for a million bucks. I don't remember the outcome ones, but it was like, they probably. Taking some meaningful amount, maybe a half a million out of his payday, which would have been a huge deal for him, but not a big deal at all.

And I just think about, , that as we talk with founders that have maybe they did one round, but that was like six years ago. And like, will your, will your venture fund just write it off or, cause that for us could mean the difference between like, You know, getting a deal done and not getting a deal done if the VC firm comes back.

And so we did it, we led your seed round or whatever, and we have some meaningful amount cause they only raised once. It's like, , it's an interesting dynamic to see, but yeah, it was a couple of points or one shitty to see the reaction to his like awesome. When, and, but awesome to see that his, his VC firm like played ball.

[00:22:10] Colin Keeley: Yeah, so to give him a shout out. , so he sold for 4 million. He had taken, , 800,000 in investor money from general catalyst and Bessemer. And when this was progressing to a sale general catalyst and Bessemer said, Hey, we'll just write it off to zero. Like you and the team keep up with. And I think it's brilliant.

I think this, I mean, this blog post is still pretty popular. It will live on forever as like general catalyst and Bessemer or super founder-friendly. , so I think is it's really nice of them. And I also think it was a smart business decision on their part to do it.

[00:22:42] Brent Sanders: Yeah, funniest thing is like, you see this guy he's been working on this business forever and he like semi-retired and I think he's got something else already started. It's probably been like what a year, which is again, like he'll be going out and raising money again. And if the. You know, VCs are an option in the future.

It's like, yeah, I'd rather work with them. You know what? You're going to get.

[00:23:08] Colin Keeley: Yeah.

he's actually doing that right now. He's raising money for maybe his new product and this lets them do it from like a basis stability where he feels like he could swing for the fences on his next one after getting this like nice wind under his belt. , and this is like the cool thing about acquisitions.

It's like, you know, this guy worked hard, built something really nice that good asset goes to the next person who continues to grow it. And then he's free to like do his next thing. And that's basically what we're providing people as well.

[00:23:35] Brent Sanders: Yeah. So what is maybe, I think I've seen it in the corner of my eye. It's like a finance.

[00:23:42] Colin Keeley: Yeah. , financial planning, wealth planning. I'm not sure who he's targeting exactly, but.

[00:23:47] Brent Sanders: Himself. That's clearly what he does. He had, he had a SAS business and built analytics for it, and then he got a bunch of money and now he has to build a tool to, to manage. So we just need to put him into any situation that, you know, he's got the pain point and he'll build something for it. That's a good sign.

It's a good founder.

[00:24:06] Colin Keeley: for sure. , yeah. I don't know how he's doing. He's raising publicly. If anyone is interested, you can check it out. It's on a, I don't know how he's doing sexually. It must be on one of the big platforms. It must be like Republic or something, but he's been tweeting about it all week. Uh,

[00:24:23] Brent Sanders: participated in any of those?

[00:24:26] Colin Keeley: no, I,

never have.

I've done angel list deals is like. Nothing on Republic.

[00:24:31] Brent Sanders: how was that?

[00:24:33] Colin Keeley: Super slack angel list is just an amazing product. And everyone I've interacted with over there is great.

[00:24:39] Brent Sanders: Yeah. Yeah. The, the Republic stuff I've participated in like friends or like projects I've worked on putting, put some like token amount, nothing serious, like, um, you know, serious investment, but do it as like a, almost like a better option than go fund me or Kickstarter. But, um, yeah, it was, I'm not really sure.

W if that's always a great reflection on the business, right? It's like, kind of shows how, if that's an elitist attitude or like a VC, , but it seems like a funky thing to do first. Right? If that's your, your first option, then you go out to, to VCs. It's like, I don't know. Some people I have heard people say like, I will, would never do this again with my own money.

Now that I know I could raise even a small amount from, you know, the folks that.

[00:25:29] Colin Keeley: Uh, so it used to be a huge negative signal. Like a, I mean, it basically meant you couldn't raise two normal VCs or angels. So you had to throw it to like the not sophisticated investors for like a hundred dollars here. A hundred. Oh, I was there, but now better and better companies are like, Hey, I wanna carve out one to $5 million in my round and I want to open it up to our users.

So I think Rome. , Gumroad did this, , maybe a few others that were like, they're actually competitive rounds and they could have easily got more money, but they wanted to carve out a little bit and give it back to their users and let them invest the longterm. , so I guess it's becoming less of a negative signal, how it is.

[00:26:08] Brent Sanders: Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. I, I think that's super cool. Especially in the case of things like Rome, where you have like a psychotic deranged user base, just kidding. Uh, but in all seriousness, it's like, those are your die hard. You know, finally somebody has built the thing for them and you know, it's going to be around 30 years from now.

I think you've mentioned this in the past. It's it reminds me of like, you know, old school Linux software or something where it's like, ah, this is the thing, you know, the best texts that are in the world and I'm going to use it forever. And like by or nano or BIM, these things are all, you know, people just love them and they're ergonomic and they work well.

And, you know, eventually they, they kind of. Supersede commercial product. They're just become part of cause. Right? Like eventually Roam, somebody will, you know, fast forwarding 50 years from now. It's not going to be a company I'm assuming maybe it is, but let's say it's just, you know, the, the founding team is no longer doing any more, but like it's still like a pattern or way of doing things that, uh, electronically, you know, you could see people just, okay, we're going to take.

Platform and open source it or whatever. And just seeing like that style of program become its own thing. You know, as I think back to like the mouse pointer, right back in the day, it just becomes ubiquitous with how people, , use things like somebody did invent all of this stuff that we use.

Um, but it eventually just gets absorbed by the larger, you know, computing mindset or whatever mine.

[00:27:43] Colin Keeley: You still use Roam.

[00:27:45] Brent Sanders: I don't know, I don't anymore. I, I would love to, but I actually have, I'm backed down to something awful. And it's just pen and paper, which is totally to range, but it's, I do pen and paper. I have to journal.

I have like the daily note pad. It's like a legal pad. And then I do like my nightly week weekend journals, which is like strategic stuff of like, okay, what do I need to be doing this week, month? And then I review my notes on it. So I go through like a legal pad every two to three weeks,

[00:28:18] Colin Keeley: Do you copy it,

into a digital format ever? Or it's all on paper,

[00:28:23] Brent Sanders: yeah. So, you know, everything goes into my calendar. That's like my operating log. So if it's important, it ends up in my calendar. It's something I'm doing. Like that's the digital results. I'd love to get it all digital. I would tell you like my. I spent so much time in front of the computer that it just, I need to get away from it.

Like, I'll go down to the beach, I'll go down to the water or whatever, and like bring an opiod. And that's the part I like just getting away from my computer.

[00:28:55] Colin Keeley: Yeah, I still use Roam and I love it. I think it's going to be the worst venture investment ever.

[00:29:02] Brent Sanders: Y

[00:29:03] Colin Keeley: I mean, I think they raised it like a $200 million valuation or something absurd. Uh, I just, there aren't that many people like me at our bank. It's the learning curve is like pretty extreme. And if you're like, they're just getting deeper and deeper with like a, a small base of customers.

[00:29:20] Brent Sanders: I love it. I think it's awesome. Yeah.

[00:29:22] Colin Keeley: I love it as well. Um, but there is like obsidian, which is like an open source version. So I just, uh, I think if, I mean, if they try to raise prices too much, people just hopped a little open source and it's, you know, a pretty simple product with a pretty small user base, which is a tough combination for like a hopeful unicorn in the future.

[00:29:42] Brent Sanders: You know, what I think is a better model for this than, than venture capital. I mean, cause yeah, that's, that's not going to be a great, there's just no way that someone's going to buy it for 200 billion, but, and hopefully they prove us wrong, but was, there was a company we looked at once called invoiced ninja and this was a cool platform where they open-sourced the product, but they will host it for you.

And it's a common platform, a common way to do these sort of like community led products where it's. Maybe it starts up in source or you can self host. Um, I could have totally seen it go that way, where they become the open source that you can, you can run, but then you have basically the sponsored version or paid version that they host, or, you know, you can download and use it's it's all getting murky, right?

There's these. Different copyleft licensing. There's all these different ways of kind of distributing and supporting software now. And it's not really thought out yet. So it's like venture is definitely the most, uh, what's the right word for it. It's not necessarily the most lucrative. It's probably the best way to get a bunch of cash in and try to go, you know, what do they call it?

Um, what's that book? Not hyper scaling.

[00:30:54] Colin Keeley: I'll put scaling.

[00:30:56] Brent Sanders: Blitz scaling. Yeah. Like, I don't know that you need to blitz scale room. Like that's appropriate for venture in my mind, but it's like, if you want to just go deep on features and raise some money to support your developer, like team, I think that's probably sufficient.

[00:31:12] Colin Keeley: Yeah.

Uh, I don't, they you'd have to stretch pretty far to see like network effects is something in Rome. Um, I think this is maybe a situation where it's like, you could do a token offering, like in the crypto world or people to buy a present or like, I mean, that's just Republic on the blockchain basically.

So you could go to users and be like, Hey, we want a few million bucks to invest in the product by ourselves. And then from there we could have stability and like be around forever.

[00:31:39] Brent Sanders: Yeah. I want to get that Rome airdrop.

[00:31:41] Colin Keeley: Yeah, I think that would've made more sense, but also that didn't exist, you know, three, four years ago to do that. anything else you want to talk about here?

[00:31:51] Brent Sanders: Nope. Nope. Can't think of anything else we just been, I mean, do we want to, do you want to do an update on the portfolio and acquisitions or should we do that each time we record? Or do you want to keep that private

[00:32:05] Colin Keeley: I don't know how interesting it is to people.

[00:32:09] Brent Sanders: truly? Yeah. Like. I would love to talk about the deals we're seeing what that's not cool. Like we're not, that's not exactly like, it's not cool to do the founders. Some of these things are confidential. So I don't know if we can really talk about live deals

[00:32:24] Colin Keeley: No, we can't talk about live deals. We can talk about, uh, you know, dead deals. I think as long as we keep it vague, or we could bring people on to talk about deals.

that are public, you know, something they came across. I think that'd be Cool. Some other podcasts do something like. I'd like to start having more guests, which had always said like a bunch, but now we've narrowed in on a niche that, , we're more interested in talking about.

So I'd be down to talk to a lot of acquisition folks. , if anyone's listening and noticed a good person, you know, reach out and get them on the podcast.

[00:32:52] Brent Sanders: Cool.

[00:32:55] Colin Keeley: Uh, yeah.

[00:32:56] Brent Sanders: that's it.

[00:32:56] Colin Keeley: that's it. All right. Take care, everyone.

[00:32:58] Brent Sanders: Thanks for listening.

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