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Kirk Simpson's Journey: From Startup Challenges to a $537 Million Exit and Beyond
148 Plays6 months ago
In this episode of Marketing Spark, Mark Evans sits down with Kirk Simpson, co-founder of Wave Accounting, which was sold to H&R Block for $537 million in 2019.
Kirk shares his journey from Wave's early days, detailing the inspiration behind the company and the challenges faced while growing it into a successful business.
Key highlights include:
- Origins of Wave Accounting: Kirk and his co-founder James Lochrie's vision was to simplify financial management for small business owners, inspired by Mint’s innovative approach to personal finance.
- Challenges and Successes: The duo faced initial struggles with funding and market penetration but eventually succeeded through strategic positioning and a fortunate feature in the Google Chrome app store.
- Free Model and Product Development: The advantages and pitfalls of offering a free product and the importance of continuously improving the product to meet user expectations.
- Venture Capital Journey: Insights into raising venture capital, the adrenaline and focus it requires, and the importance of telling a compelling business story.
- Acquisition by H&R Block: The process and emotions involved in the acquisition, including the challenges of transitioning from a startup to an acquired company.
- New Ventures: Kirk's latest entrepreneurial endeavour, GoConfirm, is an identity verification platform to enhance trust in peer-to-peer transactions, particularly in marketplaces like Facebook.
Kirk’s story is a testament to the rollercoaster ride of entrepreneurship, highlighting both the highs and lows and offering valuable lessons for aspiring entrepreneurs.
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Transcript
The Thrills and Challenges of Entrepreneurship
00:00:09
Speaker
It goes without saying that entrepreneurship is an exciting, unpredictable, uneven, and sometimes rewarding experience. Sometimes you're in the right place at the right time with the right product. Sometimes you're the sexy new thing in a market hungry for change. Sometimes you just get lucky. And sometimes you just never know.
Success Stories in Marketing Consultation
00:00:31
Speaker
When I look back at my years as a marketing consultant, I've had conversations with many entrepreneurs who have gone on to have amazing success stories. And I've been lucky enough to help some of them in some way. One of them is Kurt Simpson, who I met in 2009 when he and James Lockrey were developing Way of Accounting. I can distinctly remember having coffee with Kurt and trying to convince him to embrace a different business model.
00:00:57
Speaker
Unfortunately, Kurt ignored my advice. WAVE became a massive success and was purchased by H&R Block in 2019 for $537 million. Amazing. Like many successful entrepreneurs, Kurt has jumped back into the game with GoConfirm, an identity verification platform founded with early WAVE investor, Peter Carasia.
Kurt Simpson's Entrepreneurial Insights
00:01:19
Speaker
And they recently released a new tool that can vet suspicious emails and texts. It's my pleasure to welcome Kurt Simpson to Marketing Spark. Nice to see you again. Nice to talk to you. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
00:01:33
Speaker
Let's go back to those early days, the days when you and I were having coffee talking about wave talking about this new venture that you wanted to get going. If I recall correctly, you were in the sports industry before sports related industry before wave and way with this new idea that you had come with. So take us back to those early days of wave. You know, why did you think that?
WAVE's Marketing Strategies and Challenges
00:01:57
Speaker
the problem that you were tackling needed to be solved. And how did you develop the idea? What was the journey that you took to get away from idea to reality?
00:02:08
Speaker
I think the original idea, all credit goes to James Loughry for because he was working with small business owners at a tax prep firm. And he really saw the disaster state of their financial affairs in general. And also just how much small business owners hate doing all of this stuff and believed that we could put together a better software platform.
00:02:34
Speaker
Both of us were heavily influenced by what Mint was doing in the personal finance space. This was 2009, 2010 was peak Mint. They had come along and really revolutionized personal finance management. And they had this new innovation, which today seems like it has always been, but really wasn't. And that was that users would actually give their username and password to their online bank.
00:03:02
Speaker
so that they could screen scrape those transactions and bring them into the personal finance management tool and make it seamless for customers. And this was a revolutionary concept and they also made it free. And so we looked at that and thought personal finance management seems like something that people love to do until they don't do it anymore.
Product Positioning and Marketing Magic
00:03:25
Speaker
Whereas small business owners have to do it because of tax and for other reasons. And so we thought there was something to it and there we went.
00:03:35
Speaker
Now, if I recall correctly, I was trying to convince you not to do completely free. You embrace the free model, because obviously you'd seen what Wave was doing. Over some of the biggest challenges that you faced, you and James faced in the early days with Wave, new player, established market accounting that you were going into, you were bootstrapped, if I recall correctly, how did you overcome some of those challenges? And how did you start to get momentum for the product?
00:04:03
Speaker
Yeah, James was able to bootstrap us for a little bit and then we put in money as well. But we always knew we needed to raise venture funds and we were trying to get the product and our overall thinking to a place where we could really raise a seed round.
00:04:19
Speaker
2010 at the time when we were raising a seed round was a very different time in the Canadian ecosystem than it is today. So there was really a lot of challenges trying to raise that first seed round, but we persevered probably made a hundred or 200 pitches and started to get that pulled together. But I think to your point and your question, I think the, one of the things that was a big struggle in the early days was how do you spread the word?
00:04:45
Speaker
How do you get customers? That then led to some downstream issues in terms of free is an incredibly, you know, strong marketing tactic, obviously in a market where typically you were buying the software back in those days for a couple hundred dollars or starting to pay 20 bucks a month for it. And so we had a really innovative model, but we needed to spread the word. And that really was the first challenge was how do we do that?
00:05:14
Speaker
challenge many small companies face today, competition is fierce. The barriers to entry and B2B SaaS have almost evaporated with no code or low code, you can get a product up and running. And more so than ever, it's not a matter of building a better mousetrap is actually getting the mice to discover your trap.
Meeting Product Expectations
00:05:35
Speaker
How do you do that? How do you
00:05:39
Speaker
drive the word, how do you get momentum when you're working with minimal marketing budgets, when a lot of your marketing efforts are knocking on doors, grunt work, maybe you get lucky, maybe you get some kind of virality, a media person writes about you, an influencer posts an update. If you were to advise early stage entrepreneurs looking some way to make marketing magic happen, what would you tell them?
00:06:04
Speaker
I brought back to those days. And I would just say like the only lessons I have from it were a couple of things. Number one is I think positioning your product is really important. And I think one of our big insights and unlocks was the realization that a lot of accounting software was really positioned towards accountants and less so small business owners themselves.
00:06:33
Speaker
And so one of our insights was we've really got to figure out how do we talk the language of small business owners? How do we position the product in a way that it can really resonate with small business owners? Our big unlock at that time was a tagline saying shoebox accounting stops now. And for almost every small business owner, they had that visual in their mind of a shoebox.
00:06:58
Speaker
And so it was a really powerful sort of initial tagline to get them in the right headspace and peak their interest. Then it was a matter of, to some of the examples that you said, it's just trying to chase down every avenue, right? We tried PR.
00:07:16
Speaker
We tried, social wasn't very big at the time, so that wasn't really a channel that we could leverage. Friends and family, referrals, everything. But I will say that so much of this, as you will have seen from other companies and referenced in the opener, so much of this is luck. At the time, there was a new product coming out called the Google Chrome App Store.
00:07:39
Speaker
And I'll never forget our developer came to us and said, guys, do I have permission to spend $5 on listing us in the Google Chrome store and spending about two days building an integration, a really lightweight integration. We're like, tell us more about this. He did. We're like, yeah, for sure. Let's give it a shot. We did it. We bumped along for a little bit. And then all of a sudden one April, 20, 2011.
00:08:05
Speaker
Saturday, I woke up, went downstairs, put on the coffee, had young kids at the time, so it was up early. And at the time we were getting an email every time somebody signed up for Wave. I opened up my inbox and it was just littered with emails. And I'm like, what is going on? So I text James and I'm like, what's happening? And we determined that the editor has featured us in the Google Chrome App Store.
00:08:29
Speaker
And suddenly we went from probably fifty signups a day to close to three or four hundred signups a day. So it just goes to show that you've got to hunt down every lead. You've got to try every different thing. You've got to figure out your positioning so that when you do get those breaks, people understand what you're offering and then you just sometimes really just hope for some luck.
00:08:53
Speaker
I guess the other thing is that luck gets you so far, it can get you into the spotlight in the Chrome store, but at the end of the day, the product has to deliver. It has to delight, it has to fulfill the brand promise. And in Wave's case, there was a market ready with a strong appetite for something new, for something different. Wave just met their needs in a way you went. But I always say product is king and you can layer lots of stuff on top of it.
00:09:20
Speaker
I would also add to that that this brought up the downstream issues because to be honest, I think we nailed the positioning so well and got into all of the right places. And then our product didn't live up to the hype. That then brought a new challenge, which was how do we catch up?
00:09:44
Speaker
And how do we ensure that we're delivering enough value for these customers because we're getting tens of thousands a month and a lot are churning. And so the problem with free is that you get a whole bunch of people in the door. It's really helpful to have that kind of volume in terms of your ability to AB tests and make changes to the funnel and see what's working and all of those kinds of things. But it does not overcome product efficiencies.
00:10:11
Speaker
the challenge. I imagine
Venture Capital and Fundraising Advice
00:10:13
Speaker
that must be a very stressful situation where you've got expectations that you're not meeting. You got a dev team that is suddenly under pressure to make the product more user friendly, more valuable. What was that like? What was that like to be in the pressure cooker and having to probably do major changes in a short period of time if you didn't want to lose your momentum?
00:10:37
Speaker
First of all, you realize, and now with GoConfirm and being back at the start of the product market fit journey, you realize, let's be honest, having a lot of demand is a blessing. And so the first thing that you've got to do is just thank your lucky stars. That's the problem you're dealing with and you don't have this miracle product with nobody knocking on your door. So first is to just step back, take a moment and say, thank you for the opportunity.
00:11:04
Speaker
But then the second to your point is not just dev but product and product design and engineering and the entire company. It was really all hands on deck of trying to figure out where were the deficiencies, et cetera. And again, I would double down on the issue with free.
00:11:22
Speaker
is that it is very difficult to separate the real challenges from the noise. What I mean by that is you don't have a credit card. You don't have that payment event every month where there's a churn event that could happen and you can learn from those customers. It's very difficult to determine, especially with small business owners that have a tendency to go in and out of these products based on what else is happening in their life. What is, who's really churned? What are the reasons for those churn?
00:11:52
Speaker
How can we make it better? All of those kinds of things. And I would say it took us until.
00:11:58
Speaker
2015, 2016, where we really started to turn the corner in terms of building a better product because there was fundraising that happened through that mix. You've got to present certain metrics and a vision within that sort of can side swipe the company a little bit too. So it was a real grind to try and figure out how do we make the product better? As an aside, you've talked about Wave being a free product.
00:12:25
Speaker
Can you explain the business model? What drove revenue for WAVE? Obviously, you have to pay the bill somehow. And maybe you can provide listeners with some insight into that. Mint, again, was the inspiration. And what Mint did is they got to about supposedly $10 million a year in revenue. And it was really based on advertising
00:12:46
Speaker
and customization of that advertising against users' data. If you had a certain type of credit card and Mint knew that you could be saving more, getting better cash back rewards, whatever it was, they would then do an affiliate program and offer you a better credit card, et cetera. That's the simplistic way of looking at it. And as I said, they got to about $10 million of revenue
00:13:08
Speaker
Our view in the early days was like small business was much more attractive to advertisers. We had so much more data about those businesses. Small business owners don't have that group buying opportunity that big corporations do. So we thought, oh, this would be really interesting. We probably got it to about a $1.5 million run rate business, the ad business over time. But we quickly realized that was not going to scale. That was not going to pay the bills. And it was not going to lead to the kind of valuation
00:13:37
Speaker
that we were hoping for and also that we were raising money at. And so thankfully, two things happened. One is FinTech became popular. And two is we hired probably outside of the founders, the most important hire we've made in the early days was a guy by the name of Les Whiting. He came to us from
00:13:59
Speaker
the payment processing business. He was an amazing entrepreneur and he helped us get into payments in the very, very early days. We were working with Stripe when they were 30, 40 people. And suddenly we really grabbed those fintech wins. And ultimately when I left the business in 2022,
00:14:21
Speaker
It was public knowledge that we were doing about $100 million of revenue a year. So those financial technology inclusions, whether or not it's payments, payroll, we got into banking, et cetera, became really the tailwinds in the business model for the business. Obviously, I want to talk to you about, go confirm it, a couple of things about Wave that I didn't want to touch upon. One was raising a venture capital. Wave raised a lot of venture capital along the way. Obviously, one of the most successful Canadian startups
00:14:52
Speaker
What was that like? In the early days, you're raising a little bit of capital, and then in the latter stages, you're raising a lot of capital. I suspect a lot of work, a distraction, stressful, exciting. For an entrepreneur, what does that journey feel like? What does it look like?
00:15:08
Speaker
Ironically, I met you for the first time when we had started a business called adventurelifestyle.com, which was webcasting adventure events. A lot of what I had done early on and still like to do is just outdoor adventure events. I say that because
00:15:24
Speaker
Quite frankly, I love adrenaline. And fundraising was really an adrenaline-fueled event. It was all-encompassing. It was thrilling. It was frustrating. It was all of those things. I will say, without going on and on about this, I think the one piece of advice that I give entrepreneurs who have
00:15:49
Speaker
Decided to go down this venture capital train because first the first decision is do i want to go down this path i think people romanticize it people think that all businesses need to do it etc and the absolute answer is that if you can bootstrap if you can drive.
00:16:05
Speaker
the growth of the company through revenue, it's absolutely the better path because you're not suffering the level of dilution. You've got more control over your destiny, all of those kinds of things.
The Acquisition by H&R Block
00:16:17
Speaker
But if you have decided that the business model, and of course, because we were building free software, there was going to be a significant ramp up in cost before there would be revenue, it was clear we needed to go down the VC road.
00:16:29
Speaker
So once you've made that determination, I think the thing that people sometimes get wrong is to view it as a distraction or as this is taking away time and focus from my business, all of those things. At the end of the day, those are true. I get it. But one of the things that I always found was actually it was a real opportunity to get hyper focused and hyper focused on
00:16:58
Speaker
Being able to tell a compelling story about your business means you need to know your business inside and out, need to know what your growth leavers are, and need to be able to tell that story in a really compelling way.
00:17:13
Speaker
And what that makes you do is focus on what is happening in my business. Where are the growth drivers? So you need to understand the business inside and out to be able to explain it properly. And two, you need to be able to paint a vision that is super exciting that somebody's willing to give you tens of millions of dollars. That then comes really in handy when you're trying to recruit people.
00:17:38
Speaker
when you're trying to motivate the people about the vision of the company that are already working within the company. So I think there's all sorts of benefits to the process. And I think it's worth embracing rather than looking at as a necessary evil.
00:17:54
Speaker
Let's fast forward the story a little bit. Companies driving lots of revenue, Canadian success story. You guys as entrepreneurs are basking in the spotlight. If only that was the way that it actually happened. I suspect there was a lot of drawing times along the way. But at some point in time, especially when you've raised venture capital, a liquidity event has to happen. The investors have to get their money back.
00:18:21
Speaker
What was the story? What was the process of being acquired by H&R Block? Were you guys looking to sell? Had you been talking to people? Were you looking to raise another venture round? Walk me through that journey to the point where H&R Block steps up and says, I'm going to give you guys a lot of money. What do you think?
00:18:38
Speaker
I actually go back in time, I think it was 2013, we almost sold to zero. And we were literally done, completely done the negotiation. We were actually literally negotiating my relocation down to San Francisco with my family, all of those kinds of things. And then the rug got pulled at the very last minute.
00:19:01
Speaker
And for any entrepreneur that's gone through that process, that was one of the most challenging times because you start to think about what happens next and you realize there's a lot of challenges in the business and now you're going to hand that over to somebody else and you're going to integrate it and all of those kinds of things. And all of a sudden,
00:19:21
Speaker
It gets pulled and you got to go back and re-engage in the process. And that was really, really challenging. So fast forward to late 2018, early 2019, we're in the middle of a fundraise process. It's going well, but not exceptionally well, maybe not as well as I maybe thought or hoped it would go. But we had the investment lined up on good terms, et cetera.
00:19:50
Speaker
And H&R Block really came in quickly and made it clear to us that they weren't looking at a strategic investment. They were looking at an acquisition. And I tell you between the time that I met the CEO in person, Jeff, incredible leader, and one of the reasons why we did the deal was because of Jeff. I met him in the third week of March and the deal literally fully closed at the end of June.
00:20:20
Speaker
So it was really fast. And for any entrepreneur, there is just not nothing like having options in order to drive parties to move quickly to decisions. And that's really what happened with HRB. That's why it all came together really quickly. How did it feel after the papers were signed and the big number was in front of you? And obviously you and James and all the other investors must have done quite well in the process. Was it?
00:20:49
Speaker
I guess it's a combination of relief and happiness and sadness in some respects because this is your baby that you've grown for 10 years. That's a really interesting question. I think that and you have good insights on it because I think most people think it's just like just pop the champagne and off you go. I would describe several emotions that come with it. The first is obviously an incredible level of
00:21:16
Speaker
satisfaction and excitement and all of those kinds of things and speaking about adrenaline before there's nothing like the adrenaline of negotiating this agreement and then working with the team to get it to close and being unsure whether or not it's gonna close or not and keeping your own mind saying through the process that you've been through this before and it didn't close until the last minute and you're anxious all the way to signature so that's one.
00:21:42
Speaker
The second was a really nuanced thing in that I felt a little bit inauthentic in that I had, you know, really going into 2018 and 2019, I'd spent a lot of time internally in the company explaining and pitching the vision of what wave could be. And then the morning, probably the most stressful morning that I had in this journey was I was walking down, we have an office on Carlaw. I live just north of that.
00:22:11
Speaker
And we had to call an all hands meeting at eight in the morning. And as you can imagine, we never had all hands meeting said eight in the morning, but HRB was going to announce it before market opened. We needed to get everybody together. And I remember waiting, walking down and just feeling incredibly anxious about telling the team that I had decided to, to accept the offer and sell the company. And so that was a really tough moment. The team was incredible. They were.
00:22:40
Speaker
super excited and excited for everybody involved and that kind of stuff. Their reception to that was just amazing, but I was very nervous going into that. And then I will detail that after it closed, so it closed at the end of June, I had a weekend scheduled with friends to celebrate. And the morning that we were about to head off to that celebration, I was crying on my back deck and I couldn't understand why. And.
00:23:07
Speaker
I think it really was a lot of what you described, which is I didn't really know what I was going to do next. I knew that I was, I needed to stick around for a period of time, which was going to be challenging unto itself. But mostly so much of my identity was wrapped up in the company.
00:23:25
Speaker
And I was still in my mid 40s and I was like, have I peaked and what comes next and all of those things. So it's a much more nuanced, emotional roller coaster than I think you think about going into it.
Reflecting on the Entrepreneurial Journey
00:23:39
Speaker
In some respects, it's a weird entrepreneurial midlife crisis. That's exactly right. And also at the same time as a midlife crisis. So it's, it's a double whammy.
00:23:49
Speaker
Entrepreneurship is not easy. It appears to be sexy and exciting and glamorous, but there's a lot of hard times and a lot of work. And after you've been at something for 10 years and you've got the tattoo on your arm, you're drinking the Kool-Aid all the time. And suddenly you got to shift gears and you stuck around wave for, I think, three years. Did the cut over the transition.
00:24:10
Speaker
When did you realize that there was another chapter in the Kurtzense entrepreneurship story? When did you glam on to the idea that I want to do something else. I want to start it all over again. It's not going to be repeat of this wave journey, but it'll be different. It may not be better, but it'll be different. It'll be exciting. It'll get my competitive juices fired up again. Were you actively searching for that next thing or did the next thing come to you? How did you decide that?
00:24:39
Speaker
Go Confirm, which had other names beforehand, was the thing that you wanted to embrace as entrepreneurship version 2.0 or 3.0. How many trips you've done down the road, right? I think the first thing is that B was amazing at saying what you guys are trying to do, the growth rates you're achieving,
00:25:02
Speaker
How you're trying to solve for small businesses, all of that kind of stuff is what we want to keep. We want you folks to essentially run on your own, keep doing what you're doing. We'll support you. Anything we can do together to make it better. Great.
00:25:16
Speaker
but we're going to leave you alone to run with it. And Jeff and I had a great relationship through that process. So those three years were super challenging to stay motivated and to continue to motivate the team. The exec team at Wave pretty much stayed as is through those three years, which is remarkable.
00:25:35
Speaker
and everybody kept grinding and we kept really wanting to push and drive and deliver. We felt a huge sense of obligation that the H&R Block had paid a significant amount for the company and that we were going to deliver. And so we needed to change a bunch of things being an acquired company rather than a startup, but everybody stayed pretty damn well committed to continuing to make WAVE what WAVE was.
00:26:03
Speaker
At some point you realize, okay, at the end of my three years, I'm going to go. And I never, ever thought I was going to start something again. And I'm being a hundred percent honest about that. I like, I thought no chance.
00:26:17
Speaker
Near the end of my time, we started Peter. I've known Peter for a long time. He was an early investor in Wave. He then came over and helped run CorpDev and BizDev and was really instrumental in helping us sell the business. And once the acquisition had closed, et cetera, Peter transitioned out of Wave, but we kept in touch and stayed close. And we really started to talk about
00:26:40
Speaker
passwords and identity and this kind of stuff and just throwing around a lot of what was happening in the market where we thought things were going, etc. And once I was out of wave, it just became clear to me that I really liked the space and that it got the juices flowing in a way that I didn't
00:26:57
Speaker
expect, and that I thought it was a really big market. There was a huge opportunity. And I also was really drawn to something that was in the consumer space rather than in the enterprise small business space. And so again, that kind of got the juices flowing. And then it became clear over the course of that summer, once I had transitioned out of HRB, that we could raise capital pretty easily and at a good valuation. And I thought, let's give it a go.
00:27:26
Speaker
Did you think of, obviously you had enough money from the HRB acquisition to essentially do what you want. Do nothing if you wanted to, travel if you wanted to, spend time with your kids and your family if you wanted to. Did you feel that you need to take some time off? Obviously this idea came along, you got excited about it. You jumped into it. Did you feel in hindsight that maybe you should have stepped away for a bit and, or maybe that wasn't the route that you wanted to go?
00:27:54
Speaker
I took a lot of the summer off. Um, we had some great times as a family and I had some great adventures and all of those kinds of things in hindsight, I probably should have taken a bit more, but I, there's a few things that sort of came into my mind. Number one is I remember Mike Serbinis talking to me about the fact that after Kobo
00:28:15
Speaker
And thinking about what he was going to do next, one of the things that came to mind for him and I really resonated with was, how are my kids going to see me moving forward? Are they going to see me as somebody who's semi-retired playing golf and pick a ball, or are they going to see me as somebody who's.
00:28:32
Speaker
continues to want to learn and grow and evolve and drive and all of those kinds of things and that really stuck with me the second was that like i'm at an age where my kids are still in school it's not like my wife and i can just go off on a whim and within all of those frameworks
Lessons from GoConfirm
00:28:49
Speaker
there is nothing that motivates me more than working with great people on a heart problem. And that is a drug that I experienced at WAVE that is just hard to move away from. It's just being around intelligent, smart, driven, hardworking, people with different perspectives, and to just sit around and try and put that all against a really hard problem is so inspiring.
00:29:17
Speaker
And I think ultimately I just felt like that was something I wanted to do. It's been an interesting last couple of years since you raised, I believe it was six and a half million dollars.
00:29:30
Speaker
Where's GoConfirm at? Last week you introduced a new product that got a lot of media coverage which drew me to your story and this is the reason that we're talking. What's been those two years like and what are some of the lessons that you've applied to GoConfirm from your wave experience?
00:29:49
Speaker
We raised money in the summer of 2022. We started the initial two additional co-founders of the business. Sam and Jason began in October with us to really launch this thing. So it's been about a year and a half. It has been a humbling lesson in product market fit and our drive to find it. I think it's been just as rewarding, if not more so than I would have hoped in terms of working with amazing people who are really motivated to try and make this space work.
00:30:19
Speaker
I think some of the core lessons or things that I was able to do post-wave that have been helpful.
00:30:26
Speaker
Number one is that raising the initial capital was significantly easier than the previous experience with Wave and a lot of our previous investors gave us a vote of confidence and allowed us to raise the money fairly easily. That seed round of six and a half million US is amazing. It's also you want to actively fight against
00:30:52
Speaker
something that a lot of VCs talk about, which is you don't want to be that overfunded startup that doesn't have that intrinsic drive and fear of running out of money as a motivator. We work hard to ensure that stays within the culture of the company, that every hour and day matters on this journey. And then the second is what makes up a startup that we all know is people. And I think
00:31:16
Speaker
Being an entrepreneur that probably a thousand people at some point worked at Wave, you get a very poned instinct for what makes talented early stage startup people. And I think we've been super, super fortunate about that at GoConfirm. Then the last thing I'd say is despite raising that money, one of the things that I learned from Wave is like small teams can often accomplish more.
00:31:45
Speaker
then growing teams there's a lot of reasons for that ensuring alignment within the team is much much easier. Ensuring that you don't get into a state of having to have meetings just to get people line from different departments and this kind of stuff so we kept go confirm it about ten people are mental model is what's happened the.
00:32:07
Speaker
impact that it had with about 60 people. And so there's just a lot of those kinds of lessons that you can take into the second time that is, I think, helpful to try and ensure that you're you can make progress. From a culture
00:32:22
Speaker
perspective. I'm curious about how do you maintain that intimacy and that connection? Are you working together in person on a regular basis? There's a bias these days, especially in software to work remotely to let people do their own thing. As long as the work get done, how do you balance that need for alignment and connection with the new working reality?
00:32:48
Speaker
It's a great question and one that I struggle a little bit with. I grew up in a time where this wasn't the case. It was all in person. And so I don't think I'm the most up-to-date leader in terms of the best practices about driving great culture through more remote or hybrid work environments.
00:33:09
Speaker
To be honest, I often listen to Sam, a co-founder and head of products, a younger guy who's had more experience working in these kinds of environments. To be honest, I listen to a lot of what he and others say about some of the best practices because they don't come naturally to me.
00:33:26
Speaker
That said, I think what I'm really focused on promoting is a couple of key concepts. One is we get together at least every couple of months as a team to spend time with one another, not just at the office, but dinner out and these kinds of things so that we can continue to build those relationships. And second is just an overall culture of hire great people, align them around the visions and values, and then let them drive.
00:33:56
Speaker
and empower them.
00:33:58
Speaker
to have impact. And I think that whether or not remote, hybrid, or in-person, that is to me the key part of the culture that we try
GoConfirm's Mission and Goals
00:34:09
Speaker
and build. It would remiss of you if I didn't ask. You mentioned product market fit. I obviously have to ask you, what problem is GoConfirm solving? And how are you doing it? What's the solution that you are attempting to develop to tackle the problem that you see needs to be addressed?
00:34:27
Speaker
I think on a super 50,000 foot view level, our view is that more and more interactions are happening in the digital world. And that through that, trust is degrading.
00:34:43
Speaker
And so if we look at an area that we're really passionate about right now, which is peer to peer marketplaces, 1.2 billion people a month use Facebook marketplace. It is an incredible top of funnel for selling stuff peer to peer. And yet it is rife with scams.
00:35:03
Speaker
With safety issues etc and i think that's a huge lost opportunity and one of the things that we're working on right now is how do we enable. People to verify one another and therefore have more trust in that interaction and what could actually come out of that.
00:35:22
Speaker
if you had more trust. So an example of that right now that's top of mind is Taylor Swift tickets. That whole secondary market is so rife with scams.
00:35:34
Speaker
And you either have one of two choices. You can pay the really exorbitant secondhand ticket fee from one of the sellers, or you can take your chances with a marketplace and really hope that you're not one of the people who get scammed. And we think that there should be a third choice, which is
00:35:53
Speaker
verification, and the enablement that can open up to do more commerce with people that you feel comfortable doing commerce with. And that's really what we're trying to do. How we do it is through identity verification, and then the ability for someone to control that identity on their own phone and use it in peer to peer transactions to bring more trust. So if someone wanted to embrace the GoConfirm platform right now, what do they do? Is it open to the public? Can I sign up right now?
00:36:23
Speaker
It's on a wait list right now and we'll open that up over the next two to three weeks. So what does the next six to 12 months look like for a go from firm? Like where do you see yourself a year from now? What we have to do is convert the anxiety and the stress that we all have when doing these marketplace transactions into a new paradigm. And that's hard to do. I've never been in something where there's so much demand
00:36:51
Speaker
And the way that you can solve it is a new paradigm and it's hard to get people to embrace that. And in some ways the new paradigm could look like a scam unto itself. We've just got to crack that code and we're going to experiment a lot with ways to do that. The team has some really great ideas that we're going to implement over the coming couple of months. And if those things don't work, we're going to get punched in the face again and we'll try something else.
00:37:20
Speaker
If there was ever a need to rinse and repeat the wave thing, maybe brand positioning is obviously one of them. You got to tell a good narrative out there. You got to make the story accessible. A hundred percent. And all of those things that you said are really important because you're essentially trying to get them to see a new way that the world could and should work and what the implications would be for them if that was the case.
00:37:44
Speaker
Sounds like another amazing challenge. It sounds like your juices are flowing again, which is great. It's nice to have an act two and hopefully act two will be somewhat, even if it's not nearly successful as act one, it'll still be a great act in many ways. Yeah. The learning and the doing is a lot of the fun part of the journey. Where can people learn more about you and go confirm these days?
00:38:06
Speaker
So go to GoConfirm.com to see more. We have a new product out there as well called Scam Spotter, GoConfirm.com slash Scam Spotter. You can upload a picture of a text message or an email that you've received to help educate you on whether or not it's a scam or not. We really want to help folks feel more comfortable online. And this is one of the ways we're doing it. And then they can find me on LinkedIn.
00:38:34
Speaker
Thanks, Kurt. Thanks for just an amazing story about entrepreneurship, the highs, the lows, the good times, the bad times. We've had a great ride, and here's to getting lucky again. Exactly. Yes, please. Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, rate it. Subscribe to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, your favorite podcast app, and share via social media.
00:38:56
Speaker
If you're a B2B SaaS company, look $1 to $5 million in revenue, looking for strategic and tactical support to scale. We should talk about how I can help you as a fractional CMO and strategic advisor. Reach out via email, marketmarkivans.ca, hit with me on LinkedIn or visit marketingspark.co. Talk to you soon.