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Ventures from the Valley brings you inside the rooms where billion-dollar decisions get made. Hosted by R136 Ventures, each episode features candid conversations with the founders, operators, and investors shaping the future of technology; from AI infrastructure to global fintech to the companies redefining how we build.
Uh dear friends uh colleagues partners uh I'm Victor Alovski and this podcast brought to you by R136 Ventures. So in this this episode we have uh Robin Alex uh who is a co-founder uh at High Level the AI powered business operating system that serves over 70,000 marketing agencies and powers more than 1 million businesses worldwide. Robin's path to entrepreneurship began when he witnessed uh firsthand the chaos of fragmented marketing tools while working inside a Dallas digital marketing agency. watching small businesses uh struggling with like 20 plus uh disconnected software tools and uh uh watching leads dying. He partnered with Sean Clark and Veran uh to build high level uh in 2018. So Robin welcome thank you for having me Victor. Absolutely. Yeah. So uh let me start with questions. uh so first when we uh recently published and that's how we came across high level recently published our AI B2B scaling stars uh leadboard for now so high level came out number one with astonishing score of 17.7 well ahead of other companies like builder.io IO cuado and others. So my first question is what do you think of high level doing differently that uh uh the rest of the list is doing and maybe uh what is like similarity to others. So how would you distinguish yourself in a very unique way? Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, when you think about high level, you know, while we are an all-in-one platform, I think our biggest differentiator is that we do work with the implementers that, you know, position the software for small businesses. Um, and I think if you take a step back and look at how the economy and industry is built in every generation of technology shift, there are small businesses out there who can't afford resources, can't afford people to help them um, at a full-time basis and implementing and paying attention to the trends and things like that. But if you look back to when, you know, the internet was taking off, every business needed to get a website online. Well, these small businesses don't have the resources, don't have the funding to just have a dedicated IT person or a technical person or, you know, at that time a web developer ready to go to build. So, they're always calling somebody to help implement tools and technology for them. So, you know, the when the internet was taking off, they were looking for someone to build a website. So, they call and find someone who could do that. Then, social media was taking off. Very similar. They don't have someone on standby. So, they're just reaching out, calling person, and sometimes they're calling back to that person who helped build the website to help with their social media. Then came with the automations and workflow building CRM. They don't have anyone on staff, so they're looking to hire out. And now with AI, I think they are very open. And you know, I think this is the first time in a long time that, you know, small businesses are actually at the bleeding edge of taking on the opportunity and implementing change. uh because they don't have the staff, they don't have the resources and they see the opportunity to uh to you know to provide that cost savings within their business. If you look at the counter side of it, you know, you have enterprise businesses, you know, companies that use you know some of these heavy antiquated software, they have to hire dedicated resources to manage and and monitor and maintain it. But when you know individual users want to leverage AI, there's a lot of bureaucracy within those organizations. there's a lot of job justification you know fear factor you know hey we don't have the agreements with these large LLM providers so you can't use it yet we have to go through security and audits and things like that so I think large businesses are actually slow to implement AI but for us and for our use case you know we work with that small layer of individuals who small businesses contact to provide implementation of these tools and because of that businesses are so eager small businesses are very eager to imple implement AI. So they're calling on to this this community of individuals to help implement it. And for us, we don't have to predict the future. We just need to build the tools that our customers in cases this agency layer, this consultant layer is needing to help implement. So as long as we're matching up with what they need and help them deliver it, we win. And so that that's the tools and what we've been thinking about and why we've been able to accelerate so fast with our AI usage. Well, you mentioned AI so many times, but uh company was founded back in 2018. So, probably uh when you founded the company, this like term hasn't been used at least uh uh so much, right? So your first revenue was uh first year revenue that is from public sources we scrapped was like around 40 grand uh and you were selling uh direct to SMB uh right and uh uh to our knowledge um there was like a high churn and model really didn't stick and then like one agency uh conversion really reframed the entire business and uh uh well my question is why uh actually u exactly matching the needs of SMB didn't work out, why they still uh needed agencies rather than just uh building a direct relationship. So what was like the secret source and u why uh and how like I mean first of all how this decision came uh on board I mean did you have like much of discussion pivot not pivot sell to agencies continue finding the way to SMBs and uh how fast did you make this decision? So yeah, so you know prior to me joining high level Sean and Verun um were you know my other two co-founders they were actually um the original co-founders helping to to really go out and build tools for small businesses. Now through that you know they were making u you know not a lot of revenue in the grand scheme of things and to your point high churn. So when you go to small businesses I think they see the promise and the vision. However what they really lack is they don't have that support. they don't have that team to help do that implementation because it's also not just the implementation and then set it and forget it. You know, it requires some modification, some iteration to really fine-tune it to make sure that operation with the business. That was the biggest issue that they dealt with. Now, when I joined um really it was through an interesting uh you know world where they were prospecting trying to figure out how to launch their software and where they started was in um reputation management side of things. they had actually reached out to a customer that I had in, you know, as I was running a marketing agency. We were that outside consulting partner for these small businesses in helping them implement, iterate and make sure that success is happening. And so that customer actually, you know, did a magnificent job in saying, "Hey, I don't know how to help you. You should connect up Robin and their team to help bridge the gap because I want this tool for my business." And so not only did I help them get implemented and get what they needed to help with that business, we started talking about kind of this greater issue with small businesses in general and what agencies were actually doing. So you know to that point the secret sauce was actually slightly pivoting in the perspective of we need to be able to talk to the SMB but also make it easy knowing that there's always third-party imple.
So how do we make sure that it's valuable for them to get the outcome that the small businesses is looking for? So in many ways that was our secret sauce and that's what we found early on when you know Sean Vern started building software kind of going direct to SMBs and once they met me um you know I was able to to join and kind of you know help you know clarify or demystify you know how implementations actually occur and you know that's what we've actually wrote on from here you know to to where we are today. Well, and uh like speaking uh generally about like pivoting uh how would you recommend to pivot because I mean many startups at a start not only at the start but like through their lifetime uh are pivoting. So should it like be one shot? Should it be like uh more gradual? So I mean for what kind of piv pivot would you like advocate like faster and more aggressive or or still like watching your back? And I have like few startups I'm helping to grow. So it's a constant debate. So I'm sure they will listen to your advice. You know, I I think the best time to be aggressive. Well, let let me caveat it in saying that there's definitely seasons and the right time to to make these decisions. But when you're early and you don't have a lot of consistent revenue or, you know, you don't have a lot of things locking you down into a decision, you should be as aggressive as possible and trying to test out many different variations, many different opportunities, and trying to to pivot as fast as you can. And a lot of it is just listening to the customer, listening to prospects. What do they want? Where are you missing the, you know, the goalpin? Um I I think that is very easy and the best time that you can do it is when you're early on in the business as you become more late stage or you start getting more consistent revenue and you know you have to take it very methodical because you know the question that you always ask is are you willing to risk the existing revenue and for many people they're not willing to risk it or they have a a their tolerance risk is very very low. So, you know, that's where you want to be a little bit more methodical or, you know, give it more time to season. But for us, you know, when I met Shawn Brun, they were early stage, you know, didn't even have a lot of the the core foundational things. So, it was very easy to pivot and, you know, we never looked at it as pivoting. It was just trying to figure out uh market fit. So yeah, you know that I I think when you're early pivoting doesn't even matter because you're just trying you're just trying to answer questions for small businesses or you know just any business at that time eventually that that how I see it. I mean usually like uh founders like split some think that it should be faster and some like trying like to tolerate and and do it like uh uh in a more soft way. But anyway, so after pivoting, you went from like 900 or finding your product market fit in a way. Uh you were uh uh at 900 u uh agencies to almost as our users, right? Almost 250,000 users in just less than two years. So obviously this tremendous growth uh breaks certain things. So uh what broke first uh and uh uh what surprised you about how agencies adopted the platform? Are there like any uh insights you can share? Yeah, you know even that term product market fit. I think early on we never really looked at it as product market fit. It was just we found an audience and we wanted to build whatever that audience wanted. And the biggest thing there wasn't necessarily just building tools. It was making sure that we built tools that they could actually use and we wanted to see them actually win using it, right? So, it wasn't like we're sitting in a black room, you know, like in our cave and just building it and then trying to figure out how to template. It's we're building it alongside our customers. Um, and at that time, you know, it was that audience of that implementation layer agencies in many ways, working with them, trying to figure out how to make the tools work for their needs. And once we saw one, we are very passionate in trying to say, okay, we see that smile on your face. We got what you needed. And you, you know, do you know other people who are dealing with the same problem? And and if you're close to that community, everyone knows each other. So if you can win for one, you win for many. And they're very quick to bring in more people to, you know, into our funnel to help accelerate, you know, like you guys found a magic sauce for me, so I want to tell more people. So that's what we did there. And then we were also very verbose and saying like we got this win. Let's show other people kind of in that same lens of how they won. So I think that's the biggest thing where I see a lot of SAS companies where they go wrong is they try to get quote unquote case studies, but what they're really trying to do is just trying to say, "Hey Victor, do you mind recording a video or writing up, you know, that we did a good job for you?" That doesn't actually that isn't what future customers are looking for. What they want to know is Victor, how did you win? What exactly you do to win? And that meat and potatoes is really the the better case study and once you're able to cast that out. So we would do webinars. We would actually celebrize, you know, let's say you Victor, we would do a joint webinar with you as our customer. We would interview you and let people ask you questions. So you created you created a pride a pride kind of a pride. Exactly right. And we're just in the background just waving like no it's it's Victor. Victor's the magic sauce. Look at how he did it now. He just used our hammer. He just used our screwdriver and our tools. But it's his magic sauce. And so through that people would come to buy the same tools um through us there. and anything anything what like uh you would not expect from your like crowd to do like I mean usually like uh people are very creative in using tools right so I mean the most creative way I I I really witnessed uh uh people using uh like Chad [ __ ] is my uh 17 years old daughter who came to like uh uh CVS and I was looking for like medicine and she simply took a picture of the shelves and asked Chad GPT where is this uh stuff and then Chad GPT pointed out exactly right so I spent like 15 minutes uh going through like this uh stuff and then she did it in like a few seconds so anything like that uh like when you really was surprised oh my gosh that's that's the thing no yeah so you know one of the biggest aha moments was early on you know we were building these tools we really thought It's teaching people how to use it in a very singular way. You have to do these things. And what we realized was that people wanted to know where the lines were, but no one wants to be put into a box. It's like, okay, I see the general use case, but can I do more functionality because I have better ideas. And for us, we were very conscious in saying, let people be creative on the platform. like you know we want to drive them through a general lane but if they have opportunity to connect with other software or build on top of it and do these other creative things we actually open that up and so that's where we decided to become you know very much API driven API first and so and then make it API open so that other customers in many cases have the extensibility that they're looking for um and then on top of that we let you know you to inject um you know through JavaScript or CSS and things like those little things went a long way for us because it's no longer about us building tools. It's us creating a platform that other people can build on top of. Um, and so that that's just something that we always listen to our customers throughout the journey and we never said no. It was always well let's figure out how to make it happen. Um, and because we never wanted to be prescriptive. We wanted to just you're the expert so let's help you be continue to be the expert there. Yeah, that makes sense. Uh well um let's switch gears a little bit. Uh uh so you are also very unique in a way you actually bootstrapped uh the company. Uh so you turned down uh to my knowledge many VC uh uh term shits and attempts to invest into you and obviously you were seen as a hot company growing with such an astonishing speed. Uh so um uh why uh you decided to uh pass on uh venture capital uh for so long and uh why did you decide to bootstrap? What was the reason? Uh why not take more money and grow faster? Well, I I think you know we you know the first 12 actually the first 18 months Shan Vern and I never took a penny out of the company personally. We took every single dollar back in, you know, and we were very fortunate. You know, I, you know, had some income coming in because I was still running the agency for a while. And then, you know, Sean Baroon, you know, they were able to, their spouses were working. So, they were able to just, you know, work to just help build the company. So, we took every single penny back in. And then the way that we built the model, we never had a sales team. We never had uh you know if you look at our biggest expense item was actually our hosting and you know we it took us about 6 months to hire our first employee. So for the first six months there was really a lot of expenses very minimal right. So we just took every single penny, put that back into the company and you know we always looked at as let's continue to build a war chest and then through that we were profitable since in you know since the beginning of the company which was you know why what is more dollars going to actually do to help grow like that was always the question that we would always ask but at the same time we never had a sales team. We never wanted, we never saw the need of having a sales team because you try to build it, you try to do it, and most companies fail the first go around with having a sales team because they're trying to run paid ads, you try to run sales and all that. We didn't have the expertise. Um, and so we just kind of kept doing what we're doing. So for the first, you know, 36 months, um, we were profitable and, you know, just just really taken all the dollars and reinvest into the company. That's what allowed us to hire. Um, and so when the opportunity came up in 2021, we did have a lot of VCs that that came in. And what we knew was that we were doing something special and unique. And oh, by the way, we were extremely profitable. Every time we're talking to a VC one, they kind of looked at us as being this very odd company in our go to market way because we didn't have the sales team. We didn't have all this. And we kept challenging them, why should we change? like what do you see? And no one could give us a clear answer. What they told us though the consistent message was what what did they want to change is like specifically they wanted us to they told us that the model that we were building would not last. Mhm. They told us that we needed to take every single penny that we had in the company and now hire a sales team, now hire paid ad or go get paid ads and build and grow that way and not and probably not doing a white labeling, right? Uh they said the white labeling was a bad idea. Mhm. They told us our pricing model they don't like they don't like it. Yeah. Yeah. They don't like our pricing model. They don't like uh the unlimited function that we had. You know, we're a flat rate company, right? So, we give you all the tools just for a small subscription fee. They wanted to change basically the whole business from A to Z. And then the question that we would ask is can you guarantee an outcome on the back end? Because if you look at every single company that's out in the world, even publicly traded companies, most of them are not profitable. And their biggest line item is building the SA the sales team, paid ads, advertising, marketing, and what we, you know, kind of the model for every VC is like, yeah, you'll invest into all these things. We're going to take every single dollar that's in the company as well as we're going to throw in more dollars to help grow it to then get you to the next stage. And don't worry about being profitable or not. That's not important. We're going to flip it and sell it to the next, you know, PE firm or whatever. Yep. And we just thought that that was a broken model and broken system. So we never went down that venture route and we would just shut people down. Like they were crazy. You want to invest into our business that we were able to build and do in a very unique way and say that's not right. Like that makes no sense to us. Like why would we want to invest? And we I mean to this day we're still having fun and doing the same exact thing. So but in 2021 we you know kind of looked at it as this uh you know as the height of the market and we got to get free consulting and so you know while we had many venture firms and things like that tell us how we did a bad job they gave us some ideas on things that we can improve and fix on. So it was amazing there and then through that journey we had a private equity firm that said guys you guys are doing something so unique we don't want to touch any of that. What we want to do is um we don't you know you don't need any dollars to put into the company to keep the lights on. You guys have that figured out. What we want to do is one you know give us an opportunity to give we had a lot of employees that joined us early on at that time. I think we had about 200 employees. um they could have gotten better jobs and bigger jobs in other places, but they really love the mission that we were on. So, it's you know they wanted to become a minority investor with us. They don't want to change any of the businesses. They wanted to support us on the back back office is you know getting a better finance team HR you know make sure that we're operating legal and then through that you know we did a secondary round so not primary capital it's it's all secondary um and it allowed us to give you know really rightsize our team and give them bonuses and that and that's part of the journey and being this sort of culture right you know you you want to be a part of building something and then monetizing along the way so that's what we were able to do in 2021 um and to this day you know that P firm is still on the cap Um, but you know, just as much as a minority thing, you know, Sean Vern and I, as well as our employees, you know, operate and manage the company. Um, and we make the controlling decisions. I I think that that's an important piece. Um, but for us, it was just making sure that our team gets to participate along the way. Yeah, it's very unique uh for uh current state of uh venturebacked businesses in it. And um what you tell is like probably the story that many founders would appreciate to have uh uh for themselves. Um so you were like not mostly but almost like every day you were kind of a profitable business from like bootstrap all the way along till now. So did you have like do you still have like maintain any explicit rules like burn rates, ceilings, uh like reinvestment ratios uh uh margin floors uh anything you would uh what you would refuse to breach uh I mean you should like be like very disciplined on the way right or uh or it's like very natural so like that that's the business uh goes itself that way. uh anything is I mean when you grow like you might have like crazy ideas why not to do this why not to do that right why won't we like hire now 10 uh software developers if no if not even you do like any like sales and marketing you still may uh reimagine what you can invest in right I mean there are so many ways uh to spend and burn money right anything like that and how you like pushed yourself out of this you know trap yeah so it's funny all those fancy terms that you of like you know burn rate risk and you know percentages and all that like we don't operate that way for us it's just very much running it in in a sense of as you would want to run your personal finances without having any credit cards or debt or anything like that and so you know like I said for the first 18 months we didn't take a single penny out of the company and when we did take money out of the company it was at the least amount that we just needed to sustain you know our current expenses it was never taking out large amounts of or anything like that. We wanted to reinvest into R&D and and growing the business. And so that was really important to us. And whenever we had those opportunities of spending more one, do we have a strong conviction of this investment that we can at least get our money back, right? Like how close can we get to to break even? That's really the thesis that we always ran into. um if the company is profitable any investment that we make moving forward if we cannot if you don't have a conviction on you know you getting your money back within x amount of time and you just estimate it then it's probably not the right decision and that's where we were you know in some cases maybe slow to to doing some investments but you know at the end of the day you know in hindsight I think it was the right call because we were able to be very you know strong in in making sure that the decision that we have like we want to make sure that we're passionate about it and not just throwing money and hoping someone else will solve it for us. It's no, we want to feel strong. We want to make sure that who we partner with or how we do it, like we feel confident that's going to come back to us. And look, it's not going to happen 100% of the time, but at least, you know, that partnership or like you having that feeling behind it adds that additional fuel to the fire to make sure that, you know, worst case just get our money back out of the deal. Yeah. Yeah, totally agree. Um so your uh 40% lifetime affiliate commission is remark remarkably generous. Uh most SAS companies cap it at 20 maximum 30%. Or switch the time limited payouts. So you build a model where you have like 70,000 or more agencies astonishing number which is simultaneously customers distributors uh evangelists if you will. How did you arrive like at 40% lifetime and what does the unit economic uh uh math look like uh like to continue like sustainably grow at this scale? If you may just open a little bit of secrets on that side. Yeah. So I mean we touched on it a little earlier, right? Like so as we would uh work with a agencies or these consultants and things like that, we would get on calls with them and just try to figure out what is the tool that they need to get to their next outcome. And not only are we building the tool, we're sitting down with them from a very much customer care, customer success perspective to make sure that they're implementing it right to getting that what they what they wanted to build. And then we were very quick to saying, "Hey, do you know anyone else that would want this software?" And what we were so amazed by is without giving them any additional money, they were just so happy that we helped them make money. Of course, I'm going to tell my friends. So, I'm going to tell Bob. I'm going to tell Sally. I'm going to tell them. And they would get us on a call with them, help book a meeting with these other individuals. Um, they wanted to make sure that any dollar that's coming our way, we were very transparent. Any dollar that we make, we're putting back into the company. We're hiring more. We're doing more R&D. We're trying to build more. And so, people love that from a mission side. And over time, we just got really good at asking and created a little bit of a virality effect here. And remember, we were cash flow positive since the beginning. We were profitable since the beginning. So, we never really spent money on sales. We never had a sales team. We never did uh paid ads or or things of that nature at a significant level. And so we when we started researching other competitors that that's out there, even the publicly traded ones, they spend close to 60 to 70% in sales and marketing in some cases, and they're burning cash. They're not profitable. And we looked at like, wow, we don't want to spend any of that money, you know, like let's just hire more. So when we were talking to customers, they would always say, "Yeah, we're always willing to bring someone to you, but you know, if you look at other companies, they offer these affiliate programs. Not only will I refer one or two people, but you know, I'm associated to a community here. I'm associated to, you know, an association or I have a group myself of 500 people or a thousand people. If we're able to put together a deal, I'll refer people there." And so, you know, at that time we looked at, you know, what was the highest paying affiliate program and someone told us, you know, it was 40%. And it was for life. And so, from the unit economics, we just kind of looked at it as, okay, Victor, if you are able to go out to your community and you bring people on, we'll pay you 40% for life. And so, we just did that, not realizing, you know, that they would actually do it. And we only had to pay out for a small percentage of the noise that they were able to to bring because you know if you if you think about it being in a room you're going to talk about you know high level as a product if there's a 100 people in there everybody hears it. Now a percentage of people will take action today but you know the the bigger volume point for us was that echo chamber more people are talking about it more people you know it just becomes top of mind and all that. And so for us that 40% for life was well worth uh paying out and something that we still hold today and and it's our most important driver of our business that that's um you know how we drive in most of our our customers is through these evangelists, through these individuals, through these associations, through these partners. Um and we want them to participate and that allows us to not need a sales team in so many ways. Uh well, and just maybe like out of curiosity, uh like do you have like any salespeople or you just simply have no like sales sales? Uh we we don't have a a traditional sales model, you know, the outbound SDR, BDR. We don't have paid ads uh in the same sense of like trying to make sure that that we're constantly feeding the SDRs and BDRs. And so if you look at that from a sales and marketing perspective, that usually covers about 25 to 30% of someone's uh budget. Just that team alone, you know, for us, we don't have the traditional sales team. When people come in, we have a a demo team. Their whole thing is not necessarily the direct sales component. It's the we just want to make sure that you get a good experience. Now if we give you such a great experience, we do monitor you know the effectiveness of those demos to get version there but look at as more the at the value ad not the sales ad. And then you know we have another team uh you know from an account management perspective and they you know really work with uh customers to to make sure that they're getting the right value out of the product. And then from there, you know, if there's right opportunities to get other product and services, they're able to to pinpoint and help uh navigate customers in that direction. Um, but generally speaking, you know, we don't have the the sales team, the SDRs, the BDRs, the account execs and things like that. That's really trying to, you know, solve at the top of the funnel. And uh, well, you are now uh, pretty global, right? So, you do business not not only in the US, but like in so many different places. I mean do you support the community uh somehow else rather than just only with like uh uh 40% take take rate? I mean anything uh you do for community I don't know professional development uh education uh motivation in any other way um non non-financial incentives anything you may share as you actually created a kind of a network right like a very strong network so a business business that doesn't have a network effect by definition uh started like to look like a network effect business which is kind of an amazing stuff yeah yeah you know if you think about our business remember there's like this small layer businesses always pick up the phone and call somebody to help them and it's this underserved community of individuals and so you know through the journey we realize that there there is this large community that people are always willing to help and and for that so we wanted to figure out ways to bring everyone together so we do a lot of live events we do a lot of online events as well um one of our biggest one is every year in October we do what we call our summit um it's called the level up summit and that's where we bring in I think this year we're close to estimating around 2,000 people that they all be there. We we'll have some of the best speakers um you know and they all use or leverage high level that understand technology in many cases they're all leveraging AI today. So telling their stories, telling their ways to impact the the business. So we we put that together and that's a great way to create a great community. Um and people come to Dallas for that. Now you know to point out worldwide now we're starting to do smaller events you know throughout the world. So, you know, just a couple weeks ago, I was in India with uh one of my other founders, Verun, and we were there really supporting that community. I think we had close to 500 people that showed up there. Um, we partner with other events and other associations around the world that are doing events as well. We want, you know, I think in many ways we want to help prop up the ecosystem um of people talking about high level, but also the ways to help improve businesses. I think that's super important to us. We also have a community of people who are certified admins and we want to give them opportunities to um so we actually pass leads on to this community of you know business opportunities that we get every single day. Uh we also do online webinars every single week. We do webinars so that people virtually can see um impactful ways that other business owners are winning. You know I mentioned that example earlier Victor of you know when you are able to find a win we want to put you on a pedestal. We want people to see how you won and show the meat and potatoes behind it. So we host those events you know once a week and so people are able to come in there and then you know most important part is we have a very thriving Facebook community over 150,000 people who are in that that Facebook group um you know talking about different ways to use the product you know the challenges the struggles of operating a business or you know maybe they're running into challenges with the software and so for us it's important to have that community but I think the other X factor is that I am a part of the community right so I am in there talking to customers messaging ing them, being a part of it. Sean, Ver, both of us, all all three of us are in the community communicating with our customers. We're jumping on calls with them because it's not so much of curating the community, it's a being a part of the community. And I I think that's important to us as well. Well, um, uh, I think I would quote yourself, I just saw it somewhere, uh, that, uh, what, uh, brings you to here not necessarily will bring you to there. Yeah. Uh uh so uh you scaled up successfully through this model uh to 80 million error. Uh would you be able to um uh uh double down and get to a billion dollars error uh with the same uh stuff or you think you will have to change at some point? Do you see like the path to one billion? Oh 100%. Uh and I think it's something that we'll you know we're pretty confident in doing. you know, this the quote that we always say, you know, there's always this bigger quote that everyone knows is, you know, what got you here, you're going to have to ch change it and it won't get you to the next thing. And we're on the other side of that coin. It's what got us here will get us there. We just need to take it as a flywheel, compound it, and just keep doing it and you just build that muscle and get stronger and stronger and stronger and stronger, right? Like just like working out every day, it becomes very boring. It becomes very monotonous, but you know, the more reps you do, just the easier it becomes. And so we definitely believe in that and we think that we're going to move incredibly fast and you know I I I want to be you know one of the biggest companies out there you know my partners and and it's not so much of you know us just building tools it's because we're able to work with our community work with our customers and providing the best value out there and as long as we're we stay strong to our mission we're going to we're going to do some amazing things. Uh well, you also championed multiply uh what works uh doubling down on core practices rather than replacing them with like consultant uh uh playbooks. Uh I just I'm wondering what did work? So is there something what you tried and uh what really didn't work um despite yeah your like high expectations that it will it will but it didn't and uh can you just give like a few examples what didn't work out? I mean I think you know some areas that we you know from a core business perspective it was always trying to figure out where do we spend money and how do we effectively do it. We were always, you know, I would always say we would wait to get punched in the face a few times before we we make the final decision. And good or bad, that allowed us to really think through making sure that we're we're going on the right path. But along the way, we needed to be comfortable to pivot, you know, like what we were talking about earlier is like, you know, being able to shift quickly if things are not going the right right way. We need to feel comfortable with that. And uh, you know, Sean always likes to to quote Charlie Mer and I think or or Warren Buffett, I can't remember, but it's, you know, when the uh I can't remember it, but basically it's like you know when the the tide runs away, you'll see who's swimming naked and we never wanted to be in that position, right? So, it's how do you make smart decisions? How do you always think of like what the backup plan is ahead of time and be comfortable that you know the decision that you make today may not be the right decision, but at least it pushes us forward. So then we can be agile and and shift and make modifications as needed. You know, one one that I remember was early on we were trying to move into a help desk system and it was a very co costly investment. We had to change a lot of change management a lot of things there and it was something that I was personally pushing and I remember it was a big check you know I was like wow we're turning into a real company we you know doing this and we implemented it and then it was the launch day and every one of our customers had problems and it was just challenge after challenge after challenge after three days of it was that important decision of like okay do we like the decision that we made and do we wait do we keep going going we basically said look we you know, the rest of the week to figure this out and if not, we are reverting back. We do not want our customer to deal with it. And we we reverted back seven days later and said, "We're getting out of this." And so, we had to get attorneys involved and things like that to get out of the contract, but we didn't care. We focused on what makes our customers happy and it is what it like that's our leading voice and if we have to lose money on it, that that's fine. But our customers is what makes us value. And you know, we could have played the other side of like just keep trying, just keep pushing. Don't worry, the noise will go away. We just decided that's not worth our time and effort. Makes sense. Makes sense. Uh well uh uh coming to like a little bit to the numbers again uh and values. Uh so what is like your like high high level high level high level northstar metric for you guys? uh what you will uh want to achieve like a single number or a single thing uh anything in your mind what you like constantly monitor and you care about yeah I mean the the metric isn't so much about our our revenue I mean of course we track all those sort of things but our north star is not our direct revenue our northstar is our customers uh revenue so you know what we like to say is we want to be a$10 billion uh company as fast as possible where we are generating $9 billion of revenue into our customers pockets. And if we're able to do that consistently every single year, $9 billion, you know, on the back end because we're supporting them, we'll be a billion dollar a year um you know, revenue company. And so for us, it's it's more about how much dollars are we bringing into our customers pockets more so than ours. And we just believe if we do a good job on that, money will come our our way. Do you do you calculate uh like for example a blended uh cost of acquisition and what does LTV to cost of acquisition look like although you don't have like a direct uh sales uh still do you like manage to like monitor LTV to crack? Uh yeah, well you know the fun thing about our business is, you know, we we work with these these associations, these partners, you know, these affiliates in many ways. Um we don't pay them anything ahead of time. So our, you know, I like to think that we're a zero CAC company that there is no cost to it. That's that's the reason I'm asking. Uh I mean, it's like a very weird formula for you, right? because you do not have like uh a head um cost of acquisition. Yeah. Yeah. Uh but still if you if you if you if if you convert that into like LTV to gak what the number will look like if I'm uh you know I don't know the number off the top of my head but like I said you know we don't pay anything to invest in individuals to promote and send customers so there's no cost of that position and then you know when we talked about the LTV side we are you know there's aligned incentives and aligned motivation that you know here at high level we want to keep the customer long term, the person that's referring people also want to make sure that customer is successful. And so we're both aligned to make sure because if that person who refers that customer is able to keep that customer for life, they get 40% on the back end of the subscription. And so uh you know that's really the best way that we look at it is not so much from a CAC to LTV perspective. is just are we making sure that customer is successful and if they were if they they will be successful and as long as they are successful we're going to pay you 40% for life. Makes sense. Well uh let's switch gears. Uh there are two uh uh basically topics I wanted to cover first uh uh your kind of cultural uh uh code if you will. Uh so uh how would you describe the company? uh what's the culture uh uh you maintain uh how do you manage uh to grow I mean you have uh what 700 employees right now or even more uh so different countries different cultures anything uh you like uh develop for yourself anything uh in writing like put in stone or it's like all uh uh like uh embedded without like being uh uh uh spoken I don't So I mean anything you may think of uh like your cultural code. Yeah. You know uh you know these days we're closer to 2,000 employees around the world. I think yeah I think we're in 13 countries where um the the biggest thing you know we're not really big on writing down what culture is. You know I'm a big believer in culture is more about a feeling and an experience that you're able to create. Um it does start you know from a top down perspective. Um, and it's something that, you know, Sean Vern and I are very big on from the sense of we're a remote first company. Everyone works from home and we, you know, we're always on camera. We're always um in live Zoom calls. We want to was it like from 20 2018? I mean, from day one, from the very beginning, we were always so Sean is in Eugene, Oregon. I'm in Dallas, Texas, and Ver's in Qar. Um, in Doha, Doha, Qatar. And so, you know, even us three, we just met online. So, you know, we wanted to make sure that we had a culture that that breeded that. Um, and we always looked at as we wanted to hire the best talent in the world, not the best talent in a geo specific region, right? So, which allows us to have better opportunities. Um, and so, you know, from a culture, I do believe that it's top down. And so, you know, we use just the standard communication. We live off of Slack, we live off of Zoom. We want to have meetings and be present and we want to have that culture. You know, cameras go a long way and it's okay if you're not, you know, properly dressed in prim. Uh, you know, that's okay as well. It's about getting the job done. Um, we created a culture for teams. As soon as you sign on, you're logging into Zoom and we create breakout rooms and so it's almost like having your office, you know, that you have and people can float in and out, connect with people, but you're always available, right? So we kind of created that as a dynamic. um you know from the other piece of the culture is we you know with with Slack we try to do annual events and so we'll do a leadership retreat where we'll fly in a lot of our leaders and then historically every year we would do two uh retreats where we'd fly in majority of our team on the east and west side um and take them to a fun vacation you know a fun trip that we are able to to not only connect with team members allow them to connect with their teams as well as cross collaborate with other teams as as well and then do some unique experiences. Um, what I'm excited about this year is we're no longer splitting it east and west. We're actually trying it where we're trying to bring the whole world. I think we'll have close to 1500 people that's all going to fly in almost every Yeah. So, so we're really excited about that. Um, but at the end of the day, you know, it's that's what we do from an employee side, but our culture also is really representative of our customers. And so we do many events with our customers um and then we host our event that will fly in a lot of our team to be a part of as well. So how close can we stay connected because I think the human experience even in the new agentic AI world the human experience is always going to win and so we want to make sure that we formulate and create that tight bond there. Yeah totally true. So uh uh I deliberately um wanted to speak about AI at the end of uh our uh session uh episode. Uh so um I've seen like a lot of companies uh raising now money for uh what is called rollup strategies and many of them are trying to uh uh basically uh convert uh uh agencies marketing agencies into like rollup strategies. uh do you see any threat uh of losing your customers because your customers will be uh gone? I mean your customers are primarily agencies. So obviously uh this might be a kind of path uh going forward because uh well obviously I'm I'm sure you share the view that uh all like middleman will go right I mean there will be no like need for a middleman in many cases um and agencies are at risk. So do you see any kind of uh threat to your business through that or anything else uh you would imagine that what AI can bring uh in terms of like disruption uh uh into your market in particular when like uh people will start using you said very complex tools right very complex tools I'm a software engineer so I'm wipe quing uh through my life but I never seen like doing it so easy now right I just wipe coded a CRM platform uh in like two weeks time not like uh really spending much time on doing this and now we are using kind of like CRM which is selfdeveloped. I mean to say that uh something what you build now might be also in like at risk by being replaced through like a simple uh command line where you just say what you need and that's done. Um, anything you think of like that? Obviously, I'm I'm sure you're discussing it a lot. So, any anything how you see the future of that? Yeah, I I think as a world and as an economy, this is just the next generation of the same same conversations that we've seen historically. Um, back when uh, you know, probably 20 years ago, 30 years ago, when you wanted to buy a computer, you had to buy something off the shelf. you'd have to go to Radio Shack or Circuit City or, you know, Best Buy to buy a computer. And then immediately the world got flooded because now you can just buy a computer case, you can buy, you know, graphics card, you can buy a processor, all a cart and custom, you can custom build your whole solution, right? Did we see all the big, you know, HP, Dell, and all those, you know, they're they're all thriving today. They've all figured out that you know while people have not all not all not all some some figured out some not right I mean we know those who figured out right I mean others we don't remember exactly the best players will always figure out how to to do it right and as consumers there's always this idea that yes you can do things yourself which is why they call it the DIY world you know I was giving this an analogy the other day during co the DI world exploded because, you know, instead of, you know, I'm at home all day, right now is the time for me to renovate my bathroom, I can go to the hardware store and buy all the tools myself. But we also saw an explosion of people paying outside contractors to doing the work because you would start and then to realize you don't have the expertise and more importantly, you don't have the time to keep pushing this on because you don't have the passion. So in that lens for us, the way that we think about it is, do we really believe that a plumber is going to vibe code their way into a new CRM? At some point, they got to go back to becoming a plumber. And so you Victor, you said that you built a CRM. Well, you're going to build it and out of the box, it's going to be fine. That's kind of the first case. But when you need that next step or you run into a bug or you built run into a system challenge, who's going to do that work? Right. It's it's now you who now has to go back into agent a human a human agent. Yeah. Or you know whatever it might be. You have to now sit down with that agent to now rebuild the system to you know making the patches and things like that. So, are you now essentially becoming an engineer? And sure, now you're using AI and coding and things like that to help build it and move it on, but are you willing to leave your post and what you do today, Victor, to now becoming leading agents to build this right now? If I could, you're becoming a CTO in many cases. And all the while, what are you building? How are you even going to operate the the CRM if you're building the CRM to then, you know, grow your business? And so I think that is something that people are I think the opportunities are so much better and making it easier. However, does human capacity does the human relationship change? You know, is a dentist going to stop becoming a dentist to learn AI to then vibe code their their solution and basically give up helping their patients, right? Like that to me is kind of where I don't think that the world is going to 100%. I think what's really interesting and happening though is the people that have the bandwidth that you know have the technical capability how now have access to a wide array of tools that they didn't have before to build and create new innovation. So we are up for a disruption but I don't think the disruption that is happening today and what we'll see in the future is you know drastic effect that people are expecting you know the plumber the electrician is always going to be the electrician you know until until uh uh it will be replaced by kind of a humanoid robot or whatever right most probably most probably not coming soon. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly right. Like, you know, when Uber came out, there was a lot of fight with a lot of, you know, the cab mafia, the taxi cab mafia in all these cities, right? And they still exist. If you go to New York, there's still a line for taxi cabs, even though Uber is readily accessible. There's always going to be protection into it. Um, and so maybe at some point in the future, it's all going to go away. But, you know, I I think I think I think with autonomous autonomous full autonomous uh vehicles, it will, right? Uh I mean at some point it will be so so much at some point in the future. Yes. But here's also the other thing. Are you worried about the future or are you wor worried about today? You know, and I think most small businesses are worried about the challenges that's right in front of them today. Absolutely. Versus what's happening in the future. And as things progress into the future, they're going to be apt to trying it and testing it out. But you know, this goes back to that, you know, I love this. you know how we're talking about pivoting and when is the right time your uh tolerance of risk continues to get minimized when you have existing revenue today. So, you know, even the electrician or even the homeowner when you have a home that you spent a lot of money and time on, are you going to trust the human to come fix it or this new robot? And it's going to take some new robot, you know, some new autonomous agent, you know, to grow to a significant scale before a homeowner is going to feel comfortable saying, I don't need a human anymore. I need an electrician. So, I it's playing this balance of where the future goes, which no one really knows. Everyone's trying to predict where it's going to go, but you know, I look at it as what are the technological advances that we can have today and in the short term that's going to provide businesses success and growth today. So that's kind of the the caveat and I think you know for us this implementation layer I think now has access to so many cool tools that they can create innovation to help businesses forward. Yeah, I totally agree. I mean uh for sure uh I mean people will uh find out uh what to do next right I mean any innovation cycle brings more jobs than eliminates and I think this cycle this cycle is going to do the same I mean and I believe that every cycle had its own like fears uh and uh uh projections that uh uh like a lot of uh uh jobs will go uh and it really happened but so many were created, right? So, I I I totally got it. Yeah, I I'm I'm with you on this for sure. Yeah. So, um maybe my last question, uh Robin, and it was exciting conversation. Thanks for all the insights. Uh if you send a message and give a piece of advice to yourself back to 2018 when you founded the company, what that would be?
Um, you know, that's a good question. Uh, looking back in 2018, I think the only advice I would give myself is, you know, don't worry. Uh, you know, you'll figure it out. Uh, you know, as that sounds, it's, um, you know, I had great partners that I met, you know, and it was all by luck and all by chance. And a lot of it was just always saying yes, like just keep trying something. You know, in many ways, my risk tolerance was very high to being able to be agile. even when I had a, you know, decent sized agency with 30 employees and I was always willing to try new things and get to that. Um, and then, you know, looking back, I'm just so fortunate that I still kept that same mindset of like just say yes, you'll figure it out. You, you know, just always try to figure it out and never let a no stop you. It's just a no in many ways is just a hurdle. You know, how do you convert that to a yes? And it may not be the original idea that you had, but that new version and making it a yes, you know, could be so much more beneficial. Um, and so I would just be telling myself, don't change, just keep with that same mindset and keep going. Thank you, Robin. Um, thanks for this uh amazing conversation. And so this this was Robin Alex co-founder of High Level and Victor Alowski uh uh R136 Ventures and uh our episode uh podcast Ventures from the Valley. Please watch us uh in YouTube, Spotify and many other channels. Thanks Robin. It was really great uh to speak. Yeah. No, it was a great conversation. Thanks so much Victor. Thank you.