Just TALK To Your Customers!

Transcript: 

Jared Ward: 0:06

Welcome to our most recent episode of Ops Unfiltered. Today I have an awesome guest, tanner Chatterley. Cheers, cheers, gorilla Mind, cheers, let's go.

Jared Ward: 0:16

It's your first time? New Tropic-infused energy drinks? Gorilla Mind, shout out. If you're on NetSuite, come talk to us, we can cut costs. Tanner is the CEO of orderprotectioncom. I'm really excited to dive into his journey on his path to become CEO of a SaaS business here in Utah. So Tanner and I have become friends behind the scenes and I'm excited to dive into his story today. Hopefully you guys can learn some stuff about business and the complexity and troubles of running a VC funded startup. What's, what's your experience? Why are you in the e-commerce order protection space?

Tanner Chatterley: 0:51

Yeah, yeah. So I feel like I've told this story probably I don't know probably like a hundred times now, but like every single time there's like new details because like crazy shit just keeps happening all the time. Um, so yeah, so actually I graduated from, from byu, idaho, five years ago and that's where I met my wife, right like the classic byu story where you're like, hey, I go junior year, I got married. You know, we got pregnant right away. My wife was nine months pregnant there graduation. So we left to Utah to join Route actually. So Route's someone who we compete with now in the space. What year was this was 2019. So I joined in the summer of 2019.

Tanner Chatterley: 1:35

So five, yeah, five plus years ago now, when Route was really small there was probably like 25 employees, 30 employees, something like that, and I started as a CSM, so Customer Success Manager. So just right away was just like out of the gates, didn't really know what I want to do. After graduating, I studied marketing as my undergrad and then just kind of like found this knack for like business intelligence. It was like, okay, this is, this is something I'm super interested in. I did a internship at Tableau in Seattle for a summer when I first got married to my wife and I started using that tool and I was like, man, this is cool. I like the data side, as it kind of relates to solving problems like having the visibility to go and tackle some challenges. And then on the CSM side I was like, okay, I was talking to. You know, route was so popular at the time.

Jared Ward: 2:22

What a freaking rocket ship. At that time it was insane.

Tanner Chatterley: 2:24

It was insane. It was insane so we were just onboarding so many customers.

Jared Ward: 2:28

Route. They're just like shipping protection that you enable on your cart of an e-commerce company and it's like, well, it was like two bucks or how much?

Tanner Chatterley: 2:37

Yeah, it was 98 cents, 98 cents, it was 98 cents for pretty much everyone that was on, this was 2019, but 98 cents went a little bit farther than it does in 2024 so yeah, talk about product market fit. Geez, the timing was the time. It was insane because obviously the following year was covid well I so.

Jared Ward: 2:53

I remember I was ceo of a brand during that time and the value add was so straightforward it's like hey, you want to increase cart conversion and put an extra $2 million to your bottom line.

Tanner Chatterley: 3:07

Like that's it that was the pitch.

Jared Ward: 3:10

It was like yeah.

Tanner Chatterley: 3:11

Yeah, let's do it.

Jared Ward: 3:12

And you click a button and it installs.

Tanner Chatterley: 3:15

They did a great job. They did a great job especially early on. It was like the timing and everything was crazy. The product was so basic to start, but to your point, it was like product market fit was already kind of established and we were onboarding hundreds of customers, probably per month. It was insane, right, because to your point, it was like it's like adding an app on your phone, right. You just go to the Shopify app store, you install it. Pretty easy to set up, really light offering Right.

Tanner Chatterley: 3:42

And I was there for two and a half years, like I said, started when we were probably just doing a couple million in revenue and then left when you know there's 420 employees and I think I think I was doing like 50 mil in AR. That's insane. In like two and a half years it was crazy. So tons of traction. But yeah, I just I heard and understood a lot of things from customers, right, they were just like, hey, you know, this is either great, this. From customers, right, they were just like, hey, you know, this is either great, this isn't great, this is what's working well, this is what's not working well. So I just chatted with a bunch of customers and then left Route to actually join the founder of Redo, taylor Brown, and things didn't work out there. It was like too early, I think, for me to start and obviously Redo's taken off.

Tanner Chatterley: 4:19

They're killing it. Now we compete with Route and Redo. It's just the best of all three worlds now that we're in. So I've been in space for about five years now. So after that I took a brief stint kind of out of Ecom at a company called Omni which sold to JP Morgan for a huge, huge amount of money.

Jared Ward: 4:39

Wow, I didn't know that.

Tanner Chatterley: 4:40

Yeah, I mean I don't take any credit for that. I was there for like seven months Just like a good landing spot, and then I knew I wanted to get back in e-comm. So when the opportunity was right, I knew that if I was given that opportunity, that I could definitely like impact some change here. And then the co-founder of Order Protection, Matt LaFront, hit me up when there was just a couple contracted employees at Order protection and just a handful of customers. And then yeah, we've. We've taken it quite a bit away since then and now want to do things differently.

Tanner Chatterley: 5:11

Right so we kind of have a different, different roadmap, different vision for the product, things like that.

Jared Ward: 5:15

So first question what is? What's the difference between because especially in Utah, I see the main players, it's like Route Redo, now They've emerged and then Order Protection, then probably Ship Insure maybe what's the difference between you and those three?

Tanner Chatterley: 5:35

Yeah, the biggest thing for us is we've pretty much built a CRM for shipping-related issues, so Fulfillment. We're soon to be tapping into WMS software as well, because we've built kind of like this, this open API framework type CRM. So we connect to your help desk, we connect to your subscription platforms, we connect to anywhere where like order and fulfillment data is populated, so you're going to be connecting to WMS.

Jared Ward: 6:02

How are you going to connect to WMS that's like super relevant for us Through TrackStar.

Tanner Chatterley: 6:07

Oh, we already integrate to TrackStar, so that's the plan.

Jared Ward: 6:09

We haven't done it yet, wait are you going to be able to just auto-generate a return and deplete it from inventory? We've been wanting that.

Tanner Chatterley: 6:18

That's right. I've been wanting that, so we're doing it, we're doing, it, we're doing it. It's going to be a combined thing. So the whole play for order section is essentially we want to automate a lot of that journey for the end consumer. So we will identify through fulfillment events.

Jared Ward: 6:35

Massive pain point on the inventory side and none of those platforms routes even ship insurer. They don't really care about it.

Tanner Chatterley: 6:49

So we want to be more predictive, right? So if we determine, based on someone's tracking information, that that order is never going to show up to them and if it meets the policy that our brands create within our platform. So that's another big differentiator between order protection and our competitors is that you can completely one-off customize your policy, the actual insurance policy, for both the end consumer in terms of like, when they can file claims, certain indicators of okay, if this order is stuck in transit for five days or three days, whatever the case may be, you can customize kind of the risk tolerance that order protection will take on on the brand side and then, for the end consumer side, getting pretty predictive in terms of hey, if we determine it meets our policy of it's stuck in transit for three days, I'm actually going to generate a reshipment order without the customer even having to file a claim to order protection, ah, okay.

Tanner Chatterley: 7:35

Right, or generate an in-store credit, one-time discount code or gift card that will hit their email email with a message from order protection saying hey, we've determined that your order is likely never going to arrive to you and, based on the policy that the brand has with order protection, as a provider, we are going to we're giving you this in store credit to go and shop Right. So that's kind of like the ultimate experience for the end consumer in our mind is having that predictive like okay, hey, I don't have to wait for my order to never show up and file a claim and have to wait for some type of customer interaction with one of these other providers we're just going to, because we're the ones ensuring that we're just going to ship that store credit gift gift card to you dude.

Jared Ward: 8:21

And if, on the inventory side, if you're taking care of the inventory depletions and additions automatically through trackstar, that makes it where, like I'm just gonna refer everybody to you. Yeah, because like that comes up with every single one of our implementations. Okay, so how do you guys handle returns? It's like, well, which of the 17 platforms do you use? Yeah, because we're definitely there. So if, if you guys do that through track star, like it is such an easy push for us, like user order protection, it'll all be automated.

Tanner Chatterley: 8:51

Well, one thing that we run into on the inventory side is when we start talking to some of these, you know, global brands. They don't store their inventory in one system, right? They might keep warranty inventory. So if you have a warranty claim that comes through, whatever system you're using, they might store their inventory outside of Shopify for inventory related to warranties or claims, whatever the case may be. Or if you run out of stock, what's the process? Right? So we're very much, fundamentally we have the platform, we know what we do best, which is shipping insurance, and then how do?

Tanner Chatterley: 9:27

we connect our partners like Luminous and Parcel Lab and Rebuy and others that specialize in other things, but cohesively bring the whole picture together through our integrations, through our API framework and webhooks.

Jared Ward: 9:43

basically, Okay, really cool. A follow-up question. There's two types of if I had to generalize, two types of SaaS companies. So there's SaaS companies that have extremely high barriers of entry to start doing business, aka Luminous.

Tanner Chatterley: 10:01

Yes.

Jared Ward: 10:02

One of the highest.

Tanner Chatterley: 10:03

I would say you guys are one of the highest that I've come across.

Jared Ward: 10:05

Yeah, very hard to do and then then you have businesses where very low barrier entry to get an mvp and start selling it 100.

Jared Ward: 10:14

1. I know what it feels like on this side. It's a totally different set of challenges on on the side of a product that's relatively easy to make. Then it turns into branding and partnerships and your go-to-market strategy. How has it been running the latter company? Something that's like the tech isn't overly complicated. You can get sales quick, but then you have to differentiate and be better than everybody and retain, yeah. How have you been able to retain and be better than everybody and retain, yeah, and retain? How have you been able to retain and grow a simple product?

Tanner Chatterley: 10:50

and make it not so simple Like find your-. How do you basically build the moat around your business is essentially what you're asking. Because, the barrier to entry is incredibly low, especially for Shopify. Right. Like I have, I'm told of probably a new competitor entering this space on shopify, probably once a month. Like it is so incredibly easy to start something like this, right, we're like what I would call our competition us at the beginning of this is more of a tech enabled service, right you throw this widget on checkout a tech enabled service, right?

Tanner Chatterley: 11:26

You throw this widget on checkout, right? You can serve as kind of like this, this portal. The customers can basically view what you're doing, but it is a service, right? I run a 24 seven support team that resolves claims. When a claim is resolved though that's kind of like once I have someone assess a ticket within our CRM that's a shipping related ticket there's a financial decision that's tied to that ticket every single time for order protection, whereas if it's a brand, they get you know, especially some of the bigger ones that we service. They get 30, 40,000 tickets per month. Not all of those are financial decisions, but you're essentially leaving the decision up to a customer service rep to make on a consistent basis for your business, which impacts your bottom line, right? So how do we take the financial aspect of the shipping insurance offering that everyone's doing and how do we make that a more aligned decision with your financial team, your ops team, people running the warehouse and checking inventory?

Jared Ward: 12:25

picking packing.

Tanner Chatterley: 12:26

How do we give them all visibility into these decisions and how do we basically clean up a lot of what's happening in terms of, like mispicks, wrong items being sent to the end consumer right, like all of these impact that consumer journey.

Jared Ward: 12:40

So you're trying to address the core issue, which is it's not a widget that protects orders. It's like it's order issues, shipping issues. Specifically, it's shipping issues.

Tanner Chatterley: 12:58

Yeah, so that's our biggest thing, right, creating a more sophisticated platform that is integrated and ingesting data from all of your systems to help you make a financial decision for that end consumer. So the barrier to entry it's very competitive, right? Like you saw reader's announcement, yeah, everyone did Like good for them. Right, sick what they're doing. But what I see is we're in a race to the bottom. Like, quite honestly, if you don't know it and you just dumped a shit ton of cash into this particular space, you've got to have a foolproof plan, because it is a race to the bottom in terms of who can give away the most margin to the brand and still operate a successful company. Yeah, right, because we have revenue shares. Right, we do revenue shares with all of our partners and, essentially, when a new entrant enters the market, that is the only lever they have to pull, because they don't have any of the technology yet.

Tanner Chatterley: 14:05

Right.

Tanner Chatterley: 14:05

And there's the ones that react to that the most are SMB customers on Shopify where they're like hey, I will take a watered down version of all three or four of these products. That might not communicate the best between each other, but if it's free and I can make a little bit of money, then I'm going to take it Right. Whereas the more sophisticated companies are looking for the best product, they still care about a revenue share Right, like. How is this an equal partnership? About a revenue share? Right, Like, how is this an equal partnership? But at the end of the day, they want the best product and they want it to communicate directly with the different technology platforms they're using. Right, and that's where we're positioned, not to service, kind of the long tail of Shopify that's. You know, route's got 13,000 plus customers. They've grown like crazy. But what we care about most is what is our relationship with our brand partners and are we solving more than just a kind of minute problem?

Jared Ward: 15:04

Yeah, I think, going into the partnership side, I think something that can be really differentiated is you're doing this thing called, like, the Homey tech stack.

Jared Ward: 15:14

Yeah differentiated is you're doing this thing called like the homey tech stack, yeah, which is which I think is really smart, because if you can get in with somebody like luminous or gorgeous or like have your go-tos, then all of a sudden you're, you're just part of the a much bigger ecosystem, and everything just works better when order protection is in I mean, you think about luminous, right, I come to your office, if you come to my office, it's like I have almost, I've got 23, 24 employees, right, like I don't know how many employees Luminous has at this point now.

Tanner Chatterley: 15:43

But it's like yeah, same range, right Like. And we're competing against teams of, you know, 80 to a hundred sales reps, right, like. So how am I supposed to, how am I supposed to compete against that? Like? The resources that we have versus our competition is just wildly skewed, right? So how do the Davids of the world? Right?

Tanner Chatterley: 16:06

I made that comment about you when you came on the podcast yesterday, because I'm like, dude, you're trying to take down Oracle, like you're trying to take down Microsoft, right, like? How do we compete with these incumbents? It's by specializing and then finding the right partners to basically distribute our product through their bigger teams. So we might go and partner with the Goliaths, right, that service a different part of the post-purchase experience that have access to a wealth of customers, a wealth of information and data that I don't have access to. Right, so that's how we do it.

Tanner Chatterley: 16:47

It's like the homie tech stack. It's a fun way to say, like our preferred partners. We're just just homies, dude, we're all servicing the same people. Why don't we go about it in a more unison way, as opposed to saying, hey, you know what, for my own sake and my own benefit, I'm going to build out all these products that everyone does and have one app to rule them all. I remember a company called ClickUp and they raised like $400 million during the height of COVID so much money, and that was like their tagline. I have never seen a company do that well outside of like Microsoft. Microsoft does it through acquisition right and distribution channels. For us it's that same approach. How do I make my one sales rep feel like five? And it's through plugging in the right, the right partners, the right people, the right time.

Jared Ward: 17:38

Yeah, no, I love it Going back to route a little bit with your experience at route and what we've seen is a route. I believe they just did a down round technically. What is something they didn't do to differentiate and solidify their foothold on the market?

Tanner Chatterley: 17:55

That's a great question. So and this is public information we're being sued by route and I think I shared that with you. Yeah, so I'll be careful. And great people there I met some great people and obviously very successful business. One thing that I believe is my own personal opinion they stopped listening to their customers pretty early on in the process and the reason being is because Route and if you have the Route mobile app or whatever on your phone, they went down kind of like, hey, we want to be a mobile app.

Jared Ward: 18:28

So that's the big bet that they took. They took a big bet and it wasn't Data infused with a mobile app for the consumer.

Tanner Chatterley: 18:34

Yeah, kind of more of like a. We want to create like this shopping experience where you can see and discover all these products across the world through our mobile app, right like. So the whole mantra was like tracking right like, you can track all your orders in one place. You've seen the billboards on i-15? Yeah, and then once we have these end consumers in the mobile app, how do we sell them other products from the D2C ecosystem? It's basically like shop from Shopify.

Jared Ward: 18:59

Yeah.

Tanner Chatterley: 19:00

Very similar. So they competed directly there and they said you know, it's kind of like. You know, I remember being an all hands one day and there is very little talk about shipping insurance. We were talking about all these other things that didn't make any revenue for the business.

Tanner Chatterley: 19:14

about shipping insurance, we were talking about all these other things that didn't make any revenue for the business and I was like. I was like I think this is uh. I was like I think this is not going to be great. So I was like that's when. I was like I need to, I need to go see what else the market has and and what we can build.

Jared Ward: 19:29

What is the lesson that you learned that you're now taking to order protection from what you saw route do?

Tanner Chatterley: 19:34

Yeah, the biggest thing, the biggest lesson from that, is to just communicate, often with your customers. And honestly it's such a generic answer but very few people actually like I pick up the phone. My my customers either call me every day or I call them every day. We have a conversation. It's not like I'm specifically saying like hey, I'm going to set up 30 minutes of time with you and we're going to talk about, like what features you want us to build. Literally, just talk to your customers. Doesn't even have to be about anything work-related, product-related, just talk to them. Often the concerns that they see about your current offering and things that they anticipate that you will eventually lead to building will come out in natural conversations. And it's a good thing. You like to talk to people, jared that you do stuff like this. You're a charismatic personal dude. You will, if you haven't already. You're incredibly sharp, obviously, but it's like if you haven't already, it's like you will find those things very, very consistently just come out of the woodwork when you're just having conversations.

Tanner Chatterley: 20:42

But, that's the biggest thing is is ask the right questions, and you just have to and from a prospect too. So I would say listen, uh, ask your, your customers questions, listen, and then the people that you want to be your customers go and find what their biggest problem is that you can solve with what you're currently offering today, and then from that you'll find the gaps and develop what you need to develop on the product side to go and fill those gaps. I essentially all I do personally now as CEO is how do I find the biggest brands and solve their biggest CX or shipping related problem?

Jared Ward: 21:26

So if you had to encapsulate everything in one sentence, what value does order protection provide to brands?

Tanner Chatterley: 21:32

So the biggest value and it's one sentence. I've probably rattled this off a few times, but we decrease customer service costs while enhancing the end consumer experience. So typically those don't go hand in hand right, because if you typically need to deploy more resources, hire more people, if you're going to provide really fast response times and AFRT has got to be low and resolving a claim there's typically back and forth with the carrier and the customer. We take that entire experience and condense it down so that your end consumer is getting a resolution to a claim, which is a financial decision made by order section, in an hour or less.

Jared Ward: 22:08

And do other competitors not prioritize that as well as you generally? Yeah, okay not prioritize that as well as you generate. Yeah, okay, so it's truly like you are their team and you care so much that you're going to respond way faster and, yeah, make sure everything gets taken care of.

Tanner Chatterley: 22:24

I mean, it's one of those things where it's like we completely white label our service for a lot of brands so they don't even know that order protection exists in that claim filing experience. That was never like a cool thing. Like at route, it was like one of our biggest things at one of our all hands was like routes got to be a household name, like we want everyone to know the brand right. And I was like dude, I'm a shipping insurance company.

Tanner Chatterley: 22:49

Like like I I don't have a brand dude yeah, my, the name of the company is orderprotectioncom, if everybody thinks you're just the brand.

Jared Ward: 23:01

like they praise the brand.

Tanner Chatterley: 23:02

Yeah, and they're like dude. This is sick. This experience has been great you are a billion dollar company For sure For sure.

Tanner Chatterley: 23:07

So that was the biggest thing. Right, it was like how do we become a utility for our brands? Right, and it's and it's funny because it's like what I just described to you can be and it is already a commodity. Right, you can only offer the best experience at the quickest. Like people are just going to get faster and faster in those responses and those resolution times. Right, like we're working on automating probably 50% of our tickets in the next three months. Right, because Q4 comes and we get a shit ton of claims and it's like, okay, I can staff up my team a little bit more or I can automate 50% of my claims that are fulfillment related, claims that I already have all the data for.

Jared Ward: 23:48

That could be such a differentiation.

Tanner Chatterley: 23:50

If you guys go for an AB round building software around like the, this concept of like you are an outsource cs team for cx team for all hundreds of brands and that that's where the secret sauce could be yeah, 100, that's really cool yeah, it's so the the kind of and I won't give up too much of the secret sauce because we have, like I said, said I was like I think our product roadmap and vision is is unique because I have I don't do it anymore at all, honestly because I I have people on my team that are much smarter than me and better than me at at running analytics and stuff, but it's like I have a lot of that background where I like to see what's happening. I want the visibility and that is something that you can. You can bring under one hood, right, and like bring all together. Everyone's like, hey, I have to offer all these different products and value streams, but what they don't understand is the hidden costs of maintaining all of these different value streams.

Tanner Chatterley: 24:48

Right, and as you move up market to where the money is, it just gets harder and harder because these, these customers that you're gonna be servicing at market which is why everyone kind of hangs out in the same area in my space, which is like S&B mid-market is because they don't need a lot of like customized solutions, right, but once you get like the gaps of the world or like the H&Ms or you know these publicly traded companies. It's like, dude, they need very custom solutions. Just for what we do today, right, which is just shipping, insurance and a few other things I won't allude to. And so that's where it's like our biggest partners and champions of order protection are like we can do anything for them. Right, because the platform we built is supportive of their growth. Right, it's not supportive of my growth as order section, like, oh, this platform is going to take me to 100 million dollars of arr. It's like no, this, this will support our brands better than anything else in the market I'm inspired by your story of what's a good metaphor.

Jared Ward: 25:52

It's like the guy who never wanted to be the chosen one but, had to step up as the chosen one. So at order protection, obviously there was a lot of drama that went down. Yes you're head of revenue.

Tanner Chatterley: 26:06

Some shit went down which head of revenue in an early stage company means like you have, like you're an account manager. You have sales yeah, two sales reps.

Jared Ward: 26:13

I'm I'm selling order protection exactly you're just selling, so you go from just selling order protection. You're not the founder, um, and some shit goes down and a lot of shit, a lot of shit goes down and you become the the ceo, like you were really reluctant to step into that but, what were you thinking during that time when the board sort of pinged you and they're like, hey, can you, can you step up what was going through your head?

Tanner Chatterley: 26:44

my heart was pounding, pounding on my chest, because there was. I think I shared this with you. There was two different occasions before I accepted the call to basically do what I needed to do in order to, in order for the company to survive. And I said no the first two times because I was like, hey, like this is probably too much for me, right, like this is a lot what you're asking me. There's and there's no, there's no benefits at the time. There's no benefits to taking on all that responsibility, stress, anxiety and accountability. It wasn't like hey, we're going to pay you a lot more money or hey, like we're going to guarantee you you're going to get a shit ton of equity. It was just like this will die, right. Like we were probably two months away from running out of money after having raised a year prior, less than a year. It was less than a year, yeah, 10 months prior.

Jared Ward: 27:47

So you got two months left. At one point you're just selling order protection and then all of a sudden they're like hey.

Tanner Chatterley: 27:55

By that time I had a team of 20 people because we hired a ton Right. Like you raise VC money, you hire a ton of people hoping that revenue is going to catch up.

Jared Ward: 28:05

Yeah.

Tanner Chatterley: 28:06

And that burn will come down, but that wasn't the case. It to catch up and that burn will come down, but that wasn't the case. It wasn't. It wasn't happening. We, we made some decisions early on, right Leadership decisions and personnel decisions and just wasn't clicking.

Tanner Chatterley: 28:19

It came to the point where it's like you know, obviously there was like the business was being abused in a couple of different ways and and they're like we need you to. We need you to take over. What's crazy is when you come into a business I was just telling my executive team about this yesterday when you come into a business, you have to prove your value right away. You got to prove it fast if you want to stay there.

Tanner Chatterley: 28:40

And if you want to be the best, you've got to continuously prove that A lot of people will prove their value early on and then they'll turn off the jets right, they'll take their foot off the gas and it's like cool, I can get comfortable now because I proved my value. Our board dynamics have changed, probably on three different occasions, four different occasions. Now you have to constantly prove your value and your worth. I was okay doing that, whereas a lot of people would not have been comfortable with okay, hey, you know, I've done all these things that have shown that I'm worth, my value, that I provide. And then new people just coming in. It was like constantly I had to get better, I had to do more.

Jared Ward: 29:20

That's what a true founder is. Something that I've experienced with Luminous is like with every phase of the business you have to evolve into something. Some you have to become a new person like pre-seed was doing everything. Yeah, it's doing everything about the first. I got the first five clients on, holding them on with my bare hands. Yeah, I'm. I'm the product manager for everything that you know bring on a co-founder cto like okay, next stage is like the seed stage.

Jared Ward: 29:47

Okay, like cto is taking over a lot of the product stuff. But now I'm like, now it's like selling, direct selling and implementation. Like then, going into this phase, I'm having to evolve in a go-to-market specialist. And yeah, you have to.

Tanner Chatterley: 30:02

It's evolution.

Jared Ward: 30:04

Right, you have, and as soon as you stop evolving, the business stops evolving.

Tanner Chatterley: 30:09

Correct, you stop growing.

Jared Ward: 30:10

I totally agree with that. Sounds like you're a founder at heart. You're an entrepreneur at heart.

Tanner Chatterley: 30:17

That's right, man. We just finished some fundraising and we're able to put some of our own money into the business, because we've spoken to a ton of investors and these particular ones that we that, uh, that we partnered with were like you're not a founder unless you write check, right. So it's like I had my, my whole executive team. I'd chat with everyone in my executive team. I was like we're all writing our own checks and we're all putting money in during this round so that we can, so that we're all bought in Right. So we're all completely bought in. We got skin in the game, and so it's like. So when, when the competition cause there's so much of it come to the table, it's like like we're all fucking ready to go. Right. Like we're all in the trenches. Right.

Tanner Chatterley: 30:57

My VP of engineering is our best engineer by far. I mean like he's heads down grinding right. Your CEO is selling your biggest deals right, grinding right. Your CEO is selling your biggest deals, right. Your VP of sales holds a quota, just like his reps do. Your head of CS is resolving claims right, like you have this. Your head of product is writing SQL queries right. So it's like you have this, this mentality that we will not lose, right, like we will be the best. And it's funny because, like, as you know, the incumbents fall asleep.

Tanner Chatterley: 31:39

They do Right, they fall asleep. They get lulled to sleep because there's so much success there, or money, vc, whatever and so there's still so much opportunity. You just have to go take it.

Jared Ward: 31:49

I love that man, you, you totally turned it around and I have so much respect for you because likewise dude. What you've done is is insane I, I relate to that so much. That's, that's how. That's how I run the team at luminous is like sure we have heads of departments like you know, marketing a cto, but like everybody is getting their hands dirty yeah and we're vc funded but we're super capital efficient.

Jared Ward: 32:18

We treat it as a war chest, like once we've proved some things, then we have cool. Now we have money to like put gas on it. Everybody comes to luminous to take a massive pay cut and to get equity, a lot of equity. Um, because, say, I have the exact same belief if we're gonna beat net suite, you gotta come to luminous for the right reasons. You gotta come here. You gotta be making 150k over there and come make 50 over here. But a lot of equity, yeah, and that's how I know you're coming here for the right reasons, for sure, and that's how we're gonna win. It's and it's not just me that's bought it. I get everybody.

Tanner Chatterley: 32:55

Yeah, you know what I mean. Yeah, it's, it's cool, man, it's not. And it's not like when you're at a big company that's a, a rocket ship. Everyone's just like drinking the kool-aid and you're like. I got to the point where I was like drinking the k Kool-Aid.

Jared Ward: 33:07

Drinking the.

Tanner Chatterley: 33:08

Gorilla Mine. Yeah, dude, I'm almost through this.

Jared Ward: 33:10

This actually helps quite a bit. I've been dialed. I'm taking the case back with me.

Tanner Chatterley: 33:17

Shout out Gorilla, mine. Yeah, you get to a point where it's like you know, everyone's sipping this Kool-Aid and you're like, man, this is too sweet for me. It's too sweet for me, the Kool-Aid is too sweet. You're like some some's not right here. Right, like you get a little like suspicious, right, so, um, but yeah, at this stage, right Like the people that are like quote unquote, drinking the Kool-Aid is like no, it's like we're mixing our own Kool-Aid.

Tanner Chatterley: 33:40

Right Like this is like everyone's got their hands in it, everyone's, you know, pitching in where they can and and, uh, you know, you guys go out to lunch on Thursday together. It's like I make sure that. Like I had a mission president actually, who was some executive at ExxonMobil and had to go out to Nigeria to live out there for like five years and one of the biggest things he was like I literally just put people that worked in different departments and I sat them with each other. They've never talked to each other, they work on different ends of the business and I sat them with each other and so many problems were solved by just coming together from different departments, even at the stage of company that we are, and just sharing a meal together. It's a team man, it's a team sport. So, yeah, it's just one of those things I fully believe in, which is like the relationships I have with my employees, coworkers, whatever, whatever we call them.

Tanner Chatterley: 34:35

Right, our team. It's like dude, you see these people more than you see anyone else. Right? We talked about this yesterday too. You're like, you know. My question to you is what hobbies did you have to give up and what friendships? Right, because it's like you give up everything to do this and you better make it worth it in the end. Right, and you form new relationships, new friendships, but you make a ton of sacrifice to turn something that was in such a bad position like order protection was, you know, a year and a half ago to what it is today. And through people within the business, through investors that ended up not doing the right thing at times or just blatantly lying and doing bad things right to what it is today. And it's a testament to one our customers, first and foremost, and then the team.

Jared Ward: 35:23

Well, massive respect man.

Tanner Chatterley: 35:25

Thanks, dude.

Jared Ward: 35:25

To close out where can everybody find you?

Tanner Chatterley: 35:28

Just LinkedIn dude. I post on linkedin. I'm a linkedin whore now yeah, we that's you just, it's just one of those things, dude it's like I think adam robinson from retentioncom he started it. He started it all, man. One day we saw that and you know we were paying a bunch of money and like paid ads and stuff and we're like this doesn't work, and so then we started doing the op show and these things and it's just, it's so much more personal starting content in your go-to market, like the op show.

Jared Ward: 35:55

How is how's that performed for order protection?

Tanner Chatterley: 35:58

it's great, you guys it's great, like I mean that, in combination with what we call, like our op champions, which are, like our, our biggest advocates that are willing to jump on a call or be a reference, whatever the case may be, that in tandem is incredible, right, because you have, I always say, in the mouth of two or three, right, it's one thing to hear from your CEO, it's one thing to hear from a sales guy with an order restriction, but then you have real life customers trying to solve the same problem and the OP show, the content that comes from it. It's so natural to just say, hey, come out, let's have you on the op show, right, like and and just prefacing, I'll talk to you about business after, but like, I just want to get, get to know you. Right, that's a whole, the whole part about the ob show yeah so it's been fantastic from like an roi standpoint.

Tanner Chatterley: 36:47

I'm sure the same for you guys as well yeah, well, I love it, man.

Jared Ward: 36:50

You're such a genuine guy, tanner chatterly.

Tanner Chatterley: 36:54

Orderprotectioncom go look it up linkedin, that's right.