This Almost Cost Us EVERYTHING

Jared Ward: 0:06

hey guys, welcome to our building in public series through ops unfiltered. I'm jared and I have my co-founder today, brendan bb, so let's catch you guys up what's been happening in luminous real fast. These are just like quick bullet point updates. So we are now going out for a fundraising round. Yeah, what made us decide to do a in-between Series, a fundraising round?

Brendon Beebe: 0:27

Yeah, things were going really well. I think we're closing a lot more and we're closing way more consistently than we thought, and the amount of expenses that's building up on implementation dev product, I think it's just putting a lot of strain on all the parts within Luminous and it would feel way easier to maintain that growth if we simply had four or five extra people.

Jared Ward: 0:50

We could have done a Series A. Honestly, I think we had the traction, we had the revenue. It just felt a little bit too premature, like if we just do an in-between round, buy us another year time we can really be in the driver's seat of Series A discussions. Then I'd say the other update has been made some hires. So we hired a backend developer, really good one that Brendan knew, jordan Bush, so he was at 4Up and then Limble yeah, he's incredible.

Brendon Beebe: 1:17

Really excited to finally have him.

Jared Ward: 1:18

Why did you want to hire Jordan? You worked with him before.

Brendon Beebe: 1:22

Yeah, so Jordan was at 4Up. He was there before I was developer number two. He worked remotely the entire time. He was there and it was really. 4up was built off of three developers for a really long time Joel Hopkins, jordan and myself. It was just us for a long time and that was enough to get by.

Jared Ward: 1:38

So he has a full gamut of skills.

Brendon Beebe: 1:39

He's very social he's not the stereotypical developer very social like. He's not the stereotypical developer.

Jared Ward: 1:44

he has a very business mind and I feel like that's really important and we need somebody who's jazzed about building at this stage, and he is, yeah, and we can already tell. Other update has been sales and marketing has gone really well.

Jared Ward: 1:55

We broke a million in build sass, a million in sass revenue, a million in which sass error so we've talked about this before and like, there's a million in SaaS revenue, a million in which SaaS ARR so we've talked about this before and there's a million in contracted ARR, then there's a million in actual build and then there's a million in just SaaS. And I think what we've been talking, we've been coming to the realization that, like, look, the real 83K or the real million dollar run rate is when sas bills 83k yeah in a month, and we're actually there now well, for so long it was like it's so easy to play with the numbers to do

Brendon Beebe: 2:35

contracted. Or, like you can say, well, technically I contracted that for double and they're discounted the first year. Or technically they promised they would come in, so we're going to count that, yep, and it's like so many ways to game the numbers. The only way not to game it is the money has to come into our account and then on that month we count it as like that's where we're at, and so for a long time it was hey, we're here, but it's contracted. And then we readjusted and we were way less than what we actually were.

Jared Ward: 3:03

Honestly hitting that. That's been like a massive turning point for me. I think it was a big deal. I don't know. 94% of SaaS companies die before they reach a million in ARR, so, honestly, it's a massive milestone for us. We did it and it wasn't a fake one. It wasn't the fake contracted with ancillary revenue streams coming. No, it's like we hit a real million in arr this year. We effectively went from like 250k to a million within a year yeah so good job.

Jared Ward: 3:35

Us now that's uh, that's uh introduced our next bottleneck, which has been a bottleneck from hell. Um, and that's that's been implementation. Cs we'll talk about a little bit later. Last thing I'd say is we went to saster. We go to saster every single year. This year is like taking a whole freaking busload of people. Last year was just three people, this year was like eight, which felt way different this year. But yeah, why do we go to saster, brendan?

Brendon Beebe: 4:01

I think, more than anything, it gives a time to like. I think an offsite can do a similar, have a similar effect, but it's two or three days where you're disconnected, you're not doing your day-to-day and you can step away and think like what can we change for this next year? I think SASTR makes it 10 times better because you're seeing and interfacing with people from hundreds of different SaaS companies, people who are crushing it, people who know what they're doing, and so it just lets you rethink about how you're running your department and what you're doing differently.

Jared Ward: 4:32

You get to compare yourself to excellent companies, saaster. The stories they tell, the speakers they get are the best of the best at different stages. So they get people who went from zero to 10 million, or 10 to 100, or 100 million to a billion. So, like, they have a good mix of like excellence at different phases so you can always learn something from them they have. They have product-led growth companies that went from 10 to 100. They have sales-led growth companies that that went from 10 to 100 or wherever.

Brendon Beebe: 4:58

So, yeah, you can always yeah, it gets you out of the utah ecosystem. Utah ecosystem is great, but it's so tiny.

Jared Ward: 5:04

Such a bubble.

Brendon Beebe: 5:05

Yeah, there's so few amazing, fantastic SaaS companies in Utah and so every Utah meetup you get to hear from the founders of Divi and it's like you can only hear from them so many times. Yeah.

Jared Ward: 5:19

Or Pattern.

Brendon Beebe: 5:19

Yeah, who's not?

Jared Ward: 5:20

really SaaS. So my favorite talk at SaaS-ter was the Apollo founder. So he talks about his journey of basically like they were four years into the company they had done a Series A and all of a sudden they were faced with their extinction At post-Series A after they had achieved some level of product market fit. I believe they had gone to like 2 million ARR. So the founder just detailed exactly how they went from almost dead to now one of the biggest ZoomInfo competitors.

Jared Ward: 6:00

But it wasn't scalable Apollo. They pivoted to appeal to product-led growth model and everybody in their space was doing sales-led growth. Like ZoomInfo, they're going on market selling big, massive enterprise contracts. So what ZoomInfo did was, first off, they cut 50 employees, cut it down to I believe it's like five, five sorry, 10, 10 total employees. Then they totally they just dove in and reconstructed their entire company to service smb. So like what really impressed me was, instead of just saying like well, I guess we need to go out market like zoom info, they were like no, there's a market here, we're just not monetizing them correctly.

Jared Ward: 6:41

and they dissected every part of their business from support to pricing, to pricing mechanisms like what scale to contract uh, to sales, making it true self-serve um, and basically they went from, you know, almost dying to like now they're I believe they're at like series d competing head-to-head with zoom info that it was incredible. So like so many cool lessons there.

Brendon Beebe: 7:05

I think my favorite at Sastra was Jason Lemkin's ending Q&A. It's always really, really, really good. He talks a lot about the state of the market and just general recommendations and every year you kind of pick up something different. And there's a big focus on AI this year and how to plug that into a traditional SaaS.

Jared Ward: 7:29

Right on this moment I can't remember what he talked about, but I took some really awesome notes. I remember why. Here's a question. So there was a Klarna post recently. The Klarna post was basically this by the end of this year, we will cancel Workday. We will cancel Salesforce. Like all of our ERPs, that tech will be non-existent. We don't need it. We will just only use custom AI plugins to the mission-critical tools. What do you think of that? Are we building into a dead market because of AI? Are all system of records and ERPs? Are they a dying breed now?

Brendon Beebe: 7:57

I guess my confusion with that post is like where does the truth live? You have to have some sort of system of record, otherwise do you just end up with spreadsheets connected to ai, yeah, or are you using ai to build your erp and then I mean that's going to run into other issues jason limkin.

Jared Ward: 8:15

He talked about this. He was like it's like, yeah, that was. That post was probably 80 bullshit yeah it's like but you know, it's kind of cool, like uh, it gives a lot of publicity. It is interesting, though, like I would say honestly that would be.

Jared Ward: 8:30

My biggest fear of building in this ecosystem is like maybe, maybe does ai get so good one day that it's trivial to like spin up a custom erp like like, maybe you have the foundations and maybe the company that like they have the foundational code for all of your modules, but maybe AI gets so good you can, it's all about the last mile development, the last mile customizations to customize it to the client's needs. So that's always. My concern is like man, is Odoo going to like figure this out and crush us all? I don't know.

Brendon Beebe: 9:04

That's a really good point.

Jared Ward: 9:07

Or NetSuite Right us out and crush us all, or I don't know, that's a really good point. Or netsuite, right. Imagine if you could plug into an ai model, like all the attributes of the customer and like netsuite. Oh, they already have the templates of their model, they have everything. And imagine if ai could just customize it. But that's where, like I'm not an ai engineer, I don't know what's feasible.

Brendon Beebe: 9:25

Right. I think one of the things AI was like the topic over and over and over again. And if anything, especially if you use AI for development, you know it's not perfect. Like it's a great help and it gets most of the way there, and if you're starting from scratch, it's really awesome. But the moment it's like you want really refined adjustments or when there's a very specific workflow or process, that's where it just really fails. Right now, the context window is so limited. But is there a world where the context window gets so large that it's actually able to do those types of things? I think that's what people think, but is that 10 months away or 10 years away? I don't know.

Jared Ward: 10:10

So, after SASTR, what are you now implementing to make sure that Luminous doesn't fall behind in the AI race?

Brendon Beebe: 10:16

Yeah, I think post-SASTR, one of the big things we took from it wasn't that we have to pivot our entire product to AI, but that there's probably very small niche use cases within the software that can be super optimized using AI, whether that's helping come up with the product name or whether it's how do you categorize this SKU.

Brendon Beebe: 10:34

I think there's really small experiences that when you plug in, it's not the AI, that's the feature, and that's where you know. The past year was these stupid co-pilots, and we went into this realm of like everybody should use command lines to tell the software you want it to do, but nobody wants a text interface to like tell their ERP how to work. You want to use the interface and have AI working there without them knowing it's there, and so I think that's the route we're taking, and so one of the things we're implementing is we'll have a hackathon every month, or maybe one to two days hackathon every month, where the engineers, developers, will be able to just play around with it and roll out some quick prototypes, see what works, what doesn't work, and it's mostly just to get our feet wet, get us comfortable with working with the OpenAI APIs and miscellaneous things.

Jared Ward: 11:24

So what are some of the main features that we've rolled out this past quarter? What's been new in Luminous product?

Brendon Beebe: 11:29

Yeah, this has been a really awesome month. So the past month has really been focused on the whole sale experience and billing and payments, and so we're really targeting this customer who's on NetSuite, using NetSuite CRM for their sales and invoicing, and so we rolled out automated billing, being able to save a card on file and have the auto bill according to the payment terms, sending out payment reminders when an invoice isn't paid. We rolled out an integration to new order so anybody using new order for their wholesale flow we can digest those sales orders, split them out across multiple shipment dates, then bill them on an invoice and bill that you know however frequently you want. Other piece was some refinement on our relationships so sales orders can be invoiced multiple times. We talked about this last time, but our focus is really on the wholesale customer and so they're dealing with really large sales orders that are fulfilled over time.

Brendon Beebe: 12:16

And those sales orders are invoiced kind of as the fulfillments occur.

Jared Ward: 12:19

Yeah, this is so common. Whenever an e-com company or forget, not even e-com just well, it's extremely common with e-commerce companies. So you get a massive sales order from like Shields or something, or even just a specialty retailer, you purchase from China. It comes in batches and then you send it as it comes in. So now, to my knowledge, I think, one of the only systems that you can effectively send multiple invoices per one sales order no.

Brendon Beebe: 12:48

I'm sure lots of people do.

Jared Ward: 12:49

There's a specific competitor. What was the thing that we were?

Brendon Beebe: 12:52

talking about with SYN7? Maybe it's SYN7 that can't do that. There's these really small use not niche, but like specific use cases that immediately prevent somebody from using customers, and I think SYN7 was the one that couldn't have multiple invoices per sales order.

Jared Ward: 13:06

Yeah, okay. So we just have a competitor, syn7, who you can't do, that. You can't have a sales order and then send multiple invoices per sales order. So does this change at all? Who our perfect?

Brendon Beebe: 13:18

customer is. I think it refines it more. I mean it expands who our perfect customer is. So now our perfect customer is doing billing in Luminous. Our perfect customer might have a new order and they're doing larger orders. Our perfect customer can now be somebody who's invoicing as they fulfill the order, where a lot of our current customers it's one invoice per sales order like very basic. This just expands. The expands our market a little bit bigger.

Jared Ward: 13:43

So what are the next 12 months look like for the product? Has anything changed there?

Brendon Beebe: 13:47

The next year is really going to be focused on wholesale for the retail experience, so we have a whole flow coming out for a retail EDI that will hit sometime next year. We're going to continue to expand our wholesale offering and go a little bit deeper on our B2B side. We see our B2B offering while it won't ever be as customizable as a new order for your wholesale platform, we really think that we can deliver a B2B experience that's on par with what you want to get from new order, and so that will be a big focus, probably the end of next year basically, if you, if you're a omni-channel e-commerce company that does a lot of wholesale and you want that billing to be totally automated, like we're a great fit for you.

Jared Ward: 14:28

if, like shop five plus, running your b2b sales through shop five plus isn't quite automated, like the way it connects to the 3PL and the way it bills customers and it invoices to QuickBooks, let us know we can honestly do a great fit.

Brendon Beebe: 14:43

So, on the sales side, what have you been seeing? As far as market sentiment goes towards NetSuite, what trends are you seeing?

Jared Ward: 14:49

I'm seeing a big trend away from massive ERPs. I would say this trend started in like the mid-2010s, when VC money was just being thrown at e-commerce companies because they thought it was a vehicle for, you know, billion dollar valuations. So what that led to was small e-com companies now have budget for big erps and big coos, and that led to a lot of decisions Frankly, I think bad decisions implementing NetSuite and having like a really expensive COO who knows NetSuite and I think the dust is settling now. You know it took like five to ten years for the dust to settle on those decisions, but now we're seeing the dust has settled. These companies are not nearly as big as they thought they were going to be and to get to profitability, uh, we see a lot of companies willing to drop their big, clunky erp and get something that's more right-sized. That's, that's what I'm seeing.

Brendon Beebe: 15:50

That's amazing. What about finance? How do you get off a bigger erp? What are you seeing?

Jared Ward: 15:53

first off, it depends on like if you, if you come to a system like luminous, we obviously we don't have a general ledger, so you have to migrate off of netsuite onto another general ledger like quickbooks. So what luminous does is we'll we actually have a, we have a partner team that does this. They they can migrate off of netsuite onto quickbooks. So luminous, just like we, sell you an all-in-one migration. So we have our team that will migrate you from NetSuite to QuickBooks and then we'll do the operations migration from NetSuite onto Luminous. But that's what we're seeing. But it's definitely one of the challenges, like your CFO has to be okay going to QuickBooks a lot of times, going back to QuickBooks. It's a challenge, though it's awesome. Why did Luminous specifically choose not to build a general ledger? A lot of our competitors are currently building a general ledger. We see a bunch of new companies who are just purely like a general ledger for e-commerce, like DayZero is one Finaloop. There's another couple ones that come up is one Final Loop.

Jared Ward: 16:57

There's another couple ones that come up. And then you have other ERPs who are on top of all of the operational stuff they have to build their building at General Ledger we specifically chose not to. Why was that?

Brendon Beebe: 17:09

It was a very purposeful decision. I think we looked at a lot of the people who built ERPs in the 2010s, like Deere Systems. It was a General ledger first. Or even if you look at NetSuite, it was Larry Ellison put a billion dollars in and they built a general ledger and then it kind of progressed from there and you see a lot of people doing it right now.

Brendon Beebe: 17:30

But I think when we looked at the market and who we're servicing we're servicing e-commerce companies we found the majority of these e-commerce companies had outsourced bookkeeping. They didn't have somebody in-house running all of these An outsourced bookkeeper. The last thing they want to do is jump onto a brand new platform. Oftentimes, these younger general ledgers are missing basic functionality that you'd expect to have in even QuickBooks or Xero or some of these common ones. And so we decided, hey, let the bookkeeper, let the accountant use their financial platform. We don't have to switch them off, we don't have to even sell them on switching and we can be act as a sub ledger. We can take care of costs, we can take care of cogs, we can take care of purchasing, we can do all the accessory, like actions, without having to own the general ledger and the financial statement, um, and it makes the sell a lot easier. Now. We don't have to go sell a CFO or sell somebody on switching everything over.

Brendon Beebe: 18:22

It's much easier to jump in, and we wanted to be operations focused. I think your frustrations with a lot of the platforms is they were finance focused and operations second, and so for us it's operations first, let's figure out finances later.

Jared Ward: 18:38

Yeah, I also think the strategy. There's something really important that we determined. This is how I put it there's like a natural evolution in e-commerce companies, which is you use a fractional bookkeeper until one day you hire a veteran CFO and that sort of explains the gap between QuickBooks and NetSuite. You just use a fractional $700 a month bookkeeper until one day you don't think there's a reason to build a general ledger. Because even if we build a freaking, smashing general ledger, it's just amazing. It has everything and it's purpose-built free commerce.

Jared Ward: 19:26

Like are you gonna? Okay, so are you gonna convert every single major accounting firm? Maybe somebody will do it one day, but like not this day. That's a tall task to do, because that's the thing with general ledgers you have to convert an entire populace. So either you have to if you're going up market, you have to convert a entire populace of e-commerce cfos to get off of netsuite, which that would be a decent bet right now, like still extremely difficult but like the problem is building a general edge. You have to start down market and then, oh God, you have to convert thousands and thousands of accountants off of QuickBooks and that it just feels impossible right now.

Jared Ward: 20:06

That's why we didn't build a general ledger. Boys and girls.

Brendon Beebe: 20:10

But we might someday, yeah, maybe.

Jared Ward: 20:12

Honestly, I feel like our bet is we see so many honestly like cool general ledger products out there. My bet is that one of them is going to fail in the next three years. When I say fail, I mean like be a good product but probably run out of money. Their go-to-market wasn't quite good enough and maybe we can gobble one up and embed it into Luminous All right. So I said that we were going to talk about our current bottleneck. This is us getting. Brendan and I are opening up, being vulnerable here. The past week has been hell.

Jared Ward: 20:41

Yeah it sucked. I was going to San Francisco, I was implementing clients doing sales quarterly planning, I got sick and I was moving into a new place on Friday. It just freaking sucked. That's more personal stuff, Like from a company perspective. With the big increase in sales we felt the next bottleneck and it really shined a light on some mistakes that we've made as leaders on, like the CS implementation front. How would you categorize these mistakes so other leaders don't make them?

Brendon Beebe: 21:15

I don't know if they're as much as mistakes or just normal growing pains. Yeah, I think other leaders don't make them. I don't know if they're as much as mistakes or just normal growing pains. Yeah, I think, uh, I feel like the important part in a startup is you're evaluating where things are at and you're making changes, and the structure to your company is kind of being created as you're growing as fast as possible. It's like what's the phrase? Like building a plane as you're flying, yeah, and so it's just a matter of catching it and then identifying where it is.

Jared Ward: 21:40

I would say the lessons that we've learned through multiple departments is like if, like clear tiers of ownership, you can't just hire somebody and then have an have ambiguous ownership.

Jared Ward: 21:55

That's what we noticed. It's like we we hired two, two people who are basically parallel to each other. Nobody was above one or the other, or at least it wasn't immediately clear, yeah, and I think what that led to it also wasn't clear between us who owned CS, and I think what that breeded was this ambiguous culture of ownership there, where it was like, okay, well, who is responsible for churn and who is responsible for knowing where this customer is at? And it was just super ambiguous, and I think sales increasing just sent a spotlight on that and we were like, oh shoot, wow, we need to clearly identify who owns what here. So it led us to we split out the CS department into three different departments. So one is front of line support, one is CSMs and the other is implementation, and each one of those departments has clearly defined objectives and KPIs and each one of those departments is now going to have a head who is responsible for that.

Jared Ward: 23:03

Honestly it feels like structurally it feels so much better Part of the frontline support. We decided to use a software called ServiceBell and honestly, the reason why was because it just feels on brand for us. So Intercom, but it integrates into Intercom. We'll have to figure that out. But Luminous has this sort of like where we really differentiate ourselves from our competitors like NetSuite and SYN7.

Jared Ward: 23:26

Support is really hard to get and it's like totally non-human or uh, since heaven, support is really hard to get and it's like totally non-human, it's or like it's overseas support. So we see this as an opportunity to really differentiate ourselves on support. Server spell is essentially like imagine facetiming somebody and that us support person is competent and they can like take control of your screen or like do an ad hoc training. So we really thought that that was on brand for us and it's one of those things where it doesn't feel scalable. But I want to figure out how to make that scalable because I think it'll help us. We've clearly proven that our support, like human interaction, is one of the biggest differentiators. It's why people choose us. So it's our first attempt to sort of try to make it more technology-driven and see if we can scale it.

Brendon Beebe: 24:19

There's a talk at Sastr, actually, where they mentioned, you know, when you're a small company, a sub-10 million ARR, your product's not going to be as good breadth-wise, it's going to have more bugs than you know the bigger softwares and the only way you can differentiate is that human touch. And so this is our way of like solidifying hey, we are completely different. You can actually facetime our support agents and they'll get on with you. It's such a selling point as the product's going to evolve, it's going to get better and we'll get there. And as it's growing, this will make up a lot of the difference.

Jared Ward: 24:48

So the ERP problem, I believe, is multifaceted. We've had this conversation offline, but sure you have the software problem, which is like how can you create a superior ERP experience and divide up the modules and custom fit that to an e-commerce company? But the second part that people don't talk about is I't I? I don't think you'll ever just have a self-service erp that works I, I just I don't, I don't, I don't think so right I.

Jared Ward: 25:17

I think the second part is support and training, like who's going to help you implement it, and I think that's that's a big part, that the reason why we're dumping money into this service belt thing and into support is because we're really making a bet that it's not just technology. This is also the support that you get. You have to have superior support and you have to have constant human contact to get your ERP working correctly.

Brendon Beebe: 25:46

Well, here's a question, correctly. Well, here's a question. If you look at netsuite akumatica, any of the sap, the support and implementation, is completely outsourced. Right, you go to a service company, you pay the service company a million dollars. They help implement the platform and then on the other side of things, you have this in sevens where it's there is no support. You just kind of figure it out on your own. Yeah, why don't the big platform erps offer like a compelling services, like professional services implementation team?

Jared Ward: 26:23

imagine if we did it that way and our focus, our bottleneck, was purely how fast, how many people can we sell, like? Just imagine that Right.

Brendon Beebe: 26:33

That's why.

Jared Ward: 26:34

Or maybe that's not why I don't know, but that's what it feels like Like. Imagine that, imagine oh my gosh, we would just be selling this shit. But I think that's where the breakdown is, because your incentives are not aligned with the customer that you're selling. It's sort of just like oh yeah, they'll figure out implementation, and then you're selling through your contract, so it doesn't matter if they deliver a horrible experience.

Brendon Beebe: 27:07

It doesn't really.

Jared Ward: 27:09

And then NetSuite doesn't really care. I mean I'm sure they do, to a horrible experience it doesn't not really. And then NetSuite doesn't really care. I mean they do, I'm sure they do to a certain extent, but not really. If you're selling a three-year deal, they're stuck in. They know that every ERP implementation is going to suck, but you know they're stuck on it. So I don't know there's not much incentive to take on that implementation, not really financially.

Brendon Beebe: 27:33

Yeah, at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter how successful you are, as long as you figure out how to implement some part of it. It's probably going to be a pain in the butt to switch off anyways.

Jared Ward: 27:43

And Larry Ellison. He knows it, he's the second richest dude in America. That dude's printing money. What does he do? He just owns everything. Netsuite can do everything. It's the back-end tech of most Fortune 500 companies. Do you think there's a deeper discussion there with tech? Maybe that's because, honestly, is software in the cloud is like a relatively new thing, it changes how you build the products nest.

Brendon Beebe: 28:17

we was built as a platform that could do anything but so generic that it requires super a crazy amount of customization to actually get to do what you want, and so we could build a super generic platform, and it just puts a lot more heavy lifting on the implementation side. Or do we narrow our focus on who we can service, make that as seamless as possible, and if we're owning the implementation piece, can we also build the tooling to make that as easy? Yeah, I think so. I think so too.

Jared Ward: 28:50

But I think that's what we have to stay curious on. As a company, we can't just be like we can't just throw. Well, actually, we can actually just throw people at it. I think that's the benefit of fundraising in this market, is you can throw, you can build out the technology as best you can and then throw people at it. Is might not be scalable, but it's something that eventually we'll have to catch up like. We'll have to be able to scale support in a meaningful way, and that's like the onboarding experience has to sort of be embedded into the software itself. One day.

Brendon Beebe: 29:23

Yeah, there is something to say, like channel partners or somebody who's reselling us, who's also managing support. If that's ever going to happen, we need the tooling in place that they can see all the logs, see what's going. Why isn't that automation working? Why is that API call failing? They have to be able to debug all that, which is a whole other feature set because we just do that right. So if we go the route of channel partners, which that's probably that seems to be what everybody does is that the right path?

Jared Ward: 29:55

I personally, I don't think so. I feel like the opportunity in the erp space is to specifically not rebuild net suite like I got. So if the question is basically, do we just rebuild NetSuite for e-commerce? Like I mean we could, but I feel like other people have sort of tried that already. Syn7 basically rebuilt NetSuite in the cloud and they built a self-service cloud. So they went all in on like the complete inverse, Like no, you can build a self-service erp. I think the distinction is like we're we're building a product but we're embedding support.

Brendon Beebe: 30:35

We're not saying that erps can be self-onboarded, we're saying that we will also own the result of whether or not you get implemented and then you look at a locate who a lot of channel partners really like, but I think it's because they built a lot of tooling to support channel partners but at the same time Locate sold and they never grew $25 million or something. They had a million in ARR.

Jared Ward: 31:01

total it's a really interesting discussion, but I do think the ERP space is going to get disrupted. It's a $13 billion opportunity. If you think about like product distribution and like retail e-commerce in in the united states, it's a it's a over 10 billion dollar opportunity and I think, like, even if we take off 10 of that, even if we, even if we build a billion dollar company and it's just like omni-channel merchants, like the biggest omni-channel merchants who also do wholesale and e-commerce Everybody throws out stupid numbers like this is a $15 billion opportunity.

Brendon Beebe: 31:41

Is it? What are your numbers there?

Jared Ward: 31:45

I don't know what our TAM is. I mean, we've pitched it to investors and I just know the TAM is massive.

Brendon Beebe: 31:51

The TAM is unimportant when you're starting anyways, get to 10 million and then figure out how to make it larger. Yeah, exactly I think at the end of the day, we have so many ideas on how to actually grow the company past 10 million, whether that's through payment processing, through purchasing, through sourcing, like there's a hundred different ideas on new product offerings that can naturally expand that to him.

Jared Ward: 32:15

Exactly. Thanks, guys, we'll see you next month for our Building in Public series Excellent Out.