Ep 213: How To Structure Your Content Creation For The Content Website You Just Bought with Frank Olivo

Jaryd Krause (0:00)

Your content website can generate tones of traffic and revenue, but only if you know how to structure the content on your website. Well once you bought it Hi, I'm Jaryd Krause, host of the buying online businesses podcast. And today I'm speaking with Frank, who is the founder of Saga Pixel, a digital marketing agency specializing in SEO now in this podcast episode, Frank and I break down so many great things.

Firstly, we talk about an affiliate site, he started what was involved with that and why it ranks so well. We also talk about how to structure your content site after you bought it, how to use only the best categories, how to determine which ones they are, what they would be, and which zombie content to actually delete, and why we will talk about how to create a content plan that is not just going to be great for SEO, but great for humans.

So we kind of lean into talking about the type of content that you actually want to create that actually generates revenue, but at the same time, why is it's valuable to think about the traffic, or should say, the humanans journey, and how they're learning about your niche or your topic, and why understanding that can lead to more traffic, better SEO, more time on page and eventually more revenue? Obviously play the long game here, then I asked you a very specific question around AI driven content to Frank and why it's not what everybody thinks it is.

Both Frank and myself share our opinion on chat GPT AI driven content, what it looks like for Google what it looks like for humans. And where this may end up playing out in the years to come. We'll talk about once you've got all your site structure set up and your content plan set up and you're starting to write content once you've got your content written. And it's ranking, we talk about running PPC ads to content and when actually, it makes sense to do that. And when it doesn't make sense to do that, and what type of articles you would be sending Pay Per Click advertising to now there's so much value in this episode, I know you're absolutely going to love it.

Now, we do teach people to buy online businesses, we're talking about buying a business and then growing it through this podcast episode. So make sure you don't go away and just take a stab in the dark at this, make sure you get some help get my buying online businesses due diligence framework, you can get it for free, it saved me millions of dollars or save so many of my clients millions of dollars. And it's made people millions of dollars as well.

It takes the guesswork out of buying a business, and you can get that at buyingonlinebusinesses.com/freeresources. And there are other awesome resources on that page to enjoy.

Welcome to the Buying Online Businesses podcast. Thanks for coming on.

Frank Olivo (3:15) Thanks for having me, Jaryd.

Was that the intention with this one, though? So initially, I've always been passionate about home recording, and I used to be a musician. And I wanted to do some because I saw that there were a lot of opportunities there. I just saw the art of the websites that were ranking in search for these queries. And I just knew I could beat all of them without even putting forth much effort. So that was the route that I decided to start off with. And this was right when I was opening up my agency, and I didn't know whether it would actually become an agency or not.

Jaryd Krause (3:51)

Cool. And so it ended up ranking, and you sort of end up ranking quite well. I want to dive in, and how long ago was this when you started this?

Frank Olivo (4:00)

So the story is that I started this up in January, and we opened up the agency in January of 2017. I want to say it was like the summer of that year; I put the website up, I started reading a couple articles, and I used the methods that we use for our content planning. I'm a heavy Ahrefs user, and I'm a heavy Content Explorer user with traps. So my favorite method for finding content topics is to go into the content explorer for a seed keyword, apply a whole bunch of filters to find such things as getting over a certain amount of traffic that has a domain rating under a certain amount, see what's generating traffic, and then take a look at the SERPs to see what do we need to do to write a better article than this?

Put together The Brief, write it, and, you know, let pretty much the inevitable happen and get the pages ranking. In that case, we were going again after I ended up starting off by going after a query related to plugins like we were doing, like I was doing, and I was ranking for a lot of people searching for plugins for home recording for Pro Tools or whatever. Some of the articles I wrote, as I remember, were about vocal compression plugins, like the best compression plugins for vocals. I think we were number one for it, for that specific query, and it got a lot of traffic.

And it was crazy, because I did this the same years that I opened up the agency, and most of my efforts were going towards the agency. Today, I have 27 employees. And the reason it fell by the wayside was the fact that I just got so busy with Saga Pixel that I really didn't put any effort in, regardless of the traffic, which was in the 10s of 1000s every month, and we didn't. And this was offered like a couple days of work. Honestly.

Jaryd Krause (5:49)

Congrats. I know the feeling when you have a primary business that ends up getting more attention because it's seeing a result or a bigger result. I wanted to dive into site structuring, which is going to be a bit different, like when, with this site that you started, somebody comes to you and says, Hey, can you do an SEO audit?

And then you need to change the structuring of some sites? We built this; did you go away and find a few, maybe three to five or two to four main categories? pages that you wanted to create? And if so, how did you discover them? Was it through doing a lot of content research on Ahrefs and then taking that out and distilling it down to like two to four main categories?

Frank Olivo (6:39)

I didn't use any tools for that. What the pillars for us for that website were and could be, again, I have the websites, the hosting expired, and I never put it back up honestly. And I probably could again, but what I did was organize it by type of recording. So recording guitar, recording drums, recording vocals, and I think we had another one that was like recording bass, I want to say, and those are basically the four pillars.

Jaryd Krause (7:08)

And how do you come up with those? Were they just the ones that you wanted to rank for? And then put and rank content under that sort of those pillars. Yeah, so the whole idea was more than that with recording. If you're already recording at home, these are the different things you're going to be recording, you're going to be doing drums, bass, guitars, and vocals.

And then there are so many subtopics that you could do under any one of those that I just saw a lot of opportunities in the short term for ranking for those subtopics. Yeah, great looks like when somebody comes to you with a site where they're ranking for just a vast range of keywords, and they've got maybe some categories or some main hub pages that may not actually be the, for the site, and they might need to change them.

Is that a thing? Is that a thing that you pick up on an SEO audit when you do that? And if so, how do you opt in to a new strategy with, you know, restructuring the site in a way if that's the case for a content site? Because there are a lot of people listening, and they might just buy a site that's got, it's insane, the lawn can niche. And they've got so many different category pages that they don't know what type of content they should be creating.

Frank Olivo (8:24)

So the biggest problem—that's not the biggest problem that we see, typically, what we see is they didn't know how to select the topics in the first place. When clients come to us, they write articles that don't actually target a query, We saw this week that, like the titles were things like acne, because that's it that's there. That's the biggest problem that I see.

Now, if we buy, however, if we had someone come to us that has articles that are all over the place, it depends at that point on what the goal is for the website. If you had, for example, a lawn care website, I would then want to identify pillars that you could produce content around. If we have stuff on there that is out in left field that we think could potentially negatively impact the overall experience, like Google's understanding of what this website's about, So if we had a website about lawn care and then they added a section about conservation, for example, I would recommend getting rid of the content, maybe putting up a second website and migrating that content there and setting up redirects.

But I wouldn't recommend mixing content like topics like you see on these content farms or from people trying to sell you links that they have like finance, tech education, and marketing. Don’t do that. Don't do that. If you're not just trying to sell links to anyone that will pay and doesn't know any better, Don't run that business model at all. Laid off. Yeah, just please don't. But if you had a lawn care website and you saw that the stuff was all over the place, the first step I would take would be to prune the content if needed.

If there are any sort of zombie pages on the website that aren't getting any sort of traffic, take a look at them and determine if there is a valuable keyword that you could target with them. And if not, get rid of it. Aside from that, the next step, or the step after that, would be to then identify, out of all these pillars, what seems to be the one that's going to be able to deliver the biggest results for you, website owner. So if you're monetizing through ads, then I would be going for just raw traffic. If we're monetizing for Philly at marketing, then we really should be looking at what's going to have the best margins.

So, for example, in this case, it was, yeah, the highest end keywords, but also the stuff that was going to have the best affiliate commissions. Yeah, for a recording website, you know, whether you're selling guitar strings or cables or not as an affiliate, you're going to have to move a lot of cables and a lot of strings in order to make any money off of that. But if you're ranking for things like recording interfaces, that's going to be a $500 to $2,000 purchase. And you don't have to move that many of them to get some good commissions.

So my decision making would be determined based on what my end goal is, whether it's affiliate marketing or advertising. I think a lot of people, when they come to SEO, have the belief that they just need to get more traffic to a certain business, and the business is only around because it's earning income. So why not create content that's going to allow the business to make income on the chance that, yeah, if you've got a content site and you just rank for info articles, then yeah, a lot of traffic is helpful. But other than that, like affiliate and then all the other business models, like SaaS and E comm.

Not after keywords are going to generate revenue instead of just generating traffic. I think a lot of people get this mixed up because they think SEO is just about traffic, right? Or volume of traffic. Do you see that when people come to you and say, Hey, can you help me with my site? Yeah, I mean, we, I harp on it with our team, on our weekly meetings, just making sure that when we present to a new client, if their call, when they call to get a proposal, the first thing that I tell them, our content has to check three boxes, it's got to be on your buyer’s journey, it's got to be something that you can rank for.

And it has to be something that has a significant enough search volume, which is very subjective. In the case of an affiliate website, for example, if you have something that has an incredibly high volume, but there's just no purchase intent behind it, it's a waste of your time and a waste of your server resources and your hosting resources. But if you have an advertising model, eyeballs or eyeballs, you know, it's going to bring in that money.

So that is one of the benefits. If you are an SEO that struggles, and I've been, I've interviewed probably in the hundreds of SEOs at this point just for roles at the agency. And I see that a lot of them, the majority of them, struggle with understanding intent and the buyer's journey, meaning they'll see a topic that's relevant to what the website's about.

But there's not a clear path to them googling this thing, and then making a purchase for whatever the services are or whatever, if you're an SEO that struggles with that, I don't recommend it. I think that you're going to have a harder time monetizing your website through affiliate marketing than you would through ads.

Jaryd Krause (13:41)

That definitely, definitely feels like it's the same for an info article or info site mailing for traffic, but they should still be thinking about the buyers’ journey, because even though there's no end in sight, there typically isn't an end product to sell. And I would encourage people to have an email list and then some affiliate marketing from the email list if you can, sticking with the lawn care niche. So you have no products to sell other than ad space.

Well, it's still similar in the way that you think about people's journey with lawn care around. Well, they've just decided to start caring for the lawn what's step one, and then put them through a certain journey of content that they should flow through of like, I've just bought my house, I want to start caring for my lawn. What do I need to do to fertilize it?

The next step is how often do I need to grow. The next step is what's the best mower and then maintenance and what do you think that's a valuable and important thing to think about the journey even just for an info site? I love that the page is longer.

Frank Olivo (14:41)

Yes, I love that, especially for a website. That is an ad that's ad driven. That's relying on ad revenue. Because if somebody comes in with one problem and they may not have even thought about the subsequent steps in the process, they're exactly where you described them. This is ideal, I think, not only from the standpoint of getting more impressions for your ads on your website as they're visiting more pages, but also from an engagement standpoint.

I am in the camp of people who believe that Google is paying attention to the engagement that people have on your websites. I think I find it telling that they changed that in you in the UAE to do Google Analytics, there's a section called engagement. Now, I think that the only reason that they don't just go out right and say, "Like, Bing, has that like click through rate and engagement on websites and whatnot as a ranking factor is that I think that they're afraid that they're going to end up having people try to spam through with click spam and whatnot, which would cost them billions of dollars and resources just from, you know, bots, clicking on the search results back.

It's just taking up so much, like you said, so many resources. It would anyway. So if that's the case, for all sites or businesses, understanding the journey and then putting them through owning the content that they should consume, and building on my YouTube channel, I've got a playlist of, like, where to start. And you know, start here, and 12345 basically gets you a mini course on my YouTube channel.

And it takes people through the journey to the point where, like, "Now I'm ready to take the next step, if they were to work with us, do you feel that they have the ideology that you need to have that sort of journey? How do you then start creating a content plan for that? Well, I still like to start with stuff that's going to bring them in through organic search, it's going to get them in through the SERP in the beginning.

And once we've kind of tapped that out, like the strategy that we've used for our own website, it's been to create comprehensive clusters of content around marketing, digital marketing, for specific types of businesses. So we do a lot of work in healthcare. If you go to sacrifical.com, you'll find that any article about, like marketing for plastic surgeons is linking on the sidebar to articles about PVC and plastic surgeons, tick tock social media, how to select keywords, everything you'd want to do.

And the whole idea is if somebody comes in for one of those, if they're interested in finding seo keywords, quote, unquote, for their new website redesign, maybe they would be interested in reading the guide about SEO and then seeing what our approach is. And then maybe PVC because they just want more leads and so forth. I started by trying to get them on the website. However, after that, if we have something that maybe there's not a lot of search volume for like, last year, I did a trends and cosmetic surgery marketing article.

Not that necessarily it was trying to get people into the SERPs, but to get people get visitors to engage more with the other articles on the website, I thought someone that's interested in SEO, or marketing or whatever, maybe for plastic surgeons may be interested in find that well, what's going on what's changing in this industry, the ways that word that we've used, that we can identify those things are a lot of times just knowing who your customer is, like you just described working with a lawn care business, you know, these are the things that people have to go through. That's ideal.

That's not always going to be the case tools like traps if you go to keyword, the Keyword Explorer, they have a questions tab. I love also asked.com It's another great way to find opportunities for finding questions that people have that will then show you what implicitly like what their journey is. And so the public, um, everybody knows about that one great tool.

Jaryd Krause (18:35)

It's a really good tool, that one answers the public, it would be really good for piecing together a customer journey for a niche that you're new to people that are listening, they're just going to buy a site and they don't know anything about lawn care, lawn care, I find it's okay. Because if they're interested in the business model, they can have writers go away and create the content for them.

And have people help create a content plan or use answer the public for that hybrid, maybe they maybe they get some help from you with a content plan. And then they go away and get somebody to write the content. It's pretty big recording is AI, content, chat GPT and my own thoughts around it. And believe Google is not going to be too excited about more content. That is possibly not the greatest content. But Google is going to do the right thing for human beings at the end of the day, not for AI. I have that perception. And I hope it's true.

Frank Olivo (19:29)

Put something out on tik tok about this a few weeks ago when this all started. So if anybody that's been paying attention to their coverage report that publishes a lot of content, will notice that sometime in last spring and around May of 2021. It got really difficult to index new content. We had a lot a lot of cases. It was the bane of our existence, honestly here that we were putting out these articles on our own website or client’s websites that would say and discover not indexed for like four months.

And then it would finally get indexed. And it would rank at number four for the keyword that we were targeting. So it wasn't like a quality issue. Yeah, it was just a matter of like, Google just got really, they turned the knob on what they were indexing, and they got bad. And then I want to say it was like sometime this summer, it was like somebody hit a switch, and it was gone. And then there was an update this fall, where it kind of tightened up a little bit. Again, it wasn't as bad as it was before. But I'm seeing the discovery not indexed again, on some websites that we know have no quality issues, I'm getting to the answer with this.

The web is getting really big for Google, and it costs them billions of dollars to crawl and index the web. And they've reported that a ludicrous amount of web 50% of it is duplicate, or spam. And as AI gets easier and easier to use and more accessible to everybody, people are going to just churn out so much AI generated content, and Google's gone have to crawl it, and it's going to cost them money to crawl it. And as a result, my prediction is that they're going to want to make examples of websites that are using as they want on Black hat world in these places for people to put up the screenshots of my website getting hacked, what got hammered.

And the words to get around that AI content is going to get penalized. You're going to hear that other people say, Well, I think my chat GPT content and run it through quill bought the GPT detectors now say that they don't detect it as being AI generated. My argument against that is that Google's technology, whatever they're using, is way more powerful. And they have a very, a, an economic incentive to the tune of billions of dollars to identify this content and not index it. So you, you can place your bets, I'll place my bets and you know, ultimately, somebody will be right.

Jaryd Krause (22:01)

Somebody will be right. But like if you follow the money, where a lot of decisions lie. Well, it’s just interesting, because I have a lot of people like Oh, my God, it's going to be so good. Because I can just get AI generated content, and it's going to be cheaper, it's going to be quicker, it's going to be easier. People have gone away and ranked sites fully built by AI and stuff like that to make money.

So they're cutting corners and not thinking about the human experience and the value that a human's going to get from the site. It's not going to want to rank that right like Google eventually is going to slam it and the people that understand how Google an or probably is going to work. I mean, a lot of SEOs get it but a lot of people that are coming into the space just believe like this is amazing. This is a shortcut. But more often than not shortcuts I believe as a philosophy, my life a lot of the shortcuts that we take in our life. Not really that short.

Frank Olivo (22:56)

I do remember when I first saw that, this person does not exist on this website. I remember seeing those pictures and you saying like, wow, these are so lifelike, like I couldn't distinguish between this and a real photo. Yeah, today, I can spot one of those pictures from a mile away. Correct. And I think we're right now with chat GPT and AI generated content at a wow, I can't believe that this level of law. But soon enough, give us some time and we're going to eat any human being that is going to be able to read this and say it reads like it was generated by an AI.

Jaryd Krause (23:31)

And it's also going to make us as humans write better and write with more humor and comedy and be more real. And we will start to see how real human content is, rather than this is the answer to how you water you.

Frank Olivo (23:52)

Now every time I read AI generated content, I'm going to read in that voice.

Jaryd Krause (23:59)

It's recorded as well, just in case you need to hear it again. So we don't have to harp on about that. I think you and I have the page there. And I believe a lot of SEOs are not that I'm an SEO, but we help people run PPC ads for content. Be very curious about this because we've gone through the site structure theorization, content planning, content creation.

Now we didn't really harp on about content creation in itself. We talked about GPT. But I talked about that a lot in many different areas. But we want to talk about running ads to buy articles or affiliate articles, really running ads to affiliate stuff is frowned upon by many platforms, right? About running ads to info content. Is it just for and do see and do this for just content? Or does the info content actually have a call to action with an opt in or is a lead into a certain product?

Frank Olivo (24:58)

Paid search is not my favorite channel for promoting content I actually prefer promoting it on Twitter and other platforms if it has, if it has a very strong CTA in some cases, when we've when we've run it before, it's funny that you asked this question because one of our clients, one of our ecommerce clients wants us to start running paid search to their articles. And as we're approaching this strategy with them, I'm seeing the opportunities because they sell kitchen products. And without getting into too much detail, but it's way more detailed, it's way more detailed than kitchen products, they sell, they sell a very specific kitchen product. And we've put together some guides to purchasing this like it's not microwave.

So let's say you're looking to buy microwaves, a guide to purchase in microwaves, we can bid on keywords that would possibly even have a high likelihood of someone choosing our clients microwave versus other brands microwave because it has a unique value proposition. So sending traffic to such a page may even be better than sending it to a product page. Because the person is in the is in the is in the consideration phase where they're looking at different options.

That's usually the strategy. It's like we have a piece of content that is going to be very highly tailored to the consideration phase, like a Hub Spot for example, it would make sense for them to bid on a keyword like CRM comparison of CRMs or reviews of CRMs for small business, for example, because they know that they're going to have a leg up on the Zoho of the world. And, and they're putting together a guide. Or even funny if they sent the traffic to a website. That's not even theirs. Because then it is even pure, it appears to be non-partial of a backlink from that site that's not theirs to their product.

So that means you have an internal link. If it is their own site, will you have an internal link to the product on those content pages? Or a couple of links? Yeah, okay. I use them as an example. Because this was somebody that HubSpot was very entitled to, to my opinion, a very smart move on their part that they did a few years ago that they ranked themselves for like CRM, best CRM for small business, and they did a checklist. So it's a comparison article that compared their CRM to everybody else's, and they were okay, talking about the ups, you know, the pros of some of their competitors.

Jaryd Krause (27:29)

They can be affiliates, as well, you know, have a list, you know, affiliate income from your competitors and from your own product. So with that said, What are these ads to content, pay traffic to content? What do these ads look like? You just run it straight from Google search with some keywords. Would you be doing it from socials?

Frank Olivo (27:54)

I mean, it depends on the platform. I know that there are certain types of content that would lend itself very much to Twitter advertising. I think that Twitter is an underutilized platform for advertising overall, you don't really hear about it much.

Jaryd Krause (28:11)

I've noticed this for the last two years, and I had promoted, I have promoted things on Twitter and the reporting is not great. I will say that to lots of traffic for quite cheap. I think Twitter is underrated as well. Underrated.

Frank Olivo (28:26)

If this Facebook on the other hand, I think maybe getting to the point of being overpriced for some types of products. LinkedIn, LinkedIn, also very expensive. It's LinkedIn advertising. Just sending it to the info page is probably going to be a losing proposition. i It appears that the strategies I've seen work well, we by the way, I'm no expert in social and paid social, by the way, I'll underline that.

But from the experts that I have spoken with, it seems like things like white papers that provide actual real value tend to do particularly well. A fellow agency owner showed me a campaign that he ran for one of his clients, where they were getting they were capturing leads from like Microsoft, from me like a heavy hitter of fortune 500 companies LinkedIn can work if you know what you're doing.

Jaryd Krause (29:20)

I haven't delved into LinkedIn yet. It's awesome to chat. Really. It's been so good, Frank, can we send people to check out more about saga pixel or more about what you're doing? Cuz we've chatted about so much and people are going to be like, Wow, okay, I've got a good idea of what I need to do with diet once I buy it. Where can we send people to check out more about what you're doing?

Frank Olivo (29:41)

So for the time being the best thing, if you can find me on Tik Tok, if you just want to hear some videos about doing content research, I've been putting up more stuff there the last few months. It's just at saga pixel.com or just add saga pixels, my handle, but for me on LinkedIn, share a lot content there if you're interested in working with us you can check us out at saga pixel.com And but at any rate, I love connecting with people on LinkedIn and obviously everybody loves followers on social media so.

Jaryd Krause (30:06)

the name first and your first name second. LinkedIn. So you guys check out those links in the show notes. Thank you so much for coming on, Frank. It's been awesome to chat and I really appreciate it.

Frank Olivo (30:18)

See me, I love talking shop with people.

Jaryd Krause (30:20)

Everybody that is listening. Thank you for listening and I'll speak to you on the next one. Hey YouTube watcher. If you thought that video is good, you should check out this video here on the two best types of websites beginners should buy or check out my playlist on how I made my first 100k from buying websites and how to do due diligence check it out is an awesome playlist you'll enjoy it? GPT my own thoughts around it and believe Google is not going to be too excited about more content that is possibly not the greatest content. But Google is going to do the right thing for human beings at the end of the day, not for AI.

Frank Olivo (34:29)

I'm getting to the answer with this. The web is getting really big for Google. And it costs them billions of dollars to crawl and index the web. And they've reported that a ludicrous amount of web 50% of it is duplicate or spam. And as AI gets easier and easier for more access to use and more accessible to everybody. People are going to just churn out so much AI generated content, and Google's going to have to crawl it and it's going to cost Money to crawl.

And as a result, my prediction is that they're going to want to make examples of websites that are using as they want on Black hat world and these places for people to put up, the screenshots of my website got hacked, what got hammered, and the word to get around to that AI content is going to get penalized. You're going to hear that other people say, Well, I take my chat GPT content and run it through quill, but the GPT detectors now say that they don't detect it as being AI generated.

My argument against that is that Google's technology, whatever they're using, is way more powerful. And they have a very, a, an economic incentive to the tune of billions of dollars to identify this content and not index it.

Jaryd Krause (1:21:46)

Do you want to know how to start working your way up to owning great SAAS businesses that are cash cows, or learning how to flip them? Hi, I'm Jaryd Krause, host of the buying online businesses podcast. And today, I'm speaking with Andrew piano, who is a UC Berkeley grad. He has built three profitable companies, exit one and currently acquires a small SaaS company at EXPO capital Expo has done seven acquisitions to date and is on target for 1 million in revenue in 2023.

Now, in his podcast episode, Andrew and I talk about why startups are so hard, there's pressure and the stress on them and why so many of them fail, and then why Andrew decided to start buying businesses, specifically SaaS businesses. So we talk a little bit about his story. We also talk about what you should be looking out for when you're doing due diligence on a software business. Obviously, there's the common things, we lean in and talk about how to do software due diligence, where you actually need a partner, a developer, who's a partner to partner with on the site, not just for your dealings, but owning the site as well, and how critical that is, especially for a SaaS business.

We also talk about the costs of owning a small SAAS business, we talk about the small product surface of a SaaS business, which can help for growth, we talk about a lot of other growth activities that can be put into customer service making the product better, and you know retaining and retention for growth of a business. So product leads growth, and then we also talk about where Andrew finds his deals from and where he sells those deals as well. So there's so much value in this podcast episode. If you're looking to buy a SaaS business, either now or in the future. This is mandatory listening. Enjoy. Andrew, welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on.

Andrew piano (1:23:30)

Thanks so much, Jaryd. Happy to be here.

Jaryd Krause (1:23:32)

I'm looking forward to this chat. So we just connected on surfing in Santa Monica. So I've got a lot around the globe, which is quite cool. It's always good to talk to people that are ocean lovers and business lovers. I'd think there's so much in common that I draw from surfing and life into business. Do you find that similar for yourself as well? Yeah, but I'm like, I'm a fair weather surfer. And I'm probably a fair weather business person too.

Andrew piano (1:23:59)

So like I can, I can definitely see you know, you got to roll with the punches right? Like you got to be in the right place at the right time to catch the right wave like you know, leverage, right? You're not going to catch something if you're not like going the same speed as the waves. And then I just you know, in my daily life, just blatantly ignore all the good advice.

Jaryd Krause (1:24:17)

I have no doubt that all of us have been ignored. So you've been buying SaaS businesses. Now, when you started buying SaaS businesses two and a half years ago, I put a ragtag team together. It was really like an open call to anybody that wanted to start wiring money to each other on the internet and buying software businesses, right. That was kind of the start of it. And yeah, we started two and a half years ago and bought a really tiny first deal. Why software businesses like why did you want to start buying software businesses? What about that business model excites you?

Andrew piano (1:24:48)

So I was the CTO of a small venture studio here in Santa Monica. And that was like all straight venture stuff, right? Like we had a portfolio of three companies. We were trying to Build and then spin out and raise venture for. And then the other part of the business was just pure venture. So we were just, you know, like writing checks I wasn't, but the other part of the venture studio was and over time I became CTO of one of our portfolio companies.

We raised 8 million bucks and had like, you know, 2530 people at our peak. And after five years of struggling through that business, it ended up going to zero. And I looked around and said, man, isn't starting a business hard. Might there be some easier way or less risky way to do this? And I started following Andrew Wilkinson and seeing what tiny capital is doing, sure swift some of those guys and thought, why not, let's just try it. Let me just put, I don't know 10 grand that I'm perfectly happy to lose learning, call it like my little mini MBA and find some partners to de risk it a little bit.

And let's go buy a couple of these things and just feel it out. I'm a software engineer by training. So I don't know anything about e-commerce. All the content stuff that you guys talk about is way over my head, too. I'm like, sheesh, man. We're like, woefully underutilizing SEO and content to grow those things. But yeah, that was kind of the start.

Jaryd Krause (1:26:09)

I think a lot of SaaS businesses don't have the best content marketing strategy, to be honest, when I've looked at some SaaS businesses and like, look at it I love I love focusing on retention. And I love membership and SaaS businesses for that reason. And you know, a lot of the marketing can go or marketing budgets should go into product and service.

There's a lot left on the table with no content marketing strategy, especially for evergreen. Yeah, it holds the business in a solid way. If it's good evergreen content. And it's organic. Part of it's a skills gap, you know, I think it'll delight your users to know how long it took us to just get one blog post per week, per company to an email list that you send out and have that work that took forever? I wouldn't say it's like the highest quality thing, but like that is the extent to which we are doing content marketing.

Yeah, yeah, there's so many similarities in what you did to myself, except I definitely am not a technical guy. I was a plumber. And I started to try and make money online through a few startups that didn't really do anything. And I was like, hang on, I should try and buy one. And so you start around 10 grand, your first one, I started around a similar price range, 15. Grant and then worked my way up. And yeah, it's cool. It's cool to see that you've had that same chain of thought of like, why don't you like these startups really, they're grueling. They're just insane, aren't they? Like, what about the startups that made it a no brainer for you to buy a business?

Andrew piano (1:27:39)

You mean, why was the venture so hard relative to buying a business? Or what went wrong with the venture backed company? Yeah, I think the problem with venture in general is that particularly a couple of years ago, right, in a zero interest rate environment like that, that's like free money. And so a lot of capital was flowing to companies that had really no business being a venture scale business. I, that wasn't the case for our big swing, let's call it a full on enterprise SAAS, it was a machine learning company.

And if it had worked, it would have been a large company, it was one of those kinds of swing for the fences type bets, I think some of the challenges that we ran into is sales. So investing in sales before you run out of money is hard. And then some corollaries to what we're doing now like and you know, this kind of influences what we try and buy today, when you have a product that is for an enterprise and you're selling six figure ticket sizes, that's really cool, right? You get one customer, they pay you 100 grands plus a year, you only need a couple of those for it to start to get meaningful. That's really, really cool.

The downside is it takes six to 12 months, sometimes 18 to close one of those guys, and they're going to demand everything you've got, and then some, right, so you are, you know, slave is the right word, but you whatever their request is, no matter how large, you're basically like, you can't say no, especially as a startup. So, managing those long sales cycles, while raising a bunch of money is just really challenging.

The other part too is when you go out to raise and let's say you raise like a pre seed round. That's relatively straightforward to do, right? You don't have to have any revenue. Here's kind of like, here's the people, here's the idea. They're like, okay, great. Here's half a million bucks. Like, come back. When you've got a product. Every time that you go back for more money, the bar gets raised on you at the beginning, right? Everything's potential. There's no numbers for the VCs to pick apart. Everything's just like gravy, and like, oh, wouldn't this be cool? Imagine a world where right and you just fill in the blank. It's like playing Mad Libs. But as the months and years go on.

Those VCs are comparing you against these companies that are like lottery ticket winners, right? All of them have hockey stick growth and You know, are you going to be like in the top 10% of those portfolios? Probably not. And so what happens to those middle tier companies is like, they die, right. That's why venture backed startups have a relatively low success rate. And my insight, actually, you don't have the capital to go and execute on this. But there's a whole kind of world of distressed ventures.

So, you know, we spent 8 million bucks and five years building this really cool thing. And it went to zero, like, like, just straight zero. But like, that's kind of crazy to think about, like, was there a zero value created? Was there a $0 worth of like, IP created? And I think the answer is no. So again, we don't have the capital to go and execute on this. Today, we're bootstrapped. It's just the three of us buying it with just our own cash. But yeah, there's a whole world where I think that kind of like those companies that fall off the venture track, have a place to land and we've actually bought two Y Combinator companies.

Are you familiar with that? That accelerator yc? No, Y Combinator, it's one of the, if not the most famous, startup incubators in the world, and they crank out like hundreds of startups every year. And, you know, many, many household names have gotten their start at YC. But even more, right, fall off and go to zero. But again, that's not to say that they haven't fallen off. That's right. And, but a lot of them, you know, they might have 50,000 a year in revenue, 100,000 years in revenue, and it's like, they're not venture scale.

But if I take all the engineers and fire them, right, or like, you know, they go away, and we hire some developers out of South America, or, you know, at the beginning, like, yours truly would just jump in there and be like, Oh, I think I can handle this, we can we can make it so that that 50,000 or $100,000, a year is kind of significant. For us, right, small fries, that's like, that's pretty decent money for depending, again, on how much effort we have to put into each of these little businesses.

Jaryd Krause (1:32:01)

I don't know much about raising, raising funds and doing the whole startup and quick startup to try and get hockey stick growth, one of the philosophies that I have is that the more pressure and stress that we put on ourselves, the less that we typically because we're operating from a place of fear, the less good we perform, because we have less sleep we have. And there are the instances where you know, sometimes when people are on the ropes, they will come out swinging and do really well.

But I think more often than not, it's the opposite, where there's so much pressure and stress on the thing to work with the little sleep and the stress on the on everything team. Time, it makes it hard. And I think that's why even if the startups that I've started are very small, like without millions of dollars, like tiny, tiny, tiny, you know, penny pinching on a shoestring even just with one human being, it's tough. So this is why I think there's a big shift into the purchasing of things that have a proven track record.

So when you decide to move into things that have you know, SaaS business, have a proven track record, you can just literally utilize your skills right as a CTO and add way more value than trying from the bottom. Brian, have you noticed training from scratch? Trying from scratch, because you've got way more leverage there to work on?

Andrew piano (1:33:21)

So a little bit of self-awareness. I am a terrible picker of things that other people will like, like this. And not in a cool way, right? There's like tastemakers, who are like, like that thing is going to be really cool. In five years. That is not me. Okay. The things I think are cool, like no one else things are cool, meaning I build stupid ideas. And I know this about myself. And so one like superpower, again, is like even if I find something within the SAAS world, like 2550 customers, that to me is like, that's product market fit.

You know, that's pretty good, right? Like, I've had plenty of ideas that never got 25 customers, let alone like one customer. And so for me, I'm like, Okay, I actually, like I probably over index on looking at the existing customer base and saying, like, I trust that, right, like, I trust that there are real dollars there. And of course, you know, we can talk about diligence. But like, you got to look at the bank accounts and make sure people aren't like doing weird stuff where they like, have their friends subscribe.

And then like, there's kickbacks on the back end, but like and then buy it and then all the revenue goes away. Like all that stuff. You got to verify but you know, by and large at face value, like the first thing we bought was like a total and complete commodity. And I don't even think I understand that business. Still today. It was a tool called screenshot API. And it takes as you might expect screenshots right. Like it's a developer tool.

So people need to take like 10s of 1000s of these things. It's got like the weirdest customer base ever and like who needs all these screenshots? Like that's not a use case I've ever encountered before. But when we bought it, it was it was you know, we bought it for like, I don't know, 2025 grand and it was making I think $500 a month at the time, and there was like 3040 customers and I thought to myself, like, you know, there's a little foothold. Let's see what we can do here.

Jaryd Krause (1:35:09)

A lot of it. So when you look at something like that with the due diligence, so specifically around SaaS, the software due diligence, being a CTO, because there's a lot of people listening to this, that their goal is to buy a SaaS business, because it's like, usually the glory business, it's like the legacy business, buy something. And it's just got, it just got really good profit margins.

And you know, it's the most one of the most passive types of digital assets you can have, if it's depending on what type of asset you buy, of course, but typically, so many people are wanting to buy these SAAS businesses, what are some of the things they should be looking out for when they're doing due diligence on the software? Are you saying, you know, have somebody helped with the software? DD part of it? Because of myself, I would not know how to do just the software on a screenshot, type SaaS product?

Andrew piano (1:36:03)

There's, I think there's two different answers. One is if you're not going to partner like you, yourself, as a solo operator, want to buy a SaaS business, but you're not technical, you need a partner of some kind, whether they're on you know, the cap table or buy the business with you, or it's the person from Up work that helped the other founder build the startup, like you need to have that person involved in some capacity.

The loveliest ones that we've bought have been ones where A and I think this is really important for like an initial acquisition, the surface area of the product should be quite small. So screenshot API, what does the thing do to take screenshots? Does it do these 900 other things? No, it does not. It takes screenshots, right. So the surface area of the product is small. And what that is as close to I'll ever admit to being like passive income. And by passive I mean, for us, we have two of these, where I'd consider them relatively passive, again, having a small surface area on the product side, we bought them nearly complete.

So if there wasn't a lot of investment on our side, right, we were doing the due diligence to know that we wanted to buy something that was relatively passive, because we bought stuff before that we thought was going to be passive. And it ended up being that, you know, all of these feature requests were sitting in, you know, intercom, or some like chat support system. And there were a ton of people that were willing to pay for the software, if they had all these features. That's not the case, when you buy something that is just like a narrow, I call it just like a single promise to the customer.

So again, do the thing, take screenshots, that's what I need, great, they sign up, they pay that smaller surface area, I think is really important. It also makes diligence easier, because frankly, there's just not that much code to go through, which helps a lot. And I think the thing for us too, and this is where I start to kind of drift into just like putting my CTO hat on, I like we have three full time developers now. But the buck always stops with me. So I'm like a failsafe, I don't want to have to do this. But our worst case scenario for a bad technical by is me doing like a diving save. Right. And that's nice to have, like, that's one of our kind of, I guess, competitive advantages. But for somebody that's non-technical, that's going to have to be that person on Up work, or, you know, whatever, wherever they found that developer, they're going to have to get somebody that they can ping it anytime, because stuffs going to go haywire, even just in like the natural growth progression of a small startup, like things break, because you don't want to pay for bigger servers than you need, right.

So like, at some point, those small servers, if you're growing even at, like, 5%, month over month, you're going to need to, like scale those things up. And unless somebody's watching, you're going to hit a limit or wake up at 2am and get like, you know, your customers yelling at you that the site's down or something like that. So again, like step one for us, we go through and like, I just want to know where the bodies are buried. So every single one of these is probably crappy, crappy, built, they're probably built quite fast, right? Again, I'm talking sub, let's say anything that makes less than 100,000. A year. Yeah, this is not like a pristine code that is going to sunset you into, like, your lifelong cruise on the Caribbean.

Like, that's not what this is going to be the I would expect, like the first one to three months, you're going to have to invest probably the most you ever will, on the engineering side to fix things, you know, listen to customer support, see if there's like actual features that you really, really, really need to build. And if you're not able to go through the code yourself, then I think you definitely need somebody to at least like to look through the architecture and look through the code base, make sure that it does the things that it says it does. Right, so people can put like a bunch of features on the site and you got to use it and it's like, they just put a button there.

But like, you know, the button on the front page is the tip of the iceberg. You have to have all the code that does the things I and then just a quick note, like on IP, because I think a lot of people get stuck in this like, oh, well like what's proprietary? The answer is probably nothing. Probably nothing is proprietary, there's probably nothing patentable, anything in your software, it's probably a total commodity. And it's probably copy-able, right? So I looked at somebody else's product.

For most of these, like micro acquisitions, I could buy, I could go build the thing in like two or three weeks, just by myself, just like, I could just go copy that thing wholeheartedly. But that's not what you're buying, right, you're buying sort of like the brand, I don't, I don't want to call it brand, because brands like a whole thing. But it's like the starting point of a brand, and the customer base, right. And then and then of course, all the content stuff that you already know about.

Jaryd Krause (1:40:44)

Yet, you're basically buying product market fit, that needs some, some serious work to add to it to get it to a point where the competitors aren't just going to squash it in one fell swoop because they've got gazillions of dollars, say like, say like zoom comes along and says, Hey, like, you just need to take screenshots, like all the time, or like another software that might be similar, like a tracking software that Up work actually uses screenshots, you know, lots of screenshots to track up virtual systems work, it's I'm glad there's so many things to unpack there.

Andrew, I'm glad that you said that. It's not like not you’re that you're buying something sub 100k, you're you've got a lot of work to do, like, a lot of people will come and say, Jared, I want to buy a software business and I got 15k or 10k. And you've done this, but you've or CTO, you've, you've done this, this is your whole career behind this. And you know what, and you've got investment to put into this smaller asset, whereas most people it's 15, KS, or everything they've got, and they want to try and make it work.

So if you are in that camp, first and foremost, congratulations, you got 15 grands, it's good, everybody. We shouldn't compare ourselves to everybody else. Because we're all born in different places and have different circumstances, circumstances, maybe start with a different asset, then get into SaaS, because you're you need to, like you said, and or you need to force some capital into it. And maybe even more than what you purchased that, for example, are you open to sharing how much you poured into the first one that you bought for 20? Grand Andrew? And what?

Andrew piano (1:42:14)

Yes, so that one's that one, we bought for 25 grand, there were three partners. So 25 divided by three, that was intentional, I just wanted to do this. And then wrangled other poor folks to like, you know, come and partner with me on it. And we bought it. And during diligence, it was in a programming language that I just don't like and think is old and I'm, you know, kind of a snob about and we immediately rewrote the whole thing.

But I went, I walked into that deal, knowing that I'm going to spend an absurd amount of time Andrew writing code to rebuild this thing from scratch. And that's what we did. And I don't ever want to do that again. But for the first one, I was like, I'll you know, I'll do whatever it takes, right, like, what is it? Yeah. So that one again, we weren't paying for a developer, but I was doing it. So it was like my hours. If it was, you know, an hourly rate, it would have been like, you know, I got paid $1 an hour so far, right? Like, we haven't taken any money out of the business, which is a whole no other thing we can talk about that the reality is like, running these things when stuff goes wrong.

And you have to pay for a developer to go and fix things. That's a variable cost that's really hard to predict. And generally speaking, for our tiny ones, we run like, slightly negative, generally most months because I think the other part too, and I know we're bouncing all over the place, but like the income with SaaS can be super lumpy. So if they ran like a promo deal in February, three years ago, there's a ton of annual payments that come through in like February, right? But then you're starving by like June, July, right? Nothing's coming in.

And so I think actually, like, you look in a striped dashboard, and it says, like your MRR is $2,000. And you're like, sweet, I get $2,000 a month. But no, you do not. You might get like 4000 Some months and like zero some other months two, and so managing the cash flow. And that was also like, that was the one of the biggest surprises to getting into this space.

Jaryd Krause (1:44:10)

Check that out during due diligence because Black Friday sales can alter the average monthly revenue. It's funny if I find the people that are really good with their own personal finances can be really good with business finances, and that's where a lot of I like to help people fix their leaky bucket syndrome, what I call before they get before they even Chuck money into a deal.

A lot of people come to the space and say, Jaryd, I've got this amount of money and I want to use finance to buy the deal. I normally ask them, how have you got any other debts? And what are their personal debt to credit card debts? Because if you're not great with your own personal finances, and you're going to buy a business and poor finance into it, the money can leak out just as fast as it's coming in because you don't know how to handle it because you haven't worked on the smallest stuff first, and that's not to poke holes at anybody but It's just to get people aware that finance is cool. It's really good. But especially with online assets, there's the risk involved. Right at the Absolutely. You see much of that before? I mean, you have startups being financed.

Andrew piano (1:45:14)

I, my personal finances, I don't know that I'm the best with personal finances to be honest. But I mean, I mean, being really frugal on spending when you have just a certain amount in the bank and you have to make something work, it's really tough. The real benefit is that we, the three of us that initially started this for the first year and a half didn't take any money out of the business.

And it was only in January of last year that one of the three partners went full time and started taking a salary. So I'm still not a burden to the business. And the other partner is still not a burden to the business. And we're still just like writing checks occasionally to fill gaps, right? Because we have payroll now and some headcount and are continuing to try and be just as frugal as possible.

Jaryd Krause (1:46:03)

And what is your goal with these is your goal to sell them eventually, or to hold them as cash cows to reinvest some of that money into other assets?

Andrew piano (1:46:14)

You know, sometimes people I don't I don't know how you feel about this. But I was told by various people, like start with a thesis, so like, what's your investment thesis? And we, for the first couple of months, were like, Okay, great. We got this thesis so specific. And did you do nominee deals that matched that thesis criteria?

Zero, there was zero, we didn't buy anything, because nothing matched it. So we're like, okay, maybe a thesis like isn't the right word for this. And so we ended up buying like three little things pretty close to each other. And, today, I still don't think that we have enough cash to really have any kind of thesis, so we have bought the SAAS app. Like there's let's, let's say there's two categories of SaaS applications to there's like, b2b enterprise SAAS, right. So you're selling high ticket deals to like other enterprises.

These are like larger companies, right? These aren't somebody that is like a freemium model and comes and signs up and spends 10 2050, on under the under $100 per month with you these are like, you know, 1000s of dollars per month type of customers, we've bought a couple of those. And those are way different operationally than these self-serve freemium, right? When you come in, there's a two-week free trial and a certain amount converted, and it's your tweak. And those are kind of the knobs you tweak, right? Like, where's my top of the funnel? What's my conversion rate to sign up?

What's my sign up to paid rate, what's my retention, all that stuff, we have since started buying more kinds of product lead growth, as it's also called, or freemium type products, right? Those are much, much easier for us operationally. And again, we're still trying to focus on things like those single promises to the customer. But in terms of finances, there's really not that much money coming in the door on a monthly basis above, like our base payroll costs. For the smaller businesses, the money comes from sales of these businesses. So if you're really looking for compound capital, I think you have to flip them, I think you have to, I think you have to do that. Because otherwise you're going to wait for these things to start cash flowing.

And that accumulation is just too damn slow. I think you have to flip them. So we'd like to be more like permanent capital stuff. And there's some stuff I think we'll hold for a very long time. But our biggest financial gains have come from selling the businesses after we've taken them over, you know, kind of cleaned them up, like giving them a fresh coat of paint, and then you know, sold them on to somebody else.

Jaryd Krause (1:48:40)

It's great to hear because people listening may have an ideology. I'm going to buy a SAAS business and just sit there and let it just churn out money. And you can't do that, but it's going to need, it's going to need work, it's going to need development to keep up maintenance, and especially in SAAS, like, keep away the competition. Like once, you know, the competition is like, there's a lot of money in SaaS, and, you know, a big SaaS business can just come and squash one of these businesses pretty fast.

So like the growth, I feel like the growth really needs to be injected quite fast. You know, you don't want to have somebody else come out with a free tool to their SaaS business. That is your whole business model. And then you've just like you're about to sell it in five or six months’ time.

Andrew piano (1:49:22)

That I mean, I mean, part of diligence, right is figuring out like, what's the if something were to kill this, what would it be? There's a name for this exercise I forget. It's like a pre mortem, I think they call it instead of like a post mortem. So absolutely, like for these, again, single purpose apps which are quite close to commodities. You could be killed by a feature and a competitor, a larger competitor.

They could also just release a free tool that does the thing and they're like, yeah, we'll lose 20 grand a month because like, that means nothing to us, right and they can just kill your business. So you definitely have to like to think about what could kill it but you I think I have maybe a weird stance on competition. I just don't care that much about competition. It's just I just haven't seen it affect anything. Of course, if you are going into a competitive space, what are some of the things you need, your product has to have, like at least the same coverage of features that the competitor does, right?

Like if you only do 1/10 of what the competitor does for twice the price? Yeah, like it's not going to work. So long as you have feature parity, you guys both do roughly the same thing. I think we have competitors who like another one of our micro tools, a developer tool that turns like a Google spreadsheet into an API to developer things. There's a ton of huge competitors in that space. But you know, some people just like us, they like the way the product looks right?

Talk about non passive, one of the very first people we hired, the very first person we hired full time was customer support. Because no matter what, even if you think it's passive, right, there's still going to be people with questions. And like, you can win so much business by just responding within an hour to somebody's question that they could fully look up, right, they might just be testing you. But it's so nice to be able to just open a chat box and talk to a real human and get a real answer. And yes, we try to win on simple things like that to beat out the competition.

Because somebody might be paying about the same as us, but they're not going to switch because they're like, Oh, well, I can just reach out to like Andrew on the Support Chat. And they always like to treat me well, that can be enough for a customer to stay.

Jaryd Krause (1:51:31)

That's what you're talking about with product lead growth. And also marketing budget, you know, marketing budgets easier, usually cheaper to keep somebody than to find new customers. So where do you find these businesses? Where are you buying them? And then where are you selling him? Are you selling him through the network? Are you buying through the network? Are you different, different platforms?

Andrew piano (1:51:54)

So the first two I hustled on Twitter, I just reached out to a bunch of I looked up on indie hackers.com. They have some people that self-report revenue numbers. And so I just like looking for something really tiny. And this is still my direct outreach today, which we still do all the time. Still, it works great. And because it's true, and it's honest, I say something along the lines of like, I know, it's probably not the right time. But if you're ever thinking of selling, I'd love to chat. And a ton of people respond like Oh, I was thinking but I don't want to go through this listing process or maybe they just have questions about how acquisitions work in general that I answer, like, I've built a lot of goodwill through that.

So the first two are from Twitter, micro acquire.com. That's kind of like the big player in the SaaS space. Now, I think they just rebranded to acquire.com. We have bought and sold several businesses there. There's no broker fees or anything like that. They're awesome. And we've recently been working with a broker to sell our first business with a broker. We've sold the other two ourselves. So we're just trying out the broker thing and seeing how that goes. Cool.

Jaryd Krause (1:53:09)

Congrats, Andrew, where can people go and find out more about what you're doing at XO capital.

Andrew piano (1:53:14)

I am at Andrew piano on Twitter, P E. R N cool.

Jaryd Krause (1:53:21)

Guys, be careful. He might be hunting some deals. So that's good. It's probably a good thing. Because that is a strategy that a lot of people that want to buy sites, even content sites and other types of businesses will be able to use as well. So I'm so grateful that you shared that. It's really good, guys. Check it out.

Andrew piano (1:53:37)

Thanks so much for having me.

Jaryd Krause (1:53:39)

Thanks for coming on. Guys. Check these links out in the show notes. There'll be links there. Everybody's listening. Thank you so much for listening. If you're thinking of buying any business listen to this again, there's so many little hidden secrets and hidden clues in growth and due diligence throughout this and if you know somebody is looking to buy a business share this podcast episode with them selfishly, it helps myself and Andrew help more people but by growing the podcast, it helps us to get in front of more people and you get to help your friends too. So thanks.

Hey, YouTube watcher. If you think that video is good, you should check out this video here on the two best types of websites beginners should buy or check out my playlist on how I made my first 100k from buying websites and how to do due diligence. Check it out is an awesome playlist you'll enjoy. Many people are wanting to buy these SaaS businesses, what are some of the things they should be looking out for when they're doing due diligence on the software? You're saying, you know, have somebody help with the software? DD part of it because I would not know how to do this software on a screenshot, type SaaS product.

Andrew piano (1:56:27)

There's, I think there's two different answers. One is if you're not going to partner like you, yourself, as a solo operator, want to buy a SaaS business, but you're not technical, you need a partner of some kind, whether they're on you know, the cap table or buy the business with you. Or it's the person from up work that helped the other founder build the startup, like, you need to have that person involved in some capacity. We have three full time developers now.

But the buck always stops with me. So I'm like a failsafe. I don't want to have to do this. But our worst case scenario for a bad technical by is me doing like a diving save. That's nice to have, like, that's one of our kind of, I guess, competitive advantages. But for somebody that's non-technical, that's going to have to be that person on up work or that, you know, whatever, wherever they found that developer, they're going to have to get somebody that they can ping it anytime, because stuffs going to go haywire.