How I Tested That

David J Bland (0:1.590)

Welcome to the podcast, Kate.

Kate (0:11.234)

Thank you so much for having me. This is exciting.

David J Bland (0:13.970)

Yeah, I was so excited because I was thinking about who to invite on this podcast, especially just getting started. And I thought of you and how we met several years ago in San Francisco. I think it was after Mind the Product. And you were at a PE firm in San Francisco, and we started collaborating on some assumptions mapping and some cool testing. And since then, you've kind of bootstrapped and built your own company. And I would love for you to share some context with our listeners on how you thought about that process, how you tested through. And yeah, just give us some context.

Thanks.

Kate (0:44.938)

Yeah. So one guide, it helps to start with, with what my company is. One guide is...

a platform that provides leverage to PE and VC firms. What has started happening over the past 10, 20 years is that a lot of firms have started centralizing all kinds of really cool resources for their portfolio companies. So think about playbooks and templates and benchmarks and go-to advisors and recommended vendors and events that they're having for their portfolio companies. But for the most part, those are still really scattered where you have to ask your investor and they send it to you via email

they have a one-off event. And so OneGuide is this centralized platform for P,E and VC firms to house all of that. And then we also have an extended network of tactical experts, David, you are one of them, who are experts in things like testing business ideas or leveraging AI and marketing or doing an AWS transformation or designing employee onboarding. And so it's pretty cool to have this

by really specific experts. And so that's kind of the niche we found, but as we can get into, that's not exactly where it started.

David J Bland (2:0.330)

Yeah, thank you. And yes, full disclosure, I am on the platform. It wasn't hard for you to convince me to join because I think what anything you're working on is awesome. And so I do really believe there's value here. And so maybe start with where you started that journey as a bootstrapped entrepreneur, you know, trying to figure out how do you use your limited resources to go test and kind of reduce your risk. So maybe we can start there.

Kate (2:23.582)

Yeah, so I started with the expert network piece. And I learned later that you're never supposed to bootstrap a marketplace. I didn't fully know that at the time. And it didn't fully work the way that I thought it would. But the idea was, hey, there are all these really specific experts that are very inefficient to find. You don't wanna go to big name agencies that are much more expensive because they've invested in branding. You wanna go to like the single shingle consultant

you know, they used to be a designer and now they're a design consultant, or they used to be a DevOps professional and now they're a DevOps consultant. And so the idea was to kind of create an Angie's list of resources for growing startups and sell that to CEOs. I learned along the way through some testing that CEOs were very excited about having access to that, but much less enthusiastic about paying for it.

often thought this is one of these things that my investor is supposed to provide for me. They pitched me that they like one of the reasons I should take their money is because they were going to provide access to this type of thing. And that's part of the pivot that led back to I should sell investors and through them it became kind of a B2B2B where my client is the investor and through them I serve that investors portfolio companies.

David J Bland (3:47.345)

So it was desirable.

But they almost expected it, and so it necessarily wasn't viable for you, even though the demand was there, it sounds as if that's what you're describing. So you're going through this process and you're getting this repeated feedback at roughly how many people did you did it take before you realized, wow, we need to pivot here?

Kate (3:57.054)

Yes, that is a very good way to put it.

Kate (4:14.171)

So I got about 10 or 20 startups on the platform and paying me something nominal on the order of a couple hundred dollars to get access to my network and to do some calls with my experts. And I got really good feedback. So for example, I had a friend, sort of a friend of a friend who was a founder who was willing to test this out and he was working his.

his head of customer support had just been promoted from a support rep and she was trying to figure out, okay, what does it mean to set up a support function? And I was able to make an intro where she could speak to somebody who had run a support function at several companies and scaled it up. And that was enormously valuable and I got fantastic feedback from it. But then when I tried to pitch him on, okay, would you spend a couple grand a year for a subscription to this? The answer was no. So I think all in, it was that 10 or 20 startups

to access this network and at the time the network was like 30 people it was it was pretty small but I had a really hard time getting to any kind of meaningful recurring revenue.

David J Bland (5:21.633)

So in that process, were you doing the connections manually? What did that look like, the connection process?

Kate (5:28.630)

Oh yeah, this was me on my very best admin game of just making introductions. So I had built out a website where I had interviewed all these experts to document what they were good at. So there were 2000 word guides from each expert on their thing, and the experts were listed in a directory. And so technically you could self-serve using the software, but really nobody did. It was much more concierge where, hey, what's the problem you have? Cool, here are the two people I recommend.

I'd like to talk to that one. All right, I'll make an intro." And then I was actually dialing into the zoom to make sure that both people dialed in. If they didn't, I was like texting them. And then for feedback afterwards, I was manually sending an email with a type form to get their feedback and then manually putting it back in. This was not a beautiful system. It was a lot of hamster wheel running around on the back end.

David J Bland (6:26.473)

Granted, that system doesn't sound like it scales, but it sounds as if you learn quite a bit from doing that work manually behind the scenes and manually connecting people.

Kate (6:38.046)

I did. I learned a lot about what would need to be scaled. One of the unfortunate things I learned was that model probably, operationally, it was possible to scale it. But there were some other startups that had looked a lot like this, that had tried to do expert call type of things for startups.

And most of them charged a fee, a percentage of each call. So you know, the startup would pay, let's say $200 for this call with this expert. Oftentimes the experts set their own rate and the startup would collect a commission on every call. And you start doing the math on that and you realize, okay, if you're only collecting 15% and each call is a hundred or $200, you have to do a lot of calls before you start to get to meaningful revenue for your startup.

And it wasn't happening. I was getting a couple of them, but I needed to get to some way of getting startups paid for access to the network, not just for individual calls.

David J Bland (7:48.734)

That makes sense. So the demand you would need to get to that point, it wasn't viable. Even though it sounds as if, kind of similar to your other comment previously, it was desirable. It sounds as if they were getting

a lot of value out of those connections. I mean, were you getting that kind of feedback or was it positive feedback you were getting from both sides or slanted one towards the other? Like explain that a little bit.

Kate (8:13.838)

So I was getting positive feedback. And the interesting thing was that of those initial testers, most of them were individual startups, but a couple of them were firms, P.E. and V.C. firms that I had kind of connections to. And they said, yeah, I'll test it. I'll set up some calls with a couple of my portfolio companies. And one of them actually asked, would it be okay if I did a call with multiple companies on the call? And I said, I guess, why not?

Um, and then we, we kept talking and we thought, well, if there are going to be multiple calls, we probably don't want it to be a free for all, we should prepare something. And so I worked with the experts to prepare a little bit of a presentation based on the interview that we had done to document their guide. And we kind of stumbled into our first portfolio event and it went really well. And so that was sort of an interesting.

It wasn't a design test. It was an accidental, it was a happy accident of, oh, interesting, we should do more of these group events. And that actually led into sort of a new phase of maybe it is more interesting to work with the investor as kind of an aggregator of portfolio companies, as opposed to trying to work with those individual startups themselves.

David J Bland (9:29.945)

So you're trying to bootstrap a marketplace. You are concierging everything behind the scenes. You're connecting people. You're doing the manual feedback and everything. And then you kind of stumble into this situation where, oh, maybe it's the firms.

They want group calls. Like that seems like a really natural way to find maybe a path to viability. So I'm assuming this was a few years ago. So how did you kind of take that and use that learning to adjust your strategy? What kind of steps did you use to kind of test your way through that?

Kate (10:6.518)

Yeah, so this was back in 2021 when One Guide was launched. So I founded One Guide in January of 21. I spent the first half, three quarters of the year trying this startup angle. I even, I did a virtual conference over the summer trying to really go to individual companies. It.

I mean, I got people to attend it, but it didn't lead to any sales at all. And so I think for the whole, the whole first three quarters of the year, I sold about $3,000 worth of these minuscule, um, kind of trial packages. But once we kind of came across this. Event idea, uh, it started to be more interesting to say, well, maybe I can sell PE and VC firms on

providing more to their portfolio companies, and instead of doing one-off individual events, I can do these group events. And that actually kind of led to more intentional testing using methods that are more similar to the tests that are in your book. I guess, would it be helpful to talk through some of those specifics?

David J Bland (11:12.253)

Yeah, I'd love to know sort of where you started and then how you sequenced things or how it led you to get more evidence to say, okay, there's something here after we've made this pivot.

Kate (11:22.790)

Yeah, so we, I had spent some money on some developers to build out the platform for the individual companies. That was the platform that housed the experts and their guides. But I didn't really have budget for this event testing thing, so that was another one where I just started trying things. And so what I did was I found, I needed to have another set of

How do you invite people to these events? How do they RSVP for the events? How do they get it on their calendar? How do you send them emails afterwards? And I found this tool called Add Event. It still exists and it's actually a really nice, it's still a really nice tool. If you wanna just have an easy way to let people click a button and add an event to their calendar or RSVP and get and then add an event to their calendar. And so I just embedded that on a WordPress webpage and I made the webpage really nicely branded

firm was that I was working with. And the WordPress page had a bunch of other stuff about the event, like, you know, a nice description and pictures of the expert, but the RSVP was just this add event button. So we've got an embedded widget. We're dumping people into the calendar hold. We're sending pretty manual invites. And we're hosting it on Zoom. So this was a very low cost way to start to do these events. But we started getting really interesting feedback.

Kate (13:39.710)

I think in the last quarter of 2021, we sold 10 times as much as I had in the first three quarters with this sort of pivot into, oh, I should sell into PE and VC firms.

David J Bland (13:52.735)

Yeah, I think we throw this term around pivot a lot, but in reality, it's a story very similar to yours. You know, you find something you think

people want it, but will they pay enough and it's not viable? And then being just open-minded through the testing process, you realize, oh, there's this other request we got. And what if we pull that thread and follow that path a little bit and understand, oh, there's something there that might be more viable that isn't so far away from your vision that it's not worth pursuing. It sounds as if you weren't using everything that you built as is, but it was close enough to what you were trying to do that it was really interesting to you to follow that path.

Kate (14:22.402)

Mm-hmm.

David J Bland (14:31.970)

with the firms. I would put that, I would say that's a little bit of both. I mean, desire is more like the willingness and what's, you know, like the jobs, pains and gains of a segment. And then viability is a lot about willingness to pay.

Kate (14:33.582)

I, yeah, it was in hindsight. At the time I was really hesitant. So I think, we think about variability and viability. What part of that equation thinks about market opportunity? Because that was a big concern for me. Is that in the...

David J Bland (15:1.642)

And this is something that can make it viable, right? And you can also think about costs, the costs incurred and viability. So while I try to impact them, I feel like they're very related. And then you can kind of back your way into, okay, what's the problem size here? And then is there a big enough market? So I feel it's a little mix of both.

Kate (15:20.830)

I, maybe there's sort of this third piece of do people want this? Are they willing to pay for it? And are there enough of them? And I got really hung up on the, are there enough of them? And that's part of the reason I wanted to start with startups as opposed to with investors, because there are obviously many, many more startups in the world than there are investors and selling into investors is slow. It's just a much more.

deliberate sales process as opposed to, you know, a startup, especially as a brand new company, it's much easier for them to make a decision of like, are we going to try something? And so I was initially hesitant to make this shift.

Arguably, it's what I should have been doing from the beginning. I had just come from the world of PE investing I knew it really well. I had it sort of differentiated Perspective, but I was reluctant to go there because I thought that the market opportunity would be much smaller

That was short-sighted. The market opportunity is plenty big, especially for a bootstrapper. And the other advantage is that nobody else was going after it in the same way that one guide is. But I think I let preconceptions even stymie my desire or willingness to test.

David J Bland (16:35.264)

So maybe reflecting back on it, it seems like the obvious choice, but in the moment, there's a lot of uncertainty and there's a lot of anxiety there and your biases kind of creep in a bit. And I could see that happening. So going through that process, I wanted to touch on something you said there about startups versus PE firms. So it sounds as what you were saying was with PE firms, we often talk about, you know, this user customer versus the decision maker and economic buyer and

Sometimes people have budget, but they don't have decision-making authority. Sometimes they have both, and then sometimes they're even different than the user customer that uses the product. It sounds as if the way you're describing startups is that, well, they're new, they really don't have a lot of complexity as far as multiple people, you know, a very limited number of people. So when you're selling to them, you might have that decision-maker also have budget, and it's just a quick decision. Whereas PE firms, maybe you can help me understand.

Is it still similar in that the person with the budget is also the decision maker or are there other players that you sort of have to navigate through to get them on boarded and get them to pay?

Kate (17:39.938)

Definitely other players. So the way that most PE firms are set up, their partnerships and most significant procurement becomes a partner, a decision that the entire partnership weighs in on. And so by default, there is kind of a buying committee. And you can get around that with, at the beginning, I was charging, you know,

it was like $2,900. So it was a really, it was a low amount of money in the scheme of PE and VC firms. And so those I could kind of, somebody who wanted to try it could get the credit card and put it on the credit card. But then as I moved later on, as One Guide evolved, we are now much, much more robust a software platform than the embedded ad event that I described in 2021.

as you start moving into having this robust software offering that requires implementation. And so you're trying to sell an annual contract because it'll take a couple of months to implement and then a couple of months to kind of get up to speed. And so really you need an annual contract to be able to demonstrate value. That becomes a bigger price tag, which becomes a bigger decision, which involves more people. So I've learned a lot about.

selling as well. There's been a lot of testing and iteration in how does the sales process work, not just in how does the product work.

David J Bland (19:3.982)

Sounds like it. So it sounds as if there was a threshold there that if you stay there on a certain threshold, then those might be the same person, the person that makes the decision and they have the budget because they have a budget that say it's on a corporate card or something. But once you get beyond that, it's, well, I have to go get approval now, which slows everything down.

Kate (19:15.135)

Yeah.

David J Bland (19:22.570)

And so it makes it a bit more complex. Very interesting. So help us understand. So you make this pivot. It wasn't obvious at the time. And now you're servicing firms. And so what's that evolution beyond the Add Event button? How did you start testing your way beyond that and finally getting to where you are today? Explain maybe a bit of that journey as well.

Kate (19:26.341)

That's exactly right.

Kate (19:48.050)

Yeah, so there's kind of one more big phase of the evolution, which was moving away from, I had initially built one software product and I was gonna have lots of users. And the idea was, startups would be subscribers, maybe investors would be subscribers, but they would all just be, they would just have a user account on the One Guide platform. And the One Guide platform would have a bunch of experts and...

Then we introduced this where we had some standalone event pages that we were using for these group events. But what I learned was that each individual PE and VC firm had their own library of resources. And often that library was pretty scattered and they valued the One Guide Network, but they also had already invested in curating some resources, be those content resources or network resources that were valuable and had already been vetted by them.

And so they needed a place to centralize them. And so this was one that there was no way to, you had to take a little bit of a gamble and do some software development to say, okay, what if I start to move from one one-guide tool to individual resource portal hubs for each firm? And so building branded firm portals.

each of which would contain One Guide resources that you could have access to as well as the firm's resources. But firm A would have firm A's resources, firm B would have firm B's resources. And so you could have this kind of mix of the One Guide network plus your own private curated set of resources.

David J Bland (21:27.401)

So it feels like that could have been very manual too. I mean tracking down all these resources and trying to put that together maybe explain a bit how that went.

Kate (21:35.970)

Well, that one honestly is still a little manual. One of the, there are kind of three ways that resource hubs can fail. And I have learned them all. So the first is that the hub doesn't actually include everything. If you're trying to get people to log in to more than one place.

it just becomes really challenging to get them to do it. And so for a while, we didn't have all of the things you need. And I...

Today, as of 2024, the things I think you need are one, content management, so a place to house all of your word-based stuff, file-based stuff, PDFs, PowerPoints, video-based stuff, so a flexible CMS. And then you need a place to house your expert network. And experts broadly could be an advisor or a go-to consultant or a software vendor that you recommend and have a discount with. So a place to house all of those,

you like them, what reviews you have on them. A place to put all of your events, and this was something that used to be separate and needed to be looped in, where are all of your where can you register for events, where can you find recaps for events. And then the trickiest was a place for your community. So a directory of everybody else who's in the network, everybody else who's in the portfolio community, a place to have discussions, kind of forum type discussions with them.

So the first way that a hub can go wrong is by not having all the pieces. And today I think those four pieces are necessary. And there was software development that went into making that possible with some pieces that were done manually along the way. The second way that a hub can go wrong is that there's not enough content in it.

Kate (23:27.630)

And this one, there's a little bit of manual that comes in here too. So imagine you were given access to a resource hub, you log in and there's like three things in there. It's gonna be kind of an unsatisfying experience and you're probably never coming back. My...

unscientific take is that you need about 50 so that there you can have different categories and oh there's stuff in this category in this category you can search you can find results. We now have almost 150 guides in our network and then most of our clients add a lot of guides as well and so we actually have a services piece that I have not found a way around which is ghost writing content for our clients so that they have more resources and then content loading to help upload them if they're

Maybe AI will help there in the future, but there is still some elbow grease. And then the third way that a hub can go wrong.

is that nobody uses it. And I made this mistake as well, which is you think if you build it, they will come and they won't. And so you have to build in other ways to continue to drive engagement. In our case, that's been quarterly newsletters and oldie but a goodie. Just remind everybody who's a member quarterly, hear the events that we have going on, here's the new content that we've added. And then I really love events

bring people together synchronously. Getting a community to just have spontaneous conversations is really, really hard. It's something that we're still working on. But bringing together a dozen people for one hour to have a really good conversation for that hour is a lot easier. And so events have been... there still is some manual pieces that go into coordinating events. We've built software around that to make it easier, you know, make it easier to send reminders, make it

Kate (25:22.488)

your on the calendar invite automatically end up on your calendar. But there still are there are always manual pieces to make sure that you actually get the usage that you need to see the results that the clients signed up for.

David J Bland (25:38.404)

Yeah, thank you for going into things that go wrong. I think it's because so much goes wrong in all this and it's more about how you'd be resilient and how do you take what you've learned and use that to inform your strategy. I was thinking as you were talking, it feels as if you're...

I mean, this is several year journey for you. So it feels as if you're at a stage now where your testing might be more focused or more at a, I don't want to say at a featured level or a service level, but as far as the overall business model and your strategy, it feels like that's starting to work out and you're being successful and now you're still testing, but maybe you're testing at a more fine tune level. Maybe you can elaborate a bit on that.

Kate (26:18.166)

That's a really good way of putting it. So we accumulated a fair amount of, actually I'll call it testing debt, which is effectively when we built these, you know, single feature prototype things or Wizard of Oz type things and they work.

And then you're excited that they worked, but you also have to either continue to operate them in that really manual way, or you have to fix it. So we unfortunately, over the past year and still today, spend a fair amount of dev time on.

on making less manual the things that began very manually. So yes, we are moving to a more fine tuned testing era, but we still carry some of the test debt from the previous era. And so the stuff that we're testing today is more, it is much more fine-grained. We're introducing new modules.

which will be exciting. So for example, it's not near launching yet, but building a chat bot that can index everything within a portal and answer questions based on what's in the portal and retrieve assets from the portal in connection to those answers. And so things like that are really exciting and there's a bunch of testing of how do you make that experience good, but it is more of a module as opposed to testing the will this whole thing work.

David J Bland (27:48.140)

Yeah, I love that idea of test and debt. You know, it's...

Certainly something I'm aware of, especially if I'm working with a bigger company, you know, that's usually the pushback I get is we can't do this test because then that will incur debt and we have to come back and clean it up. And I always balance that with, yes, when we can perfectly, you know, architect something that's fully scalable and surrounded by tests and nobody wants it to. So there's always that balance. But I agree, there's a time you have to come back and clean it up. You know, you have to come back and say, OK, now we're operationalizing this.

And we're winding down the things that didn't work, and we're not just leaving them hanging out there on the code base. So I do think that's a great point that you bring up.

Kate (28:28.694)

Well, the flip side is that the beauty of testing as opposed to building, or doing lightweight testing as opposed to building is that you haven't spent a lot of time on it, you're not committed to it. So for example, we had this idea, I had this idea, it was actually, it turned out kind of a bad idea, that I could do some kind of office hours. So I wanted to, sometimes there's this problem where,

Individual portfolio companies are hesitant to ask for help because they don't really know how much they're allowed to have or they don't really know Sometimes companies feel weird about saying I'm working on SEO marketing and I just want to set up an hour with an SEO expert to talk to them about it Not everybody likes that

motion. And so they might join a group event. And I thought, well, maybe we could do office hours where we'll pick experts that we think will be popular and we'll put them forward and we'll offer slots. And you can sign up for one of the slots with one of these experts. And we did that in, this was after the era of our JKE embedded ad event, but we did something similar where we had an air table form that had some dynamic logic that, you know, there were these many slots, but it would know when one had been taken. So it was like our own little scale.

and we embedded our little air table form to try out some of these office hours. And they went over like a lead balloon. Like these were really cool experts and people would sign up. We did them in combination with these big AMA events. People would go to the AMA event but then we'd have four slots and only one would fill. And that was... I still don't know why because I still thought it should work and it didn't. And I'm glad that we didn't spend a bunch of time and

Kate (30:12.553)

wasn't going to work.

David J Bland (30:14.505)

Yeah, it's like if it works, amplify it if it doesn't, you know, shut it down or wind it down and not continue to. I think the challenge always with entrepreneurs is, especially if you're bootstrapped is, well, how long do I go before I shut that down? And everyone wants an answer. Like how many experiments should I run? Or what's a how many weeks should I spend?

Kate (30:18.776)

Yeah.

David J Bland (30:35.366)

I don't really have a specific answer. Often I'm just saying, hey, let's go for six to 12 weeks. Beyond that, I mean, if it's not working, you probably should stop investing in it. But that's just an overall answer. I mean, it's very specific to your situation. But I do think there's something about using your gut, but also using the data to make this decision and say, you know what, we're not seeing traction here. Let's pause and, you know, work on, spend our efforts on something else.

Kate (31:1.094)

Yeah, it is, there's a little bit of what's my level of conviction and how strong is the data. So the office hours is actually a decent example of one where I had really pretty firm conviction, but the data was kind of, you couldn't interpret it any other way. Like people were not, like we had made it very possible for them to sign up and they were not. And so the level of effort versus the return just wasn't there at all.

I think it's trickier when you can't test it as immediately. So there are some places where you have to take more of a long-term gamble and you just believe in your gut that it will work, especially in B2B. You have some really great examples of B2B tests, but I think sometimes there's no way around the long time gap between when you start to have an idea and build around that idea and test that idea, and when you get definitive results in the form of like hard revenue.

David J Bland (31:31.137)

Yeah.

Kate (32:1.058)

So.

David J Bland (32:1.964)

Even with my own work, sometimes it takes six months a year for people to come around. And I have to be very patient with that and have other things, obviously, I'm working on in the meantime. But B2B is certainly, you do have to have a patient, an element of patience. But I do think it's really refreshing to hear you talking about testing your way through it as if, you know, I do hear the argument sometimes that, well, we're B2Bs and we can't do this testing. I'm hoping that's less and less common, you know, that where people are realizing

Kate (32:5.995)

Yeah.

David J Bland (32:30.858)

Oh yeah, we may have fewer number of customers, or maybe it's a different kinds of testing, but we shouldn't just pitch people and expect them to pay for things. Let's try to get behind what kind of problems they have and everything before we start pitching them or designing a solution. So I do see a bit of co-creation happening more. And it sounds as if the way you kind of fell into this or maybe stumbled upon the firms and their needs, even though you had a big kind of...

and deep domain expertise in that world. It feels as if you took a very thoughtful approach about, oh, they have all these other problems and maybe that can be part of our solution. Maybe we can solve for those. But it didn't seem like you went in pitching, here's your all-in-one solution of all these different pieces.

Kate (33:17.614)

No, it's one of those where I almost had to get out of my own way and it took me a while.

Kate (33:28.722)

Ultimately, One Guide is one of those very common B2B stories where you live a problem in an industry and then you solve the problem in that industry. And when I tell the story now and I only have 30 seconds, it's a very short story of, you know, here were, here was the gap that I felt and here is the solution that I built to fill that gap. But it was very meandering, partly for that reason I mentioned earlier that I wanted a bigger market, partly because you had to figure out in what ways the firm that you were at

was similar to other firms and in what ways it was different. And it took a lot of conversations. And I, I know that interviewing is a common testing technique. I, I didn't do a ton of interviewing before I started selling. I ended up interviewing through sales. You know, discovery became a big part of my interview process, but you start to understand, okay, what are the ways in which most companies in this industry are the same? And fortunately for me, there is.

Those four categories of software functionality really are repeated. People need a place to manage content, they need a place to manage experts, they need a place to manage events, and they need a place to manage community. And after enough conversations, you start to...

Kate (34:46.338)

the waves kind of consolidate into a pattern. Like, okay, I'm starting to see the signal through the noise. And then you can overlay your experiences from working in the seat for five years onto that pattern, and it starts to be more powerful.

David J Bland (35:0.805)

Yeah, I like how you frame that. It feels as if, I think what we normally say is by the fifth, you know, kind of customer, customer that's similar, right? By the fifth one, you start hearing the same thing repeated different ways. And that sounds similar to how you overlaid your expertise on that.

Thank you. I love the journey. I love how you went through, you know, early days, bootstrapping, how you pivoted and the emotion of pivoting and the anxiety of doing so, and then how you're testing your way to where you are today. Thank you so much for sharing your story. If people wanna learn more about you, more about One Guide, where should they go to find out more?

Kate (35:34.902)

Definitely. Our website is askoneguide.com. And also you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm Kate Hopkins. Would love to connect.

David J Bland (35:46.593)

Thank you so much, Kate. So we'll put those links out for you all to find. And I just appreciate you spending time with your journey and being very open and transparent about the missteps along the way. So thanks so much for sharing that with our listeners.

Kate (35:58.242)

Thank you, I've really enjoyed it.