How to Sell Podcast: Make How You Sell, Why You Win

David Fastuca [00:00:00]:
Welcome back to the How to Sell podcast. Today's episode is gonna be a little bit different. I finally got rid of Luigi. I've muzzled him up. He's stuck in the corner, and he promised he's gonna be quiet for the next 45 minutes. God willing. This episode is a replay of a live event that we recently held with 2 unique humans in the startup space that have achieved crazy success. Now it wasn't success that was done overnight.

David Fastuca [00:00:23]:
The 3 things you're gonna learn on this episode is the importance of strategic partnerships and how to set them up, the challenges and risks of partnerships, and the marketing growth strategies that led to this epic success of these 2 diverse entrepreneurs. Now let's dive right in and get into the show. So, I love to welcome our esteemed guests, Dom and Judy. So, they, for those who don't know these 2 amazing humans, they are amazing entrepreneurs in the space, especially within Australia, they're 2 giants in the Technology space. So, let's let's just put it at that. So, we've got Judy Anderson Verve, the group CEO of Euthymia and joining her is Dominic Pym, an entrepreneur and technologist. Most commonly known for founding Up, which is Australia's leading digital bank amongst other ventures, and together, they've formed something quite unique with Avemia. So it's been a testament to their commitment to sharing knowledge and opportunities within the startup ecosystem.

David Fastuca [00:01:28]:
But I'm going to hand it over to Judy and Dom. First, let's can you share a little bit about the origins of Vimeo, what it is, how it works, and then we can take it from there?

Judy Anderson-Firth [00:01:39]:
Thanks, David. And, yeah, it's awesome to be here. And if anyone's tuning in, and listening in and Dom and I don't actually address, like, your most, you know, pressing question around growth. We don't cover it today. Of course, you can reach out to us on socials, and LinkedIn or any other way you can find us on the internet. We'd be happy to help out. So Euphemia is the family office for Don Pym, who is, as David said, most well known for being the co founder of Up and also Pym Payments and several other businesses, including a record label. If you're lucky enough, you might hear that story from Don one day.

Judy Anderson-Firth [00:02:13]:
But Euphemia is on a mission to go big and grow a home. We're really passionate about highlighting Australian innovation and we can't do that ourselves. And so, growth hacking and all of the things that we'll talk about today, we not just apply as advice to the founders, but in our portfolio, not the investments that we make, but also on ourselves. So happy to reveal what we do at Euphemia to make that awesome and also some of the things that we've learned and that we share along the way with founders. But more broadly, the family office, we invest in Fintech to try and help fix money, climate tech to try and help fix the planet, women led startups, or really any founder from a disadvantaged background who hasn't had equal access to opportunity, and startup infrastructure, so the picks and shovels of the tech sector that can help us grow faster. More broadly, the group also has a property portfolio, a shield portfolio, and a foundation to help people in need. Dom, did I miss anything that you think? So,

Dom Pynn [00:03:03]:
no, you got everything. I thought I might add a sort of different context because, why are we qualified to talk about growth? You know, from my perspective, I've been I've founded a bunch of different companies and been involved in many different start ups, probably a dozen or more over the last 25 years. But we also have invested in probably 50 or a 100 different companies that are all struggling with the same questions around growth. So I feel like in terms of the companies that we started, in terms of the companies that we advise and do strategy days and join their boards or their advisory boards, and then also in terms of the companies that we're investing in, I think all of those are areas where we can add some value and probably one of the ones that is quite elusive is selling to large enterprises, big public companies partnering for success through large established channels. So, yeah, as we go through, maybe I'll try and angle some of the things towards that rather than just talking about ourselves all the time.

David Fastuca [00:04:02]:
Perfect, perfect. Well, that's a great introduction. Thank you both. So I'd love to begin with, you know, you're mentioning such a diverse portfolio, how are you growing, Athena? How are you attracting businesses, you know, to to come to yourselves? There's a plethora of, you know, firms out there that, you know, claim to do certain things and basically money and expertise, to startups, but how do you attract, amazing startups to Athena?

Dom Pynn [00:04:33]:
Maybe I'll just start, Judy, by saying that, like Judy is the boss, she's the CEO, so she probably could give a really good answer. But just from my perspective, I wanted to say that, it's the same in the companies that we started or the companies that we invested in, is that we're nearly always recommending for people to have product led growth rather than sales and marketing led growth. And it's not that the 2 compete with each other, they're actually complementary. But you can't really be selling or marketing or growing a business or a product without it being awesome. So, the thing that we most encourage our portfolio companies and the companies that sort of come to us, the thing that we most encourage them to do is to build a great product and build, you know, try and find that elusive product market fit and create something that people want because the largest channel to market for B2B and B2C is word-of-mouth. If people think that you're awesome, if you're the highest rated thing or if you've got a great strong network of word-of-mouth because your product is awesome, then that's gonna absolutely help you in your marketing growth and sales, channels, techniques, tactics, fundamentals, the whole lot. So I think I just want to start by saying that, is that I think, you know, having a really great product and then delivering what your customers want, finding that product market fit, that's the number one, that's the biggest sort of foundational piece. And then for us, that was actually just communicating who Euphemia is and like generally being transparent.

Dom Pynn [00:05:57]:
So, what happens in a family office? What goes on behind the scenes? What value are we able to add to other companies? What experience do we have? How can we actually help those companies to grow and be successful. And then what we find is that a bunch of the people on the call today will be from our portfolio companies because they're very excited and they go and tell their mates and then their mates come to us and say, Dom, Judy, you know, we're looking for money, we're looking for advice, we're looking for partnerships, how can you help? And so, yeah, I really think that's sort of for me, the core number one fundamental is get the product right, deliver what the customer wants and then worry about the sort of, you know, sort of feedback loops and other sort of tactics that actually help you then grow that.

Judy Anderson-Firth [00:06:38]:
I couldn't agree more. And if anyone on this call has read The Lane Startup by Eric Ries, like it's really obvious in there, He articulates a handful of engines of growth that founders can use to test and grow their product or service in market with customers. And word-of-mouth is like the holy grail because you can't pay for it, right? Or you pay for it maybe in writing code and sending people out to talk to customers. You pay for it in other ways, but it really is exactly what Dom said. Like when people talk about product led growth nowadays, like it's a new term that's come about in the last like maybe 5 years or so, but it really is just word-of-mouth because when the product is actually solving a real customer need, something that someone is super frustrated by and your product or service solves that for them, then they're so happy to tell their friends, their family, their colleagues because they have had a problem solved for them. So, yeah, you can't buy word-of-mouth, and it is absolute gold. It is one of the reasons why it was so successful, it is so successful. And then everything else is really supplementary.

Judy Anderson-Firth [00:07:40]:
Paid advertising, you have a side effect of using the product where a new customer will discover your product because they've used another product, and it just so happens that your product makes sense to use with that one, which is where we can talk about partnerships and the network effect and how that becomes important, or repeat use, right? Like you have it and that's where we get into lifetime value. So totally agree with Dom, like the number one hack is just be obsessed with your customer and build something that they actually love.

David Fastuca [00:08:08]:
That's both great points there. And, you know, you did mention there, Judy, that word-of-mouth is is the holy grail. It's it's the warmest lead that you'll get, it can be, the cheapest acquisition channel, for a business, whether a technology company or a service business. Has there been anything that you've seen through either the business you're involved with personally or the investments that you've made of a way to actually manufacture, strong referrals, without, you know, your typical sort of drop box method of giving away free product for for referral. Well, what have you seen work amazingly well? And then on the on the flip side, what have you seen, you know, fail in terms of trying to manufacture referrals? Because that's a big thing that we always try to do.

Judy Anderson-Firth [00:09:00]:
Yeah, I'll give you one example from, my Startup Victoria days. So prior to teaming up with Dom and building Euphemia, I was CEO of Startup Victoria, which is Australia's largest startup community. It's now known as the Startup Network and it has 60,000 members in the community, so it's the largest one in the country. And one of the programs that we built during my time was something called Growth Club. It doesn't really exist today, but, back then, it was pretty awesome. It's how I met Don, and that was a peer to peer founder support program where if you were a later stage founder with at least $1,000,000 in annual recurring revenue, you could team up with other founders and have monthly dinners where you talk about your problems. There's no sales people in the room, no sponsors, no partners. It's purely just peer to peer popping the hood and helping solve each other's problems based on your experiences.

Judy Anderson-Firth [00:09:47]:
And there'd be sort of bimonthly education events with experts where you can bring your senior people to those and learn on particular topics that were important. And something that was important for that, like word-of-mouth was absolutely the way to do that because founders trust other founders. You know, they trust the recommendation of other founders and there's so many programs, there's so many events that you can go to in the startup community. It's one thing for Startup Victoria to tell you that it's awesome and you should come along. It's a total other thing for a founder to say, Hey, I went to this awesome thing. I actually got a lot of value. Because the time coins are the most valuable for founders. It's not actually about how much the membership costs.

Judy Anderson-Firth [00:10:23]:
It's, should I spend my time doing this or should I spend my time on my business? And so what worked really well for us was baking in basically ownership from those customers and what we call them members of that product. And so they co created that with us and they onboard new members, the members actually had to find new members that they wanted to bring, that they wanted to learn from. We'd support them in the back end with all the logistics, but they had to nominate who they were. If they knew, then they'd have to provide an intro for us and we could do the rest. And so having that baked into, I guess, the process of onboarding and the rules of how the product worked, was a really great tool for us. That's something that worked quite well.

Dom Pynn [00:11:10]:
I might just add something there. Like, from my perspective, I'll talk about 2 companies that I started. So, I saw Grant Bissett on the participant list. Granted, I started a company called Pin Payments, and it was the first all in one payment API in Australia. So it was like Stripe in Australia before Stripe. And I think it was 2011 when we started the business, and and there wasn't a lot like it. PayPal sort of had had their huge success and then Braintree was sort of getting started and at the time, the Collison Brothers literally had just started Stripe. I think they were maybe a year or a couple of years in.

Dom Pynn [00:11:43]:
And so they didn't have any presence in Australia. So for us, it was about getting market share really quickly. And then the second one I'll talk about is Up, and I think it's pretty obvious that Up has just announced recently, we have over 800,000 customers. We should have a 1000000 customers this year and be well on track to be not only the fastest, but fastest growing bank, but also the largest bank for under 35s in Australia. So, both of those are big success stories in the, let's say, retail consumer growth space. And then, what's not obvious is that both Up and Pin, as well as other companies that have started like a Cleogram, for example, all of those companies had b2b relationships. So I'll just touch on them briefly, just to add to what Beauty was saying. So the first thing is, if you're going to be, to answer your question, if you're going to be building a consumer customer base and you wanted to have a hack or a guide or some way to do it, Grant and I used to talk a lot about the onion and the onion has a core and then all these different layers.

Dom Pynn [00:12:44]:
And so if you start with the core, what is the core? The 2 founders were the core and then the employees. So we all started testing the product and eating our own dog food ourselves. Then we went out to our family and friends, and our family and friends group wasn't very big, it was just maybe 20, 25 people, whatever. But then from there, we went out to a small group of alpha, you know, really early stage customers that wanted to test the product and give feedback and really participate in the product. And so that went to sort of maybe 250 people. And then we started thinking about the channels that we wanted to go through to go beyond that. And so, when you start with your staff and then you go to your family and friends and then you go to the early adopters, maybe a specific community, for us at PIM, it was developers. And obviously for ARPA, it wasn't developers, it was people that were interested in financial services, financial literacy, banking, you know, Excel spreadsheet, you know, that sort of stuff, people that are passionate about money.

Dom Pynn [00:13:37]:
And then the onion slowly grows. Now the final piece of the onion, I mean, it's never ending, but the sort of final layer that you want via hack is, it's channels. And so what we did at Pin is we partnered with organizations like, for example, Perpetual, you know, the oldest financial institution in Australia, or NAB, you know, one of the big four banks. And those partnerships actually opened up channels, but also developers. So, by getting in with the development community or getting in with the development network, then those developers were able to spread the word through the network. Now the cost of acquisition is exceptionally low, as you mentioned, but also, sort of the referral kudos is very high. So, if you're just going to pay for referrals, then you end up with a really poor quality customer. So, moving to Up, we did something similar enough where we started with the staff and then we moved to our friends and family and then we moved to an alpha and then a beta, and we sort of ended up with 2 a half 1000 people in this sort of beta product before we very quickly, in a matter of months, went from 2 a half 1000 to 30,000 customers, and then within 7 months, we went to a 100000 customers.

Dom Pynn [00:14:36]:
Now 100000 customers was our long term goal. We thought that we could get them one day eventually and we did it in less than 1 year, nearly half a year. So that was quite an extraordinary growth curve. But what we did there was we partnered with organizations that you would never have heard of before, Astrakar, you know, Bendigo Bank, Apple, Google, Wires, Afterpay. And so what we do is we partner with all these amazing channel partners that were able to amplify not only our product, but our brand and our growth. And so I think when you're looking at sort of some sort of hack, if you like, certainly in the consumer space, you can you can start with those early adopters and those those, friends and family and those, you know, low hanging fruit, and then use that network as a way to grow very quickly. But as it starts getting to scale, when you sort of don't feel like that word-of-mouth is going to continue going, then the partnerships and the channels actually sort of start kicking in and then you're looking at b to b type stuff. So in the Grain Exchange, for example, we did a partnership with the largest bulk handler, and the bulk handler stores the grain and then puts it on boats and stuff.

Dom Pynn [00:15:35]:
And so in the in the agricultural industry, they're the biggest player. And so we went and met with the 3 biggest players and then partnered with the biggest one. And within a short period of time, we had 75% of all the farmers East Coast of Australia using our technology. And that's because it became almost the default technology to use because it was through that b to b channel. So yeah, hopefully that gives people a little bit of an insight, a bit of a framework, and you can do that in any business. You notice that I just mentioned 3 different businesses, PIN Payments, UP and and the Grand Exchange, all three of those are very different businesses operating in different segments, different industries with different products, but the same framework is useful for that early stage growth. Now, Domo, I wanna

David Fastuca [00:16:16]:
I wanna pull a thread on what you're saying there, right, because, you talk about some big names, partnering up there. 1, I want to know how did you get in there? What was the process like? What was that because you're selling, becoming a partnering with a brand such as Apple or Mastercard, you're selling, there's a big process there. So what would happen, you know, to just to take a bit of, a few steps forward on this conversation would be you're selling to an individual, you know, that whose role is in partnerships within Mastercard, they then need to sell it internally, and then so I want to understand what that journey is is like for you, and then how you activate it, because it's one thing to establish a partnership with a brand, then how do you actually make it work? You know, I've been victim of set up partnerships, think it's going to be great, they've got a mass network, 50,000 people, and then don't get one sale from it. How did you make it work?

Dom Pynn [00:17:14]:
Yeah, that's good. Two good questions. So maybe starting with the type of partner, so you can't really partner with Apple, it's very rare. And so we never did any sort of formal partnership with them. What we did is we identified areas where there were opportunities for new product. So Apple is a product company. So we were over at Dub Dub DC, which is their sort of developer conference, you know, worldwide developer conference, they call it. And we were over there and we saw some new things that were coming down the pipeline and so we approached Apple here in Australia and said, hey, we want to bring what's called instant issuance, which is a way to instantly put a debit card into your Apple Wallet.

Dom Pynn [00:17:47]:
We wanna be the 1st bank in Australia to do that. And by pestering them and telling them that we were smart and we had software developers and we had these partnerships in place, they actually did some work with us in order for us to be the 1st bank to launch that in Australia and it's hugely successful and now every other bank. But what came out of that was Google then approached us and said, hey, can you do the same thing for the Google Wallet? And then Samsung approached us and said, could you do the same thing for the Samsung Wallet? We ended up with Garmin and Fitbit and everybody. And so, we became the 1st bank with all of those different wallets and then lots of other banks, you know, obviously, fault mode. But that all started because we recognized that that particular opportunity with Apple was a product opportunity and they don't do partnerships and they won't let you call them a partner and you've got to sign so many NDAs and all sorts of things. So what we did there was we sort of hacked that, corporate relationship by saying what's important to them? Important to them is getting their product into market early and finding some partner who can do that, so that's that's what we did there. With, Google, it was actually, in order for them to be competitive, they wanted to launch their version of the wallet, and at the time, it was either Google Pay or Android Pay or Google Wallet that kept changing its name, But we, we we approached them and said, well, you know what we did with Apple? We could do the same thing with Google. And then they said, right, well, what we want to do is applicate a certain amount of marketing budget to that to make sure it's successful, to your second question, is that they said it's no good building that technology, that product, and then being like Apple, like Apple launches a product in market and it just goes, bunter, they say, and that just goes nuts.

Dom Pynn [00:19:14]:
But then Google came along and said, well, we've got a similar product, but we want to ensure that it's successful. So they put marketing dollars behind it. So what we did was we negotiated a very simple sort of hack with them, is that we said for every $5 that we put in to paying a referral bonus to a customer, can you put in $5? And we went, you know, $5 each. Now, again, those sort of relationships end up in NDAs and they're private and confidential and it's difficult to talk about the details of those relationships, but what we did is we recognized that they wanted to back it with

Judy Anderson-Firth [00:19:40]:
marketing dollars and that we also had some

Dom Pynn [00:19:41]:
marketing dollars, so and we can grow the customer base for us, and that's actually quite complementary. I'd say it'd be like quite different with different participants. In the case of the Grain Exchange, they wanted to, create a competitive differentiator with the other big players. So there's 3 big players and there's some minor players. And, they wanted to create a differentiator so they they were upgrading their systems. And I used to work at SAP, and so I said, well, why don't I come along for free? Like we used to charge 1,000 of dollars a day to do SAP consulting, but I said, I'll come along for free, have a look at your SAP systems and then give you some advice. And so we looked at those systems and took a few people with us, some software developers, and then we came up with a bunch of ways where they could improve their, the project that they were doing for their software installation and ways that we could integrate with it. And then we pitched them like a reverse pitch, we pitched back to them to basically say, so simply they didn't pay us for us to then do a pitch back to them, and then we basically said we could integrate with your systems and create a direct link to the farmer.

Dom Pynn [00:20:46]:
How does that sound? And they're like, oh, that's amazing. None of our competitors have that. We would be the 1st in market with that. And so we sort of got them hooked by this idea of being first in market. Now, all those examples I gave, Apple, Google, and, there was Graincorp, all 3 of them were to be first in market. Now we always say to people that being first in market is really critical, but actually being best is more important. So it's no good, as you said in the first question, how do you do it? You've got to have the guts and the confidence and the curiosity to actually approach the partner and then get rejected a 100 times before somebody says yes. But then the second thing is you need to find ways to ensure that it's successful.

Dom Pynn [00:21:21]:
So, we would go out of our way to run events, to do EDMs, to send messages like push notifications through our app, to have as many communication points as we could with our Grow Up and customer base in order to ensure success. And what did we do with the marketing money, say, for example, in the Google case? Well, we spent it with Google. So we said, okay, we'll get money from Google and we'll spend it with Google, right? And so we actually spent it on AdWords and we spent it with Facebook and Instagram and so on. Now, I just wanted to say another thing. As I said before very casually, if you pay for growth, you sometimes end up with really horrible customers that aren't engaged, that that, you know, don't do a lot of transactions or don't participate in your network and don't refer you, and so you don't just want to pay for customers. So what we found is if we spent a lot of money, let's say $20,000 in a day, then we would get lots of customers. Let's say you paid $20 for an acquisition, you get a 1,000 customers. That's amazing, right? Those 1,000 customers would be the worst customers ever.

Dom Pynn [00:22:15]:
If we paid, say, $100 or $200 in a day, then we could acquire 10 or 20 customers that were actually awesome. They were the right target customer, they were engaged customers, and they became our biggest referrers. So what we found is that there's not a direct correlation between the amount of money that you spend on growth and the quality of the customer that you acquire. And that's how you ensure success is that you do experiments to find the right type of customer at the right or the right acquisition price, and then over the longer term, mid to long term, you can assess the quality of those customers.

David Fastuca [00:22:50]:
Right. We're gonna we're gonna come back to the experiments part, but I wanna ask Judy, you know, setting up the Start Up Network, and all the partnerships that took place there led to its amazing growth, right? So, and you were at the helm, of those amazing partnerships. How did you approach that, especially being new to the space, and you did some amazing large, big brand partnerships. Can you share a little bit of insight into those, avenues?

Judy Anderson-Firth [00:23:18]:
For sure. And everyone probably just saw me emphatically nodding as Dave Wood does. Tom was talking about all of the partnership stuff because he's really giving you gold there. You know? Like, if I was to sort of give you the highlights version of that, like, you have to do something the partners can't. Like that's the thing, you know? Otherwise, why would they work with a brand that they don't know or that their customers don't know that has all sorts of risk attached to it. Like, they're a large established incumbent with everything to lose, and you're a small nimble startup with nothing to lose. So, you know, the risk appetite and the ways of working are so different that for there to be a great gel in terms of the partnership and for that big brand to go out of their way to partner with you and to work with you. You really have to be either doing something that they can't do.

Judy Anderson-Firth [00:24:08]:
You were doing something so much faster, you are doing something so much cheaper, or you're doing something so much more innovatively. And so that really is the trick. And the thing that I see a lot of founders get wrong is that, having a partnership is almost they're gonna sell us for us. We don't have to do anything. We've got a partnership with this big thing. They've got a whole network of clients and they'll just put us on their website or put us in their app store or put us in their sort of, you know, software ecosystem and before you know it, you know, like, we don't have to do anything. You know, like the like the this partnership, this company is gonna sell our products to their customers for us. And the reality is it just doesn't work like that.

Judy Anderson-Firth [00:24:52]:
You still, like, once you have that partnership, once you've done everything that Don's told you to do around like taking, you know, taking a risk and, you know, having those 100 conversations to get that one partner. Once you've got that contract, once you've got that agreement, your partner has actually become a second category of customer that you now have to serve. And what founders often get wrong is that they don't resource that adequately. It sort of becomes, we won that contract, we've signed that agreement, and now let's pivot back to customers and product. But now what you've actually built is really, I think about it more as a diversified revenue stream. And so now you just have another channel that you're managing, managing the channel of growth through partnerships, and you're now managing the channel of growth through word-of-mouth and product led growth, and you're probably also still managing growth through your paid advertising channels. And so, you know, depending on the value of each of those customers, the volume you're getting from that channel, and what your churn is looking like from each of those channels. It's going to guide you as to what the appropriate resourcing is gonna be in terms of your people and your time and your money that you're putting on them.

Judy Anderson-Firth [00:25:55]:
So they're just kind of the things I wanted to call out from what Dom had to say. But absolutely, like from my experience, I've had to learn that in the startup big role because being a community led organization in a not for profit as well, you certainly can't do it all by yourself. So even though I'm not a founder, I feel like a bit of an imposter whenever someone calls me an entrepreneur because I've technically never built my own business. I've always built other people's businesses. But, you know, like that that really is the key and you have to build on the shoulder of other giants. And so one example I'd love to give is actually in a previous role at Inventium. It's a boutique innovation consultancy. It uses organizational psychology and neuroscience to teach larger established organizations how to innovate.

Judy Anderson-Firth [00:26:38]:
And when I first joined that business, we were 3 people working out of a co working space. And Inventium is a bit of a weird name, you know? Like it does sort of stack up next to Google, next to Lego, next to Blackmores, next to Lendly's, next to these big like ASX 250 brands with global headcount across the world, but they were our clients. And so how did this, you know, sort of boutique, you know, firm get clients like that with such credibility? And again, like, it really came down to the fact that we knew our shit. Sorry, excuse, I hope I can swear on this podcast, but we knew, like, we were adding a huge amount of value because we were taking all of the latest scientific research on how to innovate, how to protect yourself from the disruption of startups and bringing that into the businesses through structure, resourcing, strategy, training, you know, KPIs, etcetera, from the top down. And so we were genuinely solving, like, those customers' problems. But again, it was B2B and we're a small brand, even though we did grow to become, quite large and we were on AFR Fast Growth Companies' list during my time there, which was an awesome achievement. But one of the best things we ever did was pitch the AFR, which it was actually Boss Magazine at the time, which doesn't exist anymore, to co create a competition to run a run a list, in their publication of the most innovative companies because we knew that this media publication had a big brand. It had the audience and the readership as, like, prospective clients that we wanted to work with that we think we can add value to.

Judy Anderson-Firth [00:28:09]:
But if we were to run our own competition, you know, Inventium's most innovative companies, there's no one can't. You know, like no one that doesn't have the prestige, it doesn't have the gravitas, you know, no one wants to be featured on that list. Who cares? But people definitely want to be featured on the BOSS or now to the AFR Most Innovative Companies list that has gravitas, that has readership, that has audience. And so what the AFR could do is publish that list, promote that list, and talk about the companies, and would also give them basically a whole ream of stories to talk about. 100 of companies with 100 of products and innovations and progress that they could talk about. And now, what Inventium could do is all of the methodology. We could do all of the we could do something that AFI couldn't do, and they could do something that we couldn't do. And it was an incredibly successful partnership for us.

Judy Anderson-Firth [00:29:04]:
We got more than 80% of our new clients came through every year from the Afar Most Innovative Companies list competition because guess what? You got a lone score? Who knows how to help you? Who knows how to improve your score the next time you go around? You know, like and as a result of entering, you got this full report where you could find out, like, where you're scoring lower and, like, by the way, here's all these programs and and consulting work that we do to help you improve, so next year, you get a better score. So, like, that's an example, of where we would certainly punching above our weight in terms of that brand partnership, but over the years, it then gave us those clients, and then those clients and those brands sold us.

Dom Pynn [00:29:44]:
They also gave you a thumbs down. I think it was just the Zoom sort of AI or something that came up with

Judy Anderson-Firth [00:29:49]:
a That's a bad example.

Dom Pynn [00:29:50]:
No. It came on a dog. It was a really good one. I don't know what happened

Judy Anderson-Firth [00:29:53]:
to you.

David Fastuca [00:29:55]:
Have you ever wondered a sales plan. They have a sales operating system that is the engine that drives the revenue function for their business. If you need more qualified leads, if you're struggling to nurture deals, if you need to close more deals faster, or even if you need to hire a plus salespeople, click the link in this podcast episode or visit grow forum dot ooforward/apply to have a chat with Luigi and myself to see how we can help you. Now back to the show.

David Fastuca [00:30:38]:
First off there, Judy, I I I know you're not a founder, but you are kickass at what you do, so kudos on that side, right? Secondly, you probably almost saw me head butt the mic when you mentioned at the start there about the secondary character because, of customer, sorry, because I experienced that firsthand. So I just want to share a quick story because it was the most one of the most painful experiences and costly, to to my business at the time. So I was running a tech company, it was in the business travel space, we had got investment from a major player in the US, they were a listed company called Travelport, they had 10,000 agents, so 10,000 potential channel partners, that we could sell our business to that would then go sell to all their customers. So we thought, $1,000,000 company overnight, let's see, we're on. But lo and behold, they were, for lack of a better word, and this is recorded, but I'm not there no more, they were absolutely hopeless. It created an absolute bottleneck for the company, it almost crippled us, where we had to try and serve the, agents, to try and educate them on what we were doing, how well we were doing it, how well we were different, and we were getting nothing in return. So it completely, we didn't resource for it, because we didn't think it was going to be such a bottleneck and such a selling problem for us. And, you know, it deterred, probably, to Dom's point, earlier and even earlier, Judy, it consumed a lot of our time, which as a growing company, time, just as much as money, is your probably biggest asset.

David Fastuca [00:32:24]:
So it derailed our focus and made us look at things that weren't core to the Business. And to the point of you know, having something that Transport bought didn't have, like they had tonnes of cash, but they couldn't move faster though, they had a lot of red tape internally, so they saw us as a Vehicle to We had a product that they didn't have, and we can get to market faster than them. We could be their sort of rogue company on the side that did crazy things. Yeah, I love that. So Judy just posted a comment, don't be afraid to fire your partners and customers because they can cripple you, love it.

Dom Pynn [00:33:01]:
And then to your question earlier about, you know, what are the sort of first steps, I think it might be worth just giving another example that we did a partnership with Afterpay and when we partnered with them, they weren't, you know, the Afterpay that we all know now that's, you know, so huge and all the rest of it. It took a number of years to go from where they were to, you know, to becoming such a huge business. But it all came about because one of our very first employee, one of our top people is our Chief Product Officer, Anson Parker, and Anson had sort of been shopping on the weekend or whatever and had an Afterpay experience and he came back to the office and said to me, hey Dom, do you happen to know anyone at Afterpay? Because I reckon we could really do something awesome with them. And so Anson and I literally were walking around the city and we could see the Afterpay logo plastered all these merchants off the of the shops and everything. And so we said, you know, where's their office? So it's in Queen Street, so we'll just we'll just literally drop in. And so we had the guts to actually walk into the Afterpay office, and then in the foyer, I'm going through my address book trying to find if I know anybody who works at Afterpay. Turns out I didn't, but the CEO at PIN Payments, did. So I reached out to him and he put me in touch with this guy, David, who isn't there anymore, but he was there at the time.

Dom Pynn [00:34:05]:
And so while we're in the foyer, we, sort of found somebody that we knew in the building and then we pinged them and got them to come down and say, g'day. We never left the foyer, they never took us into their office, you're scared we're some sort of stalker, are they? But what we did is show them a little demo that Anson had put together over the weekend based on his own personal experience. Now that takes a lot of guts. First of all, to walk into the building of a public company, secondly, to find someone who works there, and then thirdly, to actually, in the meeting, pitch them that your idea that you've had. And so they became one of our, our very first partners at UP and we announced during the Up launch that we had a partnership with Afterpay. And now we've got, I don't even know how many, but it'd probably be tens or hundreds of thousands of customers who are using Afterpay with that and getting all these benefits and experiences that we created. In a similar way, I will say that we thought because of the huge growth, we thought that we would also be able to piggyback off that. Turns out, that doesn't work that way and we had to put a lot of energy and work collaboratively together with Afterpay into growing the market for them in terms of the banking side and then growing the market for us in terms of the Afterpay side.

Dom Pynn [00:35:05]:
So, so yeah, so I think I just wanted to share that little anecdote because you have to actually be, you know, have have the fortitude, but also the confidence to be able to approach those the branded partners if you wanted to, you know, if you want to sort of create those channel relationships.

Judy Anderson-Firth [00:35:20]:
And wanted to build on that having been on the other side of the table because, ironically, the partnership work at Startup Victoria wasn't as difficult as it may seem because we had what a lot of our partners wanted, which was the founder audience. You know, we were the go we are the go to destination for founders in Australia. And so if you wanna talk to a founder, you've got a product or a service that you wanna sell to a founder, like, we're the best channel to go through. And so, we were actually almost even though we weren't an Afterpay or a Google, we weren't a big brand like that in our sector and with our audience. We are the go to. We were the go to. So a lot of those, like, I've been on the other side of companies trying to sell us, and we were quite selective with who we would, team up with as a partner because, you know, even though we're neutral and enough for profit, anything we put in front of a founder, we basically have to vouch for it. We're not going to waste founders' time, right? Like we're not going to put a poor quality tool or service in front of them.

Judy Anderson-Firth [00:36:17]:
And so we went through quite a rigorous process of assessing people and the ones that always stood out to us that was like a no brainer were the worst ones were the ones where it was like, oh, yeah, we're just going to put some stuff in your newsletter. Can you just let us have an EDM feature, you know, like a few times a year? And like, here's a referral link. And, you know, it was just very basic and very transactional. And clearly, they were there just to tick a marketing box. The ones who really stood out to us were the ones who had done their research on our audience, knew exactly who they wanted to speak to, knew exactly how their product or their service solved a problem for our founders, and they came up with something creative. They came up with something innovative for how they were gonna deliver on that value promise. And it wasn't about selling. It was about solving a problem for our members and that just always made it easy.

Judy Anderson-Firth [00:37:09]:
It was just an absolute no brainer. So for example, you know, we would have a partner like, like, you know, like Google for Entrepreneurs, for example. They weren't gonna try and sell, you know, Google Cloud Services. They were going to open up the books to all of the senior tech people within their company and provide office hours mentoring for founders. So any time they had a question about something that they couldn't solve, you could go right to the expert and have that resolved for you, which, like, if if you're trying to get tech support for Google, normally, like, we're luck. You're not gonna be able to speak to, like, a head of engineering or anything like that. So, like, that's a great example of where they were doing something truly different, truly unique that really spoke to our founders. And also then for us, like LevelUp app brand because then for us, we didn't have to pay for those people to come and do office hours, we just had to do a partnership, which they paid us for, you know? And it was something that we could actually add value for.

Judy Anderson-Firth [00:38:02]:
So, yeah, that's a little bit, I guess, something outside of the table, what it looks like and feels like.

David Fastuca [00:38:07]:
That was great. I just took some notes myself there, to solve the habit of this. That was great, Judy. Dom, I want to go back to earlier conversation on, you know, running tests. It's something that, you know, we always look at doing within Growth Forum, and it's like what tests can we run to, you know, see if this is going to work in a particular market. Do you have a framework, that you share within the businesses that you work with, or even within Up and your previous experiences on how you approach running growth tests within the businesses?

Dom Pynn [00:38:39]:
Well, we don't have a framework. I think it's, and I'm sure there's some around, but I think it's actually quite different in each of the different businesses that I've been involved in. And for the businesses that we've been helping with strategy or advising or channel sales or growth, it's different than what it has been at UP. One of the things I talk about at UP is, almost a sort of, an oxymoron, like I talk about, the excellence of everything. UP is a really unique player in the banking sector because we have the very best technology, the very best security, the very best design, the very best features, the very best price, like we have everything. And so it's sort of easier for us to compete and to create those growth loops, because we're not actively selling, we're doing what Judy was just talking about, is that we're providing a benefit. The benefit of ARP is that for the first time ever, you can save money or for the first time ever, you understand where your money is going and where you're spending it or for the first time ever, you feel financial literate or you don't have to use an Excel spreadsheet. And so, really, what we're selling is that emotional peace of mind for young Australians who want to be better with money.

Dom Pynn [00:39:49]:
So we're not actually going out and competing against other banks to sell a bank account. And that's one of the tricks, I think, of creating that sort of product led growth is that creating a product that has some unique selling proposition, something that is different compared to your competitors, and then you're not actually directly competing. You're not selling the same thing that they're selling. What they're competing then on is price or feature parity. And it's pretty much the Android, iOS sort of story. Once you're in the Apple ecosystem, you've sort of got all the things that you need and you feel proud of what you bought and you're happy to show off your new phone and all this sort of stuff. When you're in the Android ecosystem, you've got to pull together a whole bunch of different things and probably you bought it because it was cheaper, or probably you bought it because it had a better camera. So suddenly, all the Android participants, whether it's Samsung or Google or whoever, they're competing on either price or product, you know, the features, whereas Apple are just bringing an ecosystem play.

Dom Pynn [00:40:43]:
And so it doesn't matter whether you're an Apple fan or a Samsung fan or a Google fan, I'm giving that example because it's a really well known one that people can associate with. It's similar for Up. If you're any of the big four banks, you have to bring out a new feature or lower your price in order to compete with us. But what do we do? We provide excellence in everything. We've got the best design, we've got the best technology, the best security, the best features, the most unique things, And so I think that it's not so much of a framework, I would say it's more a fastidious focus on delivering something that we don't have to sell, that almost sells itself. If you can do that with your product, whether it's a widget that you're creating or whether it's a software tool that you're building or whether it's a channel partnership that you're trying to, you know, trying to set up, if you can create something that's unique and something that people want, then I think that almost is the framework.

David Fastuca [00:41:31]:
If you know that, I love that. Judy, anything to add on that?

Judy Anderson-Firth [00:41:35]:
No, I thought it was awesome. I was actually just thinking, we spent a lot of time talking about, community, product led growth, partnerships and some a lot of like good tips and tricks in there. We've almost, inadvertently, you know, I guess, like, by not talking about paid advertising, I think that's showing our bias, you know, to which channels we think add the most amount of value. But the reason why historically paid advertising, and as Dom mentioned, like, you know, and in my experience as well, like we used to We've bought lists before and, you know, tons, you know, ads and whatever, that you just don't see the same lifetime value from a customer. They churn a lot more quickly. They're harder to convert. The CAC is higher. Like, it's just a harder channel.

Judy Anderson-Firth [00:42:20]:
Like, it really is a lot harder than everything we've spoken about before. But one shining light in like the paid advertising and like customer acquisition through digital ads and through online marketing and through organic growth where they haven't yet discovered you, you know, all of those customers that aren't in a partner network, that aren't in a word-of-mouth network. There's a company that we've just invested in called Heat Seeker dot ai, and they're awesome because they're solving that problem for founders and for high growth companies who want to find new customers for with an existing product or they want to be able to test new product features to grow their existing customer base. And so what they've basically built is a tool that uses technology, it uses AI to basically run a huge amount of experiments in market on both real customers that they find through social networks, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, etcetera, but also on artificial personas that are created based on the knowledge that they can glean from who your existing customers are. They can run multiple experiments to see not just what product features are going to work, but also how does the language land? Like, you know, and so test what's your language market fit is in those ads that you're running and so reducing failure rates of those ads. So saving you money, you know, by not spending, you know, money with Meta that isn't actually getting you a conversion. And then by the time you're ready to run a paid ad, you know that it's already been tested and you know that it's going to get you a higher conversion rate when you put it in market. So, that tool's really awesome.

Judy Anderson-Firth [00:43:51]:
It's a pre seed company. It's brand new. They've just released their alpha version of the product. So, it's something that if you're curious about paid advertising and it's something you haven't had much success with so far, like, I do recommend checking it out. Obviously, we have a bias. We've invested in Heidseeker. We see its potential, but I definitely recommend having a look.

Dom Pynn [00:44:11]:
I think the bias is founded, it's grounded in the success that we've had with Pin, the success that we've had with Up and the success that we've had with other businesses. I will say this, like Heatseeker automates and makes and accelerates a lot of the things that we would do manually. So at Pin, for example, we would run an ad and then we would test it on a small audience, see how it performs, and then we would tweak it. We would take customer feedback on sign up and then we'd incorporate that feedback into our sales process. We would go through different channels and then we would measure those channels against each other and see how they perform. So, in terms of that sort of your question earlier about testing, we were doing all that sort of stuff manually. What, Heatseeker does is make all of that happen lightning fast and with AI bots, and then with real people as well. And so that sort of gives you a really good foundation, a good grounding.

Dom Pynn [00:45:02]:
And I'll say before about the excellence of everything with ARP and I sort of I never got to the crescendo, which was the question about testing. We typically will do 3 or 4 different iterations of things at UP, whether it be, the features that we're selling in the product, the price that we're trying, and when we did our referral bonus, we actually named it, we brand everything. So we branded the referral, instead of calling it the UP Referral Program, we call it hook up a mate. And so, suddenly that language makes it interesting for the customer And what we found is that we were going on the weekend to barbecues or going out to a movie or whatever it is, and people were asking all the time. I would walk down Collins Street or Martin Place and people would high five me and and say, you know, you're that Up guy. Right? And we'd just get talking about it, and we realized, well, how do you actually make that into a digital product? How do you make it so that you can hook up your mate if you're at a barbecue or if you're walking down the street? You're at the university and you're chatting with some mates and suddenly, you want to show them your bank account, it doesn't make sense because you don't want them to see all your money and everything. So, how do you create this mechanism for hooking up a mate? And by running small tests, we were able to see, well, what would happen if we paid $5 to the referrer? What would happen if we paid $5 to the referee? What would happen if we paid $5 to each? What if it was $2.50? What if it was $10? How does that work? And so we would do that over and over and over and over again. And the benefit of Heatseeker is it can sort of do all that sort of stuff.

Dom Pynn [00:46:24]:
And I love what Judy just said about language market fit because if you said, here's our referral bonus, versus we'll give you some cash for hooking up a mate, What's the difference in that language and how does that impact your conversion rate and how does it impact the quality of the people that you're converting or that you're onboarding? And you don't really know the answer to that until you try it. And so we tried it with ARP in production in real life, we literally tried it and then we would iterate and improve and it's taken us many years to get that program really humming. Whereas, the idea with Heatseeker is you can do all that sort of digitally, virtually before you have to actually do it in production. That's pretty awesome.

David Fastuca [00:47:04]:
Yeah, that's great. It's a great way. Look, again, it's a massive time saver and the cost in a in a to actually find out those bindings, could be in excess of 10, 20, $1,000 later before you work out what's working and what's not. I love, as bad as you sound, talking about failure. It's something that many people shy away from, everyone loves talking about all the things that help them win and all the great, shining things that have worked for them. But I love trying to help, especially our Community shortcut their way to growth success and, you know, so they can live a better life and support the Family better. So I'd love to understand, from you both, you know, what have been, say, the top two biggest failures in your growth journey, you know, to date, and what have been the key lessons from those?

Dom Pynn [00:47:59]:
I mean, there's so many failures. We did this, in the spirit of, swearing. We did this event called the fuck up knots, someone actually tweeted, a venture capitalist actually tweeted saying, Oh, why would you have Dom doing this? I'm paraphrasing, but he's the worst kind of person to ask because everything he touches turns to gold,

Judy Anderson-Firth [00:48:27]:
everything he does is successful. Nothing could

Dom Pynn [00:48:27]:
be further from the truth. I'm a 25 year old we've has been through blood, sweat and tears. It's been hard yards, you know, businesses failing, products failing, customers getting grumpy and irate, even people suing us. You know, we've been really through the school of hard knocks to get to the point of being successful. So what I started doing when they asked me if I would present it is coming up with a list of all the failures that we've had in the last decade or so. I started Excel spreadsheet and when I got to over 125 failures, I thought there's no way in 5 minutes I can talk about that many things, so I need to narrow it down. So what I did is I narrowed it down to the top 3 or the top 5, and I still went for about 25 minutes. I ran way over time.

Dom Pynn [00:49:18]:
So I just wanted to say right from the get go, talking about failure, embracing failure, understanding how other people have failed, and then trying to apply that, learning to your own experience is absolutely critical. But I will say this, and I started by saying this at the fuck up nights, is that it doesn't make sense to just learn from other people's failures. I can tell you some stories and I will, but that doesn't make sense. What makes sense is to learn from the school of hard knocks yourself. The only thing that you're going the only way that you're going to get that knowledge and experience is through practical implementation, by actually trying to do it. So running those sales tests, running those onboarding experiments, trying different products, trying different pricing. And then each time you fail, then you can turn that into either a learning experience or if it doesn't fail and it turns to be a success, well, then you keep doing what you're doing because you want to keep seeing that level of success and building on it and iterating and improving. So so, yeah, so that's just my philosophy first to to put out there.

Dom Pynn [00:50:17]:
And then in terms of a couple of failures, well, we've had monumental failures. We've had products that we've built and brought to market. 1 of the better known ones sorry, one of the better ones that's not known is a story I'll tell about Up. When we first partnered with, pre UP, it was before we created UP. When we first partnered with Bendigo Bank, we had this idea, and our company was called Ferosha. And so we had this idea that we wanted to build a digital bank and be the 1st digital bank, you know, the Lord in Australia and all this sort of stuff. And so that was great, but then we found out you needed a banking license. And so the first problem that we had is we started going down the path of trying to build a bank without actually having the regulatory stuff in order.

Dom Pynn [00:50:57]:
We didn't know all the details about what you needed to launch a bank. And we very quickly found out that not only do you need a banking license, but you need a couple of $100,000,000 because you need $100,000,000 in reserve and then you need another $100,000,000 to run the operation. So as a small group of say, I don't know, 10 or 15 people at the time, we realized that was probably out of our reach. So what we did to remedy that failure is that we partnered with Bendigo Bank, one of the greatest partnerships we ever did. That partnership with Bendigo started as a vendor, where we were building software and they were paying us for it, but then it turned into a joint venture, where we're 5050 partners in a joint venture, which eventually ended up in them acquiring our business. So that one mistake, that one sort of failure where we tried to do something without actually fully being aware of how to do it, turned into partnership, we were building, this mobile and internet banking. Now, mobile back in 2011, 2012 wasn't really that big a thing. I think the iPad had just been released and the iPhone had been out since 2,007, 2008.

Dom Pynn [00:52:05]:
So, mobile wasn't really the big thing then, And we were building a web based version of the mobile, of the banking platform, and we hadn't thought yet to build a mobile version. Now, we did it all with paper and pen. So the good thing that we did was rather than building the software and spending maybe 1,000,000 of dollars or 100,000 of dollars and then having a failure. We did it all as a paper prototype, and then we got the bankers in, and the bankers came into our office, which is a little office on the top floor of a pub, the Provincial Hotel, it was pretty cool. And we got the bankers in, and the bankers saw our prototype and said, oh, no, no, no, no, what about this mobile thing? And so we've actually made a mistake because we started building technology for the browser before we realized that actually mobile is where it's at now. Up Today is the first and only, still the only, mobile only bank in Australia. Now, you cannot say that that's the entire reason that we've been successful, but the growth of the mobile phone, the adoption of the iPhone and subsequently Android, and having a computer in your pocket and being able to do your banking not once or twice in a month, but over a 100 times a month is actually that growth curve we piggyback along that by being a mobile only bank. If we hadn't made the mistake of going down the path of building out a prototype for the web and then being told by the bankers that this is not quite right and we really shouldn't be looking at mobile, and they started building their own mobile platform and then they said, you know, could you guys build something better? And they had 75,000 users on their mobile platform that they'd built themselves.

Dom Pynn [00:53:32]:
And so, our goal was to get a 100,000 to beat that 75, and obviously we did. But the mistake that we made was thinking that, mobile wasn't here to stay and that we were going to focus on building a web platform. So they're probably, you know, small mistakes that we made. And I'll just give you one bigger mistake to sort of, you know, to, I guess, wow some of the people, is that we built a business, the grains business, and it was to help farmers sell their grain. We did the big partnership that I talked about with the Bulk Handler, and our company was only 16 months old. And the mistake that we made was that we sold the company for too much money, too quickly, too early to the wrong partner. And the partner that acquired us was no cultural fit at all. Within 5 weeks of the acquisition, they were terminating people.

Dom Pynn [00:54:16]:
Within 5 months of the acquisition, I think there was only 2 or 3 of us that were left. We were 32 people when they acquired us, and then they ended up suing us and not paying us. So, it's a horrible situation where we had this great opportunity, this great business, and we sold it. Not necessarily, the sale itself wasn't the problem, the problem was who we sold it to. So there was a complete cultural mismatch between a public company and then a sort of an aspiring disruptive start up business. And those 2, they didn't really gel very well together. And so that was one of the biggest mistakes we've made in our lives and it cost us 5 years of turmoil had to mortgage our houses to pay for the lawyers and all this stuff like one of the things I'll just say to people, we don't talk about it a lot because it's a really horrible experience, but when you get sued, you don't ask to be sued and you don't really have a choice. Once you've been sued, you have to protect yourself and get lawyers to fight to prove that you didn't do anything wrong.

Dom Pynn [00:55:14]:
And, of course, we didn't lose, we fought until it went away, but, and it was quite frivolous. But, that was a terrible, horrible time and that mistake that we made was to sell the business to the wrong company where there was no cultural match. And if you are a startup founder and you're building a business and you're looking at M and A or you're looking at acquisition or exit, you really want to try and do the due diligence and get that right, because it ruined 5 years of our lives.

David Fastuca [00:55:43]:
Yeah, that's painful and costly because like you said, you've got to defend yourself and it still costs you money, so the lawyers win. Judy, on yours, and then we can dive into our into questions that I can see starting to come through.

Judy Anderson-Firth [00:55:55]:
For sure, for sure. Yeah. I'm conscious of time, and I can I can just like Tom, I can tell you a million failures? You know, like if things that I've done wrong and things that haven't worked and, you know, things that don't go well, like I think I'll spare you the details of every new way that I've failed. But, like, the the thing that I think is important for me on this topic is that you do have to learn from it. Right? Like and I know that that sounds obvious. You know, no point just failing for the sake of failing. Like failure Like, I've had to learn, you know, over the last, like, 20 years of, you know, a working career that I have to love failure. And I genuinely don't know.

Judy Anderson-Firth [00:56:31]:
Like that's the reality. Like I've had to learn that habit at first when I was younger. Failure felt like a really bad thing. Like, I had personally failed. It was attached to my identity. But now, I've learned that failure makes me awesome because failure makes me better and failure makes me more successful the next time I do something. And so, like, failure actually serves me and serves my agenda to achieve what I want to achieve. And so like changing my mindset around failure was really what I think changed things for me and helps me be more awesome, you know, in my work and in my life, is genuinely being obsessed for it.

Judy Anderson-Firth [00:57:04]:
So just having that true hunger for feedback. And one other tip is that I often, sometimes failures are obvious and you don't need to unpack it. You can just grab the learning and move on. But sometimes failures are a little bit more opaque, like where you don't understand why you failed or where you went wrong. And if it is something that's quite important, it can be useful to unpack it with other people, whether it be the customer that you failed with, the partner that you failed with, the employee you failed with, the business partner you failed with, like just having it out, you know, and seeing what went wrong, like conducting a post mortem. You know, that's something that Zappos made famous, you know, is to do the retro, do the post mortem, pull it apart. What could you learn, grab those learnings and then move on. And doing that by yourself with your team, with your co founder, those post mortem sort of rituals can be really useful.

David Fastuca [00:57:50]:
Awesome. Awesome. Thank you both, for those failure lessons there. We can go on probably for days about that. We've probably got time for just the one question, but if anyone else has questions, please put them through, and I'll make sure we come back to advances. So one question from Mark. Judy and Dom loved your riff on the tension between best and fastest. Can you unpack that a little bit more? How do you resolve, embrace, that tension as you ship products and services?

Judy Anderson-Firth [00:58:19]:
We've all heard that phrase, like, perfect is the enemy, I'm done. Like, that's just the truth, you know? And so it's like, it's good enough to, like Basically, the threshold should be, is this gonna tell me what I need to learn? Like, is it good enough to tell me what I need to learn? And is it good enough to match up to our brand and our values? If that's the case, ship it. Doesn't have to be perfect. And then, yeah, like particularly in the lens of growth, like what you're looking for is learning. And so as long as it passes the threshold of it's going to tell us what we need to learn, ship it.

Dom Pynn [00:58:50]:
And if you set yourself a quality bar, then you can think about it like a matrix. And the matrix is quite simple. There's there's there's there's a few different possibilities. One possibility is that you're first to market, and first to market helps you build a customer base and build brand and build awareness and and build some level of authority in the particular market segment that you're operating in. So, first to market is really good, let's give that a tick. The second point is being the best. The best is better than being the first, and Apple have proven that time and time and time again. Tesla, there's lots of companies that have been second, 3rd, 4th to market, but have done it better than anyone else, so we better put a tick over there.

Dom Pynn [00:59:26]:
So now you can start seeing the matrix is forming. Obviously, if you can be the best in anything, then that's great and that's really where you should be focused. Obviously, being the first has the benefits of getting the mind share and building the brand and those sort of things. So, obviously, what would make sense is 1 +1 equals 3. If you could be the best and the first, and you can maintain your quality quotient, whatever your bar is for quality, and you can get to market swiftly enough that you're iterating and being comfortable in your ability to continue to improve, then actually doing both is awesome, right? So, I wouldn't say one is better than the other, they're both awesome, but then doing them both is even more awesome. So I think that, you know, the size of your team, the product you're building, the market you're operating in, the competitive environment, how much capital you have, all those things are gonna go into the decision as to whether or not we should keep building and then release at 2nd, 3rd, 4th, or 5th, but be absolutely the best, or whether we should actually launch first. I think they're both, really important things to consider before you just, you know, sort of jump in the deep end. Fantastic.

David Fastuca [01:00:28]:
Well, I can see there's another question here, but we'll come back to that. I want to be respective of everyone's time. Thank you, Judy. Thank you, Dom, for your time, and thank you for everyone that that, carved out an hour of their day to listen to these 2 legends. We've got many more events coming out for it. The, don't know if they're gonna match up to this one because this was quite up there. So but thank you all for your time, and, enjoy the rest of the day and stay cool if you're in Melbourne.

Judy Anderson-Firth [01:00:54]:
Yes, David. Thank you so much for having us. Certainly, as we as we opened at the top, if there's anything we didn't answer for you or you wanna sort of go a little bit deeper on anything that Dom and I mentioned, please, you know, make friends with us on the internet. Dom's handle, he's put in the chat. I'll put mine as well. He's at Dom Pym. I'm at Fast Track Duty, and euthymia is at euthymia_invest on most channels. So follow us, you know, say g'day.

Judy Anderson-Firth [01:01:16]:
We'd love to hear

Dom Pynn [01:01:17]:
from you. Just ignore those, negative those thumbs downs. I I never do a thumbs down. I don't know what's going on. But, yeah, thanks very much, David. I really appreciate it, and thanks everyone for your time. Reach out anytime. More than happy to help.

Dom Pynn [01:01:28]:
Thanks, guys.