Why give up the CEO title for a $25k check?

What would be your advice to founders that aspire to be on the unicorn path? You I started a bunch of small businesses in my early 20s where I tried a lot, failed a lot, learned a lot. Everyone thinks everything's perfect. And it's like, oh wow, you're so lucky. You built the unic. Oh god, I worked in a kind of bathroom/closet for a while. A lot of people told me since that was like one of probably the greatest moves I ever made. Like you can either be rich or king. And I was like, I want to be rich. How much harder would it have been to recruit 300 people in 8 months if you weren't remote? The thing that I learned that I hated the absolute most was So JC, I'm super excited to have you on the show. Uh unicorn founder, you know, no no easy feat. And I would love for you to kind of kick this off by just telling me when you knew you made it with Zen business and what that that's I mean that's a that's a that's a great that's a great start uh and curveball. So, you know, one there's many reasons why I started Zen business, but the main one was maybe not the main one, but one of the big ones was I, you know, I started a bunch of small businesses in my early 20s where I tried a lot, failed a lot, learned a lot. And the thing that I learned that I hated the absolute most was paperwork. No one's ever disagreed with me on this in any meeting I've ever had. No one's just be like, "What are you talking about? I love paperwork." And so, after that happened, I kind of set out to find a better way. And so I was, you know, in America, broke college kid. Uh, I found Legal Zoom existed. So I went to Legal Zoom, tried them out, and uh, and, you know, because I was a broke college kid, I I missed a payment. And so they sent me a letter in the mail threatening to sue me if I didn't pay my bill. You know, come to find out later on, that's like a marketing tactic they have for like retention and, you know, turn things like that. And so, you know, fast forward, uh, you know, Zen business. we're, you know, just getting started and, you know, getting customers in. And, uh, one day one of our customers sent us a letter in the mail saying how we changed their lives and they never could have, you know, started their business without us. And, you know, they were putting food on the table for their kids now. And so, that was like a kind of a full circle moment for me. When that more than anything else, that's when I knew I was like, okay, this we're doing we're doing something important here. And what what scale were you at when you got that that letter? Oh god, this is probably around like we did a it was called a seed preferred two uh before the series A. Uh and I think it was like right after that before the series A. All right. So this this is fun to talk about. You just mentioned like seed preferred to like complicated kind of bridge round maybe. Just make it up. Just make it up. It's fine. Yeah. Uh but I'd be curious like as far as your trajectory it's in business like unicorn. Everyone thinks everything's perfect and it's like oh wow you're so lucky you built the unic you know it's like I don't know how much luck you know played a factor. Maybe it did but curious to kind of hear like your fundraising you know story especially when you kind of mentioned there's maybe a little bit of a bridge there because a lot of founders go through that where maybe you didn't hit the series A metrics after your your seed right off the get-go. Kind of what was that like for you? Yeah, it wasn't it wasn't it wasn't like considered a bridge. And you know, speaking of easy, right? You know, 10 years to an overnight success, right? Yeah. You know, no one sees the no one see no one sees the work in the uh in my case, I worked in a like a old bathroom uh kind of bathroom/closet for a while. So, basically, I was 27 at the time when I started Zen Business, you know, founded in, you know, 2015 originally. And then, you know, I I I didn't know what I was doing. And so I kind of raised raised the initial like friends family angel round of like couple hundred grand. I think it was maybe three 400 and then you know kind of blew through all that. It was like 50 grand a debt on my credit cards and things weren't things were not going well. Uh that's an understatement. Met met Ross. Uh Ross is our current you co-founder and current CEO. Ross was a founding CTO of Homeaway. you know, they were like a roll up that acquired 26 uh vacation rental websites worldwide and then went public and then went uh sold to Expedia for $3.9 billion. And so uh I somehow I recruited him to come in as CEO and you know him and I were great great team still are. And uh so when he came in, you know, basically he just came off this huge success and then basically we just were able to like raise money really easily and so then did this kind of seed preferred two which I guess is yeah probably in in some ways a bridge but really it helped us like propel the business because we just needed to like raise a you know raise a little bit of a round to like get things going and and it's funny because you know the there were so many different names for all these things at the time and uh still are. So, well, so this is a very interesting path that you have here. So, you you kind of glazed over the struggle maybe at the bathroom office, you know, situation and you somehow recruited this, you know, rockstar that just came off a massive, you know, transaction. How how did you convince this how one how'd you meet him? How did you get access to him? And then how what did you use as leverage to get him to the table? I have leverage. I don't think I had any of that. That's what I'm curious about. How'd you get this guy? Yeah. So, check out my bathroom. Well, actually, it was uh it was is it his bathroom? Well, no, we worked in his garage at also, too, at some point. Got it. Which we actually I do have like the Austin, Texas start a you know, start a company in a garage store, which is cool. Uh so I uh we got accepted into the capital C capital factory accelerator program which is like you know biggest accelerator most well known in probably Austin Texas of which I'm a you know mentor and LP now and basically at the time they had this matching program so you get accepted into the accelerator and two of the partners of the accelerator both gave you like $25,000 a piece then the capital factory would match with 50 grand and I think back in the day if capital factory matched with the 50 grand and floodgate would match with like another 100 200 grand and I and I and and at this time when I was going through all this struggle of like we're trying to figure things out and we're you know essentially as close to bootstrapping as possible and just you know eating ramen actually it was soilent back in the day too soilent. Uh, and so I had 20 I I got $25,000 from one of the partners and I was like just doing everything I possibly could to like meet as many of the other partners as at uh Capital Factories I could to just try and get $25,000 out of any of them because I was 50 grand in debt on my my credit cards. And the math was like, "Okay, if I get $25,000, I get another $50,000. I can pay my credit cards off. I have another $25,000." I think the floodgate thing had kind of ended at that time. And so, uh, you know, life life is funny because, uh, timing is everything. And so, we actually, uh, tried to get a meeting with Ross like two or three times and he was like in his like honeymoon phase after, you know, uh, taking off from home away. And so, he was traveling and, you know, you doing a bunch of stuff and so he canceled on us a bunch of times. And like all credit goes to Raf, my co-founder here, because he kept following up. And so we finally met him and like we kind of hit it off immediately because obviously we're trying to make it easy for people to start businesses and like forming entities and doing compliance and registered agent and all like the gross boring stuff that nobody wants to do. And he had like seven entities at the time. He didn't know like where anything was going in coming out like completely uh you know completely understood the pain that we were trying to solve. And so you know he got interested and then we kept meeting with him and meeting with him. I think we met him, you know, five or six times over the course of like several weeks and he kept digging in and learning more and getting more and more interested and uh and then we kept getting, you know, building more and more rapport and, you know, getting to know each other better. And so we were sitting at Austin Java one day and this is like, you know, close to like the event horizon of like when my credit cards are about to start getting, you know, shut off. And uh and so of course I'm like super desperate but it's hard to and I was having to play like I'm not but like I was terrified. I wasn't sleeping. Uh and uh we were sitting there and uh he you know I was like hey Ross would love to like you know have you as investor and adviser and he's got you know great Nebraska accent and he looks at me he's like man. He's like yeah I'll give you 25 grand but I want to be CEO. And I was like yes absolutely. I didn't even think about it. I didn't need to have like, oh, let me let me think about it. I was like, yes, you got it. You're CEO. And uh rest is kind of history. I mean, a lot of people told me since that was like, you know, one of probably the greatest moves I ever made because a lot of founders wouldn't make that move, you know, but it's like the old adage like you can either be rich or king. And I was like, I want to, you know, I want to be rich. And I really believed in what we were doing. And also 28 years old, 27, whatever it was at the time. And I had this amazing opportunity to essentially get like a free MBA that I also got paid for and I was like this is a no-brainer. I'm going to learn a ton and you know we'll see where this project goes. And then it ultimately ended up becoming you know huge huge massive success. So that's kind of and so there was no leverage. It's just like he he understood the problem. He was really interested in trying to solve it. He liked us and like thought we could do it together. And so, you know, a lot of like a lot of people in his position, you know, could like manipulate us have a lot of they have he had all the leverage over us in the world, right? And you know, all credit goes to him because like he never once ever like abused that or like did anything subversive or nefarious. Like it was all support, all mentorship, all just like bringing us in. Don't get me wrong, like there was it wasn't a gift. Like he didn't give us a gift. like we worked our asses off every day all day at Zen Business. Like we showed up to work, but you know that could have gone a completely different way and forever grateful that it went the way it did. Yeah, this is such a fascinating story because this is not a common story that you hear in terms of like unicorn forego your own, you know, forego your CEO title at the earliest ages when all your credit cards are about to burn out. Uh and you know, the pressure is on. But as far as hindsight, great move, right? uh and and a bold move to to recognize that opportunity and to not hesitate, but also could just you for building that relationship and trust over an extended period of time. So, at that point, now you have this this heavy hitter as CEO. Now, was it you guys all doing the fund raise together and subsequent rounds or was he leading the charge? Were you leading the charge? How did you guys kind of you know bring that to because usually pre you know pre- series A new CEO non-founder raising money it's kind of like a unusual story but to that caliber of a person maybe it wasn't an issue yeah I mean it it really I mean it really changed the dynamic a lot so like you know like all of us you know me Rough Ross we all like were part of all the fundraisers kind of all the way through to the the series C I wasn't so much in but the up to the B I was you know pretty heavily involved in yeah and so basically like you know Oh yeah, that's what I want to say. So like, you know, I used to go in to angels and VCs and say, "Hey, you know, we're going to take down Legal Zoom, right?" Because, you know, I'm still mad about the letter. Yeah. So petty, I mean, pettiness wins championships as far as I'm concerned. And so I would go in and they would be like, "Okay." They would laugh and be like, "Yeah, like legal is going to spend 70 year $70 million a year in marketing. Like how are you going to beat that?" I said, "Well, their you know, their their product sucks. uh we're going to and I feel like they don't treat their customers right and I think we can really like hit their soft underbelly and their high price like the the price is crazy and so I think there's a a potential for disruption here and they would like laugh me out of the room haha good luck um and then recruit Ross walks into the same room same people same story and they're all like that's a great idea we're going to give you money and uh and then kind of uh then you know and then in the subsequent rounds Like so that went really quick cuz you know Ross just had to make you know some phone calls right to his people that he knew and I'm not saying I mean not saying it was easy by any stretch of the imagination but like that you know after Ross came in and like we got everything kind of shored up and then we had some breathing room to actually like go and execute and test and build products which also you know that that that was another huge struggle uh for about a year year and a half and then you know once we kind of got things going and like uh really started having some good data around you know customer and ICP and so like basically where I landed at Zen business is like I became the voice of the customer inside the company that ultimately transitioned into me leading all of product marketing. So I was in charge of all of our quantitative, qualitative research to, you know, validate, triangulate our hypotheses across like product, price, promotion, LTV, retention, churn, like all of those things. And so like I was like essentially like the subject matter expert that would come in during the fundraises and I would just walk them through the all the data. Very interesting. It's it's great to hear that kind of founder journey like you still built the company as your idea. You had the vision and then you realized that bringing in the best talent was how you created the most value. Totally. And going out recruiting that talent. What are some of your insights for founders you know listening today in terms of attracting great talent? Yeah. Yeah, I mean I think you have to be a magnet for resource uh for resource gathering and so like you know and I and I didn't I didn't see this I didn't really know this kind of like day one of course and then I saw Ross come in and all of a sudden he's just on calls he's talking to everybody he's bringing everyone in. We're getting like moonlighters and like advisers and and all of a sudden we just had this like magnetic orbit of like just talent around us and of course like you know Ross had you know Ross just came off this huge win and had a big network but the thing is you can still do that on a smaller scale just by being like curious open-minded wanting to learn you know not having an ego and just like really like being open to like you know accepting feedback and of course that comes from like you know angels and VCs a lot of times. But I mean, if you're trying to like pull talent into your orbit, like there's ways that you can go out and, you know, as far as I'm concerned, you can you can get access to anyone in the world if you really want to, you know, and there should be no barrier to that. Some people are like, "Oh, I can't ever talk to this person because they're so like three orders of magnitude away." I bet I bet you can. You just have to be, you know, uh, persistent enough to just like try and find those people and just ask, you know, one or two really good questions and then that brings them in and you start to build rapport and next thing you know, they're like actually really wanting to help you out. And I'm I'm also curious like, you know, as much as that leads to the right person coming in, but how many shots, you know, you or other founders have to take on gold to get even an opportunity to get that person on the door? Like imagine it's not just one email, you know, one cold email gets a job done. In most cases, it's, you know, Yeah. I mean, I think I think that I have I mean, you know, I think one of the things that I I you know, obviously I'm not good at a lot of things. I think one of the things I was like blessed with is like I really love talking to people and so I I mean but I also like I mean you know I I don't really like like the hustle porn thing but like I was out there like going to every event I could talking to everyone like just asking for advice and like hey this is what I'm thinking about doing what like what do you think? I drove I drove for Uber and Lyft during this time and I literally every single person that got in the car for me is a potential customer because I think everyone wants everyone in their soul wants to start a business because there's an an uh you know a human nature uh wanting for freedom, right? Which I think uh running your own business represents. And so everyone that got in the car, I'm like, "Hey, I'm I'm thinking about starting this business. We're going to automate the process for LLC's and corporations and all this stuff. What do you think?" And I just had I got like 250 reps in or whatever how many however many rides I did over that you know 6 months or whatever it was and then I would you know I was getting like in intros to people that from Uber rides right you know like that's just like one example and then you're going out and you're going to networking events and I think you just really have to you have to create momentum and the only way you can do that is through action. Yeah. To like force it and will it into existence. just can't just sit there and wait. And no, I do love the Uber story. I actually know a couple founders that have a very similar journey where they drove Uber to not only cover, you know, rent, but also to, you know, get the reps in in terms of just pitching strangers because that's a great way to get, you know, challenge your uh resolve against the amount of rejection you might have and pitching someone cold in a Uber. Totally. And also, I mean, another thing I did is uh so this guy Evan, I think it's it's Evan Castner, uh there's like there's two Evans in Austin that are awesome founders and one or both of them wrote a book together and it's called Oh, it's so good. There's like venture deals as like you know from Brad Fel. There's like kind of the Bible and then oh then there's I think it's like it's it's they wrote a book and it's around how you like basically like craft the deck, craft the story, craft the narrative and actually take the money in a very like streamlined process way. It it's great. He said that one of the biggest the best things that he ever did in early on in his career was he did improv. And so I was like, "Oh, that's interesting." And so I went I took an improv I took improv classes and I did some standup comedy and like man I mean you want to talk about like rejection from a VC like go get on stage and tell some bad jokes like you know I I just would just bomb like all the time. And I I I could I mean I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that built my like you know star tissue more than anything. That is impressive. Yeah. All these different little tactics that kind of help train your brain and prepare you for you know what what inevitably becomes a massive outcome. So you know I started this interview about kind of when you knew you you know you struck it like you were on to something that you're picking up the momentum. But when you think about the scale that you guys reached How were you scaling? What were the channels that were working for you? Obviously, you had to create the momentum at the early days, right? But, you know, Uber driving, you know, driving Uber could only get you so far. It's like when did you actually get the breakout velocity and what was the secret sauce there? Yeah. Well, so I think there's a kind of a good story before that about like the, you know, doing whatever it takes kind of thing. So, we set a goal. Basically, prior to like us deciding to compete head-to-head against Legal Zoom, we built a lot of other products that nobody wanted. We built like a site called an app called Zen Filing, which essentially was an app where any existing business owner, the 26 million existing business owners in America, could go download the app, put the name of their uh business in, and then check the compliance of their business. That did not work at all. It doesn't sound that great. No, it was terrible. Uh, but we thought it was a good idea at the time. I also had a white labelled uh a white labelled uh like formation workflow for law firms, right? Because formation is a loss leader for law firms for to get startups. And so they'll do it for free and then they you know they kind of like put like delay the fees until like the next round or whatever. And so I was like, "Hey, like we'll just like sell you this software. will white label it to you and it makes you look cool because like you have some tech um to go out to these founders. Uh turns out selling to law firms is terrible. Uh maybe the worst sale of all time because everyone has to be unanimous I think across the partners. Uh and so then we're like okay like none of this is working. Let's just compete headto-head against Legal Zoom. And so, uh, in an afternoon in a garage in Austin, Texas, I built a landing page with a, uh, a software called Lending that I got from Sumo. They had like a $49 Yeah. It's like $49 for Landing for like lifetime access. And I was like, great. Bought it. Yeah. I built I built a landing page and then I built a ad campaign in Google. And literally the the the landing page had like phone number, like name, email address, uh what type of company do you want to form, and then I had three radio buttons for like these other products we were thinking about. Uh one was called worryfree guarantee, which and then I I just sent it live and then all of a sudden just worked, right? And I was like, oh, we're doing calls and then basically we decided, hey, we're going to set a goal to grow 10 10% week overw week for or was it 20%. I think it was 20% week over week for 16 weeks, right? So that 16 weeks of my life, I literally did not do anything but this. I had the call I at night in bed, we get a call and I'd answer it on my Apple Watch like Dick like Dick Tracy. It was great. And so hit that goal the last day, like the last day of that 16 weeks, you know, I had like two more customers to get. And I was just doing all this manually by like hand. I was every time someone would come in, give us their email address, I would email them, you know, personally, hop on the phone with them, talk them through everything, and then just like take the credit card over the phone and put it in Stripe manually, right? And so the LA, this is a crazy story, and we'll get out of I want to I want to answer your question, but I want to give perspective of how we got there. I think it's important. The last day of like the 16 weeks, my dad was having heart surgery. Uh not like a major heart surgery. had like a valve replaced, but I was in the the hospital in like the waiting room, the s like the O waiting room or whatever and I literally like closed like the last deal or converted the last customer and like I was just like, you know, I was like this this monumental moment in my life and I was like, man, we just like we just hit that damn goal. And so from there like that was kind of what allowed us to like go and like raise more money and then you know then we actually like started building product around it and automating and having like workflows and things like that. Uh but you know goo like so we got lucky and this was like a you know moment in time where basically Legal Zoom just owned the Google landscape like no one was com like no one could compete against Legal Zoom and so we're just like okay you know zero dollars like in the ad it was like like I noticed like I looked through all Legal Zoom's ad none of them had pricing at all right because they had such a brand so I was like okay we'll just put like zero dollars start for free form an LLC. Like those just worked immediately and it was just like okay upside surprise. And so, you know, from a channel perspective, like Google just worked out of the gate. It was like, you know, the most uh most predictable, you know, most reliable. And what that did really was it got us enough traffic to then optimize the funnel, right? Right? Because we had so we had so much traffic coming in that we could then optimize the funnel over time like page by page just incre improve improve improve to then when we can get our conversion rate up to a point where we could then go to like affiliates and say hey we want to like we want to partner with you here's our conversion rate you know here's how much we're going to pay you on a cost per acquisition basis and then that you know was obviously lower than our CAC in Google and then that blended it down and then we kind of went you know paid affiliate for a while and then our affiliate partner partners ended up being like you know 50% of our traffic at one point and so we got very reliant on them and then we then we had to scramble to be like oh we need to do SEO like immediately as fast as we can because we need to like mitigate the risk of uh of if that partner were to like potentially pull out for whatever reason because then we would have just lost 50% of our growth overnight you know So, and and so you mentioned Google, you mentioned affiliates. Did you also were you doing Facebook ads at the time too or? Uh we were they I mean they never really worked that great you know I think I think in today's world like social and video is like way more important but kind of in 2017 2018 it was like not as important as it is today from like a brand awareness perspective and like you know top of the funnel perspective. So yeah, we we had that it like you know it would drive some conversions but like and nowhere near as meaningful as like paid and affiliate. No, it's genius. It sounds like uh you you found the channel, you doubled down on it and basically came down to a killer offer. An offer that sounded so much better than Nigel Zone, which is Yeah, because it it was a killer offer because and then where we really got the big unlock where we got the big unlock was the way we started was it was you know zero dollars to start just pay the state fees, right? And we created this kind of choose your own adventure funnel. It was great. So it was just like one product. It was like one page, one product, one pro, one page, one product, like kind of all the way through. And it was just literally binary. Yes. No. Right. And so they're like, "Do you want to form an LLC or corp LLC?" Right? Do you want expedited filing? Yes or no. Do you want EIN? Yes or no. And then what we would do is we would just drop new pages in for things that we didn't build just to test to see if people would buy them because they thought they were buying them, right? And then we would say, "Oops, my bad." Like, "That's actually not ready yet. We're not charging you for it or whatever, which is great." And then over time, right, we started we started to add so many things to the funnel, right, that we were learning a lot about what people wanted, but like the people were getting funnel fatigue because the funnel was too long. And so then we're like, "Okay, how do we solve this?" Well, oh, you know, I was like quickly realized, well, we've built enough products now based on like everything we've learned from the funnel, like let's just like put those in the packages, which is so obvious, right? But like, you know, at the time, like this this uh the offering was so good, right? $0 to start and then, you know, people would pick up a lot of things along the way. Like, you know, only like I think like 27% of people would actually make it through and just just form a company and only pay the state fees, right? Right. But we still got them as a customer before we can like cross and upsell them later. And uh and then from there, you know, this is like October, I think it was October 5th, 2018. That week, we like launched packages, right? So we had like starter, pro, premium, and like they just included like different things, whatever. And then you know, we know everyone knows how packages work. I don't have to explain that. But like you never really get like you know, and a new product launch I think is always like pretty difficult and mostly just like hand-to-hand combat. But this just worked. I mean, our LTV overnight went up 212%. It was like the it was the biggest like it was the it was the biggest uh LTV shift in like company history because everything after that was just marginal improvement forever, you know, but it's like overnight we went from like, you know, making you know, I don't know, 50 bucks a customer to like whatever 250 or something, whatever it was. And that was the that was the moment that it was like, "Okay, now it's like we got some real we got some real opportunity to put uh put fuel in the fire here." You're likely having trouble raising money or selling your company. Personally, I've had four exits and I've raised over $145 million. If you want a free coaching session with me, just like, subscribe, and leave a comment down below letting me know what you think of today's video for a chance to win a free coaching session with me. I'll select three winners every single month. You just have to like, subscribe, and leave a comment down below for a chance to win. Now, onto the video. And this is a competitive market. There are countless solutions and all different, you know, whether it's a full package solution like a legal zoom or other competitors. There's a lot of metos that came out after you guys came out. Totally. What is it like kind of competing in that red ocean? Uh, and being able to stay stay on top of that. Yeah, I mean it's it's a you know it's a never- ending uh never- ending fist fight and just total like battle. Uh so I mean what's it like obviously it's like it's super difficult and then all of a sudden you know next thing you know the cs are increasing right because everyone's bidding on the same keywords there and then you know downstream of that so then the LTV has to increase and there's like pressure on both all the time and then you also have to contend with you know the payback period and the I mean the good news here is like we had such a better offer than anyone else especially when people are doing uh like comparison shopping like we're just like the shining star and then they're doing comparison shopping and we're also the number one rated on all these affiliate sites and they're seeing that and so like we had a lot of social proof there. So I I mean I think the like where we really uh just absolutely dominated was we just built like an absolute like uh marketing machine like a go to market machine with like going back to talent, right? None of none of the other companies in the space at the time were venturebacked, aka they're not giving people shares, aka they're not getting the best talent because the best talent in the tech world like wants, you know, salary and equity. And so we were able to recruit the best people and like that was a huge I mean that was a huge advantage for us. And so at this point really competing on a superior marketing machine marketing machine with a a killer offer and that's kind of how you stood out and with the growth. Sorry. And and so I don't want to I don't want to discredit I don't I don't want to discredit like customer success. So like we we like absolutely were like like so obsessed with customer success. Like I mean if you look at our reviews on Trustpad, I think we have like a 4.8 or 4.9 and like 22,000 reviews right now. And so I mean we're talking like we were doing everything possible to give customers the best experience. So like you know like at the beginning it was like a little bit of me like I was I was on chat and intercom like I did kind of everything of course at all stages but like we we were bending over backwards to do anything we could to make people happy and like surprise and delight them. And we still do that to this day. And so like even our chief uh our chief customer officer Mitch still to this day if we get like a bad review he's calling the personally and he's like taking care of the problem for them. And so like you know if you compared you know and I'm glad I'm so glad we did that because it it forced acts as a force function for all of our competitors to also give better service because like you know prior to us you know legal zooms wasn't great like let's be honest terrible right? Yeah. Exactly. And so we like you know so that was like the huge that I mean I would say like yeah the offering was great but like customer success and being laser focused on and you know NPS and reviews was a big big differentiator for us. Like I can say as a c as a former customer of Legal Zoom many years ago, my first business back in like 2008, 2009, right? To then uh then using you guys for my real estate business uh for creating a couple LLC's. I can say it's like yeah, it was like a night and day uh difference across the board. Uh and it's it's awesome to have you on the show having been a customer of your product for several years now. Totally. Thank you. So there's all in most startups and be curious to hear how yours went like you had these really tough points in the early days and then you start picking up you know picking up velocity improving product you know figuring out the sales channel were there any other like breaking points whether are you running out of money got to raise another round or did you have money being thrown at you like what were some other kind of like at the later stage call it post series A post series B that were like you know near-death experiences or complex situations that you guys had to to deal with. Yeah. I mean, I'm so bad at like remembering like timing and dates of when things happened because like all I cared about was like the conversion rate on the website like LTV and like you know retention aka you know customer success. So I was just so focused on that I really didn't care about anything else. But I mean, I'm pretty sure that we closed our series A like right at the end of 2019. And so, I mean, we know we're all going here. Co, you know, so COVID happens. Uh, we had this amazing like office, 30 people around 30 people in Austin, Texas. It's a historical building. It's in a rock quarry. We have the all like just amazing like uh like beautiful uh birds and trees outside and it was the best time of my life. You know, the entire thing was like graffiti from our designers. Like that was like the startup vibe that like everyone wanted, right? It was the best and I miss it. And so, you know, March. So, what was cool is our one of our I think Graycoft uh like our the who led the series A when like the co thing started becoming a thing. Yeah. They got like the one of the people from like the CDC on the phone with all their portfolio companies, which is like that was a cool value ad. That's a value ad. Yeah. Yeah. And then and then the person was like, "Yeah, two weeks to stop the spread. That's Like this is going to be a long time." Then they like called it and they're like, "You need to like you need to take pro proactive measures like immediately." And so I think the entire world shut down like around the 13th or 14th of March. And we we we went we went fully remote March 6 never went back to the office, right? And so as soon as all that happened, like everything died. Like all of our traffic, all of our conversions, no one's forming businesses. And it was the worst. Like we were like we were basically like, "Okay, we're going to have to, you know, shut the business down." like we were in a very contractionary period at that point in time where like none of us knew what the hell was going to happen and uh and so we were just struggling like no one you know no one knew what to do. we couldn't increase conversions like there's just not you know if people aren't forming businesses out of like you know fear and uncertainty then like we have no control over that and then and then uh people are sitting at home uh and all of a sudden they start getting these things called stimulus checks and then uh basically for the next 16 weeks straight we had like the most insanely explosive growth you could ever imagine every day like literally every day was more conversions than the day before And every day was the most conversions we ever had. Every week was better than the last. And it was just in explosion explosive. And so cool, that's awesome. But now we're having to like blitz scale to like take uh and every all of a sudden everyone's like at home working remote. We're having to figure out how to work remote as a team that used to work in person at the same time that we're having to blit scale. And so we went from like 30 people like March 6 of 2020 to like 300 in like eight months or something. Like we like Yeah. We like had to 10x our team because of the growth. It was so crazy. I remember Chris our like head of it. I mean I don't I feel so bad for the guy. I don't think he slept for that whole time. We we would have like, you know, he would be in calls with us uh for whatever reason and behind him would be I'm not even joking you just a wall of MacBooks and he's like I he's like and all he was doing just shipping MacBooks like that was like he's he's like open the box, provision the MacBook, put it back in the box, ship it like and he was just did that like all day every day. And so, you know, obviously like this is like an an amazing an amazing thing happening on one side and like a crazy terrible thing happening on the other. And so the bipolarity of that and having to contend with that was like I mean it was really exciting on one hand but it was like crazy on the other because that like when that happened I didn't I I mean I didn't like leave my house or uh do anything but work for like four months straight and then I like just totally burned myself out. I remember like one day, it was like Friday afternoon, I think I just like went immediat like my desk was like next to the couch because I had a small onebedroom in Austin at the time and uh I just like crashed on the couch and I don't think I got off the couch until like Sunday afternoon, Monday morning. So that was that was that was rough for sure. And then kind of, you know, good news is is like because that happened, you know, we basically were able to capture a lot of the market share and then keep it. And so in addition, it's like now we're able to recruit, going back to the talent piece, now we're able to recruit like the best talent from everywhere in the country because we only had people in Austin, Texas. And so then I was like, oh wow, this is like, hey, this is like there's a lot of negatives to the work from home thing, but like this is a good positive because like best talent comes from anywhere in my opinion. And so now we're getting like amazing people from like east and west coast, like you know, from state to state and then Yeah. How much harder would it have been to recruit 300 people in eight months if you weren't remote? I don't know how we would have just the real estate logistics of getting space. Yeah, exactly. The fact that you went remote was a blessing. It I mean, you know, in retrospect, I mean, almost like if co didn't happen, we would have been on this like probably like slow like slow grow trajectory. Like I think everything would have turned out the same ultimately but you know obviously there's a lot of like a lot of bad things happened during COVID and a lot of like companies got really really hurt during co and some but some like got lucky and we were just one of the ones that got really lucky. Well in all fairness you were prepared to be lucky. You know you made that investment into SEO like that was probably massive for you guys and you had the you had the marketing engines already dialed in. You had all that hard work. So when the volume came, yeah, you were there and you were the leader. So not luck. It was, you know, I know it's always weird saying co was lucky. No, I'm not I'm not saying that. I'm just Yeah, definitely not saying that. So you have this massive explosive growth. You go from like basically maxing out your credit cards to, you know, now this massive trajectory of growth uh over several years and but you're no longer at business, right? So, you know, walk us through kind of the the journey of you making the decision to to step down from your role uh at Zen Business and kind of what what led you to do that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, I mean, I like I have nothing but the best things about my time at Zen Business and like just forever grateful for my time there and the people that I met and the uh lives we got to touch, you know, because like ultimately we ended up having, you know, six co-founders and so, you know, Ross was running Ross was running a CEO, Shanaz is, you know, their COO. They've been working together for like 25 years and like have ultimate trust with each other. And so basically, you know, as we were recruiting, like you know, I was doing I was just one man like, you know, kind of one man show head of product marketing this entire time. And then we really were like, we need to dial this up. So then we went and we went and recruited like amazing like senior level talent, right? This is like a, you know, this is like we need we were at a new stage, right? We needed someone to like, you know, go from kind of like we we went from like the zero to one and the one to 10, but we needed like the 10 to 100 person, right? Yeah. And like I I'm not I'm not I'm not that person, right? I'm not that person as like a a non-CEO. Like as a CEO, I'm pretty sure I can do that. But like if I'm having to like execute like an entire team and do the the cross functional uh like uh building of support and stuff like I just don't have the patience for that. I'm sorry. And so we just like went and recruited like the best people. And then you know I was able to give give away my day-to-day duty. Ralph was able to give away his day-to-day duty as head of product. And so we went and raised the the the uh the $200 million series C at the end of 2021 from Oak and Soft Bank and others. And with that money, you know, a big portion of it was carved out for global acquisition. And so, you know, Raf and I jumped at the chance. I mean, basically, like, you know, like Ross and Shinaz are running the day-to-day of Zen. And you can have, you know, Raf and I who are also founders, you know, the original founders go and like meet with all these other founders of similar companies to try and like, you know, buy these businesses, right? And so basically, we isolated a target list of around 30 Zen business clones around the world, every continent except for Antarctica. And then Raf and I flew around the world, uh, met with all of them. Uh, we got 200 LOI to acquire. And as we're going through the process of, uh, you know, buying these businesses, and these aren't small businesses, right? As we went through the process to buy these businesses, 2022, Fed raises interest rates, bottom falls out of the market, everyone pulls back to conserve cash and you know the macro had changed and so we made the decision like all of us like hey let's kill the global acquisition strategy no longer strategic priority for the business. We don't want to divert you know x amount of dollars all the resources attention priorities of the business trying to enter these new markets when like we just need to focus on our home market and we never need to raise cash again. So, we made the we made the you know the tough decision to kill the global acquisition strategy. Bad news is is you know I wasn't going to get to do it at Zen but I was already you know fully vested you know did some did some secondary and so I was in a good place the company was in a good place still growing and so decided hey you know I've been there what seven you know seven eight years and ready to take some time off. So how's that feel? It didn't last long. I get bored pretty easily as as most of us founders do. Yeah. Yeah. Take a break and you're like, "What?" You start twitching and got to do something. I know. I mean, I, you know, I I try I tried to I plan to take a year off, you know, wanted to get caught up on all my doctors and dentist appointments I missed over the last, you know, years. And, uh, after about three weeks, I was bored as hell, you know, sitting on the sidelines. Uh, but I mean, I still kind of forced myself to take some more time off. Made it six months until I couldn't take it anymore, and I just felt like, uh, I just a, you know, total uh, total loser again. and uh decided, you know, started looking for new opportunities. Kind of what what brings you to London? You're out here with me here in London. You that's how we got connected. I love London, by the way. Uh anyone watching hasn't been here, I highly recommend it. Uh come see uh me and Jason. We'll take you out. Uh yeah, so you know, obviously, you know, going hearkening back to the kind of the story of the global acquisition, right? So like we were looking at you know companies all over the world and uh you know think there's a huge opportunity you know with respect to you know Europe to figure out a new way to help small business owners you know working on something and uh you know really excited about the what's ahead and so yeah you know but then of course like that kind of brought me to Europe and you know wanted a different life experience and you know nice cultural experience I love history and so it's been great living here and you know I think there's a big big opportunity I'm excited to have you here in London and you excited for you to share share a little teaser into what you're up to coming soon. Yeah. But before before we wrap uh as a unicorn founder Yeah. sharing a message with other founders out there what do you think it takes or what would be your advice to to founders that aspire to be on the unicorn path? A few things. Just show up. Just just show up. Like the hard the hardest thing to do is just show up to work every day, just show up, you know, like that's one. Uh, and then one story I always tell is like kind of the I guess if I was going to, you know, tattoo I was going to get this as a tattoo, you know. Um, growing up, I went to, uh, you know, like Catholic elementary school and went through first through eighth grade from the time I was like sixth to 14. And there was a sign in the, uh, in the hallway. And I walked past it every day for eight years. Just just burned into my brain. And I look at it and I would just read it. And my last day of 8th grade before, you know, I graduated, I uh went and I ripped the sign off the wall and I stole it and I put it in my bedroom. I wish I still had it. And what it said was persistence prevails when all else fails. Good one. And then so that's my advice. That would be a general theme I picked up on this this podcast with you is persistence. uh you know, chasing down Ross and and and various other partners and uh the the maniacal focus on LTV and CAC. Uh you know, that's that's what it takes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you have to be I mean I I mean I I I'm like I ruminate a lot. So like I just like when I I just I'm I'm really good at only thinking about one thing and like just obsessing over it. And uh I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but like I just get obsessed. So yeah, it takes it kind of takes that level of obsession. It's a binary thing when you put it into the right if you're obsessed with the right thing, it's very powerful. You know, other things get maybe left behind in life for a while, right? But you know, that's how true massive value creation can be created is when someone has that level of relentless commitment to something and you really like I mean I you really have to love what you do and be passionate about it. Like I mean some people maybe are good at like you know making money for money's sake. For me, I that's not how I mean, I want to have a big impact or I want to, you know, help people and make their lives better. And so, I think you really do have to love what you do and that's what gets you through the hard times. Well said. Well, JC, if uh anyone here wants to connect or reach out, what would be the best way for them to get in contact with you? Uh, I don't really do social media, so that's tough. Uh but I I mean I I would say like LinkedIn, you know, find me on LinkedIn just JC Glansancy like you can see right here, you know, happy to connect. Um it's the photo of me. I have a beard and it's pretty and I'm also don't have hair. So, uh should be pretty easy to find. And then shoot me a message on LinkedIn. Happy to connect and more than happy to spend time with folks who have questions. Awesome. JC, it's been a pleasure. Thanks for coming on the show today. Thank you for watching today's episode. As a reminder, I'm your host, Jason Kirby. I have built and sold multiple companies with over 135 million in transactions as either a founder, operator, investor across multiple industries. I'm currently the managing director and founder of Thunder.bc, where we help companies and founders at all stages navigate what capital to raise and who to raise it from and help improve company's odds of raising the capital. If you need help, reach out to us at help.under.bc. If you like today's show, please share with your friends. Give us a like or comment down below. And as a reminder, this show is published weekly. And to get notified of new episodes and our newsletter, be sure to go to our website at join.thunder.bc. 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